In the final analysis, however, the most important thing about the International Review is not so much its regularity nor its internationally centralised character, but its capacity to act as an instrument of theoretical clarification. "The Review will be above all the expression of the theoretical endeavours of our Current, since only this theoretical endeavour, based on a coherence of political positions and orientation, can serve as the basis for the regroupment and real intervention of revolutionaries" (Preface to the first issue of the International Review, April 1975). Marxism, as the theoretical viewpoint of the revolutionary class, is the most advanced point of human thinking about social reality. But as Marx insisted in Theses on Feuerbach, the truth of a method of thought can only be tested in practice; marxism has demonstrated its superiority over all other social theories by being able to offer a global understanding of the movement of human history and to predict the broad lines of its future evolution. But it is not enough to claim to be marxist to really assimilate this method, to bring it alive and apply it correctly. If we feel that we have succeeded in doing so during the last three decades of accelerating history, it is not because we think such an ability has been granted to us by divine right, but because we feel that we have taken our inspiration throughout this period from the best traditions of the international Communist Left. At least, this has been one of our constant objectives. And in making this claim, we can offer no better supporting evidence than the body of work contained in the 600-odd articles of 100 issues of the International Review.

Continuity, enrichment, and debate

Marxism is a living historical tradition. On the one hand this means that it is deeply aware of the necessity to approach all the problems it confronts from a historical starting point; to see them not as entirely �new� but as products of a long historical process. Above all, it recognises the essential continuity of revolutionary thought, the need to build on the solid foundations of previous revolutionary minorities. For example, in the 1920s and 30s the Italian left fraction, which published the review Bilan during the 1930s, was faced with the absolute necessity to understand the nature of the counter-revolutionary regime that had arisen in Russia. But it rejected any precipitous conclusions, especially those which, while in hindsight developing quicker than the Italian left a correct characterisation of the Stalinist power (ie that it was a form of state capitalism), only did so at the price of casting aside the whole experience of Bolshevism and the October insurrection as being �bourgeois� from the beginning. There was absolutely no question of Bilan calling into question its own continuity with the revolutionary energy that the Bolshevik party, the soviet power, and the Communist International had once embodied.

This capacity to maintain or restore the links with the past revolutionary movement was especially important in the proletarian milieu which emerged out of the resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 1960s, a milieu largely made up of new groups which had lost organisational and even political links to the previous generation of revolutionaries. Many of these groups fell prey to the illusion that they had come from nowhere, remaining profoundly ignorant of the contributions of this past generation, which had been almost obliterated by the counter-revolution. In the case of those influenced by councilist and modernist ideas, the �old workers� movement� was indeed something that had to be left behind at all costs; in fact, this was a theoretical apology for a break that had actually been imposed by the class enemy. Lacking any anchor in the past, the great majority of these groups soon found that they had no future either, and disappeared. It is therefore not surprising that today�s revolutionary milieu is almost entirely made up of groups which have in one way or another descended from the left current which was clearest in its understanding of this question of historical continuity - the Italian fraction. We should add that the historical anchor is today more important than ever, faced as we are with the culture of capitalist decomposition, a culture which more than ever before seeks to erase the historical memory of the working class and which, itself lacking any sense of the future, can only attempt to imprison consciousness in a narrow immediacy in which novelty is the only virtue.

On the other hand, marxism is not merely the perpetuation of a tradition; it is geared towards the future, towards the final goal of communism, and therefore must always renew its capacities to grasp the direction of the real movement, of the ever-shifting present. Inment, of the ever-shifting present. In the 1950s the Bordigist offshoot of the Italian left tried to take refuge from the counter-revolution by inventing the notion of �invariance�, opposing all attempts to enrich the communist programme. But this approach was very far from the spirit of Bilan which, while never breaking the link with the revolutionary past, insisted on the necessity to examine new situations "without any taboos or ostracism", without fear of breaking new programmatic ground. In particular, the fraction was not afraid to question the theses even of the Second Congress of the Communist International, something which latter day �Bordigism� has been incapable of doing. In the 1930s Bilan was faced with the new situation created by the defeat of the world revolution; the ICC has been compelled to analyse the equally new conditions created first by the end of the counter-revolution in the late 60s, and more recently, by the period inaugurated by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Faced with such changing circumstances, marxists cannot limit themselves to the repetition of tried and trusted formulae, but have to submit their hypotheses to constant practical verification. This means that marxism, as with any branch of the scientific project, is in fact constantly enriching itself.

At the same time marxism is not a form of academic knowledge, of learning for the sake of learning; it is forged in unrelenting combat against the dominant ideology. Communist theory is by definition a polemical and combative form of knowledge; its aim is to advance proletarian class consciousness through exposing and expelling the influences of bourgeois mystifications, whether these mystifications appear in their grossest form within the broad mass of the class, or in a more subtle guise in the ranks of the proletarian vanguard itself. It is therefore a central task of any serious communist organisation to carry out a constant critique of the confusions that can develop in other revolutionary groups and within its own ranks. Clarity can never be advanced by avoiding debate and confrontation, even if this is all too often the case in today�s proletarian political milieu, which has lost its grip on the traditions of the past - the tradition defended by Lenin, who never shirked from any polemic whether with the bourgeoisie, confused groupings within the worker�s movement, or his own revolutionary comrades; the tradition defended as well by Bilan which, in its quest to elaborate the communist programme in the wake of past defeats, engaged in debate with all the different currents within the international proletarian movement of the day (the groups coming from the International Left Opposition, from the Dutch and German lefts, n, from the Dutch and German lefts, etc etc).

In this article we cannot attempt a complete survey of all the texts that have appeared in the International Review, although we do intend to publish a complete list of contents on our web site. What we will try to show is how the International Review has been the main focus of our effort to carry out these three key aspects of marxism�s theoretical struggle.

Reconstructing the proletariat�s revolutionary past

Given the endless campaigns of defamation against the memory of the Russian revolution, and the efforts of bourgeois historians to conceal the international scope of the revolutionary wave launched by the October insurrection, a large amount of space in our Review has necessarily been given over to reconstructing the real story of these events, to affirming and defending the proletariat�s experience against the bourgeoisie�s outright lies and lies-by-omission, and to drawing their authentic lessons against both the distortions of the left wing of capital and the erroneous conclusions drawn within the revolutionary movement today.

To cite the major examples: International Review 3 contained an article elaborating the framework for understanding the degeneration of the Russian revolution, in response to confusions within the proletarian milieu of the time (in this case the Revolutionary Workers Group from the USA); it also contained a long study of the lessons of the Kronstadt uprising, that key moment in the revolution�s decline. International Review nos. 12 and 13 contained articles re-affirming the proletarian character of the Bolshevik party and the October insurrection against the semi-Menshevik ideas of councilism; these articles originated in a debate in the group that most directly prefigured the ICC - the Internacialismo group in Venezuela in the 1960s, and have been republished as a pamphlet 1917, start of the world revolution. Following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, we published in International Review nos. 71, 72 and 75 a series of articles in response to the vast torrent of propaganda about the death of communism, focusing in particular on refuting the fable about October being no more than a coup d�Etat by the Bolsheviks, and showing in some detail how it was above all the isolation of the Russian bastion that led to its demise. We took these themes further in 1997 with another series which looked more closely at the most important moments between February and October 1917 (see International Review nos. 89, 90, 91). From the beginning the ICC�s position was one of militant defence of the Russian revolution, but there is no doubt that as the ICC matured it progressively threw off the councilist influences that had been strongly present at its birth, and lost any apologetic note in its approach to the question of the party or of seminal historical figures like Lenin and Trotsky.

The International Review also contained an examination of the lessons of the German revolution in one of its first issues (no. 2) and a further two articles on the 70th anniversary of this crucial event which has been so carefully obscured by bourgeois historiography (International Review nos. 55 and 56). But we returned to the German revolution in much more depth in our series published in International Review nos. 81-83, 85, 88-90, 93, 95, 97-99). Here again we can see a definite maturation in the ICC�s approach to its subject, one more critical of the political and organisational lacunae of the German communist movement and based on a more profound understanding of the question of building the revolutionary party. A number of articles have also dealt with the 1917-23 revolutionary wave in a more general sense, notably the articles on Zimmerwald in International Review 44, on the formation of the Communist International in no. 57, on the extent and signif in no. 57, on the extent and significance of the revolutionary wave in no. 80, on the ending of the war by the proletariat, in no. 96.

Other key events in the history of the workers� movement have also been allotted particular articles in the International Review: the Italian revolution (no. 2); Spain 1936, especially the role of anarchism and of the �collectives� (no.15, 22, 47, etc); the struggles in Italy in 1943 (no.75) and more generally, articles denouncing the crimes of the �democracies� during the Second World War (no. 66, 79, 83,); a series on class struggle in the Eastern Bloc which deals with the massive class movements in 1953, 1956, and 1970 (no. 27, 28, 29); a series on China which exposes the mythology of Maoism (81,84, 94, 96); reflections on the meaning of the events in France in May 1968 (14, 53, 74, 93, etc ), and so on.

Closely tied to these studies has been the constant effort to recover the almost lost history of the communist left within these gargantuan episodes, a reflection of our understanding that without this history we could not have come into being. This effort has taken the form both of republishing rare texts, often translated for the first time into other languages, and of developing our own research into the positions and evolution of the left currents. We can mention the following studies, although again the list is not complete: of the Russian communist left, whose history is evidently directly linked to the problem of the degeneration of the Russian revolution (International Review nos. 8 and 9); of the German left (series on the German revolution, already mentioned; republication of texts of the KAPD - Theses on the Party in International Review 41 and its programme in International Review 94); of the Dutch left, with a long series (nos. 45-50, 52) which was the basis for the book which has appeared in French, Spanish and Italian and will shortly come out in English; of the Italian left fraction, particularly through the republication of texts on the Spanish civil war (International Review nos. 4, 6 and 7), fascism (no. 71), and the Popular Front (no. 47); of the French communist left in the 1940s through the republication of its articles and manifestos against the Second World War (nos. 79 and 88), its numerous polemics with the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (nos. 33, 34, 36), its texts on state capitalism and the organisation of capitalism in its decadent phase (nos. 21, 61), and its critique of Pannekoek�s book Lenin as Philosopher (nos. 27, 28, 30); of the Mexican left (texts from the 1930s on Spain, China, nationalisations in IRs 19 and 20), the �Greek left� around Stinas (no. 72).

Also inseparable from this work of historical reconstruction has been the energy put into texts which seek to elaborate our position on the fundamental class positions which derive both from the raw experience of the class combat and from the theoretical interpretation of this experience of the communist organisations. In this context, we should cite issues such as:

- the period of transition, in particular the lessons to be drawn from the Russian experience about the relationship between the proletariat and the transitional state. This was a major debate in the proletarian milieu at the time of the foundation of the ICC, a fact reflected in the publication of a number of discussion texts from different groups in the very first issue of the International Review. This debate continued within the ICC and a number of texts for and against the position of the majority position within the ICC were published (eg nos. 6, 11, 15, 18);

- the national question: a suite of articles examining the way this question was posed in the workers� movement in the first two decades of the 20th century was published in International Review nos. 37 and 42. A second series appeared in nos. 66, 68 and 69, covering a broader sweep from the revolutionary wave to the fate of �national� struggles in the phase of capitalist decomposition;

- the economic foundations of imperialism and of capitalist decadence. In a number of texts, in response to the criticism of other proletarian groups, we have argued for the essential continuity between Marx�s theory of crisis and the analyses developed by Rosa Luxemburg in her Accumulation of Capital and other texts (see for example nos. 13, 19, 16, 22, 29, 30). Parallel to this we have devoted a whole series to defending the basic concept of capitalist decadence against a number of its �radical� detractors in the parasitic camp and elsewhere (nos. 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60);

- other such general issues we have covered include the union question in the Communist International (nos. 24 and 25); the peasant question (no. 24); the theory of the labour aristocracy (no.25 ); the capitalist threat to the natural environment, ie �ecology� (no 63); terror, terrorism and class violence, the latter also being the fruit of an important debate within the ICC, in particular over whether the petty bourgeoisie could have any political expressions in the period of decadence. The ICC in the period of decadence. The ICC�s distinction between state terror and petty bourgeois terrorism, and between both and proletarian class violence amply answered this question (nos. 14 and 15).

This is perhaps the most suitable place to refer to the series on communism which has been running regularly in the International Review since 1992 and still has quite along way to go. Originally this project was conceived as a series of four or five articles clarifying the real meaning of communism in response to the bourgeoisie�s lying equation between Stalinism and communism. But in seeking to apply the historical method as rigorously as possible, the series grew into a deeper re-examination of the evolving biography of the communist programme, its progressive enrichment through the key experiences of the class as a whole and the contributions and debates of the revolutionary minorities. Although the majority of articles in the series are necessarily concerned with fundamentally political questions, since the first step towards the creation of communism is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is also a premise of the series that communism will take humanity beyond the realm of politics and release his true social nature. The series thus poses the problem of marxist anthropology. The interweaving of the �political� and �anthroaving of the �political� and �anthropological� dimensions of the series has in fact been one of its leitmotifs. The first volume of the series began (from International Review 68) with the precursors of marxism and with the young Marx�s grandiose vision of the ultimate goals of communism; it ended on the eve of the mass strikes of 1905 which signalled that capitalism was moving into a new epoch where the communist revolution had graduated from being a global perspective of the workers� movement to placing itself urgently on the agenda of history (International Review 88). The second volume has so far largely focussed on the debates and programmatic documents emanating from the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23; it still has to traverse the years of counter-revolution, the revival of debate about communism in the period after 1968, and to clarify the framework for a discussion about the conditions of tomorrow�s revolution. But in the end it will have to return to the question of what the species will be in the future realm of freedom.

Another very important component of the Review�s effort to give greater historical depth to the class positions defended by revolutionaries has been its constant commitment to clarifying the question of organisation. This has certainly been the most difficult question of all for the generation of revolutionaries that emerged in the late 60s, above all because of the trauma of the Stalinist counter-revolution and the powerful influence of individualist, anarchist and councilist attitudes on this generation. Later on we will mention some of the many polemics the ICC has had with other groups of the proletarian milieu on this question, but it is also the case that some of the most important texts in the Review on matters of organisation are the direct product of debates within the ICC itself, of the often very painful combat the ICC has had to wage within its own ranks to fully reappropriate the marxist conception of the revolutionary organisation. Since the beginning of the 80s the ICC has passed through three major internal crises, each one of which has resulted in splits or departures but through which the ICC has also emerged strengthened politically and organisationally. To support this conclusion we can point to the quality of the articles which emerged from these struggles and encapsulated the ICC�s improved grasp of the organisation question. Thus in response to the split with the Chenier tendency in the early 80s we published two major texts � one on the role of the revolutionary organisation within the class (no. 29), the other on its internal mode of functioning (no. 33). The latter in particular was and remains a key text, since the Chenier tendency had threatened to throw overboard all the basic conceptions contained in our statutes, our internal �rules� of functioning. The text in International Review 33 was a clear restatement and elaboration of those conceptions (here we should also point to a much earlier text on the statutes, in International Review 5). In the mid 80s, the ICC took a further step in settling scores with the remaining anti-organisational and councilist influences in its midst, through the debate with the tendency which went on to form the �External Fraction of the ICC�, now �Internationalist Perspective�, a typical element of the parasitic milieu. The main texts published in the International Review around this debate illustrate its key issues: the assessment of the danger posed by councilist ideas to the revolutionary camp today (nos. 40-43); the question of opportunism and centrism in the workers movement (nos. 43 and 44). Through this debate � and through working out its ramifications for our intervention in the class struggle � the ICC definitely adopted the notion of the revolutionary organisation as an organisation of combat, of militant political leadership within the class. The third debate, in the mid 90s, returned to the question of functioning on a higher level, and reflected the determination of the ICC to confront all the vestiges of the circle spirit which had presided over its birth � to aff had presided over its birth � to affirm the open, centralised, method of functioning, based on statutes accepted by all, against anarchist practices founded on friendship networks and clannish intrigues. Here again a number of texts of real quality express our efforts to re-establish and deepen the marxist position on internal functioning: in particular, the series of texts dealing with the struggle between marxism and Bakuninism in the First International (84, 85, 87, 88) and the two articles �Have we become Leninists?� in nos. 96 and 97.

Analysing the real movement

The second key task outlined at the beginning of this article � the constant evaluation of a constantly changing world situation � has also been a central element of the International Review.

Almost without exception, every issue of the Review begins with an editorial on the major events of international situation. These articles represent the ICC�s overall orientation on these events, guiding and centralising the positions adopted in our territorial publications. By going back through these editorials, it is possible to acquire a succinct picture of the ICC�s response to all the most crucial events of the 70s, 80s and 90s: the second and third waves of international class struggle; the offensive of US imperialism in the 1980s, the wars in the Middle East, the Gulf, Africa, the Balkans; the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the onset of the period of capitalist decomposition; the difficulties of the class struggle faced with this new period, and so on. A parallel feature has been the regular slot given over to the question �what point has the crisis reached?�, which again makes it possible to review the most important trends and moments in capitalism�s long descent into the quagmire of its own contradictions. In addition to this quarterly assessment, we have also published texts which take a longer term view of the development of the crisis since it came out into the open at the end of the 60s, most notably our recent series �30 years of open crisis� (International Review nos. 96-98). More long term analyses of all the aspects of the international situation are also contained in the reports and resolutions of our bi-annual international congresses, which are always published as fully as possible in the International Review (see nos. 8, 11, 18, 26, 35, 44, 51, 59, 67, 74, 82, 90, 92, 97, 98).

In fact, it is not possible to make a rigid separation between texts analysing the current situation and historical-theoretical articles. The effort of analysis inevitably stimulates reflection and debate which in turn give rise to major orientation texts defining the overall dynamic of the period and clarifying certain fundamental concepts. These texts are also often the product of international congresses or meetings of the ICC�s central organ.

For example, the third congress of the ICC, in 1979, adopted such orientation texts on the course of history and on the shift of the left parties of capital into an oppositional stance, providing the basic framework for understanding the balance of class forces in the period opened up by the resurgence of class struggle in 1968, and the bourgeoisie�s primary political response to the class struggle in the 70s and 80s (see International Review 18). Further elucidation of how the ruling class manipulates the election process to suit its own needs was provided by the article on the �machiavellianism� of the bourgeoisie in International Review 31 and in international correspondence on the same question in no. 39. Likewise, the bourgeoisie�s more recent return to the strategy of placing the left parties in government has also been analysed in a text of the ICC�s 13th Congress and published in International Review 98.

The 4th congress � held in 1981, in the wake of the mass strike in Poland � adopted a text on the conditions for the generalisation of the class struggle, stressing in particular that the spread of mass strikes towards the centres of world capital would be a response to capitalist economic crisis rather than to capitalist world war; a further contribution attempted a historical overview of the development of the class struggle since 1968 (International Review 26). Debates about Poland, and indeed about the whole second international wave of struggles of which it was the culminating point, gave rise to a number of other important texts on the characteristics of the mass strike (no.27), on the critique of the theory of the weak link (nos. 31, 37), on the significance of the struggles of the French steelworkers in 1979 and of the ICC�s intervention within them (nos. 17, 20), on workers� struggle groups (no. 21), the struggles of the unemployed (no. 14) and so on. Particularly important was the text 'The proletarian struggle in decadent capitalism' (International Review 23), which aimed to demonstrate why the methods of struggle that had been appropriate in the ascendant period (trade union strikes in single sectors, financial solidarity, etc), had to be superseded in the decadent epoch by the methods of the mass strike. The continual effort to follow and provide a perspective for the international class movement continued in numerous articles written during the third wave of struggles between 1983 and 1988.

In 1989, another major historical shift took place in the international situation: the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc and the definitive opening of capitalism�s phase of decomposition, an exacerbation of all the features of a decadent system marked in particular by the growing war of each against all at the imperialist level. Although the ICC had not previously expected this �peaceful� collapse of the Russian bloc, it was quick to see which way the wind was blowing and was already armed with the theoretical framework to explain why Stalinism could not reform itself (see the articles on the economic crisis in the Russian bloc - International Review nos. 22, 23, 43 - and in particular the theses on �The international dimension of the workers� struggles in Poland� in International Review 24). This framework formed the basis of the orientation text �On the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries� in International Review 60, which predicted the final demise of the bloc well before it was consummated by the fall of the Berlin wall and the break up of the USSR. Equally important as guides to understanding the characteristics of the new period were the theses entitled �Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism� in International Review 62 and the article �Militarism and Decomposition� in International Review 64. This latter text took further and made more precise our articles �War, militarism and imperialist blocs� which we had published in International Review nos. 52 and 53, prior to the collapse of the Russian bloc, and which developed the notion of the irrationality of war in capitalist decadence. Through these contributions it became possible to advance the framework for understanding the sharpening of imperialist antagonisms in a world without the discipline of blocs. The very palpable sharpening of inter-imperialist conflicts, of the chaotic struggle of each against all during this decade, has fully confirmed the framework developed in these texts.

Defending the principle of open debate between revolutionaries

At a recent public forum organised by the Communist Workers� Organisation in London, referring to the ICC�s appeal for common action between revolutionary groups faced with the war in the Balkans, a comrade of the CWO posed the question "what is the ICC up to?". He suggested that "the ICC has made more turns than the Stalinist Comintern" and that its �friendly� approach to the milieu is just the latest one of many. The Bordigist group Le Prolétaire described the ICC�s appeal in similar terms, denouncing it as a "manoeuvre" (see RI�.).

Such accusations make one seriously doubt whether these comrades have followed the ICC press over the last 25 years. A brief flick through the 100 issues of the International Review would be enough to refute the idea that calling for unity between revolutionaries is a �new turn� by the ICC. As we have already said, for us the real spirit of the communist left, and of the Italian fraction in particular, is the spirit of serious political debate and confrontation between all the different forces within the communist camp, and indeed between the communists and those who are struggling to reach the proletarian political terrain. From its inception - and in opposition to the very widespread sectarianism that prevailed in the milieu as a direct result of the pressures of the counter-revolution - the ICC has insisted on:

- the existence of a proletarian political camp made up of different tendencies which in one way or another are expressions of the class consciousness of the proletariat;

- the central importance, within this camp, of those groups which derive from the historic currents of the communist left;

- the necessity for the unity and solidarity between revolutionary groups in the face of the class enemy - its anticommunist campaigns, its repression, its wars;

- the necessity for a serious and responsible debate about the real divergences between these revolutionary organisations;

- the ultimate necessity for the regroupment of revolutionary forces as part of the process leading to the formation of the world party.

In defending these principles, there have been times when it was more necessary to confront differences, other times when unity of action was paramount, but this has never called any of the basic principles into question. We also recognise that the weight of sectarianism affects the whole milieu and we do not claim to be entirely immune from it - even if we are better placed to fight it by the mere fact that we recognise its existence, in contrast to most other groups. In any case, there have been occasions when our own arguments have been weakened by sectarian exaggerations: for example, an article published in both World Revolution and Révolution Internationale carried the title �The CWO falls victim to political parasitism�, which could imply that the CWO has actually passed into the parasitic camp and thus outside the proletarian milieu, whereas in fact the article was fundamentally motivated by the need to warn a fellow communist group of the dangers of parasitism. In a similar way the title of the article we published on the formation of the IBRP in 1985 - �The constitution of the IBRP, an opportunist bluff� (International Review 40 and 41) - could imply that this organisation has entirely succumbed to the virus of opportunism, whereas in fact we have always considered its component groups to be an integral part of the communist camp, even if we have always strongly criticised what we frankly see as its opportunist errors.

From the earliest issues of the International Review, it is easy to see to what our real attitude has been:

- the first issue contained discussion articles on the period of transition, reflecting the discussion both between the groups that formed the ICC and others who remained outside it; the same International Review also points out that some of these groups had been invited to or took part in the founding conference of the ICC; moreover the practice of publishing in the International Review contributions from other groups and elements has continued ever since (cf texts of the CWO, of the Mexican group the GPI; of the Argentinian group Emancipacion Obrera; of individual elements in Hong Kong, Russia, etc);

- in International Review 11 we published a text voted by our second congress in 1977, defining the basic contours of the proletarian political milieu and the �swamp� and outlining our general policy towards other proletarian organisations and elements;

- in the late 70s we gave our wholehearted support to Battaglia Comunista�s proposal for an international conference between groups of the communist left, participated fully in all the conferences that followed, published their proceedings and articles about them in the International Review and, within the context of the conferences, defended the need for the groups involved to make common statements on the central issues of the day (such as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan). By the same token we severely criticised the decision of Battaglia to abort these conferences (See International Review nos. 10, 16. 17, 22) and also the two pamphlets �Texts and proceedings of the international conferences of the communist left�;

- in the early 80s we published a number of articles analysing the crisis which hit a number of groups within the proletarian milieu (International Review nos. 29, 31);

- International Review 35 contains the appeal to proletarian groups launched by our 5th international congress in 1983. This appeal does not propose the immediate re-convocation of international conferences but seeks to establish more �modest� practices such as attendance at the public meetings of other groups, more serious polemics in the press, etc;

- in International Review 46, towards the end of 1986, we express our support for the �international proposal� issued by the Argentine group Emancipacion Obrera in favour of greater co-operation and more organised discussion between revolutionary groups

- in International Review 67 we published a further appeal to the proletarian milieu, this time issued by our 9th congress in 1991.

Thus, the ICC�s policy since 1996 of1>Thus, the ICC�s policy since 1996 of calling for a common response to such events as the bourgeoisie�s campaigns against the communist left, or the war in the Balkans, by no means represents a new turn or some underhand manoeuvre but is fully consistent with our whole approach towards the proletarian milieu since before the ICC was formed.

The numerous polemics we have published in the International Review are equally part of this orientation. We cannot list them all here, but we can say that through the International Review we have carried on a continuous debate on virtually every aspect of the revolutionary programme with all the currents of the proletarian milieu and quite a few on its margins.

Debates with the IBRP (Battaglia and the CWO) have certainly been the most numerous, indicating the seriousness with which we have always taken this current. Some examples:

• on the party: the problem of substitutionism (International Review 17); the subterranean maturation of consciousness (International Review 43); the relationship between the fraction and the party (nos. 60, 61, 64, 65);
• on the history of the Italian left and the orin the history of the Italian left and the origins of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (nos. 8, 34, 39, 90, 91);
• on the tasks of revolutionaries in the peripheries of capitalism (no. 46, and this issue);
• on the union question (no. 51);
• on the historic course (nos. 36, 50, 89);
• on crisis theory and imperialism (nos. 13, 19, 86 etc);
• on the nature of wars in decadence (nos. 79, 82);
• on the period of transition (no. 47)
• on idealism and the marxist method (no 99).

With the Bordigists, we have debated above all the question of the party (eg nos. 14, 23), but also the national question (no. 32), decaarty (eg nos. 14, 23), but also the national question (no. 32), decadence (no. 77 and 78), mysticism (no. 94), etc.

We should also mention polemics with the latter-day descendants of councilism (eg the Dutch groups Spartakusbond and Daad en Gedachte in International Review 2, the Danish group Council Communism in International Review 25;) and with the current animated by Munis (nos. 25, 29, 52). Parallel to these debates within the proletarian milieu we have written a number of critiques of the groups of the swamp (Autonomia in no. 16, modernism in no. 34, Situationism in no.80), as well as waging the combat against political parasitism which in our opinion is a serious danger to the proletarian camp, posed by elements who claim to be part of it but who play an entirely destructive role against it (see for example the Theses on Parasitism in International Review 94, articles on the EFICC (nos. 45, 60, 70, 92, etc), on the CBG (no. 83,etc).

Even when we have polemicised very sharply with other proletarian groups, we have always tried to argue in a serious manner, basing ourselves not on speculation or distortions but on the real positions of other groups. Today, given the huge responsibilities that weigh on a still tiny revolutionary camp, we have tried to make an even more stringent effort to argue in an accurate and fundamentally fraternal manner. Our readers can go through our polemical articles in the International Review and form their own judgement about how well we have succeeded in this regard. Unfortunately however, we can point to very few serious replies to most of these polemics, or to the many orientation texts which we have explicitly offered as contributions for debate within the whole proletarian milieu. Far too often our articles are either ignored or dismissed as the ICC�s latest hobby-horses, with no real attempt to engage the arguments we have put forward. In the spirit of our previous appeals to the proletarian milieu, we can only call on the other groups to recognise and thus begin to overcome the sectarian barriers that prevent real debate between revolutionaries - a weakness that can only benefit the bourgeoisie in the end.

Comrades! Help us distribute the International Review!

It seems to us that we can be proud of the International Review and are convinced that it is a publication that will stand the test of time. Although situations have shifted profoundly since the International Review began, although the ICC�s analyses have matured, we do not think that the I00 issues of the International Review we have published so far, or the many issues we will publish in future, will become obsolete. It is no accident, for example, that many of our new contacts, once they become seriously interested in our positions, begin to build up collections of back issues of the International Review. But we are also only too aware that our press, and the International Review in particular, still only reaches an extreme minority. We know that there are objective historical reasons for the numerical weakness of communist forces today, for their isolation from the class as a whole, but awareness of these reasons, while demanding realism on our part, is not an excuse for passivity. The sales of the revolutionary press and thus of the International Review can certainly be increased, even in only a modest way, by an effort of revolutionary will on the part of the ICC and its readers and sympathisers. This is why we want to conclude this article with an appeal to our readers to participate actively in an effort to increase the distribution and sale of the International Review - by ordering more back copies and complete collections (which we will be selling at an inclusive price of £50 sterling or its equivalent), by taking extra copies to sell, by helping to find and service bookshops and distribution agencies and so on. Theoretical agreement with the idea of the importance of the revolutionary press also implies a practical commitment to selling it, since we are not anarchists who disdain the grubby involvement with the process of selling and accounting, but communists who want to reach out to our class as widely as possible, but understand that this can only be done in an organised and collective way.

At the beginning of this article, we emphasised our organisation�s ability to publish a quarterly review for 25 years, without a break, when so many other groups have published irregularly or intermittently, or simply disappeared. One could of course point out that after a quarter-century�s existence, the ICC has still not increased the frequency of its theoretical publication. This is obviously the sign of a certain weakness, but not in our opinion a weakness in our political positions or analyses. It is a weakness common to the whole Communist Left within which, despite its meagre strength, the ICC is by far the biggest and most widespread organisation. It is a weakness of the whole working class, which although it has proved capable of emerging from the counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s, has encountered some formidable obstacles in its path, not the least being the collapse of the Stalinist regimes and the general decomposition of bourgeois society. A particular characterists society. A particular characteristic of decomposition, which we have pointed out in our press, is the development throughout society, including within the working class, of all kinds of superficial, irrational, or mystical viewpoints, to the detriment of a profound, coherent, and materialist approach, of which marxism is precisely the best expression. Today, books on esotericism encounter vastly more success than works of marxism. Even had we the capacity to publish the International Review more often, in three languages, its present level of distribution would not justify our making such an effort. This is why we call on our readers to help us in this effort of distribution. By taking part in this effort, they take part in the combat against all the miasma of bourgeois ideology and decomposition which the proletariat will have to overcome in order to open the way to the communist revolution.

Amos, December 1999

In the previous article in this series, we examined the first major debates within the Communist Party of Russia about the direction being taken by the new proletarian power - in particular, the warnings about the rise of state capitalism and the danger of a bureaucratic degeneration. These debates were at their height in early 1918. But over the next two years Soviet Russia was engaged in a life or death struggle against imperialist intervention and internal counter-revolution. Faced with the immense demands of the civil war, the party closed ranks to fight the common enemy, just as the majority of workers and peasants, despite their growing hardships, rallied to the defence of the soviet power against the attempts by the old exploiting classes to restore their lost privileges.

As we have noted in a previous article (see International Review 95), the party programme drawn up at its 8th Congress in March 1919 expressed this mood of unity within the party, without abandoning the most radical hopes generated by the original impetus of the revolution. This was also a reflection of the fact that the left wing currents in the party - those who had been the main protagonists of the debates in 1918 - still had a considerable influence, and in any case were by no means radically separated from those who were more visibly at the helm of the party, such as Lenin and Trotsky. Indeed some former Left Communists, such as Radek and Bukharin, began to abandon their critical stance altogether, since they tended to identify the emergency "War Communism" measures adopted during the civil war with a real process of communist transformation (see the article on  Bukharin in International Review 96).

Other former Lefts were not so easily satisfied with the wide-scale nationalisations and the virtual disappearance of monetary forms which characterised War Communism. They did not lose sight of the fact that the bureaucratic abuses which they had warned about in 1918 had not only survived but had become increasingly entrenched during the civil war, while their antidote - the organs of mass proletarian democracy - had been losing their life-blood at an alarming rate, due both to the demands of military expediency and to the dispersal of many of the most advanced workers to the war fronts. In 1919, The Democratic Centralism group was formed around Osinski, Sapranov, V. Smirnov and others; its main focus was the fight against bureaucratism and in the soviets and the party. It had close links with the Military Opposition which waged a similar combat within the army. It was to prove to be one of the most persistent currents of principled opposition within the Bolshevik party.

Nevertheless, as long as the priority was the defence of the soviet regime against its most open enemies, these debates remained within certain bounds; and in any case, since the party itself remained a living crucible of revolutionary thought, there was no fundamental difficulty in pursuing the discussion through the normal channels of the organisation.

The ending of the civil war in 1920 brought about a crucial change in this situation. The economy was essentially in ruins. Famine and disease on a horrifying scale stalked the land, especially in the cities, reducing these former nerve-centres of the revolution to a level of social disintegration in which the daily, desperate struggle for survival could easily outweigh all other considerations. Tensions that had been held in check by the need to unite against a common foe began pressing towards the surface, and in these circumstances, the rigid methods of War Communism not only failed to contain these tensions, but aggravated them further. The peasants were increasingly exasperated with the policy of grain requisitions that had been introduced to feed the starving cities; workers were less and less willing to accept military discipline in the factories; and on another, more impersonal level, the commodity relations which had been forcibly suspended by the state, but whose material roots had remained untouched, were more and more insistently demanding their due: the black market which had flourished like noxious algae under War Communism had only partially eased the mounting pressure, and with deleterious effects on the social structure.

Above all, the developments within the international situation had brought little relief to the Russian workers' fortress. 1919 had been the pinnacle of the world-wide revolutionary wave upon whose outcome soviet power in Russia was totally dependent. But the same year also saw the defeat of the most decisive proletarian uprisings, in Germany and Hungary, and the failure of mass strikes in other countries (such as Britain and the US) to go onto the level of a political offensive. 1920 saw the effective derailment of the revolution in Italy through the isolation of the workers in factory occupations, while in Germany, the most key country of all, the dynamic of the class struggle was already being posed in defensive terms, as in the response to the Kapp putsch (see International Review 90). In the same year, the attempt to break Russia's isolation through the bayonets of the Red Army in Poland had ended in total fiasco. By 1921 - particularly after the "March Action" in Germany had ended in another defeat (see International Review 93), the most lucid revolutionaries had already begun to realise that the revolutionary tide was ebbing, although it was not yet possible or even accurate to say that it had entered into a definitive retreat.

Russia was therefore an overheated pressure-cooker, and a social explosion could not long be delayed. By the end of 1920, a series of peasant uprisings swept through Tambov province, the middle Volga, the Ukraine, western Siberia and other regions. The rapid demobilisation of the Red Army added fuel to the fire as armed peasants in uniform streamed back to their villages. The central demand of these rebellions was for an end to the system of grain requisitioning and the right of the peasants to dispose of their own products. And as we shall see, in early 1921, the mood of revolt had spread to the wokers of those cities which had been the epicentre of the October insurrection: Petrograd, Moscow … and Kronstadt.

Faced with this burgeoning social crisis, it was inevitable that divergences within the Bolshevik party should also have reached a critical juncture. The disagreement was not about whether the proletarian regime in Russia was dependent of the world revolution: all the currents within the party, albeit with different nuances, still held to the fundamental conviction that without the extension of the revolution, the proletarian dictatorship in Russia could not survive. At the same time, since the Russian soviet power was seen as a crucial bastion conquered by the world proletarian army, there was also general agreement that a 'holding operation' must be attempted, and that this necessitated the reconstruction of Russia's ruined economic and social edifice. The differences emerged about the methods the soviet power could and should use if it was to stay on the right path and avoid succumbing to the weight of alien class forces inside and outside Russia. Reconstruction was a practical necessity: the question was how to carry this out in a way that would ensure the proletarian character of the regime. The focal point for these differences in 1920 and early 1921 was the "trade union debate".

Trotsky and the militarisation of labour

This debate had in fact arisen at the very end of 1919, with the unveiling by Trotsky of his proposals for restoring Russia's ravaged industrial and transportation system. Having achieved extraordinary success as the commander of the Red army during the civil war, Trotsky (despite one or two moments of hesitation when he considered a very different approach) came out in favour of applying the methods of War Communism to the problem of reconstruction: in other words, in order to re-gather a working class which was in danger of decomposing into a mass of isolated individuals living by petty trade, petty thieving, or melting back into the peasantry, Trotsky advocated the outright militarisation of labour. He first formulated his view in his 'theses on the transition from war to peace' (Pravda, 16 December 1919) and further defended them at the 9th party Congress in March-April 1920. "The working masses cannot be wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown her and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers." Those accuse of "deserting from labour" would be placed in punitive battalions or labour camps. In the factories, military discipline would prevail; like Lenin in 1918, Trotsky extolled the virtues of one-man management and the "progressive" aspects of the Taylor system. As for the trade unions, their task in this regime would be to subordinate themselves totally to the state: "The young socialist state requires trade unions not for a struggle for better conditions of labour - that is the task of the social and state organisations as a whole - but to organise the working class for the ends of production, to educate, discipline, distribute, group, retain certain categories and certain workers at their posts for fixed periods - in a word, hand in hand with the state to exercise their authority in order to lead the workers into the framework of a single economic plan." (Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 1920; New Park edition 1975, p.153).

Trotsky’s views – though initially, Lenin was largely in support of them – provoked vigorous criticism from many within the party, and not only those accustomed to being on its left. These criticisms only led Trotsky to harden and theorise his views. In Terrorism and Communism – which appears to be as much a response to Trotsky’s Bolshevik critics as to the likes of Kautsky, its main polemical target – Trotsky goes so far as to argue that because forced labour had played a progressive role in previous modes of production, such as Asiatic despotism and classical slavery, it was pure sentimentalism to argue that the workers’ state could not use such methods on a broad scale. Indeed, Trotsky did not even shrink from arguing that militarisation is the specific form of the organisation of labour in the transition to communism: “the foundations of the militarisation of labour are those forms of state compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy by the socialist will forever remain an empty sound” (ibid, p. 152). In the same work, Trotsky reveals the extent to which the notion that the dictatorship of the proletariat is only possible as the dictatorship of the party had become a matter of theory and almost of principle: “We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of the party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the soviets the possibility of being transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. It is quite natural that, in the period in which history brings up those interests, in all their magnitude, on to the order of the day, the communist have become the recognised representatives of the working class as a whole.” (ibid p. 123). This is a far cry from Trotsky’s definition of the soviets in 1905 as organs of power which go beyond bourgeois parliamentary forms, as indeed it is from Lenin’s position in State and Revolution in 1917, and the Bolsheviks’ practical approach in October, when the idea of the party taking power had been more an unconscious concession to parliamentarism than a worked-out theory, and when in any case the Bolsheviks had shown themselves willing to form a partnership with other parties. Now, the party had “a historical birthright” to exercise the proletarian dictatorship, “even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy" (Trotsky at the 10th party Congress, quoted in Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp 508-9).

The fact that this debate developed essentially around the question of the trade unions may seem strange given that the emergence of new forms of workers' self-organisation in Russia itself - the factory committees, the soviets etc - had effectively rendered these organisations obsolete, a conclusion that had already been drawn by many communists in the industrialised west, where the unions had already been through a long process of bureaucratic degeneration and integration into the capitalist order. The fact that the debate had this focus in Russia was thus partly a reflection of Russia' "backwardness", of a condition in which the bourgeoisie had not developed a sophisticated state apparatus capable of recognising the value of trade unions as instruments of class peace. For this reason it could not be said that all the unions which had been formed prior to and even during the 1917 revolution were organs of the enemy class. In particular there had been a strong tendency towards the formation of industrial unions which still expressed a certain proletarian content.

Be that as it may, the real issue in the debate provoked by Trotsky went much deeper. In essence it was a debate about the relationship between the proletariat and the state of the transition period. The question it raised was this: could the proletariat, having overthrown the old bourgeois state, identify itself totally with the new "proletarian" state, or were there compelling reasons why the working class should protect the autonomy of its own class organs - even, if necessary, against the demands of the state?

Trotsky's position had the merit of supplying a clear answer: yes, the proletariat should identify itself with and even subordinate itself to the "proletarian state" (and so, in fact, should the proletarian party which was to function as the executive arm of the state). Unfortunately, as can be seen in his theorisation of forced labour as the method for building communism, Trotsky has largely lost sight of what is specific to the proletarian revolution and to communism - the fact that this new society can only be brought about by the self-organised, conscious activity of the proletarian masses themselves. His response to the problem of economic reconstruction could only have further accelerated the bureaucratic degeneration which was already threatening to engulf all the concrete forms of proletarian self-activity, including the party itself. And so it passed to other currents within the party to give voice to a class reaction against this dangerous tendency in Trotsky's thinking, and against the principal dangers facing the revolution itself.

The Workers' Opposition

The fact that deep issues were at stake in this debate was reflected in the number of positions and groupings that arose around it. Lenin himself, who wrote of these differences "the Party is sick. The Party is down with a fever" ( 'The Party Crisis', Pravda, January 21, 1921) was only part of one grouping - the so-called 'Group of Ten'; The Democratic Centralists and Ignatov's group had their own positions; Bukharin, Preobrazhinsky and others tried to form a "buffer group", and so on. But alongside Trotsky's group, the most distinctive approaches were adopted by Lenin on the one hand, and by the Workers' Opposition, led by Kollantai and Shliapnikov, on the other.

The Workers' Opposition undoubtedly expressed a proletarian reaction against Trotsky's bureaucratic theorisations, and against the real bureaucratic distortions that were eating away at the proletarian power. Faced with Trotsky's apology for forced labour, it was by no means demagogy or phrasemongering for Kollontai to insist in her pamphlet The Workers' Opposition, written for the 10th party Congress in March 1921, that "this consideration, which should be very simple and clear to every practical man, is lost sight of by our party leaders: it is impossible to decree communism. It can be created only by the process of practical research, through mistakes, perhaps, but only by the creative powers of the working class itself" (London Solidarity pamphlet no 7, p33). In particular, the Opposition rejected the tendency of the regime to impose a managerial dictatorship in the factories, to the point where the immediate situation of the industrial worker was becoming more and more indistinguishable from what it had been before the revolution. It thus defended the principle of collective workers' management against the over-use of specialists and the practice of one-man management.

On a more global level, the Workers' Opposition offered a keen insight into the relationship between the working class and the soviet state. For Kollontai, this was in fact the key issue: "Who shall develop the creative powers in the sphere of economic reconstruction? Shall it be purely class organs, directly connected by vital ties with the industries - that is, shall industrial unions undertake the work of reconstruction - or shall it be left to the soviet machine which is separated from direct industrial activity and is mixed in its composition? This is the root of the break. The Workers' Opposition defends the first principle, while the leaders of the party, whatever their differences on secondary matters, are in complete accord on this cardinal point, and defend the second principle" (ibid p4).

In another passage of the text, Kollontai explains further this notion of the heterogeneous nature of the soviet state: "any party standing at the head of a heterogeneous soviet state is compelled to consider the aspirations of peasants with their petty bourgeois inclinations and resentments towards communism, as well as lend an ear to the numerous petty bourgeois elements, remnants of the former capitalists in Russia and to all kinds of traders, middlemen, petty officials etc. These have rapidly adapted themselves to the soviet institutions and occupy responsible positions in the centres, appearing in the capacity of agents of different commissariats, etc ... These are the elements - the petty bourgeois elements widely scattered through the soviet institutions, the elements of the middle class, with their hostility towards communism, and with their predilections towards the immutable customs of the past, with resentment and fears towards revolutionary acts. These are the elements that bring decay into our soviet institutions, breeding there an atmosphere altogether repugnant to the working class" (ibid pp6-7).

This recognition that the soviet state - both because of its need to reconcile the interests of the working class with those of other strata , and because of its vulnerability to the virus of bureaucracy - could not itself play a dynamic and creative role in the creation of the new society was an important sight, albeit undeveloped. But these passages also expose the principal weaknesses of the Workers' Opposition. Lenin in his polemics with the group, dismissed it as an essentially petty bourgeois, anarchist and syndicalist current. This was false: for all its confusions, it represented a genuine proletarian response to the dangers besetting the soviet power. But the accusation of syndicalism is not altogether wrong either. This is apparent in its identification of the industrial unions as the main organs for the communist transformation of society, and its proposal that the management of the economy should be placed in the hands of an "All-Russian Congress of Producers". As we have said already, the Russian revolution had already shown that the working class had gone beyond the union form of organisation, and that in the new epoch of capitalist decadence unions could only become organs of social conservation. The industrial unions in Russia were certainly no guarantee against bureaucratism and the organisational dispossession of the workers; the emasculation of the factory committees which had emerged in 1917 largely took the form of incorporating them into the unions, and consequently, the state. It is also worth pointing out that when the Russian workers did enter into action on their own terrain in the very year of the trade union debate - in the strikes in Moscow and Petrograd - they again confirmed the obsolescence of the trade unions, since to defend their most material interests they resorted to the classic methods of the proletarian struggle in the new epoch: spontaneous strikes, general assemblies, elected strike committees subject to immediate revocation, massive delegations to other factories, etc. Even more importantly, the Workers' Opposition's emphasis on the unions expressed a total disillusionment with the most important mass proletarian organs - the workers' soviets, which were capable of uniting all workers across sectional boundaries and of combining the economic with the political tasks of the revolution1. This blindness to the importance of the workers' councils logically extended to a total underestimation of the primacy of politics over economics in the proletarian revolution. The one great obsession of the Kollontai group was the management of the economy, to the point where it was almost proposing a divorce between the political state and the "producers congress". But in a proletarian dictatorship, the workers' management of the economic apparatus is not an end in itself, but only an aspect of its overall political domination over society. Lenin also made the criticism that this idea of a "congress of producers" was more applicable to the communist society of the future, where there are no more classes and all are producers. In other words, the Opposition's text contains a strong suggestion that communism could be achieved in Russia provided the problems of economic management were solved correctly. This suspicion is reinforced by the scant references in Kollontai's texts to the problem of the extension of the world revolution. Indeed, the group seems to have had little to say about the international policies of the Bolshevik party at the time. All these weaknesses are indeed expressions of the influence of syndicalist ideology, even if the Opposition cannot be reduced to nothing more than an anarchist deviation.

Lenin's views on the trade union debate

As we have seen, Lenin considered that the trade union debate expressed a profound malaise in the party; given the critical situation facing the country, he even felt that the party had been mistaken in authorising the debate at all. He was especially angry with Trotsky for the manner in which he had provoked the debate, and accused him of acting in an irresponsible and factional manner over a number of organisational issues linked to the debate. Lenin also seemed to be dissatisfied with the very focus of the debate, feeling that "a question came to the forefront which, because of the objective conditions, should not have been in the forefront" (report to the 10th party Congress, March 8, 1921). Perhaps his main fear was that the apparent disorder in the party would only exacerbate the growing social disorder within Russia; but perhaps he also felt that the real nub of the question was elsewhere.

Be that as it may, the most important insight Lenin offered in this debate was certainly on the problem of the class nature of the state. This is how he framed the question in a speech given to a meeting of communist delegates at the end of 1920: "While betraying this lack of thoughtfulness, Comrade Trotsky falls into error himself. He seems to say that in a workers' state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake. Comrade Trotsky speaks of a 'workers' state'. May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers' state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: 'Since this is a workers' state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?' The whole point is that it is not quite a workers' state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes ... For one thing, ours is not actually a workers' state but a workers' and peasants' state. And a lot depends on that (interjection from Bukharin: 'What kind of state? A workers' and peasants' state?'). Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout, 'What kind of state? A workers' and peasants' state?' I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets and that will be answer enough.

But that is not all. Our Party Programme - a document which the author of The ABC of Communism knows very well - shows that ours is a workers' state with a bureaucratic twist. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong... We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers' organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state" ('The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky's Mistakes', Collected Works vol 32, pp22-3).

In a later article Lenin retreated a bit on this formulation, admitting that Bukharin had been right to question his terms: "What I should have said is: 'A workers state is an abstraction. What we actually have is a workers' state with this peculiarity, firstly that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and secondly, that it is a workers' state with a bureaucratic distortion'. Anyone who reads the whole of my speech will see that this correction makes no difference to my meaning or conclusions" ('The Party Crisis', Pravda, January 21 1921, CW vol 32 p48).

In fact Lenin showed a great deal of political wisdom in questioning the notion of the "workers state". Even in countries which don't have a large peasant majority, the transitional state will still have the task of encompassing and representing the needs of all the non-exploiting strata in society, and can thus not be seen as a purely proletarian organ; in addition to this, and partly as a result of it, its conservative weight will tend to express itself in the formation of a bureaucracy towards which the working class will have to be especially vigilant. Lenin had intuited all this even through the distorting mirror of the trade union debate.

It is also worth noting that on this point about the class nature of the transitional state there is a real convergence between Lenin and the Workers' Opposition. But Lenin's criticism of Trotsky did not lead him to sympathise with the latter. On the contrary, he saw the Workers' Opposition as the main danger; the Kronstadt events in particular convinced him that it expressed the same threat of petty bourgeois counter-revolution. Under Lenin's instigation. the 10th party Congress passed a resolution on "The syndicalist and anarchist deviation in our party" which explicitly stigmatises the Workers' Opposition: "Hence, the views of the Workers' Opposition and of like-minded elements are not only wrong in theory, but are an expression of petty bourgeois and anarchist wavering, and actually weaken the consistency of the leading line of the Communist party and help the class enemies of the proletarian revolution" (CW vol 32 p248).

As we have already said, these accusations of syndicalism are not entirely without foundation. But Lenin's principal argument on this point is deeply flawed: for him, the syndicalism of the Workers' Opposition resides not in the fact that it emphasised economic management by the trade unions rather than the political authority of the soviets, but in its alleged challenge to the rule of the Communist Party. "The Theses of the Workers' Opposition fly in the face of the decision of the Second Congress of the Comintern on the Communist Party's role in operating the dictatorship of the proletariat" (Summing up speech on the report of the CC of the RCP, March 9 1921, CW vol 32, p199). Like Trotsky, Lenin had definitely come to the view that "the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class" ('The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky's Mistakes', op cit). Faced with Trotsky, this was an argument for the unions to act as "transmission belts" between the party and the class as a whole. But faced with the Workers' Opposition, it was an argument for declaring their views to be outside of marxism altogether - along with anyone else who questioned the notion of the party exercising the dictatorship.

In fact the Workers' Opposition did not fundamentally challenge the notion of the party exercising the dictatorship: Kollontai's text proposes that "the Central Committee of our party must become the supreme directing centre of our class policy, the organ of class thought and control over the practical policy of the soviets, and the spiritual personification of our basic programme" (op cit pp41-2). It was for this very reason that the Workers' Opposition supported the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion; and it was the latter which posed the most explicit challenge to the Bolsheviks' monopoly of power.

The Kronstadt tragedy

1. The official view and its reluctant supporters

In the wake of widespread strikes in Moscow and Petrograd, the Kronstadt rebellion broke out at the very time the Bolshevik party was holding its 10th Congress2. The strikes had arisen around largely economic issues, and had been met with a mixture of concessions and repression by the regional state authorities. But the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, initially acting in solidarity with the strikes, had gone on to raise, alongside demands for relaxing the harsh economic regime of War Communism, a series of key political demands: new elections to the soviets, freedom of the press and of agitation for all working class tendencies, the abolition of political departments in the armed forces and elsewhere, "because no party should be given privileges in the propagation of its ideas or receive the financial support of the state for such purposes" (from the resolution adopted on the battleship Petropavlovsk and at the mass assembly of 1st March). It amounted to a call to replace the power of the party-state with the power of the soviets. Lenin - rapidly echoed by the official mouthpieces of the state – denounced it as the result of a White Guard conspiracy, although he did say that the reactionaries were manipulating the real discontent of the petty bourgeoisie and even a section of the working class that was susceptible to its ideological influence. In any case, “This petty bourgeois counter-revolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak put together, because ours is a country where peasant property has gone to ruin and where, in addition, the demobilisation has set loose vast numbers of potentially mutinous elements" (speech to the 10th Congress, op cit, p184).

The initial argument, that the mutiny was from the outset led by White Guard generals on the spot, was soon proved to be without foundation. Isaac Deutscher, in his biography of Trotsky, notes the unease that set in among the Bolsheviks after the rebellion had been crushed: “Foreign communists who visited Moscow some months later and believed that Kronstadt had been one of the ordinary incidents of the civil war, were ‘astounded and troubled’ to find that the Bolsheviks spoke of the rebels without any of the anger and hatred which they felt for the White Guards and the interventionists. Their talk was full of ‘sympathetic reticences’ and sad, enigmatic allusions, which to the outside betrayed the party’s troubled conscience” (The Prophet Armed, p514, OUP edition, 1954). Certainly Lenin had seen very quickly that the rebellion proved the impossibility of maintaining the rigours of war communism, the NEP was in one sense a concession to the Kronstadters’ call for an end to the grain requisitions, although the central demands of the rebellion – the political ones, centring around the reanimation of the soviets – were totally rejected. They were seen as the vehicle through which the counter-revolution could unseat the Bolsheviks and destroy all remnants of the proletarian dictatorship. “The way the enemies of the proletariat take advantage of every deviation from a thoroughly consistent, communist line was perhaps most strikingly illustrated in the case of the Kronstadt mutiny, when the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and White Guards in all countries of the world immediately expressed their willingness to accept the slogans of the soviet system, if only they might thereby secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and when the Social-Revolutionaries and the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in general resorted in Kronstadt to slogans calling for an insurrection against the soviet government of Russia ostensibly in the interests of the soviet power. These facts fully prove that the White Guards strive, and are able, to disguise themselves as communists, solely for the purpose of weakening or destroying the bulwark of the proletarian revolution in Russia” (draft resolution of the 10th Congress of the RCP on party unity, written by Lenin, CW, vol. 32, pp241-2).

Even when the thesis that the mutiny was actually led by the White Guard generals had to all intents and purposes been abandoned, the basic argument remained: this was a petty bourgeois revolt which would clear the way to the forces of open counter-revolution. Literally so, because Kronstadt was a vital naval port at the gates of Petrograd, and in a more general sense, because it was feared that ‘success’ for the rebellion would have inspired a nation-wide peasant jacquerie. The only possible alternative was for the Bolsheviks to act as the guardians of the proletarian power, even if the proletariat as a whole was no longer participating in this power and sections of it were sympathetic to the rebels. This viewpoint, it must be said, was by no means restricted to the Bolshevik leadership. We have already said that the Workers Opposition put themselves in the front line of the forces sent to recapture the fortress. In fact, as Serge points out, “the Congress mobilised all present, including many oppositionists, for the battle against Kronstadt. Dybenko, a former Kronstadt sailor himself and an extreme Left Communist, and Bubnov, the writer, soldier and leader of the ‘Democratic Centralism’ group, went out to join battle on the ice against rebels who they knew in their hearts were right” (op cit.).

Internationally, the communist left was caught in a quandary. At the third congress of the Communist International, the KAPD delegate Hempel supported Kollontai’s call for greater initiative and self-activity by the Russian workers, but at the same time argued, on the basis of the KAPD’s theory of ‘Russian exceptionalism’, that “we say this because we have for Germany and Western Europe a different conception of the dictatorship of the proletarian party. In our view, this dictatorship was justified in Russia, because of the Russian situation – the lack of sufficiently developed forces among the proletariat means that the dictatorship has had to exercise more from above” (La Gauche Allemande, Invariance, 1973, p72-3). Another delegate, Sachs, protested against Bukharin’s charge that Gorter or the KAPD had taken the side of the Kronstadt insurgents, even though they seemed to recognise the proletarian character of the movement: “After the proletariat at Kronstadt rose up against you, the Communist Party, and after you had declared a state of siege against the proletariat in Petrograd…! This internal logic in the succession of events, not only here in the Russian tactic, but also in the resistances that have been expressed against it, this necessity has always been recognised and underlined by comrade Gorter. This phrase has to be read to see that Gorter did not take the side of the Kronstadt insurgents and it’s the same for the KAPD” (ibid.).

Perhaps the best description of the anguished state of mind of those elements who, though critical of the direction the revolution was taking in Russia, decided to support the crushing of Kronstadt is provided by Victor Serge in Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Serge shows very well how, during the period of War Communism, the regime of the Cheka, the Red Terror, had become more and more unrestrained, engulfing the supporters of the revolution as well as its enemies. He chronicles the disastrous and treacherous treatment of the anarchists, particularly the Makhnovist movement, at the hands of the Cheka. And he records his shame at the official lies that were spread about the strikes in Petrograd and the mutiny in Kronstadt – for this was the first time that the soviet state had resorted to the systematic lying that became the hallmark of the Stalinist regime later on. Nevertheless, as Serge recounts, “after many hesitations, and with unutterable anguish, my communist friends and I finally declared ourselves on the side of the party. This is why. Kronstadt had right on its side. Kronstadt was the beginning of a fresh, liberating revolution for popular democracy: ‘The Third Revolution!’ it was called by certain anarchists whose heads were stuffed with infantile illusions. However, the country was absolutely exhausted, and production particularly was at a standstill: there were no reserves of any kind, not even reserves of stamina in the hearts of the masses. The working class elite that had been moulded in the struggle against the old regime was literally decimated. The party, swollen by the influx of power-seekers, inspired little confidence…Soviet democracy lack leadership, institutions and inspiration: at its back there were only masses of starving and desperate men.

The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for freely-elected soviets into one for ‘soviets without communists’. If the Bolshevik party fell, it was only one short step to chaos, and through chaos to a peasant rising, the massacre of the communists, the return of the émigrés, and in the end, through the sheer force of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian…” (op cit., pp128-9). And he pointed out the pressing danger of the White Guards using the Kronstadt garrison as a spring-board for a new intervention, and of the spreading peasant revolt in the countryside.

2. Voices of Dissent

There can be no doubt that the active forces of the counter-revolution were slavering at the mouth at the thought of using Kronstadt ideologically, politically and even militarily as a hammer with which to beat the Bolsheviks. And in fact they continue to do so to this day: for the main political ideologues of capital, the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion is one more proof that Bolshevism and Stalinism are two peas in a pod. At the time of the events, it was this overwhelming fear that the White Guards would take advantage of the revolt to settle scores with the Bolsheviks, which tipped many of the most critical voices of communism towards supporting the repression. Many, but not all.

Of course there were the anarchists. In Russia at this time anarchism was a true swamp of diverse currents: some, like the Makhnovists, expressed the best aspects of the peasant revolt; some were products of deeply individualist intelligentsia; some were out and out bandits and lunatics; some, like the ‘soviet anarchists’, the anarcho-syndicalists and others, were proletarian in essence despite the weight of that petty-bourgeois outlook which is the real core of anarchism. There is no doubt, however, that many of the anarchists were correct in their criticisms of the rule of the Cheka and of the crushing of Kronstadt. The problem is that anarchism offers no framework for understanding the historical significance of such events. For them, the Bolsheviks ended up crushing the workers and sailors because they were, in Voline’s words, “marxists, authoritarians, and statists”. Because marxism advocates the formation of a proletarian political party, calls for the centralisation of the proletariat’s forces, and recognises the inevitability of the state in the period of transition, it is doomed to end up as the executioner of the masses. Such timeless ‘truths’ are of no use to understanding the real, evolving historical processes and drawing the lessons from them.

But there were also Bolsheviks who refused to support the suppression of the rebellion. In Kronstadt itself, in fact, the majority of the party members went over to the rebels (as did a number of the troops sent to recapture the fortress). Some of the Kronstadt Bolsheviks simply resigned from the party in protest against the slanders being spread about the nature of events. But a number of them formed a Provisional Party Bureau which issued an appeal denying the rumours that the Kronstadt rebels were shooting communists. It expressed its confidence in the Provisional Revolutionary Committee formed by the newly-elected Kronstadt Soviet and ended with the words “Long live the power of the Soviets! Long live international working class unity!” (quoted in The Kronstadt Commune by Ida Mett, first published in 1938 and reprinted by Solidarity in 1967).

It is also important to mention the position adopted by Gavriil Miasnikov, who went on to form the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party in 1923. At that time Miasnikov had already started to speak out against the increasingly bureaucratic regime dominated by the party and the state, although it seems that he was not yet part of any oppositional grouping within the party. According to an essay entitled “Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group” (The Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984), Miasnikov was deeply affected by the Petrograd strikes and the Kronstadt mutiny (he was in Petrograd at the time). “Unlike the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition, he refused to denounce the insurgents. Nor would he have participated in their suppression had he been called to do so”. Avrich then quotes Miasnikov directly: “if someone dares to have the courage of his convictions, he is either a self-seeker or, worse, a counter-revolutionary, a Menshevik or an SR. Such was the case with Kronstadt Everything was nice and quiet. Then suddenly, without a word, it hits you in the face: ‘what is Kronstadt? A few hundred communists are fighting against us’. What does this mean? Who is to blame if the ruling circles have no common language not only with the non-party masses but with rank-and-file communists? So much do they misunderstand one another that they reach for their weapons. What then is this? It is the brink, the abyss” (Avrich cites Socialtischeskii vestnik, February 23, 1922, as his source for this quote).

Despite these insights, it took a long time for the political lessons of the Kronstadt events to be drawn in any real depth. In our view, the most important conclusions were drawn in the 1930s by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. In the context of a study called ‘The question of the state’ (Octobre, 1938), it wrote of Kronstadt: “It may be that in certain circumstances the proletariat – and we will even concede that they may be the unconscious victims of manoeuvres by the enemy – enters into struggle against the proletarian state. What is to be done in such a situation? We must start from the principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the proletariat by violence and force. It would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have kept it from the geographical point of view, since substantially this victory could only have one result: that of altering the very bases, the substance of the action carried out by the proletariat”.

A number of important issues are raised by this passage. To begin with it affirms clearly that the Kronstadt movement was proletarian in character. Certainly there were petty-bourgeois, especially anarchist, influences in a number of views expressed by the rebels. But to argue, as Trotsky did in his retrospective justification, ‘Hue and Cry over Kronstadt’ (New International, April 1938), that the proletarian sailors of Red Kronstadt in 1917 had been replaced by a petty-bourgeois mass who could not put up with the rigours of War Communism, who demanded special privileges for themselves, and so ‘repelled’ the workers of Petrograd, is in total opposition to reality. The mutiny began as an expression of class solidarity with the workers of Petrograd, and delegates from Kronstadt were sent to the Petrograd factories to explain their case and canvas support. ‘Sociologically’ its nucleus was also proletarian. Whatever changes had taken place within the fleet since 1917, a cursory glance at the delegates elected to the Provisional Revolutionary Committee shows that the majority were sailors with a long record of service and that they had clearly proletarian functions (electricians, telephonists, boilermen, engineers etc.). Other delegates were from local factories and in general the factory workers, particularly those from the Kronstadt arsenal, played a key role in the movement. It is equally untrue that they demanded privileges for themselves: point 9 of the Kronstadt ‘platform’ demands “equal rations for all working people, with the exception of those in trades detrimental to health”. Above all, their demands had a clear proletarian character, and intuitively corresponded to a desperate need for the revolution: the need to revive the soviets and to end the party’s entanglement with the state, which was not only crippling the soviets, but destroying the party from within.

The understanding that this was indeed a proletarian movement is the key to the conclusion drawn by the Italian Left: for the latter, any attempt to suppress a proletarian reaction to the difficulties facing the revolution could only distort the very existence of the proletarian power. Thus the Italian Fraction drew the conclusion that within the proletarian camp, all reactions of violence are to be outlawed, whether to spontaneous movements of self-defence or towards political minorities. Referring explicitly to the trade union debate and the Kronstadt events, it also recognised the necessity for the proletariat to maintain the autonomy of its own class organs (councils, militias etc.), to prevent them from being absorbed into the general apparatus of the state, and even to pit them against the state if need be. And although it had not ditched the formula of the “dictatorship of the party”, the Fraction was most of all insistent on the need for the party to remain quite distinct from the state. We will return to this process of clarification undertaken by the Fraction in a subsequent article.

The bold conclusion drawn by the passage from Octobre - that it would have been better to have lost Kronstadt from the geographical point of view than carry out an act that would distort the very meaning of the revolution – is also the best answer to Serge’s concerns. For him it seemed that the crushing of the revolt was the only alternative to the rise of a new “anti-proletarian dictatorship” that would “massacre” the communists. But from the advantage of hindsight we can see that despite the crushing of the revolt an anti-proletarian dictatorship did arise and did massacre the communists: the Stalinist dictatorship. Indeed, it must be said that the crushing of the revolt only accelerated the decline of the revolution and thus unknowingly helped to clear the way for Stalinism. And the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution was to have much more tragic consequences than the restoration of the White Guard could ever have done. If the White generals had come back to power then at least the issue would have been clear, as was the case with the Paris Commune, where all the world could see that the capitalists had won and the workers had lost. But the most horrible thing about the way the revolution died in Russia is that the counter-revolution won and called itself socialism. We are still living with the awful consequences.

The party ties a noose around its neck

The conflict between the proletariat and the ‘proletarian state’, which appeared openly in the events of 1921, placed the Bolshevik party at a historical crossroads. Given the isolation of the revolution and the terrible conditions this had imposed on the Russian bastion, it was inevitable that this state machine would increasingly be transformed into an organ of capitalism against the working class. The Bolsheviks could either try to remain at the head of this machine – which actually meant being more and more subsumed within it – or ‘go into opposition’, take their place amongst the workers, defending their immediate interests and aiding them to regroup their forces in preparation for a possible revival of the international revolution But although the KAPD did seriously raise this question in the autumn of 19213, it was far harder for the Bolsheviks to see the issue at the time. In practice the party had become so profoundly entangled with the state machine, and so pervaded with substitutionist ideology and methods, that there was no real possibility if the party as a whole taking this audacious step. But what was realistically posed in the period was the struggle of the left fractions against the degeneration of the party, for the maintenance of its proletarian character. Unfortunately, the party compounded the error it had made over Kronstadt by concluding, in Lenin’s words, that “now is not the time for oppositions”, by declaring a state of siege within the party and banning fractions, as it did at the conclusion of the 10th Congress. The Congress “Resolution on party unity” demanded the dissolution of all opposition groups at a time when the party was “surrounded by a ring of enemies”. It was not intended to be permanent, nor to end all criticism within the party: the resolution also called for more regular publication of the party’s internal discussion bulletin. But in seeing only ‘the enemy without’, it failed to give sufficient weight to the ‘enemy within’: the growth of opportunism and bureacratism inside the party, which was making it more and more necessary for opposition to take an organised form. Indeed, by banning factions, the party was tying a noose around its own neck: in the years that lay ahead, when the course of degeneration was becoming more and more evident, the resolution of the 10th Congress was to be used again and again to stifle all criticism and opposition to this course. We will return to this question in the next article in this series.

CDW

A new step in capitalist barbarism

War after war. After Kosovo, Timor. After Timor, Chechnya. Each competes to surpas Timor. After Timor, Chechnya. Each competes to surpass the others in horror and bloodshed. The conflict between the Russian army and the Chechen militia is bloody, and tragic for the Chechen population: "The latest Chechen tally is 15,000 dead; 38,000 injured; 220,000 refugees; 124 villages completely destroyed; and a further 280 villages with 80% damage. They say that 14,500 children have been maimed and 20,000 of them orphaned" (The Guardian , 20/12/99).

The country is raped, ravaged; the population starved, exiled, terrorised and desperate. To give some idea of the extent of the "humanitarian" disaster, for a country like the USA these figures would be the equivalent of 2 million dead, 5 million wounded and mutilated, and 28 million refugees! Since the article was written, these figures have certainly increased.

To this, we should add the Russian losses, which according to the Committee of Mothers of Russian Soldiers are at least 1,000 dead and 3,000 wounded (Moscow Times, 24/12/99).

In a Grozny flattened by bombardment, the survivors among the civilian population are hiding in cellars, without water, heating, or food, living like rats; in the outlying devastated villages and towns, the refugees live under the yoke of Chechen mafia gangs, or of the Russian soldiery, itself terrified and drunk with vodka, murder, and loot; in the neighbouring republics, the refugees are parked in veritable concentration camps, without shout supplies, medical attention, heating, in tents often without even a bed. The situation in the camps is dire. Just as it was in the camps for Kosovar refugees, where "international aid" arrived in dribs and drabs - and was largely stolen by the Albanian mafia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) - while the great powers of NATO dropped billions of dollars-worth of bombs on Serbia and Kosovo. Today, more tens of billions of dollars are going to finance the Russian state and its war, while the great powers leave the Chechen population to rot in the camps: "The sick and old go without medical attention. To feed themselves, residents rummage through local garbage bins, hoping to find rotten potatoes for soup. The water, drawn from a fire reservoir, is brown and full of insects, and even after boiling smells bad" (Moscow Times, 24/12/99). In the camps, the refugees are still subjected to the terror of the Russian military, which ransomed, aggressed, bombed and machine-gunned them during their flight. As The Guardian titled (18/12/99), "refugees of Chechen war find no sanctuary in camps" where nobody "can leave the camp without a day pass allowing them past the armed guards at the camp gates".

Between 200 and 300,000 refugees have fled the fighting and bombardments. In fact, the Chechen population is being subjected to collective assassination. The massive bombardment of towns and v villages, the Russian troops terrorising of the population, the machine-gunning of refugee columns in the corridors left open by the Russian army, have all pushed the Chechens to flee. This bloody ethnic cleansing follows that of 1996� carried out by Chechen troops after their victory over the Russian army, and which forced 400,000 Russian inhabitants to leave the region. Just as the Serb militias� ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars was followed by that of Kosovo�s Serb civilians by the UCK.

A lot of this is already said by the TV and the press. One might be surprised at the extent of the media campaign in Western countries, denouncing the Russian intervention, after they supported - and with what fervour! - the massive bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. But this campaign is particularly hypocritical, and attempts to hide the duplicity of the media. For what they do not say, is that the conditions, the methods and the consequences of this war, like the others, will be more and more terrible, and that they are only paving the way to still more numerous, widespread and terrible wars. They do not say, that these wars are the expressions of capitalism�s historical bankruptcy.

Today, imperialist wars are an expression of capitalism�s decomposition

Ten years ago, ethnic cleansing was exceptional and limited to a few particularly backward countrieuntries. During the 1990s, it has become the norm in imperialist war, whether in Africa, Asia, or Europe. Tens of millions of refugees throughout the world will never return to their town, their village, their home. They have been dumped forever in the camps. The situation of the Palestinians is becoming the norm on every continent. The self-assertion of a multitude of minority nationalisms - what the press calls "the explosion of nationalism" - is no longer the exceptional and limited phenomenon of the 1980s. it has provoked the proliferation of national conflicts, and the emergence of states, each one more mafia-ridden and corrupt than the next. Power-struggles between rival mafia have become the norm. Traffic in drugs and weapons of every description, banditry, kidnapping - which are and will continue to be among these "new nations" main resources - have also become the norm. The situation in Afghanistan - or in Africa, or in Colombia - is spreading to every continent. The norm? Chaos, spreading throughout every continent.

By contrast, the massive terror bombing of civilian populations, the destruction of whole towns and villages, is nothing new. It is a characteristic of all the imperialist conflicts, whether localised or world-wide, in the period of capitalism�s decadence, ever since 1914 and World War I. The destruction visited on Europe and Japan in 1945 had nothing to envy that of Chechnya in the year 2000. Groznyny today gives us a good enough idea of Dresden in 1945. What is new, is that the destruction caused by today�s wars will never be rebuilt. Neither Pristina in Kosovo, nor Kabul in Afghanistan, nor Brazzaville in the Congo, nor Grozny after 1996 were ever rebuilt, nor will they be. The economies devastated by war will never recover. There will not be - there cannot be - a new Marshall Plan. This is the situation in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, most of the African countries, Timor, which have all suffered the destruction of the "modern" wars of the 1990s. The permanence and proliferation throughout the 20th century of all these characteristics of imperialist war specific to capitalism�s decadence are an expression of its historical bankruptcy. They are an expression of its decomposition.

We have denounced today�s media campaigns over the war in Chechnya for their hypocrisy and duplicity. In reality, governments, politicians, journalists, "philosophers" and intellectuals are all accomplices in justifying capitalist barbarism and state terror. Chechnya today, like Kosovo yesterday, is witnessing the ethnic cleansing, the flight of civilians, the destruction of their villages and homes, the looting of their possessions, blackmail and murder by militias and troops, refugees in camps by the hundreds of thousands, the repression of a national minority, and the determination to ensure the disappearancnce of a whole population. Not to denounce - or rather not to pretend to denounce - the mass crimes in Chechnya, would make the media, indeed the whole democratic apparatus, the open accomplices of the great powers� humanitarian lies. "Whether you live in Africa, Central Europe, or anywhere else, if someone wants to commit mass crimes against an innocent civilian population they should know that, as far as we are able, we will prevent it" declared Bill Clinton at the end of the war in Kosovo. Not to at least appear to denounce today what was used yesterday as a pretext for military intervention would annihilate all the campaigns on the right of humanitarian interference. And would therefore also reduce the ability to intervene militarily in the future. By contrast, the pretence of denunciation makes it possible to continue the ideological campaign, and even to add a new layer to it.

What interests are at stake in the Chechen war?

But are these anti-Russian media campaigns only propaganda? Do they not reveal an opposition between Russia and the Western powers? Is there not a conflict of economic, political, strategic - in other words imperialist - interest, especially in the Caucasus? Are the US not giving support to projects for oil pipelines, which would avoid Russian territory and pass instead either via Georgia or Turkey? Do the diffeifferent powers not aim to control the oil of the Caucasus, or even to take for themselves the financial profits from its exploitation?

It is true that there are opposing interests among the great powers in the Caucasus. Along with the decomposition of the USSR, then of Russia, they are the other factor in the bloody conflicts throughout the Caucasus, indeed throughout all the ex-"Soviet" republics in Asia. This is the reason for the active presence of the various local powers, with Turkey and Iran to the fore, and world powers, with Germany and the USA vying for influence in Turkey. But what do we mean by "imperialist interests"? Are they simply a matter of the "oil rent", and the profits to be made from it?

A struggle for "oil rent"?...

What is the real situation as regards oil in the Caucasus? "Oil production in this region is no longer a major factor (�) This industry, along with the maintenance of a refining activity, is undoubtedly a real source of finance for the local clans in power, but is certainly not on the Federal [ie Russian] level" (Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1999).

What directly economic "vital interest" can the United States have in controlling such a small oil production, when they already control without difficulty the major part of world oil production in the Middle East, Venezuela, Meuela, Mexico, and the US itself? The US can hope for no direct financial profit from the Caucasus. So why this active American presence? To control the oil trade routes?

"If the Caucasus remains an object of major geopolitical confrontations, it is for another reason: control over the transit of oil from the Caspian Sea, even if the volumes seem to be less than at first thought. And in this respect, the power struggle between the two slopes of the [mountain chain separating the North Caucasian republics of the Russian Federation from the ex-Soviet republics of the South Caucasus] has sharpened considerably during the last year. The Russians have always insisted that most of the oil should transit by their territory, as it did during the Soviet era, via the Baku-Novorissisk pipeline (�) But on 17th April 1999, a new pipeline was officially opened between Baku and Supsa, a Georgian port on the Black Sea coast which is practically integrated into the NATO security system (�) In mid-October, the presidents of Turkey and Azerbaijan confirmed the construction of a pipeline between Baku and the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan: all the oil from the South Caucasus would thus bypass Russia" (idem).

So is this a matter of gaining control over the economic profits to be made from extracting and shipping Caspian oil? They financial gains to be made are certainly far from negligible for the republicblics of the ex-USSR in the region, or even for Russia and Turkey. But what about the United States?

"But whether the route [the proposed trans-Turkey pipeline] agreed to last week � which is strategically advantageous for the US but costly for the oil companies � can be profitable quickly is still a big question. So, too, is the nature and extent of political fallout with Russia, the loser in the deal" (International Herald Tribune, 22/11/99, our emphasis).

The United States� real interest, its real aim, is not economic but strategic, and it is the American state which is directing the strategic and economic orientations of US capitalism - against the advice of the oil companies, in this case. In capitalism�s decadent epoch, imperialist interests and conflicts are geopolitical, and while directly economic interests continue to exist, they are put at the service of the state�s strategic orientations: "For the Clinton administration, the prime concern has been strategic : guaranting that any pipeline would skirt Russia and Iran and thus denying those nations a choke-hold over a new energy supply for the West" (idem).

...Or for strategic interests?

The real goal of the United States is not to profit from the "oil rent", but to deprive Russia and Iran of any control over the transit of oilt of oil, and to ensure its own control vis-à-vis its own main European rivals, especially Germany. Just as in professional soccer today, the richest clubs buy great players that they do not really need, and which they don�t let play, simply to prevent them playing for rival teams. The real conflict of Western power strategic interests in this zone is often hidden: it is nonetheless profound. An unstable Russia ready to sell to the highest bidder, an anti-American, pro-European or even pro-German Iran, in control of the region�s oil routes, would represent a strategic threat to US power. The assiduous court being paid to Turkey - an particularly influential imperialist power throughout this Turkish-speaking region - by America and the European powers (the former offering a pipeline, the latter entry into the European Union) indicates clearly enough what is at stake and where are the divisions between the great imperialist powers. For the Americans, control over Caucasian oil would allow them to deprive the Europeans of it if necessary, and so give them a further means of pressure and a significant advantage in the balance of imperialist forces. It would bring no financial benefit - it is even likely to prove expensive - but it would be a particularly important strategic advantage.

The Western powers support Russia in Chechnya

The Western pressress� media campaigns about the war in Chechnya are hypocritical and conniving, but they are not directly part of these geo-strategic conflicts. The European press is much more virulent than the Americans in denouncing Russia�s intervention, when one might expect them to denounce the advance of the US. The fact is that although the war in Chechnya is connected to these imperialist antagonisms, especially from the Russian viewpoint, it is not directly part of them. Or more exactly, it is not coveted by the Western powers in the same way as the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), where they are struggling amongst themselves for influence. "We accept the fact that Moscow is protecting its territory" declares Javier Solana, Co-ordinator of European Union foreign policy (International Herald Tribune, 20/12/99), adding for the benefit of public opinion, "but not in this way", which is particularly rich coming from NATO�s ex-Secretary General, the man who gave the order to bomb Serbia and "push it 50 years into the past" last March. "Their [the Russians�] goal, their legitimate goal, is to defeat the Chechen rebels, and to stop terrorism within Russia, to stop their invasion of neighbouring provinces like Dagestan" (Bill Clinton, International Herald Tribune, 10/12/99). To which we can add the declarations of all the main American and European leaders, such as Germany�s ex-pacifist ecologist Foreign Minister in the leftwing Schröder government: "Nobody is questioning Russia's right to combat terrorism (...) but present actions by the Russians are often in contradiction with international law"(Joschka Fischer, in International Herald Tribune, 18/12/99), which is not bad either coming from one of the most fervent supporters of Western military intervention in Serbia, an operation which was even more illegal from the standpoint of international law and organisations like the UN which the ruling class has set up to try to settle its international differences.

How come such unanimity? Why such support for Russia, giving it carte blanche to obliterate Chechnya? Is this not contradictory with the dynamic of imperialist interests in the Caucasus?

The contradiction of the Western powers: against chaos in Russia, or for their imperialist interests?

"It�s not only the USSR which is about to disintegrate: it�s the Union�s biggest republic, Russia itself, which threatens to explode, without having any way of imposing order - except through veritable bloodbaths whose outcome is in any case entirely uncertain" (International Review no.68, December 1991). Since 1991, this tendency towards the decomposition of the ex-USSR has been largely borne out in the facts. The tendency for the whole capitalist world to rot on its feet at the politicalitical, social, economic, ecological levels strikes at all states, but especially the most fragile and those on the periphery. It has shown itself especially clearly in Russia.

Russia�s catastrophic and chaotic situation is cause for concern among the great Western powers. Russian military intervention in Chechnya has done nothing to reassure them, on the contrary: "Generals have talked of massive resignations and even civil war if the politicians interfere with their campaign, an ominous new note in the disintegration of Russian governance after a strong tradition of the military keeping out of politics. The fear that Russia instils now, a decade after the breach of the Berlin Wall, is the turbulence and irrationality of its weakness (...) It may bring the watershed of Russia's past communist evolution, losing the struggle for democracy and unleashing chaos and eventual military rule. That is why governments are so hesitant to react" (Flora Lewis, "Russia risks self-destruction in this irrational war", International Herald Tribune, 13/12/99).

This anxiety and hesitation are shared by all the major Western powers, despite their imperialist antagonisms. And even if the Americans tend to back the Yeltsin clique, while the Europeans at present tend to back the Primakov clique, they are all agreed not to throw too much oil on the flames, and so to limit the country�s slide into chaos. From this sis standpoint, the Yeltsin clique�s success in the December legislative elections was somewhat worrying for the country�s political stability, with the re-election of a particularly unpopular and incompetent - other than in filling its own pockets - ruling team, which owed its success solely to its bloody military victories in Chechnya. As we write, Yeltsin�s resignation and his replacement by his Prime Minister Putin clearly aims to bring on an early presidential election and guarantee the Yeltsin family judicial immunity in which to enjoy its ill-gotten gains. The disintegration of the Russian state may be halted by a "tough" Prime Minister - now President - taking, with the army, the reins of power. At least for the moment. And if the initial military successes in Chechnya continue, which is far from certain despite Russia�s crushing material superiority.

But the ineluctable aggravation of the economic situation, and the centrifugal tendencies of the Russian Federation threatening it with break-up, are a menace for the country itself and the whole capitalist world. Rusting away they may be, the missiles and nuclear submarines of the ex-USSR remain all the more dangerous in a country falling into anarchy and political instability. When Clinton, for the benefit of "public opinion", criticised the excesses of Russia�s intervention, Yeltsin�s threat that Clinton "has for a minute forgotten that Russia has a full arsenenal of nuclear weapons" (International Herald Tribune, 10/12/99) cannot simply be put down to the clowning of an old alcoholic. The mere fact that this corrupt buffoon, pickled in vodka, pinching the bums of his secretaries before the whole world�s TV, has been able to remain in power in Russia for 10 years, says much about the state of decomposition of the Russian bourgeoisie�s political apparatus. The great imperialist powers find themselves in a contradictory situation: on the one hand, the implacable logic of imperialist competition pushes them to grasp every opportunity to gain an advantage over their rivals and so to plunge society still further into chaos and decomposition, especially in countries like Russia; on the other hand, they are relatively conscious of this dynamic of chaos and decomposition, understand its dangers, and from time to time try to hold it back. But let�s be clear, it would be illusory to think that the capitalist world can reverse this tendency towards its own decomposition, just as it would be illusory to think that the infernal logic of imperialist competition could come to an end, and no longer provoke ever more war, chaos, and bloodshed. The common desire not to plunge Russia still further into the mire is only temporary: the implacable logic of imperialist interest will give new impetus to the tendency to chaos and decomposition in the Caucasus, as in other regions of the world.

The Western powers support Russia to limit its chaos

Confronted with the menace of an uncontrollable Russia, there is a tacit agreement among the Western states not to dispute its control over the Northern Caucasus which is part of the Russian Federation; but accompanied by an equally tacit warning not to try to gain a foothold in the Southern Caucasus, where the great powers are vying amongst themselves. This agreement has been expressed concretely in the "authorisation", to use the terms of the Russian press by the great Western powers for Russia to intervene to defend its "legitimate rights" in Chechnya, and drown the country in blood. "In the framework of the treaty on conventional weapons, the OSCE summit in Istanbul has authorised us to deploy, in the North-Caucasus military region, far more men and material than in 1995 (600 tanks instead of 350, 2200 armoured vehicles instead of 290, 1000 canons instead of 640). Russia will of course concentrate this military power in Chechnya" (reprinted in French from the Russian weekly Obchtchaïa Gazeta by the Courrier International of 16/12/99, our emphasis).

Let us at least give the Russian press credit for speaking clearly and frankly, and of reporting faithfully the intentions of the great Western powers: "We leave you the Northern Caucasus, but we take take the right to fight amongst ourselves for control of the South Caucasus". The tribulations of the Caucasian populations are not at an end. This region is yet another which will never again know peace, and which will never recover from the destruction which will continue to hit it.

Bourgeois democracy is war and misery

The hypocritical and conniving Western media campaigns have no intention of lessening, still less of combating capitalism�s military barbarism. They are aimed essentially at the Western populations, and in particular at the working class, in order to hide the link between imperialist war and capitalism�s economic bankruptcy, in order to hide the disastrous dynamic into which it is dragging humanity. They denounce the war in Chechnya in the name of the "right of humanitarian interference", the better to justify the war in Kosovo. The criticise the inaction of Western governments the better to glorify bourgeois democracy, when all the main protagonists of recent wars in Kosovo, Timor, and now Chechnya are democratic states with democratically elected governments. "Democracy is a not a guarantee against many nasty things" they say, in order to make it a goal with which everybody should identify: "We need to recapture a purpose in world affairs that is morally, intellectually and politically compelling. The democratic visioision retains an enormous vitality. Our duty is to help define the 21st century as a Democratic Century (...) Democracy is now demonstrably a universal value" (Max Kampelman, one-time US diplomat, International Herald Tribune, 18/12/99).

Today�s deceitful media campaigns aim to make us believe that a lack of democracy is the cause of wars and poverty. To think that "our fundamental challenge is to recognise that the political struggle remains between the democratic way of life and the denial of human liberty and political freedom"(idem) is to fall - however little - into the logic of defence of bourgeois democracy, for "more democracy", as we were endlessly told during the great media spectacle during the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. It means identifying with the nation-state, lining up behind the national bourgeoisie. It is a dead-end, a trap. Far from stopping, or even holding back, the descent into hell, any mass adhesion by the population, and above all by the working class, to the "ideals" of bourgeois democracy would only accelerate the world�s slide into capitalist barbarism. Is that not precisely the terrible experience that the world has undergone since the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc and these countries� adoption of Western-style bourgeois democracy? And is that not precisely what the incessant media campaigns about the benefits of democracy are trying to hide? ? The chaos in Russia and the war in Chechnya are both a product of capitalist democracy.

Support the internationalists in Russia

Humanity�s salvation from capitalist barbarism lies down a different road. The international bourgeoisie�s media never mention it, or even its expressions. And yet, they exist, and it is clear that they would encounter a significant echo if they were not stifled, drowned, lost, barely audible, under a constant deluge of ideological campaigns. The road of refusal of sacrifice and war exists; it does find an expression. Faithful to the internationalist principle of the workers� movement, all the groups of the Communist Left have intervened to denounce the imperialist war in Yugoslavia (see International Review nos. 98 and 99). This road has also found expression in Russia itself. In the midst of general hostility and severe repression, at the price of serious personal risks, in the midst of nationalist hysteria, we salute the militants who have spoken out against Russia�s imperialist intervention in Chechnya, and who have defended the only road which can hold back, then put an end to military barbarity.

DOWN WITH THE WAR!

Don�t take us for idiots!

Yeltsin, Maskadov, Putin, Bassaiev�

They are all the same clique!

They are the ones who hthe ones who have organised the terror in Moscow, Vogodonsk, Dagestan, Chechnya. It is their business, their war. They need it to reinforce their own power. They need it to defend their oil. Why should our children die for their interests? Let the oligarchs fight amongst themselves!

Don�t believe the imbecile and nationalist speeches: we must not accuse a whole people of committing crimes which have been perpetrated by nobody knows who, but which are only the interests of the rulers and masters of every nation.

Don�t go to the war, or let your sons go! Resist this war as much as you can! Go on strike against this war and those who started it.

Some internationalists of Moscow.

Oppose the bourgeoisie and reject all nationalism, oppose the state whether democratic or not, refuse capitalism�s war, call the working class to struggle and the defence of its living conditions, stand up against capitalism: that is the road. It is the road that must be taken by the whole working class in every country. It is the road of working class struggle, of struggle against capitalist exploitation, against its sacrifices and poverty. It is the road to the destruction of capitalism, of this system which every day spreads more death and poverty throughout the world. It is the road of communist revolution.

Wars proliferate. The economic crisis is ravaging the world. Disaster follows disaster because of the all-destroying frenzy of capitalist production. Every day, the planet is less liveable, less breathable, more infernal. Only the working class can give an answer to these tragic ills that capitalism bears in itself. Only the world proletariat can offer humanity a perspective.

RL, 1/1/2000

The IBRP has published Theses on Communist Tactics for the Periphery of Capitalism which put forward its position on the existence within capitalism of a division between the central and peripheral countries, and its consequences for the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The Theses give a response to the different questions about the national question and the proletariat, such as:

• what links exist between the proletariat of the peripheral countries and that of the central countries?

• Is an international movement of the working class more likely to start from the centre of capitalism or from its "weakest link"?

• Could the movements of the "dispossessed" of the periphery be transformed into the motor of the world revolution?

• Does a progressive bourgeoisie exist in the "dominated" countries that the proletariat could support?

• What should be the proletariat’s attitude towards "national liberation movements"?

We think that it is important to examine critically the IBRP’s Theses with the intention of contributing to the clearest possible responses to this kind of questions posed by the working class movement, an aim that should concern all revolutionaries.

The revolutionary and internationalist positionof the groups of the Communist Left

In the first place, the IBRPs Theses make clear its framework of revolutionary and internationalist political principles. We are not saying this to flatter the IBRP, but so that the working class can identify the common principles that unite the groups of the Communist Left, what we call the proletarian political milieu. This is made all the more necessary by the fact that some of these groups - including the IBRP - have at times forgotten, if not denied, that other groups exist which share the same principles. This is what happened during the bombing of Kosovo, when the ICC made a call for common action by these groups in order that in such a critical moment the voice of all internationalists could be expressed in the highest, clearest and most united manner possible. This call was rejected on the grounds of the "differences" that separate us. Furthermore, those political principles that we agree on are the point of departure for discussing our differences, which are certainly not insignificant.

Thus, from the preamble to the Theses, the IBRP expresses positions that we can only agree with. Concerning the character of the proletariat and the revolution, it reaffirms the principle put forward since the beginnings of the workers’ movement as to the international and world-wide character of the proletariat, fro from which it follows that the class will only be able to assert its programme of emancipation on an international scale. From the outset, the Theses declare that the fundamental Stalinist idea about "socialism in one country" was only an ideological cover for the state capitalism which arose from the defeat of the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the last century, and the degeneration of the Soviet state. The Theses’ "socialism is international or it is nothing", is part of the tradition of the communist movement, a position reaffirmed by the Communist Left which arose out of the degeneration of the Third International,

From this comes the corner-stone of the Communist programme: a "single international programme of the proletariat. Thus, one class, one programme! (…) The communist party has only one programme: the dictatorship of the proletariat of the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and for the construction of socialism" (Theses, Preamble). However, the uniqueness of the programme does not only mean the one aim, but also, based on the historical experience of the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the 20th century, the elimination of the distinction between the "minimum programme" and the "maximum programme", an aspect also reaffirmed in the Preamble. Finally, a first general aspect relating to the countries of the peririphery is put forward: there cannot be different programmes for the proletariat of different countries (be they "central" or "peripheral"); the communist programme is the same for the proletariat of all countries and cannot be replaced with programmes that are still bourgeois.

Clearly, there are some concepts which the ICC does not share concerning the general analysis of capitalism; nevertheless, this does not invalidate the clearly internationalist spirit of the preamble. All of the general principles that we have mentioned, we also hold.

The centre and the periphery of capitalism, equilibrium or contradiction?

Theses 1 to 3 are devoted to the characterisation of the present relations between countries. The IBRP rejects the mystifications about the division between the "developed" and "developing countries" as mere ideological tranquillisers. As for the "dominating" and "dominated" countries they simply note that a dominated country can in turn be the dominator in relation to others. Then by a process of elimination, the Theses take up the definition of "peripheral and central countries": "The concept of centre and periphery indicates the Marxist conception of the present historical period. Having super-imposed the laws of its international market and the economic mechanisms which accompany it on different pre-capitalisitalist economic-social forms, imperialism dominates even the remotest corner of the globe" (Thesis 2).

The meaning of this definition is the rejection of a distinction between countries that can carry out a different programme (communist or democratic) or of an alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of the "dominated" countries (aspects which we will return to later). We support the IBRP’s concern to distance itself from any justification for a "national" struggle or an alliance with a bourgeois fraction under the pretext of "different economic conditions" between countries. The Theses, in fact, combat here the ambiguity on this point found amongst the groups influenced by Bordigism.

However, we cannot share the IBRP’s definition, even though we agree with the use of the concept of centre-periphery. The main problem is that in its definition of the central-peripheral countries the IBRP does not see a historical limitation of capitalism, but an economic and political rationality: "In one sense the perpetuation of pre-capitalist economic relations and ‘pre-bourgeois’ social and political systems was necessary and functional for the domination of imperialism.

Necessary in the sense that the super-imposition of capitalism is not determined by an overpowering will to dominate socially and politically but by the generaleneral economic needs of capital (…)

functional for the domination of imperialist capitalism. On the one hand the contrast between the living and working conditions of the industrial proletariat and the rest of the disinherited masses assures the class is divided. On the other hand it means that social and political tensions will find their outlet on the terrain of bourgeois progressivism (…)In conclusion, there is no contradiction between capitalist domination and the perpetuation of pre-capitalist economic relations and social structures which can even be a condition of that very domination" (Theses 3, our emphasis).

The idea of a situation of "equilibrium" or "stability" between the periphery and centre permeates this Thesis, as if the relationship had not undergone an historical development, as if capitalism will control and regulate the same mode of expansion through out the world. Thus, the inequalities between the different countries that fall under the orbit of capital are not the result of the contradictions of capitalism, but rather, they are determined by its "necessities".

For us, on the contrary, capitalism’s inability to equalise the conditions of all the countries of the world expresses precisely the contradiction between its tendency to an unlimited development of its productive forces, a growing expansion of production and the d the capitalist market, and the limit that the realisation of profits encounters in the market. The fundamental aspect of this inability is not the continuation of "pre-capitalist relations", as the Theses pose it, but the accelerating destruction of these relations (the destruction of small scale production) everywhere and their replacement by large scale capitalist production. However, this is only up to a certain point, until the historic limit on capitalism’s expansion of social production begins to appear. From then on the destruction of pre-capitalist relations continues, but absorbing increasingly less of the exploited population into large-scale production. This can be seen as much in the ruin of the peasant and artisan masses and, the constant growth of the under-employed masses in the large cities, as in the existence of countries and regions that remain industrially "backward".

In other words, the process of the destruction of small scale property, during the 20th century has not absorbed all of the working population into large-scale capitalist production, as some currents in the 19th century workers’ movement imagined it would. On the contrary, the formation of masses, ruined by capitalism, who are pulled towards a "peripheral" existence is one of the most marked expressions of the system’s decadence (and accentuates the phenomena of its decomposition).

The Theses implicitly deny a contradiction of capitalism that the Communist Manifesto has already highlighted: the creation of the world market requires capitalism constantly to conquer new markets, new sources of raw materials and labour power, into which to expand. But the destruction of the old relations limits the possibilities for new expansion.

The Theses on the other hand talk about the continuation of pre-capitalist relations, as a condition of capitalist accumulation, when it is precisely capitalist accumulation that leads to the destruction of these pre-capitalist relations.

This is where the IBRP is unclear on the notion of capitalist decadence. It is stuck in a vision that dates from the beginning of the 20th century when it was still possible to talk about regions dominated by "pre-capitalist relations"; but we have to analyse the consequence of the continuation of the capitalist system throughout the 20th century. The IBRP imagines that the same relations on the world market as existed last century (when the capitalist world market had already subordinated the backward regions, but when pre-capitalist production still continued) still remains a permanent feature today. This theoretical position has the consequence of weakening its later rejection of national liberation struggles and alliances with the bou bourgeoisie, because it appears as if the material bases for the existence national struggles and the "progressive" bourgeoisie still pertain, despite the IBRP’s efforts to argue against this.

Moreover, the "functional" aspect of the continuation of the centre-peripheral relation is not developed further in this part of the Theses. However, it does prepare the idea that the non-proletarian masses of the periphery can be more "radical" than the proletariat of the central countries, because the material conditions of the latter are better.

The "radicalisation" of the masses of theperiphery and the subject of the revolution

Thesis 4 defines the different social make-up of the central and peripheral countries. It shows in passing that the bourgeoisie and proletariat are the fundamental and antagonistic classes in the peripheral countries, as they are in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, what the Theses emphasise that in the periphery "The perpetuation of the old economic and social relations and their subordination to the interests of international imperialist domination" determines the subsistence of "intermediate social strata" and thus a "diversity in the forms of domination and oppression". But "when social stratification atypical of capitalism survives it tends to be breaking down, down, in a word, in a state of agony. What tends to increase is the extent of proletarianisation of strata previously occupied in traditional subsistence of local trading".

This idea of the "breaking down" of the other social strata is in contradiction to what the Theses said previously about "the continuation of old relations". That is to say, on the one hand, "the old relations" continue to be "necessary and functional", but on the other, the social classes that correspond to these are in a "state of agony". Today, the fundamental cause of the existence of the growing masses of under-employed and unemployed, who live in the most abject poverty in the countries of the periphery is not the "breaking down" of old social strata, nor their general "proletarianisation"; to remain at this level of analysis is to see today’s situation in terms of the beginning of the 20th century.

The fundamental point is that only the first part of this proletarianisation - the ruin and expropriation of the old strata - is completed, but without this leading to the second: the integration of these expropriated masses into large-scale production.

This phenomenon was already known during the origins of capitalism, when a nascent industry was still not able to absorb the peasant masses who were being violentlylently expelled from the land; now, this phenomenon is occurring again, but not as an indication of the decline of the old forms of production and capitalism’s ascent, but rather as the expression of its historical limit, of its decadence and decomposition.

The situation is worsened by the growth in the number of unemployed proletarians relative to the employed, due both to the growth of a young population which cannot be absorbed by production, and to the mass unemployment produced by "recessions", which is less and less reabsorbed with each new "recovery". This tendency of capitalism in general, is still more serious in the periphery, and forms part of the same historical tendency: the growing inability of capitalism to absorb the work force into large-scale production. What we have then are growing masses who orbit around the proletariat, who in a certain sense live on its back, who do not have experience of collective struggle, who are ideologically closer to petty mind small property owner, who are inclined to revolt in order to loot for their own ends, or who enrol in the armed gangs of all sorts of bourgeois gangsters. These characteristics have nothing to do with the "continuation of old relations", but with the decadence and decomposition of capitalism, which does not decline in a "prolonged" way, but rather increases with the passage of time. The IBRP should recognise and differentiate thehese from the "decomposition of the old social strata".

The characterisation of these non-proletarian masses is important in determining the attitude of the proletariat and revolutionaries towards them. For the IBRP the non-proletarian masses of the peripheral countries have a better "potential for the radicalisation of consciousness" than the proletariat of the central countries: "The diversity of social structures, the fact that the imposition of the capitalist mode of production upsets the old equilibrium and that its continued existence is based on and translated into increasing misery for the growing mass of proletarianised and disinherited, the political oppression and repression which are therefore necessary to subjugate the masses, all this leads to a potential for a greater radicalisation of consciousness in the peripheral countries than in the societies of the metropoles. Radicalisation does not necessarily mean to the left, as is demonstrated by the recrudescence of Islamic fundamentalism following on the real rebelliousness of the poverty-stricken masses (Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon).The material stirring of the masses, produced by the objective conditions of hyper-exploitation, is always and necessarily expressed in the ideological and political terms of those who have an active presence in the given situation. In general the domination of capital in these countries s still does not mean its total domination over the collectivity, nor does it involve the sort of subjugation of the whole society to capitalist ideology and legality as in the metropolitan countries. In many of these countries the ideological and political integration of the individual into capitalist society is not yet the mass phenomenon it is in the metropolitan countries (…) Here there is no democratic opium to lull the masses into submission, only the harshness of repression" (Thesis 5, our emphasis).

Firstly, the concept expressed in this Thesis makes an abstraction of the position and interests of the class that could lead to the development of a revolutionary consciousness, of which the proletariat is the only bearer in our epoch, putting in its place a supposed "radicalisation of consciousness" based only on conditions of generalised poverty. The material expression of this "radicalisation" is nothing other, as the IBRP says itself, than looting and hunger riots; in reality the IBRP confuses "radicalisation" with "desperation". Fundamentalism can feed on the desperation of the masses: revolutionary consciousness on the contrary replaces this desperation with hope for a better society and life. Riot in itself is not the beginning of a revolutionary movement, but a dead end. Only integration into a class movement can turn the energy of the starving masses i into something fruitful for the revolution. This integration does not depend on competition between the Communist Party and the fundamentalists to channel this "radicalisation", but on the presence of a working class movement that can lead in struggle the other sectors exploited by capital.

Moreover, since they make the axis for the possibility of the beginning of a revolutionary movement, not the movement of the working class, but the "radicalisation" of the masses of the periphery, the Theses slip into the old position that the revolution will begin with the "weakest link" of capitalism. The idea that the domination of capitalism in the periphery "does [not] involve the sort of subjugation of the whole society to capitalist ideology and legality as in the metropolitan countries" contradicts the - correct - idea put forward at the beginning of the Theses about the world domination of capitalism. It is enough to see the bourgeoisie of the central countries’ absolute control over the media, that allows them to spread an idea simultaneously in every country in the world (for example the myth of the "surgical bombing" of Iraq or Yugoslavia) to reject the vision of "unequal ideological domination" in the peripheral countries. In recent decades, the creation of new means of communication, transport, weaponry, rapid deployment forces… means that the bobourgeoisie’s political, ideological and military domination really does reach into every corner of the globe.

The fact that democracy can take a much more caricatured form in the peripheral countries does not imply a precarious bourgeois domination, only that it does not need the same form of domination. However, it is always kept in reserve (to be used as a new mystification when the situation demands, as we are seeing today). By contrast, the proletariat of the developed countries has a vast experience of the most refined form of bourgeois political domination: democracy.

It is not the "weakest link" of capital that will tip the balance of the revolutionary movement, but the strength of the working class. This is many times greater in the industrial concentrations of the central countries.

In fact, the idea of a "greater potential for radicalisation" reminds us of the old question of the "introduction of revolutionary consciousness from outside the movement". According to the IBRP if a "potential for radicalisation" present in the peripheral countries is turned into a dead end or towards fundamentalism, instead of being transformed into a revolutionary movement, this is not because of its inter-classist character, but because of the absence of revolution leadership.

With the idea of a "greater potential for radical radicalisation", revolutionary consciousness stops being a class consciousness and is turned into abstract revolutionary consciousness. This is where the concept of the "radicalisation of consciousness" leads. Thus the IBRP takes its reasoning to its logical conclusion: better conditions for the development of consciousness and the revolutionary organisation exist not amongst the industrial proletariat of the central countries… but amongst the "disinherited masses", those desperate masses of the periphery, inclined towards fundamentalism: "It is still likely to be the case that the circulation of the communist programme will be easier and the ‘level of attention’ received by revolutionary communists will be higher than in advanced capitalist societies" (Thesis 5).

This vision turns reality on its head: on the contrary, the difficulty in clearly seeing the class differences between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, produces a heterogeneous vision in the masses of the peripheral countries, an absence of class frontiers and a greater receptivity to the ideas of leftism, religious fundamentalism, populism, ethnicity, nationalism, nihilism, etc. The dispossessed and lumpenised masses are more removed from a collective vision of the proletarian struggle, they are more atomised and receptive to all kinds of bourgeois mystification, and social decomposition strengthens thisis mystification still more. At the same time, the weakness of the industrial proletariat in the peripheral countries makes the revolutionary struggle more difficult, precisely because the proletariat has a tendency to remain diluted amongst the pauperised masses and has more difficulty in putting forward its own autonomous revolutionary perspective.

The idea that it is "likely to be the case that the circulation of the communist programme will be easier" in the periphery is a dangerous illusion, dragged in from who knows where. In fact, the material conditions for communist propaganda are more difficult: illiteracy, the lack of printing presses, of transport, etc. On the other hand, "ideological backwardness" does not mean any kind of "purity" that will allow the spreading of revolutionary propaganda but a jumble of the "old" ideas of the small businessman or of the peasantry, regionalism, religion, etc with "new" ideas marked by atomisation, desperation about the present and the future, dominated by ideas of capital’s eternal rule that the bourgeoisie spreads through radio and television: a jumble that is difficult to break from. Finally, in these peripheral countries there is almost no tradition of proletarian struggle or revolutionary organisation: the reference points for the struggle are therefore the national movements of the bourgeoisie, the "guerrillas", etc, which are yet another sourcrce of confusion.

The Theses, say nothing about the proletariat of the countries of the periphery in relation to that of the central countries, for example, their differences in strength, concentration, or experience, their ability to overcome national frontiers, nor of the possible form that the unity between the proletariat of both parts will take; nor of the particular difficulties that confront the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the periphery. Aspects that in any case could give rise to a particular proletarian "tactic", in relation as much to their class brothers in the central countries as in relation to the dispossessed masses who gravitate around them. These are all "tactical" questions that revolutionaries evidently have to discuss and clarify.

However, the IBRP does not refer to the "fundamental class", the real subject of the revolution, but in a general way about the "proletarianised and disinherited masses" of the periphery, who furthermore are contrasted with the proletariat of the central countries, and whom it considers to have "a better potential for the radicalisation of consciousness" and to be more receptive to the communist programme. That is to say, in the end the Theses don’t express a tactic for the proletariat, but a position that lacks confidence in or is disillusioned with the working class movement, tha that looks for a substitute: the dispossessed masses of the periphery.

The IBRP’s opportunism on the organisation question

The IBRP’s position on the "potential for radicalisation of the disinherited" has important consequences for the organisation question. Thesis 6 refers to this aspect and here we reproduce it in full:

"Such ‘better’ conditions certainly translate into the possibility of organising a greater number of militants around the revolutionary party than in the countries at the centre. [Thesis 5]

6. The possibility of ‘mass’ organisations led by communists is not the same as revolutionary leadership of the trade unions as such. And it doesn’t imply the massification of the communist parties themselves. Rather the opportunity will be used by the communist party to organise strong workplace and territorial groups as its instruments of agitation, intervention and struggle.

Even in the peripheral countries trade unions - as bodies which negotiate the price and terms of sale of labour power - retain the general and historical characteristics of all unions. Moreover, as recent experience in Korea shows, the unions act as mediators in the interests of capital towards the workers. Thus, even tho, even though they remain one of the areas where communists work, intervene, make propaganda and agitate they are not - and never will be - instruments for revolutionary attack.

It is not therefore the leadership of the unions that interests communists, but the preparation - inside and outside of them - for going beyond them. This is found in the mass organisations of the proletariat which are a preparation for the assault on capitalism. Communist militants, organised as a party, are the driving force and political vanguard first of all in the formation of mass struggle organs and then in the struggle for power. And the party will be that much stronger when it has learnt organise appropriate organs throughout the area where it has a direct influence.

For these reasons therefore, even in the peripheral countries, there is the possibility of organising communist territorial groups. Territorial groups because they group together the proletarians, semi-proletarians and the disinherited of a particular area under the direct influence of the communist party; communist precisely because they are directed along communist lines; that is to say, because they are animated and guided by party members and party organisms" (Thesis 6, our emphasis).

It necessary to say, right away, that what the Thesis has to say about the organisation qtion question is sparse and confused. But the main problem is that the IBRP opens many doors to opportunism on the organisation question. We will try to set out the problems one by one:

a) On the party. The Thesis says nothing except that the "better conditions" in the periphery will mean that the party will have a "greater number of militants" than in the central countries. To pose the matter in this way is at least irresponsible and even more so faced with the accumulation of questions left to us, on the one hand by the historic experience of the Third International, and on the other by the social structure of the countries of the periphery.

Does the "greater number of militants" mean that it is possible to have a "mass" party in the periphery? In any case, this is what is implied by the previous thesis; but then we are talking about a conception of the party already superceded by history, the IBRP is taking us back to the epoch of the Second International. If this is the case, then we need to point out not only the danger of removing political criteria for integrating new militants, but also and above all, the danger of blurring the party’s function of political leadership in this epoch. If the Thesis is not talking about the formation of a mass party, then it is absurd to predict whether there are going to be "greater" or "fewer" numbers, because thi this depends on factors which arise from the circumstances of the revolutionary movement, even from the size of the population in each country.

The Third International already posed the question of the centralisation of the world communist party. The Theses do not pronounce on this, but (unless the IBRP has a federal conception of the world party) we might ask, since the IBRP considers that there are "better conditions" in the periphery, whether it thinks that the nucleus of the new international will appear in the peripheral countries? Could the world party spread out from these peripheral countries, giving economic and political support to the formation of new sections throughout the world? Would its political leadership perhaps be in some country in Africa, South America or Indochina? With the development of the international working class movement this type of question is going to have to be answered in increasingly concrete terms, it is going to be more determining for organisations’ activities and, it is already orientating them.

There also remains the question of the class composition of the party. Evidently, the criteria for belonging to a restricted, rigorously militant party, exclude the sociological aspect - whether the militant is a worker, artisan, or peasant: selection will be on political criteria, through a break with ideologies and interests foreign to the workiorking class and the adoption of the interests and aims of the proletariat. This break is not easier in the countries of the periphery, precisely because of the influence of the "backwards" element (the peasantry, petty-bourgeoisie) and the element of disintegration (underemployment in the cities), that can try to penetrate the party of the working class. Petty bourgeois radical leftism (especially "guerrillerism") is a particularly difficult obstacle that confronts the formation of revolutionary organisations in the periphery.

When all is said and done, a numerically larger party in the countries of the periphery could only come about by relaxing the criteria for membership, and the IBRP open the doors to this, with its illusions about "better conditions" and a "higher level of attention". This relaxation, which is a serious danger generally, is still greater in the countries where the proletariat is weaker as a class; it involves opening the door to the penetration of conceptions and ideologies alien to the proletariat. This is what the phrase in the Theses about "the possibility of organising a greater number of militants" boils down to.

b) On the unions. The IBRP’s confused position on the unions being "organs for negotiating the price and conditions of labour power", "mediators of capitalist necessities inside the workers’ movement",I>", in which communist can work… for their overthrow, is inserted into these Theses without any previous explanation

to cap it all, nothing is said about the unions in the peripheral countries (which is supposed to be the Theses’ subject!), an in particular there is no mention of the fact that in the periphery the character of the unions as state instruments is usually brutally open (membership is usually obligatory, the unions have armed bodies for repression, the workers are prohibited from expressing themselves in meetings, etc); a character that the IBRP’s definition tends to hide.

To say, in the peripheral countries, that "communists work in the unions" can only have one of two meanings: either it is a platitude because all workers have to join unions; or it means to work within the union organisational structure, in the union elections, as delegates, etc…which means forming part of the union machinery, and in effect defending their existence. To add that "it is necessary to work in them in order to go beyond them" does not advance the argument one centimetre. In fact, confronted with the workers’ contempt towards the unions, the left of capital in the peripheral countries has always put forward slogans calling for the creation of new unions to replace the old ones.

c) On "mass organisations". The Theses are not explicit about wbout what they mean by "the formation of mass struggle organs". This ambiguity is increased when they refer to some supposed "territorial groups" that gather together proletarians, semi-proletarians and the dispossessed, and that appear to be some kind of intermediary between the party and the unitary organisations. The problem is that such groups, far from being a sort of link between the two, constitute a danger for both types of organisation that the proletariat needs:

* From the Party’s point of view, there exists the danger of a loss of rigour and discipline, since by definition these groups "directed along communist lines" would tend to fuse with the party. On the one hand, we have the present organisational characteristics of the IBRP, such as its implicitly federalist structure (each group within the Bureau has its own organisational structure, etc,), its lack of rigour in the integration of new groups. On the other, we have the Theses, which say that it is "easier" to form "communist groups" in the peripheral countries (ie, groups under the control of the IBRP, but without any requirement as to clarity of principles, or rigorous discipline). We may fear that the IBRP tends to sacrifice the future of solid party organisation on the alter of the immediatist formation of groups with ambiguous frontiers. This is what we mean by opportunism on the organisation question.

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* As for the unitary organisations, the introduction of a kind of organisation which is no longer the mass organisation of the proletariat but something inter-classist, where the radical petty-bourgeois and lumpen elements are mingled with the workers, represents a source of confusion and disorganisation for the proletarian struggle.

This obliges us to insist on the fact that the working class - in all countries, including the periphery - needs its own mass organs, such as the workers’ councils, that exclusively express its own autonomous class point of view for its struggle, and in order for it to be able to lead other classes. If we consider the proletariat to be the only social driving force of the revolution, then the existence in the peripheral countries of "semi-proletarian" masses does not mean that the creation of mass class organs is any less necessary, it is clear that it is just as vital as in the central countries.

The proletariat faced with the national question

A good half of the Theses are devoted to the national question. Here the IBRP make a great effort to liquidate any ambiguity as regards the proletariat supporting "national liberation struggles" or the "democratic-bourgeois revolutions", and the possibility that the proletariat coariat could enter into a "temporary alliance" with "progressive" fractions of the bourgeoisie, especially in the peripheral countries. These ambiguities were inherited from the Third International and Bordigism, and are still held by some of the present day groups who claim descent from the Italian Communist Left. The ICC can only welcome and support the effort of clarification contained in the Theses. We will first of all underline the principles that we share with the IBRP, in order to show the differences that remain, which in our opinion demonstrate the need to go deeper into the liquidating of such ambiguities.

In the first place, the Theses underline that the bourgeoisie of the peripheral countries is, in its exploiting nature, identical to that of the central countries: "The bourgeoisie of the peripheral countries is a constituent part of the international bourgeoisie which dominates the whole system of exploitation because it is in possession of the means of production on an international scale (…) with equal responsibility and with the same historical destiny"; and that the contrasts between the peripheral and metropolitan bourgeoisie "do no, and will not affect the substance of the relationship of exploitation between capital and labour. On the contrary, they both defend these against the dangerous presence of the proletariat" (Thesis 7). It also shows that the particulalar characteristics of capitalism in the periphery, such as its judicial expression (for example, that businesses may be state property) or the agricultural character of production, do not constitute essential differences within the capitalist class.

The Theses declare that "in the imperialist epoch proletarian tactics absolutely exclude any sort of alliance, however temporary, with any bourgeois fraction. A proletarian policy does not recognise any such fraction as ‘progressive’ or ‘anti-imperialist’, arguments which have been used at various times to justify united front tactics (…) the national bourgeoisie of the backward countries (…) is linked by a thousand threads to the imperialist centres (…) Its conflicts with this or that front, with this or that imperialist country, are not class conflicts, but are struggles inside the capitalist process and consistent with its logic" (Thesis 9).

Therefore, there is no sense in the proletariat allying itself with the bourgeoisie. "Communist internationalists consider as immediate enemies all those bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political organisations who (…) who preach and try to reach a class alliance between the proletariat and bourgeoisie" (Thesis 10).

Finally, the Theses reaffirm the aims of the proletariat on the international scale: the internationalist communist forces "reject aject any form of alliance or united front (…) The main task of internationalist communist organisations is the political and organisational preparation for the class’ assault on capitalism on a national scale in each country where they operate. But this is founded on a strategy which sees that only the international proletariat is capable of overthrowing capitalist rule and building a socialist society (Thesis 10).

In the peripheral countries communist internationalists do not put in their programme a regime which guarantees the elementary freedoms and forms of democratic life. Their aim is rather the dictatorship of the proletariat" (Thesis 11).

We share with the IBRP all these positions, which are fundamental for sticking to a class terrain in the present epoch, especially confronted with the present imperialist wars.

Unfortunately, the Theses are sprinkled with ambiguous expressions, that tend to contradict the clear declarations we have just cited. These expressions demonstrate the persistence of the idea of the possibility of certain national struggles, although the Theses repeatedly insist that the proletariat should not fall into the trap of supporting such struggles.

For example, the Theses talk about sections of the national bourgeoisie which are "not directly involved in capitalist internationalnational circles", which "do not directly participate in the joint exploitation of the international proletariat" and which could carry out struggles that could "assume the form of opposition to the domination which metropolitan capital establishes over their country" (Thesis 8). According to the Theses this could be the case in Nicaragua or Chiapas (Mexico). In the very next line it recognises that this will only lead to a "new oppression and the replacement of one group of exploiters by another". In another part of the Theses it is asserted that "National revolutions are therefore destined to finish up on the ground of inter-imperialist equilibrium" (Thesis 9); and further on we find out that "in the case of movements that give way to ‘new democratic’ or ‘revolutionary democratic’ governments [the communist forces] will put forward the true communist programme and play a genuine revolutionary role" (Thesis 10). The problem is that for the IBRP there still exists, despite everything, the possibility of national revolutions, despite the fact that it puts the phrase in inverted commas and despite the fact that it insists that the proletariat has nothing to gain from them. This consideration weakens its general analysis, because it leaves the window open to the concepts that it tried to throw out the door: the division between the "dominated" and "dominating" bourgeoisie, the "progressive" nature of such "national struggles"; and, finally the possibility that the proletariat participate in this in alliance with the bourgeoisie. The fact that the Theses have to repeat time and time again that the proletariat must not ally itself with the bourgeoisie, does not demonstrate clarity, but the intuition that something is not right, that it has left a crack open which has to be blocked up at all costs.

For us, the possibility of bourgeois national revolutions was closed historically with capitalism’s entry into its decadent phase and the opening of the epoch of the proletarian world revolution. In the present epoch, "national liberation movements" are a mere mystification, destined to enrol the proletariat behind inter-imperialist conflicts. The IBRP’s Theses, make an abstraction of the fact that the bourgeoisie of the backward countries also has an imperialist character: either they work under the supervision of a great power - in order to gain imperialist benefits, or to change gangs-; or else act independently but then it has its own imperialist pretensions (as is the case with the middling powers). But the ambiguity of the Theses stops them taking up this point, rather they take an even more dangerous backwards step.

Thesis 12 asserts that "mass national movements are not simply due to the existence of bou bourgeois nationalist organisations. On the contrary, they are due to the widespread disposition to struggle of the oppressed, disinherited and super-exploited masses which bourgeois nationalism is able to play on with its propaganda and take over by means of its organisational activity". But what the IBRP call "mass national movements" are nothing other than today’s imperialist wars, and it is precisely the bourgeoisie that gives them a "nationalist" mask. Here the IBRP falls prey to bourgeois mystification. These supposed "mass national movements" are not the expression of the "disposition to struggle of the oppressed", but the exact opposite; the most complete ideological and political domination over these masses, which has reached such a level that they kill each other for interests that are completely alien to them. The IBRP’s affirmation is the same as and, as absurd as, saying that "World War Two was not only testimony to the existence of imperialist tensions, it also responded to the masses’ extensive willingness to struggle…".

In Thesis 11 we read another slip of the same calibre as the previous one: "In the peripheral countries communists internationalists do not include in their programme a regime which guarantees democratic freedoms. Their aim is rather the dictatorship of the proletariat (…) They will thus make themselves the firmest and most consistent defenenders of freedom. In so doing they will unmask the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organisations which campaign for a bourgeois democratic regime whilst being prepared to deny it immediately after". Here the Theses simply "forget" that, as Lenin clearly put it, democratic freedoms do not exist, only class freedoms; which is to say, the role of revolutionaries is not to be "defenders" of bourgeois democratic liberties, but to denounce their class character.

Politically, these two concepts about, "mass national movements" and the "defence of freedom" leave the door open to the possibility of intervening in "national" or "democratic" movements. They come close to considering that behind these movements lies not only the bourgeoisie, but the "disposition to struggle of the oppressed"; this constitutes another dangerous concession to the enemy camp. Along with the organisational aspects which we criticised above (especially as regards work in the unions) this verges on opportunism.

The need to understand the decadence of capitalism

At the level of theoretical analysis, the Theses’ ambiguities reflect difficulties in understanding the present stage of capitalism. An inadequate distinction between capitalism’s ascendancy and decadence leads to theto theoretically equating phenomena that in reality have completely different causes; to equating the process of the destruction of the pre-capitalist forms of production in the origins of capitalism, with the present process of social decomposition; to minimising the differences between the national movements of the 19th century and today’s imperialist conflicts with a "national" mask.

There is certainly an effort to give these Theses an adequate historical framework. Thesis 9 in particular takes up the position of the 2nd Congress of the Communist International on the national question and the alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, and makes a critique of Lenin’s position and that of the Bolsheviks about supporting national liberation struggles. But in the same Thesis there is a limited vision of the historical changes that took place at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. It is centred exclusively upon the errors of the Theses adopted by the Congress of the CI. It does not mention the existence of a developing discussion in the revolutionary milieu of the time about the end of national struggles with capitalism’s entry into its imperialist and decadent phase, and the danger for the proletariat of falling in behind bourgeois national movements.

In the last Thesis there is a call to the proletarians and dispossessed oed of the peripheral countries, for "class unity with the proletarians of all countries, towards the common objective of the dictatorship of the proletariat and international socialism" (Thesis 13).

We think that there is a very interesting idea at the end of the Theses. It says that the rejection of nationalism is much more important "in those situations where nationalism habitually degenerates into the most mindless and reactionary localism (…) In such situations, where obscurantist ideology has already replaced the elementary principles of class solidarity, it is all the more necessary, though so much more difficult, to reaffirm basic class solidarity. This is the essential precondition for any revival of the revolutionary communist movement".

This quote includes two important aspects which reflect the present situation of capitalism with clarity: the degeneration of nationalism into the "the most mindless and reactionary localism" and the replacement of class solidarity by "obscurantist ideologies". Here the Theses are talking about nothing other than the social decomposition of capitalism. It would be enough to develop these ideas, clearly expressing that it is not a question of isolated cases, in order to open up an understanding that a new and general capitalist tendency exists. These correct ideas of the IBRP should open the doordoor to a recognition of the growing difficulties for the proletariat and its revolutionary organisations particularly in the peripheral countries (in contrast to the "better opportunities", etc, about which they talked above). And it ought, above all, to open the way to a full understanding, and not just a fragmentary one, of capitalism’s decadence and decomposition and the historic dangers it contains.

Leonardo

The 20th century has drawn to a close to the sound of a vast concert celebrating the advance of democracy all over the world, and its supposed benefits. Throughout the century, its victories are celebrated over dictatorships both red and brown, and its heroes - Gandhi, Walesa, Mandela, Martin Luther King et.al. - are fêted for the application of its "great and generous principles". If we are to believe the propaganda, the situation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the struggles which have taken place since to defend and develop democracy are cause for hope in a future of peace and harmony which should be thoroughly encouraging for mankind as a whole. We have been treated to regular crusades by the great democracies, to impose and defend "human rights" in countries which did not respect them, by force if necessary - in other words at the cost of the most barbaric massacres. We have been offered the sight of an International Court of Justice, set up to judge and punish those found guilty of "crimes against humanity". Let the dictators tremble! And for the years to come, we are promised the emergence of a "world-wide democracy" based on a "growing role for civil society". The recent demonstrations during the WTO negotia negotiations, with the Roquefort Revolutionary José Bové at their head, are supposedly forerunners of this "world-wide democracy" or even of a "People�s International" in struggle against the dictatorship of the market, unrestrained capitalism, and bad food. For today�s proletarians, the only worthwhile struggle seems to be for the creation of democratic regimes in every country in the world, which will bring with it equal rights for both sexes and all races, and which will defend an "attitude of good citizenship". The ideology-vendors of every description, and especially on the left, are more mobilised than ever to convince the workers that this is the good fight, and to push them into it. And for any who have doubts, or hesitate to take part, the message is: "Despite its faults, democracy is the only regime which can be reformed and perfected - and anyway there�s no hope of any other". Faced with the growing poverty and barbarism imposed on us by capitalism, there is supposedly no other possibility than to behave as a "good citizen", to accept the system because we are told there is no other choice.

We are reprinting the Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictatorship presented by Lenin on 4th March 1919 to the First Congress of the Communist International, first and foremost to answer this deceitful ideological barrage, aimed especially at the working class, the only classss capable of putting into question and overthrowing the whole system. The Theses remind us in particular that democracy is only the most effective form of the dictatorship which oppresses the working class, and defends the bourgeoisie and its privileges as an exploiting class. They rightly declare that "the more �pure� democracy is (�) the more clearly does the oppression of capital and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie come to light". Finally, the Theses remind us that the World War was fought "in the name of liberty and equality". The 20th century - the most bloody and barbaric in mankind�s history - has seen this lie repeated too many times, to justify World War II and innumerable local wars and massacres since then.

The publication of these Theses today is also justified by the need to give the lie to the bourgeois propaganda which pretends that real communism is the same thing as Stalinism - one of the worst dictatorships the world proletariat has ever suffered - and that Stalin was Lenin�s heir, when in fact he was Lenin�s antithesis. It was Lenin himself who wrote and presented the Theses, which show that communism is the real democracy, that bourgeois democracy is nothing but a sham designed to justify the survival of its system. It was Lenin, better than anyone, who defended the principle that "the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is, the minority of the population, the large landowners and capitalists", and that it is "an extension of actual democratic usages, on a scale never before known in the world, to the working classes whom capitalism enslaved".

The Stalinist dictatorship had nothing in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat put forward by Lenin, it was its gravedigger. Stalinist ideology has nothing in common with the proletarian principles defended by Lenin, it was their monstrous betrayal. As we wrote in International Review no.60, as Stalinism was beginning to collapse: "At first, this will be a difficult period for the proletariat. Apart from the increased weight of democratic mystifications, in the West as well as in the East, it will have to understand the new conditions in which it is fighting". We are publishing these Theses adopted by the Communist International�s First Congress, as a major political weapon for the proletariat to confront its difficulties, and resist the ruling class� present ideological offensive, which aims to poison the workers� consciousness by making them believe that bourgeois democracy is the only "viable and humane" regime.

Text of the Theses

1. The growth of the revolutionary movement of the proletariattariat in all countries has provoked the bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers� organisations to convulsive efforts to find theoretical arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Among these, particular emphasis is placed on the rejection of dictatorship and the defence of democracy. The falseness and hypocrisy of this argument, repeated in a thousand forms in the capitalist press and at the February 1919 Bern conference of the Yellow International, is however clear to anyone who is unwilling to commit treachery to the principles of socialism.

2. In the first place, the argument uses abstract concepts of "democracy" and "dictatorship", without specifying what class is in question. Putting the question in this way, outside or above the class standpoint, as though it were valid as a standpoint of the entire people, is a downright mockery of the basic theory of socialism, namely the theory of the class struggle, which is still recognised in words, it is true, by the socialists who have gone over to the camp of the bourgeoisie, but judging by their deeds is forgotten. For in no civilised capitalist country is there "democracy in the abstract", there is only bourgeois democracy, and the question is not one of "dictatorship in the abstact" but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, that is, of the proletariat, over the oppressers and exploiters, that is, the bourgeoisie, in order to ovovercome the resistance put up by the exploiters in the effort to maintain their rule.

3. History teaches us that an oppressed class has never and can never come to power without passing through a period of dictatorship, that is, without the conquest of political power and the forcible suppression of the most desperate and frenzied resistance, that shrinks from no crime, which is always put up by the exploiters. The bourgeoisie, whose rule is now defended by socialists who express hostility to "dictatorship in general" and stand up body and soul for "democracy in general", won their power in the civilized countries by a series of revolts, civil wars, the forcible suppression of monarchical rule, of the feudal lords and slave-owners, and of their attempts at restoration. Thousands and millions of times, in their books and pamphlets, their congress resolutions and speeches, socialists in every country have explained to the people the class character of these bourgeois revolutions. That is why the present defence of "bourgeois democracy" in speeches about "democracy", and the present outcry against the proletarian dictatorship in the clamour about "dictatorship", is an outright betrayal of socialism, objectively a going over to the camp of the bourgeoisie, a denial of the right of the proletariat to its political revolution, a defence of bourgeois reformism, and this precisely at the historical momoment when bourgeois reformism has gone to pieces throughout the world and when the war has created a revolutionary situation.

4. By recognising the class character of bourgeois democracy, of bourgeois parliamentarianism, all socialists have articulated the ideas expressed with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels when they said that even the most democratic bourgeois republic is nothing but the instrument by which the bourgeoisie oppress the working class, by which a handful of capitalists keeps the working masses. There is not a single revolutionary or a single Marxist among those who now raise such an outcry against dictatorship and advocate democracy who has not loudly and solemnly sworn to the workers that he acknowledges this basic truth of socialism; but now, when ferment and movement have started among the revolutionary proletariat, aimed at breaking this and fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, these traitors to socialism present the case as though the bourgeoisie had made a gift of "pure democracy" to the workers, as though the bourgeoisie renounced resistance and were ready to submit to a workers� majority, as though in the democratic republic there were no State apparatus for the oppression of labour by capital.

5. The Paris Commune, which everyone who wanted to be considered a socialist extolled in words, for they knew tha that the working masses had a great and genuine sympathy with it, proved particularly clearly the historical conditioning and limited value of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois democracy, which are highly progressive institutions in comparison with the Middle Ages, but which in the epoch of proletarian revolution inevitably require to be changed from the ground up. It was Marx himself, who placed the highest value on the historical significance of the Commune, who in his analysis of it demonstrated the exploiting character of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism, under which the oppressed class is given the right, once in several years, to decide which deputy of the possessing classes shall represent and betray the people in Parliament. It is now, when the Soviet movement which is seizing the entire world is carrying forward before all eyes the cause of the Commune, that the traitors to socialism forget the practical experience and the concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeat the old bourgeois rubbish about "democracy in general". The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.

6. The significance of the Commune consists further in this, that it made an attempt to destroy and utterly root out the bourgeois State machine, the apparatus of officials, court, army, and police, and to replace it by the self-governing mass organisation of workers without any separatioion of legislative and executive powers. All bourgeois democratic republics of our time, including the German, which the traitors to socialism, making a mockery of truth, call proletarian, retain this bourgeois State apparatus. That proves once more, clearly and unmistakably, that the outcry in defence of "democracy" is nothing but defence of the bourgeoisie and their privileges of exploitation.

7. "Freedom of assembly" can be used as an example of the demand for "pure democracy". Every class-conscious worker who has not broken with his class grasps immediately that it would be monstrous to promise the exploiters freedom of assembly in times and situations in which they are resisting their overthrow and defending their privileges. Neither in England in 1649, nor in France in 1793, did the revolutionary bourgeoisie guarantee freedom of assembly to the royalists and nobility when these summoned alien troops to the country and "assembled" to organise an attempt at restoration. If the bourgeoisie of today, who have long since become reactionary, demand that the proletariat shall guarantee in advance that "freedom of assembly" shall be assured to the exploiters regardless of the resistance the capitalists put up to their expropriation, the workers will only laugh at such bourgeois hypocrisy. On the other hand the workers know very well that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic "freedom of a assembly" is an empty phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, have also enough leisure for meetings, and enjoy the protection of the bourgeois apparatus of power. The proletariat of town and country, as well as the small peasants, that is the overwhelming majority of the population, have neither the first nor the second nor the third. So long as this is true, "equality", that is, "pure democracy", is a deception. To win real equality, to make a reality of democracy for the workers, the exploiters must first be deprived of all public and private mansions, the workers must be given leisure and their freedom of assembly defended by armed workers and not by the offspring of the nobility or officers from capitalist circles in command of an intimidated rank and file.

Only after such changes is it possible to speak of "freedom of assembly", of equality, without mocking the workers, the labouring people, the poor. But nobody can bring these changes about except the vanguard of the working people, the proletariat, by overthrowing the exploiters, the bourgeoisie.

8. "Freedom of the press" is another leading watchword of "pure democracy". But the workers know, and the socialists of all countries have admitted it a million times, that this freedom is deceptive so long as the best printing works and the biggest paper supplies are in capitalitalist hands, and so long as capital retains its power over the press, a power which throughout the world is expressed more clearly, sharply, and cynically, the more developed the democracy and the republican regime, as for example in America. To win real equality and real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, the capitalists must first be deprived of the possibility of getting writers in their service, of buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And for that it is necessary to throw off the yoke of capital, to overthrow the exploiters and to crush their resistance. The capitalists have always given the name of freedom to the freedom of the rich to make profits and the freedom of the poor to die of hunger. The capitalists give the name of freedom of the press to the freedom of the rich to bribe the press, the freedom to use wealth to create and distort so-called public opinion. The defenders of "pure democracy" reveal themselves once more as defenders of the dirty and corrupt system of the rule of the rich over the means of mass education, as deceivers of the people who with fine sounding but thoroughly false phrases divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capital. Real freedom and equality will be found in the system the communists establish, in which there will be no opportunity to get rich at the expense of others, no objective possibility of subjecting the press, directly or indirectly, to the power of money, where nothing will prevent the workers (or any large group of workers) from having and employing equal rights to use the presses and paper belonging to society.

9. The history of the 19th and 20th centuries showed us, even before the war, what this much-praised "pure democracy" really means under capitalism. Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the more "pure" democracy is, the more openly, sharply, and ruthlessly does the class struggle proceed, the more clearly does the oppression of capital and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie come to light. The Dreyfus affair in republican France, the bloody collisions between striking workers and the mercenaries armed by the capitalists in the free and democratic republic of America, these and a thousand similar facts disclose the truth which the bourgeoisie try in vain to conceal, namely that in reality terror and a bourgeois dictatorship rule the most democratic republic, and come openly to the surface whenever it seems to the exploiters that the power of capital is endangered.

10. The imperialist war of 1914-18 exposed the true character of bourgeois democracy, once and for all, even to the backward workers, even in the freest republics, as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. To enrich a group of German and English mil millionaires and billionaires, dozens of millions of men were killed and the military dictatorship of the bourgeoisie established in the freest republics. This military dictatorship still exists in the Entente countries even after the defeat of Germany. It was the war, more than anything else, that opened the eyes of working people, tore the false tinsel from bourgeois democracy, and revealed to the people the whole pit of speculation and greed for profits during the war and in connection with the war. The bourgeoisie waged this war in the name of freedom and equality; in the name of freedom and equality the war contractors enormously increased their wealth. No efforts of the yellow Bern international will succeed in concealing from the masses the exploiting character of bourgeois freedom, bourgeois equality, and bourgeois democracy, now fully exposed.

11. In the country of Europe where capitalism has been most highly developed, that is, in Germany, the first months of full republican freedom which followed the downfall of imperialist Germany, showed the German workers and the entire world the real class-content of the bourgeois democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg is an event of world-historical significance not only because the best people and leaders of the truly proletarian communist international perished tragically, but also because it finally showed up thehe class character of the leading European state, of, it can be said without exaggeration, the leading state in the world. If prisoners, that is, people who have been taken under protection by the State power, can be murdered with impunity by officers and capitalists under a government of social-patriots, the democratic republic in which this can happen is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Those who express indignation over the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but do not understand this truth only demonstrate their obtuseness or their hypocrisy. In one of the freest and most advanced republics of the world, in the German republic, there is freedom to kill the imprisoned leaders of the proletariat and to go unpunished. It cannot be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy does not blunt but sharpens the class struggle, which has now, as a result of the war and its consequences, reached boiling-point.

All over the civilised world Bolsheviks are being deported, persecuted, imprisoned; in Switzerland, one of the freest bourgeois republics, and in America, there are pogroms against the Bolsheviks. From the standpoint of "democracy in general", or "pure democracy", it is simply ludicrous that progressive, civilised, democratic countries, armed to the teeth, should fear the presence of a few dozen people from backwards, hungry, ruined Russia, described as savages s and criminals in millions of copies of bourgeois newspapers. It is obvious that a social system that can give rise to such glaring contradictions is in reality a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

12. In such a state of affairs the dictatorship of the proletariat is not merely wholly justified, as a means of overwhelming the exploiters and overcoming their resistance, but quite essential for the mass of workers as their only protection against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is getting ready for new wars.

The chief thing that socialists don�t understand, a failure which reflects their intellectual short-sightedness, their dependence on bourgeois prejudices, their political treachery to the proletariat, is that when, in capitalist society, the class struggle on which it rests becomes more acute, there is nothing between dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and dictatorship of the proletariat. The dream of another, third way is the reactionary lament of the petty bourgeoisie. Proof of this can be found in the experience of more than a hundred years of bourgeois democracy and the workers� movement in all advanced countries, and particularly the experience of the last five years. The same proof is furnished by economic theory, by the entire content of Marxism, which analyses the economic necessity of bourgeois dictatorship in very commodity economy, a dictatoratorship which can be abolished by none other than the class which through the development of capitalism itself develops and grows, becomes more organised and powerful, that is, by the class of proletarians.

13. The second theoretical and political mistake of the socialists is their failure to understand that the forms of democracy have inevitably changed in the centuries since it first appeared in the Ancient World, as one ruling class gave way to another. In the republics of Ancient Greece, in the medieval cities, in advanced capitalist States, democracy has different forms and varying scope. It would be the greatest nonsense to assume that the most profound revolution in mankind�s history, the first transference of power from the hands of the exploiting minority to the hands of the exploited majority, could take place within the framework of the old bourgeois parliamentary democracy, without the greatest changes, without the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions, new conditions for their use, etc.

14. The dictatorship of the proletariat is like the dictatorship of other classes in that, like any dictatorship, it originates in the necessity of suppressing by force the resistance of the class which is losing its political power. The fundamental difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of other classes, that of the lhe large landowners in the Middle Ages and that of the bourgeoisie in all civilised capitalist countries, consists in this, that while the dictatorship of the large landowners and the bourgeoisie forcibly suppresses the resistance of the overwhelming majority of the population, namely the working masses, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is, the minority of the population, the large landowners and capitalists.

From this it follows further that the dictatorship of the proletariat must inevitably involve not only a change in the forms and institutions of democracy, but change of a kind which results in an extension of actual democratic usages, on a scale never before known in the world, to the working classes whom capitalism enslaved.

And in fact the forms taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which have already been worked out, that is, the Soviet power in Russia, the workers� councils in Germany, the shop stewards" committees in Britain and similar Soviet institutions in other countries, all these make a reality of democratic rights and privileges for the working classes, that is, for the overwhelming majority of the population; they mean that it becomes really possible to use these rights and privileges in a way and on a scale that was never even approximately possible in the best democratic bourgeoigeois republics.

The essence of Soviet power lies in this, that the permanent and sole foundation of the entire State power, of the entire State apparatus, is the mass organisation of those very classes which were oppressed by the capitalists, that is, the workers and semi-proletarians (peasants who do not exploit labour and who are always forced to sell at least part of their labour). The masses, who even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, where in law they had equal rights, but in fact were prevented by a thousand ways and tricks from taking part in political life and making use of democratic rights and liberties, are now drawn into continuous, unhampered, and decisive participation in the democratic administration of the State.

15.The equality of citizens, regardless of sex, religious belief, race, nationality, which bourgeois democracy always promised everywhere but in fact never carried out, and could not carry out because of the role of capitalism, has been made a complete reality at one stroke by the Soviet regime, or the proletarian dictatorship, for only the power of the workers, who are not interested in private property in the means of production and in the struggle for their distribution and redistribution, is able to do this.

16. The old democracy, that is, bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism, was so organized thzed that it was the working classes who were most alien to the administrative machine. The Soviet power, the proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, is so organized that it brings the working masses close to the administrative machine. The merging of legislative and executive power in the Soviet organization of the State serves the same purpose, as does the substitution of the production unit, the workshop or factory, for the territorial constituency.

17. The army was an instrument of oppression not only under the monarchy; it is still that in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic. Only the Soviet power, as the only established State organisation of the very classes oppressed by the capitalists, is in a position to abolish the dependence of the military on the bourgeois command and really fuse the proletariat with the military, to arm the proletariat and disarm the bourgeoisie, without which the victory of socialism is impossible.

18. The Soviet organisation of the State is designed to give the proletariat, as the class which was most concentrated and educated by capitalism, the leading role in the State. The experience of all revolutions and all movements of enslaved classes, the experience of the world socialist movement, teaches us that only the proletariat is in a position to unite the scattered and backward strata of the working and exploited pop population and carry them along.

19. Only the Soviet organisation of the state is able to destroy, at one stroke and completely, the old, that is, the bourgeois apparatus of bureaucracy and judiciary, which under capitalism, even in the most democratic republic, remained and had to remain, being in fact for the workers and the working masses the greatest obstacle to making democracy effective. The Paris Commune took the first world historical step in this direction, the Soviet regime the second.

20. The abolition of State power is the goal of all socialists, including and above all Marx. Unless this goal is reached true democracy, that is, equality and freedom, is not attainable. But only Soviet and proletarian democracy leads in fact to that goal, for it begins at once to prepare for the complete withering away of any kind of State by drawing the mass organisations of the working people into constant and unrestricted participation in State administration.

21. The complete bankruptcy of the socialists who met in Berne, the complete absence of understanding which they showed of the new, that is, proletarian democracy, can be seen very clearly from the following. On 10th February 1919 Branting declared the international conference of the Yellow International in Berne closed. On 11th February 1919 its members in Be in Berlin published an appeal of the "Independents" to the proletariat in Freiheit. In this appeal the bourgeois character of Scheidemann"s government was admitted. It was reproached for wanting to abolish the workers� councils, which were called "bearers and defenders" of the revolution, and the proposal was made to legalize the councils, to give them statutory rights, to give them the right to veto the decisions of the National Assembly and refer the question at issue to a national referendum.

Such a proposal reflects the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the theoreticians who defend democracy and have not understood its bourgeois character. This ridiculous attempt to unite the system of councils, that is, the proletarian dictatorship, with the National Assembly, that is, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, finally exposes the mental poverty of the yellow socialists and social-democrats, and their reactionary petty-bourgeois policy, as well as their cowardly concessions to the irresistibly growing forces of the new proletarian democracy.

The majority of the Yellow International in Berne, who condemned Bolshevism but did not dare, for fear of the working masses, to vote formally for a resolution on these lines, acted correctly from the class standpoint. This majority is completely at one with the Russian Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries and with the Scheidemanns ins in Germany. The Russian Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, who complain of persecution by the Bolsheviks, try to conceal the fact that this persecution was provoked by their participation in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In precisely the same way the Scheidemanns and their party in Germany took part in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the workers.

It is therefore quite natural that the majority of those attending the Yellow International in Berne should come out in favour of condemning the Bolsheviks. But that did not represent a defence of "pure democracy"; it was the self-defence of people who feel that in the civil war they are on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

For these reasons the decision of the majority of the Yellow International must be described as correct from the class point of view. But the proletariat should not fear the truth, but look it straight in the face and draw the political conclusions which follow.

On the basis of these theses and having heard the reports of the delegates from various countries, the congress of the Communist International declares that the chief task of the Communist Parties in countries where Soviet power is not established are:

1.To explain to the broad masses of the working class the historical meaning of the political and practical necessity of a new proletarian democracy which must replace bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism.

2. To extend and build up workers� councils in all branches of industry, in the army and navy, and amongst agricultural workers and small peasants

3. To win an assured, conscious communist majority in the councils

To the generation of revolutionaries which emerged from the resurgence of class struggles at the end of the 1960s, it was difficult enough to recognise the proletarian character of the October 1917 insurrection and the Bolshevik party which provided its political leadership. The trauma of the Stalinist counter-revolution had produced, in reaction, a flight towards the councilist vision of Bolshevism as the protagonist of a purely bourgeois revolution in Russia. And even when, after many hard debates, a number of groups and elements came round to the view that October really had been red, there persisted a strong tendency to place severe constrictions on the political magnitude of the event; “thus far, and no further: the Bolsheviks were proletarian, but we can learn mainly from their shortcomings”. The caricature of such haughty judgements of our own past was that of the Communist Workers’ Organisation, who in 1975 insisted that after 1921 and the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, not only was the Russian revolution dead and all the parties of the Communist International agents of capitalism – but also that all those groups who today did not share this deadline were themselves counter-revolutionaries1. Nor was this kind of approach absent among the groups who formed the ICC in the same period. The section in Britain, World Revolution, had rejected its original position that the Bolsheviks were agents of a state capitalist counter-revolution, but when it came to the history of the Bolshevik party after 1921 we can find the following view expressed in World Revolution n°2: “…Trotskyism no less than Stalinism was a product of the defeat of the proletarian revolution in Russia. The Left Opposition was not formed until 1923 and long before that Trotsky had been one of the most ruthless supporters and executors of the Bolsheviks’ anti-working class policies (the crushing of the Petrograd strike movement and the Kronstadt uprising, the militarisation of labour, the abolition of the workers’ militias, etc). His disputes with other factions of the bureaucracy were disputes about the best means of exploiting the Russian workers and of extending the state capitalist ‘Soviet’ model to other parts of the world”.

It was therefore hardly an accident that, at that time, very little serious study was made of the period between 1921 and the definitive victory of Stalinism in the late 20s. But the revolutionary movement, and the ICC in particular, has come a long way since then; and if we now dedicate a good deal of space to examining the debates that rent the Bolshevik party during this period, it is because we have come to understand that, far from being the expression of an inter-bourgeois feud, these political conflicts expressed the heroic resistance of the proletarian currents within the Bolshevik party against the attempts of the counter-revolution to capture it completely. It is a thus a period which has bequeathed to us some of the most precious lessons about the tasks of a communist fraction - that political organ whose first task is to combat the degeneration of a proletarian revolution and its most vital political instruments.

1922-23: Lenin moves towards opposition

The New Economic Policy, introduced at the 10th Congress of the party in 1921, had been defined by Lenin as a strategic retreat necessitated by the isolation and weakness of the Russian proletariat. Within Russia, this meant the isolation of the proletariat from the peasantry, who had been ready to support the Bolsheviks against the old land-owners during the civil war, but who were now demanding some material compensation for this support. The Bolshevik leadership had in fact seen the Kronstadt rebellion as the warning signal of an impending peasant counter-revolution, and for this reason had suppressed it without mercy (see International Review n°100). But they also knew that the “proletarian state” - of which the Bolsheviks saw themselves as the guardians - could not rule by force alone. Concessions would have to be made to the peasants on the economic front in order to keep the existing political regime intact. These concessions, codified in the NEP, involved the abolition of the forcible grain requisitions which had characterised the War Communism period, and their replacement by a “tax in kind”; private trade would now be permitted to the mass of middle peasants; a “mixed economy” would be established, in which state industries would function side by side with private capitalist enterprises, and even in competition with them.

The real isolation of the Russian proletariat, however, was the result of the international situation. At its Third Congress in 1921, the Communist International had recognised that the utter failure of the March Action in Germany signified the ebbing of the revolutionary tide which had risen in 1917. Faced with the need to reconstruct a ruined and starving Russia, the Bolsheviks realised that they could not count on the immediate assistance of the world proletariat; and by the same token, if the political power they had helped to create was to play a role in the expected future revival of the world revolution, this power would have to take the economic measures necessary for its survival.

Lenin’s speech begins on this last theme. He talks about the preparations for the Genoa conference to which Soviet Russia was sending a delegation, charged with the task of restoring trade relations between Russia and the capitalist world. Lenin’s approach to this was quite matter of fact: “Needless to say, we are going to Genoa not as Communists, but as merchants. We must trade, and they must trade. We want the trade to benefit us; they want it to benefit them. The course of the issue will be determined, if only to a small degree, by the skill of our diplomats” (Speech to the 11th Congress of the RCP(B), Collected Works, vol. 33. P 264). And indeed Lenin was quite right to make this distinction between communist activity and the requirements of the state. There can be no objection in principle to a proletarian power exchanging its goods for those of a capitalist state as long as it is recognised that this can only be a temporary and contingent measure which cannot call genuine principles into question. Nothing can be gained from gestures of heroic self-immolation, as the debate around the Brest-Litovsk treaty had already demonstrated. The problem here was that the Soviet state’s overtures to the capitalist world were beginning to involve the trading of principles. The failure to come to an agreement with the Entente powers at Genoa led the two outcast states of the day, Russia and Germany, to conclude the Rapallo Treaty in the same year. This treaty contained a number of vital secret clauses, among them the stipulation that the Soviet state would supply arms to the German Reichswehr. This was in stark contrast to the Bolsheviks’ commitment to do away with all secret diplomacy in 1918; it was the first real military alliance between the Soviet state and an imperialist power.

To this military alliance there corresponded a growing political alliance with the bourgeoisie. The “tactic” of the United Front, launched around this period, shackled the Communist parties to the forces of social democracy which had been denounced as agents of the ruling class in 1919. With the emphasis more and more on finding powerful allies for the Russian state abroad, this policy flowed effortlessly into the heinous theory that it was even permissible to forge fronts with the rightwing nationalists in Germany, the prototypes of Nazism. These political regressions were to have a devastating effect on the workers’ movement in Germany in the events of 1923 - and the abortive uprising which took place in that year (see the preceding article in this issue, and International Review n°s98 and 99) was in part suppressed by the Reichswehr with weapons supplied by the Red Army. These were ominous steps in the degeneration of the Communist parties and the integration of the Russian state into the concert of world capitalism.

This downward slide was the product, not of the Bolsheviks’ ill-will, but of profound objective factors, even if subjective errors certainly played their part in accelerating the decline. Lenin’s speech expresses this graphically. He was under no illusions about the economic nature of the NEP: he insisted that it was a form of state capitalism. We have seen (International Review n°99) that in 1918 Lenin was already arguing that state capitalism, being a more concentrated and developed form of bourgeois economy, would be a step forward, a step towards socialism for the backward Russian economy with its semi-mediaeval vestiges. In the 1922 Congress speech, he returned to the same theme, insisting that there was a fundamental distinction to be made between state capitalism under the rule of the reactionary bourgeoisie, and state capitalism administered by the proletarian state: “…we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society. Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism, but has not yet got on new rails. The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat. We refuse to understand that when we say ‘state’ we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the workers, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We are the state” (ibid, p 278).

This “we are the state” was already a forgetting of Lenin’s own words in the 1921 trade union debate, in which he had warned against completely identifying proletarian interests with those of the state (see IR 100); equally evident is that Lenin has begun to lose the distinction between the proletariat and the vanguard party. But in any case Lenin himself was acutely aware of the real limits of this “proletarian control of state capitalism”, because this is the moment when he made his famous comparison between the Soviet state, this “heap” as he called it, still profoundly marked by the tares of the old order, and a car which refuses to obey the hands of its driver:

“Never before in history has there been a situation in which the proletariat, the revolutionary vanguard, possessed sufficient political power and had state capitalism existing alongside it. The whole question turns on our understanding that this is the capitalism that we can and must permit, that we can and must confine within certain bounds; for this capitalism is essential for the broad masses of the peasantry and for private capital, which must trade in such a way as to satisfy the needs of the peasantry. We must organise things in such a way as to make possible the customary operation of capitalist economy and capitalist exchange, because this is essential for the people. Without it, existence is impossible…You communists, you workers, you, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which undertook to administer the state, must arrange it so that the state, which you have taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to. Well, we have lived through a year, the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in this past year? No. But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both. Be that as it may, the car is not going quite in the direction the man at the wheel imagines, and often it goes in an altogether different direction” (Ibid, p 279).

In short, the communists were not directing the new state - they were being directed by it. Moreover, Lenin was perfectly lucid about the direction spontaneously being followed by this car: it led towards a bourgeois restoration, which could easily take the form of a peaceful integration of the Soviet state into the capitalist world order. Thus he acknowledges the “class honesty” of a bourgeois political trend like the Russian émigrés around Smena Vekh who had already begun to support the Soviet state because it could envisage the Bolshevik Party becoming the most capable overseer of Russian capitalism.

And yet the profundity of Lenin’s intuitions about the nature and scale of the problem facing the Bolsheviks was not at all matched by the solutions he put forward in the same speech. For him there was no question of confronting the process of bureaucratisation with its proletarian antidote - the revival of political life in the soviets and other unitary organs of the class. The reaction of the Bolshevik leadership to the Kronstadt revolt had already shown its loss of conviction in going down that road. Neither did Lenin call for any let up in the virtual state of siege applied to the party’s own inner life after Kronstadt. In that same year the Workers’ Opposition came under renewed fire after its attempt to appeal to the 4th Congress of the Comintern about the inner party regime in Russia; and Miasnikov was expelled from the party after Lenin had failed to convince him to desist from his calls for freedom of speech.

For Lenin the primary problem was identified as being the “lack of culture” of the communist state managers - their inability to be better administrators than the old Tsarist bureaucrats, or better salesmen and money-makers than the “NEPmen” who were springing up everywhere now that the economy had been liberalised. As an example of the terrible bureaucratic inertia hampering the new administration he cited the absurd story of how a foreign capitalist offered to sell cans of meat to starving Russia, and how the decision to buy the cans was avoided throughout the entire state and party apparatus until the very highest echelons of the party were involved.

No doubt such bureaucratic excesses could have been reduced here and there by making the bureaucrats more “cultured”, but it would do nothing to change the overall direction of the car of state. The power that was really imposing this direction was more than just the NEPman or the private capitalist - it was the vast impersonal power of world capital that was inexorably determining the course of the Russian economy and of the Soviet state. Even in the best of conditions, an isolated workers’ fortress would not have been able to resist this power for very long. In the Russia of 1922, after civil war, famine, economic collapse, the disappearance of proletarian democracy and even of large segments of the proletariat itself, it was entirely utopian to hope that a more effective mode of administration by the communist minority could reverse this overwhelming tide. On the contrary, Lenin was soon compelled to admit more and more that the rot infesting the state machine was not simply limited to its “uncultured” lower strata, but had penetrated the very highest rungs of the party ladder, to the “Old Guard” of Bolshevism itself, giving birth to a veritable bureaucratic faction personified above all by Josef Stalin.

As Trotsky observed in his article ‘On Lenin’s Testament’ written in 1932, “it would be no exaggeration say that the last half year of Lenin’s political life, between his convalescence and his second illness, was filled with a sharpening struggle against Stalin. Let us recall once more the principal dates. In September 1922, Lenin opened fire against the national policy of Stalin. In the first part of December, he attacked Stalin on the question of the monopoly of foreign trade. On December 25, he wrote the first part of his testament. On December 30, he wrote his letter on the national question (the ‘bombshell’). On January 4, 1923, he added a postscript to his testament on the necessity of removing Stalin from his position as general secretary. On January 23, he drew up against Stalin a heavy battery: the project of a Control Commission. In an article on March 2, he dealt Stalin a double blow, both as organiser of the inspectorate and as general secretary. On March 5, he wrote me on the subject of his memorandum on the national question: ‘If you would agree to undertake its defence, I could be at rest’. On that same day, he for the first time openly joined forces with the irrreconcilable Georgian enemies of Stalin, informing them in a special note that he was backing their cause ‘with all my heart’ and was preparing for them documents against Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky”.

Despite being gripped by the illness that would shortly end his life, Lenin put all his political energy into this last-ditch struggle against the rise of Stalinism, and proposed to Trotsky that together they form a bloc against bureaucratism in general and Stalin in particular. Thus having first rung the alarm bells about the general course of the revolution, Lenin was already laying the foundations for - if necessary - passing on to an oppositional stance. But when we read the articles that Lenin wrote at that time (“How we should reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection”, and in particular the March 2nd article Trotsky refers to, “Better fewer but better”), we can see the limitations still being imposed by his position at the very head of the state machine. As in his April speech, the solutions are still entirely administrative: reduce the number of bureaucrats, re-organise Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate), fusion of Rabkrin and the party’s Control Commission... or else, as at the end of “Better fewer but better”, Lenin begins to place his hopes for salvation less on the workers’ revolution in the West than on the rising of the “revolutionary and nationalist East”. Either way, there is a definite loss of perspective. Lenin had seen the danger in part, but had not yet drawn the necessary conclusions. Had he lived longer, no doubt he would have gone much deeper in identifying the causes of the problem, and thus into the policy to be followed. But now the process of clarification had to pass into the hands of others.

1923: the emergence of the left oppositions

Lenin’s removal from political life was one of the factors which precipitated an open crisis in the Bolshevik party. On the one hand, the bureaucratic faction consolidated its grip on the party, initially in the form of the “triumvirate” formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, an unstable bloc whose main cement was the desire to isolate Trotsky. The latter, meanwhile, although with considerable hesitation, was compelled to move towards an overtly oppositional stance within the party.

At the same time, the Bolshevik regime was faced with new difficulties on the economic and social front. In the summer of 1923, the so-called “scissors crisis” called into question the application of the NEP under the triumvirate. The scissors in question were made up of falling agricultural prices on the one hand, and rising industrial prices on the other; in effect it threatened the balance of the entire economy and was the first clear crisis of the “market economy” installed by the NEP. Just as the NEP had been introduced to counter the excessive state centralisation of war communism, which had resulted in the crisis of 1921, so now it became evident that the liberalisation of the economy had exposed Russia to some of the more classic difficulties of capitalist production. These economic difficulties, and above all the government’s response to them – a policy of wage and job-cuts, like in any “normal” capitalist state – in turn aggravated the condition of the working class, which was already at the limits of impoverishment. By August-September 1923 a rash of spontaneous strikes had begun to spread through the main industrial centres.

The triumvirate, which was above all interested in preserving the status quo, had begun to see the NEP as the royal road to socialism in Russia; this view was theorised especially by Bukharin, who had moved from the extreme left to the right wing of the party, and who preceded Stalin in working out a theory of socialism in one country, albeit “at a snail’s pace” thanks to the development of a “socialist” market economy. Trotsky on the other hand had already begun to call for more state centralisation and planning in response to the country’s economic difficulties. But the first definite statement of opposition from within the leading circles of the party was the Platform of the 46, submitted to the Politburo in October 1923. The 46 was made up both of those who were close to Trotsky, such as Piatakov and Preobrazhensky, and elements of the Democratic Centralism group like Sapranov, V Smirnov and Ossinski. It is not insignificant that Trotsky’s signature was not on the document: the fear of being considered part of a faction under the conditions of the ban on factions in 1921 certainly played a part in this. Nevertheless, his open letter to the Central Committee, published in Pravda in December 1923, and his pamphlet The New Course, expressed very similar concerns, and definitively placed him in the opposition’s ranks.

The Platform of the 46 was initially a response to the economic problems facing the regime. It took up the cudgels for greater state planning against the pragmatism of the dominant apparatus and its tendency to elevate the NEP into an immutable principle. This was to be a constant theme of the left opposition around Trotsky - and as we shall see, not one of its strengths. More important was the urgent warning it issued about the stifling of the party’s internal life:

“Members of the party who are dissatisfied with this or that decision of the central committee, who have this or that doubt on their minds, who privately note this or that error, irregularity or disorder, are afraid to speak about it at party meetings, and are even afraid to talk about it in conversation… Nowadays it is not the party, not its broad masses, who promote and choose members of the provincial committees and of the central committee of the RCP. On the contrary the secretarial hierarchy of the party to an ever greater extent recruits the membership of conferences and congresses which are becoming to an ever greater extent the executive assemblies of this hierarchy… The position which has been created is explained by the fact that the regime is the dictatorship of a faction inside the party… The factional regime must be abolished, and this must be done in the first instance by those who have created it; it must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and internal party democracy” (cited in EH Carr, The Interregnum, p 368-70).

At the same time, the Platform distanced itself from what it referred to as “morbid” opposition groups, even if it saw the latter as expressions of the crisis within the party. This was undoubtedly a reference to currents like the Workers’ Group around Miasnikov and Bogdanov’s Workers’ Truth which had emerged around the same time. Shortly afterwards, Trotsky took a similar view: a rejection of their analyses as too extreme, while at the same time seeing them as manifestations of the unhealthy state of the party. Trotsky was also unwilling to collaborate in the methods of repression aimed at eliminating these groups.

In fact, these groups can by no means be dismissed as “morbid” phenomena. It is true that the Workers’ Truth group expressed a certain trend towards defeatism and even Menshevism: as with most of the currents within the German and Dutch left, its insights into the rise of state capitalism in Russia were weakened by a tendency to put into question the October revolution itself, seeing it as a more or less progressive bourgeois revolution (see the article on the communist left in Russia in International Review n°9).

This was not the case at all with the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), led by long-standing worker-Bolsheviks like Miasnikov, Kuznetsov and Moiseev. The group first came to prominence by distributing its Manifesto in April-May 1923, just after the 13th Congress of the Bolshevik party. An examination of this text confirms the seriousness of the group, its political depth and perceptiveness.

The text is not devoid of weaknesses. In particular, it is drawn towards the theory of the offensive, which failed to see the retreat in the international revolution and the consequent necessity for a defensive struggle by the working class; this was the reverse of the coin to the analysis of the Communist International, which saw the retreat in 1921 but which drew largely opportunist conclusions from it. By the same token, the Manifesto adopts the erroneous view that in the epoch of the proletarian revolution, struggles for higher wages no longer have any positive role.

Despite this, the strengths of the document far outweigh its weaknesses:

• its resolute internationalism. In contrast to Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition group, there is not a trace of Russian localism in its analysis. The whole introductory part of the manifesto deals with the international situation, clearly locating the difficulties of the Russian revolution in the delay of the world revolution, and insisting that the only salvation for the former lies in the revival of the latter: “The Russian worker has learned to see himself as a soldier in the world army of the international proletariat and to see his class organisations as the regiments of this army. Every time the disquieting question of the destiny of the October revolution is raised, he turns his gaze beyond the frontiers of Russia, to where the conditions for revolution are ripe, but where the revolution does not come”.

• its searing critique of the opportunist policy of the United Front and the slogan of the Workers’ Government; the priority accorded to this question is a further confirmation of the group’s internationalism, since this was above all a critique of the politics of the Communist International. Nor was the group’s position tainted with sectarianism: it affirmed the need for revolutionary unity between the different communist organisations (such as the KPD and the KAPD in Germany), but completely rejected the CI’s call for a bloc with the social democratic traitors, its spurious new argument that the Russian revolution had succeeded precisely though the Bolsheviks’ clever use of the United Front tactic: “…the tactic that will lead the insurgent proletariat to victory is not that of the United Front, but the bloody, uncompromising fight against these bourgeois fractions with their confused socialist terminology. Only this combat can lead to victory: the Russian proletariat won not by allying with the Socialist Revolutionaries, the populists and the Mensheviks, but by struggling against them. It is necessary to abandon the tactic of the United Front and warn the proletariat that these bourgeois fractions – in today’s period, the parties of the Second International – will at the decisive moment take up arms for the defence of the capitalist system”;

• its interpretation of the dangers facing the Soviet state - the threat of “the replacement of the proletarian dictatorship by a capitalist oligarchy”. The Manifesto charts the rise of a bureaucratic elite and the political disenfranchisement of the working class, and demands the restoration of the factory committees and above all of the soviets to take over the direction of the economy and the state2. For the Workers’ Group, the revival of workers’ democracy was the only means to counter the rise of the bureaucracy, and it explicitly rejected Lenin’s idea that the way forward lay through a shake-out of the Workers’ Inspection, since this was merely an attempt to control the bureaucracy through bureaucratic means;

• its profound sense of responsibility. In contrast to the critical notes appended by the KAPD when it published the Manifesto in Germany (Berlin 1924), and which expressed the German left’s premature pronunciation of the death of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, the Workers’ Group is very cautious about proclaiming the definite triumph of the counter-revolution in Russia or the final death of the International. During the Curzon crisis of 1923, when it seemed that Britain might declare war on Russia, the members of the Workers’ Group committed themselves to defending the Soviet republic in event of war; and above all, there is not the least hint of any repudiation of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik experience. In fact, the group’s stated attitude to its own role corresponds very closely to the notion of the left fraction as later elaborated by the Italian Left in exile. It recognised the necessity to organise itself independently and even clandestinely, but both the group’s title (Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party - Bolshevik), and the content of its Manifesto, demonstrate that it saw itself as being in full continuity with the programme and statutes of the Bolshevik party. It therefore appealed to all healthy elements within the party, both in the leadership and in the different opposition groupings like the Workers’ Truth, the Workers’ Opposition, and the Democratic Centralists, to regroup and wage a determined struggle for the regeneration for the party and of the revolution. And in many ways this was a far more realistic policy than the hope of the ‘46’ that the factional regime in the party would be abolished “in the first instance” by the dominant faction itself.

In sum, there was nothing morbid in the project of the Workers’ Group, nor was this a mere sect with no influence in the class. Estimates put its membership in Moscow at 200 or so, and it was thoroughly consistent in its advocacy of taking the side of the proletariat in its struggle against the bureaucracy. It thus sought to make an active political intervention in the wildcat strikes of summer-autumn 1923. Indeed it was for this very reason, coupled with the growing political influence of the group within the ranks of the party, that the apparatus unleashed the full force of repression against it. As he had predicted, there was even an attempt to shoot Miasnikov “while trying to escape”. Miasnikov survived and though imprisoned and then forced into exile after his escape from prison, continued his revolutionary activity abroad for two decades. The group in Russia was more or less crippled by mass arrests, although it is clear from The Russian Enigma, Anton Ciliga’s precious account of the opposition groups in prison in the late 20s, that it by no means disappeared completely and continued to influence the “extreme left” of the opposition movement. Nonetheless, this initial repression was a truly ominous moment: it was the first time that an avowedly communist group had suffered direct state violence under the Bolshevik regime.

Trotsky’s fatal hesitations

The fact that Leon Trotsky openly threw in his lot with the left opposition in 1923 was of capital importance. Trotsky’s international reputation as a leader of the Russian revolution was second only to Lenin’s. His criticisms of the regime in the party, and of its political orientations, sent a clear signal around the world that all was not well in the land of the Soviets; and those who had already begun to feel uneasy about the direction being taken not only by the Soviet state, but above all by the Communist parties outside Russia, had a figure around whom they could rally their forces, a figure who indisputably stood for the tradition of the October revolution and of proletarian internationalism. This was particularly the case for the Italian Left in the mid-20s.

And yet from the beginning, it is evident that the oppositional policies adopted by Trotsky were less coherent and above all less resolute than those defended by the communist left as such, in particular the Miasnikov current. Indeed, Trotsky largely failed to carry through the struggle against Stalinism even in the limited terms envisaged by Lenin in his last writings.

To give the most important examples: At the 12th Congress of the party in April 1923, Trotsky failed to deliver the “bombshell” that Lenin had prepared against Stalin concerning the national question, his role in Rabkrin, his disloyalty, even though Trotsky at this stage was still very much at the center of the party and enjoyed widespread support. On the eve of the 13th Congress, at the meeting of the central committee on May 22 1924, where Lenin’s testament and his call for Stalin’s removal were debated and Stalin’s political survival hung in the balance, Trotsky remained silent; he voted for the non-publication of the testament, against the express wishes of Lenin’s wife Krupskaya; in 1925 Trotsky even dissociated himself from his American sympathiser, Max Eastman, who had described and quoted from the testament in his book Since Lenin Died. Trotsky was persuaded by the Politburo to sign a statement denouncing Eastman’s efforts to bring the testament to light as “pure slander…which can only serve the ends of the enemies incarnate of communism and the revolution”. When he finally changed his mind and decided to publicise the testament, it was too late: Stalin’s grip over the party apparatus had become virtually unbreakable. Furthermore, during the period between the dissolution of the 1923 left opposition and the formation of the United Opposition with the Zinovievists, Trotsky frequently absented himself from the affairs of the central committee, focussing more on cultural or technical matters, and, when physically present, often took no real part in the proceedings.

A number of different factors can be involved to explain Trotsky’s hesitations. Although all are fundamentally political in nature, some of them are also connected to certain of Trotsky’s individual characteristics. Thus, when Trotsky’s comrade Yoffe wrote his last message to Trotsky before taking his own life, he made a number of criticisms of Trotsky’s shortcomings: “I have always thought that you have not enough in yourself of that ability which Lenin had to stand alone and remain alone on the road which he considered to be the right road…You have often renounced your own correct attitude for the sake of an agreement or a compromise, the value of which you have overrated” (quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, OUP 1959, p382). In effect, these are accurate descriptions of a tendency which had been quite marked in Trotsky prior to going over to the Bolshevik party – a tendency towards centrism, the incapacity to take clear and incisive positions, the tendency to sacrifice political principles in favour of organisational unity. This hesitant approach was further reinforced by Trotsky’s own fears of being seen to be involved in a vulgar struggle for personal power, for Lenin’s crown. This is in fact Trotsky’s own principal explanation for his vacillations during this period: “I have no doubt that if I had come forward on the eve of the 12th Congress in the spirit of a ‘bloc of Lenin and Trotsky’ against the Stalin bureaucracy, I should have been victorious… In 1922-3… it was still possible to capture the commanding position by an open attack on the faction… of the epigones of Bolshevism…”. However, “Independent action on my part would have been interpreted, or to be more exact, represented as my personal fight for Lenin’s place in the party and the state. The very thought of this made me shudder” (Trotsky, My Life, p 481). There is certainly some truth in this: as one of the oppositionists remarked to Ciliga, Trotsky was too “chivalrous a man”. Faced with the ruthless and unprincipled manoeuvring of Stalin in particular, Trotsky was loath to descend to the same level, and thus found himself outmanoeuvred at virtually every turn.

But Trotsky’s hesitations must also be examined in the light of a number of more general political and theoretical weaknesses, all closely inter-linked, which prevented him from taking an uncompromising stance against the rising counter-revolution:

• the inability to recognise clearly that Stalinism was indeed the bourgeois counter-revolution in Russia. Despite Trotsky’s famous description of Stalin as “the gravedigger of the revolution”, Trotsky and his followers had their eyes fixed on the danger of a “capitalist restoration” in the old sense of a return to private capitalism. This is why he saw the main danger within the party incarnated in Bukharin’s right wing faction, and why his watchword remained: “a bloc with Stalin against the right perhaps; but a bloc with the right against Stalin, never”. Stalinism was seen as a form of centrism, inevitably fragile and bound to be pulled either towards the right or the left. As we will see in the next article in this series, this inability to appreciate the real danger represented by Stalinism was linked to Trotsky’s erroneous economic theories, which identified state-controlled industrialisation as a form of socialism, and which never understood the real meaning of state capitalism. This profound political weakness was to lead Trotsky into increasingly grave mistakes in the last ten years of his life;

• part of the reason why Trotsky was unable to see that the regime in Russia was being reabsorbed into the capitalist camp was his own close involvement in many of the errors that had accelerated this degeneration, not least the policies of militarisation of labour and repression of workers’ discontent, along with the opportunist tactics adopted by the Comintern in the early twenties, particularly the ‘United Front’. Partly because he was still tangled up in the higher branches of the bureaucratic tree, Trotsky never came to question these errors and consistently failed to take his opposition to the point where he was standing with the proletariat and against the regime. Indeed it was not until 1926-7 that Trotsky’s opposition really took its case even to the rank and file of the party; it was hardly able to contemplate agitating among the mass of the workers. For this reason many workers did indeed see the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin as no more than a distant clash between the “great ones”, between equally distant bureaucrats.

Trotsky’s inability to break from an attitude of “no one can be right against the party” (a term he publicly defended at the 13th Congress) was severely criticised by the Italian Left in its reflections on the defeat of the Russian revolution, and the meaning of the Moscow Trials in particular: “The tragedy of Zinoviev and the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ is the same: their desire to reform the party, their subjection to a fetishism of the party which personifies the October revolution and which has pushed them at the last trial to sacrifice their lives.

We find these same concerns in the attitude of Trotsky when, in 1925, he allowed himself to be chased out of the Commissariat of War, even when he still had the support of the army, above all in Moscow. It wasn’t until 7 November 1927 that he came out openly against the party; but it was too late and he failed pitifully. This attachment to the party and the fear of becoming an instrument of the counter-revolution in Russia has prevented him from taking his critique of Russian centrism to its extreme but logical consequences, even after his expulsion” (Bilan n°34, “La Boucherie de Moscou”, August-September 1936).

Faced with an advancing counter-revolution that was strangling the very breath out of the party, the only way to save anything from the wreckage would have been to have formed an independent fraction, which while trying to win over the healthy elements within the party, did not flinch at the necessity of carrying out illegal and clandestine work amongst the class as whole. This, as we have seen, was the task which Miasnikov’s group set itself in 1923, only to be thwarted by the action of the secret police. Trotsky, by contrast, found himself hamstrung by his own loyalty to the ban on factions which he himself had supported at the 1921 party congress. Both in 1923, and then in the final battle in 1927, the apparatus made full use of this ban to confuse and demoralise the oppositions around Trotsky, giving them the choice between dissolving their groupings or taking the leap into illegal activity. On both occasions the first course was favoured in the vain hope of preserving the unity of the party; on neither occasion did it preserve the oppositionists from the wrath of the Stalinist machine.

***

The next article in this series will examine the process that culminated in the final victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia.

CDW

ICC Introduction

Anti-fascism is a tough nut. With the campaign for the extradition of Pinochet in full swing, the "democratic" sections of the ruling class (in other words almost all of them) unleashed a new campaign on the anti-fascist theme, this time against the arrival in the Austrian government of Georg Haider’s FPÖ. During the European Union summit in Lisbon on 23rd March, the heads of state and government of fourteen countries agreed on the sanctions to be applied to Austria, as long as the representatives of Haider’s party remained in the government. Everybody was out to win the prize for most vigorous denouncer of the "xenophobic, anti-democratic, fascist danger". We had the French President Chirac, the leader of the French right, vigorously condemning what was going on in Austria, at the same time as the publication of an opinion poll showing that half the population of France is xenophobic. Not to be left out, all the organisations of the left, starting with the Trotskyists, warned loudly about the "fascist menace" which is supposed to be a serious threat to the working class, and organised endless demonstrations against the "Haider scandal".

Whatever the specific reasons that led the Austrian bourgeoisie to bring the "fascists" into the government, the event has proved an excellent opportunity for all their European and even North American colleagues to breathe new life into a mystification, which has already proved very effective against the working class. In recent years, the campaigns against the "fascist danger" have had nothing more nourishing than the electoral success of the Front National in France, or attacks on immigrants by skinhead gangs. Even the Pinochet show failed to draw the crowds, since the old dictator had gone into retirement. Obviously, the arrival of a "fascist" party in a European government is an altogether more filling dish for this kind of campaign.

When the comrades of Bilan (the French language publication of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party) published the text that we are reprinting below, fascist governments were in power in several European countries; Hitler had been in power in Germany since 1933. But they didn’t lose their heads, and let themselves get dragged into the frenzy of "anti-fascism" which gripped not only the socialist and Stalinist parties, but also currents which had opposed the degeneration of the Communist International during the 1920s, in particular the Trotskyists. Bilan was able to give a warning, clear and firm, against the dangers of anti-fascism – which, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War turned out to be prophetic. In Spain, the fascist fraction of the bourgeoisie was only able to repress the proletariat because, although the workers had armed themselves spontaneously during the Franco putsch of 18th July 1936, they let themselves be drawn off their class terrain, the terrain of intransigent struggle against the bourgeois republic, in the name of the priority of the anti-fascist struggle, and the need to form a front of all anti-fascist forces.

The situation today is not that of the 1930s, when the working class had just suffered the most terrible defeat in its history, at the hands not of fascism, but of the "democratic" bourgeoisie. It was precisely this defeat that made it possible for fascism to come to power in certain European countries. This is why we can say today that fascism is not a political necessity for capitalism today. Only by completely ignoring the differences between the situation today and that of the 1930s can currents which claim to belong to the working class, or even to be in favour of revolution like the Trotskyists, justify their participation in the campaigns about the "fascist threat". In this sense, Bilan was absolutely right to insist that revolutionaries had to analyse events within their historic context, taking account especially of the balance of class forces. During the 1930s, Bilan developed its arguments against the Trotskyists in particular (described in the text as the "Bolshevik-Leninists", as the Trotskyists described themselves during the 1930s). At the time, the Trotskyists were still part of the working class, but their opportunism was to lead them into the bourgeois camp during World War II. And it was precisely in the name of anti-fascism that the Trotskyists were to give their support to Allied imperialism during the war, trampling on one of the most fundamental principles of the workers’ movement: internationalism. That being said, Bilan’s arguments against the anti-fascist campaigns, its denunciation of the danger that fascism represents for the working class, remain perfectly valid today: the historic situation has changed, but the lies used against the working class, to draw it off its class terrain and under the sway of the democratic bourgeoisie, remain fundamentally the same. The reader will have no difficulty in recognising the "arguments" attacked by Bilan: they are exactly the same as those we from the anti-fascists today, and especially from those who claim to be revolutionaries. We can cite just two passages from Bilan’s text as examples:

"…isn’t the position of our opponents, who want the proletariat to choose the least bad organisational form of the capitalist state, the same as that of Bernstein, who called on the proletariat to achieve the best form of capitalist state?".

"…if the proletariat is really strong enough to impose a governmental solution on the bourgeoisie, then why should it stop at this objective, rather than posing its own central demands for the destruction of the capitalist state? By contrast, if the proletariat is not yet strong enough to launch the insurrection, then doesn’t pushing it towards a democratic government mean in effect spurring it down a path that will make the enemy’s victory possible?".

Finally, to all those who claimed that anti-fascism was a means for "regrouping the workers", Bilan replied that the only terrain on which the proletariat could regroup was that of the defence of its class interests, which remains the same no matter what the balance of class forces: "since it cannot pose the problem of power, the proletariat has to regroup for more limited, but still class objectives, in partial struggles (…) Instead of engaging in large-scale changes to the workers’ demands, the imperative duty of communists is to determine the regroupment of the working class around its class demands and within its class organisations: the unions".

At the time, unlike the Dutch-German Left, the Italian Communist Left had not yet clarified the union question. Ever since World War I, the unions had become, irrevocably, organs of the capitalist state. This in no way invalidates the position defended by Bilan calling on the workers to regroup around their class demands. This position remains perfectly valid today, when every fraction of the bourgeoisie is inviting the working class to defend that precious commodity, democracy – whether against fascism, or against any attempt to undertake a new revolution which could only lead to a return to the same totalitarianism that collapsed ten years ago in the so-called "socialist" countries.

In this sense Bilan’s article, published below, adopts the same approach in denouncing the democratic lie as did our publication of Lenin’s theses "On bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship" in the previous issue of the International Review.

Bilan no.7, May 1934, "Anti-fascism: a formula for confusion"

In the ebb of the revolution, the present situation is very likely to be more confused than any before it. This is the result, on the one hand, of the counter-revolutionary development of all the bases that the proletariat conquered in bitter struggle after the war (the Russian state, the IIIrd International), and on the other, of the workers’ inability to oppose this development with an ideological and revolutionary front of resistance. The workers have reacted through struggle, and sometimes with magnificent battles (Austria) to the combination of this phenomenon and the brutal offensive of capitalism, oriented towards the formation of alliances for war. But these battles have failed to shake the power of centrism, the only mass political organisation, and one which has henceforth gone over to the forces of the world counter-revolution.

In such a moment of defeat, confusion is only a result obtained by capitalism, incorporating the workers’ state and centrism for the needs of its own preservation, orienting them onto the same terrain occupied since 1914 by the insidious forces of the social-democracy, the principal agent of the disintegration of the masses’ consciousness and spokesman for the slogans of proletarian defeat and capitalist victory.

In this article, we will examine a typical confusionist formula: something that is called – even amongst workers who consider themselves on the left – "anti-fascism".

Our aim here is not to analyse the situation in countries like France or Belgium (where the problem is posed especially acutely), to determine whether or not a fascist attack is imminent; nor will we examine the idea that a perspective is opening of a spread of fascism to every country. Moreover, we will not consider here the theoretical problems linked to the significance of fascism, or to the attitude that the proletariat should adopt towards democratic institutions in the event of a fascist attack. We will study all these questions in later articles. For the purposes of clarity, we will limit ourselves here to one problem: anti-fascism and the struggle front that it is supposedly possible to create around this slogan.

Ithoma">It is elementary – or rather it used to be – to say that before engaging in a class battle, it is necessary to establish the goals we are aiming for, the methods to use, and the class forces which can intervene in our favour. There is nothing "theoretical" about these considerations, and by that we mean that they are not open to facile criticism by all those elements, indifferent to "theory", whose rule is to ignore all theoretical clarity and to get into bed with anybody, in any movement, on the basis of any programme, as long as there is "action". Obviously, we are amongst those who think that action springs not from outbursts of anger, or the goodwill of individuals, but from the situation itself. Moreover, for action, theoretical work is vital in order to guard the working class against new defeats. And we need to understand the significance of the contempt that so many militants show for theoretical work, for in reality this always comes down to replacing proletarian positions – without saying so – with the principles of the enemy social-democracy, amongst those revolutionary milieus while at the same time calling for action at all costs in the "race" against fascism.

As far as the problem of anti-fascism is concerned, its numerous supporters are guided not only by a contempt for theoretical work, but by the stupid mania for creating and spreading the confusion necessary to build a broad front of resistance. There must be no demarcation which might put off a single ally, or lose any opportunity for struggle: this is the slogan of anti-fascism. Here we can see that for the latter confusion is idealised and considered as an element of victory. Here we should remember that more than half a century ago Marx said to Weitling that ignorance has never done any service to the workers’ movement.

Today, instead of establishing the aim of the struggle, the methods to use, and the necessary programme, the quintessence of marxist strategy (which Marx would have described as ignorance) is presented thus: adopt an adjective – the most common today being "Leninist" of course – and talk endlessly, and completely out of context, about the situation in Russia in 1917, and Kornilov’s September offensive. Alas! there used to be a time when revolutionaries had heads on their shoulders and analysed historical experience. Then, before trying to make an analogy between the situations of their own epoch and these experiences, they tried first to determine whether it was possible to draw a political parallel between past and present; but those times are gone, especially if we look just at the usual phraseology of proletarian groups.

We are told that there is no point in establishing a comparison between the situation of the class struggle in Russia in 1917, and that today in other countries; likewise, there is no point in trying to determine whether the balance of class forces then bore certain similarities to that of today. The victory of October 1917 is a historical fact, so all we need to do is copy the tactics of the Russian Bolsheviks, and above all to make a very poor copy which varies depending on the different milieus that interpret events on the basis of radically opposing conceptions.

Those who call themselves "Leninists" today are not in the least bothered by the fact that in Russia in 1917 capitalism was undergoing its first experience of state power, whereas fascism on the contrary has emerged from a capitalism that has been in power for decades, and that the volcanic revolutionary situation in Russia 1917 was the opposite of today’s reactionary one. On the contrary, their marvellous serenity cannot be so much as ruffled by a comparison of the 1917 events with those of today, based on a serious examination of the Italian and German experience. Kornilov is the answer to everything. The victories of Mussolini and Hitler are supposedly due solely to deviations by the communist parties from the classic tactics of the Bolsheviks in 1917, thanks to political acrobatics that assimilate two opposing situations: the revolutionary and the reactionary.

***

As far as anti-fascism is concerned, political considerations don’t come into it. Its aim is to regroup all those threatened by fascist attack into a sort of "trade union of the threatened".

The social-democrats tell the radical-socialists to look to their own security, and to take immediate defensive measures against the fascist threat, since Herriot and Daladier could also fall victim to a fascist victory. Léon Blum goes even further, solemnly warning Doumergue that unless he watches out for fascism, he can expect the same fate as Brüning. Centrism addresses "the socialist rank and file", or alternatively the SFIO addresses centrism, in order to create a united front, since both socialists and communists are threatened by fascism. Finally there are the Bolshevik-Leninists who get their hackles up to proclaim grandiloquently to all and sundry that they are ready to create a struggle front devoid of any political consideration, on the basis of a permanent solidarity amongst all the "working class" (?) formations, against the activity of the fascists.

The idea underlying all these speculations is certainly very simple – too simple to be true: bring together all those under threat, driven by the same desire to avoid death, into a common anti-fascist front. But even the most superficial analysis will show that the idyllic simplicity of this proposal in reality hides a complete abandonment of the fundamental positions of marxism, the negation of past events and of the significance of events today. Of course, it is easy enough to proclaim that Herriot was wrong to join the government that came out of the "riot" of 6th February, and that he should remember that Amendola, a member of the government that handed over power to the fascists, was assassinated by the latter. It is equally easy to assert that the radical socialist party in Clermont-Ferrand has behaved suicidally in agreeing to a "truce of parties", since the Gquot;, since the German experience shows that Brüning’s "truce" admirably served the purposes of fascism, and that fascism on the other hand didn’t spare the democratic parties. And finally, with the same nonchalance, to conclude by declaring that the French and Belgian socialists should learn from the events in Germany and Austria and adopt a revolutionary policy in order to save themselves from certain death. The centrists in turn – still according to the same bible – should learn, from the fate of Thälmann and the concentration camps, the need for an "honest" United Front tactic instead of instead of one aimed not to help the working class struggle but to "destroy the socialist party": this is the demand of the right-wing social-democratophile Doriot, who uses the support of the workers of Saint-Denis to channel their desire for struggle and their reaction against centrism, into the dead-end of confusion.

But all these sermons about what the radicals, socialists, and centrists ought to do in order to save their own skins and their institutions will change nothing in the course of events, since the real problem comes down to this: how is it possible to transform radicals, socialists, and centrists into communists, since the struggle against fascism can only be based on a front of struggle for the proletarian revolution. And no matter how many sermons are preached, the Belgian social democracy will still launch its plans for the preservation of capitalism, will not hesitate to torpedo every class conflict, in a word will not hesitate to hand the unions over to capitalism. Doumergue will copy Brüning, Blum will follow in the steps of Bauer, and Cachin in those of Thälmann.

We repeat, our aim in this article is not to determine whether the situation in France or Belgium can be compared to the circumstances which allowed the rise to power of fascism in Italy and Germany. Our analogy is concerned above all with the fact that Doumergue is a copy of Brüning, from the point of view of their function in two quite different capitalist countries, and that this function is – as it is for Blum and Cachin – to immobilise the proletariat, to disintegrate its class consciousness, and to make it possible to adapt the state apparatus to the new circumstances of inter-imperialist struggle. There is good reason to think that in France especially, the experience of Thiers, Clémenceau and Poincaré will be repeated under Doumergue, and that we will see a concentration of capitalism around its right-wing forces, without that meaning the strangulation of the bourgeoisie’s socialist and radical-socialist forces. Moreover, it is profoundly wrong to base proletarian tactics on political positions derived from a mere perspective.

The problem is not therefore that fascism threatens, so we should set up a united anti-fascist front". On the contrary, it is necessary to determine the positions around which the proletariat will gather for its struggle against capitalism. Posing the problem this way means excluding the anti-fascist forces from the front for the struggle against capitalism. It means – paradoxical though this may seem – that if capitalism should turn definitively towards fascism, then the condition for success is the inalterability of the programme and the workers’ class demands, whereas the condition for certain defeat is the dissolution of the proletariat in the anti-fascist swamp.

***

The action of individuals and social forces is not determined by laws of preservation of individuals or forces, outside any class considerations: Brüning and Matteoti could not have acted in considee acted in consideration of their own personal interests, or the ideas they defended, by taking the road to proletarian revolution which alone could have saved them from fascism. The action of an individual or force is a function of the class they belong to. This explains why the present actors of French politics are merely following in the footsteps of their predecessors, and will continue to do so even should French capitalism move towards fascism.

The basic formula of anti-fascism (the "union of the threatened") is thus revealed to be completely inconsistent. Moreover, if we examine the ideas of anti-fascism (at least as far as its programme is concerned) we find that they derive from a dissociation of fascism and capitalism. True, if we question a socialist, a centrist, or a Bolshevik-Leninist on the subject, they will all declare that fascism is indeed capitalism. But the socialist will say: " we need to defend the Constitution and the Republic in order to prepare for socialism"; the centrist will declare that it is much easier to unite the working class struggle around anti-fascism than around the struggle against capitalism; while according to the Bolshevik-Leninist, there is no better basis for unity and struggle than the defence of the democratic institutions which capitalism can no longer accord the working class. It thus turns out that the general assertion that "fascism is capitalism" can lead to political conclusions which can only stem from the dissociation of capitalism and fascism.

Experience has shown – and this annihilates the possibility of any distinction between fascism and capitalism, that capitalism’s conversion to fascism does not depend on the will of certain groups within the bourgeois class, but on the necessities of a whole historical period, and the specificities of states which are less able to resist the crisis and the death-agony of the bourgeois regime. Insofar as it is possible to establish a complete separation, the experience of Italy and Germany shows us that when capitalism is forced to move towards a fascist organisation of society, the fascist battalions provide the shock troops that are directed against the class organisations of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie’s democratic political formations then declare their opposition to fascism, with the aim of persuading the proletariat to confide the defence of these institutions to democratic laws and the Constitution. The social-democracy, which acts along the same lines as the liberal and democratic forces, also calls the proletariat to make its central demand that the state should force the fascist forces to respect the law, disarm them, or even outlaw them. The line of action of these three political forces is in complete solidarity: their origin lies in the necessity for capitalism to arrive at the triumph of fascism, wherever the capitalist state aims to raise fascism to the new form of capitalist social organisation.

Since fascism corresponds to the fundamental needs of capitalism, we have to find a possibility of struggle against it on a radically different front. It is true that, today, we often find our opponents falsifying our positions because they do not want to combat them politically. For example, we only have to oppose the anti-fascist slogan (which has no political basis), because experience proves that the anti-fascist forces are just as necessary to the victory of fascism as the fascist forces themselves, to be told: "we don’t care about analysing the political and programmatic substance of anti-fascism, what matters is that Daladier is preferable to Doumergue, and that the latter is preferable to Maurras, and that consequently it is in our interest to defend Daladier against Doumergue or Doumergue against Maurras. Or, according to circumstances, to defend either Daladier or Doumergue because they are an obstacle to the victory of Maurras, and our duty is "to use the slightest fault-line in order to win a stronger position for the proletariat". Obviously, the events in Germany – where the "fault-lines" first of the Prussian, than of the Hindenburg-Von Schleicher governments, were nothing but so many stepping stones to the rise of fascism – are mere bagatelles which can be ignored. Our interventions will of course be denounced as anti-Leninist or anti-marxist: we will be told that we are indifferent to whether the government is right, left, or fascist. As far as this is concerned, we would like once and for all to pose the following problem: taking account of the modification in the post-war situation, isn’t the position of our opponents, who want the proletariat to choose the least bad organisational form of the capitalist state, the same as that of Bernstein, who called on the proletariat to achieve the best form of capitalist state? We will be told, perhaps, that the idea is not to demand that the proletariat espouse the cause of the government considered to be the best form of domination… from the proletarian viewpoint, but that the aim is simply to strengthen the positions of the proletariat to the point where it can impose a democratic form of government on capitalism. In this case, we need only change the words, the meaning remains the same. After all, if the proletariat is really strong enough to impose a governmental solution on the bourgeoisie, then why should it stop at this objective, rather than posing its own central demands for the destruction of the capitalist state? By contrast, if the proletariat is not yet strong enough to launch the insurrection, then doesn’t pushing it towards a democratic government mean in effect spurring it down a path that will make the enemy’s victory possible?

The problem is certainly not the one posed by the partisans of the "best choice": the proletariat has its own solution to the problem of the state, and has no influence on the solutions that capitalism adopts to the problems of its own power. Logically, it is obvious that it would be to its advantage to have very weak bourgeois governments that allowed the evolution of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle; but it is equally obvious that capitalism will only form left or far-left governments if these latter are its best line of defence in a given situation. In 1917-21, the social-democracy came to power to defend the bourgeois regime, and was the only form of government that madovernment that made it possible to crush the proletarian revolution. Given that a right-wing government would have pushed the working masses towards insurrection, should the marxists have recommended a reactionary government? We put forward this hypothesis to show that there is no such thing as a governmental form which is in general better or worse for the proletariat. These notions exist only for capitalism, and depend on the situation. By contrast, the working class has an absolute duty to regroup around its class positions to fight capitalism in whatever concrete form it may take: fascist, democratic, or social-democratic.

The first essential consideration in today’s situation is to say openly that the problem of power is not immediately posed to the working class, and that one of the cruellest expressions of this situation is the unleashing of the fascist attack, or the movement of democracy towards emergency powers. Hence we need to determine the basis on which the working class could regroup. And here a really curious conception separates the marxists from all the confusionists and enemy agents at work within the working class. For us, the workers’ regroupment is a problem of quantity: since it cannot pose the problem of power, the proletariat has to regroup for ms to regroup for more limited, but still class objectives, in partial struggles. The others, whose extremism is a mere bluff, alter the proletariat’s class substance to say that it can struggle for power in any period. Unable to pose the problem on a class – i.e. proletarian – basis, they emasculate it by posing the problem of an anti-fascist government. We would add that the partisans of dissolving the proletariat in the anti-fascist swamp are of course the same who prevent the formation of a proletarian class front to fight for its economic demands.

In France, the last few months have seen an extraordinary flowering of anti-fascist programmes, plans, and organisms. This has absolutely not prevented Doumergue from carrying through a massive reduction in pay and pensions, a signal for the wage reductions which French capitalism has absolutely the intention of generalising. If only a hundredth of the energy spent on anti-fascism had been directed towards the formation of a solid working class front for a general strike in defence of immediate economic demands, it is absolutely certain that on the one hand the threat of repression would not have been carried out and on the other that the proletariat, once regrouped, would have recovered its self-confidence. This would in turn haveould in turn have created a changed situation where the problem of power could once again be posed in the only form it can take for the working class: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It follows from all these elementary considerations, that the only justification of anti-fascism would be the existence of an anti-fascist class: an anti-fascist programme would follow on from the programme inherent to such a class. Our inability to reach such a conclusion is not due only to the simplest formulations of marxism, but to the elements of the situation in France. In the immediate, we are posed with the problem of how far to the right anti-fascism stops: with Doumergue, who is there to defend the Republic? with Herriot, who takes part in the "truce" to save France from fascism, or with Marquet who claims to represent the "eye of socialism" in the National Union, or with the Young Turks of the Radical Party, or just with the socialists? Or with the devil himself, provided only that hell is paved over with anti-fascism? Posing the problem concretely proves that the slogan of anti-fascism only serves the interests of confusion and prepares the certain defeat of the working class.

Instead of engaging in large-scale changes to the workers’ demands, the imperative duty of communists is to determine the regroupment of the working class around its class demands and within its class organisations: the unions. As far as the CGT is concerned (the CGTU having altogether ceased to be a union since it became a mere appendage of centrism), it is in the process – and this is another characteristic expression of the disintegration of the proletarian class – of a fundamental change, to become just another political party with the aim of modifying society on an inter-classist basis. We can thus see that anti-fascist ideology is leading to the disappearance of the union, the very organ which could have regrouped the proletariat in the present situation, where only its immediate demands could rebuild the working class’ unity in struggle. To conclude, we would also say that the necessity of relying on the union organisations is the result of a historical fact which cannot be denied simply on the grounds of the weakness of the unions’ influence in France. We are not basing ourselves on the formal idea of the trade union, but on the fundamental consideration – as we have already said – that since the problem of power is not posed today, it is necessary to aim for more limited objectives, but which are still class objectives for the struggle against capitalism. And anti-fascism is creating the conditions where not only will the least of the working class’ political and economic demands be drowned, but where its chances of revolutionary struggle will be compromised, and it will find itself exposed to becoming a prey to capitalist war, before it can recover its ability to wage the revolutionary battle to build the society of tomorrow.

Wars on every continent, poverty and hunger everywhere, disasters of every description – the world is in a catastrophic state.

"A year after the Kosovo war began, vengeance killings, increasing crime, political infighting, intimidation, and corruption in that territory make an unpleasant picture (...). Kosovo is a mess" (The Guardian, 17/03/00). The hatred and warfare in the Balkans has got worse since the war and NATO occupation in Kosovo. NATO occupation in Kosovo. The war in Chechnya continues to cause thousands of casualties, most of them civilians, while hundreds of thousands of refugees starve in the camps. As in Kosovo, as in Bosnia before it, awful atrocities are committed. The capital Grozny has been obliterated. American generals boast that NATO bombing has put Serbia back 50 years. The Russian generals have achieved a still better performance in Chechnya: "This small Caucasian republic has been set back a century, as far as development is concerned" (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2000). The fighting that has devastated the country is still going on, and will continue for a long time.

Hot spots of military tension are proliferating. They are particularly dangerous and numerous in South-East Asia. "In no other region do so many critical issues converge so dramatically" (Bill Clinton, cited in the International Herald Tribune, 20/03/00).

Poverty and hunger throughout the world

"Half of all the people in the world are poor" (International Herald Tribune, 17/03/00). All the talk about prosperity is given the lie by the terriblthe lie by the terrible situation of billions of men, women, and children. "The world’s production of basic foodstuffs covers 110% of human needs, and yet 30 million people continue to die of hunger every year, and more than 800 million are undernourished" (Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1999).

The situation in the peripheral countries, once called the "Third World", now described as "emerging", or "developing" is one of absolute pauperisation. "The number of hungry people remains high in a world of food surpluses. In the developing world, there are 150 million underweight children, nearly one in three" (International Herald Tribune, 9/3/00).

Today, we are told over and over that the Asian crisis of 1997 has passed, that the "Asian tigers" are back, that the recession has been much weaker than expected in Latin America, and that growth rates are positive again. And yet, "2.2 billion people [live] on less than $2 per day in Asia and Latin America" (International Herald Tribune, 14/07/00, quoting James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank). With inflation under control, the rise in produtrol, the rise in production in Russia is "a minor miracle, if we just consider the macro-economic indicators" (Le Monde, 24/03/00). As in the countries of Asia and Latin America, this improvement in the "economic fundamentals" has been achieved at the expense of the population, and at a cost of growing poverty. Russia "remains a country in virtual bankruptcy, undermined by a foreign debt of $170 billion dollars (…) Living standards have fallen since 1990, and average monthly income is now equivalent to $60 per month, the average wage is $63 per month, and the pension $18. In August 1998, at the moment of the crash, 48% of the population lived below the poverty line (fixed at about $50); by the end of the year this had risen to 54%, and today it stands at almost 60%" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 14/03/00).

Poverty in the industrialised countries

The idea that the industrialised countries are an oasis of prosperity no longer stands up to even the most superficial examination, still less to the actual experience of hundreds of millions of men and women, mostly workers whether employed or unemployed. As we pointed out in our previous issue, 18% of the US population – at lepulation – at least 36 million people – lives below the poverty line. There are 8 million in the same situation in Britain, 6 million in France. Unemployment has fallen, but only at the cost of an increasing flexibility and precariousness of labour, and a drastic drop in wages. Along with Britain and the USA, Holland is often cited as an example of economic success. Le Monde poses the question: how can we explain the fall in Dutch rates of unemployment from 10% in 1983 to less than 3% in 1999? "Several themes have already been considered: (…) The development of part-time work [which accounted in 1997 for] 38.4% of total employment, and extensive retirement from economic activity (very particular to Holland), by people considered invalids (almost 11% of the working population in 1997). [Finally], the wage restraint negotiated during the 1980s could be the cause of the marked fall in unemployment" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 14/03/00). The mystery is solved: in one of the world’s most developed countries, 1 out of 10 adults is an invalid! It’s hardly a laughing matter. The secret of the Dutch success is insecure, part-time jobs, and fraudulent figures for the economy and health, along with a drastic drop in wages. That is the recipe, and the same one is being applied everywhere.

And these data are only a part of the social and economic reality in the industrialised countries: we should not forget the enormous public and private debt in the US, the growing trade deficit, and the huge speculative bubble hanging over Wall Street, and all the world’s stock exchanges with it. America’s uninterrupted period of growth during the 1990s, whose benefits we are told so much about, is being financed by the rest of the world, massive debt, and the ferocious exploitation of the working class. Japan, the world’s second industrialised power, is still suffering an apparently endless officially recognised recession, despite a gigantic state debt which had risen "to $3.3 trillion at the end of 1999, making it the biggest in the world (…) Japan has overtaken the US as the world’s most indebted country" (Le Monde, 4/03/00).

The reality of the world economy is a long way from the idyllic picture we are presented with.

Deadly disasters and the destruction of the planet

Ecological and "natural" disasters are proliferating. The are proliferating. The lethal flooding in Venezuela and Mozambique comes after that in China, and has left thousands of dead and missing, hundreds of thousands of hungry homeless. At the same time, a less spectacular drought is ravaging Africa, even in countries which on other occasions have been hit by flooding. The thousands buried alive in the ruins of their shanty-towns, built on the slopes of the mountains surrounding Caracas, are not the victims of a natural disaster, but of the anarchy and the living conditions imposed on them by capitalism. Nor are the rich countries spared by disaster, even if the results are less dramatic in the immediate. Accidents in nuclear power stations are becoming more and more frequent, as is oil pollution caused by shipwrecks among the world’s ageing fleet of tankers, rail and air accidents. The pollution of the Danube by a massive discharge of mercury from a Romanian gold mine is another example. Water itself is increasingly polluted and rare: "About one billion people have no access to safe, clean water, mainly because they are poor" (International Herald Tribune, 17/3/00). In town and countryside, the air is poisoned. There is a widespread re-emergence of diseases that had once disappeared: "This year, 3 million people will die of tuberculosis, and 8 million people will develop the diseasel develop the disease, almost all in poor countries (...). Tuberculosis is not just a medical crisis. It is a political and social problem that could have incalculable consequences for generations to come" (Médecins sans Frontières, quoted in International Herald Tribune, 24/03/00).

The destruction of the social fabric, and its consequences

The deterioration of living conditions, on both the general and the economic level, is accompanied by an explosion of corruption, Mafia activity, and extreme delinquency. Whole countries are rotten with drug-addiction, gangsterism, and prostitution. The Yeltsin family’s embezzlement of billions of dollars of IMF funds allotted to Russia is only a caricature of the universal corruption developing throughout the world.

Millions of children are living in a terrible hell: "The list of activities where children are transformed into commodities is a long one (…) Children are not only sold on the international adoption market, far from it. They are used much more for their labour power (…) The sex industry – the prostitution of both adults and children – has become so l – has become so lucrative that it now represents almost 15% of certain Asian countries’ GDP (Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia). Throughout the world, the victims are not only increasingly young, but also increasingly helpless, especially when they fall ill, and are thrown onto the street or sent back to their villages, where they are rejected by their families and abandoned by everybody" (Claire Brisset, Information Director for the French UNICEF committee, quoted in Le Monde, 21/03/00).

Equally horrible is the development of prostitution among young girls. One consequence of the war in Kosovo was to throw thousands of adolescents into the refugee camps. While the young men were enrolled in the UCK Mafia, drug trafficking and criminal gangs, the girls "were bought or kidnapped in the refugee camps to be sent either abroad or to the bars for soldiers in Pristina (…) Most of them suffered aggression, especially rape, before being forced into prostitution: at first (explained a French police officer), I didn’t believe in the existence of veritable concentration camps where girls are raped and prepared for prostitution" (Le Monde, 15/03/00).

At every level – wars, economic crisis, poverty, ecological and social disintegration – the situation is catastrophic.

Where is capitalism taking the world?

Is this a period of transition – a terrible one certainly – towards a better world of peace and prosperity? Or is it an inexorable descent into hell? Is this society going through torment in order to emerge into a period of extraordinary development thanks to the new technologies? Or are we faced with capitalism’s irreversible decomposition? What are the fundamental tendencies underlying every aspect of the capitalist world?

The destruction of the environment

Despite the speeches, despite the ecologists in government, capitalism’s destruction of the planet can only get worse. Whenever the scientists are allowed to carry out an objective study – and to publish the results – their predictions are dire.

In the words of a specialist in water use: "We are heading for disaster (…) The worst scenario would be to carry on as we are today; it would mean certain crisis (…) In 2025, the majority of the planet’s population will live in conditions of scarcity, or extreme scarcity, of water" (cited in Le Monde, 14/03/00). This scientist draws the conclusion that "A change in policy world-wide is vital".

There is no need here to mention, again, the hole in the ozone layer, or the global warming that is melting the ice-caps and causing the sea level to rise. Air in most of the world’s great cities has become unbreathable, and the associated diseases – asthma, chronic bronchitis, cancer, etc – are on the rise. Nor is it just the cities or industrial areas that are affected. A cloud of pollution produced by Chinese and Indian industry – a cloud the size of the United States – hung for weeks over the Indian Ocean. What is capitalism’s response? A proposal to stop, or at least to reduce pollution? Absolutely not! On the contrary, the answer is to appropriate the air, and sell it: "For the first time, the universal resource of air is going to become a commodity (…) The principle of a market in emission rights [ie in the right to pollute] is simple (…) A country which produces more CO2 than it is allowed can buy the right to pollute more fro pollute more from a state that produces less" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 21/03/00). Just as it does with water. As it does with children. As it does with the proletarians. Instead of stopping, or even slowing down, the destruction of the environment, capitalism – by transforming everything it touches into a commodity – is accelerating its destruction.

Worse poverty to come

Since the beginning of the century, despite all the enormous quantitative progress in the development of the productive forces, the living conditions of the whole world population, including the working class in the industrialised countries, have declined considerably, even without counting the sacrifices and misery of the two world wars. As the Communist International said in 1919, the period of capitalism’s decadence was opened (see the article in this issue on the legacy of the 20th Century).

The 1970s saw bankruptcy in Africa and rising debt in Latin America. The 1980s saw bankruptcy in Latin America and rising debt in Eastern Europe. The 1990s saw bankruptcy in Eastern Europe and rising debt, quickly followed by bankruptcy, in South East Asia. Whetheth East Asia. Whether in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe or Asia, the situation has deteriorated dramatically throughout the late 20th Century. At the beginning of the 1970s, the poor numbered 200 million (according to the World Bank definition, disposing of less than $1 per day). By the beginning of the 1990s, the number had risen to 2 billion.

When Stalinist state capitalism collapsed in the Eastern bloc, Western pseudo-prosperity was promised to all. "But instead of [the countries of the ex-Russian bloc] converging with the wage levels and living conditions of Western Europe, the region’s relative decline accelerated after 1989. Even in the most developed countries, GDP fell by 20%. Ten years after the transition began, only Poland has exceeded the GDP of 1989, while Hungary only began to reach that level at the end of the 1990s" (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2000).

In Asia, where we are told that the crisis of summer 1997 is over, "many banks are still saddled with frightful debts, which despite the improving economic climate, have no chance of ever being repaid" (cited from the Economist in Courrier International). Certainly, the bour Certainly, the bourgeoisie has lately been expressing its delight at the Asian economies’ powers of recovery. "According to the vice-president of the World Bank for East Asia and the Pacific, the recovery of the region’s economies is ‘remarkable’". He goes on to say that "poverty is no longer rising, exchange rates are stable, there are substantial reserves, exports are rising, foreign investment is recovering and inflation is low" (Le Monde, 24/03/00). If "poverty is no longer rising", it is because the "good fundamentals" have already been achieved thanks to the destruction of whole sectors of the Asian economies and the massive pauperisation of the population. It is thanks to an increase in private and state debt that "there are substantial reserves", and a devalued currency encourages exports and investment. But even in the case of South Korea, the world’s 10th industrial power prior to the crisis of 1997, specialist opinion is divided, and there are many who refuse to get carried away by the demands of the propaganda machine.

"Hilton Root, an economist, former Wharton School professor and senior fellow at Milken, painted a worrisome picture of a Korean recovery more skin-deep than deeply rooted. South Korea's powerful chaebols - powerful conglomerates - are still digging out from mammoth debt, the country has too few families owning much too much wealth, and corruption continues to despoil the nation's political and legal system. Mr. Root doubts that the Korean recovery is sustainable even if Mr. Kim emerges stronger than ever. Yet many people worry that, without such a mandate, South Korea would quickly slip into reverse" (International Herald Tribune, 18/3/00). Our economist’s explanations are far from complete, but it is clear enough that the situation is far from being as bright as the bourgeoisie’s specialists would have us believe.

For the countries of the capitalist periphery, in other words for the great majority of the world’s population, the economic perspective is one of ruin, poverty, and hunger.

Towards rising unemployment and job insecurity in the rich countries

How can we say that capitalism is bankrupt in the face of today’s apparent economic growth? Are we blind? Won’t the "new economy" re-launch the machine and ensure a continuednd ensure a continued prosperity? Aren’t we heading for the "full employment" that the governments tell us about? Reality or illusion? A possibility or a lie?

The economic forecasts in the media are pure propaganda. Their purpose is to hide the general bankruptcy. The politicians, the specialists, the journalists, support their arguments with manipulated and deceptive figures. A return to "full employment" is supposed to be just on the horizon, thanks to the "new economy". How are they going to manage it? By job insecurity, forced part-time working and cheating: "As times change, so do landmarks. For years, it was agreed that full employment should be defined as a rate of unemployment no higher than 3%. Lately, the experts concluded that the same result would be reached with 6% of unemployed. Today, some are even raising the figure to 8.5%" (Le Monde, economic supplement, 21/03/00). This revision in the criteria demonstrates that there will be no return to "full employment" in the statistics, and shows just how much confidence they have in their forecasts. Unemployment and job insecurity will get worse, and weigh more heavily on the living and working conditions of the world working class.

The same is true of the figures for growth. It is normal enough for an eminent Japanese politician to refuse to admit that an open recession exists in his country: "even if the GDP has fallen for two quarters running, we do not think that the economy is in recession" (quoted in Le Monde, 14/03/00). And why should he not? Since the figures are massaged to appear in the most favourable light: "In the past, [a growth rate of 1-1.5% for the world economy] would have been considered as a recession. During the last three world ‘recessions’ – 1975, 1982, and 1991 – it is probable that world production never really fell" (The Economist, translated in Courrier International). In these conditions, we cannot take seriously the triumphant declarations on the return to growth in the industrialised countries.

In fact, one of the bourgeoisie’s main aims in the present situation is to hide from the world population – and especially from the working class in the industrialised countries – the economic bankruptcy of capitalism. One of the most crying expressions of this bankruptcy is the fall in production, recession, with all its terrible and violent consequencnd violent consequences. All the hymns of praise to American growth – whose "artificial" conditions and cost to the population we have already examined – aim to hide the world recession. The occasional mention of the "serious recession in most Third World countries" (The Economist) and in the countries of Eastern Europe, is drowned in the flood of praise for the American example.

Towards worsening contradictions in the US economy

Despite all the cheating, the bourgeoisie nonetheless has to try to get a clear picture itself, if only to try to control the process of decline. Whence today’s interest in a "soft landing". The "Asian" crisis, which ravaged Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe in the summer of 1997, was contained in North America and Western Europe. The cost to the latter, especially the US, was an increase in private and public debt, accompanied by inflation, an overheating economy, and a still more gigantic and "irrational" stock exchange speculation.

The most serious financial authorities and economic specialists give the lie to the paeans of praise to the economy’s good heconomy’s good health and the revolutionary boom of the Internet and the "new economy"; in fact, they have only one concern: that the world economy should manage a "soft landing". They recognise that in reality, the economy is already in decline. "One thing is certain: US expansion will slow down (…) will the slowdown be brutal enough to cause a worldwide recession? This is very unlikely, but the danger cannot be dismissed. [Nonetheless] this situation has two alarming consequences. Firstly, a substantial slowdown will be necessary to prevent a return to inflation in the US during 2000 (…) If the new economy is a mirage, or at least much less real than is claimed, then today’s stock market valuations of American companies cannot be justified. As soon as the necessity for a moderation in world demand is combined with a stock market that is both over-valued and unprepared for disappointment, including the most serious, then all the conditions will be united for a much less successful landing" (The Economist, translated in Courrier International).

Doubt is setting in. will the bourgeoisie manage to keep control of the decline, and avoid a brutal collapse as in 1929? The issue is not one of bankruptcy or not. The bankruptcy not. The bankruptcy is already here. Unemployment and job insecurity, or full employment? The unemployment is already here. No, the real question is: will the bourgeoisie continue to control the decline, as it is still able to do today? Will the collapse be controlled, or uncontrolled? Doubt is present in another article in the same publication. "If it succeeds a soft landing, [the USA] will have pulled off a miracle every bit as remarkable as the sustained growth that it has known in recent years" (idem). Heavens! Two miracles in succession! What blind faith. And what confidence in the virtues of the capitalist economy. Like the first, this second miracle will be performed not by the market, but by authoritarian state intervention – especially by the USA – in the economy, by political decisions by governments and "technical" decisions by central banks, which will once again cheat with the law of value, not to save the economy but to "land" it as softly as possible.

Towards more war

As we have seen, peace will not return to Chechnya. Nor to the Balkans. The hotspots are numerous. Amongst the multitude of local antagonisms, the permanent tension between China and Taiwan,een China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan (and therefore India and China), all except Taiwan being armed with nuclear weapons, is full of danger. At the same time, the partly hidden antagonism amongst the great industrial powers is sharpening. These rivalries are either a direct cause – as in Yugoslavia – or an exacerbating factor in local conflicts. The disagreements over Kosovo and NATO’s use of occupying forces are an expression of this.

Renewed local conflicts, sharpening antagonisms between the great imperialist powers, this is where capitalism is taking us, day by day.

At the level of local imperialist antagonisms, the present period of decomposition has provoked a situation of chaos on most continents. "Almost everywhere, in the Southern countries, the state is disintegrating. There is a development of lawless regions, ungovernable chaotic entities untouched by any form of legality are plunging back into a state of barbarism, where the only law is imposed by the gangs of looters that hold the population to ransom" (Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1999). Abandoned Africa is the clearest illustration. Immense regions of central Asia have gone down the same path; though to a lesser exugh to a lesser extent, Latin America is also affected as we can see from the Colombian example.

As on the economic and ecological levels, capitalism’s irreversible tendency towards decomposition is dragging humanity into chaos and catastrophe. "This empire [Russia], falling apart into autonomous regions, this incoherent, lawless grouping, this flamboyant universe where the most enormous wealth lives alongside the most terrible violence, is a shining metaphor of this new Middle Ages into which the whole planet could plunge if globalisation is not brought under control" (Jacques Attali, one-time adviser to French President Mitterand, in the French weekly L’Express, 23/03/00).

Has humanity a future?

The state of the world today is catastrophic and frightening. The perspectives that capitalism has to offer humanity are as apocalyptic as they are inevitable. Inevitable, that it, unless we have done with the cause of these ills: capitalism itself.

"The myth persists that hunger results from a scarcity of food (...). The common thread that runs through nearlyt runs through nearly all hunger, in rich and poor nations alike, is poverty" (International Herald Tribune, 09/03/00). Capitalism has developed sufficient productive forces to feed the entire world, even despite the immense destruction of wealth and productive forces throughout the 20th century. Abundance and an end to poverty are possible for all humanity. With them, a mastery of the productive forces and the social distribution of goods. The end of the exploitation of man by man. An end to wars and massacres. An end to the wanton destruction of the environment. Economically and technically, the question has been settled since the beginning of the 20th century. It only remains to pose the question of the destruction of capitalism.

Against this, the ruling class reminds us endlessly that any revolutionary project is inevitably doomed to bloody failure; that communism is the same thing as its negation, Stalinism. It uses its "opposition" forces to put forward democratic campaigns against Pinochet, against the far right in Austria, against the hold over society of the great financial powers, against the WTO during the great anti-summit media show in Seattle, for the Tobin tax via associations like ATTAC patronised by Le Monde Diplomatique. These campaigns have extensions adapted to the situation in each country: the Dutroux affair in Belgium, the struggle against ETA terrorism in Spain, the Mafia scandals in Italy, anti-racism in France. Their main theme is that the population, and in the first place the working class, should regroup as "citizens" behind the state in order to support it, or, even more radically, to force it to defend democracy.

The aim of these campaigns and democratic mystifications is clear. To substitute the struggle of all classes and interests of the citizens, for the working class struggle; support for the state, for the struggle against capitalism, and the state as its supreme defender. The working class has everything to lose in an inter-classist mass of citizens or "the people". It has everything to lose in lining up behind the capitalist state. The bourgeoisie is trumpeting that the class struggle is over and that the working class has disappeared. And yet the very existence of these campaigns, their – often international – extent and orchestration, reveals that for the bourgeoisie the working class remains a real danger.

This is all the more true in that today, the working class struggle is making an appearance – dispersed certainly, controlled and defeated by the unions and the political forces of the left, but nonetheless indicative of a growing discontent at the attacks the class is subjected to. In Germany, Britain, and France, significant movements have taken place, even though they remain hesitant and largely controlled by the unions. The movement and demonstrations by the New York subway workers (see Internationalism n°111, our publication in the USA) was doubtless one of the main expressions of the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the working class today: on the one hand combativeness, a refusal to accept sacrifices without fighting back, a readiness to gather and discuss the needs and means of the struggle, and a certain distrust for the union’s manoeuvres; on the other, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of determination in overcoming the obstacles set up by the unions, to engage the struggle openly and to spread it to other sectors.

All the lies about the economy’s good health are intended to delay as far as possible the development of a consciousness throughout the working class, not of the attacks and the deterioration of its living and working conditions – that is daily common knowledgly common knowledge already – but of the bankruptcy of capitalism. And on the ideological and political level, the incessant, systematic campaigns on the need to defend and strengthen democracy are at the centre of the bourgeoisie’s political offensive against the proletariat in the present period.

Historically, the stakes are high. For capitalism, it is necessary to delay the development of massive and united struggles, and to prevent the workers developing their self-confidence. It is necessary to exhaust, disperse, and eventually to defeat the inevitable proletarian counter-attack. It will be a disaster for all humanity if the proletariat is defeated in the decisive battles to come!

RL, 26/03/2000

The letters from Bordiga and Trotsky: presentation

In International Review n°s 98 and 99 we dealt with the defeat of the German revolution as a sign of the defeat of the world revolution; we now return to this question through the debates and srough the debates and struggles that took place within the Communist International at the time. The German question and the defeat suffered by the workers’ movement in Germany in 1923 were key questions of the day for the international working class. The eclecticism and tactical oscillations of the CI produced a disaster in Germany. This put an end to the revolutionary wave of the 20s and prepared the ground for the defeats that followed: in China (a situation we have already examined in this Review) and in Britain (the Anglo-Russian Committee and the General Strike). In the end it led to the irrecoverable loss of the International when it adopted the thesis of ‘socialism in one country’ and to the crisis of the Communist Parties which were sucked into the counter-revolution and the second imperialist war.

Our aim here isn’t to deal exhaustively with these important debates in the CI, but simply to contribute to the dossier on the German revolution with this correspondence, which gives us an idea about the political positions and clarity of judgement of these two great revolutionaries at the time of the events themselves.

1923 marked a definite break in the period that followed the first imperialist war. imperialist war. It was the end of the revolutionary wave, which had been inaugurated by the October revolution in Russia. It also marked a break in the Communist International, which no longer had any clear analysis of the political situation.

It was in 1923, at the third plenum of the CI’s Executive, that Radek fell into "national Bolshevism". He saw Germany as "a great industrial nation which has been reduced to the level of a colony". He made an amalgam between a country which, although occupied militarily, remained one of the main imperialist states in the world, and a colonised country. He thus led the KPD and the CI onto the terrain of nationalism; and the CI was already widely infected by opportunism and centrism.

Thus, according to the declaration of the CI’s Executive, "the fact of insisting strongly on the national element in Germany is just as revolutionary as insisting on the national element in the colonies". Radek went even further: "what is called German nationalism is not just nationalism: it is a broad national movement with a huge revolutionary significance". And Zinoviev was only too happy to point out in his conclusion to this conclusion to the work of the plenum that a bourgeois paper had recognised the "national Bolshevik" character assumed by the KPD.

Then, suddenly, in mid-1923, the CI made an about-turn, from a wait-and-see, possibilist attitude – "the revolution was not on the agenda"(as Radek put it in his report on the capitalist offensive to the IVth Congress of the CI) – to frenetic optimism less than one year later: "The revolution is knocking at the door of Germany. It’s a matter of a few months". Consequently, in the presence of the general staff of the KPD, it was decided in Moscow to rush ahead with preparations for the seizure of power, and even to fix the date. On October 1 Zinoviev declared to Brandler, the secretary of the German party, that he saw "the decisive moment coming in four, five or six weeks". In Germany however, the slogans raised were contradictory: the call for insurrection was coupled with the call for a "workers’ government" alongside social democracy. The same social democracy which had done the most to crush the revolution of 1919 and murder the best working class militants and revolutionaries, including Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogisches.

It was the first major crisis of the CI. In parallel with these dramatic events, where the movement in Germany entered a descending curve, a crisis erupted in the leadership of the Bolshevik party. The Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were now in open conflict with Trotsky and the Opposition.

It was in 1923 that the CI adopted a sudden "leftist" turn, which stole the thunder of those who were criticising the CI from the left. From 1924, Zinoviev sought to use the defeat of the German revolution against the Opposition.

Later on Trotsky returned to the question of the German revolution and in his letter from Alma Atma to the VIth Congress of the CI, dated 12 July 1928, he wrote: "the second half of 1923 was a period of tense expectation for the revolution in Germany. The situation was approached too late and too hesitantly…. the Vth Congress (of the CI, in 1924) began moving towards insurrection at a moment of reflux".

Only the Italian communist left was able to draw the first clear lessons from this crisis in the CI, even if they were still quite incey were still quite incomplete. At the IVth Congress of the CI in 1922 it had already sounded the alarm, notably against the tactic of the United Front and the growth of opportunism in the International. In 1923 Bordiga was in prison but, as the divergences became more and more significant, he wrote a manifesto "To all comrades of the Communist Party of Italy" which would have resulted in a break with the CI if it had been supported by the other members of the party’s executive committee. Then in 1924 Bordiga developed his own critique of the Vth Congress.

The letters published below are from the "Perrone Archives" (1). They were written during the VIth Plenum of the CI’s Executive, when Bordiga confronted Stalin on a whole number of issues, including the Russian question (2). Bordiga asks Trotsky for some clarifications on the German question. Trotsky, contrary to the assertions of Stalin, replies that the favourable moment for insurrection had already passed in October 1923 and that he had never supported Brandler’s policies during this period.

On 28 October 1926, Bordiga wrote to Karl Korsch that he was "satisfied with Trotsky’s positions on the German revolution&quoan revolution". However, while Trotsky’s criticisms were in accord with Bordiga’s on this event, as on the necessity to discuss the Russian question and the situation of the CI, Trotsky’s political positions were not as trenchant and well-argued as those of Bordiga when it came to essentials. Bordiga had a much clearer critique of the opportunist tendencies in the CI, marked in particular at the IVth Congress with the adoption of the United Front tactic, which was a concession to social democracy and a way of opening the CPs to the centrists (notably the "Terzini", who were allowed to enter the CP of Italy against Bordiga’s objections).

Bordiga’s letter to Trotsky

Moscow, 2 March 1926

Dear comrade Trotsky,

At the current enlarged Executive, during a meeting of the delegation of the Italian section with comrade Stalin, certain questions were posed about your preface to the book The Lessons of October and about your criticisms of the October 1923 events in Germany. Comrade Stalin argued that there was a contradiction in your attitude to this po attitude to this point.

To avoid the risk of quoting comrade Stalin’s words with the slightest inaccuracy, I will refer to the formulation of this same observation which is contained in a written text, i.e. the article by comrade Kusinen published in the French edition of International Correspondence, no 82, 17 December 1924. This article was published in Italian during the discussion for our IIIrd Congress (Unita, 31 August 1925). Here it is argued that:

Following the collapse of the USSR, various individuals and small groups have emerged within Russia since 1990 to question the world bourgeoisie's lying equation that Stalinism equalled communism.

In International Review 92 (1st Quarter 1998) we reported on two Moscow conferences, called by some of these elements, on the question of the heritage of Leon Trotsky. During the proceedings of these conferences a certain number of the participants wanted to look at other, more radical, analyses of the degeneration of the October Revolution made by other members of the left opposition in the twenties and thirties. They also wanted to gain knowledge of the contribution of the Communist Left to this question and the attendance of the ICC at the conferences aided these enquiries.

Alongside this report we published a thorough critique of Trotsky's book 'The Revolution Betrayed' by one of the conference animators.

Since then, the ICC has been corresponding with elements in Russia and here we want to publish some extracts from one of these correspondents in order to help enrich the international debate about the nature of communist positions and organisation for the future world proletarian revolution.

As our readers will see the stance adopted by our correspondent - V, from the south of Russia - is sympathetic to the tradition of the communist left. He demmunist left. He defends the Bolshevik Party on the one hand and on the other recognises the capitalist and imperialist nature of the Stalinist regime. In particular he takes up an internationalist position on the 2nd Imperialist World War, unlike the Trotskyists who justified participation in it on the basis of the defence of the USSR and its supposed proletarian gains.

However the treatment by our correspondent of 2 main questions, firstly on the possibility of the world revolution in 1917-23 and secondly on the possibility of national liberation after 1914 and thus on the possibility of any progressive capitalist development during this century, shows a disagreement on the methodological framework within which to understand these revolutionary, internationalist principles.

We have taken the liberty of making extracts from some of the comrade's letters in order to save space and get to the heart of the matter. We have also corrected some of the English, not out of love for good grammar, but to facilitate its translation into the different languages of the International Review:

"... The Bolsheviks were mistaken theoretically about the possibiliti about the possibilities of a world socialist revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. Such possibilities have appeared only today, at the end of the 20th century. But they were absolutely correct in action, and if we, by some wonder, could be transferred to 1917, we would be with the Bolsheviks and against all their enemies, including the 'left'. We understand that it is an unusual and contradictory position, but it is a dialectical contradiction. The actors of history aren't pupils in a classroom, who give correct or mistaken answers to the questions of the teacher. The most banal example is Columbus, who thought that he had discovered the path to India, but had actually discovered America. Many learned scholars didn't make such a mistake, but they didn't discover America!

"Were the heroes of peasant wars and early bourgeois uprisings correct - Wat Tyler, John Ball, Thomas Munzer, Arnold of Brescia, Cola di Rienza etc in their struggle against feudalism when the conditions for the victory of capitalism were still immature? Of course they were correct: 1) the class struggle of the oppressed, even when defeated, speeds up the development of the existing order of exploitation and because of this it hastens the downfall of this order. After defeats the oppressed can become capablsed can become capable of victory. Rosa Luxemburg wrote excellently about this in her polemics with Bernstein in 'Social Reform or Revolution'.

"If the necessity of revolution exists, revolutionaries must act, even if their successors will understand that it was not socialist revolution. The conditions for socialist revolution were not yet mature. The illusions of the Bolsheviks about the possibility of world socialist revolution in 1917-23 were necessary illusions, inevitable illusions like the illusions of John Ball or Gracchus Babeuf....Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades with their illusions did an enormous progressive work and have left for us a precious experience of proletarian, though defeated, revolution. The Mensheviks with their theories failed to lead even a bourgeois revolution and ended as the left tails of the bourgeois landlord counter-revolution.........

"If we want to be Marxists, we must understand the objective causes of the defeats of the proletarian revolutions of the 20th century. What objective causes will make the world socialist revolution possible in the 21st century? Subjective explanations like Trotsky's 'treachery of social democrats and Stalinism’ or your ‘weakness or ‘weakness of class consciousness at an international level’ is not enough. Yes, the level of class-consciousness of the proletariat was and is low, but what are the objective causes of it? Yes, the social democrats and Stalinists were and are traitors, but why did these traitors always win against the revolutionaries? Why did Ebert and Noske win against Liebnecht and Luxemburg, Stalin against Trotsky, Togliatti against Bordiga? Why did the Communist International, created as a decisive split with the opportunism of the degenerated 2nd International, itself degenerate into opportunism three times quicker than the 2nd? We must understand all this.

On the decadence of capitalism:

"Your understanding of this period only as the decadent stage of capitalism, only as some monstrosity. (for example in an article from Internationalisme on the collapse of Stalinism), doesn't answer the question of why the period was progressive, capitalist of course, in the Stalinist USSR and other red flag countries.

On the national question

"Concerning your pamphlet 'Nation or Class’. We agror Class’. We agree with your conclusions, but don't agree with part of the motivation and historical analysis. We agree, that today, at the end of the 20th century, the slogan the right of nations to self-determination has lost any revolutionary character. It is a bourgeois-democratic slogan. When the epoch of bourgeois revolutions is closed this slogan too is closed for proletarian revolutionaries. But we think that the epoch of bourgeois revolutions closed at the end of the 20th century not at its beginning. In 1915 Lenin was generally correct against Luxemburg, in 1952 Bordiga was generally correct on this question against Damen, but today the situation is reversed. And we consider your position to be completely mistaken that different non-proletarian revolutionary movements of the third world, that had not an iota of socialism but were objectively revolutionary movements, were only tools of Moscow, as you wrote about Vietnam for example, rather than objectively progressive bourgeois movements.

"It seems you make the same mistake as Trotsky who understood the crisis of capitalism as an absolute impasse not as a long and torturous process of degeneration and degradation when the reactionary and negative elements of capitalism more and more outweighed its progressive elementts progressive elements. Was there progress in the Soviet Union? Yes, of course. Was it socialist progress? Of course not. It was a transition from a semi-feudal agrarian country to an industrial capitalist country, i.e. bourgeois progress, in blood and mud, like all bourgeois progress. And the revolutions in China, Cuba, Yugoslavia etc: were they progressive ? of course antagonistically-progressive transformations in many other countries. We can and we must speak about the halfway, antagonistic character of all these bourgeois revolutions, but they were bourgeois revolutions. The objective conditions for proletarian revolution in China today are more mature, than they were in the twenties due to the bourgeois revolution in the forties."

If there's a common thread running through these extracts it is the idea that the 'objective conditions' for the proletarian revolution have not existed on a world scale for the greater part of the twentieth century, contrary to what the ICC, following the 1st Congress of the Communist International, believes. Thus the October Revolution was premature and consequently, at least until the end of the century, some form of progressive capitalist development was possible in the peripheries of the world system, and thus national liberation.

A clear understanding of objective conditions in society, that is the economic development of society at a given historic period, is a fundamental need for Marxists, since they, unlike the anarchists, recognise that socialism, instead of merely desirable, is a new mode of production whose possibility and necessity is conditioned by the economic exhaustion of capitalist society. This is the cornerstone of historical materialism as we are sure the comrade agrees.

Likewise there can be little argument that Marx saw the objective conditions for socialism as essentially twofold: "A social formation never perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never take its place before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." (Preface..)

Considering that world capitalism was not yet ready economically to perish in 1917 the comrade draws the conclusion that the immense upheaval in Russia could only lead to a bourgeois revolution at the economic level. At the political level it was a proletarlevel it was a proletarian revolution that was destined to fail owing to the fact that its communist aims didn't correspond to the real material needs of society at the time. The Bolshevik Party and the Communist International could thus only be heroic failures that misread the objective conditions just as John Ball, Thomas Munzer and Gracchus Babeuf thought a new equal society was possible when the conditions for it were not there.

The comrade says that this position on the nature of October is contradictory in the dialectical sense. But it contradicts one of the basic concepts of historical and therefore dialectical materialism that "Humanity only sets itself such tasks as it can solve: indeed, on closer examination, it will always be found that the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation" (Preface).

The consciousness of social classes, their aims and problems tends to correspond to their material interests and their position in the relations of production and exchange. It is only on this basis that the class struggle evolves. For an exploited class like the proletariat, self-consciousness can only develop aftss can only develop after a protracted struggle to free itself of the hold of the consciousness of the bourgeoisie. The difficulties, incomprehensions, mistakes, confusions in this effort reflect the lagging of consciousness behind the development of material conditions - another aspect of historical materialism that sees social life as essentially practical - concerned with furnishing food, clothing shelter - and therefore preceding the attempts of man to explain the world. But the comrade has the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat ripening on a world scale for a task that didn't exist yet. He turns Marxism on its head and has millions of proletarians mobilising themselves for a life or death struggle for a bourgeois revolution by mistake. And to do so he has them led by general ahistorical figures - the revolutionaries - who are motivated not so much by the class they are fighting for but by a general desire for revolution.

Does revolutionary consciousness ripen in a class by mistake?

Is there a historical trend for revolutionary consciousness to mature before its time? If we look a little closer at the historical circumstances of, say, the Peasants Revolt in the England of 1381 (John Ball), or the Peasant War in Germany easant War in Germany in 1525 (Thomas Munzer) we can see that this isn't the case: the consciousness of these movements tends to reflect the interests of the protagonists and the material circumstances of the time.

The latter were at root a desperate response to the increasingly onerous conditions imposed on the peasantry by the decaying feudal class. In these revolts as in all movements of the exploited throughout history there developed a desire for a new society without exploitation and misery. But the peasantry has never been and can never be a revolutionary class in the real meaning of the term since, as essentially a strata of small property holders, they are not the bearers of new relations of production, i.e. a new society. The peasantry in revolt was not destined to be the vehicle for the new bourgeois mode of production emerging out of the towns of Europe during the decadence of feudalism. (As Engels points out the peasantry was destined to be ruined by the victorious capitalist revolutions). Moreover the variation in the size of their property works against the necessary common identity of a revolutionary class.

In the bourgeois revolutions themselves, (in Germany, Britain and France between the 16th and 18th the 16th and 18th centuries) the peasantry and artisans played an active but auxiliary role, not for their own interests. To the extent to which proletarian interests emerge in a distinct way at this time they violently clash with even the most radical wing of the bourgeoisie, witness the fight between the Levellers and Cromwell in the English Revolution of 1649 or Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals versus the Montagnards in 1793.

The peasantry didn't have the cohesion or conscious goals of a revolutionary class, it couldn't develop its own world view and evolve a real strategy for the overthrow of the ruling class. It had to borrow its revolutionary theory from the exploiters since its vision of the future was still shrouded in a religious, i.e. conservative form. If its goals and heroic battles inspire us today and appear out of their time its because the last millennium (and the previous four) has had on important common characteristic: the exploitation of one part of society by another: that's why the names of its leaders have lasted through the centuries in the memory of the exploited.

It was only at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth that the socialist idea appears for the first time s for the first time with real force behind it. And this period coincides, not accidentally, with the development of the proletariat in embryo.

The maturation of Communist consciousness reflects the material interests of the working class

The proletarians are the ancestors of peasants and artisans robbed of their land and means of production by the bourgeoisie. They have nothing left to tie them to the old society and no new form of exploitation to bring about. Having only their labour power to sell and working in association they have no need for internal divisions. They are an exploited class, but, unlike the peasantry have a material interest in not only ending all forms of private property but in creating a world society where the means of production and exchange are held in common: communism.

The working class, growing up with the development of large scale capitalist industrial production has enormous potential economic power in its hands and, being concentrated in millions in and around the major cities of the world, linked by modern means of transport and communication, it has the means to mobilise itself for a successful assault on the bastions of cat on the bastions of capitalist political power.

The class consciousness of the proletariat, unlike the consciousness of the peasantry is not tied to the past but is forced to look to the future without any utopian or adventurist illusions. It must soberly draw all the consequences, however gigantic of overthrowing existing society and constructing a new one.

Marxism, the highest expression of this consciousness, can give the proletariat a true picture of its conditions and objectives at each stage of its struggle and of its final goals, because it is able to uncover the laws of historical change . This revolutionary theory emerged in the 1840s and over the next few decades eliminated the vestiges of utopianism in the socialist ideas held by the working class. By 1914 Marxism was already triumphant in a working class movement that had 70 years of fighting for its interests under its belt. A period that included the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the experience of the 1st and 2nd Internationals.

And at this point Marxism showed itself able to criticise its own mistakes and political analyses and positions that had become sitions that had become obsolete with the march of events. The Marxist left, that the comrade identifies with, in all the major parties of the Second International, recognised the new period opened by the 1st World War and the end of the period of peaceful capitalist expansion. The same Marxist left came to lead the revolutionary insurrections that broke out at the end of the war. But its just here that the comrade, who would have done what the Bolsheviks did in October 1917 as a stepping stone to the world revolution, repeats the pseudo-Marxist arguments about the immaturity of the objective conditions that all the opportunists and centrists of Social Democracy - Karl Kautsky in particular - used to justify the isolation and strangulation of the Russian Revolution.

If the revolutionary wave failed it wasn't an inevitable subjective reflection of the insufficiency of objective conditions, but a result of the fact that this maturation wasn't quick and profound enough to take hold of the world proletariat in the relatively short 'window of opportunity' that opened up after the 1914-18 war and the contingent difficulties that resulted, without mentioning the specific difficulties of the proletarian revolution in comparison with the revolutions of previous revolutionary classes. ses.

For historical materialism the epoch of social revolution that results from the maturation of the elements of the new society is heralded by the development of 'ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out'.

The Communist International was not a precocious aberration as the comrade seems to be saying - in fact it only just caught up with events. It was the expression of a search for a solution to capitalism in the face of a maturation of objective conditions. To make its failure inevitable is to make historical materialism a fatalistic and mechanical recipe rather than a theory in which 'men make history'.

1917-1923 World capitalism deserves to perish

In 1914 the elements of the new society had matured in the old. But had all the productive forces for which the old society had room been developed? Had socialism become a historic necessity? The comrade answers in the negative and his evidence is the progressive development of capitalism in Stalinist Russia, China, Vietnam and other countries. The Bolsheviks thought they were making the world ere making the world revolution but were leading a bourgeois revolution instead.

For the comrade, the proof is the industrialisation of Russia and its transition from feudalism to capitalism after 1917, and the existence of 'progressive elements' in a period of increasing decline.

But for historical materialism every mode of production has distinct epochs of ascendancy and decline. Capitalism, being a world system unlike the feudal, ancient and Asiatic modes of production before it, has to be judged ripe for revolution on the basis of its international condition, not on the basis of this or that country, that taken by itself might give the illusions of a progressive development.

If one isolates certain periods or certain countries in the period of the decadence of capitalism since 1914 it is possible to be dazzled by the apparent growth of the system particularly when it occurs in some of the under-developed countries as the result of the coming to power of a state capitalist clique.

Capitalism's decline, again unlike previous societies, is characterised by over-production. While the decline of Rome or the decay of feudal Europe meant a stagnation and even a regression and decline in production, decadent capitalism continues to expand production (even at a slower average rate: about 50% less than in its ascendant period) while stifling and destroying the productive forces of society. So we don't see, like Trotsky, an absolute halt to the growth of capitalist production in its descendent phase.

Capitalism can only expand the productive forces if it is able to realise the surplus value contained in the ever increasing mass of commodities that it throws on the world market.

"…The more capitalist production develops, the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with immediate demand, but depends on a constant extension of the world market...Ricardo does not see that the commodity must necessarily be transformed into money. The demand from workers cannot suffice for this, since profit comes precisely from the fact that workers demand is less than the value of what they produce, and is all the greater when this demand is relatively smaller. The demand of capitalists for each others' goods is not enough either...To say that in the end the cap in the end the capitalists only have to exchange and consume commodities amongst themselves is to forget the nature of capitalist production and that the point is to transform capital into value." (Marx, Capital Book IV, Vol. LL and Book lll, Vol l)

While capitalism expands the productive forces tremendously - labour power, means of production and consumption - the latter only exist to be bought and sold because they have a dual nature as use values and exchange values. Capitalism must monetise the fruits of production . Thus the benefit of the development of the productive forces in capitalism remains, for the mass of the population largely a potential, a shining promise that always seems out of reach, because of their restricted purchasing power. This contradiction, which explains capitalism's tendency to overproduction that only leads to periodic crises in the ascendant period of capitalism, results in a series of catastrophes once capitalism can no longer compensate for it by the continuous conquest of pre-capitalist markets.

The opening up of the imperialist epoch and in particular the generalised imperialist war of 1914-18, showed that capitalism reaches its limits before it has completely eliminated all vestigeliminated all vestiges of previous societies in each country, long before it has been able to turn every producer into a wage labourer and introduce large scale production to every branch of industry. In Russia agriculture was still run on pre-capitalist lines and the majority of the population were peasants, and the political form of the regime had yet to take a bourgeois democratic form in place of feudal absolutism. Nevertheless the world market already dominated the Russian economy and in St Petersburg and Moscow and other major cities were concentrated huge numbers of proletarians in some of the biggest industrial plants in Europe.

The backwardness of the regime, and of the agrarian economy didn't prevent Russia from being completely integrated into the web of imperialist powers with its own predatory interests and objectives. And the coming to political power of the bourgeoisie in the provisional government after February 1917, didn't lead to any deviation from the imperialist policy.

Thus the Bolshevik objective of spring boarding from the Russian revolution to the world revolution was entirely realistic. Capitalism had reached the limits of national development. The relative backwardness of Russia was not dness of Russia was not the cause of the failure of this transition but the failure of the German Revolution.

Nor was the failure of the early Soviet regime to take socialist economic measures a specific product of Russian backwardness. The transition to the socialist mode of production can only begin in earnest when the capitalist world market has been destroyed by world revolution.

If we agree that socialism in one country is impossible and that nationalism is not a step towards socialism, there is nevertheless the illusion that after the victory of Stalinism, industrialisation represented a progressive capitalist step.

Isn't the comrade forgetting that this industrialisation served fundamentally the war economy and the imperialist preparations for World War 2 and that the elimination of the peasantry led to the gulags with their multi-millioned population? In a word that the fantastic growth rates of Russian industry were only achieved by cheating the law of value, by depriving temporarily the sanction of the world market and evolving an artificial pricing policy?

The development state capitalism, exemplified in an aberrant form in Russia, has however been the characteristic means in capitalist decadence for each bourgeoisie to face up to its present and future imperialist rivals. In the decadent epoch the average share of state expenditure in the national economy is around 50% compared with a little over 10% during capitalism's ascent.

In capitalist decadence, there is no catching up with the advanced countries by the less developed countries and so the gaining of political independence from the major powers by the supposed bourgeois revolutions claimed by the comrade remains largely a fiction. While by the end of the 19th century the growth of Gross National Product of the less developed countries was one sixth of the advanced capitalisms, in decadence this disparity has grown to one sixteenth. Consequently the integration of the population into wage labour faster than population growth itself, which is a characteristic of the genuine bourgeois revolutions of the past, just doesn't happen in the less developed world in decadence. On the contrary the mass of the population is more and more expelled from the production process altogether.

The capitalist world as a whole under world as a whole undergoes periodic fluctuations in growth in the 20th century that put the crises of the 19th century into the shade. The world wars of this epoch, instead of being the means to renew growth like the relative skirmishes of the 19th century, are so destructive that they lead to the economic ruin of both the victors and vanquished.

Our rejection then of the possibility of capitalism's progressive development throughout the 20th century has nothing to do with any squeamishness about the 'blood and muck' of bourgeois revolutions, but is derived from the objective economic exhaustion of the capitalism mode of production.

In Lenin's aphorism the period of 'horrors without end' is replaced after 1914 by 'the end, full of horrors'.

The cycles of crisis, war, reconstruction and new crisis of capitalism this century confirms that all the productive forces that this mode of production has room in it for have developed and it deserves to perish. It’s certainly true that at the end of the 20th century capitalism's decadence is far more advanced than at the beginning: in fact it has entered into a phase of decomposition. But the comrade giv But the comrade gives us no evidence for saying that capitalist decadence has begun at the end of the century and no arguments for placing such an immense qualitative change at the end rather than at the beginning of over two cycles of capitalism's permanent crisis.

Consequences

If one denies that the decline of capitalism applies to a whole period, beginning with the First World War and thus extends to the mode of production as a whole, then one is arguing for the revolutionary struggle of the working class on sentiment rather than on historical necessity.

Denying the objective necessity for world revolution between 1917-23 and making its defeat inevitable is indeed a bizarre position. But it has dangerous consequences, since it removes the imperious need to draw all the lessons of the defeat of the revolutionary wave at the political and theoretical level. While the comrade identifies with the Communist Left he doesn't draw on all its work of subjecting the revolutionary experience to a fundamental critique in particular concerning the national question. Even if the comrade denies today any possibility of national liberation it is only on a contingent not ay on a contingent not a historical basis. If one can still see progressive developments in counter-revolutionary imperialist movements like Maoist China, Stalinist Vietnam or Cuba then the danger of abandoning consistent internationalist positions remains.

Como

1) So, history, contrary to what the comrade says, has never shown one class carrying out the historic destiny of another, precisely because revolutions in the mode of production only occur when all the possibilities of the old one and its ruling class have been exhausted and when the revolutionary class bearing the germ of the new society has undergone a long period of gestation in the old society. See the ICC pamphlet 'Russia 1917, start of the world revolution' in particular the refutation of the theory of the double revolution. Life is difficult enough without having to make someone else's revolution. And in a time when it is no longer relevant.

2) See the ICC pamphlet 'The Decadence of Capitalism' and International Review 54.

Recent publications of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, and discussions between the ICC and the CWO at the latter’s public meetings, have confirmed that the way debate between proletarian organisations is carried out has btions is carried out has become a political issue in itself.

The IBRP have themselves raised this issue in Internationalist Communist no. 18, since they accuse the ICC of displaying a "penchant for slander by allusion" when we levelled the charge of empiricism against some of their analyses in our article ‘The marxist method and the ICC’s appeal over the war in ex-Yugoslavia’ in International Review n°99.

We will not answer this particular accusation, except to refer readers to the text in question, which in our opinion contains no slanders but makes an entirely political argument for this characterisation. We want to pose the question in a more general way, although this will necessitate giving some very specific examples of the problem we are raising.

The ICC has always taken the question of polemics and debate between revolutionary organisations very seriously indeed; this is the direct reflection of the importance we have always ascribed to the existence and development of the proletarian political milieu itself. This is why we have from our inception made polemical articles a regular featureticles a regular feature of our press, consistently attended the meetings of other groups, supported or initiated numerous attempts to reinforce the unity and solidarity of the revolutionary movement (conferences, joint meetings, etc). In our own internal life, we systematically read and discuss the publications of other proletarian currents and make regular reports on the proletarian milieu. In our published polemics with other groups we have always tried to make it clear where we agree with them as well as where we disagree; and when dealing with disagreements, to pose them as clearly and accurately as possible, referring in some detail to the published texts of other groups. This concern has also been based on the understanding that sectarianism, the constant stressing of differences above what unites the movement, has been a real problem for the milieu since the end of the period of counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s. The clearest example of this danger is provided by Bordigism, which in its attempt to erect an impenetrable barrier against the encroaching counter-revolution, came to the conclusion - for the first time in the history of the workers’ movement – that communist politics could only be embodied in one monolithic current.

In the past few years, recognising that ars, recognising that the need to defend the essential unity of the proletarian camp against the attacks of the ruling class has grown more acute than ever, we have made an even more concerted effort to root out any vestiges of sectarianism in our own polemics. We have made sure that our polemics are carefully planned and centralised on an international scale; that they avoid exaggerations, any spirit of petty rivalry, any ‘tit-for-tat’ answers on secondary points. We have also rectified certain erroneous formulations that have caused misunderstandings between ourselves and other groups (see for example the article on "100 issues of the International Review"in IR 100). Our readers can only judge for themselves whether this effort has borne fruit. But they can refer to all of our recent polemics with the IBRP in the IR, for example, on the 6th congress of Battaglia Comunista in IR 90, on the origins of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in IR n°s 91 and 92, or most recently, our critique of the IBRP’s "Theses On The Tasks Of Communists In The Capitalist Periphery", in IR 100. We offer such articles as examples of how we think a serious debate ought to be conducted: one which does not shy away from very sharp criticism of what we consider errors and even influencers and even influences of bourgeois ideology, but which is always based on the actual theory and practise of other proletarian groups.

We must speak frankly and say that the polemics of the IBRP in the recent period do not measure up to these standards. We will give the most serious example first. It is contained in the IBRP’s official statement "Revolutionaries faced with the prospect of war and the current situation of the working class" in Internationalist Communist n°18, a balance sheet of the meaning and historic significance of the recent war in the Balkans. Without entering into a more detailed discussion about the many important general questions raised in this text, we want to focus on the IBRP’s conclusions about the response of the rest of the proletarian milieu to the war: "Other political elements in this arena, although not falling into the tragic mistake of supporting one of the warring parties, have, in the name of a fake anti-imperialism or because of historically and economically impossible progressive visions, equally distanced themselves from the methods and perspectives of work which lead to regroupment in the future revolutionary party. They are beyond saving and are victims of their own idealist or mechanistic frameworks, incapable of recognising the peculiarities of the explosion of the perennial economic contradictions of modern capitalism".

Two fundamental points are raised here. First, if indeed the organised groups of the proletarian milieu are "beyond saving", this has very serious implications for the future of this milieu. Apart from anything else, it implies that the future world party – unlike any class party formed in the past – will be formed around a single current in the marxist movement. At the same time, it would have the gravest consequences for the militant energies that are presently trapped in the organisations that are themselves "beyond saving", and it would be the responsibility of the IBRP to set about recuperating what it could from the wreckage - a task that the IBRP does not even consider in this text. But to return to the problem of the method of debate: despite the gravity of its assertions, not once does the IBRP make it explicit whom it is referring to. We are left to guess, on the basis of previous IBRP polemics, that the "idealists" are the ICC, the "mechanists" the Bordigists…but we cannot be sure. This is political irresponsibility of the worst sort, completely outside the best traditions of the workers’ movement. It was never the style, for example, of Lenin, who always made it absolutely clear whom he was directing his polemical fire against, or of the Italian left in the 1930s, who were extremely precise in their assessment of the potential or otherwise of the different currents who made up the proletarian milieu of their day. If the IBRP thinks that the ICC and the Bordigist groups are beyond saving, let them argue it openly, and on the basis of the real positions, analyses and intervention of these groups. We emphasise the latter point because while mentioning names is vital, it is not enough. To recognise this we only have to look at the other polemic in this issue of Internationalist Communist, "Idealism or marxism: once more on the fatal flaws of the ICC", written by an IBRP sympathiser who left the ICC in very unclear circumstances a few years ago. This text, which is offered up as an interim answer to our article on the IBRP in IR 99, is a "model" of bad polemic, making any number of assertions about the ICC’s political methodology without once troubling to quote any texts of the ICC.

The second example is provided by the "Correspondence with the ICC" in the publication of the Communist Worn of the Communist Workers’ Organisation, Revolutionary Perspectives (n°16). This correspondence deals mainly with our respective organisations’ analysis of the recent electricians’ strike in Britain. The circumstances of this letter are as follows: we wrote to the CWO in November to provide them with a copy of a pamphlet by J MacIver entitled "Escaping a paranoid cult", which was produced in conjunction with the expulsion of the ICC from the "No War but the Class War" discussion meetings in London (see World Revolution n°229). For us this document was an example of a classic parasitic attack, not only on the ICC but also the IBRP and other proletarian groups. The CWO chose not to publish this part of the letter, or their response to it. At the end of our letter we also asked the question which was published in Revolutionary Perspectives, concerning the class nature of the electricians’ strike committee. Since to our knowledge this was based entirely on the shop steward organisations, we took the position that it was a radical trade union organ rather than a real expression of the electricians’ struggle. However, the CWO in their article in RP n°15 seemed to see something much more positive in this body. Since we respect their opinions, we wanted to know from them whether they hadthem whether they had any information that could throw a different light on the question, since it can sometimes be very hard to tell the difference between a real organ of workers’ struggle and a very radical expression of the unions. The CWO’s reply, while not actually supplying us with any of the concrete information we hoped for, did raise many political issues, not least about the nature of the trade unions and rank-and-fileism. But this is not the place to enter that discussion. Again, we wish to draw attention to the method of the CWO’s polemic, above all when it comes to describing the actual positions of the ICC. We are told:

"You still have a perspective that the working class is really, ‘subterraneanly’ conscious of the need to smash capitalism. The only ‘mystification’ which holds the struggle back is that put about by the trades unions. If only the working class was ‘demystified’ of its trades unionism then they would take the revolutionary path. This is one of the examples of your semi-religious idealism. The marxist method knows that the working class will become revolutionary through its practical experience and the revolutionary programme which we defend will most closely match the needs of a class that grows in consciousness. It will not be a question of 1. ‘demystifying’ the workers, 2. then go into struggle. The demystification, the struggle and the reacquisition of its own programme will all occur simultaneously as a part of the movement against capitalism".

We agree that it would be idealist to argue that the workers will first be ‘demystified’ of trade unionism and then enter into struggle. But we defy them to point to any text by the ICC which defends this conception. Rather than making accusations of this type, or arguing as they do in the same letter that we "do not say anything positive about the actual workers’ struggle", we would ask them to actually relate to the many texts we have published on the present period of the class struggle, texts which attempt to place the current difficulties of the class – but also its forward steps – in their general context since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Those texts would also have made it clear how important we think it is for the workers to go through the daily, practical confrontation with the unions in order to lay the ground for a an eventual break with them. The CWO may have many disagreements with our analyses, but at least the debate would be clear for the rest of the proletarian movement.

The passage we have quoted contains another problem: the tendency to attack as some kind of ICC shibboleth positions which are not at all our invention but which, at the very least, represent our attempt to develop the authentic traditions of the marxist movement. This is the case with the notion of subterranean maturation, which the CWO use almost as a term of ridicule, but which has a long pedigree going back via Trotsky to Marx – who coined the immortal phrase "well grubbed old mole" in describing the class struggle. In fact we argued this point in a polemic with the CWO in IR 43, back in the mid-80s, an article which has never elicited a reply. But if the CWO don’t like our interpretations of such concepts, let them go to the sources in the marxist classics (such as Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution) and argue against them directly.

The most recent public debate between the ICC and the CWO – at a CWO meeting in London – again showed this tendency on the latter’s part. The theme of the meeting was communism and how to get there, and in many ways the discussion that followed was a very positive one. The ICC saluted the presentation, which defended the marxist vision of communism and the class struggle against all the current campaigns of the ruling class about the "death of communism"; we had no hesitation in saying that we agreed with virtually all of it. Quite naturally as well, there was a discussion about the differences between the ICC and the CWO on the question of the state in the period of transition, and this was also positive in that it there seemed to be a real will on the part of the majority of CWO comrades there to understand what the ICC was saying about this. We argued, in response to the CWO, that while Lenin’s State and Revolution is a fundamental point of departure for posing the question of the state in the marxist framework, the views he defended in 1917 have to be deepened and to some degree revised in the light of the actual experience of proletarian power in Russia. Basing ourselves on the debates that took place within the Bolshevik party in this period, and in particular on the conclusions drawn by the Italian Left in the 1930s, the ICC considers that the proletarian dictatorship cannot simply be identified with the inevitable transitional state. Again, without going into all the ins and outs of this problem, we want to take issue with a statement made by one CWO comrade, which for us is another very clear example of how revolutionaries should not conduct a debate. According to this comrade, this position was no more than an invention of one member of the Left Fraction, Mitchell: "he just made it up". This assertion is factually incorrect – Mitchell’s own series of articles published in Bilan ("Problems of the period of transition") took as their starting point a previous series of studies of the state also published in Bilan ("The problem of the state"), and many other fundamental articles by the Italian and Belgian Fractions as collective bodies, as well as by other individual comrades, take the same position. But above all this kind of assertion shows a real contempt for the work of the Fraction, which after all is the common political ancestor of the ICC and the IBRP. At the meeting we already appealed to the CWO to read the article "The proletariat and the transitional state" in IR 100, which provides clear evidence that Bilan’s position on the state was based on the actual debates in the Bolshevik party, in particular the 1921 trade union debate (not to mention the tragedy of Kronstadt). We further call on the CWO to make a serious and collective effort to study the work of Bilan on this question, and are ready to supply them with the relevant texts (we intend in any case to republish the Mitchell series in the not too distant future).The comrades of the CWO are fully at liberty to reject the Fraction’s arguments, but let it be on the basis of a considered study and reflection.

In sum, we think that the issues facing the revolutionary movement today – whether the analysis of contemporary events, such as wars and class movements, or more historical experiences such as the Russian revolution, are too important to be diverted into false debates or to be cheapened by unsubstantiated assertions and accusations. We call on the IBRP to raise the level of their polemics as part of an effort towards improving the tone and the content of debate throughout the whole milieu. The presentation at the London CWO meeting said quite rightly that marxism is the advanced point in humanity’s attempt to demystify the world. In some ways therefore the milieu of marxist organisations can be compared to an international scientific community which is struggling to advance its understanding of fundamental questions such as the origins of the cosmos. Debate about such questions by genuine scientists demands a high level of rigour and accuracy, and if the marxists are to advance their understanding of the universe of the class struggle, they cannot afford to fall below this level themselves.

Amos

During the 1970s, we were asked to believe that the economic crisis was due to a shortage of oil; then in the early 80s we were promised that "Reaganomics" would get us out of the crisis. But never since capitalism was once again confronted with its open crisis 30 years ago have we witnessed such a massive ideological campaign aimed at convincing us that the crisis is over, and that a new era of prosperity is opening up. The propaganda of the last few years would even have us believe in a 3rd Industrial Revolution. According to one particularly puffed protagonist of this campaign, "This is a historic event at least as vital as the industrial revolution of the 18th century (...) The industrial era was founded on the introduction and the use of new sources of energy; the "informational" era is based on the technology of knowledge production, information treatment, and the communication of symbols". On the basis of US growth figures in recent years, the media tell us endlessly that unemployment is about to disappear, that what they call the "economic cycle", characterised since the beginning of the 70s by low growth and periodic, ever-deeper, recessions, has given way to a period of uninterrupted growth, for which only the most superlative adjectives are adequate, and all that because we have entered a "new economy" born by a major technical innovation: the Internet.

What then is the content of this "revolution" that so enchants the ruling class? It is based essentially on the fact that the Internet, and the development of telecommunications networks generally, allows information to be stocked, and delivered instantly whatever the distance. Supposedly, this will bring buyers and sellers together on a planetary scale, whether they be individual consumers or companies. Since companies can thus do away with commercial services in order to buy and sell, commercial costs will diminish considerably. Markets will thus get bigger, since thanks to the Internet every producer will have instantaneous access to a planetary market. The appearance on the Internet of commodities requiring significant technical knowledge of a new kind will encourage the creation of new companies: the famous "start-ups" have a bright future before them in terms of growth and profits. This will encourage greater productivity within industry, since the circulation of information will allow better and cheaper co-ordination of services and factories. It will also be possible to reduce stocks, since production and sale will be instantaneously related, whence savings in the cost of buildings and storage. The costs of marketing will be reduced, since advertisements published on the Internet can potentially reach everyone connected to it. Another point, whose political consequences are particularly important, is the media's insistence on the new impetus given to innovation, since the Internet is based on knowledge alone and not on costly machinery; this is supposedly going to democratise innovation, and since innovation makes it possible to create start-ups, everyone will be able to get rich.

Yet despite these cries of triumph in the media, there are nonetheless a series of discordant notes which suggest thaat there may be some doubt as to the imminence of this wonderful new period: for one thing, everybody agrees that poverty is growing throughout the world, that "inequality" is getting worse in the developed countries, and that far from rising to their fabulous destiny in the new economy more and more start-ups are turning into shut-downs. A number of these new entrepreneurs, up to their necks in debt, are likely to join their employees in the army of the "new poor". Moreover, the extravagant rise in share prices, especially those associated with the new technologies, is a cause for alarm among many economic leaders who fear that such a rise runs the risk of causing a financial crisis which the world economy will be unable to absorb.

If we are to examine the significance of the "new economy" seriously, we need to take account of the fact that many experts believe that the growth in the labour productivity of the US economy, after falling from its level of 2.9% annually at the end of the 1960s, has risen again for several years, to reach 3.9% during the 1990s. This is supposed to mean that capitalism has entered a new period.

First of all, these figures are debatable: for example, R. Gordon of North-western University in the US (writing in the Financial Times of 4th August 1999) estimates that growth in hourly labour productivity has risen from 1.1% prior to 1995, to 2.2% between 1995 and 1999. Moreover, for many statisticians these figures are not very strong arguments, for several reasons:

 

• the direct profitability of all productive investment has only slightly increased, which means that the progression of labour productivity has only been achieved thanks to an increase in the intensity of work (line speeds), and hence in the exploitation of the working class;

 

 

• productivity always tends to increase at the high point of a recovery (as was the case in the USA between 1998-99), because production capacity is used more intensively;

 

 

• finally, the real increases in productivity have been achieved above all in the manufacture of computers, leading the Financial Times to comment that "The computer is the origin of the miracle of productivity in the production of computers" (ibid.).

 

Spurred on by competition, capitalism achieves technical progress, which does indeed increase labour productivity. But capitalism has always done this, and the figures certainly do not show us to be in an exceptional period that constitutes a real divide with the decades that went before.

Most importantly, however, the comparisons between the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century and what is happening today are completely false. Steam power, and all the great inventions of the 19th century, made it possible for the worker to produce a far greater quantity of use values with the same amount of labour time; this allowed the bourgeoisie to extract a higher surplus value - which of course was the object of the exercise. Labour productivity has certainly risen during the 20th century, especially during the last 30 years, thanks to the automation of production. This has given the bourgeoisie and its specialists an argument to claim that the white-coated computer operator glued to his screen on the factory floor is not a worker (presumably the robots work by themselves!), and that the working class is consequently a disappearing species.

This is not what is happening with the Internet. The worker still produces the same quantity of goods in a given time. The Internet changes absolutely nothing from the point of view of production. With all its noise about the "new economy", the bourgeoisie is trying to make us believe that capitalism is a world of traders, and to make us forget that before a commodity can be sold, it first has to be produced; they are thus trying to blind us to the fact that the working class is the real heart of society today, the class which for the most part keeps the rest of society alive.

Even if the Internet, or any other invention, were to reduce the cost of marketing in a manner analogous to the railways in the 19th century which divided the cost of transport by 20, thus reducing the price of goods, it would still not create new economic growth. The railways made powerful economic growth possible, because they transported goods for which there existed an expanding market: capitalism was in the process of conquering the entire planet, and using it as a source of new markets. Today, no such new markets exist. Selling on the Internet will simply lead to the disappearance of a whole series of commercial activities. The result? Jobs will disappear, and will not be replaced by new Internet jobs, precisely because the Internet makes it possible to reduce the cost of selling to the consumer or to other companies. The same is true of the progress that the Internet is supposed to bring to company reorganisation. None other than John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, one of the biggest companies in the new technology sector, tells us so: "We have got rid of thousands of unproductive jobs by using the Internet for relations with our employees, our suppliers, and our clients (...) the same is true for expense claims. As a result, there are now only two people checking the expense claims of our 26,6,000 employees (...) We have been able to cut 3,000 jobs from after-sales service" (quoted in Le Monde, 28/03/2000). And to make the message absolutely clear, he adds: "In ten years, any company that has not moved completely onto the network [ie has not eliminated all these jobs] will be dead". This implies a reduction in the wages distributed by these companies, which of course does nothing in itself to increase global solvent demand, which would be necessary for an economic recovery. In the absence of new external outlets, which is the case overall in decadent capitalism, innovation - whether at the commercial level or not - cannot resolve the crisis, just as it cannot create new jobs. True, Chambers tells us that he has "redeployed these 3,000 people to research and development", but this is only possible due to the sharp rise in Cisco's sales thanks to the wave of Internet and network installations; as soon as these installations near completion, Cisco will obviously no longer be able to pay for such substantial R&D.

There is thus nothing really new in today's economic evolution, and however desperately the bourgeoisie seeks for signs of a new and rising "Kondratieff cycle", they won't find salvation there. We can see a proof in what can only be called a crash in technology shares during spring 2000. Between 10th March and 14th April 2000, the NASDAQ (the US high-tech stock exchange) lost 34% of its value; Internet companies like boo.com (financed by powerful financial groups such as J.P. Morgan Bank and the French businessman B. Arnault) went bust. This bankruptcy will be followed by others; the markets are already circulating lists of Internet companies in difficulty, one of the best-known being Amazon, the online bazaar as famous in its home town of Seattle as Boeing, and whose growing financial difficulties are causing new jitters on Wall Street. According to the Gartner Group, between 95% and 98% of companies in the sector are under threat (Le Monde, 13th June 2000), which is merely a confirmation of the fact that their apparently extraordinary take-off is nothing but a speculative bubble full of hot air.

And if the "new economy" does not exist, neither is the Internet the means to re-launch the economy as a whole, known today as the "old economy". One of the reasons that Amazon.com is on the verge of bankruptcy is that its entry into competition with the distribution majors has led the latter to react: Wal-Mart, the world's number one distributor, is also selling now on the Internet. Faced with the competition of these new companies threatening to "cannibalise" their markets, the "old" companies hhave not been long to react, as a manager in one of France's big distribution companies explains: "At Promodes, we came to the conclusion that if we didn't do so, somebody else would cannibalise our activity" (Le Monde, 25th April 2000). As this manager recognises implicitly, when he speaks of "cannibalising", the companies which decide to sell on the Internet (as we have already seen in the case of Cisco) do not create jobs but eliminate them. In the same issue of Le Monde, we read that the Internet is at least partially responsible for the loss of 3,000 jobs in the UK bank Lloyd's TSB, 1,500 jobs at Prudential Insurance, and that the American distributor of computer software, Egghead, has closed 77 shops out of 156.

These are the real effects of the so-called "new economy". The real measures that companies are adopting as regards the Internet are nothing but a moment in the deadly competition among capitalists, for a market which was saturated long ago. This trade war can also be seen in the wave of mergers and buy-outs, which has been going on for a decade and which is now on the increase. Today, the best way to dominate in the world market is to buy out the competition's market and productive apparatus: "During 1999, this market exploded by 123%, to reach 1,870 billion francs (...) a planetary race to increase in size has begun" (Le Monde, 11th April 2000). Within the framework of decadent capitalism, during these bouts of competitive fever every sector of the bourgeoisie always has at least one method of confronting the competition: attacking the living conditions of the working class. For example, it is well known that these monster mergers almost invariably lead to job losses.

The huge increase in "new technology" share prices, which boosted share prices in general throughout the developed world's stock markets, far from heralding a new period of economic growth is merely the fruit of the bourgeois state's attempts to confront an ever-deepening crisis by using debt: according to the managing director of Altavista France, you needed merely "to get together 200,000 francs with a few friends to attract 4 million francs from a venture capitalist; then you spend half of that on advertising in order to launch on the stock exchange and raise another 20 million" (L'Expansion, 27th April 2000); from the point of view of accumulation, this is simply absurd. Since there is no really productive outlet for investment, money can only be placed in unproductive activities such as advertising, which are connected to competition, and end up turning to speculation - whether on the stock exchange, the financial markets, or in oil futures. This is the only explanation for thhe way in which new technology share prices - before they collapsed - increased by 100% during the year, when most of the issuing companies had only ever lost money. There is nothing new in this either, since the bourgeoisie has been developing non-productive activity ever since it first understood that the 1929 crisis would not end in a spontaneous recovery as had been the case with the crises of the 19th century. Some bourgeois journals have been forced to recognise this: "The Net economy may correct the long-term tendency to [a decline in] productivity (...), but the mainspring of economic activity is the debt economy (...) The ascendant phase was prolonged by credit far more than by the rise in new technologies, which are merely an alibi for speculation" (L'Expansion, 13th April 2000). And this speculation can only, as we have seen for 20 years, lead to new financial convulsions like the one we are witnessing today.

The media propaganda around the Internet's transformation of society would see us all networking, taking part in the process of innovation, and contributing to the progress of our companies by becoming shareholders. The reality of the "new economy" shows us that this is all an immense bluff. There is every chance that the founding share-holderers of bankrupt start-ups will find themselves reduced to poverty, while all those who were conned by advertising into speculating in shares on the Internet - supposed to increase their income at the cost of a mere 20% down-payment on the price of their shares - have been forced, since the crash, to reduce their income for years to come in order to repay the bank loans they contracted to buy the shares in the first place. Paying wage-earners with stock options, or forcing them to buy shares in the company, does not transform workers into shareholders; on the contrary, it represents a two-fold reduction in wages. Firstly, the part of their income that the wage-earners accept to leave in the hands of the employer is nothing less than an increase in surplus-value and a wage reduction in the short term. Secondly, however enticing the offers made to get wage-earners to accept the idea of owning shares in "their" company, this in fact makes their income dependent on the company's future success: if share prices fall, the wage-earner's income falls also. Today's fashion for "people's capitalism" is a myth: it is the bourgeoisie, whether through the state apparatus or company management, which owns the means of production which function as capital, and it can only valorise the capital by exploiting the working class. The worker cannot gain all or part of this valorisation, precisely because for capital to be valorised, and to make a profit, the worker can only be paid the value of his labour power. If the bourgeoisie has created pension funds, or worker share-holding, it is because today's capitalist crisis is so deep that all methods are good to reduce the value of labour power today and tomorrow, by making it dependent on share prices. The collapse in technology shares today gives an idea of what will happen in the future to the workers' incomes which, in one way or another, are dependent on share prices.

In the final analysis the bourgeoisie's efforts to promote worker share-holding is nothing but another attack on their living and working conditions. The casualisation of employment allows capital, whenever necessary, to eject the worker from production overnight. Worker share-holding allows it to reduce the income of active or retired workers whenever the situation of the company, or of capital in general, deteriorates.

There is another economic attack hidden behind the deafening campaign over the "new economy". Connecting the company to the Internet means that information becomes instantly available, and that there is no longer any pause between two tasks: once one task is finished, the next is immediately presented via the network, any task can be instantaneously modified, etc.; tasks are assigned more and more rapidly, the rhythm becomes infernal to the point that we can easily understand that "at least one third of employees connected to the Internet work at least 6.5 hours a week at home - to get some peace and quiet�" (Le Monde, 13th April 2000). The apparently generous gift of a computer that some large companies are offering their employees (Ford 300,000, Vivendi 250,000, Intel 70,000) is particularly revelatory of this desire to have the workforce permanently at work. Repeated denials of any such desire are disingenuous to say the least, when Ford management declares that the aim is to make its employees "better able to respond to customers", and to give them "the habit of a greater exchange of information". More and more experts in workplace organisation consider that in the "information society" it is increasingly difficult to tell where work begins or ends, and that the notion of working time itself is becoming vague; this is confirmed by employees themselves, who say that since they can be contacted at home, "they never stop working" (Liberation, 26th May 2000). In fact the bourgeoisie's ideal is that all workers should become like the founders of a Silicon Valley start-up, who "work 13-14 hours per day, 6 days a week, in a workspace 2 metres square (...) who never take a break or even lunch, and never stop to chat in the cafeteria" (L'Expansion, 16th March 2000). And these working conditions are the general rule in every start-up in the world.

The monstrous media campaign has yet another aim, still more important. The reality behind the "new economy", where everyone networks, is transformed into an "innovator" or a shareholder, shows that this is all a great bluff, but it is a bluff with a purpose.

First of all, it claims that society, at least in the developed countries, is undergoing a real improvement, and that if working conditions come under attack in this or that company or state administration then this is an exception, a special case. It claims that if the workers try to resist, then their struggle can only be an anachronistic rearguard action, and that as a result they are bound to be isolated. The propaganda about the "new economy" is first and foremost a means to demoralise the workers, to avoid their discontent being transformed into combativity.

Moreover, it claims that society is changing to such a point that capitalism itself is being transformed, so that any project of overthrowing capitalism has become meaningless. We are told that whoever takes part in the "new economy" will become rich: he will go beyond his condition as a member of the working class. But whoever does not enter this network-innovator-shareholder trilogy will become the victim of a "greater inequality of income", a new "fracture" in society, which is no longer divided into bourgeoisie and working class, but into the members of the "new economy" and those excluded from it. To drive the point home, we are told that participation in the "new economy" is a matter of intelligence and determination. According to the review Business 2000, "You are either rich or a cretin".

All this is completed by propaganda proclaiming the transformation of the company, where value is created, where labour power is exploited, and where classes are defined. Just as someone who has access to wealth thanks to his participation in the "new economy" cannot be described as a worker, so the enterprise - where wealth is produced - is no longer divided into the bourgeois (who possess capital) and the workers (who possess nothing but their labour power): "the 'new economy' means more teamwork: the employees are a real 'team', they are associated with the wealth of the company by stock options", according to the director of BVRP Software (Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2000).

In fact, the underpaid, casual, or unemployed workforce, who are not part of the "new economy", represent the vast majority of the working class. The wealth-producing class is not represented by the student in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, who is conned by the mirage of riches just within his grasp. The wealth-producing class, the working class, is exploited more and more by the bourgeoisie, and when it can no longer be exploited it is ejected from production by unemployment. Confronted with these attacks, the working class has no choice but to fight back. And for this, the workers' consciousness of the struggle's necessity and perspectives is essential.

In the final analysis, the themes and objectives of the propaganda around the "new economy" are the same as that around the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989.

On the one hand, there is the attempt to strip workers of their class identity, by presenting society as a community of "citizens", where social classes, and the division and conflict between exploiters and exploited have disappeared. Yesterday this claim was supposedly proven by the bankruptcy of the "socialist", "workers'" regimes, today by the myth that workers and bosses have the same interests because they are all shareholders in the same company.

On the other hand, the aim is to deprive the working class of any perspective outside capitalism. Yesterday this was supposedly demonstrated by the "bankruptcy of socialism". Today,ay, by the idea that even if capitalism has its faults, even if it is incapable of eliminating poverty, or wars, or disasters of every kind, it is nonetheless capable of functioning, of guaranteeing progress and of overcoming its crises.

But the very fact that the bourgeoisie needs to use such extensive ideological campaigns, the fact that it is preparing new economic attacks, means that it scarcely believes itself in the fairytale land of the "new economy". The sophisticated economic policy deployed by Alan Greenspan, head of the US Federal Reserve, to ensure a "soft landing" for the US economy, after years of debt and trade deficits and just as inflation is on the rise, is scarcely an indication of a new period of unimaginable economic growth. "Soft landing", or a more serious recession: these real facts confirm what marxism has already shown: that capitalism's reconstruction after World War II has been followed by a decline into a new economic crisis, which capitalism is absolutely incapable of overcoming, and that this crisis is plunging an ever-growing part of humanity into absolute pauperisation, and making life ever more difficult for the whole of the working class. Capitalism's future offers us nothing more than a continuing degradation. Only the proletariat can create a society ruled by abundance, because it alone can be the basis for a society which produces for the satisfaction of human need and not for the profits of a minority. This society is called communism.

JS, June 2000

Resolution on the international situation

The international situation in the year 2000 confirms the tendency, already analysed by the ICC at the beginning of the last decade, for a gap to open up between a growing open crisis of the decadent capitalist economy, and an abrupt acceleration of imperialist antagonisms on the one hand and a retreat in class struggle and class consciousness on the other.

Marxism has never claimed or expected th claimed or expected that there would be a mathematical connection between these phenomena that characterise the "epoch of wars and revolutions" (to use the Communist International's phrase); that X amount of crisis would always be equal to Y amount of class struggle. Its task instead is to understand the perspective of proletarian revolution by assessing the inherent tendencies of each of these three factors and their reciprocal action, where the economic factor is the determinant one in the last analysis.

The open crisis that began at the end of the 1960s brought to an end the post-Second World War reconstruction period. The class struggle re-emerged after 40 years of counter-revolution as a consequence of this crisis, with a perspective of decisive class confrontations with the bourgeoisie that would lead either to the communist revolution of the proletariat, or, as the Communist Manifesto put it, the "ruin of the contending classes" (through imperialist war or other catastrophes).

Marxism is not dismayed that this historical tendency towards class confrontations is not verified by the appearance of the relative passivity of the proletariat at the present time. It goes beneath the surface to fully understand social reality.

1) Capitalism's historic crisis is progressively exhausting the palliatives intended to overcome it. The Keynesian expansionist solution to the problems of the world economy ran out of steam at the end of the 70s. Neo-liberal austerity was mainly a creature of the 80s, although the ideology of globalisation after the collapse of the USSR extended its life span into the 90s. The latter half of this decade and the current period are characterised mostly however by the collapse of these economic models and their replacement by a pragmatic response to the inexorable deepening of the crisis that swings between overt state intervention and allowing the "sanction of the market".

State capitalism, the characteristic form of decadent capitalism has no intention of giving up its ability to phase in the economic crisis, but it cannot overcome it due to the insufficiency of solvent markets which results in a permanent crisis of overproduction.

2) New markets have failed to materialise. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the break-up of Stalinism, the world victory of western capitalism in 1989 has failed to open up unheard-of possibilities for selling its products, as promised by the architects of the new world order.

The eastern European countries have failed to provide the expected opportunities for capitalist expansion. Instead there has been a collapse of production in Russia and most of its ex-satellites. The poverty of its population, the absencsence of any business legality has seen a flow of wealth in the reverse direction to western banks, and a de-investment in Russian industry.

All the wars of the decade, from the Gulf to Kosovo, despite their massive destruction, have failed to create the expected opportunities for reconstruction. Instead the slaughter of populations, the destruction and dislocation of the economy, further contracts the market.

3) The various locomotives of the world economy have been derailed. The reunification of Germany has finally ended the economic "miracle": mass unemployment, sluggish growth and massive debts testify to it. East Germany turned out to be a heavy burden, not a new field for capital accumulation.

Japan, the world economy's most important supplier of liquidity and the second largest economy in the world, has failed to emerge from stagnation throughout the decade, not least because of the contraction and then collapse of the South East Asian economies in 1997.

After the crash of these economic "tigers" and "dragons" in the east, weakening the emerging Chinese "economic powerhouse", other growth engines in the third world, like Mexico and Brazil, broken down.

Only the United States has apparently reversed this trend, with the longest period of economic expansion in its history. But instead of re-ignie-igniting the embers of the world economy the expansion of the American economy has only prevented them from being extinguished entirely and at an enormous cost. There has been a new explosion of the US trade deficit and new levels of indebtedness.

4) The gadgets of technological innovation do not overcome capitalism's inherent contradictions. In decadent capitalism the main driving force behind technological change, the growth of the productive forces, has been the needs of the military sector, the means of destruction.

Both the computer "revolution" and now the Internet "revolution" are attempts to graft these spin-offs of war (the Pentagon has always been the world's leading user of computers and the Internet was originally created for military purposes) onto the capitalist economy as a whole to give it a new lease of life.

The Internet gold rush is still in full swing, as indicated by the fantastic worth assigned to "technology stocks" by the Dow Jones to companies which have sometimes made no profits but are valued entirely on the basis of hypothetical future wealth. Indeed most of the growth in stock market speculation today is driven by e-commerce. Enormous investments and record mergers are being carried through in the hope of finding a new Eldorado.

Developments in technology certainly can speed up production, cut cut distribution costs, and provide new sources of advertising revenue, better exploiting existing markets. But unless the consequent expansion of production can find new solvent markets the development of the productive forces that new technology promises will remain fictional. Its benefits can only be partially utilised by capitalism, to centralise and rationalise certain sectors of the economy - usually those in the service sector.

It has to be emphasised that the "new economy" frenzy which has seized hold of investors is itself an expression of capitalism's economic impasse. Marx already showed this in his day: stock exchange speculation does not reveal the sound health of the economy but the fact that it is sliding towards bankruptcy.

5) The impasse of the capitalist economy is much sharper than in the 1930s but it is disguised and drawn out by a number of factors. In the 30s the crisis hit the two strongest capitalist nations, the United States and Germany, the first and worst, and led to a collapse of world trade and a depression. Since 1968 however the bourgeoisie has profited from the lessons of this experience in facing up to the re-emergence of the crisis, drawing lessons that have not been forgotten in the 90s. The world bourgeoisie under the domination of the US has not resorted to protectionism on the scale of the 30s.

By using measureures of international capitalist co-ordination — the IMF, World Bank, WTO, new currency blocs — it has been possible to avoid this outcome and instead push the crisis onto the weakest and most peripheral areas of the world economy.

6) In understanding the point which the decay of capitalism has reached we must distinguish between its conjunctural manifestation in the cycles of crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis - and the "business cycles" that still punctuate the life of the capitalist economy.

It is these recessions and recoveries (four since 1968) that enable the bourgeoisie to pretend that the economy is still healthy by pointing to continued or renewed growth. The bourgeoisie can conceal this growth's diseased dependence on massive "super-debt", and the parasitic expansion of various waste industries (arms, advertising, etc). It can thus hide the weaker nature of each recovery and the increasing strength of each recession under a mass of misleading statistics about real growth, unemployment, etc

For revolutionaries the proof of capitalism's bankruptcy therefore does not lie only in the increasingly severe but temporary official falls in production during recessions, or in stock market "corrections", but in the worsening manifestations of an insoluble and permanent crisis of overproduction taken as an historic whole. It is the open crisis sis of capitalist decadence that propels the proletariat onto the road that leads to the seizure of power on the one hand, or if it fails, makes the present slide into militarist barbarism irreversible.

7) It is only in the moral imperatives of vulgar materialism that the class struggle should inevitably answer the deepening of the economic crisis with a corresponding force.

For marxism, it is certainly the economic crisis that reveals to the proletariat the nature of its historic tasks in their entirety. However the tempo of the class struggle, as well as having its own "laws of motion", is also profoundly effected by developments in the "superstructural" regions of society: at the social, political and cultural levels.

The non-identity between the rhythm of the economic crisis and that of the class struggle was already apparent in the period between 1968-89. The successive waves of struggle for example did not correspond directly to the hills and troughs of the economic crisis. The ability of state capitalism to slow down the acceleration of the crisis has often interrupted the rhythm of the class struggle.

But, more importantly, unlike the period 1917-23, the class struggle has not developed overtly at the political level. The fundamental break that the proletariat made with the counter-revolution after May 68 in France wnce was expressed essentially in a determined defence by the working class at the economic level, where it began to re-learn many lessons about the anti-working class role of the trade unions. But the weight of the parties that had, at different stages, gone over to the counter-revolution during the past century - of the social democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist varieties - and the minuscule influence of the left communist tradition on the other - prevented the "politicisation" of the struggles.

The stalemate in the class struggle that has resulted - a bourgeoisie unable to unleash another world war (because of the continued resistance of the working class to the demands of capitalism in crisis), a working class unable to finish off the bourgeoisie, has led to the period of the decomposition of world capitalism.

8) For certain narrow conceptions of marxism, the evolution of the superstructure of society can only be an effect not a cause. But the decomposition of capitalist society at the social, political and military levels has significantly retarded the evolution of the class struggle. While mechanical materialism looks for the cause of class peace in a supposed reorganisation of capitalism, marxism shows how the absence of perspective that characterises today's period delays and obscures the development of class consciousness.

The campaigns abs about the death of communism and the victory of capitalist democracy that have flowered on the ruins of USSR have disoriented the world proletariat. The working class has felt its impotence in the face of a succession of bloody imperialist conflicts whose real motives have been obscured behind humanitarian or democratic propaganda and a facade of unity among the major powers.

The gradual decay of the social infrastructure in education, housing, transport, health, environment, and food has created a climate of despair that affects proletarian consciousness.

Likewise the corruption of the political and business apparatus and the decline of artistic culture strengthens cynicism everywhere.

The development of mass unemployment particularly amongst youth, leading to lumpenisation and the normalisation of drug culture, begins to corrode the solidarity of the proletariat.

9) In place of the language of truth of the right wing governments of the 80s, the bourgeoisie now speaks with a neo-reformist and populist dialect in order to smother the class identity of the proletariat. Bringing the left of the bourgeoisie into government has proved to be the ideal means of making the most of the proletariat's disarray. No longer speaking the language of struggle as it did in opposition in the eighties, the left parties in government are ware well equipped to give a softer edge to the attacks on working class living standards. They are better able to obscure militarist barbarism with a humanitarian rhetoric. And they are more suited to correcting the failures of neo-liberal economic policies with more direct state intervention.

10) Nevertheless the working class suffered no lasting defeat in 1989, and since 1992 it has taken up the struggle to defend its interests.

The proletariat is slowly and unevenly regaining confidence in its capacities. And through the development of combativity we can expect to see an increasing distrust of the trade unions, who, in concert with the left governments, are trying to isolate and fragment the struggles and give them the political agenda of the ruling class.

Nevertheless, we cannot expect to see, at least in the short to medium term, a decisive shift in advantage toward the proletariat, one that would put the present strategy of the bourgeoisie in question.

11) In the longer term the potential for the proletariat to strengthen itself politically and close the gap on its class enemy is intact, linked to the following factors:

• the advancing economic crisis, which will push forward proletarian reflection on the need to confront and overcome the system
• the increasingly massive, simultaneous, and generalised character of the attacks, posing the need for a generalised class response
• the increase in state repression
• the omnipresence of war, destroying illusions in the possibility of a peaceful capitalism
• the possibility of growing militancy
• the entry into struggle of a second undefeated generation of workers (see point 17, in the resolution on the international situation from the 13th ICC Congress, in International Review n°97).

12) And while it is undeniable that there has been over the last decade an ebbing of class consciousness in the proletariat as a whole, on the other hand, the events of these years have led to a profound questioning and reflection in the most advanced sections of the working class - even if they are still only tiny minorities. This has tended to lead them towards the positions and history of the communist left. The international development of discussion circles confirms this.

Of course, at present, the bourgeoisie can officially ignore these developments and present today's revolutionary organisations as completely irrelevant.

But the ideological campaigns on the supposed death of communism, the end of thend of the working class and its history; the attempt to equate proletarian internationalism with negationism; the attempt to infiltrate and destroy revolutionary organisations; all this testifies to the bourgeoisie's concern for the long term maturation of the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. As a historical class, the proletariat is much more than the level of its struggles at any particular time would suggest.

In the 30s, in another period, the Italian left grappled with the lessons of the defeat of the Russian revolution, when the proletariat had been mobilised behind the bourgeoisie. Today's revolutionary minorities must complete the foundations of the future party, not least by accelerating the process of unification of today's proletarian political milieu.

In future insurrections of the proletariat, the revolutionary party will be as decisive as it was in 1917.

13) The course of history is still towards decisive class confrontations, but the collapse of the bi-polar imperialist world in 1989, rather than ushering a new epoch of peace, has made it more likely than before that the scales of history will be tipped in favour of the bourgeoisie's "solution" to the economic crisis - the destruction of humanity through imperialist war or environmental catastrophe. The imperialist blocs required the adhesion of the proletariat to the res respective camps and thus the prior defeat of the working class. The imperialist free-for-all since 1989, and the growing decomposition of society, means that irreversible barbarism can occur without this kind of mobilisation.

14) The tendency toward the re-formation of imperialist blocs remains an important factor of the world situation. But the collapse of the old Eastern bloc has given the centrifugal tendencies of world imperialism the upper hand. The removal of the counter-weight to the US bloc has led the former satellites of the two post-Yalta constellations to spin off in different directions and pursue their conflicting interests autonomously. And for this very reason the US has been obliged to resist the threat to its hegemony. The military weakness of Germany or Japan, in particular their lack of nuclear weapons and their political difficulty in developing them, means that these powers are unable to provide a sufficient magnet for the formation of a rival bloc.

15) Consequently imperialist tensions are exploding in the most chaotic way under the impulse of decadent capitalism's economic impasse, that accentuates competition between each nation. Those who are wrongly expecting a period of relative peace within which capitalist blocs will re-form are vastly underestimating the danger of imperialist war that is developing both at the qualitative and qua quantitative levels.

The NATO war in Kosovo in 1999 has in particular led to a marked acceleration in imperialist tensions and conflict around the world. It saw the first bombing of a European city, and the first armed intervention of German imperialism since the 2nd World War. The immediate launching of a second Chechnyan war by Russia showed imperialist terror had been given a new respectability.

There is a gradual but increasingly simultaneous extension of imperialist conflict to all the great strategic zones of the planet:

• to Europe where ex-Yugoslavia has become a permanent arena for the contest of the major powers that continually stoke the fires of local bloodbaths and threatens to draw in neighbouring regions;
• to Africa where imperialist war has become the norm rather than the exception;
• to South and East Asia, in the Indian sub continent ("the most dangerous place in the world" - President Clinton), over Timor and between China and Taiwan, not forgetting the antagonism between North and South Korea, and the re-assertion of Japanese ambitions;
• to the Middle East where the Pax Americana is continually coming unstuck - thanks to the interference of the European powers and the egoism of the local imperialisms;
• and even to Latin America, where Uncle Sam has lost exclusive rights to its imperialist hunting ground.

Although imperialist war is as yet mainly confined to the peripheral areas of world capitalism, the increasing participation of the great powers indicates that its ultimate logic is to consume most of the main industrial and population centres of the globe.

16) Bloody as the present conflicts already are, the recent development of a new arms race means that the imperialist powers are preparing for future wars of real mass destruction. The brief hiatus in increased military expenditure after 1989 is coming to an end. Lord Robertson, the new Secretary General of NATO, has warned the European powers that they must increase defence spending to be able to keep a war going "for at least a year". The new central European NATO powers - Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - are having to upgrade their ageing military airforce.

The United States is providing an important stimulus to this deathly spiral. Its decision to push ahead with its "missile defence" system has already brought forth a more aggressive nuclear policy by Russia and threatens to tear up the SALT 1 and 2 agreements. And the United States already spends $50 billion a year on maintaining its existing nuclear arsenal.

The significance of the nuclear arming of India and Pakistan, as far as new wars between these two rivals are concerned, hardly needs comment.

17) We will look in vain for a serious economic rationale for today's growing military chaos. The decadence of capitalism signified that the growing appetites of the industrialised imperialist powers could henceforth only be satisfied by a re-division of the world market, in direct competition with rivals of comparable strength. Wars to open up new markets against pre-capitalist empires were replaced by world wars of survival. Thus strategic motives had taken the place of directly economic objectives in waging imperialist war. War had become the way of life of capitalism, reinforcing its economic bankruptcy on a global scale.

Even so the world wars of the 20th century and the preparation for them still had a logic and order: the forging of blocs and spheres of influence in order to reorganise and reconstruct the world after militarily defeating the enemy. Consequently, despite the tendency for mutual ruination, there was still a certain economic logic in the military posture of the competing powers. It was the have-not nations who had the most interest in militarily disturbing the status quo, and the haves who opted for a defensive strategy.

18) Today, this long term strategic rationalityality of purpose has been replaced by a more short term survival instinct, dominated by the particular interests of each state.

The United States can no longer play the role it did between 1914-17 and 39-41, waiting for its rivals and allies to exhaust themselves before entering the fray. Thus the main economic beneficiary of the two world wars will have to increasingly exhaust itself in the military effort to preserve its world hegemony without the hope of re-creating a stable bloc around it.

Germany, the main contender to rival the US, is economically strong, but has no realistic hope of creating a rival military pole.

The rival secondary imperialisms have no possibility of offsetting their weaknesses by coalescing around rival superpowers. Instead each one has to go it alone - to punch above its weight - with more hope of frustrating the alliances of rivals than of forging its own, and even being forced into wars against its allies - as Britain and France were against Serbia in the Kosovo war - in order to stay in the game.

19) In this situation war today increasingly appears purposeless, as war for its own sake. The destruction of towns and villages, the devastation of regions, ethnic cleansing, turning whole populations into refugees or the direct massacring of defenceless civilians seems to be the objective of imperialerialist war rather than the consequence of actual military, let alone economic, goals. There are no lasting or clear-cut victors but a temporary stalemate, before renewed battles of increased destruction.

The reconstruction of war-devastated countries that used to be the only possible and temporary economic benefit of war is today a fantasy. Old war zones will remain as rubble.

But ultimately this situation is only the logical outcome of an economic system whose tendencies to self-destruction have become dominant.

This is what is meant by the irrationality of war in the decadence of capitalism. The period of decomposition has only taken it to an anarchic conclusion. War is no longer undertaken to further economic goals, or even for organised strategic objectives, but as short term, localised and fragmented attempts to survive at each other's expense.

But humanity's time has not run out yet. The world proletariat has not yet been defeated in its main concentrations in the advanced capitalist countries nor been turned into canon-fodder. Despite the retreat which the working class has been through since 1989, it is still possible for it to catch up with history. The ineluctable aggravation of the economic crisis will act on the growth of class militancy and the development of consciousness about the historic bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, which are the preconditions for the working class to fulfil its capacity to carry out the communist revolution.

Presentation

Anarchism today has the wind in its sails. Anarchist ideas, in the form both of the emergence and strengthening of anarcho-syndicalism, and of the appearance of numerous small libertarian groups, are getting off the ground in several countries (and are getting more and more attention from the capitalist media). This is perfectly explicable inperfectly explicable in the present historic period.

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s allowed the bourgeoisie to unleash unprecedented campaigns proclaiming the "death of communism". These had a definite impact on the working class, and even on elements who rejected the capitalist system and hoped to see its revolutionary overthrow. According to the bourgeoisie's campaigns, the bankruptcy of what has been presented as "socialism" or even "communism" marks the bankruptcy of Marx's ideas, which the Stalinist regimes had transformed into an official ideology (by systematically falsifying them, needless to say).

Marx, Lenin, Stalin - all the same enemy: this is the theme rehashed for years by every fraction of the ruling class. The anarchist current has defended exactly the same theme ever since the creation in the USSR of one of the most barbaric regimes that decadent capitalism has produced. The anarchists have always considered marxism as "authoritarian" by nature, and for them the Stalinist dictatorship was the inevitable result of the application of Marx's ideas. In this sense, the present success of the anarchist and libertarian currents is essentially a fall-out from the bourgeoisie's campaigns, a sign of their impact on those elements who refuse to accept capitalism, but who are trapped by all the lies that have inundated us dururing the last ten years. The current that presents itself as the most radical opponent of bourgeois order thus owes a large part of its progress to the concessions which it makes, and has always made, to the classic ideological themes of the bourgeoisie.

That being said, there are many anarchists and libertarians today who feel somewhat uncomfortable with all this.

On the one hand, they find it hard to swallow the behaviour of the most important organisation in the history of anarchism, which had the most determining influence on the working class of a whole country: the Spanish CNT. It is obviously difficult to lay claim to the tradition of an organisation which, after years of propaganda for "direct action", of denouncing any kind of participation in the bourgeois political game of parliamentarism, of fiery speeches against the state in all its forms, found nothing better to do in 1936 than to send four ministers to the bourgeois government of the Spanish Republic and several councillors to the Catalan Generalitat. In May 1937, when the Barcelona workers rose against the government's police (controlled by the Stalinists), these anarchist ministers called on them to lay down their arms and "fraternise" with their executioners. In other words, they stabbed the workers in the back. This is why some libertarians today prefer to look back to the currents that emerged within anarchism, and which tried to oppose the criminal policies of the CNT: currents like the Friends of Durruti, which in 1937 fought the CNT's official line, to the point where the Spanish CNT denounced them as traitors and excluded them. It is to clarify the nature of this current that we are publishing the article that follows, drawn from a pamphlet on the war of 1936 published by the ICC's section in Spain.

On the other hand, some of those who turn towards libertarian ideas realise (it's not too difficult) the emptiness of anarchist ideology, and look for other reference points to reinforce its classic thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc). And what better reference could they find than Marx himself, whose "disciple" Bakunin once declared himself to be? Determined to reject the bourgeois lies, which make marxism responsible for all the woes that have befallen Russia since 1917, they try to oppose Lenin to Marx, and so fall under the influence of these same campaigns, which always portray Stalin as Lenin's faithful heir. To promote a "libertarian marxism", they therefore try to return to the tradition of the German and Dutch Communist Left, whose main theoreticians - such as Otto Rühle to begin with, and Anton Pannekoek later - considered that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a bourgeois revolution, led by a bourgeois Bolshevik Party, which itself was inspired by a bourgeois-Jacobin thinker, Lenin. The comrades of the German and Dutch Lefts were always very clear on the fact that they drew wholly from marxism, and nothing from anarchism, and rejected any attempt to reconcile the two currents. This does not prevent some of today's anarchists from trying to annex the Dutch and German Lefts, nor certain - often sincere - elements from trying to work out a "libertarian marxism", and succeeding in the impossible synthesis between anarchism and marxism.

Just such an attempt is to be found in the text published below, an "open letter" written by a small French group called the "Gauche Communiste Libertaire" (GCL), in response to our article "German/Dutch left is not a branch of anarchism [40]", published in WR 231. After it, we also publish substantial extracts from our (non-exhaustive) reply.

ICC

(The last two texts mentioned in this Presentation are not yet available on our website, although they soon will be)

The Friends of Durruti, lessons of an incomplete break with Anarchism

The Anarchist group "The Friends of Durruti" has often been used to demonstrate the vitality of Anarchism during the events in Spain after 1936, since its members played a prominent role during the struggle of May 1937, opposing and denouncing the CNT's collaboration with the government of the Republic and the Generalitat. Today the CNT boasts about the group's achievements, sells its best-known publications, and endorses its positions.

For us however, the essential lesson of the experience of this group is not the "vitality" of Anarchism, but on the contrary, the impossibility of posing a revolutionary alternative from within it. Although the Friends of Durruti opposed the CNT's policy of "collaboration", they did not understand its role as an active factor in the defeat of the proletariat, its alignment in the bourgeois camp; and therefore did not denounce the CNT as a weapon of the enemy. They always maintained that they were militants of the CNT and that there was a possibility of bringing it back to the proletariat.

The fundamental reason for this difficulty was the Friends of Durruti's inability to break with Anarchism. This also explains why all the efforts and revolutionary courage of the group's members sadly did not lead it to a clarification about the events in Spain in 1936.

1936: Proletarian revolution or imperialist war?

In the history books the events in Spain from 1936 are described as a "civil war". The Trotskyists and the Anarchists see them as the "Spanish Revolution". For the ICC they were neither a "civil war" nor a "revolution" but an imperialist war. It was a war between two fractions of the Spanish bourgeoisie: on the one hand, Franco backed by German and Italian imperialism; and on the other, the Republic of the Popular Front, which in Catalonia, in particular, included the Stalinists, the POUM and the CNT, backed by the USSR and the democratic imperialisms. In July 1936 the working class mobilised against Franco's coup, and in May 1937 in Barcelona against the attempt by the bourgeoisie to crush the proletariat's resistance. However, on both occasions the Popular Front managed to defeat it and divert the proletariat towards the military slaughter using the excuse of "anti-Fascism".

This was the analysis of Bilan, the publication of the Italian Communist Left in exile. For Bilan, it was essential to see the international context within which the events in Spain unfolded. The international revolutionary wave which had put an end to World War One and had spread across five continents had been defeated, even though in 1926 it still echoed in the workers' struggles in China, the General Strike in Britain, and in Spain. Nevertheless, the dominant feature of the 1930s was the preparation by all the main imperialist powers for another global conflict. This was the international framework for the events in Spain: a defeated working class and the road open towards World War II.

Other proletarian groups such as the GIK-H defended similar positions, despite also giving space in its publications for positions close to Trotskyism, which thought that the proletariat, starting from the struggle for a "bourgeois revolution", could carry out a revolutionary intervention. Bilan patiently discussed with these groups, including its own minority, who defended the position that a revolution could arise from the war and who mobilised in order to struggle as part of the Lenin Column in Spain.

For all the confusions of their positions, none of these groups was compromised by support for the republican government. None of them participated in the subjection of the workers to the Republic, none took the side of the bourgeoisie. Unlike the POUM and the CNT!

Today the bourgeoisie tries to use these errors of the proletariat to present the political treason and counter-revolutionary role of the POUM and CNT during the events from 1936 in Spain as a "proletarian revolution" led by them, when in reality they were the bourgeoisie's last line of defence against the workers' struggle, as we have already shown:

"But it was above all the POUM and the CNT which played the decisive role in enrolling the workers for the front. The two organisations ordered an end to the general strike without hat having played any part in unleashing it. The strength of the bourgeoisie was expressed not so much by Franco, but by the existence of an extreme left able to demobilise the Spanish proletariat" (In our book The Italian Communist Left 1926-45, page 95).

The Anarchist foundations of the CNT's betrayal in 1936

For many workers, it is hard to understand that the CNT, which regrouped the most combative and determined proletarians, and whose positions were the most radical, betrayed the working class by taking the side of the bourgeois Republican state and enrolling the class in the anti-fascist war.

Confused by the amalgam and heterogeneity of positions that characterise the Anarchist milieu, they come to the conclusion that the problem was not the CNT but the "treason" of the 4 ministers (Montseny, Garcia Oliver etc) or the influence of currents such as the Trentists.

It is true that during the international revolutionary wave that followed the Russian Revolution, the main forces of the proletariat in Spain regrouped in the CNT (the Socialist Party had allied itself with the social patriots who had led the world proletariat into the imperialist war, and the Communist Party represented a very small minority). Fundamentally, this expressed a weakness of the proletariat in Spain, due to the characteristics of the developmlopment of the national capital (poor national cohesion, disproportionate weight of the landowning sectors of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy).

This environment had been a breeding ground for Anarchist ideology, which expressed the thinking of the radicalised petty-bourgeoisie and its influence on the proletariat. This weight had been aggravated by the influence of Bakuninism in the First International in Spain. This had disastrous consequences, as Engels made clear in his book The Bakuninists at Work [41], in which he showed how they dragged the proletariat behind the radical bourgeois adventure of the 1873 Cantonist movement in Spain. Then, when Anarchism had to choose between the working class taking political power or the government of the bourgeoisie, it had preferred the latter:

"...the same people who call themselves autonomists, anarchist revolutionaries, etc., have on this occasion flung themselves into politics, bourgeois politics of the worst kind. They have worked, not to give political power to the working class - on the contrary this idea is repugnant to them - but to help to power a bourgeois faction of adventurers, ambitious men and place-hunters who call themselves Intransigent Republicans" ("Report on the Madrid Federation of the IWMA", in Engels' book, Collected Works vol.23, p582).

During the revolutiutionary wave that followed World War I, the CNT felt the influence of the Russian Revolution and the Third International. The 1919 CNT Congress clearly took position on the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary character of the Communist International, within which it decided to participate. With the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the opening of a course towards counter-revolution, the weaknesses of its Anarchist and Syndicalist foundations deprived the CNT of the theoretical and political strength to draw the lessons of the succession of defeats in Germany, Russia etc and to give revolutionary leadership to the enormous combativity of the proletariat in Spain.

After its 1931 Congress, the CNT preferred its "hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat" to its previous positions on the Russian Revolution, whilst seeing the Constituent Assemblies as "the product of a revolutionary action" (Report of the Congress: position of the CNT towards the Constituent Assembly), despite its formal opposition to the bourgeois parliament. With this, it began to move towards supporting the bourgeoisie, most explicitly through such fractions as the Trentists; and despite the fact that elements who adhered to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat continued to exist within it.

In February 1936, the CNT flouted its abstentntionist principles, through indirectly calling for a vote for the Popular Front: "Naturally, Spain's working class, which has for many years been advised by the CNT not to vote, placed upon our propaganda the construction we wanted, which is to say, that it should vote, in that it would be easier to stand up to the fascist right, if the latter revolted, once they were defeated and out of government".

With this we can clearly see its move towards support for the bourgeois state, its involvement in the policy of defeating and isolating the proletariat in preparation for the imperialist war.

Thus we should not be surprised by what happened in July 1936. The Generalitat was at the mercy of the workers in arms, but the CNT handed the power to Companys, called for a return to work and sent the workers to be massacred on the Aragon front. No more surprising was what happened in May 1937, when the workers responded to the bourgeoisie's provocation by spontaneously setting up barricades and taking control of the streets; once again the CNT called on them to abandon the struggle, and stopped workers from returning from the front to support their comrades in Barcelona.

What happened in Spain demonstrates that in the era of wars and revolutions, sections of Anarchism are won over by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, but that Anarchism as as an ideological current is incapable of confronting the counter-revolution and posing a revolutionary alternative; it even reveals an attachment for the defence of the bourgeois state. Bilan understood this and expressed it brilliantly "...it is necessary to openly say that: in Spain the conditions don't exist for transforming the actions of the Spanish proletariat into the signal for the reawakening of the world proletariat, even when there certainly exist some more profound and exacerbated contrasts in economic, social and political conditions than in other countries... The violence of these events must not lead us into making errors in the evaluation of their nature. They demonstrate the life and death struggle that the proletariat has entered with the bourgeoisie, but they also prove the impossibility of replacing it by violence alone - which is an instrument of struggle and not a programme of struggle - a historic vision which the mechanism of class struggle is unable to render fertile. Because the social movement has not the strength to bring to fruition a final vision of the proletariat's goals, and because there is no communist intervention oriented in this direction, it can only drop back into the pitfalls of capitalist development, dragging down in its bankruptcy the social and political forces which hitherto had been the classic representation of the workers' class skirmishes: the anarchists".

The Friends of Durruti; an attempted reaction to the CNT's treason

The Friends of Durruti were Anarchist elements, who despite the bourgeois orientation of the CNT within which they had always been militants, continued to adhere to the revolution and, in this sense, are testimony to the resistance of proletarian elements who refused to go down the same path as the Anarchist union.

For this reason the CNT and the bourgeoisie in general, try to present this group as an example of the revolutionary flame that still burnt in the CNT, even during the worst moments of 1936-37.

However this idea is completely false. What marked the revolutionary approach of the Friends of Durruti was precisely its struggle against the positions of the CNT and its reliance on the strength of the proletariat, of which it formed a leading part.

The Friends of Durruti were on the class terrain, not as militants of the CNT, but as militant workers who felt the force of their class on the 19th July and who, on this basis, opposed the positions of the Confederation.

On the contrary, their attempts to reconcile this proletarian impulse with their commitment to the CNT and its Anarchist orientation, made it impossible for them to take up a revolutionary alternative or to be able to drew clear lessons from these evese events.

The Friends of Durruti group was an Anarchist affinity group, and was formally constituted in March 1937. It was formed from the convergence of a current which took position, in the CNT's own press, against its collaboration with the government, and another current which returned to Barcelona in order to struggle against the militarisation of the militias.

The group was directly linked to the course of the workers struggles, upon which its reflection and struggle rested. It was not a group of theorists, but of workers in struggle, of activists. Therefore, they basically upheld the struggle of July 1936 and its "conquests" - the Control Patrols which arose in the workers areas and the arming of the working class - although for them the movement's fundamental importance lay in the spirit of the July days, and in the spontaneous strength of the workers' struggle, when they took up arms against Franco's attack and took control of the streets of Barcelona.

In the May Days in 1937, the Friends of Durruti group struggled on the barricades and issued a leaflet which made it famous, demanding the formation of a revolutionary junta, the socialisation of the economy and the shooting of the guilty. In the struggle, its positions converged with those of the Trotskyist-leaning Bolshevik-Leninist group, within which Munis was a militant, and with which it maintained discussions that fed its reflection, but which were not able to push the group to break with Anarchism.

After the May Days it began to publish El Amigo del Pueblo (15 issues in all), which expressed its attempt to clarify the questions posed by the struggle. The most prominent theoretician of the group was Jaime Balius, who in 1938 published a pamphlet Towards a new revolution [42], which took up a more developed defence of the positions put forward in El Amigo del Pueblo.

However, the group was dependent on the oxygen of the workers' struggle and when this was defeated by the Republican state, it disappeared back into the folds of the CNT.

Although it represented a workers' response to the CNT's treason its evolution was truncated by its inability to carry out a break with Anarchism and Syndicalism. Although the struggle and strength of the class kept it alive and fed it, the Friends of Durruti were unable to go beyond that.

An incomplete break with Anarchism

On the two central questions for the class struggle that were debated between July and May, the relationship between the war on the anti-fascist front and the social war, and the question of collaboration with the Republican government or its overthrow, the Friends of Durruti opposed the politics of the CNT and struggled against thst them.

The nature of the war in Spain

Unlike the CNT, which had openly opposed the workers' actions on the 18th July, the Friends of Durruti defended the revolutionary nature of these events: "It has been stated that the days of July were a response to fascist provocation, but we, the Friends of Durruti, have publicly supported the position that the essence of those memorable July days resides in the proletariat's thirst for absolute emancipation". (All quotes from Towards a new revolution).

They also struggled against the policy of subordinating the revolution to the needs of the anti-fascist war; a question that had played a large part in the group's formation:

"Counter-revolutionary work is facilitated by the lack of consistency amongst many revolutionaries. We have given a clear account of the large number of individuals who think that in order to win the war it is necessary to renounce the revolution. This decline has intensely accentuated since the 19th of July (...) It is inadmissible that in order to lead the masses to the battle front they want to silence their revolutionary desires. It should be the other way round. Strengthen the revolution even more in order that the workers with a rare spirit launch upon the conquest of the New World, which in these moments of indecision remains mains nothing more than a promise".

And in May 1937 they opposed the CNT's orders to its militants at the front to stop their march on Barcelona in order to defend the workers struggling in the streets and instead to continue the war at the front.

This determination in the struggle, however clashed with the poverty of the Friends of Durruti's theoretical reflections on the war and revolution. In reality they never broke with the position that the war was united with the proletarian revolution, and that it was therefore a question of a "revolutionary" war opposed to imperialist wars, which from the beginning made them victims of the bourgeoisie's policy of defeating and isolating the proletariat:

"From the first moment of clashes with the military, it was already impossible to disentangle the war and the revolution (...) As the weeks and months passed, it became clearer and clearer that the war which we support against the fascists has nothing in common with the wars waged by states (...) We anarchists cannot play the game of those who pretend that our war is only a war of independence with purely democratic aspirations. To these ideas we, the Friends of Durruti, respond that our war is a social war".

With this, they placed themselves in the orbit of the CNT, whose "radical" version of bourgeois ois positions about the struggle between dictatorship and democracy dragged the most combative workers into the slaughterhouse of the anti-fascist war.

In fact the Friends of Durruti's considerations on the war were made on the basis of anarchism's the narrow and ahistorical nationalist thinking. This led them to a vision of the events in Spain as the continuation of the bourgeoisie's ludicrous revolutionary efforts against the Napoleonic invasion of 1808. Whilst the international workers' movement was debating the defeat of the world proletariat and the perspective of a Second World War, the Anarchists in Spain thought about Fernando VII and Napoleon:

"What is happening today is a re-enactment of what happened in the reign of Ferdinand VII. Once again in Vienna there has been a conference of fascist dictators for the purpose of organising their invasion of Spain. And today the workers in arms have taken up the mantle of El Empecinado. Germany and Italy need raw materials. They need iron, copper, lead and mercury. But these Spanish mineral deposits are the preserves of France and England. Yet even though Spain faces subjection, England does not protest. On the contrary - in a vile manoeuvre, she tries to negotiate with Franco (...) It is up to the working class to ensure Spain's independence. Native capitalism will not do it, since international capital crosses all frontiers. This is Spain's current predicament. It is up to us workers to root out the foreign capitalists. Patriotism does not enter into it. It is a matter of class interests".

As we can see, it takes a clever piece of work to turn an imperialist war into a patriotic war, a "class" war. This is an expression of Anarchism's political disarming of such sincere worker militants as the Friends of Durruti. These comrades who wanted to struggle against the war and for the revolution, were incapable of finding the point of departure for an effective struggle. This would have meant calling on the workers and peasants, enlisted in both gangs - the Republic and the Franquistas - to desert, to turn their guns on the officers who oppressed them and to return to the rear and struggle through strikes and demonstrations, on a class terrain, against the whole of capitalism.

For the international workers' movement however, the question of the nature of the war in Spain was a crucial one, which polarised the debate both between the Communist Left and Trotskyism and also within the Communist Left's own ranks:

"The war in Spain has been decisive for everyone: for capitalism, it has been the means to enlarge the front of forces working for war, to incorporate anti-fascism, the Trotskyists, the so-called Left Communists and to stifle the workers' awakening which appeapeared in 1936; for the left fraction it has been the decisive test, the selection of men and ideas, the necessity to confront the problem of war. We have held on, and, against the stream, we are still holding on." (Bilan no44; quoted in "The Italian Communist Left" page 105-06)

The CNT's collaboration in government

The Friends of Durruti were much clearer in their opposition to the CNT's policy of collaboration with the Republican government than on the question of the war.

They denounced the CNT's treason in July:

"There was a precious opportunity in July. Who was going to oppose the CNT and FAI imposing themselves in Catalonia? Instead of putting confederal thinking into action, wrapping themselves in the folds of black-red flags and the shouts of the multitude, our committees made a round trip official places, but without deciding a position that matched our strength in the streets. After weeks of doubt they begged to participate in power. We remember perfectly well that at the regional level they proposed the constitution of a revolutionary organism which was to be called the National Defence Junta at the national level and Regional Juntas at the local level. However they did not carry out the decisions that had been adopted. They hushed this up by not mentioning the infringement of the decisions taken at the plenary session. First of all they entered the Generalitat, and then later they joined the government in Madrid".

And more forcefully in the manifesto they distributed on the barricades in May:

"The Generalitat stands for nothing. Its continued existence bolsters the counterrevolution. We workers have carried the day. It defies belief that the CNT's committees should have acted with such timidity that they ventured to order a 'cease-fire' and indeed forced a return to work when we stood on the very threshold of total victory. No account was taken of the provenance of the attack no heed paid to the true meaning of the present events. Such conduct has to be described as treason to the revolution which no one ought to commit or encourage in the name of anything. And we know how to categorize the noxious work carried out by Solidaridad Obrera and the CNT's most prominent Militants"

This manifesto led to the CNT repudiating the group and threatening it with expulsion, although the threat was not put into practice. The Friends of Durruti withdrew their accusation of treason in El Amigo del Pueblo no 3 "In the last issue the Friends of Durruti retracted the idea of treason, in the interests of Anarchist and revolutionary unityity" (El Amigo del Pueblo no 4). This was not for lack of courage '-they had shown plenty of that - but because they could not see beyond the CNT, which they considered to be an expression of the working class and not an agent of the bourgeoisie.

In this sense, the limitations of their thinking were those of the CNT and Anarchism and therefore when they finally did criticise the CNT, based on a more serene reflection away from the struggle on the barricades, it was for not having a platform:

"The vast majority of the working population stood by the CNT. In Catalonia, the CNT was the majority organisation. What happened, that the CNT did not make its revolution, the people's revolution, the revolution of the majority of the population...

"What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty, but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists (read Socialists and Stalinists) who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bourgeoisie a breathing space, to ro return, to re-form and to behave as would a conqueror.

"The CNT did not know how to live up to its role. It did not want to push ahead with the revolution with all its consequences" (from Towards a new revolution).

However, the CNT did have a well defined theory: the defence of the bourgeois state. Balius' assertion applies to the whole proletariat (in the sense that Bilan also understood - its lack of a revolutionary vanguard and orientation) but not to the CNT. At least from February 1936, the CNT was unequivocally compromised with the bourgeois government of the Popular Front:

"When the moment came in February 1936, all the forces active within the proletariat, joined together in one front: the necessity to bring about the victory of the Popular Front in order to get rid of the domination of the Right and to gain an amnesty. From the Social democrats to Centrism, to the CNT and the POUM, without forgetting all the parties of the republican left, all were agreed to channel the explosion of class antagonisms into the parliamentary arena. And here we see written in flaming letters the incapacity of the Anarchists and the POUM, as well as the real function of all the democratic forces of capitalism" (Bilan, The lessons of the events in Spain).

From July, far from not knowing how to mto make the revolution as the Friends of Durruti believed, the CNT was very clear about what it was doing:

"For our part, and this was the CNT-FAI's view, we held that Companys should stay on as head of the Generalitat, precisely because we had not taken to the streets to fight specifically for the social revolution, but rather to defend ourselves against the fascist mutiny" (Garica Oliver's response to Bolloten's questionnaire, quoted in Agustín Guillamón: The Friends of Durruti Group [43], page 13).

If during the May Days in 1937 the Friends of Durruti confronted the CNT, called for a "revolutionary junta" against the Generalitat government, and for the "shooting of the guilty", this was not the product of a break with Anarchism, nor an evolution from Anarchism towards a revolutionary alternative (as Guillamón claims), but the expression of the proletariat's resistance. It was no more than an observation, not an orientation towards the seizure of power: this question could not be posed at a time when the bourgeoisie held the initiative, and had launched a provocation to finish off the workers' resistance. But as Munis pointed out, they could go no further:

"In La Voz Leninista n°2 (23rd August 1937), Munis made a critique of the notion of the "revolutionary junta" set out in no.6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (12thAugust 1937). In Munis' view, the Friends of Durruti suffered from a progressive theoretical decline and a practical inability to influence the CNT, which led them to abandon some of the theoretical positions which the May experience had enabled them to adopt. Munis noted that in May 1937 the Friends of Durruti had issued the call for the "revolutionary junta" alongside "all power to the proletariat"; whereas in no.6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (August 12, 1937) the slogan "revolutionary junta" was invoked as an alternative to the "failure of statist forms". According to Munis, this represented a theoretical retreat from the Friends of Durruti's assimilation of the May experience, taking them further away from the marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and drawing them back into the ambiguities of the anarchist theory of the State".

Once the agitation of the workers struggle had passed and their defeat had been consummated, the reflections and proposals of the Friends of Durruti returned, without trauma, towards the CNT, and the "revolutionary junta" ended up being turned into the Committee of the Anti-fascist Militias, which they had previous denounced as an organ of the bourgeoisie:

"The group harshly criticised the dissolution of the Defense committees, thehe Control Patrols, the Committee of militias and directly criticised militarisation, it understood that these organs had their roots in the July days and that they would be the base - along with the unions and Municipalities - for a new structuring, that is to say, that they should be the model of a new order of things, naturally this includes the modifications brought about by the lessons of the course of events and revolutionary experience" .

Compare the above with the following quote from the same author's 1938 pamphlet Towards a new revolution: "In July a Committee of Antifascist Militias was set up. It was not a class organ. Bourgeois and counter-revolutionary factions had their representatives on it".

Conclusions

The Friends of Durruti group was not an expression of the revolutionary vitality of the CNT or Anarchism, but an effort by militant workers, despite the dead weight of Anarchism, that had never been nor could be the revolutionary programme of the working class.

Anarchism can trap within its ranks sectors of the working class, weakened by a lack of experience or trajectory, as can be seen with young proletarians today, but its proposals cannot not lead to a revolutionary alternative. In the majority of cases, as with the Friends of Durruti, they show courage and combativity, but as the the history in Spain has demonstrated on two occasions, during two decisive moments its ideological speculations were in the service of the Bourgeois State.

Worker elements may think they can join the revolution from Anarchism, but in order to adopt a revolutionary programme they have to break with Anarchism.

Rs, 31/3/00.

We are a small group based in the Vaucluse [south of France, ed.], and we identify with libertarian marxism.

In your article, you say that some parts of council communism had “an incorrect analysis of the defeat of the Russian revolution, considered (…) as a bourgeois revolution whose defeat is attributed (…) to ‘bourgeois’ conceptions defended by the Bolshevik party and by Lenin, such as the necessity of the revolutionary party”.

In fact, we are in agreement with those components of council communism who see the Russian revolution as a bourgeois revolution led by Jacobins.

It seems to us that Pannekoek would agree with us, so let us quote him: “There are many who persist in imagining the proletarian revolution in the guise of past bourgeois revolutions, in other words as a series of phases, each one engendering the next: first, the conquest of political power and the creation of a new government; then the expropriation by decree of the capitalist class; finally, a reorganisation of the process of production. But in this case, it is impossible to end up with anything other than state capitalism. For the proletariat to become truly master of its destiny, it must create simultaneously its own organisation and the forms of the new economic order. These two elements are inseparable and constitute the process of social revolution”.

Is it not because the Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution that it took on the shape that Pannekoek describes?

In what way are these conceptions a serious theoretical weakness? You don’t say…

By contrast, Lenin’s conceptions remain Jacobin and bourgeois: a minority, a vanguard, the elite of a party ends up substituting itself for the working class, which was moreover in the minority in Russia. This substitutionism led to the repression of Kronstadt in 1921, the repression of a soviet which demanded political freedom and the liberation of the anarchist and Socialist-Revolutionary oppositionists. This substitutionism led to the repression of all the currents of the workers’ movement: the anarchists (Makhno, Voline…), the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the centrists (Dan and Martov…).

Need we remind you that within the Bolshevik party, only Miasnikov defended the freedom of the press. The same Miasnikov was excluded by a commission of the Orgburo that included Trotsky and Bukharin!

Otto Rühle shared our views on the Bolshevik party: “The Party was considered as a military academy of professional revolutionaries. Its main pedagogical principles were the undisputed authority of the leader, a rigid centralism, iron discipline, conformism, militarism, and the sacrifice of the personality to the interests of the Party. What Lenin developed in reality was an elite of intellectuals, a nucleus which, thrown into the revolution, would seize the leadership and would take the power to themselves” (text quoted in La contre-revolution bureaucratique, ed: 10/18).

Lenin’s conception of an active minority of professional revolutionaries is opposed by Otto Rühle, an anti-authoritarian marxist excluded from the KAPD on Moscow’s orders and theoretician in 1920 of the General Workers’ Union (AAUE), which was neither a trades union, nor a vanguard, but a union of revolutionaries within the councils in Germany. This “Union” was based on the precept: “The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves”, as Marx wrote in 1864.

This conception of Lenin’s, of an active minority, is not the only spoonful of tar in the honey-pot of Leninist theory. Lenin also defended the bourgeois right of the self-determination of nations. His text published in June 1914 is nothing but a polemic against Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin supported Polish nationalism, that poison dividing the proletariat. In Germany, these conceptions of Lenin ended up in a support for German nationalism during the occupation of the Ruhr, and the celebration of the German national hero Schlageter (a nationalist shot by French troops during the occupation of the Ruhr). The German Communist Party thus made common cause with the fascists! Similarly, in Leftism, an infantile disorder, Lenin defended bourgeois parliamentarism, compromises with the bourgeoisie, and the entry of “communists” into the reactionary bourgeois trades unions.

Worse still, Lenin’s text Materialism and Empirio-criticism represents a return to 18th-century bourgeois materialism, and forgets the historical materialism of Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach.

So, what is historical materialism?

You say that it is a method for analysing the class contradictions of any society… very well! But an analytical method for action, and action for the liberation of human beings from all exploitation and oppression. Marx defended “the abstract principle of individual freedom” just as much as the anarchists. Marx appears to us today as a libertarian, a moralist of freedom. He criticises a capitalism that denies the personality, and the freedom of the individual. A “marxist” must defend liberty and respect the liberty of others. Respect for equality means nothing. Men are different from women. All individuals are different from each other.

This is a position of principle that goes beyond the struggle of the proletariat. Some of the non-industrialised tribes of the Indonesian or Amazonian forests are right from a marxist viewpoint to oppose the destruction of nature and of their life environment, even if as a result they oppose the particular interests of the proletarians who are lumberjacks or road-builders…

Similarly, non-working mothers are exploited by the class system; they work to raise their children even if they don’t sell their labour power. Their struggle for the liberation of women from exploitation is necessary to the arrival of communism. Prostitutes are also exploited as sexual objects; their struggle for the disappearance of prostitution seems like a struggle for council socialism. Real marxism is always anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, for the disappearance of psychiatric asylums, the disappearance of prisons, and the destruction of all systems of punishment in the school or the family.

When you describe the tendencies of anarchism, you leave out anarcho-syndicalism. Did not the philosopher Georges Sorel consider the anarchists entry into the trades unions as one of the greatest events of his day? You confuse Bakunin, an anti-authoritarian and rarely a Jacobin, with his disciple Netchaev, a real putschist. You ignore the Berne Congress of 1876 which gave anarchism its substitutionist deviation of “propaganda by the deed”. You also ignore the work of Daniel Guerin on the French Revolution, fascism, anarchism… You ignore also that libertarians like Erich Muhsam were at the head of the Bavarian workers’ councils in 1919. When you describe the struggle of tendencies within the Social Democracy, you caricature this as a struggle between the marxists and the revisionists. In fact, there were four tendencies within the pre-1914 Social Democracy:

- a marxist wing: Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek defending the proletarian struggle, the mass strike and the destruction of the state;

- reformist revisionists like Edward Bernstein defending capitalism’s “peaceful evolution” through reforms;

- an “orthodox” centre, including Karl Kautsky, characterised by economic fatalism and a cult of the productive forces, which for this kind of degenerated marxism became a sort of god. For Karl Kautsky, it was the intellectuals who were to bring socialist consciousness to the proletariat from the outside: a real revision of marxism!

- finally, Kautsky’s Russian Bolshevik disciples, a typically Russian amalgam of Jacobinism and Blanquism.

The workers’ councils did not exist during the Paris Commune. Marx therefore doesn’t talk about them. But when they appeared during the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin (1907) saw them not as an organ of proletarian self-government, but as mere struggle committees…

The phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” no longer means anything today: the words have covered the facts. Facts have changed the meaning of the words.

In 1871, the Paris Commune was the destruction of the state by a government where a debate existed between Proudhonists and Blanquists.

The 1917 October Revolution was the Jacobin dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party.

It would therefore be better to use the expression “the power of the councils”.

Jean-Luc Dallemagne, an orthodox Trotskyist theoretician who defends the Stalinist USSR (and China, Cuba, etc…) as “workers’ states” also accuses the ultra-left currents of being petty-bourgeois: “The various ultra-left currents, that came out of the opposition to Lenin, come together again in the moralising and petty-bourgeois demand for ‘freedom’” (Construction du socialisme et revolution, Jean-Luc Dallemagne, Ed. Maspero).

This same Dallemagne defends the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party and the repression of Kronstadt as the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat!

Let us not confuse state capitalism with the power of the workers’ councils!

Let us conclude on the Spanish Revolution of 1937: during a revolutionary period, the “Friends of Durrutti” had a mass influence, like the AAUE in Germany in 1920. But try to understand them, rather than curling up in your own convictions. Don’t accuse them peremptorily of having revolutionary positions “despite themselves and their own confusions”, by accident, “by class instinct rather than out of a real understanding of the situation of the proletariat as a whole”.

In short, it seems to me that the ICC wants to close prematurely a fertile debate between anarchism and marxism.

Gauche Communiste Libertaire

In the summer of 1927, replying to a series of articles in Pravda which rejected the possibility of any ‘Thermidorian degeneration’ of the USSR, Trotsky defended the validity of this analogy with the French revolution, in which an element of the Jacobin party itself became the vehicle for the counter-revolution. Despite the historical differences in the two situations, Trotsky argued that the isolated proletarian regime in Russia could indeed succumb to a “bourgeois restoration”, not only through an outright, violent overthrow by the forces of capitalism, but also in a more gradual and insidious manner. “Thermidor”, he wrote, “is a special form of counter-revolution carried out on the instalment plan through several instalments, and making use, in the first stage, of elements of the same ruling party – by regrouping them and counterposing them to others” (‘Thermidor’, published in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1926-7, Pathfinder Press, 1980). And he pointed out that Lenin himself had fully accepted that such a danger existed in Russia: “Lenin did not think that the possibility was excluded that economic and cultural shifts in the direction of bourgeois degeneration could take place over a long period even with power remaining in Bolshevik hands; it could happen through an inconspicuous cultural-political assimilation between a certain layer of the Bolshevik party and a certain layer of the rising new petty bourgeois element”.

At the same time Trotsky was quick to argue that, at this juncture, Thermidor, though a growing danger posed by the growth of bureaucratism and of openly capitalist influences within the USSR, was still far from being completed. In the Platform of the United Opposition which was published not long after this article, he and his co-authors expressed the view that the perspective of international revolution was far from exhausted and that within Russia itself there persisted considerable gains from the October revolution, in particular the Russian economy’s “socialist sector”. The Opposition therefore remained committed to the struggle for the reform and regeneration of the Soviet state, and to its unconditional defence from imperialist attack.

In historical hindsight, however, it is clear that Trotsky’s analyses lagged behind reality. By the summer 1927, the forces of bourgeois counter-revolution had all but completed their annexation of the Bolshevik party.

Why did Trotsky underestimate the danger?

There are three key elements in Trotsky’s misreading of the situation facing the Opposition in 1927.

1. Trotsky underestimated the depth and extent of the counter-revolution’s advance because he was unable to go back to its historical origins – in particular, to recognise the role played by the Bolshevik party’s political errors in accelerating the degeneration of the revolution. As we have shown in previous articles in this series, while the fundamental reason for the weakening of proletarian power in Russia lay in its isolation, in the failure of the revolution to extend and in the devastation caused by the civil war, the Bolshevik party had itself made matters worse through its entanglement with the state machine and its willingness to substitute its own authority for the authority of the unitary organs of the class (soviets, factory committees, etc). This process was already discernible in 1918 and reached a particularly grave point with the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921. And Trotsky found it all the harder to criticise these policies in that he had often played a prominent role in implementing them (eg his calls for the militarisation of labour in 1920-21).

2. Trotsky clearly understood that the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy had been greatly facilitated by the succession of international defeats suffered by the working class - Germany 1923, Britain 1926, China 1927. But he was unable to see the historic scale of this defeat. In this he was by no means unique: it was not until the advent of Hitler to power in Germany, for example, that it became clear to the Italian left fraction that the course of history had been overturned and that it was running towards war. Trotsky, on the other hand, was never really able to see that such a profound reverse had occurred and throughout the 1930s continued to see signs of impending revolution when in fact the workers were more and more being taken off their own terrain and led onto the slippery slope of anti-fascism, and thus of imperialist war (Popular Fronts, war in Spain…). In any case, Trotsky’s unfounded ‘optimism’ about the possibilities of revolution led him to misinterpret the causes and effects of Stalinist foreign policy and the reactions of the great capitalist powers. The Platform of the United Opposition in 1927 (influenced, without doubt, by the ‘war scare’ of the day, which considered a declaration of war by Britain on the USSR to be imminent), insisted that the imperialist powers would be compelled to launch an attack on the Soviet Union, since the latter, despite the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy, still constituted a threat to the world capitalist system. In such circumstances, the Left Opposition remained wholeheartedly committed to the defence of the USSR. It had of course made many incisive criticisms of the way the Stalinist bureaucracy had sabotaged the workers’ struggle in Britain and China. Indeed, the disastrous results of Comintern policies in those two countries had been a decisive element in spurring the 1926-7 Opposition to regroup and intervene. But what Trotsky and the United Opposition did not grasp was that Stalinist policy in Britain and China, where the class struggle was directly undermined in favour of cementing an alliance with bourgeois factions ‘friendly’ to the USSR (the trade union bureaucracy in Britain, the Kuomintang in China), marked a qualitative step even in comparison to the CI’s opportunist bungling in Germany in 1923. These events expressed a decisive turn towards the insertion of the Russian state into the world wide power games of capital. From now on, the USSR was to act on the world arena as another contending imperialism, and the defence of the USSR was to become more and more indefensible from the communist point of view, since the USSR’s very reason for existence – to serve as a bastion of the world revolution – had been liquidated.

3. Closely linked to this error was Trotsky’s failure to identify the real spearhead of the counter-revolution. His defence of the USSR was based on a false criterion: not, as it was with the Italian left, on the consideration of its international role and effect, and not even on whether the working class actually retained political power, but on a purely juridical criterion: the retention of nationalised property forms at the centres of the economy and a state monopoly over foreign trade. From this standpoint, Thermidor could only take the form of an overthrow of these juridical forms and a return to classical expressions of private ownership. The real ‘Thermidorian’ forces, therefore, could only be those elements outside the party who were pushing for a return to private (or rather, individual) ownership, such as the kulaks, NEPmen, political economists like Ustryalov, and their most overt points of support within the party, in particular the faction around Bukharin. Stalinism was characterised as a form of centrism, without any real policy of its own, perpetually balancing between the right and the left wings of the party. With his own attachment to the identification between nationalised property forms and socialism, Trotsky was unable to see that the capitalist counter-revolution could establish itself on the basis of state property. This condemned the current he led to misunderstanding the nature of the Stalinist project, and to perpetually ‘warning’ about a return to private property forms which never came (at least not until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and even then only partially). We can see this fatal delay in understanding very clearly in the way the Opposition responded to Stalin’s declaration of the infamous theory of “socialism in one country”.

Socialism in one country and the theory of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’

In the autumn of 1924, in a long and turgid opus entitled Problems of Leninism, Stalin formulated the theory of “socialism in one country”. Basing his argument on a single phrase written by Lenin in 1915, a phrase which could in any case be interpreted in different ways, Stalin broke with a fundamental principle of the communist movement from its inception – that the classless society could only be established on a world wide scale. His innovation made a mockery of the October revolution itself, because as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had never tired of saying, the workers’ insurrection in Russia had appeared as an internationalist response to the imperialist war; and it was, and could only be, the first step towards a world wide proletarian revolution.

The proclamation of socialism in one country was not a mere theoretical revision; it was the open declaration of the counter-revolution. The Bolshevik party as a whole had already been caught in the contradiction of interests between its internationalist principles and the demands of the Russian state, which was increasingly representing the needs of capital against the working class. Stalinism solved this contradiction at a single stroke: henceforth, it would owe loyalty only to the requirements of Russian national capital, and woe to those in the party who still clung to its original proletarian mission.

Two crucial events had enabled the Stalinist faction to show its true intentions so plainly: the defeat of the German revolution in October 1923, and the death of Lenin in January 1924. More than any of the previous reverses in the post-war revolutionary wave, the defeat in Germany in 1923 showed that the retreat of the European proletariat was more than a temporary affair, even if no one at the time could guess just how long the night of the counter-revolution would endure. This result could only strengthen the hand of those for whom the idea of extending the revolution across the globe was not merely a distraction from but an obstacle to the task of building Russia into a serious economic and military power.

As we saw in the last article in this series, Lenin had already initiated a struggle against the rise of Stalinism, and he would certainly not have countenanced the open abandonment of internationalism that the bureaucracy proclaimed with such indecent haste after his death. Certainly Lenin alone would not have been a sufficient barrier to the victory of the counter-revolution. As Bilan wrote in the 1930s, given the objective limitations facing the Russian revolution, his fate as an individual would no doubt have been that of the rest of the opposition: “If he had survived, centrism would have had the same attitude towards Lenin as it took towards the numerous Bolsheviks who paid for their loyalty to the internationalist programme of October 1917 with deportation, prison and exile” (Bilan 18, April-May 1935, p 610, ‘L’Etat Proletarien’). All the same, his death removed a major obstacle to the Stalinist project. Once Lenin was dead, Stalin not only buried his theoretical heritage; he also set about creating the cult of “Leninism”. His notorious “we vow to thee, comrade Lenin” speech at the funeral already set the tone, modelled as it was on the rituals of the Orthodox Church. Symbolically, Trotsky was absent from the funeral. He had been recuperating from illness in the Caucasus, but he also fell for a little manoeuvre of Stalin consisting in misinforming Trotsky about the date of the ceremony. Thus Stalin was able to present himself to all the world as Lenin’s natural successor.

Crucial as Stalin’s declaration was, its full import was not immediately grasped within the Bolshevik party. This was in part because it had been put forward unobtrusively, somewhat buried in an indigestible helping of Stalin’s ‘theoretical’ work. But more importantly, it was because the Bolsheviks were insufficiently armed theoretically to combat this new conception.

We have already noted during the course of this series that confusions between socialism and the state centralisation of bourgeois economic relations had long haunted the workers’ movement, particularly in the period of social democracy; and the revolutionary programmes of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave had by no means exorcised this ghost. But the ascendant tide of revolution had kept the vision of authentic socialism well to the fore, above all the necessity for it to be established on an international basis. In contrast, as the retreat of the world revolution left the Russian outpost high and dry, there was an increasing trend towards theorising the idea that by developing the statified ‘socialist’ sector of its economy, the Soviet Union could take major steps towards building a socialist society. The Italian left, in the same article as the one just cited, noted this tendency in some of Lenin’s later writings: “Lenin’s final articles on cooperation were an expression of the new situation resulting from the defeats suffered by the world proletariat, and it is not at all astonishing that they could be made use of by the falsifiers who came up with the theory of ‘socialism in one country’”.

These ideas were further theorised by the left opposition, particularly Trotsky and Preobrazhensky, in the ‘industrialisation debate’ of the mid-20s. This debate had been provoked by the difficulties encountered by the NEP, which had exposed Russia to the more open manifestations of capitalist crisis, such as unemployment, price instability, and disequilibrium between the different branches of the economy. Trotsky and Preobrazhensky criticised the cautious economic policy of the party apparatus, its failure to adopt any long term plans, its over-reliance on light industry and the spontaneous operation of the market. To rebuild the Soviet economy on a healthy and dynamic basis, they argued, it was necessary to allocate more resources to the development of heavy industry, which also required long term economic planning. Since heavy industry was the core of the state sector, and the state sector was defined as inherently ‘socialist’, industrial growth was identified with progress towards socialism and thus corresponded to the interests of the proletariat. The ‘industrialisers’ of the left opposition were convinced that this process could be kick-started in Russia’s predominantly agrarian economy, not by becoming too dependent on the import of foreign capital and technology, but by a kind of ‘exploitation’ of layers of the peasantry (the richer ones in particular) through taxation or price manipulations. This would generate sufficient capital to finance investment in the state sector and the growth of heavy industry. This process was described as “primitive socialist accumulation”, comparable in its content, if not in its proposed methods, to the period of primitive capitalist accumulation described by Marx in Capital. For Preobrazhensky in particular, “primitive socialist accumulation” was no less than a fundamental law of the transitional economy, and was to be understood as a counter-weight to the operation of the law of value: “Every reader can count on his fingers the factors that counter-act the law of value in our country: the foreign trade monopoly; socialist protectionism; a harsh import plan drawn up in the interests of industrialisation; and non-equivalent exchange with the private economy, which ensures accumulation for the state sector, notwithstanding the highly unfavourable conditions created by its low level of technology. But all of these, given their basis in the unified state economy of the proletariat, are the external means, the outward manifestations of the law of primitive socialist accumulation” (‘Economic Notes III: On the Advantage of a Theoretical Study of the Soviet Economy’, 1926, published in The Crisis of Soviet Industrialisation, a collection of Preobrazhensky’s essays edited by Donald A Filtzer, Macmillan, 1980)

This theory was flawed in two key respects:

• it was a fundamental error to identify the growth of industry with the needs and class interests of the proletariat, and to argue that socialism would arise in a quasi-automatic manner on the basis of a process of accumulation which, though dubbed ‘socialist’, actually had all the essential features of capitalist accumulation, based as it was on the extraction and expanding capitalisation of surplus value. Industry, state-owned or otherwise, does not equal the working class; on the contrary, industrial growth carried out on the foundations of the wage labour relation can only signify the increasing exploitation of the proletariat. This false identification on Trotsky’s part paralleled his identification between the working class and the transitional state which he had theorised during the trade union debate of 1921. Its logic was to leave the proletariat with no justification for defending itself against the demands of the ‘socialist’ sector. And as with the problem of the state, the Italian left fraction in the 1930s was able to show the profound dangers inherent in such an identification. Although at the time it shared some of Trotsky’s illusions that the ‘collectivised’ sector of the economy conferred a proletarian character on the Soviet state, it did not at all agree with Trotsky’s enthusiasm for the industrialisation process per se, insisting that progress towards socialism should be measured not in the rate of growth of constant capital, but by the extent to which production was geared towards the satisfaction of the proletariat’s immediate material needs (prioritising the production of consumer goods rather than producer goods, shorter working day, etc). Taking this argument one step further, we would say that progress towards socialism demands a complete overturning of the logic of the accumulation process;

• secondly, if Russia was able to take decisive steps towards socialism on the basis of its vast peasantry, what was the actual role of the world revolution? With the theory of “primitive socialist accumulation”, the world revolution appears merely as a means of speeding up a process already well underway in a single country, rather than being a sine qua non even for the political survival of a proletarian bastion. In some of his writings, Preobrazhensky comes perilously close to this conclusion, and this was to leave him entirely vulnerable to the demagogy of Stalin’s ‘left turn’ in the late 20s, when the latter appeared to be carrying through the programme of the industrialisers within the party.

Since it was itself carrying these confusions, it was not accidental that the left current around Trotsky did not immediately grasp the full counter-revolutionary significance of Stalin’s declaration.

1925-7: the opposition’s last stand

In fact, the first explicit attack on the theory of socialism in one country came from an unlikely source – Stalin’s former ally Zinoviev. In 1925, the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev fell apart. Its only real unifying factor had been “the struggle against Trotskyism” - as Zinoviev later admitted, this bugbear of “Trotskyism” was really an invention of the apparatus, aimed mainly at preserving the triumvirs’ position in the party machine against the figure who, after Lenin, most obviously embodied the spirit of the October revolution – Leon Trotsky. But as we saw in the last article in this series, the initial stand of the left opposition around Trotsky had been broken because of its inability to answer the charge of “factionalism” thrown at it by the apparatus, a charge backed up by the measures that all the main tendencies in the party had voted for at the 10th Congress in 1921. Faced with the choice of constituting itself into an illegal grouping (such as Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group), or retreating from any organised action within the party, the opposition adopted the latter course. But as the counter-revolutionary policies of the apparatus became more and more overt, those who retained a loyalty to Bolshevism’s internationalist premises - even, as in some cases, a very tenuous one – were compelled to become more overt in their opposition.

The emergence of the opposition around Zinoviev in 1925 was one expression of this, even if Zinoviev’s sudden turn to the left also reflected his anxiety to retain his own personal position within the party and the power base of his party machinery in Leningrad. Naturally enough, Trotsky, who in 1925-26 had gone into a phase of semi-retreat from political life, was highly suspicious of this new opposition, and at first remained largely neutral in the initial exchanges between the Stalinists and the Zinovievists, as for example at the 14th Congress, where the latter admitted that they had been largely mistaken in their diatribes against Trotskyism. Nevertheless, there was a basic element of proletarian clarity in Zinoviev’s criticisms of Stalin – as we have said, he actually denounced the theory of socialism in one country before Trotsky, and began to talk about the danger of state capitalism. And as the bureaucracy strengthened its grip over the party and over the entire working class, and particularly as the catastrophic results of its international policy became apparent, the push towards a common front between the different opposition groupings became more and more urgent.

Despite their misgivings, Trotsky and his followers joined forces with the Zinovievists in the United Opposition in April 1926. The United Opposition also at first comprised Sapranov’s Democratic Centralism group (known as the Decists); indeed Trotsky claimed that “the initiative for the unification came from the Democratic Centralists. The first conference with the Zinovievists took place under the chairmanship of Comrade Sapranov” (‘Our Differences with the Democratic Centralists’, November 11 1928, in The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1928-29, Pathfinder Press 1981). At some point in 1926, however, it appears that the Decists were expelled – supposedly for advocating a new party, although this does not accord with the demands contained in the group’s 1927 platform, which we will return to later1.

Despite its formal agreement not to organise as a fraction, the Opposition of 1926 was obliged to constitute itself as a distinct organisation, with its own clandestine meetings, bodyguards and couriers; and at the same time, it made a far more determined attempt than the 1923 opposition to get its message across, not just to the party leadership, but to the rank and file of the party. Each time it took a step in the direction of forming itself into a definite fraction, however, the party apparatus redoubled its maneouvres, slanders, demotions and expulsions. The first wave of these repressive measures came after the spies of the apparatus exposed an Opposition meeting in the woods outside Moscow in the summer of 1926. The initial response of the Opposition was to reiterate its criticisms of the policies of the regime at home and abroad, and to take its case to the mass of the party’s membership. In September and October, delegations of the Opposition spoke at factory cell meetings throughout the country. The most famous of these was at the Moscow aircraft factory, where Trotsky, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Radek, Sapranov and Smilga defended the Opposition’s standpoint against the heckling and abuse heaped on it by the goons of the apparatus. The response of the Stalinist machinery was even more vicious. It moved to eliminate the leading Oppositionists from their most important posts in the party. Its warnings against the Opposition became more and more explicit, hinting not only at expulsion from the party but at physical elimination. The ex-Oppositionist Larin spoke Stalin’s hidden thoughts at the 15th party conference in October-November 26: “Either the Opposition must be excluded and legally suppressed, or the question will be settled with machine guns in the streets, as the Left Socialist Revolutionaries did in Moscow in 1918” (cited in Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Simon and Schuster, 1960, p 282).

But as we have already said, Trotsky’s Opposition was also shackled by its own fatal flaws: its dogged loyalty to the banning of factions adopted at the 1921 Party Congress and its hesitations in seeing the really counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Following the condemnation of its factory cell demonstrations in October, the Opposition leaders signed a statement admitting that they had violated party discipline and abjuring future “factional” activity. At the plenum of the ECCI in December, the last time that the Opposition was allowed to state its case in the International, Trotsky was again hamstrung by his unwillingness to put the unity of the party into question. As Anton Ciliga put it: “notwithstanding the polemic brilliance of his oratory, Trotsky wrapped his exposition of the debate in too great a prudence and diplomacy. The audience was unable to appreciate its depth, the tragedy of the divergences separating the Opposition from the majority (…) The Opposition – I was struck by this at the time – was not aware of its weakness; it was also to underestimate the magnitude of its defeat and to neglect to draw the lessons from it. Whereas the majority, led by Stalin and Bukharin, manoeuvred to obtain the total exclusion of the Opposition, the latter constantly sought for compromise and amicable arrangements. This timid policy of the Opposition was instrumental, if not in bringing about its defeat, certainly in weakening its resistance” (The Russian Enigma, first published as Au pays du grand mensonge in 1938, first English edition 1940; this edition 1979, p 7-8).

The same pattern repeated itself towards the end of 1927. Stirred into action by the bureaucracy’s fiasco in China, the Opposition formulated its formal platform for the 15th Congress. This attempt was met by a typical manoeuvre of the apparatus. Having obliged the Opposition to resort to a clandestine printing press to produce the platform, the press was raided by the GPU; the latter conveniently discovered that a “Wrangel officer”, in touch with foreign counter-revolutionaries, was involved in the press. Although this “officer” proved to be a GPU agent provocateur, the discredit heaped upon the Opposition was exploited to the maximum. Under increasing pressure, the Opposition decided once again to make a direct appeal to the masses – speaking at various rallies and party meetings, and in particular intervening in the demonstrations celebrating the October revolution (November 1927) with its own banners. At the same time, the Opposition made an attempt finally to raise the issue of Lenin’s testament. In fact it was too little, too late. The mass of workers were descending into political apathy and could make little of the Opposition’s differences with the regime. As Trotsky himself realised against Zinoviev’s short-lived optimism at this juncture, the masses were weary of revolutionary struggle and were more likely to be swayed by Stalin’s promises of socialism in Russia than by any calls for further political upheaval. But in any case, the Opposition was unable to present a clearly distinct revolutionary alternative, a point underlined by the mildness of the banners raised in the November demonstration, which raised slogans such as “down with Ustryalovism” “against a split”, and so on - in other words, stressing the need for “Leninist unity” in the party at a time when Lenin’s party was being annexed to the counter-revolution! Once again, the Stalinists exhibited no such mildness. Their thugs beat up many of the demonstrators on the day, and soon afterwards Trotsky and Zinoviev were summarily expelled from the party. It was the beginning of a spiral of expulsions, exiles, imprisonment, and finally, massacres against the proletarian vestiges of the Bolshevik party.

Most demoralising of all was the effect that the mounting repression had on the morale of the Opposition itself. Almost immediately after the expulsions, the Zinoviev-Trotsky alliance came apart, with the weakest component breaking first: Zinoviev, Kamenev and the majority of their followers capitulated abjectly, confessed their “errors”, and begged to be readmitted into the party. Many of the more right wing Trotskyists also capitulated at this time2.

Having destroyed the left within the party, Stalin soon turned on his allies on the right – the Bukharinists, whose policies were most openly favourable to the private capitalist and the kulak. Facing a series of immediate economic problems, in particular the so-called goods famine, but above all urged forward by the need to develop Russia’s military capacities in a world heading towards new imperialist conflagrations, Stalin announced his “left turn” – a sudden lurch towards rapid industrialisation and the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” – the forced expropriation of the upper and middle peasants.

Stalin’s new turn, accompanied as it was by a campaign against the “rightist danger” in the party, had the effect of further decimating the ranks of the opposition. Those like Preobrazhensky who had laid so much emphasis on industrialisation as the key to advancing towards socialism, were rapidly seduced into the idea that Stalin was objectively carrying of the programme of the left and urged the Trotskyists to return to the party fold. Such was the political fate of the theory of “primitive socialist accumulation”.

The events of 1927-28 clearly marked a turning point. Stalinism had triumphed definitively through the destruction of any opposition forces in the party; there were now no further obstacles to the pursuit of his essential programme - the construction of a war economy on the basis of a more or less integral state capitalism. This effectively spelt the death of the Bolshevik party, its total fusion with the state capitalist bureaucracy. With its next stroke, Stalinism asserted its final domination over the International, and the latter’s complete transformation into an arm of Russian foreign policy. By adopting the theory of socialism in one country at its 6th Congress in August 1928, the CI signed its death warrant as an International just as surely as the Socialist International had done in 1914. This was true even if, as in the period after 1914, the death agony of the individual Communist parties outside Russia was a more drawn-out process, only reaching its end in the mid-30s with the routing of their own left oppositions and the open adoption of a position of national defence in preparation for the second world holocaust.

The break between Trotsky and the communist left

But while the above conclusion may be crystal clear in hindsight, the question was still being hotly debated in the surviving opposition circles. In 1928-9 this largely took the form of a debate between Trotsky and the Democratic Centralists, whose growing influence on his followers can probably be measured by the amount of energy he put into polemicising against their ‘ultra left, sectarian’ errors.

The Decists had existed since 1919 and had consistently criticised the dangers of bureaucratism in party and state. Having been ejected from the United Opposition they presented their own platform to the 15th congress of the party – a crime for which they were immediately expelled from its ranks. According to Miasnikov, writing in the French paper L’Ouvrier Communiste in 1929, this text, which was signed “The Group of Fifteen”3, was not in direct continuity with the Decist group which had preceded it and showed that Sapranov had moved towards the analyses of his Workers’ Group: “In its main points, in its estimation of the nature of the state in the USSR, its ideas about the workers’ state, the programme of the Fifteen is very close to the ideology of the Workers’ Group”.

At first sight however the platform does not differ radically from the stance adopted by the platform of the United Opposition, even if it is perhaps more thoroughgoing in its castigation of the oppressive regime facing the working class in the factories, the growth of unemployment, the loss of all proletarian life in the soviets, the degeneration of the internal party regime and the catastrophic effects of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ on the international level. At the same time it is still situated within the problematic of radical reform, identifying itself with the call for more rapid industrialisation and putting forward a number of measures aimed at regenerating the party and restoring the proletariat’s control over the state and the economy. At no point does it call for a new party or for a direct struggle against the state. What is noticeable however is that the text attempts to go to the root of the problem of the state, reaffirming the marxist critique of the weak side of the state as an instrument of the proletarian revolution and warning of the dangers of the state totally detaching itself from the working class. Moreover, in its treatment of the question of state ownership, it points out that there is nothing inherently socialist about this: “For our state enterprises the sole guarantee against their development in a capitalist direction is the existence of the proletarian dictatorship. Only the fall of this dictatorship, or else its degeneration, can alter the direction of their development. In this sense, they represent a solid base for building socialism. That doesn’t mean that they are already socialist (…) To characterise such forms of industry, where labour power still remains a commodity, as socialism, even as bad socialism, would be to embroider reality, to discredit socialism in the eyes of the workers; it would be to present tasks as well established when they are not yet and pass off the NEP for socialism”. In short, without the political domination of the proletariat, the economy, including its statified components, can only proceed in a capitalist direction, a point that was never clear with Trotsky for whom nationalised property forms could themselves guarantee the proletarian character of the state. Finally, the platform of the Fifteen appears to be much more alert to the imminence of Thermidor. In fact it puts forward the view that the final liquidation of the party by the Stalinist faction would signify the end of any proletarian character to the regime: “The bureaucratisation of the party, the degeneration of its leading elements, the fusion of the party apparatus with the bureaucracy of the government, the reduced influence of the proletarian element of the party, the introduction of the governmental apparatus into the internal struggles of the party – all this shows that the Central Committee has, in its policies, already gone beyond the limits of muzzling the party and is beginning its liquidation, the transformation of the party into an auxiliary apparatus of the state. The execution of this liquidation could mean the end of the proletarian dictatorship in the USSR. The party is the vanguard of and essential arm of the proletarian class struggle. Without it, neither victory, nor the maintenance of the proletarian dictatorship is possible”.

Thus even if the Platform of the Fifteen still appears to underestimate the degree to which capitalism had already triumphed in the USSR, it was far easier for the Decists, or at least a substantial part of them, to draw rapid conclusions from the events of 1927-28: the destruction of the opposition at the hands of Stalin’s state terror signified that the Bolshevik party had become a “stinking corpse”, as the Decist V Smirnov described it, and that there was nothing left to defend in the regime. Certainly this was the view that Trotsky combats in the letter ‘Our Differences with the Democratic Centralists’, in which he writes to the Decist Borodai that “your Kharkov colleagues, from what I am informed, have addressed themselves to the workers with an appeal based upon the false idea that the October revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat are already liquidated. This manifesto, false in essence, has done the greatest harm to the Opposition" . No doubt Trotsky also defined as “harm” the fact that a growing wing of the Opposition was coming round to such conclusions.

In the same way, the Decists were able to grasp that there was nothing socialist in Stalin’s sudden ‘left turn’ and to resist the wave of capitulations that it provoked. But they were by no means left unscathed and these events produced splits in their ranks as well. According to Ciliga and others, Sapranov himself capitulated in 1928, believing that the offensive against the kulaks expressed a turn towards socialist policies. However, there are also indications that he soon concluded that Stalin’s industrialisation programme was state capitalist in nature. Among other things, Miasnikov wrote in L’Ouvrier Communiste in 1929 that Sapranov had been arrested that year, and also announced a regroupment between the Workers’ Group, the Group of Fifteen and remnants of the Workers’ Opposition. Smirnov, on the other hand, lost his bearings in a different way:

“The young Decemist Volodya Smirnov even went so far as to say: ‘there never has been a proletarian revolution, nor a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, there has simply been a ‘popular revolution’ from below and a dictatorship from above. Lenin was never an ideologist of the proletariat. From beginning to end he was an ideologist of the intelligentsia’. These ideas of Smirnov were bound up with the general view that the world was steering straight towards a new social form – state capitalism, with the bureaucracy as the new ruling class. It put on the same level Soviet Russia, Kemalist Turkey, fascist Italy, Germany on the march to Hitlerism, and the America of Hoover-Roosevelt. ‘Communism is an extremist fascism, fascism is a moderate Communism’, he wrote in his article ‘Comfascism’. That conception left the forces and perspectives of socialism somewhat in the shade. The majority of the Decist fraction, Davidov, Shapiro, etc considered that the young Smirnov’s heresy had gone beyond all bounds, and he was expelled from the group amid uproar” (Ciliga, op cit, p 280-282). Ciliga added that it was not hard to see Smirnov’s idea of a ‘new class’ as a precursor of Burnham; likewise his view of Lenin as the ideologist of the intelligentsia was later taken up by the council communists. What may have begun as a valuable insight – the universal scope of state capitalism in the epoch of capitalist decadence – had in the circumstances of defeat and confusion become a route towards the abandonment of marxism.

In a similar way, those in the milieu of the Russian communist left who called for the immediate formation of a new party, while motivated by correct concerns, had lost sight of the realities of the period. A new party could not be created by an act of will in a period of deepening defeat for the world proletariat. What was required above all was the formation of left fractions capable of preparing the programmatic bases for a new party when the conditions of the international class struggle permitted it; but this was a conclusion that only the Italian left was able to draw with any real consistency.

All this testifies to the extreme difficulties facing the opposition groups at the end of the 20s, who were more and more forced to develop their analyses inside the jails of the GPU, which ironically remained as oases of political debate in a country that was being silenced by an unprecedented state terror. But through the whole trauma of capitulations and splits, a definite process of convergence was taking place around the clearest positions of the communist left, involving the Decists, surviving members of the Workers’ Group and the Workers’ Opposition, and the ‘intransigents’ of the Trotskyist opposition. Ciliga himself belonged to the extreme left of the Trotskyist opposition and described his break with Trotsky in the summer of 1932, after receiving an important programmatic text by Trotsky, entitled ‘The problems of the development of the USSR: outline of a programme for the International Left Opposition as regards the Russian question’: “Since 1930 it [the left wing of the Trotskyist current] had been waiting for its leader to speak up openly, and declare that the present Soviet state was not a workers’ state. Now, in the very first chapter of his programme, Trotsky clearly defined it as a ‘proletarian state. A further defeat awaited the left wing in the treatment of the Five Year Plan: its socialist character, the socialist character of its aims and even of its methods were vigorously asserted in the programme (…) It was henceforward an idle hope to expect Trotsky ever to distinguish between bureaucracy and proletariat, between state capitalism and socialism. Those among the left ‘negators’ who could not possibly see any socialism in what was being built up in Russia had no other course open to them than to break with Trotsky and leave the Trotskyist collective. About ten – among them myself – took a decision to that effect (…) Thus, having shared in the ideological life and in the struggles of the Russian Opposition, I ended – as so many others before me and after me – with the following conclusion: Trotsky and his supporters are too closely linked with the bureaucratic regime of the USSR to be able to conduct the struggle against this regime to its final consequences (…) to him, the task of the opposition was to improve, not to destroy the bureaucratic system, to fight against the ‘exaggeration of privileges’ and the extreme inequalities of the standards of life’ – not to fight against privileges and inequalities in general….

‘Bureaucratic or proletarian opposition?’ was the title I gave to the article in which, in prison, I expressed my new attitude towards Trotskyism. Henceforward I belonged to the camp of the Russian extreme left wing opposition: ‘Democratic Centralism’, ‘Workers’ Opposition’, ‘Workers’ Group’.

What separated the opposition from Trotskyism was not only in the way of judging the regime and of understanding the present problems; it was, before all, the way in which the part played in the revolution by the proletariat was being considered. To the Trotskyists it was the party, to the extreme left wing it was the working class which was the mover of the revolution. The struggle between Stalin and Trotsky concerned party politics and the directing personnel of the party; to one as to the other the proletariat was but a passive object. The groups of the extreme left wing communists, on the other hand, were above all interested in the actual conditions of the working class and the part played by it, in what it actually was in Soviet society and what it should be in a society which sincerely set itself the task of building socialism. The ideas and the political life of these groups opened up new perspectives to me and confronted me with problems unknown to the Trotskyist opposition; how should the proletariat set about conquering the means of production taken from the bourgeoisie, efficaciously to control both party and government, to establish a workers’ democracy and safeguard the revolution from bureaucratic degeneracy” (ibid, p 271).

Ciliga’s conclusions may have had a certain councilist flavour and in later years he too was to become disillusioned with marxism. Nonetheless he was describing a real process of proletarian clarification in the most difficult of conditions. Of course it is particularly tragic that much of the fruits of this process have been lost and that it they had no immediate impact on the demoralised Russian proletariat. Some indeed would dismiss these efforts as irrelevant and testimony to the sectarian and abstentionist nature of the communist left. But revolutionaries work on the scale of history and the struggle of the Russian left communists to understand the terrible defeat that had befallen them retains a theoretical importance that is still very much relevant to the work of revolutionaries today. And it is worth pondering the negative significance of the fact that it was not the theses of the intransigents, but Trotsky’s attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, to find something proletarian in the Stalinist regime, that were to predominate in the opposition movement outside Russia. His failure to recognise the completion of Thermidor was to have disastrous consequences, contributing to the ultimate betrayal of the Trotskyist current through the ideology of ‘defence of the USSR’ in the second world war.

With the eventual silencing of the Russian communist left, the search to solve the ‘Russian enigma’ during the 30s and 40s was essentially taken up by revolutionaries outside the USSR. It is to their debates and analyses that we will turn in the next article in this series.

CDW

In this article, we criticise anarchism because it begins from “abstract eternal principles”. You reply that “Marx appears to us today as a libertarian, a moralist of freedom. He criticises a capitalism that denies the personality, and the freedom of the individual. A ‘marxist’ must defend liberty and respect the liberty of others”. And indeed there can be no real communism which is not driven by the ideal of freedom, by the will to rid society of all forms of oppression, of the whole weight of corruption and inhumanity produced by social relations based on the exploitation of man by man. Marx and Engels made this quite explicit, denouncing human alienation and the scale it had reached under capitalism, defining communism as the realm of freedom, an association of free and equal producers where the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Communist Manifesto) (…).

However, according to Marxism, the revolution will be carried out not in the name of individual freedom but as the emancipation of a class. How can this contradiction be resolved? The first element of this resolution is that the individual is not conceived as an abstract entity, which would leave intact the opposition of individual interests, but as the concrete manifestation of a social condition in which each individual sees the other as a reflection of himself. In contrast to primitive communism, the individual will no longer be subordinated to the community, nor to the majority as in bourgeois democracy. Communism is the resolution of the conflict between particular interest and general interest.

You know how hostile Marx and Engels were to the mouthing of empty phrases about “duty, rights, truth, morality, justice” etc. Why was this? Because these notions are not in any way the roots of human action. While human will and consciousness indeed play a considerable role, human beings are above all driven to act under the impulsion of material necessity. Sentiments about justice and equality animated the men of the French revolution, but this was a profoundly mystified form of consciousness for those who were about to consolidate a new society of exploitation. And the more fiery their phrases, the more sordid reality proved to be. Thus, the notions of freedom and equality do not have the same content nor do they occupy the same place for communists. Proletarian struggles and revolutions show concretely how moral values have been profoundly modified. What characterises the workers when they affirm themselves as a class is solidarity, the taste for combat, and consciousness. Thus we cannot go along with you in your reading of Marx here.

Anarchism has borrowed a lot from various other socialist schools and from marxism in particular. But what characterises it, what forms its basis, is the speculative method which it took over from the French materialists of the 18th century. According to this conception, if society is unjust it is because it does not conform to human nature. We can see what insoluble problems this position lands us in. Because nothing is more variable than this human nature. Man acts on external nature and in doing so transforms his own nature. Man is a rational, sensitive being, said the French materialists. But the fact is that man reasons and feels differently in different historical epochs and in different social classes. All the previous schools of thought up to Feuerbach, from the most moderate to the most radical, began from this notion of human nature and from concepts derived from it, such as education, the rights of man, the absolute idea, human passions, the human essence. Even those who saw history as a process regulated by laws, like Saint Simon and Hegel, always ended up appealing to some abstract eternal principle.

With Marx and the emergence of the modern proletariat we see things turned the right way round. It is not human nature that explains the historic movement, but the historic movement which fashions human nature in various ways. And this materialist conception is the only one which places itself firmly on the terrain of the class struggle. Anarchism by contrast has never managed to break from the speculative method and what it draws on from past philosophies is always their most idealist elements. What better abstraction could there be than the “Ego and its Own” that Stirner developed from his critique of Feuerbach! It was by imitating Kant that Proudhon arrived at the notion of “absolute liberty”, and then went on to forge beautiful abstractions at the level of economics - “constituted value” - and politics - “the free contract”. To the abstract principle of “liberty”, Bakunin, on the basis of what he had understood from Hegel, added that of “equality”. What has this in common with the historical materialism that you claim to defend?

With abstract contrasts like liberty/authority, federalism/centralism, not only do you lose sight of the historical movement and the material needs which are its basis, but you also end up turning the real, concrete contrast, between classes themselves, into an abstraction that can be corrected, limited, replaced by other abstractions, such as “Humanity” for example. This was also the method of “real socialism” in “The French socialist and communist literature (…) ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other; he felt conscious of having overcome ‘French onesidedness’ and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy” (Communist Manifesto). In our view you fall into this kind of trap when you talk about “a position of principle which goes beyond the struggle of the proletariat” and which applies to primitive tribes, mothers and prostitutes.

Many anarchists were genuine working class militants, but because of their ideology they were constantly drawn towards abandoning the class terrain as soon as the proletariat was defeated or disappeared momentarily from the social scene. For anarchism, in the final analysis it is not the proletariat that is the revolutionary subject, but the people in general, which is yet another abstract, unreal notion. But what is behind the world ‘people’, which has lost all meaning in bourgeois society where classes have a much more distinct outline? Nothing other than the idealised petty bourgeois individual, an individual who oscillates between the two historic classes, sometimes towards the bourgeoisie, sometimes towards the proletariat, who would like to reconcile the classes, find an area of agreement, a slogan for a common struggle. Did Marx himself not say that all individuals in this society suffer from alienation? No doubt you know what conclusion he drew from this fact.[1] [54] This was the origin for the demand for “the social and economic equalisation of classes” raised by Bakunin, and it was also why Proudhon and Stirner concluded their theses with a defence of small-scale property. In the genesis of anarchism you have the standpoint of the worker who has just been proletarianised and who rejects his new status with every fibre of his being. Having only just emerged from the peasantry or the artisans, often half-way between worker and artisan (like the Jura watchmakers for example[2] [55]), these workers expressed a regret for the past faced with the drama of their descent into the condition of the working class. Their social aspiration was to turn the wheel of history backwards. At the heart of this conception was a nostalgia for small-scale property. This is why, following Marx, we analyse anarchism as the expression of the penetration of petty-bourgeois ideology into the ranks of the proletariat. The rejection of proletarianisation remains central to the anarchist movement today which reflects in general the enormous pressure on the proletariat coming from the intermediate strata which surround it, and from which it also derives to some extent. For these heterogeneous petty-bourgeois strata, lacking in any historical perspective, the dominant aspect, alongside despair and plaintive laments, is the spirit of every man for himself, of high self-opinion, impatience and immediatism, radical revolt that leads nowhere. These kinds of behaviour and ideology do have an influence on the proletariat, weakening its sense of solidarity and collective identity.

The healthiest components of anarchism, those who have been most involved in the workers’ movement, have always been obliged to demarcate themselves from those who have taken the logic of individualism to its conclusions. But without being able to get to the roots of the problem: “It is however necessary to demarcate ourselves resolutely from the purely individualist anarchists who see the strengthening and egoistic triumph of the person as the only way of negating the state and authority, and who reject socialism itself as well as any general organisation of society as a form of oppression of a self which can have no other foundation than itself” (…).[3] [56]

It is the same for democracy and dictatorship as it is for truth and liberty: taken as abstract principles they lose all meaning. These notions also have a class content: there is bourgeois dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is bourgeois democracy and workers’ democracy. We disagree with you when you write: “The phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ no longer means anything today: the words have covered the facts. Facts have changed the meaning of the words”. The word “communism” has also been dragged through the mud. Should we therefore abandon it? The whole question lies in defining what we understand by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As you will see from reading our press, we share many of the criticisms that Rosa Luxemburg directed at the Bolsheviks and we defend workers’ democracy in the struggle and in the revolution.[4] [57] Before discussing all the questions posed by the Russian experience, we have to begin with Marx’s definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For him the term meant the political regime established by the working class after the insurrection, and it implied that the proletariat was the only class that could carry through the transformation of society in the direction of communism. Therefore it had to guard its autonomy, its power and its weapons jealously vis-à-vis all other classes. It also implied that the proletariat must firmly suppress any attempt to re-establish the old order. For us the dictatorship of the proletariat is the most complete democracy for the proletariat and all the non-exploiting classes. The lessons of the Commune were confirmed and deepened by the emergence of workers’ councils and the 1917 insurrection. The proletarian revolution is indeed “a series of phases, each one engendering the next” as you say, quoting Pannekoek. The first phase is the mass strike which poses the problem of the internationalisation of struggles and which reaches its summit with the appearance of the councils. The second phase is characterised by a situation of dual power, which is resolved by the insurrection, the destruction of the bourgeois state and the unification of the power of the workers’ councils on a world scale. The third phase is the transition towards communism, the abolition of classes and the withering away of the semi-state which inevitably arises as long as classes still exist. In what sense can this sequence correspond to a bourgeois revolution? Because, according to Marx and the marxists, the political factor is still dominant? The slogan “all power to the soviets” launched by the working class in 1917 provides the most concrete demonstration of the primacy of politics in the proletarian revolution. Inversely, the occupation of the factories in Italy in 1920, the disastrous experience in Spain 1936, clearly show the impotence of the proletariat as long as it does not hold political power. In our view what was shown to be bankrupt here was self-management, not the dictatorship of the proletariat. A first difference with the bourgeois revolution can be seen here. The transition towards capitalism took place inside feudal society; the seizure of political power by the bourgeoisie was only the culmination of this transition. The proletarian revolution is quite different. Here the councilists commit the most classic kind of teleological error. According to them, the end of the 1920s saw the triumph of state capitalism in Russia, therefore the Russian revolution must have been bourgeois from the start.

The idealist method of anarchism is trapped in such inextricable contradictions that many anarchists have been forced to break with it at moments when the proletariat affirmed itself as a force to be reckoned with. Or else they had to twist the whole sacrosanct dogma. Thus in September 1919, in the midst of the revolutionary wave, Erich Muhsam[5] [58] wrote: “The theoretical and practical theses of Lenin on the accomplishment of the revolution and the communist tasks of the proletariat have given a new basis to our action There are no more insurmountable obstacles to the unification of the entire revolutionary proletariat. It’s true that the anarchist communists have had to give ground on the most important disagreement between the two great tendencies in socialism: they have had to renounce Bakunin’s negative attitude towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and on this point rally to the opinion of Marx”.[6] [59] Thus many anarchists joined the camp of communism. But the counter-revolution was a terrible test which saw numerous militants melt away like snow in the sun, and a profound distortion of communist principles. Many were those who returned to their old loves; this included a lot of anarchists, but also many communists who went back to the social democratic fold. Only the communist left was able to draw the lessons of the defeat while remaining loyal to Red October, and capable of distinguishing those elements in the experience of the revolution which belonged to a past period from those which remained very much alive for today and tomorrow. Here the combat of Gorter and Miasnikov was exemplary.[7] [60]

You take up the theses of council communism from its main animator, Pannekoek. In The Dutch Left and the last issue of our International Review (no.101, “The council communists faced with the war in Spain”) you can acquaint yourselves with our criticisms of this current. But it was clearly an authentic component of the communist left. It remained faithful to proletarian internationalism during the Second World War whereas many anarchists and the whole Trotskyist current took the side of the allied imperialist camp, some even taking part in the resistance. Pannekoek remained a real Marxist when, in Lenin as Philosopher, he criticised the mechanistic conception which appears in Materialism and Empirio-criticism with the theory of reflection and you are right to say that Lenin “forgets the historical materialism of Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach”. But Pannekoek himself left the terrain of historical materialism when, on the basis of theoretical error which he correctly detected in Lenin, he deduced from this the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution. In our International Review we have republished a detailed reply to Pannekoek’s text (which appeared somewhat after the event in 1938[8] [61]), by the Gauche Communiste de France. For us it is a serious error to confuse a proletarian revolution that has degenerated with a bourgeois revolution. This was never the position of Gorter and Miasnikov, nor was it that of Pannekoek at the beginning. For all militants, the overwhelming reality of the facts demonstrated without any possible doubt the proletarian nature of the revolutionary wave which gave rise to workers’ councils throughout central and eastern Europe (…).

Gorter and Miasnikov,[9] [62] and Pannekoek to begin with, had the same attitude towards this degeneration: like true communists, they fought it to the end, without repudiating the proletarian revolution nor concluding over-hastily that the Bolshevik party had passed over to the bourgeois camp. The only responsible attitude is to fight the party’s opportunist course as a Fraction within it, to go on fighting even after being excluded, and until facts demonstrate incontrovertibly that the party has adopted the interests of capital. Only this attitude can save the original revolutionary programme and enrich it, to win over to its cause a number of militants, and to learn the lessons of defeat. Although he abandoned it later, Pannekoek adopted this attitude at first, following in this the example of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg confronted with the betrayal of the Social-Democracy in 1914.

We are not Leninists,[10] [63] but we come from Lenin’s tradition, especially as far as his unyielding internationalism at the outbreak of World War I is concerned. The Bolsheviks, and Rosa Luxemburg’s current to which Pannekoek belonged, fought against centrism and opportunism within the Social-Democracy before the war, and in doing so were an international and historical phenomenon of the greatest importance. We find the same tradition within the Left of the Communist International; we find it passed down from one generation to the next, and in much more difficult conditions, to the present day. The most creative currents, those who have bequeathed us the richest lessons, are those that remained firm on the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution, and which were able to break with Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which quickly sank into opportunism.[11] [64] You are right to bring up the existence of a centrist current, represented by Kautsky, within the pre-war Social-Democracy. But for us, centrism is only a variant on opportunism. Moreover, the fact that Lenin was slower than Luxemburg in identifying Kautsky’s centrism does not contradict the Bolsheviks’ membership of the Second International’s marxist current.

You write: “Lenin’s conception of an active minority of professional revolutionaries is opposed by Otto Ruhle, an anti-authoritarian marxist excluded from the KAPD on Moscow’s orders…”; for us, this passage contains two inaccuracies. The Communist International intervened on two organisational problems: the problem of Ruhle and other elements closer to revolutionary syndicalism than marxism, and that of Wolffheim and Laufenberg’s “National Bolshevik” current. But on both questions, the KAPD was in complete agreement with the CI. Pannekoek was the first to argue for the expulsion of the Hamburgers, whose anti-Semitic leanings were unacceptable. His attitude was radically different from Ruhle’s, and he adopted a clear party position when, with the rest of the KAPD, he considered himself a member in every sense of the CI, the symbol of internationalism and the world revolution. And in line with the party spirit, the KAPD was to struggle against the rise of opportunism within the CI, for the victory of its own positions, rather than deserting the combat.

The “orders from Moscow” that you mention are part of a myth, as is Ruhle’s description of the Bolshevik party which you adopt. The party was criss-crossed by innumerable discussions and crises which bear witness to its rich internal life. The elitist conception is completely foreign to Lenin, and the idea of a “professional revolutionary” is a contradiction in terms. What was important for the Bolshevik fraction was to fight the Mensheviks’ dilettantism and conceptions based on personal affinity. It demanded that the Party’s affairs be conducted with a minimum of coherence and seriousness. Substitutionism is another problem, and Lenin does indeed sometimes fall into Jacobin errors. We have criticised this conception at length in our press. Suffice it to say here that this was a conception shared by the all the marxists of the Second International, including Rosa Luxemburg.[12] [65]

This brings us to your second inaccuracy. You say that Lenin’s envisaged the Party as an “active minority”. Now, you can heap every sin in the world on Lenin’s head, but not this: the notion of the “active minority” belongs to anarchism. Because anarchism is not based on historical materialism, which recognises the proletariat’s historic mission, but on the revolt of the oppressed masses against authority, it needs an enlightened minority to direct this heterogeneous mass towards the realm of absolute freedom. Just as the workers’ movement was breaking with the period of secret societies, Bakunin’s International Alliance for Socialist Democracy upheld the conception of an enlightened conspiratorial elite. For marxism, the proletariat in freeing itself will emancipate the whole of humanity, whereas for anarchism it is humanity that uses the proletarian struggle as a means to emancipate itself. For marxism, the revolutionary vanguard is the most conscious fraction of the proletariat, a part of the whole; for anarchism, the “active minority” transcends the class, expressing the “superior” interests of humanity seen as an abstract entity. This conception is expressed explicitly by Kropotkin and Malatesta, and summarised well by Max Nettlau: “Knowing the masses’ authoritarian habits, [Kropotkin] thought that the masses needed to be infiltrated and given an impetus by libertarian militants such as the Alliance within the International”.[13] [66] You point out Bakunin’s Jacobin failings, so you know very well how hierarchically organised the Alliance was. It may have taken on different forms, but the theory of the “active minority” has remained a constant characteristic of anarchism. Once again, this conception sees the revolution as the work, not of a conscious class but of elementary forces, the most disinherited layers of society – poor peasants, the jobless, etc. – and of this enlightened elite which is to infiltrate the organs of the revolution to give them an impetus in the right direction; this elite is completely external to the proletariat, it is based on nothing other than “eternal principles”. This has nothing to do with the myriad links between the communists and the working class, which made the former a collective secretion of the latter, and which found expression in the open and frank political struggles within both the workers’ councils and the communist parties during the revolutionary wave. In the anarchist vision, two kinds of organisation come together: an enlightened minority which hides its positions and objectives – here it falls into monolithism and is deprived of the collective control and elaboration of positions by the general assembly of its militants – and a large and open organisation, where every group and individual is “free and autonomous” and obliged to accept no responsibility for its actions or positions. This conception explains why Muhsam and Landauer were prepared to cohabit with the worst opportunists during the Bavarian Council Republic. Political confrontation, collective militant responsibility, which make it possible to correct the organisation’s mistakes and to allow a minority position to triumph when it turns out to be correct, and to gather together on a clear basis the forces ready to resist the organisation’s degeneration – all these healthy organisational foundations are rejected by anarchism. This organisational conception of the “active minority” is at the antipodes of the anti-hierarchical ideas, the “organic” centralisation, the intense political life, which characterise marxist organisations (…).

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Presentation

This article is the first part of a study published in the review Bilan in 1934, by the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party. The study’s aim was to “better penetrate the meaning of the crises which have periodically shaken the whole capitalist apparatus, and in conclusion to try to characterise and define as precisely as possible the era of definitive decadence which capitalism fills with the bloody upheavals of its death-agony”.

The intention was to update and deepen the classic marxist analysis, in order to understand why capitalism is condemned to cyclical crises of production, and why with the 20th century and the progressive saturation of the world market, it had entered into another phase: the phase of irreversible decadence. The cyclical crises did not disappear, but gave way to a phenomenon that was at once more serious and more profound: the historic crisis of the capitalist system, a situation of permanent contradiction that sharpened with time, between capitalist social relations and the development of the productive forces. The capitalist form of production had become not only a barrier to progress, but a threat to the very survival of humanity. Mitchell’s1 study returns to the foundations of the marxist analysis of profit and the accumulation of capital. It shows the continuity between the analyses of Marx and those of Rosa Luxemburg who, in The accumulation of capital, explained capitalism’s tendency towards ever more deadly convulsions, and the historic limits of a system which has entered an era of “crises, wars, and revolutions”2.

Mitchell’s work of updating and deepening remains entirely valid in the present period. Bilan could not imagine today’s dimension of debt, financial speculation, currency manipulation, company mergers and concentration. Nonetheless, this analysis provides all the foundations for understanding their mechanisms. This document thus allows us to restate the foundations of the analyses developed in the article on “The new economy” published in this issue; they will be clearer still with the second part of the study, which will be published in the next issue of the International Review: “The analysis of the general crisis of decadent imperialism”.

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The marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production aims to deal essentially with the following points:

1. the critique of the remains of feudal and pre-capitalist modes of production and exchange;

2. the need to replace these backward forms by the more progressive capitalist form;

3. the demonstration of the capitalist mode of production’s progressive nature, by revealing the positive aspect and social usefulness of the laws that rule its development;

4. the examination, from the standpoint of a socialist critique, of these same laws’ negative aspect and their contradictory and destructive action, leading the evolution of capitalism into a dead end;

5. the demonstration that the capitalist forms of appropriation in the end form a hindrance to the full flourishing of production, and that consequently the mode of production creates an ever more intolerable class situation, expressed in an increasingly profound rift between the CAPITALISTS, ever richer and less numerous, and the propertyless WAGE-EARNERS, ever more numerous and more wretched;

6. finally, the recognition that the immense productive forces developed by the capitalist mode of production can only flourish harmoniously in a society organised by the only class that expresses no particular caste interest: the PROLETARIAT.

In this study, we will not analyse in depth the organic evolution of capitalism’s ascendant phase. We will limit ourselves to following the dialectical process of its internal forces, the better to penetrate the significance of the crises which have periodically shaken the whole capitalist productive apparatus. Finally, we will try to define as precisely as possible capitalism’s era of definitive decadence, in which it is being shaken by the bloody upheavals of its death-agony.

We will also examine how the decomposition of the pre-capitalist economies – feudalism, craft production, the peasant community – creates the conditions for the extension of the market for capitalist commodities.

Capitalist production satisfies the demand for profit, not human need

Let us summarise the essential preconditions for capitalist production.

1. The existence of COMMODITIES, in other words of products which, before they can be considered as USE VALUE according to their social utility, appear in a relationship of exchange with other use values of different kinds, that is to say as EXCHANGE VALUE. The real common measure of commodities is labour, and their exchange value is determined by the labour time socially necessary for their production.
2. Commodities are not exchanged DIRECTLY, but through the intermediary of a CONVENTIONAL universal commodity which expresses all their values, the commodity MONEY.
3. The existence of a commodity with a particular characteristic – LABOUR POWER – which is the proletarian’s only property and which capitalism, sole owner of the means of production and subsistence, buys on the labour market like any other commodity at its VALUE, in other words its cost of production or the price of “maintaining” the proletarian’s life energy. But whereas the consumption of other commodities creates no increase in their value, labour power on the contrary procures for the capitalist who has bought it, and is therefore its owner and can dispose of it as he will, a value greater than its cost, provided that he makes the proletarian work longer than is necessary to produce the strict minimum vital for his subsistence.

It is this SURPLUS VALUE equivalent to his SURPLUS LABOUR that the proletarian is obliged to give the capitalist for free, by virtue of the fact that he sells his labour power “freely” and contractually. This is what constitutes the capitalist’s PROFIT. This is not therefore something abstract, a fiction, but LIVING LABOUR.

We apologise for this insistence on what is after all the ABC of marxist economic theory. If we do so, it is because we must not lose sight of the fact that all the economic and political problems that capitalism confronts (and in a period of crisis, these are numerous and complex) all boil down to this central objective: how to produce the MAXIMUM of SURPLUS VALUE. Capitalism cares not a jot for production for the needs of humanity, for the its consumption and its vital needs. ONE CONSUMPTION ALONE excites its interest and passion, stimulates its energy and its will, gives it reason to exist: the CONSUMPTION OF LABOUR POWER!

Capitalism uses this labour power to obtain the highest return possible, corresponding to the greatest quantity of labour power possible. But this is not all: it must also raise to the maximum the ratio of free to paid labour, the ratio of profit to the wages and capital employed, the RATE OF SURPLUS VALUE. The capitalist achieves his ends, on the one hand by increasing total labour, by lengthening the working day and intensifying working practice, and on the other by paying for labour power as cheaply as possible (even below its value), thanks above all to the development of labour productivity which lowers the cost of goods of primary necessity and subsistence. Capitalism of its own free will obviously does not allow the worker to buy more products thanks to the fall in prices Wages always fluctuate around the axis of the value of labour power, which is equivalent to those things strictly indispensable to its reproduction: the movement of the value of wages above or below this value evolves parallel to the fluctuations in the balance of forces between capitalists and proletarians.

From what precedes, it follows that the quantity of surplus value is a function not of the TOTAL capital employed, but only of the part devoted to the purchase of labour power, or VARIABLE CAPITAL. This is why the capitalist tends to make the MINIMUM of TOTAL CAPITAL produce the MAXIMUM of SURPLUS VALUE, but as we will see when we analyse accumulation, this tendency is countered by a law that acts in the opposite direction and leads to a fall in the rate of profit.

When we consider total capital, or the capital invested in capitalist production – let us say for one year – we must consider it, not as an expression of the concrete, material form of things, of their use value, but as representing commodities, exchange value. This being the case, the value of the annual product is made up:

1. of consumed constant capital, that is to say the means of production that have been worn out, and raw materials absorbed: these two elements express past labour, that has already been consumed, materialised, during previous periods of production;

2. of variable capital and surplus value representing new, living labour consumed during the year.

This synthetic value, as it appears in the total product, is found in the unitary product: the value of a table, for example, is the sum of the value equivalent to the wear of the machine that produced it, plus the value of the raw material, and of the labour incorporated in it. The product should not therefore be considered as expressing exclusively either constant capital, variable capital, or surplus value.

Variable capital and surplus value form the revenue that springs from the sphere of production (since we have not here considered the extra-capitalist production of the peasants or craftsmen, etc., we do not include their revenue either).

The proletariat’s revenue is the wage fund. The bourgeoisie’s revenue is the mass of surplus value, of profit (we will not analyse here the division of surplus value within the capitalist class, into industrial profit, commercial profit, banking profit and money rent). Thus determined, the revenue from the capitalist sphere fixes the limits of individual consumption for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. However, it is important to emphasise that the capitalists’ consumption is only limited by the possibilities of the production of surplus value, whereas the workers’ consumption is strictly a function of the necessities of this same production of surplus value. Hence, there is a fundamental antagonism at the basis of the division of total revenue, which engenders all the others. To those who say that the workers need only produce in order to consume, or that since their needs are unlimited they are always below the possibilities of production, we reply with the words of Marx: “what the workers produce in fact is surplus value: as long as they produce it, they can consume, but as soon as production stops, consumption stops likewise. It is not true that they are able to consume because they produce the equivalent of their consumption”. He says, moreover: “The workers must always be over-producers (surplus value), and produce beyond their ‘needs’ in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs”.

But for the capitalist, it is not enough to appropriate surplus value, he cannot content himself with despoiling the worker of a part of the fruits of his labour; he must be able to realise this surplus value, transform it into money by selling the product that contains it, at its value.

Sale conditions the renewal of production: it allows the capitalist to replace the elements of capital used up in the process that has just terminated; he has to replace worn out equipment, buy new raw materials, pay the workforce. But from the capitalist viewpoint, these elements are considered not in their material form as a similar quantity of use values, as the same quantity of production to be reincorporated into the productive process, but as exchange value, as capital reinvested in production at its old level (ignoring the new accumulated value) in order to maintain at least the same level of profit as previously. To begin the cycle again, in order to produce new surplus value remains the capitalist’s supreme objective.

If production cannot be entirely realised, or if it is realised below its value, then the exploitation of the worker has earned little or nothing for the capitalist, because the free labour has not been concretised in money, and then converted into new capital capable of producing surplus value. The fact that consumable products have nonetheless been produced leaves the capitalist completely indifferent, even if the working class lacks for essentials. If we envisage the possibility of a failure to sell, it is precisely because the capitalist process of production is divided into two phases: production and sale. Although these two phases form a unity, and are closely inter-dependent, they take place quite separately. Thus the capitalist, far from dominating the market, is on the contrary completely subjected to it. Not only is sale separate from production, but the subsequent purchase is separate from the sale; in other words, the vendor of a commodity is not necessarily and at the same time the buyer of another commodity. In the capitalist economy, trade in commodities does not mean their direct exchange: all commodities, before they arrive at their definitive destination, must metamorphose into money, and this transformation is the most important phase in their circulation.

The first possibility of crises therefore springs from the differentiation between on the one hand, production and sale, and on the other between sale and purchase, whence the necessity for the commodity to be metamorphosed first into money, then from money to commodity, and this on the basis of a production that starts from capital-money to end up as money-capital.

Here then, capitalism finds itself confronted with the problem of the realisation of production. What are the conditions for its solution? Firstly, in normal conditions the fraction of the product’s value that embodies constant capital can be sold within the capitalist sphere itself, through an internal exchange which conditions the renewal of production. The fraction representing variable capital is purchased by the workers, thanks to the wages paid them by the capitalist, and strictly within the limits that we have pointed out, since the price of labour power gravitates around its value: this is the only part of the total product whose realisation, and whose market, are assured by the financing of capitalism itself. There remains surplus value. We could of course envisage the possibility that the bourgeoisie devotes all of this to its personal consumption, although for this to happen the product would first have to have been exchanged for money (we dismiss the possibility that individual expenses could be paid with already hoarded money), since capitalism cannot consume its own production. But if the bourgeoisie behaved like this, if it did no more than enjoy the fruits of the surplus product that it takes from the proletariat, if it limited itself to a simple, rather than enlarged reproduction, thus guaranteeing itself a peaceful and carefree existence, then it would be no different from previous ruling classes, except in its forms of domination. The structure of slave society prevented any technical development and maintained production at a level which perfectly satisfied the slave-owner, whose needs were amply met by the slaves. Similarly, the feudal lord, in exchange for the protection he gave the serf, received from the latter the produce of his extra work and thus rid himself of the concerns of production, the market being limited to a narrow and inelastic range of exchanges.

Under the impetus of the development of a mercantile economy, capitalism’s historic task was precisely to sweep away these sordid, stagnant societies. The expropriation of the producers created the labour market and opened the valves of surplus value for a mercantile capital transformed into industrial capital. A productive fever gripped the whole social body. Spurred on by competition, capital attracted capital. The productive forces and production grew geometrically, and capitalist accumulation reached its apogee during the last third of the 19th century with the flourishing of “free trade”.

History thus demonstrates that the bourgeoisie, taken as a whole, cannot be content with consuming the whole of the surplus value. On the contrary, its eager search for profit encouraged the bourgeoisie to set aside the greater part of the surplus value and – since profit attracts profit as the magnet attracts iron – to transform it into CAPITAL. Production continued to expand, competition stimulating its movement and presupposing technical improvement.

The demands of accumulation transformed the realisation of surplus value into a stumbling block to the realisation of the total product. While the realisation of the part reserved for consumption poses no problems (at least in theory), there nonetheless remains the surplus value reserved for accumulation. This cannot be absorbed by the proletarians, since their purchasing power is limited to their own wages. Can we suppose that it could be absorbed by exchange among the capitalists and within the capitalist sphere, and that this exchange would be sufficient to extend production?

Such a solution is evidently absurd in the end, since as Marx points out: “capitalist production supposes, not the possession of more and more goods, but the appropriation of value, money, abstract wealth”. The extension of production is a function of the accumulation of this abstract wealth; the capitalist does not produce for the pleasure of producing, for the pleasure of accumulating means of production and consumption, or of “stuffing” more and more workers, but because production engenders free labour, surplus value which accumulates, and grows more the more it is transformed into capital. Marx adds: “If we say that the capitalists need only exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves, then we forget the whole character of capitalist production, since it is also necessary to valorise capital, and not to consume it”.

We thus find ourselves at the heart of the problem which is constantly and inevitably posed to the capitalist class as a whole: that of selling outside the capitalist market, whose absorptive capacity is strictly limited by the laws of capitalism, since the surplus production represents at least the value of the surplus value which is not consumed by the bourgeoisie, but is destined to be transformed into capital. It is inescapable: commodity capital cannot become capital that produces surplus value unless it is first converted into money outside the capitalist market. “To sell a part of its commodities, capitalism needs buyers who are neither capitalists nor wage-earners, and who dispose of an autonomous purchasing power” (Rosa Luxemburg).

Before we consider where and how capital finds buyers with this “autonomous” purchasing power, we must first follow the process of accumulation.

Capitalist accumulation, a factor of progress and regression

We have already pointed out that the growth of working capital within production at the same time develops the productive forces, under the impetus of technical improvements. However, along with this positive and progressive aspect of capitalist production there emerges a regressive, antagonistic factor arising from the modification of the internal relationship of capital’s component parts.

Accumulated surplus value is divided into two unequal parts: one – the largest – must serve to extend constant capital, while the smaller part is devoted to the purchase of extra labour power; the rhythm of increase of constant capital thus accelerates to the detriment of variable capital, and the share of constant capital as a part of the whole grows: in other words, capital’s organic composition rises. The demand for extra workers certainly increases the proletariat’s absolute share of the social product, but its relative share declines, since variable capital declines relative to constant capital and total capital. However, even the absolute growth in variable capital, the wages fund, cannot continue indefinitely: at a certain moment, it reaches saturation point. In fact, the continuing rise in organic composition (in other words, of capital’s technical development) develops the power of the productive forces and of labour productivity to such a point that capital’s continued rise, far from absorbing ever more new labour power, on the contrary ends up by throwing onto the market a part of that labour power which has already been integrated into production, thus producing a “phenomenon” which is specific to decadent capitalism: permanent unemployment, the expression of a relative and constant “over-population” of the working class.

On the other hand, the full significance of the gigantic proportions reached by production lies in the fact that the mass of products or use values grows much more quickly than the corresponding mass of exchange value, than the value of constant capital consumed, of the variable capital and the surplus value; thus, for example, when a machine costing 1000 francs and able to produce 1000 units of a given product and needing two workers to operate it, is replaced by one costing 2000 francs, needing only one worker, but capable of producing three or four times more than its predecessor. It may be objected that since more products can be obtained with less labour, the worker’s wage can therefore buy more, but this forgets completely that products are first and foremost commodities, and that labour power is also a commodity: consequently, as we said at the outset, this commodity Labour Power can only be sold at its exchange value, which is equivalent to the cost of its reproduction, which in turn represents the strict minimum necessary for the worker to maintain his existence. If technical progress reduces the cost of this subsistence, then the workers’ wage will diminish correspondingly. And even if this reduction is not proportional to the fall in the cost of products, due to a balance of forces favourable to the proletariat, it must in every case fluctuate within the limits compatible with the demands of capitalist production.

The process of accumulation thus deepens a first contradiction: growth of the productive forces, decline of the labour power devoted to production, and development of a permanent relative over-population of the working class. This contradiction creates another. We have already shown what are the factors that determine the rate of surplus value. However, it is important to emphasise that for a constant rate of surplus value, the mass of surplus value, and so the mass of profit, will always be proportional to the mass of variable capital engaged in production. If variable capital decreases in relation to total capital, then the mass of profit relative to total capital also falls, and as a result, the rate of profit decreases. This fall in the rate of profit sharpens as accumulation progresses, and as constant capital increases relative to variable capital, while at the same time the mass of profit continues to rise (as a result of a rise in the rate of surplus value). It therefore does not in the least express a less intense exploitation of the workers, but means that less labour is used in relation to total capital, thus obtaining less free labour. Moreover, it accelerates the rhythm of accumulation because it harasses capitalism, biting at its heels, forcing it to extract the maximum surplus value from a given number of workers, and thus to accumulate more and more surplus value.

The law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall generates cyclical crises, and is a powerful catalyst in the decomposition of the decadent capitalist economy. Moreover, it provides us with an explanation for the export of capital, which is one of the specific traits of imperialist and monopolist capital: “the export of capital”, says Marx, “is not caused by the impossibility of employing it at home, but by the possibility of placing it abroad at a higher rate of profit”. Lenin confirms this idea (in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism), saying that “the need to export capital results from the capitalism’s excessive maturity in certain countries, where advantageous investments [our emphasis] are in short supply, agriculture being backward and the masses wretched”.

Another factor which helps to accelerate accumulation is credit, a panacea which today has acquired a magical power in the eyes of bourgeois and social-democratic economists in search of salvation and solutions: a magical word in the country of Roosevelt, a magical word for all the enthusiasts of the planned (capitalist) economy: for De Man3, for the bureaucrats of the CGT and other saviours of capitalism. Apparently, credit has the virtue of creating purchasing power.

However, once stripped of all its deceitful pseudo-scientific rags, credit can be defined very simply as follows: the putting at capital’s disposal, via its financial apparatus:

1. of money temporarily unused in the production process and destined for the renewal of constant capital;

2. of the fraction of surplus value that the bourgeoisie does not consume immediately, or that it cannot accumulate;

3. of the sums available to non-capitalist strata (peasants, artisans), or to privileged strata of the working class, in a word of everything that constitutes SAVINGS, and expresses a potential purchasing power.

At most, therefore, the operation of credit cannot do more than transform latent purchasing power into new purchasing power. Moreover, it is a problem that is only of interest to those who want to amuse idle onlookers. What concerns us is that savings can be mobilised for capitalisation and so increase the mass of accumulated capital. Without credit, savings would only be hoarded money, not capital. “Credit increases immeasurably the capacity for the extension of production, and is the internal motive force that constantly pushes it to go beyond the limits of the market” (R. Luxemburg).

A third accelerating factor should be pointed out. It is impossible for the bourgeoisie to adapt its own consumption to the vertiginous increase in the mass of surplus value. No matter how voracious its “stomach”, it cannot absorb the extra surplus value produced. Even if its gluttony pushed it to consume more, it could not do so, for it is subjected to the implacable law of competition: expanding production in order to reduce the cost price. Since the fraction of surplus value that is consumed is more and more reduced relative to total surplus value, the rate of accumulation increases. Whence a new cause of contraction of the capitalist market.

We will just mention here a fourth accelerating factor, which appeared in parallel with credit and banking capital, and is a product of the competitive process of selection: the centralisation of capital and means of production in gigantic enterprises which, by increasing the surplus value for accumulation “in bulk”, increase much more rapidly the mass of capital. Since these enterprises evolve organically into parasitic monopolies, they also become a virulent catalyst for disintegration in the period of imperialism.

Let us now summarise the fundamental contradictions which undermine capitalist production:

1. on the one hand, a production that has reached a level resulting in mass consumption; on the other, the demands of this production itself shrink the foundations of consumption within the capitalist market: relative and absolute decrease of the proletariat’s share in total product, relative restriction of the capitalists’ individual consumption;

2. the need to realise outside the capitalist market that fraction of the product which cannot be consumed internally, corresponding to accumulated surplus value, which increases rapidly and constantly under the pressure of various accelerating factors.

It is necessary therefore, on the one hand, to realise the product before production can begin again, and on the other to enlarge the available outlets in order to be able to realise the product.

As Marx emphasises: “Capitalist production is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with present demand, but depends on a continual extension of the world market. The demand of the workers is not enough, since profit comes precisely from the fact that the workers’ demand is less than the value of their product, and profit is all the greater when their demand is relatively less. The reciprocal demand of the capitalists is not enough either”.

How then will this continuous extension of the world market happen, this constant creation and widening of extra-capitalist markets whose vital importance for capitalism was emphasised by Rosa Luxemburg? Because of its historic position in the evolution of society, capitalism, if it is to continue to survive, must pursue the struggle that it first began to create the foundations for the development of its production. In other words, if capitalism is to transform into money and accumulate the surplus value that it sweats from every pore, it must disintegrate the old economies that have survived the upheavals of history. In order to sell the products that the capitalist sphere cannot absorb, it must find purchasers, and these can only exist in a market economy. Moreover, in order to maintain the scale of its production, capitalism needs immense reserves of raw materials, which it can only appropriate in the countries where they exist on condition that it does not come up against forms of property which create a barrier to its aims, and on condition that it can dispose of the labour power necessary to exploit these coveted riches. Wherever there still survive slave-holding or feudal economies, or peasant communities where the producer is tied to his means of production and works to satisfies his own needs, capitalism therefore has to create the conditions and open the way to attain its objectives. Through violence, expropriation and taxation, and with the support of these regions’ ruling strata, capitalism first destroys the last vestiges of collective property, transforms production to satisfy the demands of production for the market, establishes new production corresponding to its own needs, amputates the peasant economy of those crafts which complemented it. It thus creates a market where the peasant is forced to sell his agricultural produce – which is all that he can still produce – in exchange for the junk churned out of the capitalist factories. In Europe, the agricultural revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries had already brought about the expropriation and expulsion of a part of the rural population, and created the market for the emerging capitalist production. Marx remarked, on this point, that only the annihilation of domestic cottage industry could give a country’s home market the extension and cohesion that the capitalist mode of production needs.

Capitalism’s insatiable appetite does not stop there. It is not enough to realise surplus value. Capitalism must now eradicate the independent producers which it has caused to emerge from the primitive societies, and which have retained their means of production. It must replace their production, and replace it with capitalist production, in order to find employment for the masses of accumulated capital which threaten to stifle it. The industrialisation of agriculture begun in the second half of the 19th century, especially in the United States, provides a striking illustration of the disintegration of the peasant economies, which has widened the divide between the capitalist farmers and agricultural proletarians.

In the exploited colonies, despite the fact that the process of capitalist industrialisation remained very limited, the expropriation and proletarianisation of the mass of the indigenous population filled the reservoirs from which capitalism draws the labour power to supply it with cheap raw materials.

As a result, realising surplus value means for capitalism the progressive and continual annexation of pre-capitalist economies, whose existence is vital to it, but which it must nonetheless annihilate if it wants to continue its reason for existence: accumulation. Whence there appears another connected and fundamental contradiction: capitalist accumulation and production develop, fed by the “human” substance of the extra-capitalist milieus, but also by gradually exhausting them. What was once an “autonomous” purchasing power able to absorb surplus value – for example, the consumption of the peasantry – becomes a specifically capitalist purchasing power (in other words one that is confined within the strict limits determined by variable capital and consumable surplus value) as soon as the peasantry divides into proletarians and capitalists. Capitalism, in a sense, saws off the branch on which it is sitting.

We could of course imagine an epoch where capitalism has extended its mode of production throughout the world, and achieved equilibrium in the productive forces along with social harmony. But it seems to us that if Marx, in his schemas of enlarged reproduction, hypothesised an entirely capitalist society where the only opposition was between capitalists and proletarians, this was precisely in order to demonstrate the absurdity of a capitalist society one day achieving an equilibrium and harmony with the needs of humanity. This would mean that the surplus value available for accumulation, thanks to the expansion of production, could be realised directly, on the one hand by the purchase of new means of production, on the other by the demand of the extra workers (and where would they be found?), and that the capitalists would have been transformed from wolves into peaceful progressives.

Had Marx been able to continue the development of his schemas, he would have ended with this opposing conclusion: that a capitalist market which can no longer be extended by the incorporation of non-capitalist milieus, an entirely capitalist production – which is impossible historically – would mean an end to the process of accumulation and the end of capitalism itself. Consequently, to present these schemas (as some “marxists” have done) as the image of a capitalist production able to continue without imbalance, without over-production, without crises, is consciously to falsify marxist theory.

However, while capital prodigiously increases production, it is unable to adapt this production harmoniously to the capacity of the markets which it has managed to annex. On the one hand, the markets do not expand continuously, while on the other the various accelerating factors we have mentioned give an impetus to accumulation, causing production to expand far more rapidly than the extension of new extra-capitalist outlets. Not only does the process of accumulation engender an enormous quantity of exchange values, but as we have said, the growing capacity of the means of production increases the mass of use values in still greater proportions. As a result, the production process is capable of satisfying mass consumption, but the sale of its products is subordinated to the constant adaptation of a capacity for absorption which only exists outside the capitalist sphere.

If this adaptation does not take place, then there is over-production of commodities, relative not to the capacity of consumption, but to the purchasing power of the internal capitalist market, and the external extra-capitalist market.

If over-production could only exist once every inhabitant of a country had satisfied their most urgent needs, then any general or even partial over-production would have been impossible throughout the past history of bourgeois society. When the market is saturated with shoes, cotton goods, wines, colonial produce etc, does this mean that a part of the nation – let us say two thirds – has more than satisfied its needs in terms of shoes, etc? Over-production is not a matter of absolute need; it only concerns itself with a need that is “solvent” (Marx).

This kind of over-production is not to be found in any previous society. In the ancient, slave-holding society, production was directed towards the satisfaction of the needs of the ruling class. The low level of the means of production required the exploitation of slaves to stifle, violently, any inclination to expand the needs of the masses. Whenever any accidental over-production did occur, then it was absorbed either by hoarding or by an expansion of luxury consumption; in other words, it was not so much over-production as over-consumption by the rich. Similarly, in the feudal regime, the low level of production was easily consumed. The greater part of the serf’s product was devoted to satisfying the needs of the feudal lord, while the serf himself did his best to avoid dying of hunger: wars and famines made sure that there was no danger of over-production.

In the capitalist regime, the productive forces overflow a foundation which has become too narrow to contain them: capitalist products are abundant, but have only repulsion for mere human need; they only “give” themselves in exchange for money, and when there is no money they prefer to pile up in factories, shops and warehouses, or even just to rot.

The chronic crises of ascendant capitalism

The only limits to capitalist production are those imposed by the possibility of valorising capital: as long as surplus value can be extracted and capitalised then production progresses. Its disproportion to the general consumptive capacity only appears when the flood of commodities comes up against the limits of the market, and blocks the channels of circulation: in other words, when the crisis breaks out.

It is obvious that the economic crisis goes beyond the definition that limits it to a break in the equilibrium between various sectors of production, as some bourgeois economists, and even some marxists, claim. Marx points out that “in periods of general over-production, over-production in certain spheres is only the result, the consequence of over-production in the main branches: there is only relative over-production there because there is over-production in other spheres”. Obviously, too flagrant a disproportion, for example between the sector producing means of production, and that producing means of consumption, may determine a partial crisis: it may even be the original cause of a general crisis. The crisis is the product of a general and relative over-production, an over-production of produce of every kind (whether means of production or consumption) relative to the demands of the market.

In short, the crisis is the expression of capitalism’s inability to draw profit from the exploitation of the worker: we have already shown that it is not enough to extort unpaid labour and to incorporate this in the product in the form of a new value, surplus value; it must also be materialised in the form of money through the sale of the total product at its value, or rather at its price of production which is made up of the cost price (the value of the committed capital, both constant and variable), and the average social profit (not the profit made by each particular production). On the other hand, the market price, although theoretically it is the monetary expression of the production price, in reality differs from it because it follows the curve established by the mercantile law of supply and demand, while nonetheless moving within the orbit of value. We should therefore emphasise that crises are characterised by abnormal fluctuations in prices, resulting in a considerable depreciation of values, which can go as far as their destruction, equivalent to a loss of capital. The crisis abruptly lays bare the fact that such masses of means of production, means of consumption, and means of labour have been produced that it has become impossible to make them function as instruments of exploitation of the workers at a certain rate of profit; when this rate falls below a level acceptable to the bourgeoisie, or even threatens to suppress profit altogether, it perturbs the process of production and can even paralyse it. Machines stop, not because they have produced more than can be consumed, but because the existing capital no longer receives the surplus value that makes it live. The crisis thus disperses the mists of capitalist production; it powerfully emphasises the fundamental opposition between use value and exchange value, between the needs of human beings and the needs of capital. For Marx, “Too many commodities have been produced for the value and the surplus value that they contain to be realised and reconverted into new capital, within the conditions of distribution and consumption given by capitalist production. There is not over-production of wealth. But periodically, too much wealth is produced in its opposing capitalist forms”.

This almost mathematical periodicity of crises is one of the specific traits of the capitalist system of production. Neither this periodicity, nor the specific nature of capitalist crises, are to be found in any previous society: crises due to an excess of wealth were unknown in the ancient, patriarchal, or feudal economies, based essentially on the satisfaction of the needs of the ruling class and dependent neither on technical progress nor on a market encouraging a broad current of exchange, since – as we have seen – over-production was impossible and economic disasters were the result either of natural causes (drought, floods, epidemics), or of social factors like wars.

Economic crises only appear at the beginning of the 19th century when capitalism, consolidated by its bitter and successful struggles against feudal society, enters its period of flourishing expansion, and begins its conquest of the world, solidly established on its industrial foundations. Henceforth, capitalist production developed unevenly. Feverish output to satisfy the growing demand of the world market was followed by a blockage of the market. The ebb in circulation profoundly shook the whole mechanism of production. Economic life thus forms a long chain, where each link constitutes a cycle divided into a succession of periods of average activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and depression. The breaking point in the cycle is the crisis, “the temporary and violent resolution of existing contradictions, a violent eruption which temporarily re-establishes the upset equilibrium” (Marx). The periods of crisis and prosperity are therefore inseparable, and each conditions the other.

Until the mid-19th century, Britain, the cradle of industrial capitalism, remained the centre of gravity of these cyclical crises. The first crisis of over-production occurred in 1825 (the previous year, the trades union movement had begun to expand on the basis of the law on coalitions that the proletariat had won from the bourgeoisie). The origins of this crisis were curious for the time: the substantial loans engaged on the London market by the young South American republics had all been spent, resulting in an abrupt contraction of these markets. The crisis particularly affected the cotton industry, leading to a loss of its monopoly and revolts by the cotton workers. The crisis was overcome by an extension of outlets, which had been essentially limited to Britain: firstly, in Britain itself capital could still find vast regions to transform and capitalise through the penetration of the British countryside, and secondly, the development of exports to India opened up the market for the cotton industry; railway construction and the development of the machine tool industry opened the market to the engineering industry, which definitively got off the ground. In 1836, the cotton industry slumped after a long depression that had followed a period of prosperity; this generalised the crisis, and the starving weavers were once again offered up as expiatory victims. The crisis came to an end in 1839 with the expansion of the railway network, but in the meantime the Chartist movement was born, expression of the British proletariat’s first political aspirations. In 1840, another depression in the British textile industry led to workers’ revolts, and was to continue until 1843. Expansion began again in 1840, leading to a period of great prosperity in 1845. A general crisis broke out in 1847, and spread to the continent. It was followed by the Parisian insurrection of 1848, and the German revolution which lasted until 1849, when the American and Australian markets opened to European and above all British industry; at the same time an enormous expansion of the railway network began on the European continent.

Already at the time, Marx in the Communist Manifesto had established the general characteristics of crises, and emphasised the antagonism between the development of the productive forces and their bourgeois appropriation. With brilliant profundity, he sketched the perspectives for capitalist production: “And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented". Beginning with the second half of the 19th century, industrial capitalism began to dominate the continent. The industrial take-off of Germany and Austria began in 1860. As a result, crises became more and more far-reaching. The 1857 crisis was brief, thanks to the expansion of capital, above all in Central Europe. The British cotton industry reached its apogee in 1860, following the saturation of the markets in India and Australia. The War of Secession between the American states deprived it of cotton, provoking its complete collapse in 1863, which in turn led to a general crisis. But British and French capital lost no time, and between 1860 and 1870 established solid positions in Egypt and China.

The period from 1850 to 1873 was extremely favourable to the development of capital. It was characterised by long phases of prosperity (about 6 years) and short depressions of about 2 years. During the period that followed, from the 1873 crisis until 1896, the process was reversed: chronic depression broken by brief ascendant phases: Germany (after the Peace of Frankfurt in 1871) and the USA had just appeared as formidable competitors to Britain and France. The prodigious rhythm of capitalist production’s development overtook the rhythm of market penetration: there were crises in 1882 and 1890. The great colonial struggles for the division of the world got under way, and under the pressure of an enormous accumulation of surplus value, capitalism launched itself into the phase of imperialism, which was to lead to general crisis and bankruptcy. In the meantime, there were the crises of 1900 (the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion), and 1907. The crisis of 1913-14 was to explode into world war.

Before analysing the general crisis of decadent imperialism, which is the object of the second part of our study, we need to examine the trajectory of each of the crises of the expansionist epoch.

The two extreme points of an economic cycle are:

1. the final phase of prosperity, which leads to the culminating point of accumulation, expressed in the highest organic composition of capital; the power of the productive forces reaches a point of rupture with the capacity of the market; as we have pointed out, this also means that the low rate of profit corresponding to the high organic composition clashes with the demands of the valorisation of capital;

2. the most profound phase of the crisis, corresponding to a complete paralysis of the accumulation of capital and immediately preceding the depression.

Between these two moments, there take place on the one hand the crisis itself, a period of upheavals and the destruction of exchange values, and on the other hand the depression, followed by a recovery and prosperity fertile in new value.

The unstable equilibrium of production, undermined by the progressive deepening of capitalist contradictions, is abruptly ruptured when the crisis breaks out, and it can only be re-established when capital-values are restored to health. This clean-out begins with a fall in the prices of finished products, while the price of raw materials continues to rise for a while. The contraction of commodity prices obviously leads to the depreciation of the capital materialised in these commodities, and the fall continues until a greater or lesser fraction of capital has been destroyed, depending on the gravity and intensity of the crisis. There are two aspects to the process of destruction: on the one hand, a loss of use values as a result of the complete or partial stopping of the productive apparatus, which leads to the deterioration of unused machinery and raw materials, and on the other a loss of exchange values, which is more important because it attacks the process of the renewal of production, which it halts and disorganises. The first shock hits constant capital; the diminution of variable capital does not follow simultaneously, since the fall in wages generally comes after the fall in prices. The contraction in values prevents their reproduction on the old scale; moreover, the paralysis of the productive forces prevents the capital that they represent from existing as such: as capital, it is dead and non-existent, even though it continues to exist in its material form. The process of accumulation of capital is also interrupted because the surplus value for accumulation has been swallowed up by the fall in prices, even though the accumulation of use values may very well continue thanks to already planned extensions to the productive apparatus.

The contraction in values brings with it the contraction in enterprises: the weakest go under, or are absorbed by the strongest, which are less vulnerable to the fall in prices. This centralisation does not take place without a struggle: as long as prosperity lasts, as long as there is loot to be shared, it is divided up between the different fractions of the capitalist class at the pro-rata of the capital committed; but as soon as the crisis hits, and losses become inevitable for the class as a whole, each individual capitalist or group of capitalists tries by every means possible to limit their own losses, or to transfer them to the next man. Class interest disintegrates under the impetus of particular, disparate interests, whereas in normal times these latter respect a certain discipline. We will see that in general crises, it is on the contrary the general class interest that predominates.

But the fall in prices, which has made it possible to liquidate old stocks of goods, comes to an end. Progressively, equilibrium is re-established. Capital values return to a lower level, organic composition also falls. At the same time, cost prices fall, essentially as a result of the massive compression of wages; surplus value – capital’s oxygen – reappears, and slowly reanimates the whole body of capitalism. The economists of the liberal school once again celebrate the merits of the system’s anti-toxins and its “spontaneous reactions”, the rate of profit rises again and becomes more “interesting”; in short, enterprises return to profitability. Accumulation is reborn, sharpening the capitalist appetite and preparing the explosion of new over-production. The mass of accumulated surplus value grows, demanding new outlets, until the moment when the market once again acts as a brake on the development of production. The crisis is ripe. The cycle begins again.

“Crises appear as a means of sharpening and unleashing anew the fires of capitalist development” (R. Luxemburg).

Mitchell (to be continued)

Sixty years ago on 20th August 1940, Trotsky died, assassinated by Stalin’s underlings; the second imperialist war had just begun. In this article, we want not only to remember a great figure of the proletariat, sacrificing a little to the fashion for anniversaries, but also to use the event to examine some of his mistakes, and the political positions that he adopted at the beginning of the war. After a life of ardent militant activity, entirely devoted to the cause of the working class, Trotsky died as a revolutionary and a fighter. History is full of examples of revolutionaries who have deserted, and even betrayed the working class; few are those who remained faithful all their lives and died fighting, as did Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Trotsky was one of them.

In his later years, Trotsky defended a number of opportunist positions, such as the policy of entryism into the Social Democracy, the workers’ united front, etc. - and the communist left rightly criticised these during the 1930s. But he never went over to the enemy camp, the camp of the bourgeoisie, as the Trotskyists did after his death. On the question of imperialist war in particular, he defended until the end the traditional position of the revolutionary movement: the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war.

The closer came the imperialist war, the more Trotsky’s elimination became a key objective for the world bourgeoisie.

To consolidate his power, and to develop the policy which had made him the chief architect of the counter-revolution, Stalin had first eliminated swathes of revolutionaries, old Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin’s companions who had built the October revolution. But this was not enough. As military tensions rose at the end of the 1930s, he had to have his hands completely free at home to develop his imperialist policies. With the beginning of the war in Spain, 1936 witnessed the trials and execution first of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Smirnov1, then of Piatakov and Radek, and finally of the so-called “Rykov-Bukharin-Kretinsky” group. But although in exile, Trotsky remained the most dangerous of all the Bolsheviks. Stalin had already reached out to assassinate Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, in Paris in 1938. Now Trotsky himself had to die.

In his book I was Stalin’s agent2, general Walter Krivitsky, the head of Soviet military counter-espionage in Western Europe during the 1930s, asks “Was it necessary for the Bolshevik revolution to put to death all the Bolsheviks?”. Although he claims to have no answer to the question, on the contrary his book gives a very clear one. The Moscow trials and the liquidation of the last Bolsheviks was the price to pay for the march towards war: “In secret, Stalin’s aim [an understanding with Germany] remained the same. In March 1938, Stalin set up the great ten-day trial of the Rykov-Bukharin-Kretinsky group, who had been Lenin’s most intimate associates and the fathers of the Soviet revolution. These Bolshevik leaders - detested by Hitler - were executed by Stalin’s order on 3rd March. On 12th March, Hitler annexed Austria (...) On 12th January, took place before the assembled Berlin diplomatic corps, the cordial and democratic conversation between Hitler and the new Soviet ambassador”. This was followed on 23rd August 1939 by the Germano-Soviet pact between Hitler and Stalin.

However, while the elimination of the old Bolsheviks was first and foremost a matter of Stalin’s internal policies, it also suited the whole world bourgeoisie. Henceforth, the fate of Trotsky himself was sealed. For the whole world’s capitalist class, Trotsky, symbol of the October Revolution, had to die! “Robert Coulondre3, French ambassador to the Third Reich, gives a striking testimony in the description of his last meeting with Hitler, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Hitler had boasted of the advantages he had obtained from his pact with Stalin, just concluded; and he drew a grandiose vista of his future military triumph. In reply the French ambassador appealed to his ‘reason’ and spoke of the social turmoil and the revolutions that might follow a long and terrible war and engulf all belligerent governments. ‘You are thinking of yourself as a victor...’, the ambassador said, ‘but have you given thought to another possibility - that the victor might be Trotsky?’ At this Hitler jumped up (as if he ‘had been hit in the pit of the stomach’) and screamed that this possibility, the threat of Trotsky’s victory, was one more reason why France and Britain should not go to war against the Third Reich”4. Isaac Deutscher rightly highlights Trotsky’s remark on hearing of this conversation: “They are haunted by the spectre of revolution, and they give it a man’s name”5.

Trotsky had to die6, and he himself realised that his days were numbered. His elimination had a greater significance than that of the other old Bolsheviks, and the Russian left communists. The assassination of the old Bolsheviks had served to strengthen Stalin’s absolute power. That of Trotsky represented a need for the world bourgeoisie, including the Russian bourgeoisie, to have its hands free to unleash world war. Its way was a good deal clearer once the last great figure of the October Revolution, the most famous of the internationalists, had been eliminated. Stalin called on all the efficiency of the GPU to liquidate him. Several attempts were made on his life, and these could only be repeated. Nothing seemed able to halt the Stalinist machine. On 24th May 1939, shortly before Trotsky’s death, a commando attacked his house during the night. Stalin’s henchmen had succeeded in placing a machine-gun opposite the windows of his bedroom. They fired between 200-300 rounds, and threw firebombs. Happily, the windows were placed high above the floor, and Trotsky, his wife Natalia, and his grandson Sjeva had a miraculous escape by hiding under the bed. But in the attempt that followed, Ramon Mercader succeeded with his ice pick where the others had failed.

But for the bourgeoisie, Trotsky’s assassination was not enough. As Lenin so rightly said in State and Revolution: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain ‘halo’ for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarising it and blunting its revolutionary edge (...) They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of [Marxism’s] doctrine, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie”7.

As far as Trotsky is concerned, this dirty work has been done by those who claim to be his heirs, the Trotskyists. They have used his “opportunist” positions to justify every national war since the last imperialist world war, as well as their defence of the USSR’s imperialist camp.

When the 4th International was founded in 1938, Trotsky based his thinking on the idea that capitalism was in its “death throes”. The Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (the Bilan group) defended the same idea; we agree with Trotsky’s evaluation of the period, although not with his idea that as a result “the productive forces have ceased to grow”8. He was perfectly correct in declaring that in its “death throes”, capitalism had ceased to be a progressive social form and that its socialist transformation was on the historical agenda. However, he was wrong to think that conditions were ripe for revolution during the 1930s. Unlike the Italian Left, he announced the onset of revolution with the arrival of the Popular Front, first in France, then in Spain9. This mistaken understanding of the historic course, which led him to believe that revolution was on the immediate agenda, when in fact World War II was looming, is key to understanding the opportunist positions that he developed during this period.

Concretely, Trotsky this was expressed in the concept of the “Transitional Programme”, which he put forward at the foundation of the 4th International. This in fact was a series of practically impossible demands, supposed to raise the consciousness of the working class and sharpen the class struggle. It was the lynchpin of his political strategy. Trotsky did not see the measures in the Transitional Programme as reformist, since they were never intended to be applied, nor indeed could they be. In fact, they were designed to demonstrate capitalism’s inability to offer lasting reforms to the working class, and in consequence to reveal its bankruptcy and to push the class to struggle for its destruction.

On the same basis, Trotsky developed his famous “Proletarian Military Programme” (PMP)10, which was basically an application of the Transitional Programme to a period of universal war and militarism11. This policy hoped to win over the millions of workers under arms to revolutionary ideas. It centred around the demand for obligatory military training for the working class, overseen by elected officers, in special training schools run by the state but under the control of working class institutions like the trades unions. Obviously, no capitalist state could grant such demands to the working class, since this would deny its own existence as a state. For Trotsky, the perspective was the overthrow of capitalism by the workers under arms, all the more so since he thought that the war would create favourable conditions for a proletarian insurrection, as had happened during World War I.

“We have said more than once that the present war is only a continuation of the last. But continuation does not mean repetition (...) Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat with regard to the second imperialist war, is a continuation of the policy worked out during the first imperialist war, above all under Lenin’s leadership””12

According to Trotsky, conditions were even more favourable than they had been in 1917, inasmuch as capitalism, on the eve of a new war, had proven objectively that it was in a historical dead end, while subjectively the working class world wide had accumulated a whole new experience.

“It is this perspective [the revolution] that must be at the root of our agitation. It is not just a matter of having a position on capitalist militarism and the refusal to defend the bourgeois state, but of the direct preparation for the seizure of power and the defence of the socialist fatherland”13

Trotsky had clearly lost his bearings in thinking that the course of history still ran towards proletarian revolution. He failed to understand the situation of the working class and the balance of class forces with the bourgeoisie. During the 1930s, only the Italian Communist Left was able to demonstrate that humanity was living through a profoundly counter-revolutionary period, that the proletariat had been defeated, and that only imperialist world war, the bourgeoisie’s solution to history’s dilemma, was then possible.

Nonetheless, we can say that despite his “militarist” fantasies, which led him towards opportunism, Trotsky continued to stand firmly on internationalist ground. But in trying to be “concrete” (as he tried to be “concrete” in the workers’ struggle with the Transitional Programme, and in the army with his military policy) to win over the working masses to the revolution, he ended up distancing himself from the classical vision of marxism and defending a policy opposed to proletarian interests. This policy, intended to be very “tactical”, was in fact extremely dangerous since it tended to tie the workers to the bourgeois state for the satisfaction of their economic demands, and to make them think that a good bourgeois solution was a possibility. During the war, the Trotskyists were to develop this “subtle” tactic to justify the unjustifiable, in tactic to justify the unjustifiable, in particular their rallying to the bourgeois camp through their defence of the nation and their participation in the Resistance.

But how, fundamentally, should we understand the importance that Trotsky gave to his “military policy”? For him, the perspective facing humanity was a total militarisation of society, which would be increasingly marked by armed struggle between the classes. Humanity’s fate would be settled above all at the military level. Consequently, the proletariat’s primary responsibility was to prepare, immediately, to wrest power from the capitalist class. He developed this vision especially at the beginning of the war, when he said:

“In the conquered countries, the position of the masses will be immediately worsened. National oppression will be heaped on class oppression, and the main burden will be borne by the workers. Of all forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable”14.

“It is impossible to place an armed soldier next to every Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and French worker”15.

“We can certainly expect the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder-kegs. The danger is rather that the explosions will come too early, without adequate preparation, and will lead to isolated defeats. In general, however, it is impossible to speak of a European and world revolution without taking account of partial defeats”16

However, this does not alter the fact that Trotsky remained a proletarian revolutionary to the end. Proof lies in the content of the Manifesto of the 4th International, known as The Alarm, which he wrote to take an unambiguous position from the sole standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat against the generalised imperialist war:

“At the same time, we do not for a moment forget that this war is not our war (...) The 4th International bases its policy, not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states, but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists, for the overthrow of the ruling class in every country, on the world socialist revolution (...) We explain to the workers that their interests and those of bloodthirsty capitalism cannot be reconciled. We mobilise the workers against imperialism. We propagate the unity of the workers in all the belligerent and neutral countries”17

This is what the Trotskyists have “forgotten” and betrayed.

By contrast, from the class standpoint, Trotsky’s “Transitional Programme” and “Proletarian Military Policy” turned out to be a fiasco. Not only was there no proletarian revolution at the end of World War II, the PMP allowed the 4th International to justify its participation in the slaughter by turning its militants into good little soldiers for “democracy” and Stalinism. It was at this point that Trotskyism passed irrevocably into the enemy camp.

Clearly, Trotsky’s greatest weakness was his failure to understand that history’s course was running irrevocably towards counter-revolution, and so towards world war, as the Italian Communist Left clearly demonstrated. Thinking that the course was still towards revolution in 1936, he proclaimed that “The French revolution has begun”18; as for Spain, “The workers of the whole world eagerly await the new victory of the Spanish proletariat”19. He thus made a major political mistake in telling the working class that what was happening, in France and Spain in particular, was heading towards revolution, when in fact the world situation was moving in the opposite direction: “From his expulsion from the USSR in 1929 until his assassination, Trotsky constantly interpreted the world upside down. At a time when the task at hand was to assemble the revolutionary energies that had escaped the defeat, and first and foremost to undertake a complete political balance-sheet of the revolutionary wave, Trotsky insisted blindly that the proletariat was still marching forward when in fact it had been defeated. Hence the 4th International, created more than 50 years ago, was never anything more than an empty shell, where the life of the working class could not flow for the simple and tragic reason, that it was ebbing before the counter-revolution. On the basis of this mistake, all Trotsky’s action only contributed to the dispersal of the world’s all-too-feeble revolutionary forces during the 1930s, and worse still to drag the greater part into the capitalist mire of “critical” support for Popular Front governments, and participation in the imperialist war”20.

Trotsky’s position on the USSR is among his most serious mistakes. While he attacked Stalinism, he always considered, and defended, the USSR as the “socialist fatherland”, and at the least as a “degenerated workers’ state”.

But despite their dramatic consequences, all these political errors did not make Trotsky an enemy of the working class, as his “heirs” became after his death. In the light of events at the beginning of the war, Trotsky was even able to admit the possibility that he would have to revise his political judgement, in particular as far as the USSR was concerned.

In one of his last pieces, dated 25th September 1939 and entitled The USSR in the war, he wrote:

“We do not change our orientation. But suppose that Hitler turns his weapons to the East and invades the territories occupied by the Red Army (...) The Bolshevik-Leninists will combat Hitler, weapons in hand, but at the same time they will undertake a revolutionary propaganda against Stalin in order to prepare his overthrow at the next stage...”.

He certainly defended his analysis of the nature of the USSR, but he tied its fate to the outcome of the trials it would undergo in the test of World War II. In the same article, he says that if Stalinism were to emerge victorious and strengthened by the war (something he did not envisage happening), then it would be necessary to revise his judgement of the USSR and even of the general political situation:

“If however we consider that the present war will provoke, not the revolution but the decline of the proletariat, then there is only one possible outcome to the alternative: the further decomposition of monopolist capital, its fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy, where it still survives, by a totalitarian regime. In these conditions, the proletariat’s inability to seize the leadership of society could lead to the development of a new exploiting class emerging from the Bonapartist and fascist bourgeoisies. In all likelihood this would be a regime of decadence, and would signify the twilight of civilisation.

We would reach a similar result should the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries take power and prove unable to hold on to it, abandoning it, as in the USSR, in the hands of a privileged bureaucracy. We would then be forced to recognise that the new decline into bureaucracy was due, not to one country’s backwardness and capitalist environment, but to the proletariat’s organic inability to become a ruling class. We would then have to establish retrospectively that in its fundamental traits today’s USSR is the precursor of a new regime of exploitation on an international scale.

We have strayed a long way from the terminological controversy on the definition of the Soviet state. But our critics should not protest: only by basing ourselves on the necessary historical perspective can we formulate a correct judgement on such a question as the replacement of one social regime by another. Taken to its conclusion, the historical alternative appears thus: either the Stalinist regime is an awful setback in the process of the transformation of bourgeois society into a socialist society, or else the Stalinist regime is the first step towards a new society of exploitation. If the second forecast proved correct, then of course the bureaucracy would become a new exploiting class. However dire this second perspective may appear, should the world proletariat indeed prove itself unable to carry out the mission entrusted to it by the course of historical development, then we would be forced to recognise that the socialist programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, has finally turned out to be a Utopia. It goes without saying that we would need a new “minimum programme” to defend the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society” (our emphasis).

If we leave aside the perspective he develops here, which reveals a discouragement, not to say a profound demoralisation where he seems to lose all confidence in the working class and its ability to assume historically its revolutionary perspective, it is clear that here Trotsky is beginning to call into question his positions on the “socialist” nature of the USSR and the “working of the USSR and the “working class” character of the bureaucracy.

Trotsky was assassinated before the end of the war, and Russia ended in the victorious camp alongside the “democracies”. Historical conditions demanded of those who claimed to be his faithful followers that they undertake, as he had planned to do, a revision of his position to, as he had said, “establish retrospectively that in its fundamental traits today’s USSR is the precursor of a new regime of exploitation on an international scale”. Not only did the 4th International fail to do this, it passed, bags and baggage, into the camp of the bourgeoisie. Only a few elements escaped from Trotskyism to remain on the revolutionary terrain, such as those who formed the Chinese group which published The Internationalist in 1941, the members of the 4th International’s Spanish section around Munis, the Revolutionaren Kommunisten Deutschlands (RKD), the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, Agis Stinas in Greece, and Natalia Trotsky21.

Faithful to the spirit of her companion in life and comrade in the revolution, Natalia Trotsky, in a letter written on 9th May 1951 to the Executive Committee of the 4th International, insisted particularly on the counter-revolutionary nature of the USSR:

“Obsessed by old and outmoded formulations, you continue to consider the Stalinist state as a workers’ state. I cannot and will not follow you on this point (...) It should be clear to all that Stalinism has completely destroyed the revolution. And yet you continue to say that Russia is still, under this iniquitous regime, a workers’ state”.

Natalia drew the logical conclusions from this clear position, and quite rightly continued:

“The most intolerable is the position on war to which you have committed yourselves. The third world war threatening humanity places the revolutionary movement before the most difficult and complex situations, the gravest decisions (...) But faced with the events of recent years, you continue to call for the defence of the Stalinist state, and to commit the whole movement to it. Now, you even support the Stalinist armies in the war which is crucifying the Korean people”.

She concluded bravely: “I cannot and will not follow you on this point (...) I find that I must tell you that I find no other way out than to say openly that our disagreements make it impossible for me to stay any longer in your ranks”22.

Not only, as Natalia Trotsky says, did the Trotskyists fail to follow Trotsky’s example and revise their political positions following the USSR’s victory in World War II, but the Trotskyists’ own discussions and questioning today - when they exist - deal with the “proletarian military policy”23. These discussions continue to maintain a deafening silence on fundamental questions like the nature of the USSR or proletarian internationalism and revolutionary defeatism in the face of war. Pierre Broué recognises this, in the midst of a pseudo-scientific babble: “There is no doubt that the absence of any discussion or evaluation of this question (the PMP) weighed very heavily in the history of the 4th International. An in-depth analysis would have shown it as being at the bottom of the crisis which began to shake the International during the 1950s”24. How nicely put!

It is a fact that the Trotskyist organisations betrayed and changed camp. But Trotskyist historians like Pierre Broué or Sam Levy try to drown the question in a mere crisis of the Trotskyist movement:

“The fundamental crisis of Trotskyism came from its confusion and inability to understand the war and the immediate post-war world”25.

It is quite true that Trotskyism failed to understand the war or the post-war world; this is why it betrayed the working class and proletarian internationalism by supporting one imperialist camp against another during World War II, and why ever since it has constantly supported little imperialisms against bigger ones in the all too frequent so-called “national liberation” struggles, or the struggles of “oppressed peoples”. Pierre Broué, Sam Levy and the others may not know it, but Trotskyism is dead for the working class, and there is no hope of its rebirth as an instrument of the class’ emancipation. There is no point their trying to recuperate for themselves the real internationalists, and in particular the activity of the Italian Communist Left during the war, as the Cahiers Leon Trotsky try to do in their issue no.39.

A little decency gentlemen! Don’t mix up the internationalists of the Italian Communist Left with the chauvinist 4th International that betrayed the working class. We of the Communist Left have nothing to do with the 4th International and its avatars today. By contrast, hands off Trotsky! He still belongs to the working class.

Rol

1 See 16 Fusillés à Moscou by Victor Serge, Spartacus editions.

2 J’étais l’agent de Staline, Editions Champ Libre, Paris 1979.

3 Robert Coulondre (1885-1959), French ambassador to Moscow, then to Berlin.

4 The Prophet Outcast, Isaac Deutscher, Oxford Paperbacks, p515.

5 In the Manifesto of the 4th International on the imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution.

6 Like Jean Jaurès immediately before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, but with this difference: Jaurès was a pacifist, while Trotsky was always a revolutionary and an internationalist.

7 Essential works of Lenin, Bantam Books, 1971, p272.

8 For us, the fact that the system has entered its decadence does not mean that it can no longer develop. By contrast, for us as for Trotsky, a system in decadence has lost its dynamism, and the relations of production have become a fetter on society’s further development. In other words, the system has ceased to play a historically positive role and is ready to give birth to a new society.

9 See our book The Italian Communist Left, and our pamphlet Le Trotskisme contre la classe ouvrière.

10 This was not a new position for Trotsky, since it had already found an expression during the war in Spain: “... we must clearly distinguish ourselves from treachery and traitors, while remaining the best fighters on the front”. He compared the idea of being the best worker in the factory, with being the best soldier on the front. This formulation was also used in the Sino-Japanese war, since China was an “aggressed” nation, “colonised” by Japan.

11 "Our military transitional programme is a programme for agitation” (Oeuvres, no24).

12 Trotsky, Fascism, Bonapartism and war.

13 Ibid.

14 Trotsky, Our course does not change, written 30th June 1940.

15 Ibid. These nations are cited because they had just been defeated when the article was written.

16 Ibid.

17 Trotsky, Manifesto of the 4th International, 29th May 1940.

18 La Lutte Ouvrière, 9th June 1936.

19 Ibid.

20 See our pamphlet Le Trotskisme contre la classe ouvrière.

21 See International Review no.94, the article “Trotsky belongs to the working class, the Trotskyists have kidnapped him” in Le Trotskisme..., International Review no.58 and the article “In memory of Munis” published on his death in 1989, also Stinas’ memoirs published by La Breche, Paris 1990.

22 Les enfants du prophète, Cahiers Spartacus, Paris 1972.

23 See Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.23, 39, and 43, and Revolutionary History no.3, 1988.

24 Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.39.

25 A veteran of the British Trotskyist movement, quoted in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.23.

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The article that follows is the second part of a study published in the review Bilan in 1934. In the first part, published in the previous issue of the International Review (see Crises and cycles in the economy of dying capitalism, part 1 [88]), Mitchell returned to the foundations of the marxist analysis of profit and accumulation, in continuity with the analyses of Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. In this second part, he deals with “the analysis of the general crisis of decadent imperialism”, and explains with remarkable clarity the expressions of this general crisis of capitalism’s decadence. In its day, this study made it possible to lay the theoretical foundations for understanding the inevitable tendency to generalised war engendered by the historical crisis of capitalism; it is not merely of historical interest today. On the contrary, it is of burning immediacy in laying down the theoretical framework which allow us to understand the expressions of the economic crisis today.

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In the first part of this study we saw that the period from 1852 to 1873 was marked by a considerable development of "freely competing" capitalism (a competition mitigated nonetheless by a protectionism designed to defend growing industries). During this same historical phase, the various national bourgeoisies completed their economic and political domination on the ruins of the remnants of feudalism, breaking down all the barriers to the capitalist forces of production: in Russia, through the abolition of serfdom; in the USA through the Civil War which swept away the anachronistic system of slavery; through the creation of Italy and the foundation of German unity. The Treaty of Frankfurt closed the cycle of the great national wars which gave birth to the modern capitalist state.

The organic process in the capitalist epoch

By 1873, capitalism's rapid development had already integrated into its market the adjacent extra-capitalist domain. Europe had become a vast market economy (except for a few backward East European nations), dominated by capitalist production. The North American continent was dominated by an already highly developed Anglo-Saxon economy.

At the same time, the process of capitalist accumulation, temporarily interrupted by cyclical crises but taking off again with renewed vigour after each economic purge, led to an irresistible centralisation of the means of production, accelerated by the tendency towards the falling rate of profit and by bitter competition. There was a spread of enormous enterprises of high organic composition, encouraged by the development of joint stock companies replacing the individual capitalists, who were unable by themselves to satisfy the extensive demands of the productive process. The industrialists became mere agents subordinated to the company board.

But another process was also under way: following the crisis of 1873, the formation of monopolies grew in importance. This was a means both of countering the fall in the rate of profit, so that it remained within limits compatible with capitalist production, and of preventing an anarchic and "disastrous" competition. Their first expression was the cartels, followed by a more concentrated form, the syndicates. Finally there appeared the trusts and konzerns, which either concentrated similar industries horizontally, or grouped different branches of industry together vertically.

With the influx of a considerable mass of available savings, produced by intense accumulation, human capital gained a preponderant influence. The system of "cascading" shareholdings grafted onto the monopolistic organism, gave it the key to the control of fundamental production. Industrial, commercial, and banking capital gradually lost their autonomous position in the economic mechanism, and the greater part of the surplus-value produced was drained towards a higher, synthetic capitalist form, which disposed of it according to its own interests: finance capital. In short, the latter is the hypertrophied product of capitalist accumulation and its contradictory expressions. This definition obviously has nothing in common with the one which presents finance capital as an expression of the will of a few individuals moved by "speculative fever" to oppress and despoil the other capitalist formations and to oppose their "free" development. Such a conception, attractive to petty-bourgeois social-democratic and neo-marxist currents wallowing in the swamp of "anti-hypercapitalism", expresses an ignorance of the laws of capitalist development and turns its back on marxism while strengthening the ideological domination of the bourgeoisie.

Far from eliminating competition, the process of organic centralisation amplifies it in other forms, and in doing so it expresses nothing other than the deepening of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. The competition between individual capitalists across the whole breadth of the capitalist market (domestic and international), contemporaneous with "progressive" capitalism, is replaced by a vast international competition between more highly evolved organisms: the monopolies, masters of the national market and of basic production. This period corresponds to a productive capacity which far outstrips the limits of the national market and to a geographical extension of the latter through the colonial conquests at the beginning of the imperialist epoch. The highest form of capitalist competition finds expression in inter-imperialist wars, and appears once every territory in the world has been shared out among the imperialist powers. Under the aegis of finance capital, there appeared a process of transformation of national formations - the product of historic upheavals whose development contributed to a crystallisation of the world-wide division of labour - into complete economic entities. "The monopolies" said Rosa Luxemburg, "aggravate the contradiction between the international nature of the world capitalist economy and the national nature of the capitalist state".

The development of economic nationalism is both intensive and extensive.

The cornerstone of intensive development is protectionism, geared to ensuring not "emerging industries", but the monopoly on the domestic market. This opens up two possibilities: at home, the realisation of a super-profit and abroad, prices fixed below the value of the product, competition by dumping.

The "extensive" development, determined by capital's constant need to expand in search of zones for the realisation and capitalisation of surplus-value, is oriented towards the conquest of pre-capitalist and colonial territories.

We have shown that a continual extension of the market, in order to escape the permanent threat of overproduction of commodities as expressed in cyclical crises, is a fundamental necessity for the capitalist mode of production. This is manifested on the one hand by an organic evolution leading to the monopoly, to finance capital and economic nationalism, and on the other to a historic evolution leading to imperialism. To define imperialism as "a product of finance capital", as Bukharin does, is to establish an incorrect connection and above all is to lose sight of the common origin of these two aspects of the capitalist process: the production of surplus value.

Colonial wars in the first phase of capitalism

The cycle of national wars is essentially characterised by struggles between nations in the process of formation, building their social and political structure in accordance with the demands of capitalist production. Colonial wars, by contrast, oppose fully developed capitalist nations, already bursting out of their own narrow framework, and non-evolved countries with natural or backward economies.

The regions for conquest are of two kinds:

1. colonies for the expansion of population, which serve essentially as spheres of capital investment, and so become in some sense an extension of the metropolitan economy, undergoing a similar capitalist evolution, and even competing with the metropolis, at least in certain branches of industry. Such is the case in the British Dominions, whose capitalist structure is complete;
2. colonies for exploitation, densely populated, where capitalism has essentially two objectives: to realise its surplus value, and to appropriate cheap raw materials, allowing it to hold back the growth of constant capital invested in production, and to improve the ratio of the mass of surplus value to total capital. As far as the realisation of commodities is concerned, the process is as we have already described: capitalism forces the peasants and small producers of the domestic economy to produce, not for their own direct needs, but for the market, where capitalist products of mass consumption are exchanged for agricultural produce. The farmers of the colonies are integrated into the market economy under the pressure of commercial capital and debt, stimulating the large-scale cultivation of raw materials for export: cotton, rice, rubber, etc. Colonial loans represent an advance on purchasing power made by finance capital, and are used either to equip the network for the circulation of commodities - construction of ports and railways which improve the transport of raw materials - or for strategic works to consolidate imperialist rule. Moreover, finance capital takes care that these funds cannot be used as an instrument for the emancipation of the colonies, and that the productive forces are only developed and industrialised in as much as they do not threaten the metropolitan industries, for example by orienting their activity towards the preliminary refinement of raw materials thanks to the exploitation of indigenous labour power at virtually no cost.

Not only that, but the peasants, crushed under the weight of their own debts and the taxes raised to pay off government loans, are forced to sell their produce below its value, or even below its cost of production.

A third type of colonisation consists in the acquisition of "zones of influence" through the reduction of backward states to vassal status, through loans and inward investment. The intense flow of capital exports, linked to the extension of monopolistic protectionism, encouraged an expansion of capitalist production, at least to Central and Eastern Europe, to America, and even to Asia where Japan became an imperialist power.

On the other hand, the unequal development of capitalism was prolonged into the process of colonial expansion. On the eve of the cycle of colonial wars, the oldest capitalist nations already possessed a solid imperial basis: Britain and France, the two great powers of the day, had already shared out the "best" lands of America, Africa, and Asia. This encouraged their further extension to the detriment of their younger competitors, Germany and Japan. The latter were forced to be content with some meagre remnants in Africa and Asia; by contrast, they developed the metropolis much faster than the older nations. As an industrial power, Germany was soon to dominate the European continent in the face of British imperialism, and to pose the problem of world hegemony, whose solution was sought through the first imperialist war.

While economic contrasts and economic antagonisms sharpened during the cycle of colonial wars, the resulting class conflicts could still be "resolved" peacefully by the bourgeoisie in the most advanced countries. The colonial banditry of the latter accumulated reserves of surplus value which it used abundantly to corrupt the privileged layers of the working classi. The last two decades of the 19th century were accompanied by the triumph of opportunism and reformism within international social-democracy, monstrous parasitic growths feeding off the colonial peoples.

But extensive colonialism is limited in its development, and capitalism, the insatiable conqueror, quickly exhausted the available extra-capitalist outlets. Inter-imperialist competition, deprived of any natural outlet, took the direction of imperialist war.

"Those who are engaged today in armed conflict" said Rosa Luxemburg, "are not the capitalist countries on the one hand, and on the other the countries of natural economy, but states which are pushed into conflict precisely by their identical high level of capitalist development".

Cycles of imperialist wars and revolution in the general crisis of capitalism

Whereas the ancient natural communities survived for thousands of years, and ancient and feudal societies occupied a long historical period, "modern capitalist production, on the contrary", said Engels, "which is barely 300 years old, and whose domination dates from no earlier than the establishment of large-scale industry - in other words 100 years - has, in this short lapse of time achieved disparities of distribution (concentration of capital among a few owners on the one hand, a concentration of propertyless masses in the cities on the other) which will inevitably lead it to its downfall".

Because of the intensity reached by the contradictions in its mode of production, capitalist society can no longer continue its historic mission: the continuous and progressive development of the productive forces and of the productivity of human labour. The revolt of the forces of production against private appropriation goes from being sporadic to become permanent. Capitalism enters into its general crisis of decomposition, and history records its death spasms in lines of blood.

Let us summarise the main characteristics of this general crisis: general and permanent industrial overproduction; chronic unemployment weighing on the production of non-viable capital; permanent unemployment of considerable masses of labour power seriously aggravating class antagonisms; a chronic agricultural overproduction, which adds a general crisis to the industrial crisis, and which we will analyse later; a considerable slowdown in the process of capitalist accumulation as a result of the shrinking field for the exploitation of labour power (organic composition), and the continued decline in the rate of profit which Marx foresaw when he said that "as soon as the formation of capital falls into the hands of a few large capitalists, for whom the mass of profit can compensate for its rate, then production will lose all vitalising stimulus and will fall into slumber. The rate of profit is the motive form of capitalist production. Without profit, no production". Finally, the necessity for finance capital to seek a super-profit, not from the production of surplus value, but by despoiling both the consumers (by raising commodity prices above their value), and the small producers (by appropriating a part of a part of their labour). Super-profit thus represents an indirect tax raised on the circulation of commodities. Capitalism tends to become parasitic in the absolute sense of the term.

During the two decades that preceded the World War, these agents of general crisis were already developing and acting to a certain extent, even though the conjuncture was still in a rising curve, expressing capitalism's "swan-song" as we might say. By 1912 it had reached its zenith, and the capitalist world was flooded with commodities; the crisis broke out in the USA in 1913 and began to spread to Europe. The spark in Sarajevo caused it to explode into a world war, where the stakes were a redivision of the colonies. The slaughter which followed formed an enormous outlet for capitalist production, opening up a "magnificent" perspective.

Heavy industry produced the means of destruction instead of production. Consumer industry worked flat out, not to satisfy the needs of human beings but to hasten their destruction. On the one hand, the war carried out the "salutary" operation of restoring hypertrophied capital-values to health by destroying them without any concern for their replacement. On the other hand it also encouraged the realisation of commodities well above their value through a formidable rise in prices under the regime of price controls. The mass of super-profit which capitalism drew from thus despoiling the consumers largely compensated for the reduction in the mass of surplus value, which was the result of the decline in opportunities for the exploitation of labour power, due to its mobilisation at the front.

Above all, war destroys enormous amounts of labour which in peace, excluded from the productive process, formed a growing threat to bourgeois dominationii. It has been estimated that the destruction of real value represented a third of the world's wealth accumulated by the labour of generations of workers and peasants. From the standpoint of world capitalist interests, this social disaster takes on the air of the healthy balance-sheet of a limited company dealing in financial shareholdings, and whose profit and loss account, swollen with profit, hides the ruin of innumerable small companies and the poverty of the workers. For although the destruction is of cataclysmic proportions, its cost is not born by capitalism. During the conflict, all power converges on the capitalist state under the imperious necessity of establishing a war economy. The state becomes the great and insatiable consumer which creates its purchasing power through monstrous loans that drain all the nation's savings. This is all done under the auspices of finance capital, which of course is paid for its help. The state pays with bonds which mortgage the future revenue of the proletariat and small peasants. Marx's words of 75 years ago are fully validated: "The only part of the national wealth which really enters the collective possession of modern peoples is their national debt".

The war of course accelerates the exacerbation of social antagonisms. The last period of the massacre opens with the thunderclap of October 1917. The weakest sector of world capitalism imploded. Revolutionary convulsions shook Eastern and Central Europe. Bourgeois power trembled. The conflict had to be brought to an end. In Russia the proletariat, guided by a party tempered by fifteen years of workers' s struggles and ideological work, was able to overpower a still weak bourgeoisie and establish its dictatorship. But in the central countries, where capitalism was still solidly rooted, the bourgeoisie, although it wavered before the impetuosity of the revolutionary tide, nonetheless was able - with the support of a still powerful social-democracy and thanks to the immaturity of the communist parties - to direct the proletariat away from its specific goals. Capitalism's task was made easier by its ability, after the armistice, to prolong its wartime "prosperity" in a period of economic growth justified by the need to adapt military production to renewing the productive apparatus and restoring peacetime production in order to meet the huge need for basic necessities which emerged after the war. The recovery reintegrated into production almost all the demobilised workers, and economic concessions - while they did not affect profits (since the rise in wages was far from matching the devaluation of paper currency) - allowed the bourgeoisie to create the illusion within the working class that it could improve its lot within the framework of the capitalist regime, and so to crush the revolutionary vanguard by isolating it from the class.

Disturbances in the monetary system aggravated the disorder that the war had caused in the hierarchy of value and in the trade networks, so that economic growth (at least in Europe) took the direction of speculative activity and an increase in fictitious value, rather than of a new cyclical phase. This quickly reached its high point, since although the volume produced by the seriously reduced capacity of the productive forces remained well below the pre-war level, it nonetheless soon exceeded the low purchasing power of the masses. Whence the crisis of 1920, which as the 3rd Congress of the Communist International put it, appeared as "the reaction of poverty against the efforts to produce, trade, and live in a similar style to that of the preceding capitalist period", ie the fictitious prosperity of the war and the immediate post-war period.

Although this was not the case in Europe, in the US the crisis appeared as the conclusion of an industrial cycle. The war had allowed the US economy to break the grip of the economic depression of 1913, and offered immense possibilities of accumulation by eliminating its European competitors and opening up an almost inexhaustible military market. The USA became Europe's main supplier of raw materials, industrial and agricultural products. Based on a colossal productive capacity, a powerfully industrialised agriculture, enormous capital resources, and its position as the world's creditor, the US became the economic centre of world capitalism, thus shifting the axis of imperialist contradictions. The old Anglo-German rivalry, which had been the motive force of World War I, was replaced by an antagonism between Britain and Americaiii. With the end of the war, the US was confronted by the profound contrast between a hypertrophied productive apparatus and a considerably contracted market. The contradiction broke out in the crisis of April 1920, and it was the turn of the young American imperialism to plunge into the general decomposition of its economy.

In imperialism's decadent phase, there is only one way out for capitalism's contrasts: war. Humanity can only escape such an outcome through the proletarian revolution. But in the advanced Western countries, the October revolution proved unable to bring the proletariat's consciousness to fruition. The revolution was unable to guide the productive forces towards socialism, which alone could overcome capitalism's contradictions; thus, once the last revolutionary energies had burnt themselves out in the defeat of the German proletariat in 1923, the bourgeoisie was able to restore its system to a relative stability. Although this strengthened its domination, it nonetheless pushed it down a path leading to a new and still more terrible general conflagration.

Meanwhile, a new period of economic recovery began, which had all the appearances of a prosperity analogous to a cycle of ascendant capitalism, at least as far as one essential aspect was concerned: the development of production. But we have seen that previously, growth corresponded to an extension of capitalist markets through the annexation of new pre-capitalist regions, whereas the expansion of 1924-29 took place within the general crisis of capitalism and could not draw on such resources. On the contrary, we saw an aggravation of the general crisis under the influence of certain factors which will examine rapidly here:

1. The capitalist market was deprived of the vast outlet which had been formed by imperial Russia, an importer of industrial products and capital, and an exporter of raw materials and agricultural products, sold cheap thanks to a ferocious exploitation of the peasantry; moreover, this last great pre-capitalist area, with its immense resources and a vast reservoir of manpower, was plunged into terrible social convulsions which made it impossible for capitalism to invest there "safely".
2. The breakdown of the world economic mechanism eliminated gold as a universal currency and general equivalent for commodities; the absence of any common measure and the co-existence of monetary systems based either on gold or on a fixed exchange rate or non-convertibility, created such a difference in prices that the notion of value became vague, international trade became completely disjointed, and its disorder was aggravated by the increasingly frequent resort to dumping.
3. The general and chronic crisis in agriculture in the agrarian countries, and in the agricultural sector of the industrial countries (it was to reach its full extent during the world economic crisis). The pre-war development of agricultural production under the impetus of agricultural industrialisation and capitalisation in large areas of the USA, Canada, and Australia, was extended to the most backward regions of Central Europe and South America, whose essentially agrarian economies lost their semi-autonomous nature, to become totally dependent on the world market.

Moreover the industrial countries, which would normally be importers of agricultural produce, adopted policies of economic nationalism, and tried to make up for their own agricultural deficiencies by an extension of the land under cultivation for cereals, and through an increase in yields behind the shelter of customs barriers and subsidies. This practice extended also to countries with an industrialised agriculture (USA, Canada, Argentina). Under monopolistic pressure, the result was a regime of unreal farm prices, which rose to the level of the highest cost of production, and which weighed heavily on the purchasing power of the masses (this was true above all for wheat, an article of mass consumption).

For capitalism, the fact that the peasant economies had been completely integrated into the market meant that national markets could no longer be extended and so reached the point of absolute saturation. Although he still appeared to be an independent producer, the peasant was incorporated into the capitalist sphere of production in the same way as a wage-earner: just as the latter is despoiled of his surplus labour by being forced to sell his labour power, so the peasant is unable to appropriate the extra labour contained in his products because he is forced to sell them to capital below their value.

The national market thus provides a striking expression of deepening capitalist contradictions: on the one hand, the relative, then absolute, decline in the proletariat's share of total product, and the spread of permanent unemployment and the industrial reserve army, reduced the market for agricultural products. The resulting decline in the purchasing power of the small peasants reduced the market for capitalist products. The continuing fall in the general purchasing power of the working and peasant masses thus came into more and more violent opposition with an increasingly abundant agricultural production, especially of products for mass consumption.

The existence of an endemic agricultural overproduction (clearly demonstrated by the figures for world wheat stocks, which tripled between 1926 and 1933), reinforces the elements of decomposition acting within the general crisis of capitalism. This is because agricultural overproduction is different from capitalist overproduction properly so-called, in that it cannot be counter-acted (other than by the "providential" action of natural causes), given the specific nature of agricultural production, which is still insufficiently centralised and capitalised, and occupies millions of families.

Having determined the conditions which strictly delimit the evolution of inter-imperialist contradictions, it is easy enough to discern the real nature of the "surprising" prosperity of the period of capitalism's "stabilisation". The considerable development of productive forces and production, the volume of world trade and the international movement of capital, which are the essential traits of the ascending phase of 1924-28, are explained by the necessity to erase the traces of war, to rebuild prior productive capacity so that it could be used for its fundamental objective: the completion of the economic and political structure of imperialist states, ensuring their competitiveness and the construction of economies adapted for war. It is now obvious that all the very uneven fluctuations of that economic conjuncture, although moving in a rising curve, did no more than reflect the changes in the imperialist balance of forces fixed by the Versailles Treaty's new division of the world.

The flourishing of technology and productive capacity took on gigantic proportions, especially in Germany. After the inflationary storm of 1922-23, the investment of British, French, and above all American capital was such that much of it could find no domestic field for action, and was re-exported through the banks, in particular towards the USSR to finance the Five Year Plan.

During this process of expanding productive forces, the law of the falling rate of profit acted all the more violently. Organic composition rose still more rapidly than the development of the productive apparatus, and this was true above all in the fundamental sectors. The result was a change within constant capital: the fixed part (machinery) increased powerfully relative to the circulating part (raw materials and consumables), to become a rigid element that weighed on production costs to the extent that the volume of production faltered and fixed capital represented the counter-part to borrowed capital. The most powerful companies thus became more sensitive to the slightest economic downturn. In 1929, in a USA at the height of economic prosperity, the maximum output of steel only used 85% of productive capacity; in 1933, the rate of use of productive capacity had fallen to 15%. In 1932, the value of the production of the means of production in the great industrial countries was not even equivalent to the normal wear-and-tear on fixed capital.

Such facts only express another contradictory aspect of imperialism's degenerating phase: the maintenance of a partially unused productive apparatus as an essential military potential.

In the meantime, to reduce production costs finance capital had recourse to the methods with which we are already familiar: reduction in the price of raw materials to reduce the value of the circulating part of constant capital; fixing sale prices above their value to obtain a super-profit; the reduction of variable capital, either by the direct or indirect reduction of wages, or by an intensification of labour equivalent to prolonging the working day and achieved by the rationalisation and organisation of factory production-lines. We can understand why these last methods have been most rigorously applied in the most technically developed countries - the USA and Germany - which are disadvantaged in periods of economic downturn, relative to less developed countries where production costs are much more sensitive to a fall in wages. However, rationalisation comes up against human limitations. Moreover, the fall in wages only allows an increase in the mass of surplus-value, as long as there is no decline in the number of workers employed. Consequently, the solution to the fundamental problem - how to preserve both the value and the profitability of invested capital by producing and realising the maximum surplus-value and super-profit (the parasitic extension of the former) - has to take other directions. In order to keep non-viable capitals alive and ensure them a profit, they must be fed with "fresh" money, which finance capital of course refuses to fund from its own reserves. It therefore draws either on the savings put at its disposal through the state, or on the purchasing power of consumers. Hence the development of monopolies, of state shareholding in mixed companies, the creation of costly "public utilities", loans, subsidies to unprofitable companies or state guarantees for their revenue. Hence also the control of budgets, the "democratisation" of taxation by extending the tax base, fiscal advantages for capital in order to re-animate the "living forces" of the nation, the reduction in "unprofitable" social costs, the conversion of unearned income, etc.

However, even this cannot suffice. The mass of surplus value produced remains inadequate; the field of production remains too narrow and must be extended. While war is the great outlet for capitalist production, in "peacetime" it is militarism (ie all the activities involved in the preparation for war) that realises the surplus value of the fundamental areas of production controlled by finance capital. The latter determines militarism's capacity for absorption by confiscating a part of the purchasing power of the working and peasant masses and transferring it through taxation to the state, which is the customer for the means of destruction and strategic public works. Capitalism's contradictions obviously cannot be resolved by the respite thus gained. As Marx already foresaw, "the contradiction between the general social power finally constituted by capital and the power of each capitalist to dispose of the social conditions of capitalist production develops more and more". All the internal antagonisms of the bourgeoisie must then be taken in hand by its apparatus of domination, the capitalist state, which is called upon to safeguard the whole bourgeois class’ fundamental interests from the danger threatening it, and to complete the fusion - already carried out in part by finance capital – of the particular interests of the various capitalist formations. The less surplus value there is to share out, the sharper the internal conflicts and the more vital this concentration. The Italian bourgeoisie was the first to resort to fascism, because its fragile economic structure threatened to break up under the pressure, not only of the crisis of 1921, but also of the shock of violent social contrasts.

Germany, a power without any colonies and with a weak imperialist foundation, was forced in the fourth year of the world economic crisis to concentrate all the resources of its economy within a totalitarian state, breaking the only force which could have opposed a capitalist dictatorship with its own: the proletariat. Moreover, the process of transforming the economic apparatus into an instrument of war was furthest advanced in Germany. By contrast, the most important imperialist groupings, such as France and Britain, still possessed considerable reserves of surplus value, and so have still not entered determinedly on the road towards state centralisation.

We have just seen that the expansion of the period 1924-28 was a function of the restoration and structural reinforcement of each of the imperialist powers, with a number of secondary states that have entered the former’s orbits according to their own interests and inclinations. But precisely because this expansion includes two contradictory - though closely linked - movements, one towards the expansion of production and the circulation of commodities, the other towards a splintering of the world market into independent economies, its saturation point could not be long delayed.

The world crisis, which the dreamers of economic liberalism wanted to see as a cyclical crisis which could be resolved thanks to the effects of “spontaneous” factors, and which capitalism could therefore escape from by applying some labour plan of the De Man variety, opens the period of inter-imperialist struggles, first economic and political, then violent and bloody once the crisis has exhausted all of capitalism's peaceful possibilities.

We cannot analyse here the process of this unprecedented economic collapse. During the crisis, all capitalism's attempts, which we have already described, to find a way out of its contradictions are used tenfold and with the energy of desperation: extension of monopolies from the home market to the colonies and attempts to form homogeneous empires protected behind a single tariff barrier (Ottawa); the dictatorship of finance capital and the strengthening of its parasitic activity; the retreat of international monopolies, forced to give way before the rise of nationalism (Kreuger crash); the exacerbation of antagonisms through tariff wars, to which are joined struggles over currencies involving the gold stocks of the central banks; in trade, the substitution of compensatory clearing offices, or even of barter, for the regulatory function of gold as a general equivalent for commodities; the annulment of irrecoverable “reparations”, and the repudiation of American debts by the “victorious” states, the suspension of the financial service of private loans and debts in the “vanquished” states, leading to the collapse of international credit and of capitalism's “moral” values.

If we consider the determining factors of capitalism's general crisis, we can understand why the world crisis cannot be absorbed by the “natural” action of capitalism's economic laws, and why on the contrary these laws have been emptied out by the combined power of finance capital and the capitalist state, which have compressed all manifestations of particular capitalist interests. We should consider from this viewpoint the multitude of “experiments” and attempts at correcting the situation, the “recoveries” that have appeared during the crisis. Their action is exercised, not at the international level as part of an improvement in the world conjuncture, but at the national level of the imperialist economies, and in forms adapted to the particularities of their structures. We cannot analyse here certain expressions such as deflation, inflation, or currency devaluation. Their interest is anyway secondary, because they are contingent and ephemeral. All these experiments in artificial reanimation of an economy in decomposition nonetheless produce common fruits. Those which propose, demagogically, to fight unemployment and increase the purchasing power of the masses, lead to the same result: not to the fall in unemployment which is vaunted in the official statistics, but to a sharing out of the available work among a greater number of workers, which can only cause a degradation of their living conditions.

The increase in production by basic industry (and not by consumer industry), which can be observed within each imperialism, is nourished solely by the policy of (strategic) public works and by militarism, whose significance we understand very well.

Wherever it turns, however it tries to escape the grip of the crisis, capitalism is pushed irresistibly towards its destiny of war. Where and how the war will break out is impossible to determine today. What it is important to say and to state clearly, is that it will explode over the division of Asia and that it will be world wide.

All the imperialisms are heading towards war, whether they are dressed in democratic suits or fascist uniforms; and the proletariat cannot let itself be drawn in to any abstract discrimination between “democracy” and fascism, which can only divert it from the daily struggle against its own bourgeoisie. To make its tasks and its tactics dependent on the illusory perspective of an economic recovery, or on the pseudo-existence of capitalist forces opposed to war, would lead the proletariat straight into war, or deprive it of any possibility of finding the road towards revolution.

Mitchell

In Poland, twenty years ago, in the summer of 1980, there began the most important movement of the world proletariat’s struggle since the end of the revolutionary wave, which broke out during World War I and continued until the beginning of the 1920s. In today’s conditions, when the dominant ideology dismisses the idea that the working class even exists, let alone that it can act as a force in defence of its interests, it is essential for revolutionary organisations to remind workers of the most extensive outbreak of working class struggle for almost 80 years.

For younger workers, the events of Poland 1980-81 could well come as a revelation of a recent past where the working class clearly demonstrated that it was a force to be reckoned with in capitalist society. For older workers who have, possibly, become more sceptical, a reminder of the working class’ potential power will act as an antidote to today’s poisonous lies about globalisation, the wonders of the ‘new economy’ and the so-called end of the class struggle.

The struggles in Poland 1980 were rich in lessons for the world proletariat, and we will return to some of them at the end of this article. But one which imposed itself forcefully at the time, and which today has been completely hidden by the bourgeoisie’s ideological campaigns, is that the workers’ struggles in the so-called “socialist” countries were fundamentally the same as those of the workers in the openly capitalist western countries. In this sense, they demonstrated clearly that the working class was exploited in the Eastern bloc, just as it was in the other capitalist countries. This came down to saying that from the workers’ point of view, “real socialism” was really capitalism. In fact, this lesson was not really new. Revolutionaries had not waited until 1980 to identify the capitalist nature of the self-proclaimed socialist countries. For decades, even before the formation of the “people’s democracies”, they had clearly said that the so-called “socialist fatherland” dear to the Stalinists was nothing other than an imperialist and capitalist country, where the workers were subjected to a ferocious exploitation to the profit of a bourgeois class recruited in the apparatus of the “communist” party. They had thus not been surprised in 1953 when the workers of East Berlin rose up against the German “socialist” regime, nor in 1956 when the workers of Poland, and above all Hungary, rose against the “socialist” state, in Hungary going as far as organising workers’ councils before being massacred by the tanks of the “Red” Army. In reality, the struggles in Poland 1980 had been prepared by a whole series of workers’ struggles, which we will go back to briefly here.

In June 1956 there were a series of strikes in Poland, which culminated in an insurrectional strike in Poznan that was put down by the army. When there were further strikes, demonstrations and clashes with the police in many parts of the country in October, the Polish state could no longer rely on brute repression alone. It was the nomination of the new “reformist” leadership of Gomulka that allowed the ruling class to control the situation with a nationalist strategy that prevented any link being forged with the struggle then going on in Hungary.

In the winter of 1970-71 workers responded massively to price rises of 30% and more. Alongside strikes there were clashes with the security forces and attacks on Stalinist party headquarters. Despite the state’s repression the government were outflanked by the extent of the workers’ movement and the price rises were withdrawn. During the strikes Gomulka had been replaced by Gierek, but without this diverting the course of the workers’ struggles.

In June 1976, in response to the first price rises since 1970, there were strikes and clashes with the security forces. The price rises were withdrawn, but then the repression of the state swung into operation with mass dismissals and hundreds of workers arrested.

With the experience of such struggles behind them, it was not surprising that workers revealed a remarkable understanding of the needs and means of their struggle when they embarked on the movement of 1980.

To get an idea of why the strikes in Poland were such an inspiration at the time, why the ICC immediately produced an international leaflet on the lessons of the movement, and why it is an experience of the working class that still cries out for attention two decades later, it is necessary to give an account of what happened. What follows is partly based on an article that appeared in International Review no.23 (although that issue should not be particularly singled out, as every Review from 23-29 is rich in the lessons of the movement).

“On 1 July 1980, after a major increase in meat prices [up to 60%], strikes broke out at Ursus (suburb of Warsaw) in the tractor plant which was at the heart of the confrontation with the authorities in 1976 and in Tczew [at a car component factory] in the Gdansk region [and at a paint factory and petrochemical plant in Wloclawek]. In Ursus the workers organised general assemblies, drew up a list of demands, elected a strike committee. They resisted the threat of firings and repression and carried on work stoppages throughout the following period to support the movement. Between 3-10 July agitation spread within Warsaw (electrical supplies factories, printers), to the aircraft factory at Swi, to the aircraft factory at Swidnick, [20,000 workers at] the car plant in Zeran; to Lodz, to Gdansk. Workers formed strike committees, their demands dealt with wage increases and the cancellation of the price rises. The government granted wage increases: 10% on average, sometimes as high as 20%; often granted preferentially to strikers in order to calm the movement.

“In mid-July the strike hit Lublin. Railroad workers, transport workers and finally all industries in the city stopped work. Their demands: free elections to the unions, a guarantee of safety for the strikers, keep the police out of the factories, wage increases. [Troops were called in to maintain food supplies to the city.]

“Work started again in some regions but strikes broke out in others. Krasnik, the Skolawa Wola steel mills [employing 30,000 workers], the city of Chelm (near the Russian border), [Ostrow-Wielkopolski, 20,000 workers at a helicopter factory in] Wroclaw, were reported to be affected ... [among over 100] strikes in the month of July. Department K1 of the shipyards at Gdansk had a work stoppage; also the steel complex a Huta-Warsaw. Everywhere the authorities gave in and granted wage increases. According to the Financial Times the government established a fund of 4 billion zlotys in July to pay these increases. Official agencies were instructed to make ‘good meat’ immediately available in factories where work stoppages threatened. Towards the end of July the movement seemed to recede; the government thought it had stopped the movement by negotiating factory by factory. It was mistaken.

“The explosion was merely incubating as the one-week strike of Warsaw’s dustmen at the beginning of August showed. On 14 August, the firing of a militant of the free trade union movement, a worker known for his combativity and sincerity, provoked the outbreak of a strike [by 17,000 workers] at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk. The general assembly drew up a list of eleven demands; proposals were listened to, discussed and voted upon. The assembly decided to elect a strike committee mandated on the basis of the demands which included: the reinstatement of fired workers, increases in family allowances, wage increases of 2000 zlotys (average wage: 3000-4500 zlotys a month), the dissolution of the official unions, suppression of the privileges of the police and bureaucracy, the building of a monument to the memory of the workers killed by the militia in 1970, the immediate publication of truthful information about the strike. The management gave in to the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz and Lech Walesa and on the construction of the monument. The strike committee gave an account of its mandate to the workers in the afternoon and informed them of the management’s position. The assembly decided to form a workers’ militia; all alcohol was confiscated. A second round of negotiations with the management began. The workers took over the loud speaker system so that negotiations would be open for all to hear. Soon they developed a system whereby workers outside could be heard by the negotiators inside. Workers seized the microphone and made their voices heard. Throughout the greater part of the strike and up until the last days before the signing of the compromise thousands of workers intervened from outside to exhort, to approve, or to reject the strike committee’s decisions. All the workers who had been fired since 1970 could return to the shipyards. The management granted wage increases and guaranteed the safety of the strikers.

“On 15 August a general strike [of more than 50,000 workers] paralysed the Gdansk region. The Paris Commune shipyard at Gdynia came out. The workers occupied the shipyards and were granted an immediate increase of 2100 zlotys. They refused to go back to work, saying that ‘Gdansk must also win’. The movement at Gdansk fluctuated in a moment of hesitation: the shop floor delegates hesitated to go any further and seemed to want to accept the management’s proposals. Workers from other places in Gdansk and from Gdynia convinced the assembly of workers occupying the shipyard to maintain solidarity with them. There was a call for a new election of delegates who would be better able to express the general will. The workers from different plants in the region formed an inter-factory committee [the MKS] during the night of 15 August and elaborated twenty-one demands.

“The strike committee then had 400 members, two representatives per factory; at the height of the movement there were between 800 and 1000 members. Delegations went back and forth from their factories to the central strike committee, sometimes using cassettes to record the discussions. Strike committees in each factory took care of any specific demands, the whole was co-ordinated by the central strike committee. The strike committee of the Lenin shipyards had twelve members, one per shop, elected by a show of hands after discussion. Two were sent to the central inter-factory strike committee and reported back twice a day.

“On 16 August all telephone communication with Gdansk was cut off by the government. The central strike committee elected a presidium where the partisans of ‘free trade unions’ and dissidents predominated. The twenty-one demands settled upon on 16 August began with a call for free and independent unions and the right to strike. What had been point two in the eleven demands went to seventh place: the 2000 zloty increase for everyone”.

[On 17 August Gdansk local radio reported that “the climate of discussion in certain plants has become alarming.”]

“By 18 August seventy-five enterprises were paralysed in the Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot region. There were about 100,000 strikers. There were movements in Szczecin, and at Tarnow, eight kilometres south of Krakow. The strike committee organised the food supply; power stations and food factories operated by request of the strike committee. The negotiations having become bogged down, the government refused to talk with the inter-factory committee. In the following days new strikes at Elblag, at Tczew, in Kolobrzeg and other cities broke out. On 20 August it was estimated that 300,000 workers were on strike [including 120,000 in the Gdansk area in more than 250 plants. By 22 August more than 150,000 workers in the Gdansk area, and 30,000 in Szczecin, were on strike]. The newspaper of the Lenin shipyards, Solidarnosc, came out daily; printing workers helped to put out leaflets and publications. [Stalinist publications spoke of “a danger of permanent social and political destabilisation”.]

“On 26 August workers reacted with caution to the government’s promises and remained indifferent to [Stalinist Party leader] Gierek’s speeches. They refused to negotiate until telephone communications were re-established.

“On 27 August safe conduct passes for travel to Gdansk issued by sources in the Warsaw government were granted to dissidents so that they could go to the strikers as ‘experts’ and calm this upside down world. The government agreed to negotiate with the presidium of the central strike committee and recognised the right to strike. The telephone lines were re-established. Parallel negotiations began at Szczecin near the border with East Germany. Cardinal Wysynski called for an end to the strike; parts of the speech were shown on TV. The strikers sent out delegations to the rest of the country for solidarity.

“On 28 August the strikes spread further. They affected the copper and coal mines of Silesia where workers have the highest standard of living in Poland. The miners, even before discussing the strike and agreeing on precise demands declared that they would stop work immediately ‘if the authorities touch Gdansk’. They went on strike for ‘the demands of Gdansk’. Thirty factories were on strike at Wroclaw, in Poznan (the factories where the movement began in 1956), in the steel mills of Nova-Huta and at Rzeszois. Inter-factory committees formed in various regions. Ursus sent delegates to Gdansk. At the heart of the generalisation Walesa declared: ‘We do not want the strikes to spread because they will push the country to the point of collapse. We need calm to conduct the negotiations’. The negotiations between the presidium and the government became private; the loudspeaker system increasingly began to break down at the shipyards. On 29 August the discussions and the presidium came to a compromise: the workers will be given ‘free trade unions’ if they accept 1. the leading role of the party; 2. the need to support the Polish state and the Warsaw Pact; 3. that the unions play no political role.

“The agreement was signed on 31 August at Szczecin and at Gdansk. The government recognised the ‘self-managed’ unions; as its spokesman said ‘the nation and the state need a well-organised and conscious working class’. Two days later, fifteen members of the presidium resigned from their workplaces and became officials of the new unions. Afterwards they were soon obliged to nuance their position because it was announced that they would receive salaries of 8000 zlotys. This information was later denied because of workers’ discontent.

“It took several days to get these agreements signed. Statements from workers at Gdansk showom workers at Gdansk show them to have been morose, suspicious and disappointed. Some workers on hearing that the agreements gave them only half of the increase they had already obtained by 16 August shouted ‘Walesa, you sold us out’. Many workers did not agree with the point recognising the role of the Party and the state.

“The strike in the coal mines of Upper Silesia and in the copper mines whose aim was to ensure that the Gdansk agreement would apply to the entire country lasted until 3 September. Throughout September strikes continued: in Kielce, at Bialystok among the cotton workers, in textiles, in the salt mines of Silesia, in the transport services of Katowice”. By mid October 1980 it was estimated that strikes had occurred in more than 4800 enterprises throughout Poland.

Although the mass strike had its most dramatic expressions in August 1980, the working class kept the initiative against the first incoherent responses of the Polish bourgeoisie for some months, into early 1981. Despite the agreements drawn up in Gdansk, workers’ struggles continued, with occupations, strikes and demonstrations. Workers’ demands broadened, with economic demands widening in scope and depth, and political demands becoming increasingly more radical. In November 1980, for example, there were, in actions centred on the Warsaw area, demands for control over police, army, security police and public prosecutors. Such demands, for limitations on the repressive apparatus of a capitalist government, would not be tolerated anywhere in the world, as it puts into question the very force that guarantees the bourgeoisie’s dictatorship.

At the economic level, there were occupations of government offices in protest at meat shortages. Elsewhere there were strikes and protests about the meat ration allowed over the Christmas period. Solidarnosc was explicitly against these actions as it had for some time been campaigning for the introduction of meat rationing.

Faced with these struggles the ruling class in Poland had been inept in its response. Because of the extent of the workers’ movement it was not initially able to risk resorting to direct repression. This did not mean that the threat of repression was not used constantly by Solidarnosc as grounds for discontinuing the struggle. The threat was not only from the Polish state but also from the forces of Russian imperialism. They were rightly concerned about the possibility of the movement inspiring struggles in neighbouring countries. The threat of intervention took a concrete form when, in November 1980, there were reports of concentrations of Warsaw Pact forces gathering on the Polish borders. Although leading figures in the US and western Europe issued the usual warnings against Russia intervening in Poland, as it had done in Hungary in 56 and Czechoslovakia in 68, these were empty words. Joseph Luns, the then Secretary-General of NATO, had already said, in October 1980, that the West was unlikely to make any military retaliation for a Russian invasion. When it came to class struggle on the scale undertaken by the workers in Poland the imperialist enemies had no real differences in wanting social order resumed and workers’ struggles crushed. In reality, these Western warnings had a very definite objective: they aimed to frighten the Polish of workers with the threat of intervention by Russian tanks. They knew what had happened in Hungary in 1956, when these tanks had left thousands dead. Nonetheless, the struggles continued.

In January 1981, when Solidarnosc were discussing Saturday working with the government, on the 10th, three million people failed to turn up for work and heavy industry came to a standstill. Lech Walesa appealed for there to be no confrontation with the government.

In January and February 1981 there were strikes demanding the removal of corrupt officials. The southern region around Bielsko-Biala was paralysed by a prolonged general strike involving 200,000 workers in ike involving 200,000 workers in some 120 enterprises. There were strikes in Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, Czestochowa, Kutno, Poznan, Legnica, Kielce. A leading figure in Solidarnosc said “we want to stop these anti-corruption strikes, Otherwise the whole country would have to go on strike”. On February 9th, in Jelenia Gora (in western Poland) there was a general strike involving 300,000 workers in 450 enterprises demanding that a government sanatorium reserved for bureaucrats be turned over to the local hospital. There were further actions in Kalisz, Suwalki, Katowice, Radom, Nowy Sacz, Szczecin and Lublin - these happened after Jaruzelski has been appointed as Prime Minister and Solidarnosc had responded enthusiastically to his proposal for a 90-day period of restraint from industrial action.

The replacement of Kania by Jaruzelski in February 81, and the previous replacement of Gierek by Kania in September 1980 were important re-orientations by the Polish bourgeoisie, but they did not, in themselves, deflect workers’ struggles. They had seen Gomulka come and go, and knew that a change at the top would not change the policies of the state.

In March there was the threat of a national general strike in response to police violence in Bydgoszcz. In the end this was called off by Solidarnosc after a deal with the government. The union accepted that “there was some justification for police interference in Bydgoszcz because of a climate of tension in the city.” In the period following Bydgoszcz seven joint commissions were set up to officially institutionalise government-Solidarnosc collaboration.

However, the struggles had not finished. In mid-July 1981 fuel and price rises of up to 400% were announced, as well as cuts in the meat rations for August and September. Strikes and hunger marches reappeared. Solidarnosc called for an end to the protests. Many other issues were also taken up - corruption, repression, as well as rationing. By late September two thirds of Poland’s provinces were affected. The strike wave continued developing into mid October 81.

Although the government’s summer announcements were clearly threatening, it was not until 13th December 1981 that the clamp down of military rule was undertaken. The police state had 300,000 troops and 100,000 police - but it was 17 months after the start of the movement before the Polish ruling class felt confident that it could physically attack workers’ strikes, occupations and demonstrations. This confidence came from its knowledge of the work that Solidarnosc had done in the gradual undermining of the ability of the working class to struggle.

The strength of the movement lay in the fact that workers took the struggle into their own hands and rapidly went beyond the confines of particular enterprises. Extending struggles beyond individual factories, holding general assemblies and ensuring that delegates could be recalled at a delegates could be recalled at any moment, all this contributed to the power of the movement. Partly this can be attributed to the fact that workers had no confidence in the official trade unions - which were identified as corrupt state organs. However, while this contributed to the strength of the movement, it also laid workers wide open to propaganda about ‘free’ or ‘independent’ trade unions.

Various dissident groups had for years put forward the idea of ‘free’ trade unions, as an alternative to those which were seen as part of the state. Such ideas came to the fore particularly at times of intense workers’ struggle. August 1980 was no exception. Right from the start, when workers were struggling against attacks on their living and working conditions, there were voices insisting on the need for ‘independent’ trade unions.

The actions of Solidarnosc in 1980 and 1981 demonstrated that, even when formally separated from the capitalist state, new unions, started from scratch, with millions of determined members and enjoying the confidence of the working class, act the same as official, bureaucratic state unions. As with unions everywhere else in the world, Solidarnosc (and the demands for ‘free trade unions’ that preceded its foundation) acted to sabotage struggles, demobilise and discourage workers and divert their discontent into the dead-ends of ‘self-management’, defence of the national economy and defence of the unions rather than workers’ interests. This happens, not because of ‘bad leaders’ such as Walesa, the influence of the Church or a lack of democratic structures, but because of the very nature of unionism. Permanent organisations cannot be maintained in an epoch where reforms are no longer possible, where the state tends to incorporate the whole of society, and where unions can only be instruments for defending the national economy.

In Poland, even at the height of the strikes, when workers were organising themselves, extending their struggles, holding assemblies, electing delegates and creating inter-factory committees to co-ordinate and make their actions more effective, there was already a movement that insisted on the need for new unions. As our account of the events shows, one of the first blows against the movement was the transformation of the inter-factory committees into the initial structure of Solidarnosc.

There was much suspicion of the actions of such as Walesa and the ‘moderate’ leadership, but the work of Solidarnosc was not accomplished by a handful of ‘compromising’ celebrities, but by the union structure as a whole. Certainly, Walesa was an important figure, and acknowledged by the bourgeoisie internationally. The award of the Nobel peace prize, and his subsequent elevation to the Polish presidency were undoubtedly in continuity with his activities in 1980-81. But it should also be remembered that he had once been a respected militant, who had, for example, been a leading figure in the struggles of 1970. This respect meant that his voice had a particular weight with workers, as a proven ‘opponent’ of the Polish state. By the summer of 1980 this ‘opposition’ was 80 this ‘opposition’ was a thing of the past. Right from the beginning of the movement he was to be found actively discouraging workers from striking. This started in Gdansk, then he went on to ‘negotiations’ with the authorities on the best way to sabotage workers’ struggles, and, eventually, took the form of rushing round the whole country, often in an army helicopter, urging workers, at every opportunity, to abandon their strikes.

Walesa not only relied on his past reputation, but gave new reasons for the suppression of the struggle. “Society wants order now. We have to learn to negotiate rather than strike”. Workers had to stop their struggles so that Solidarnosc could negotiate. The framework of the national economy was clear as “We are Poles first and trade unionists second”.

The role of Solidarnosc became more and more openly one of partnership with the government, particularly after it averted the threat of a general strike in March 1981. In August 81 there was a particularly good example, when Solidarnosc was trying to persuade workers to give up eight free Saturdays to help out the crisis-ridden economy. As an angry worker told representatives of Solidarnosc’s National Commission “You dare to call on people to work their free Saturdays because the government has to be propped up? But who says we have to prop it up?”.

But Solidarnosc did not only issue direct appeals for order. A typical leaflet, from Szczecin Solidarnosc, started by saying that:

“Solidarnosc means:

• the way to get the country back on its feet
• social calm and stability
• maintenance of standards and good organisation”,

but then went on to speak of “the battle for decent living standards”. This showed the two faces of Solidarnosc, as a force for social order, but also posing as the defender of workers’ interests. The two aspects of the union’s activity were mutually dependent. By claiming to have the interests of workers at heart they hoped that their appeals for order would have credibility. Many union activists who denounced Walesa’s ‘betrayals’ would still rush to the defence of Solidarnosc itself. In February 1981, following a period where many strikes were out of the control of Solidarnosc, the leadership issued a statement insisting on the need for a united union as its splintering “would herald a period of uncontrolled social conflict”. Such an appeal was a reminder that Solidarnosc would only function effectively for Polish capitalism so long as it posed as the defender of workers’ interests.

This role for Solidarnosc was recognised internationally, as unions from the West gave advice on how unions function within the framework of the national economy. To build up Solidarnosc western unions did not restrict themselves to verbal assistance, substantial financial support was provided by a number of union federations, in particular from those pillars of social responsibilityse pillars of social responsibility in the US and the UK, the AFL-CIO and the TUC. Internationally capitalism left nothing to chance.

The struggles of 1980-81 were enriched by the previous experience of the working class in Poland. However, they were not an isolated ‘Polish’ expression of the class struggle, being the culmination of an international wave of struggles from 1978 to 1981. Miners in the US in 1978, the public sector in Britain in 1978-79, French steel workers at the start of 1979, Rotterdam dockworkers autumn 1979, steelworkers in Britain in 1980, Brazilian metal workers, oil workers in Iran, massive workers’ movements in Peru, strikes across eastern Europe following the mass strikes in Poland: all these struggles demonstrated the combativity of the working class and a growing class consciousness. The main significance of the mass strike in Poland was that it provided the beginnings of an answer to the fundamental questions posed in all the other struggles - how does the working class fight and what are the basic obstacles it faces in its struggle.

As we have seen, during the summer of 1980 the Polish proletariat was able to create, spontaneously, the most powerful and effective forms of class struggle precisely because the social “buffers” that exist in Western countries were lacking. This thoroughly gives the lie to all those (Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, and others) who claim that the working class cannot really develop its struggles unless it has first formed trade unions or any other kind of “workers’ associationism” (in the words of the Bordigists of the International Communist Party that publishes Il Comunista in Italy). The Polish proletariat’s moment of greatest strength, when it paralysed the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state and forced it to retreat, was when no trade union existed (the official unions being completely out of the running). When the union was formed, and as it bit by bit grew in strength and structure, so the proletariat began to weaken to the point where it was unable to react to the repression unleashed on 13th December 1981. When the class struggle develops, the workers’ strength ielops, the workers’ strength is not proportional to that of the unions, but inversely proportional. Any attempt to “renew” the old unions or to create new ones, comes down to supporting the bourgeoisie in its sabotage of the workers’ struggle.

This is a fundamental lesson for the world proletariat from the struggle in Poland 1980. however, the Polish workers themselves were unable to understand the lesson because they did not have a direct historical experience of union sabotage. A few months of Solidarnosc sabotaging the struggle convinced them at best that Walesa and his cronies were a bunch of bastards, but were not enough to teach them that the problem is trade unionism, not this or that “bad leader”.

These lessons could only truly be learned by sectors of the world proletariat who had already been confronted for a long time with bourgeois democracy, not immediately from the Polish experience, but from their own daily experience. In part, this is what happened in the period that followed.

In the international wave of struggles from 1983-89, particularly in western Europe, where the working class has the longest experience of ‘independent’ unions and the dictatorship of the democratic bourgeoisie, workers struggles were led increasingly to call into question the authority of the unions, to the point where in a whole series of countries (France and Italy in particular) “co-ordinations” were set up, supposedly springing from “rank-and-file assemblies”, in order to make up for the discredit of the official unions(1). Obviously, this tendency to call into question the union framework was strongly counter-acted by the general retreat of the working class following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes in 1989. But in the struggles which will necessarily develop in the future against the capitalist crisis, workers in every country will have to recover the lessons of their previous struggles. Not only the lessons of struggles that they have been directly involved in, but also those of their class brothers in other countries, and in particular those of the proletariat’s struggle in Poland 1980.

For we can be certain that the working class’ relative passivity world wide today, does not call into question that general historic course of the proletarian struggle. May 68 in France, the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969, and may other movements around the world since then have shown that the proletariat has emerged from the counter-revolution that it suffered for 40 years(2). This course has not fundamentally been called into question since then: a historic period which has seen struggles as important as those in Poland can only be called into question by a profound defeat of the working class such as the bourgeoisie has so far been unable to inflict.

Barrow

1 See in particular our article “The co-ordinations sabotage the struggle” in International Review no.56

2 See our article “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism” in this issue.

As we put this issue together, there have been major upheavals in ex-Yugoslavia and we want to take position on them immediately . It is our responsibility as a revolutionary organisation to do so . even if we can only be brief here. Our readers can be sure that we will quickly develop our analysis of these events, and our intervention in general, in particular through our various territorial publications.

Thus, if we are to believe the bourgeois media, and especially the images transmitted on the television networks of all the so-called great democracies, we have been seeing a major historical we have been seeing a major historical event in Belgrade over the last few days, a "democratic and peaceful revolution" accomplished by the Serbian people, and thus the fall of Milosevic i.e. of the "last communist dictatorship in Europe". Everything is for the best in the best of all possible capitalist worlds! And this "historic event" has been saluted and feted by all the heads of state and leaders of the great "democratic" powers, the very same people who, just one year ago, unleashed war, destruction and massacre on Kosovo and Serbia. Of course, this was all done in the name of the "humanitarian intervention" needed to stop Milosevic and his mad dogs carrying out their terrible atrocities in Kosovo.

Our organisation responded immediately to all these hypocrites and denounced them as "pyromaniac firemen", underlining the responsibility of all of them in the barbarism that swept this region:

"The politicians and media of NATO present the war as an action in defence of .human rights., against a particularly revolting regime which is responsible, amongst its other misdeeds, for the .ethnic cleansing. which has stained Yugoslavia in blood since 1991. In tained Yugoslavia in blood since 1991. In reality, the .democratic. powers care not a jot for the population of Kosovo, just as they are completely indifferent to the fate of the Kurd and Shiite populations of Iraq, which they left to be massacred by the troops of Saddam Hussein after the Gulf war. The sufferings inflicted by dictators on persecuted civilian populations have always been the pretext for the great .democracies. to unleash .just. war" (International Review 97)

A year later we asked:

"Who allowed the worst nationalist mafia cliques in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and now Kosovo, to unleash nationalist hysteria and bloody ethnic cleansing, if not the great imperialist powers? Who, if not Germany, pushed for the unilateral declaration of independence by Slovenia and Croatia, encouraging and precipitating the unleashing of nationalism in the Balkans which led to the massacres and exile of the Serbian, then the Bosnian population? Who, if not Britain and France, turned a blind eye to the repression and massacre of the Croat and Bosnian population, and the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Milosevic and the .Greater Serbia. nationalists? Who, if not the United States, supported and equipped the different rival gated and equipped the different rival gangs depending on how their rivals were positioned at any given moment? When they justify he bombing campaign on the grounds of .humanitarian interference., the .Allied. western democracies demonstrate an unlimited hypocrisy and duplicity" (International Review 98).

If today all these big imperialist gangsters haven.t got enough words to salute the "awakening" of the Serbian people who, we are told, have the "pride and the courage" to get rid of a bloody dictator, this is just a way of trying to get us to believe that the current events are a perfect justification for their bloody bombings a year ago. Le Monde, the eminent mouthpiece of the ruling class in France, says starightforwardly:

"by finally deciding to confront Serb power militarily, Europe and the USA undoubtedly weakened the master of Belgrade and isolated him further from his people"

Weren.t the so-called great democracies right, and won.t they be right in future, to intervene by force in the name of humanitarianism? In other words, they want to use the cover of "human rights" to free their hands and carights" to free their hands and carry out more massacre and destruction. From this point of view, what is happening in Belgrade (not ti mention the ideological use being made of it) is already a success for the bourgeoisie.

Another level on which the ruling class has tried to score some points is around the theme of "democracy" and its triumphant progress against all forms of dictatorship. According to the bourgeoisie, the days we are living through are striking proof of this. But this barrage is all the more effective in that, as the media have emphasised so strongly, among those who have played a leading role in the fall of Milosevic, in the "victory of democracy", is the Serbian working class which responded to the call for "civil disobedience" launched by the winner of the election, Kostunica . a big nationalist bourgeois who was for ages the accomplice of the murderous Karadic in Bosnia, and who is now presented as a great opponent of dictatorship. The columns of the bourgeois press have devoted a lot of space to those workers who, like the miners of Kolubra, went on strike in defence of the "democratic cause". If the international ruling class has one profound wish, it is that this example can be exported all over the world and above all to the big over the world and above all to the big working class centres at the heart of capitalism.

At this moment everyone is describing what.s happened in Belgrade as a "revolution" but this is a revolution of the duped. The victory of "democracy", i.e. of the bourgeois forces which represent it, can only be a victory for the capitalist class, in no way a victory for the working class.

Elfe 7.10.00

Over the last months the IBRP[1] [92]has published articles in its press on the need for the regroupment between revolutionary forces with a view to the construction of the international communist party of the future. One of these, "Revolutionaries, internationalists in the face of the perspective of war and the situation of the proletariat"[2] [93]is a document produced in the period following last year's war in Kosovo:

"The recent bellicose events in the Balkans, precisely because they took place in Europe, (…) represent a significant step forward in the process leading to generalised imperialist war. (…).

The war itself and the way it was opposed, forms the basis for adecantation and selection of revolutionary forces able to participate in the construction of the party.

They will be delimited by the basic points that follow, which are indispensable for any political initiative intending to strengthen the revolutionary front against capital and its wars".

Following this passage we find "21 basic points"[2] [93]which the IBRP defines as fundamental.

It was precisely these "bellicose events in the Balkans" that prompted our organisation, at the time of the war itself, to make an appeal to the various revolutionary organisations existing at an international level in which we said that:

"There are also differences of course, which are related to a different way of analysing imperialism in the present period and the relationship between the classes. But, without underestimating these differences, we think that what unites us is much more important and significant than that which differentiates us in relation to the tasks of the moment and it was on this basis that, on March 29 1999, we appealed to all of these groups to take acommon initiative against the war"[3] [94].

As this appeal, made over a year ago, fell on utterly deaf ears[4] [95],we have to ask why on earth the IBRP has only now come up with its "21 conditions" - with which we are completely agreed, with the exception of some reservations on two points[5] [96]- but did not accept our appeal at the time. The answer is to be found towards the end of the IBRP document, where there is a section that would seem to be addressed to the ICC (without once quoting us, of course), stating that "23 years after the1st International Conference, called by BattagliaComunista[6] [97] to launch an initial confrontation between the political groups that followed the general class and internationalist lines defended by the Communist Left from the second half of the '20s,it's possible- and therefore now necessary - to make an evaluation of that confrontation".

An evaluation? After 23 years? And why only now? The IBRP explains it thus: in more than two decades there has been "an acceleration in the process of decantation in the ‘proletarian political camp’ excluding all those organisations that, for one reason or another, have stumbled over the question of war by not coming up to the inalienable principle of revolutionary defeatism".

But the bit where they have it in for us (and for the Bordigist groups) comes immediately after this:

"Other groupings within this camp, although not falling into the tragic error of supporting the war front, (…) have nevertheless cut themselves off from the method and perspective for the work that will lead to adherence to the future revolutionary party, irretrievable victims of an idealistic or mechanistic framework" (our emphasis).

As we think that the accusations that the IBRP makes against us are unfounded - and as moreover we fear that they serve to hide a politically opportunist practice - we will try to develop a reply to these accusations by showing what has been the attitude of the marxist current of the workers' movement in terms of the "method and perspective for the work that will lead to adherence to the future revolutionary party". In doing so we will check concretely if, and to what extent, the IBRP and the groups that formed it have conformed to this line. In order to do so we will consider two questions thatare closely linked and which express the two levels at which the problem of the organisation of revolutionaries is posed today:

• how the future International should be conceived
• what policy should be followed for the construction of the organisation and the regroupment of revolutionaries.

International Communist Party or International of Communist Parties?

What will the future International be? An organisation conceived in a unitary way from the outset, that is, an international communist party, or an International of the communist parties of the various countries? On this point the thinking and the struggle of Amadeo Bordiga and the Italian Left is an indispensable reference point. For Bordiga, the Communist International should already have been, as he called it, the international party. Consistent with this conception, Bordiga even renounced certain "tactical" points that he defended (abstentionism, a regroupment that excluded the centrists) in order to make the predominance of the International over the individual national parties a living reality, in order to ensure that the Communist International was one organisation and not a federation of parties, that it had one single policy everywhere and not specific ones from country to country.

"Sowe assert that the highest level of international agreement not only has the right to establish the formulae that are in force and which must be in force for every country without exception, but it also has the right to involve itself in the situation of an individual country and can therefore say that the International thinks that - for example - in England it's necessary to do, act in this given way" (Amadeo Bordiga, address to the Congress of Livorno, 1921, in La Sinistra Comunista nel cammino della rivoluzione, Sociali editions, 1976).

Bordiga,in the name of the Italian Left, was even more correct to defend this conception against the degeneration of the International itself, when the policy of the latter became more and more confused with the policy and the interests of the Russian state:

"Its sister parties must help the Russian party resolve its problems even though it's true that they don't have direct experience of the problems of government; in spite of this they can contribute to their resolution by bringing a class, a revolutionary coefficient derived directly from the reality of the class struggle taking place in their own country" (Theses of the left for the 3rd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy, Lyon, January 1926, published in In defence of the continuity of the communist programme, "Il Programma Communista" edition, Milan, 1970).

Finally, in Bordiga's reply to Karl Korsch it emerges with still greater clarity what the International must be and what it failed to be:

"I think that one of the defects of the International today is to be 'an oppositional bloc' locally and nationally. We must reflect on this, it must be understood without exaggeration but rather in order to treasure these lessons. Lenin made a great deal of work depend on 'spontaneous’ elaboration, counting on regrouping materially and then moulding the various groups homogeneously afterwards in the heat of the Russian revolution. On the whole it wasn't a success" (from Amadeo Bordiga's letter to Korsch, published in Danilo Montaldi, Korsch and the Italian communists, Savelli).

In other words Bordiga regretted the fact that the International had been formed on the basis of a group of "oppositions" to the old social democratic parties, politically incoherent with one another and that Lenin's proposal to unify these diverse components did not have any substantial success.

It is on the basis of this conception that the revolutionary organisations of the counter-revolutionary years, in spite of the adverse political period, always saw themselves not only as internationalist but also as international organisations. And it is no accident that one of the tricks used to attack the Italian Fraction within Trotsky’s International Left Opposition was precisely to accuse them of following a "national" policy.[7] [98]

Now let us see what is the IBRP’s conception on this question:

"The IBRP was constituted as the only possible form of organisation and co-ordination, half way between the isolated work of the vanguard in various countries and the presence of a real International Party (…). New vanguards - released from the old schemas that have been shown to be useless to explain the present and from which to project the future - they undertake the task of the construction of the party (…). These vanguards have the duty, which they are fulfilling, to consolidate themselves and grow on the basis of a body of theses, a platform and an organisational framework which are coherent one with another and with the Bureau which, in this way, puts itself forward as a reference point for the necessary homogenisation of the forces of the future party"[9] [99].

Up to here the IBRP's discourse, apart from being too presumptuous in places, does not seem, on the whole, to contradict the above framework. But the next passage poses more than one problem:

"Reference point doesn't mean a structure that imposes itself. The IBRP doesn't intend to accelerate the time it takes for an international regroupment of revolutionary forces beyond the ‘natural’ time for the political growth of the communist vanguard in the various countries"[8] [100].

This means that the IBRP, or rather the two organisations that compose it, don't think that it's possible to build a single international organisation before the formation of the international party. Moreover the passage makes a strange reference to "the ‘natural’ time for the political growth of the communist vanguard in the various countries", the meaning of which becomes clearer if we see what is the vision from which the IBRP intends to demarcate itself, that of the ICC and the Italian Communist Left:

"We reject in principle, and on the basis of various congress resolutions, that the idea of creating national sections by grafting a pre-existing organisation is shared by us. You can't build a national section of the international party of the proletariat by creating within a country in a more or less artificial way a publication centre for publications drafted elsewhere and at any rate outside of the real political and social battle of the country itself" (our emphasis)[9] [99].

This passage obviously deserves an attentive response because in it is contained the strategic difference between the policy of international regroupment as applied by the IBRP and that of the ICC. Our strategy for international regroupment is of course ridiculed by referring to it as "grafting a pre-existing organisation", as the creation "within a country in a more or less artificial way a publication centre for publications drafted elsewhere" … so as to induce in the reader an automatic distaste for the strategy of the ICC.

But let's be concrete and try to take up a hypothetical case. For the IBRP, if a new group of comrades appears, let's say in Canada, who are moving towards internationalist positions, this group can benefit from critical fraternal contributions, even polemics, but it must grow and develop from the political context of its own country, inside "the real political and social battle of the country itself". This means that for the IBRP the current and local context of a given country is more important than the international and historical framework furnished by the experience of the workers' movement. What, on the other hand, is the strategy for the construction of the organisation at an international level which the IBRP tries deliberately to present in a bad light when it talks of the "creation of national sections by grafting a pre-existing organisation"? Whether there are one or one hundred aspiring militants in a new country, our strategy is not to create a local group that evolves locally, through the "real political and social battle of the country itself", but to integrate these new militants immediately into the international work of the organisation, an aspect of which is the centralised intervention in the country in which these comrades live. This is why, even if our resources are small, our organisation makes the effort to be present immediately with a local publication under the responsibility of the new group of comrades because we hold that this is the most direct and effective way, on the one hand to extend our influence and, on the other to proceed directly to the construction of the revolutionary organisation. What is artificial about that, what sense it makes to talk about “grafting a pre-existing organisation” has yet to be explained.

In fact, the roots of BC and the CWO’s organisational incomprehension lie in a deeper and more general incomprehension of the difference between the Second and Third Internationals due to the change in historic period:

• the second half of the 1800s constituted a favourable period for the struggle for reforms: capitalism was in full expansion and the International in this period was an international composed of national parties that fought within their respective countries with different programmes (democratic gains for some, the national question for others, the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia, "social" laws in favour of the workers in other countries, and so on);
• the outbreak of the World War I expressed the exhaustion of the potential for the capitalist mode of production, its inability to develop further in a way that could guarantee a future for humanity. And so an epoch of war or revolution opened up, in which the alternative of communism or barbarism is objectively posed. In this context, the problem is no longer posed in terms of the construction of individual national parties with specific local tasks but rather as the construction of a single world party with a single programme and a complete unity of action to direct the common and simultaneous action of the world proletariat towards the revolution[10] [101].

The remnants of federalism that persisted in the Communist International are the vestiges of the previous period (like the parliamentary question, for example) which still exerted a weight on the new International ("the weight of dead generations weighs on the brains of the living", as Marx wrote in The18th Brumaire).

Moreover we can add that throughout its history (even when it was normal for the international to have a more federalist structure) the marxist Left fought constantly against federalism. Let us recall the most significant episodes:

• Marx and the General Council of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association - IWA) fought against the federalism of the anarchists and their attempt to build a secret organisation within the IWA itself;
• In the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg fought to ensure that congress decisions were really applied in the diffecisions were really applied in the different parties;
• In the Third International (CI) it was not only the Left that fought for centralisation; Lenin and Trotsky themselves struggled against the "particularism" of certain parties who used it to hide their opportunist politics (for example, against the presence of freemasons in the French party).

We could also add that the process of the formation of a party at an international level before its components in the individual countries had been consolidated or even created, was indeed the process of the formation of the CI[11] [102].It is well known that there was a disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg on this question. The latter was against the immediate foundation of the CI - and for this reason had mandated the German delegate, Eberlein, to vote against its foundation - because she held that the moment was not yet ripe: most of the communist parties had not yet been formed and consequently the Russian party would have too strong a weight within the CI. Unfortunately her fears about the excessive weight of the Russian party proved justified with the reflux in the revolutionary period and the degeneration of the CI, but we think that even so Lenin was right not to wait any longer before founding the CI: in fact its formation was already too late in relation to the needs of the class, though the communists could not have done any more since the war had finished just a few months beforehand.

It would be interesting to hear from the IBRP what is their opinion of this historic disagreement: do the IBRP perhaps think that Luxemburg was right against Lenin in maintaining that the time was not ripe for the foundation of the CI?

This federalist framework at a theoretical level is obviously reflected in the IBRP’s daily practice. For 13 years, from the time of its foundation up to 1997, the two organisations that form the IBRP had two politically distinct platforms, they had no instances involving the whole organisation (except for meetings of one of the individual components with the participation of a delegation from the other, which is not the same thing at all), there is no indication of a debate between them that can be seen, nor does it seem that they feel the need to have one, even though in the 16 long years that have passed since the formation of the IBRP striking differences have often been expressed in the analysis of the current situation, in the framework for their international work, etc. The reality is that this organisational model that the IBRP dares to elevate to the ranks of "the only possible form of organisation and co-ordination" at this moment, is in fact the opportunist organisational form par excellence, This organisational form enables the IBRP to pull new organisations into its orbit, assigning them the label of "Communist Left" without pushing them too much on the nature of their origins. When the IBRP makes sinister reference to the fact that it's necessary to wait for the maturation of "the ‘natural’ time for the political growth of the communist vanguard in the various countries", in fact it is only expressing its opportunist theory of not criticising too hard the groups with which it's in contact in order to avoid losing their confidence[12] [103].

We haven't invented all this, it's a simple assessment of the 16 years of the IBRP which, in spite of all the triumphalism that emerges from the press of this political formation, has not produced any significant results: two groups formed the IBRP in 1984, there are still only two groups in it today. So perhaps it would be useful for BC and the CWO to review the various groups who have approached or have joined them only for a brief period and to assess what happened to them or why they have not remained part of the IBRP. For example, what has become of the Iranians of SUCM-Komala? And the Indian comrades of Lal Pataka? And also the French comrades who actually constituted a third component of the IBRP for a brief period?

As we can see, an opportunist policy of regroupment is not just politically wrong, it doesn’t work either.

The policy of regroupment and the construction of the organisation

On this point of course we can do no better than to begin with Lenin,the great creator of the party and the first to push for the creation of the Communist International. One of Lenin’s most important contributions was probably the battle that he fought and won at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 on the first article of the statutes, to ensure strict criteria for membership of the party:

"To forget the difference that exists between the detachment of the vanguard and all the masses that gravitate towards it, to forget the constant duty of the detachment of the vanguard to raise broader and broader strata to the level of the vanguard, would only mean to fool oneself, to close one's eyes to the immensity of our task, to diminish this task. And this is what one does when cancelling the difference between those who adhere to and those who enter the party, between the conscious and active elements and those who lend a hand" (Lenin, "One step forward andtwo steps back", 1904, in Selected Works, edited byRiuniti).

Lenin's battle on this point, which led to the separation in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Bolsheviks (the majoritarians) and the Mensheviks (the minoritarians) has a particular value historically because it preceded by several years the new model of the party, the party of cadres, tighter, more appropriate for the new historic period of "war or revolution", in comparison with the old model of the mass party, broader and less rigorous on the criteria for militancy, that was valid in the historic period of the expansion of capitalism.

In the second place the problem is raised of what attitude this party (or fraction or political group, whatever it is) should have to other existing proletarian organisations. In other words, how should it respond to the concrete need for the regroupment of revolutionary forces in the most efficient way possible? Here too we can refer to the historic experience of the workers' movement, starting with the debate within the International with the Italian Left on the question of the integration of the centrists in the formation of the Communist Party. The position of Bordiga is very clear and his contribution was fundamental in getting the International to accept the 21 conditions that stated that: "Party members who refuse in principle the conditions and the theses elaborated by the Communist International should be expelled from the party. This is particularly true for the delegates to extraordinary congresses"[13] [104].

In1920 Bordiga was concerned that some centrist components, who hadn't dirtied their hands too much in 1914, could find it convenient to work in the new communist party rather than in the old social-democratic parties, which had been greatly discredited:

"Today it's very easy to say that with a new war the same mistake wouldn't be made, that is the mistakes of the holy alliance and national defence. The revolution is still a long way away, the centrists could say, it isn't an immediate problem. And they would accept the theses of the Communist International: the power of the soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the red terror (…). Elements of the right accept our theses but inadequately, with some reservations. We communists must demand that this acceptance must be total and without limits both at the level of theory and in the field of action (…). Against the reformists we must demand insurmountable barriers (…). In the face of the programme it's not a question of discipline: you either accept it or you don't accept it, and in the case of the latter you leave the party" (from Amadeo Bordiga's address on "Conditions for admission to the CI",1920, published in La Sinistra Comunista nel cammino dellarivoluzione, Sociali editions, 1976).

Among the contributions of Bordiga and the Italian Left this is one ofthe key questions. It was on the basis of this position that Bordiga later clashed with the International when it was in serious regression, fighting against the policy of integrating centrists into the communist parties as a corollary to making the defence of the Russian state the central question over all other problems[14] [105].In particular, it is well known that the International tried to force the Communist Party of Italy to integrate into its ranks the maximalist (left) wing of the Italian SP, Serrati’s so-called"terzini" (literally, "third internationalists"), from which the Italian CP had separated in 1921 when it was constituted.

However this rigour in relation to the moderate, centrist currents never meant a sectarian closure, a refusal to talk, to discuss, quite the reverse! In fact, from its inception as an abstentionist fraction in the Italian SP, the Italian Left always worked to recuperate revolutionary energies that had remained on centrist positions, both to strengthen its own ranks and to rescue these forces from the class enemy:

"Although it was organised as an autonomous fraction within the Italian SP, with its own press organ, the abstentionist fraction tried above all to win over the majority of the party to its programme. The abstentionists also believed that this was possible in spite of the crushing victory of the parliamentary tendency represented in the alliance between Lazzari and Serrati. The fraction could only become a party by working with all its strength to win over at least a significant minority. The concern of the ‘Bordigist’ movement was always never to abandon the terrain until the struggle had been waged to the end and because of this it never was a sect, which its adversaries accuse it of being"[15] [106].

We can therefore sum up by saying that there are two fundamental elements that characterise the politics of the Italian Left (in the Bolshevik tradition):

• rigorous criteria on party membership, based on:
• militant commitment (article 1 of the statutes of the RSDLP);
• clarity on the programme and the selection of militants;
• openness in its policy of discussion with the other political currents of the workers' movement (see, for example, the Italian Left's participation in the conferences that were held in France between 1928 and 1933, or its lengthy discussions with the Ligue Communiste Internationaliste de Belgique with the publication in the review Bilan of articles written by militants of the LCIB).

It is worth mentioning that there is a link between the programmatic and organisational rigour of the Italian Left and its openness to discussion: in line with the tradition of the Left, it developed a long term policy based on clarity and political solidarity, rejecting immediate "successes" based on ambiguities that laid the ground for future defeats by opening the door to opportunism ("Impatience is the mother of opportunism",as Trotsky said); they weren't afraid to discuss with other currents because they had confidence in the solidity of their positions.

Similarly, there is a link between the confusion and ambiguity of the opportunists and their "sectarianism" which is generally aimed at the left and not the right.

When one is aware of the lack of solidity of one's own positions, one is obviously afraid to measure them against those of the Left (see, for example, the policy of the CI after the Second Congress, which opened up to the centre but became "sectarian" in relation to the Left with, for example, the exclusion of the KAPD; the policy of Trotsky, who bureaucratically excluded the Italian Left from the International Opposition in order to put into action an entryist policy in relation to social democracy; the policy of the PCInt in 1945 and after it had excluded the French Communist Left in order cheerfully to regroup with elements of the most opportunist variety who refused even to criticise their past errors).

Among the oppositions, the Italian Fraction gives us a magnificent lesson on method and revolutionary responsibility by fighting for the regroupment of revolutionaries, but above all through its clarity in terms of political positions. The Italian Left has always brought out the need for a programmatic document against the political manoeuvres which have, on the other hand, ruined the Left opposition. In this way, if there had to be a break, it would take place on the basis of texts.

The Italian Left made this method its own from its inception during the First World War within the Second International; they followed it during the degeneration of the CI from 1924 to 1928, when they constituted themselves as a fraction at Pantin (France).

Trotsky himself paid homage to this policy in his last letter to the fraction in December 1932. "The separation with an honest revolutionary group like yours doesn't necessarily need to be accompanied by animosity, by personal attacks or poisonous criticisms" (our emphasis).

Onthe other hand Trotsky’s method within the opposition had nothing to do with that of the workers' movement. The exclusion ofthe Italian Left was accomplished using the same procedures that were used by the Stalinised CI, without a clear debate to explain the break. It was neither the first nor the last time: Trotsky often supported "adventurers" who were able to win his confidence. By contrast, all the groups like the Belgian, German, Spanish Left and all the valuable, revolutionary militants like Rosmer, Nin, Landau and Hennaut were eliminated or expelled one after another until the International Left Opposition became a purely "Trotskyist" current[16] [107].

By virtue of this hard struggle to defend the patrimony of the marxist experience and, with it, its own political identity the Italian Left became, at an international level, the political current that best expressed the need for a coherent party, excluding those who were in doubt and also the centrists but at the same time developing the greatest ability to establish a policy of joining up revolutionary forces because this was based on clarity in both positions and action.

Is the IBRP (and before it the PCInt from '43 onwards) - which claims to be the only real political descendent of the Italian Left - up to the level of our political forerunners? Are their criteria for membership of the party as strict as Lenin rightly insisted they should be? Frankly, we don't think so. The whole history of this group is littered with episodes of opportunism on organisational questions and, rather than applying the orientations that it claims to adhere to, the IBRP’s political practice is in fact much closer to that of the CI in its degenerative phase, and of the Trotskyists. We will take up just a few historic examples to demonstrate what we mean.

1943-46

In 1943 the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) was formed in the north of Italy. The news roused high hopes. The leadership of the new party’s opportunist practice began with the mass entry into the PCInt of various elements from the partisan struggle[17] [108]or from various groups in the south, some of whom came from the Italian SP and the Italian CP, still others from Trotskyism; then there was a series of militants who had openly broken with the programmatic and organisational framework to which they had been committed, to throw themselves into explicitly counter-revolutionary adventures, such as the minority of the Fraction Abroad of the Italian CP who went to "participate" in the War in Spain in '36, Vercesi who took part in the"Antifascist Coalition" in Brussels during 1943[18] [109]. Of course no insistence was made that these militants, who swelled the ranks of the new party, give a real account of their previous political activity. And, talking of adhesion to the spirit and letter of Lenin, what can we say of Bordiga himself, who took part in the party's activity up to 1952[19] [110],contributed actively to determining its political line and even wrote the political platform approved by the party - without even being a member of it?

In this period it was the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL, Internationalisme) who took up the heritage of the left line, by salvaging and strengthening the political inheritance of the Italian Fraction Abroad (Bilan). And it was the FFCL that raised with the PCInt the problem of having integrated Vercesi and the minority of Bilan without asking them to account politically for their past errors, and also the fact that in forming the party in Italy they had completely ignored the work of "making a balance sheet" carried out over ten years by the Fraction Abroad.

In 1945 an International Bureau was formed, uniting the PCInt, the Belgian Fraction and a French Fraction, a "duplicate"of the FFCL. In fact this “FFCL-number 2” was constituted on the basis of a split by two elements who were part of the Executive Commission (EC) of the FFCL; they had contacted Vercesi in Brussels and were probably convinced by his arguments, although beforehand they supported the position that he should be excluded immediately, without discussion[20] [111]. One of the two was very inexperienced (Suzanne), while the other came from the Spanish POUM (and later ended up in the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie). The “FFCL-number 2” was "reinforced" when elements from the minority of Bilan and the old Union Communiste (Chazé, etc) joined it, elements who had been seriously criticised by the Fraction becauseof their concessions to antifascism during the war in Spain.

In fact the creation of this duplicate Fraction served the need to reduce the credibility of Internationalisme. As we can see history repeats itself, in as far as the PCInt simply repeated the Left Opposition’s manoeuvres against the Italian Fraction in1930, when it formed the “New Italian Opposition” (NOI), a group made up of ex-Stalinists who just two months previously had dirtied their hands by expelling Bordiga from the PCI and expelling Bordiga from the PCI and whose political function could only have been to create a provocative political competitor to the Fraction.

On 28th November 1946 the GCF wrote a letter to the PCInt with an appendix that lists all the questions that needed to be discussed and which concerned a series of shortcomings forwhich various components of the Italian Communist Left had beenresponsible during the war (Internationalisme no.16). The PCInt replied curtly to this ten page letter in the following words:

"Meeting of the International Bureau - Paris: As your letter once again demonstrates the continual deformation of facts and the political positions taken both by the PCI of Italy as well as by the Belgian and French Fractions; that you do not constitute a revolutionary, political organisation and that your activity is limited to throwing confusion and mud at our comrades, we have unanimously excluded the possibility of accepting your request to participate in the international meetings of the organisations of the GCI".

It's certainly true that history repeats itself but in a farcical way, the GCI was bureaucratically excluded from the CI after 1926, it was likewise excluded from the Left Opposition in 1933 (cf our pamphlet on the Italian Communist Left), now it was the turn ofthe GCI to bureaucratically exclude the French Fraction from its ranks in order to avoid a political confrontation.

The 50s

Eclecticism in terms of positions means that at an international level “each is master in his own house". In1952, the PCInt broke in two; on the one hand, the Bordigists reduced the intransigence of the Italian Left to a caricature,refusing to discuss with anyone else. On the other hand was the “openness” of the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista): in Autumn 1956, BC, along with the GAAP[21] [112], the Trotskyists of the Gruppi Communisti Rivoluzionari (GCR) and Azione Comunista[22] [113],constituted a Movement for the Communist Left, whose most prominent features were heterogeneity and confusion. Bordiga ironically named these four groups the "quadrifoglio" (four-leafed clover).

The 70s

In the early months of 1976 Battaglia Comunista launched "a proposal to make a start", directed "at the international groups of the Communist Left", whom they invited:

• to an international conference to take stock of the state of the groups who lay claim to the International Communist Left;
• to create a centre for contact and international discussion.

The ICC joined the conference with conviction but asked that the political criteria for participation be defined. BC, being used to conferences of a very different type (see above), was reluctant to draw stricter lines, they were evidently afraid of closing the door to someone.

The first Conference was held in Milan in May 1977 with only two participants, BC and the ICC, but BC was opposed to any public declaration, even one criticising the groups invited who had not attended the conference.

At the end of 1978 the secondConference was held in Paris, where finally various other groups participated in the work. At the end of the conference the question of the criteria for participation came up again and this time BC suggested stricter criteria:

"The criteria must enable us to exclude councilists from these conferences so we must insist on the recognition of the historic need for the Party as an essential criterion", to which we replied by recalling "our insistence that there be criteria at the time of the first Conference. We don't think that the addition of supplementary criteria today is opportune. It isn't for the lack of clarity, as much on the question of the criteria themselves as on the national or union question, but because it's premature. Great confusion still weighs on the whole of the revolutionary movement on these questions; and the NCI is right to insist on a dynamic vision of the political groups to whom we could close the door prematurely"[23] [114].

In the first half of 1980 theThird and last International Conference was held, whose atmosphere made clear from the outset how it was to end. Over and above the merits of the discussion itself, this conference demonstrated the specific will on the part of BC to exclude the ICC from possible further conferences. In one of Aesop’s fables the wolf tries unsuccessfully to accuse the lamb of having dirtied the river water from which he is drinking; he ends up by putting the blame on the lamb's father and so finds an excuse for tearing him to pieces. In the same way, BC began increasingly to see the ICC, not as a group on the same side with whom they could eventually arrive at a clarification to the advantage of all the comrades and of the new groups in the process of formation, but rather as a dangerous rival in grabbing these comrades and new groups, and in the end they found an expedient for getting the conference to approve a stricter and more selective political criterion for acceptance in order definitively to exclude the ICC[24] [115].

In conclusion we go from the First Conference, in which not only were no political criterion for participation put forward but even the suggestion of such was actually opposed, to the Third Conference, at the end of which criteria created in an ad hoc manner were put forward in order to eliminate the ICC, that is to say the left component within the conferences. The Third Conference was a remake of the exclusion of the GCF in '45 and so the inauspicious extension of the preceding episodes excluding theItalian Communist Left from the CI (1926) and from the Opposition(1933).

The political responsibility assumed by BC (and by the CWO) in these circumstances is enormous: only a few months later (August '80) the mass strike broke out in Poland and the international proletariat lost any chance of a co-ordinated intervention on the part of all the groups of the communist left.

But it doesn't end there. After some time BC and the CWO, in order to show that they hadn't destroyed a cycle of three conferences and four years of international work for nothing, invented a fourth conference in which, as well as themselves, there appeared a so-called revolutionary Iranian group, whom we had even warned BC against. It was only after some years that the IBRP finally recognised their error by acknowledging that this group of Iranians certainly wasn't revolutionary…

The 90s

And so we arrive at the recent phase in the last few years, in which we had noted a small but encouraging opening up to dialogue and confrontation within theproletarian, political camp[25] [116].In some ways the most interesting aspect was an initial integration at the level of intervention which was taking place between the ICC and the IBRP (through its English component, the CWO). An intervention that was planned together when not actually carried out together in relation, for example, to the conferences on Trotskyism held in Russia, a public meeting on the 1917 Revolution organised and held together in London, a common defence against the attack of certain parasitic formations, etc, etc. We always carried out these interventions with the clear intention not to absorb anyone, not to create a wedge within the IBRP between BC and the CWO. Certainly the greater openness of the CWO and the indifferent absence of BC always worried us. And in the end, when BC judged that enough was enough, they demanded that their partners toe the Party - sorry, the IBRP - line. From that moment onwards everything that had previously seemed reasonable and normal to the CWO began to change. No more co-ordination of the work in Russia, no more joint public meetings, etc, etc. And once more a heavy responsibility fell on the shoulders of the IBRP, who for the sake of shop-keeper opportunism, allowed the working class to confront one of the most difficult episodes in the present historic period, the war in Kosovo, without its vanguard being able to express a common position.

In order to weigh the full measure of the IBRP's opportunism in relation to its refusal of our appeal in relation to the war, it's instructive to re-read an article that appeared in the November 1995 issue of Battaglia Comunista, "Misunderstandings on the Balkan war". BC relates that it has received a letter/invitation from the OCI[26] [117]to a national assembly against the war to be held in Milan. BC judged "the content of the letter interesting and a welcome corrective to the position adopted by the OCI on the Gulf war, when it supported the ‘Iraqi people under attack from imperialism’ and was very polemical in relation to our so-called indifferentism (…) It lacks reference to the crisis in the accumulation cycle (…) and the essential examination of its consequences on the Yugoslav Federation (…). But it doesn't seem to preclude the possibility of a joint initiative on the partof those who oppose war on a class basis" (our emphasis). As we can see, only four years ago, in a situation even less serious than that at the time of the war in Kosovo, BC would have been ready to promote a joint initiative with a group that was already clearly counter-revolutionary[29] [118] just to satisfy its activist bent, whereas it had the courage to say no to the ICC because… it has positions that are too different. That certainly is opportunism.

Conclusion

We have devoted this article to replying to the thesis of the IBRP that organisations such as ours are “estranged from the method and perspectives of the workthat leads to the formation of the future party”. In order to do so we have taken into consideration the two levels at which the organisational problem is posed, and in terms of both we have shown that it is the IBRP, not the ICC, that has abandoned the tradition of the Italian and the international Communist Left. In fact the eclecticism that guides the IBRP's policy of regroupment is similar to that of Trotsky when he was taken up with building the IVth International; the vision of the ICC on the other hand is that of the Italian Fraction, which always fought for regroupment with clarity and on a basis that would make it possible to salvage elements of the centre and those with hesitations.

In spite of its various aspiring heirs, the real continuity with the Italian Fraction is represented today by the ICC, an organisation that lays claim to and makes its own all thestruggles of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

31st August 2000, Ezechiele

Notes

Published in Battaglia Comunista no.1, January 2000 and inInternationalist Communist no.18, winter 2000.

, EDI, Paris 1974, pg 35-36).

.

We stand at the dawn of the 21st century. What will it bring humanity? Following the bourgeoisie's celebrations of the year 2000, we wrote in no.101 of our Review: "So ends the 20th century, the most tragic and barbaric in human history: in social decomposition. The bourgeoisie has celebrated the year 2000 in pomp: it is unlikely to do the same in 2100. Either it will have been overthrown by the proletariat, or humanity will have been destroyed or returned to the Stone Age". And so we stated clearly what is at stake: the 21st century's outcome depends entirely on the proletariat. Either it will make the revolution, or all civilisation, even humanity, will be destroyed. Despite all today's fine humanist speeches and euphoric declarations, the ruling classes will do nothing to prevent such an outcome. Not because they or their governments do not want to. The insurmountable contradictions of the capitalist system are driving society to its inevitable fate. For a decade, we have been inundated with daily campaigns on the "death of communism", or even of the working class. It is therefore necessary to reassert with all our strength that whatever difficulties the proletariat may encounter, there is no other force in society capable of resolving its contradictions. Because the proletariat was unable to fulfil its historic task of overthrowing capitalism, the 20th century foundered in barbarism. It will be unable to gather its strength to meet its responsibility in this century unless it is able to understand the reasons why it missed its appointment with history during the century that has just ended. This article proposes to make a modest contribution to that understanding.

Before we examine why the proletariat was unable to fulfil its historic task during the 20th century, we need to return to a question that revolutionaries themselves have not always expressed very clearly:

Is communist revolution inevitable?

The question is a fundamental one, for the working class' ability to fully measure its responsibility depends partly on the answer. A great revolutionary like Amadeo Bordiga[1] could declare, for example, that "The revolution is as inevitable as if it had already taken place". Nor is he alone in defending this idea, since it is to be found in certain writings of Marx, Engels, and other marxists that came after them.

For example, we find an assertion in the Communist Manifesto that encourages the idea that a proletarian victory is not inevitable: "oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes"[2]. However, this observation is only applied to classes in the past. There is no doubt as to the outcome of the confrontation between proletariat and bourgeoisie: "The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable"[3].

In reality, revolutionaries' terminology has often confused the fact that the communist revolution is absolutely necessary, vital for humanity's salvation, with its inevitability.

More important of course is to show, as marxism has done from the outset:

- that capitalism is not a definitive mode of production, the "finally discovered form" of the organisation of production which could ensure ever-increasing wealth to all human beings;

- that at some point in its history, this system cannot help but plunge society into increasing convulsions, destroying the progress that it had itself created previously;

- that the communist revolution is vital to allow society to continue its march towards a real human community, where all human needs will be fully satisfied;

- that capitalist society has created within itself the objective conditions, and can create the subjective conditions, that make such a revolution possible: the material productive forces, a class able to overthrow bourgeois order and to lead society, and the consciousness that will allow this class to carry out its historic task.

However, the whole 20th century bears witness to the enormous difficulty of this task. In particular, it shows us that for the communist revolution, absolute necessity does not mean certainty, that the winning hand is not necessarily dealt in advance, that proletarian victory is not yet written down in the great book of history. Apart from the barbarity that overwhelmed the 20th century, the threat of nuclear war that hung over the planet for 40 years showed clearly that capitalism could very well destroy society. For the moment, this threat has faded with the disappearance of the great imperialist blocs, but the weapons that could put an end to the human species are still there, as are the antagonisms between states which could one day cause these weapons to be used.

Even at the end of the 19th century, Engels, co-author with Marx of the Communist Manifesto, had gone back on the idea of the inevitability of the revolution and the victory of the proletariat. Today, it is important for revolutionaries to say clearly to their class that there is no such thing as fate, that victory is not guaranteed in advance, and that what is at stake in the proletarian struggle is nothing less than the survival of humanity itself. Only if it is conscious of how much is at stake, will the working class find the determination to overthrow capitalism. Marx said that will is an expression of necessity. The proletariat's will to make the communist revolution will be all the greater, the greater in its eyes is the necessity of such a revolution.

Why is the communist revolution not inevitable?

"Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the 18th century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the 19th century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is Rhodes, jump here'"[4].

This well-known quotation from Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written at the beginning of 1852 (in other words a few weeks after the coup d'etat of 2nd December 1851) aimed to account for the difficult and tortuous course of the proletarian revolution. Almost 70 years later, Rosa Luxemburg took up a similar idea in an article written on the eve of her assassination following the crushing of the Berlin insurrection of January 1919:

"This contradiction between the demands of the task and the inadequacy of the pre-conditions for its fulfilment in a nascent phase of the revolutionary development results in the individual struggles of the revolution ending formally in defeat. But the [proletarian] revolution is the sole form of ‘war' - and this is also its most vital law - in which the final victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats'! (...) The revolutions have until now brought nothing but defeats, but these inevitable defeats virtually pile guarantee upon guarantee of the future success of the final goal.

To be sure, there is one condition! The question is, under which circumstances was each respective defeat incurred?"[5].

These quotations deal essentially with the painful course of the communist revolution, the series of defeats which mark its path until the final victory is achieved. But they allow us to highlight two essential ideas:

- the difference between the proletarian and the bourgeois revolutions;

- that a precondition for the proletariat's victory, which is not given in advance, is the class' ability to develop its consciousness by learning the lessons of its defeats.

It is precisely the difference between the proletarian and the bourgeois revolutions which allows us to understand why the victory of the working class cannot be considered as inevitable.

A specificity of bourgeois revolutions, in other words of the seizure of exclusive political power by the capitalist class, is that they are not the starting, but the finishing point of a whole process of economic transformation within society. An economic transformation during which the old, feudal, relations of production are progressively replaced by capitalist relations of production which serve as a basis for the bourgeoisie's conquest of political power:

"From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burghesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of the division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and industry revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois (...)

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune; here, independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable ‘third estate' of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway"[6].

Very different is the process of the proletarian revolution. Whereas capitalist relations of production were able to develop progressively within feudal society, communist relations of production cannot develop within capitalist society, dominated by commodity relationships and ruled by the bourgeoisie. The idea of a progressive development of "islands of communism" belongs to utopian socialism, which marxism and the workers' movement have fought since the middle of the 19th century. The same is true for another variation on this idea: that of producers' or consumers' co-operatives, which have never, and will never be able to escape from the laws of capitalism, and which at best transform the workers into small capitalists, when it does not lead them to become their own exploiters. In reality, because it is the exploited class within the capitalist mode of production, deprived by definition of all the means of production, the working class does not and cannot possess any economic basis within capitalism for the conquest of political power. On the contrary, the first act in the communist transformation of society consists in the world wide seizure of political power by the entire proletariat organised in workers' councils, in other words in a deliberate and conscious action. This position of power, the proletarian dictatorship, is the starting point for the working class progressively and consciously to transform economic relationships, socialise the whole of production, abolish commodity exchange, and in particular the foremost among them, wage labour, so creating a classless society.

The bourgeois revolution, the seizure of exclusive political power by the capitalist class, was inevitable to the extent that it flowed from an economic process which was itself inevitable at a given moment in the life of feudal society, a process in which conscious human political will played little part. Depending on the particular circumstances of each country, it occurred earlier or later in different countries, and took different forms: the violent overthrow of the monarchical state as in France, or the bourgeoisie's progressive conquest of political positions within the state as was more the case in Germany. It ended up as a republic, as in the United States, or as constitutional monarchy, the first capitalist state, Britain, being the typical example. However, in all these cases the bourgeoisie's eventual political victory was guaranteed. And even when the bourgeoisie's revolutionary political forces suffered a setback (as was the case for example in France with the Restoration, or in Germany with the defeat of the 1848 revolution), this had but little effect on its forward march, economically or even politically.

Of course, the precondition for the success of the proletarian revolution is the existence of the material conditions for the communist transformation of society - conditions which are created by the development of capitalism itself.

The second precondition for the proletarian revolution is the open crisis of bourgeois society, clearly proving that capitalist relations of production must be replaced by others.

However, the presence of these material conditions does not necessarily mean that the proletariat will be able to make the revolution. Since it has no economic basis within capitalism, its only real strength apart from its numbers and organisation, is its ability to become clearly aware of its nature, of its struggle's ends and means. This is precisely the meaning of Rosa Luxemburg's words quoted above. And this ability of the proletariat to gain in awareness does not spring automatically from the material conditions it is confronted with, just as it is nowhere written that it will come to consciousness before capitalism plunges society into barbarism or destruction.

One of its means for avoiding, both for itself and for society as a whole, this outcome, is precisely to learn the lessons of its defeats, as Rosa Luxemburg reminds us. And in particular, it needs to understand why it proved unable to make its revolution during the 20th century.

Revolution and counter-revolution

It is typical of revolutionaries that they over-estimate the proletariat's potential at any given moment. Marx and Engels did not escape this tendency when they drew up the Communist Manifesto at the beginning of 1848; they thought that the proletarian revolution was imminent, and that the bourgeois revolution which was looming in Germany would be the stepping-stone for the proletariat to take power there. This tendency is readily explained by the fact that revolutionaries - by definition - aspire with all their heart to the overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of their class, which often gives rise to a certain impatience. However, unlike those elements influenced by the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, they are capable of quickly recognising the immaturity of the conditions for revolution. Politically, the petty bourgeoisie is par excellence a class which lives from day to day, since it has no political role to play. Immediatism and impatience ("revolution right now", as the rebellious students of the sixties used to demand) are characteristic of this social category, some of whose elements may join the struggle of the working class, but which rallies to the strongest side - ie the bourgeoisie - as soon as the wind turns. By contrast, proletarian revolutions, the expression of a historic class, are able to overcome their impatience and to harness themselves to the patient and difficult task of preparing the future struggles of the class.

This is why in 1852, Marx and Engels recognised that the conditions for revolution had not been ripe in 1848, and that capitalism had a long period of evolution to go through for them to become so. They considered it necessary to dissolve their organisation, the Communist League, which had been founded on the eve of the 1848 revolution, before it fell under the influence of impatient and adventurist elements (the Willich-Schapper tendency).

When they took part in the foundation of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) in 1864, they thought once again that the hour for revolution had struck; but even before the Paris Commune in 1871, they had realised that the proletariat was still not ready, for capitalism still had before it the potential for massive economic development. Following the crushing of the Commune, which was a serious defeat for the whole European proletariat, they understood that the IWA in turn had ended its historic task, and that it was necessary to preserve it too from impatient and adventurist elements, and even from adventurers like Bakunin, represented essentially by the anarchists. This is why they both intervened at the 1872 Hague Congress (this in fact was the only Congress that both of them attended), to win the exclusion of Bakunin and his "Alliance for Socialist Democracy", just as they proposed, and defended the decision, to transfer the IWA's General Council from London to New York, far from the intrigues which a whole series of elements were setting in motion to lay hands on the International. In fact this decision came down to putting the IWA into abeyance, and it was finally dissolved at the Philadelphia conference in 1876.

Up to then, both revolutions - 1848 and the Commune of 1871 - had failed because the material conditions for proletarian victory did not exist. They were to blossom during the period that followed, as capitalism underwent the most powerful development in its history.

This period corresponded to a stage of great development in the workers' movement. It saw the creation of trade unions in most countries, and the foundation of the mass socialist parties, which in 1889 regrouped within the 2nd (Socialist) International.

In most West European countries, the organised workers' movement was getting under way. Although at first some governments persecuted the socialist parties (as was the case in Germany between 1878 and 1890, under the "anti-socialist laws"), this policy tended to be replaced by a more tolerant attitude. The socialist parties became a real power in society, to the point where in some countries they were the most powerful group in parliament and gave the impression that they would shortly hold an absolute majority there. The workers' movement seemed invincible. For many, the time was coming when it would be able to overthrow capitalism through the specifically bourgeois institution of parliamentary democracy.

Parallel with the rising strength of the workers' organisations, capitalism enjoyed a period of unprecedented prosperity, giving the impression that it had achieved the ability to overcome the cyclical crises which had affected it during the previous period. Within the socialist parties themselves, reformist tendencies developed, which thought that capitalism had succeeded in overcoming its economic contradictions and consequently that it was an illusion to think of overthrowing it by revolution. Theories like Bernstein's made their appearance, which considered that marxism should be "revised", in particular by abandoning its "catastrophist" vision of history. The proletariat's victory would be the result of a whole series of conquests won at the parliamentary or trade union level.

In reality these two antagonistic forces, capitalism and the workers' movement, whose power seemed to be developing in parallel, were being sapped from within.

For its part, capitalism was living its last hours of glory (which would leave their mark in the collective memory as "La Belle Époque"). Although on the economic level its prosperity seemed unassailed, especially in the emerging powers like Germany and the USA, the approach of its historic crisis could be felt in the rise of imperialism and militarism. As Marx had pointed out 50 years before, the colonial markets had played a fundamental role in capitalism's development. Every advanced capitalist country, even little countries like Holland and Belgium, had acquired a colonial empire as a source of raw materials and an outlet for their manufactured goods. But, by the end of the 19th century the whole non-capitalist world had been shared out among the old bourgeois nations. Henceforth, for any one of them to gain access to new outlets and new territories would mean conflict with its rivals. The first confrontation occurred between Britain and France, in September 1898 at Fashoda, where the two oldest colonial powers almost came to blows when the aims of the former (control of the upper Nile and colonisation on an east-west axis between Dakar and Djibouti) blocked the ambitions of the latter (to join up its empire from Cairo to Cape Town on a north-south axis). In the end, France gave way and the two rivals formed the "Entente Cordiale" against a third bandit, whose ambitions were as big as its colonial empire was small: Germany. German imperialism increasingly coveted the colonial possessions of the other powers, and this was to take shape a few years later, notably with the Agadir incident of 1911 where a German frigate put a spanner in the works of French ambitions in Morocco. The other aspect of Germany's colonial appetite was the formidable development of its navy, whose ambition was to compete with the British in the control of the seaways.

This was the other element in the fundamental change taking place in capitalism at the turn of the century: the proliferation of military tension and armed conflicts involving the European powers, the latter were also increasing both the size (for example the increase in French military service to three years) and strength of their armed forces.

The rise in militarism and imperialist tensions, as well as the great diplomatic manoeuvres among the major European nations, to strengthen their alliances in preparation for war, obviously attracted serious attention from the parties of the 2nd International. At its Stuttgart Congress in 1907, the International devoted an important resolution to the question, including an amendment proposed notably by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg which stated that "Should war nonetheless break out, the socialists have the duty to work for it to end as rapidly as possible, and to use by every means the economic and political crisis provoked by the war to awaken the people and so to hasten the downfall of capitalist rule"[7].

In November 1912, the Socialist International even called an extraordinary conference (the Basle Congress) to denounce the threat of war and to call the proletariat to mobilise against it. This Congress' Manifesto warned the bourgeoisie: "The bourgeois governments should not forget that the Franco-German war gave birth to the revolutionary insurrection of the Commune and that the Russo-Japanese set the revolutionary forces in movement in Russia. In the eyes of the proletarians, it is criminal to shoot each other for the profit of capitalists, or the pride of dynasties, or the machinations of secret treaties".

In appearance then, the workers' movement was ready to confront capitalism should it unleash the barbarity of war. Indeed at the time, the idea was widespread among the European populations and not just in the working class, that the Socialist International was the only force in society able to prevent the outbreak of war. In reality, just as the capitalist system was sapped from within and on the point of revealing the extent of its historic bankruptcy, so the workers' movement itself, despite its apparent strength with its powerful trade unions and its "growing electoral successes", was seriously weakened and on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. Worse still, this apparent strength of the workers' movement was in fact its greatest weakness. The socialist parties' electoral success had given an unprecedented impetus to democratic and reformist illusions in the working masses. Similarly, the power of the union organisations, especially in Germany and Britain, had in reality been transformed into an instrument for the defence of bourgeois order and the enrolment of the workers for war and arms production[8].

At the beginning of the summer of 1914, after the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo, tension grew in Europe and the spectre of war loomed rapidly larger. The workers' parties not only demonstrated their impotence but, for the most part, they also offered their support to their own national bourgeoisie. In France and Germany, there were even direct contacts between the socialist leaders and the government to discuss how to bring the workers into the war. And as soon as war broke out, these parties with one accord offered their full support to the bourgeois war effort, and succeeded in dragging the working masses into the slaughter. While the governments in power sang hymns to the "glory" of their respective nations, the socialist parties adopted arguments better adapted to their role of controlling the workers. This was not a war, they said in France, in the service of bourgeois interests, or to recover Alsace-Lorraine, but a war to protect "civilisation" against "German militarism". On the other side of the Rhine, it was not a war for German imperialism, but for "democracy and civilisation" against the "tyranny of the Tsarist knout". But though the words were different, the socialist leaders shared the same aim as the bourgeoisie: "National Unity" to send the workers to the slaughter and justify the state of siege, in other words military censorship, the ban on workers' strikes and demonstrations, and on publications or meetings to denounce the war.

The proletariat thus proved unable to prevent the outbreak of world war. It was a terrible defeat, but one which it suffered without an open struggle against the bourgeoisie. And yet, the struggle against the degeneration of the socialist parties, which had led to their betrayal in August 1914 and to the imperialist bloodbath that followed, had begun well beforehand, at the turn of the century. In the German party, Rosa Luxemburg had taken up the fight against Bernstein's revisionist theories, which provided a justification for reformism. Officially, the party rejected these theories; nonetheless, a few years later she had to take up the fight again, this time not only against the right but also against the centre, represented principally by Kautsky whose radical language in fact covered an abandonment of the revolutionary perspective. In Russia in 1903, the Bolsheviks entered the struggle against opportunism within the social-democratic party, first on questions of organisation then on the nature of the 1905 Russian revolution and the policy to be adopted within it. But these revolutionary currents within the Socialist International remained on the whole extremely weak, even though the congresses of the socialist parties and the International often adopted their positions.

When the moment of truth came, the socialist militants defending internationalist and revolutionary positions found themselves tragically isolated, to the point that when an international conference against the war was held in September 1915 in Zimmerwald in Switzerland, the delegates (including those from the centre, hesitating between the left and the right) could fit into four taxis, as Trotsky remarked. This terrible isolation did not prevent them from continuing the struggle, despite the repression that descended on them (in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the two main leaders of the internationalist "Spartakus" group, suffered imprisonment in gaol and military fortress).

The terrible trials of the war, the massacres, the hunger, the ferocious exploitation in the factories on the home front, began to undermine the workers who in 1914 had let themselves be sent so lightly to the slaughter. The speeches about "democracy" and "civilisation" wore thin in the face of the awful barbarism submerging Europe, and the repression of any attempt at workers' struggle. In February 1917, the Russian proletariat, with the revolutionary experience of 1905 behind it, rose against the war and hunger. It concretised in action the resolutions adopted by the Socialist International's Basle and Stuttgart congresses. Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood that the hour of revolution had struck, and they summed the workers of Russia not to be satisfied with the fall of Tsarism and the establishment of a "democratic" government. They had to prepare for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the seizure of power by the Soviets (the workers' councils) as a prelude to the world revolution. This is the perspective that became reality in Russia in 1917. Immediately, the new power called on the world proletariat to follow its example to put an end to the war and overthrow capitalism. We might say that the Bolsheviks, joined by the revolutionaries in other countries, summoned the world proletariat to a new appointment with history, after the one that it had missed in 1914.

In other countries the working class followed the Russian example, and especially in Germany, where one year later the uprising of workers and soldiers overthrew the imperial regime of Wilhelm II and forced the German bourgeoisie to call a halt to the war, putting an end to more than four years of a barbarity such as humanity had never seen before. But the bourgeoisie had already learnt the lessons of its defeat in Russia, where the Provisional Government set up after the revolution of February 1917 had proven unable to satisfy one of the workers' most essential demands: peace. Under the urging of its French and British allies, the government had kept Russia in the war, which rapidly disillusioned and radicalised both the working masses and the troops. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, not just of Tsarism, appeared to them as the only way to put an end to the slaughter. In Germany by contrast, the bourgeoisie hurriedly put an end to the war during the first days of the revolution. It presented the overthrow of the imperial regime and the establishment of the republic as a decisive victory. It immediately called on the Socialist Party to take the reins of power, and the latter received the support of the congress of workers' councils, which were still dominated by the same socialists. Above all, the same government immediately requested an armistice from the allies of the Entente, which was granted without delay. Moreover, the Entente powers did everything to help the German government confront the working class. France rapidly returned to Germany 16,000 machine-guns which it had seized as war booty, and which were to prove useful later to crush the working class.

In January 1919, the German bourgeoisie, with the Socialist Party at its head, dealt a terrible blow to the proletariat. It knowingly organised a provocation, which led to a premature insurrection by the Berlin workers. The revolution was drowned in blood, and the main revolutionary leaders (Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leo Jogisches) were assassinated. Nonetheless, the German workers were still not definitively crushed. Their attempts at revolution continued until 1923[9]. Their efforts were defeated, as were other powerful class movements that took place in other countries during the same period (notably Hungary and Italy in 1919)[10].

In fact, the defeat of the proletariat in Germany meant the defeat of the world revolution; although another last rising did take place in China in 1927, it too was drowned in blood.

At the same time as the revolutionary wave was developing in Europe, the Communist, or Third, International (CI) was founded in Moscow in March 1919, regrouping revolutionaries from all over the world. Only two large communist parties existed at its foundation, in Russia and in Germany; the latter was formed a few days before the defeat of January 1919. This International encouraged the creation in every country of communist parties that rejected the chauvinism, reformism, and opportunism which had engulfed the Socialist parties. The communist parties were intended to be the leadership of the world revolution, but they were formed too late due to the prevailing historic conditions in which they were formed. When the International was really founded, in other words at its 2nd Congress in 1920, the high point of the revolutionary wave had already passed, and capitalism had shown itself capable of taking the situation in hand, both economically and politically. Above all, the ruling class had succeeded in breaking the impetus of revolution by putting an end to its main fuel, the imperialist war. With the defeat of the world wide revolutionary wave, the parties of the Communist International which had been formed against the degeneration and betrayal of the Socialist parties, were unable to escape their own degeneration.

Several factors underlay this degeneration. The first is that the Communist parties accepted into their ranks a whole series of "centrist" elements who had left their Socialist parties and adopted a revolutionary phraseology in order to profit from the world proletariat's immense enthusiasm for the Russian revolution. Another factor, still more decisive, was the degeneration of the International's biggest party, the Bolsheviks who had led the October revolution and been the principal protagonists of the International's creation. The Bolshevik party was progressively absorbed by the state it headed; because of the revolution's isolation, it became increasingly a defender of Russian interests, to the detriment of its role as a bastion of the world revolution. Moreover, since there can be no "socialism in one country" and because capitalism can only be abolished on a world scale, the Russian state was gradually transformed into a defender of Russian national capital, a capital whose bourgeoisie was to be formed essentially by the state and therefore the party bureaucracy. From being a revolutionary organisation, the Bolshevik party was thus bit by bit transformed into a bourgeois and counter-revolutionary party, despite the resistance of many real communists, like Trotsky, who intended to keep the flag of world revolution flying. In 1925, despite Trotsky's opposition, the Bolshevik party adopted the programme of the "construction of socialism in one country", a programme promoted by Stalin and a real betrayal of proletarian internationalism, which in 1928 he imposed on the Communist International, thus signing its death warrant.

Thereafter, despite the resistance of a whole series of left fractions, excluded one after the other, the communist parties passed into the service of their respective national capitals. From being spearheads of the world revolution, the Communist parties had become spearheads of counter-revolution: the most terrible counter-revolution in history.

Not only had the working class missed its second appointment with history, it was to plunge into the most terrible period it had ever known. As Victor Serge wrote, it was "midnight in the century". In Russia, the communist party had become both the exploiting class, and the instrument of an unprecedented repression against the worker and peasant masses. Outside Russia, the communist parties played their counter-revolutionary role by preparing the proletariat's enrolment in World War II, in other words the bourgeoisie's response to capitalism's return to open crisis after 1929.

This open crisis and the terrible misery that battened on the working masses during the 1930s, could have been a powerful factor in radicalising the world proletariat, and developing its consciousness that capitalism had to be overthrown. But the proletariat was to miss this third appointment with history.

The situation of the working class in Germany, the most concentrated and experienced in the world, in a key country for the revolution, was similar to that in Russia. As in Russia, the working class had launched a revolution, and its defeat was therefore all the more terrible. The German revolution was not crushed by the Nazis, but by the "democratic" parties, and with the Socialists first among them. Precisely because the proletariat had suffered this defeat, the Nazis (who at the time corresponded best to the economic and political requirements of the German bourgeoisie) were able to complete the work of the left. Their terror annihilated any attempt at proletarian struggle, and essentially by the same means enrolled the workers in the war.

In the countries of Western Europe, where the proletariat had not mounted a revolution, and so had not been crushed physically, terror was not the method best adapted to take the workers into war. The bourgeoisie had to use mystifications similar to those used for World War I in 1914. Here, the Stalinist parties played their bourgeois part in exemplary fashion. In the name of the defence of "democracy" and the "socialist fatherland" against fascism, these parties systematically diverted the workers' struggles into dead-ends, wearing down the proletariat's morale and combativity.

This morale had already been profoundly shaken by the failure of the world revolution during the 1920s. After a period of enthusiasm for the idea of a communist revolution, many workers had turned away from any revolutionary perspective. One factor in their demoralisation was the realisation that the society created in Russia was not the paradise that the Stalinists claimed, and this made it easier for the Socialist parties to bring them back into the fold. Most of those who still wanted to believe in the possibility of revolution fell into the coils of the Stalinist parties, and the idea that the revolution's victory depended on the "defence of the socialist fatherland" and victory over fascism in Italy and Germany.

A key moment in this derailment of the world proletariat was the war in Spain, which far from being a revolution, was in fact a part of the military, diplomatic, and political preparation for World War II.

All over the world, workers wanted to show their solidarity for their class brothers in Spain, who had risen spontaneously against the fascist putsch of 18th July 1936. This was channelled into recruitment for the International Brigades (mostly officered by Stalinists), into the demand for "arms for Spain" (in reality for the bourgeois Popular Front government), and into anti-fascist demonstrations which in fact prepared the enrolment of workers in the "democratic" countries into war against Germany.

On the eve of World War I, the supposed strength of the proletariat (the powerful unions and workers' parties) had turned out to be its greatest weakness. The same scenario was played out in World War II, though the actors were somewhat different. The great strength of the "workers' parties" (the Stalinist and socialist parties, united in the anti-fascist alliance), the great "victories" against fascism in Western Europe, the supposed "socialist fatherland", were all marks of the counter-revolution, of an unprecedented proletarian weakness. A weakness that would deliver it up, bound hand and foot, to the second imperialist massacre.

The proletariat confronted with World War II

The horror of the First World War was nothing compared to the Second. Capitalism plunged into its decadence, and into a new barbarity. But whereas in 1917 and 1918, the proletariat had brought the war to an end, this was not to happen in 1945. The war continued until one imperialist camp completely crushed the other. Not that a proletarian response was completely lacking during the slaughter. During 1943, a vast strike movement developed in the industrial north of Mussolini's Italy, while during 1944 and 1945 several German cities saw movements of revolt against hunger and the war. But nothing during the Second World War was comparable to the revolts that had taken place against the First. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, because the bourgeoisie had learnt the lessons of World War I, and had taken care to crush the proletariat both physically and above all ideologically. An expression of this difference was the fact that, whereas the Socialist parties betrayed the class at the very outset of World War I, the Communist parties had betrayed well before the outbreak of the Second. As a result, the latter did not contain the least revolutionary current, whereas during the first war most of the militants who were to form the Communist parties were already socialist militants. In the terrible counter-revolution of the 1930s, the militants who continued to defend communist positions were a mere handful, and deprived of any direct link with a working class completely subjected to bourgeois ideology. It was impossible for them to develop any work within the parties that influenced the working class, as revolutionaries had been able to do during World War I, not only because they had been expelled from the party, but because the party itself no longer contained the slightest spark of proletarian life. Those, like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who had stood firm on revolutionary positions during the first war had encountered a growing echo for their propaganda among the militants of the social-democracy, the more war destroyed their illusions. Nothing like this was possible in the Communist parties. By the 1930s, they had become a completely sterile ground for the growth of any revolutionary or internationalist thinking. During the second war, the working class had fallen completely into the trap of anti-fascist ideology, and the impact of the tiny revolutionary groups, which continued to defend internationalist principles remained utterly insignificant.

The other reason for the absence of the slightest proletarian upsurge during the second imperialist war is that the world bourgeoisie, after the experience of World War I, took care to prevent systematically any rising in the defeated countries, where the bourgeoisie was at its most vulnerable. In Italy for example, the ruling class overcame the rising of 1943 by a division of labour between the German army, which occupied northern Italy and restored Mussolini to power, while the Allies landed in the south. In the north, German troops restored order with such brutality that the workers who had been most visible in the movements of early 1943 were forced to take refuge in the countryside, where they were cut off from the class base, and fell easy prey to the ideology of anti-fascism and "national liberation". At the same time, the Allies halted their northward advance, leaving Italy to "stew in its own juice" (to use Churchill's words), leaving Germany to do the dirty work of repression and allowing the democratic forces, and the Stalinist party in particular, to gain an ideological control over the working class.

The same tactics were used in Poland, where Stalin kept the Red Army immobile a few kilometres outside Warsaw when the insurrection broke out. The German army drowned the rising in blood, and flattened the city. When the Red Army entered Warsaw a few months later, the workers were massacred and disarmed.

In Germany itself, the Allies took care to crush any attempt at a workers' rising by an abominable bombing campaign against working class districts (the bombing of Dresden, from 13th to 14th February 1945, caused 250,000 deaths, three times more than Hiroshima). The Allies refused all the armistice proposals from different fractions of the German bourgeoisie, and from famous military men such as Marshal Rommel and Admiral Canaris, head of the secret service. For the victors, there could be no question of leaving Germany in the hands of the German bourgeoisie alone, not even its anti-Nazi fractions. Bourgeois politicians still remembered the experience of 1918, when the government that had taken over from the imperial regime had had the greatest difficulty in re-establishing order. The victors thus decided to administer a defeated Germany directly, and to establish a military occupation of every inch of German territory. The German proletariat, the giant which from 1918 to 1923 had shaken the whole capitalist world, was now prostrate, shattered, reduced to wandering the ruins in search of its dead, or a few familiar objects, subject to the goodwill of its conquerors to eat. In the victorious countries of the European continent, many workers had joined the Resistance with the illusion - encouraged by the Stalinist parties - that the armed struggle against Nazism would be the prelude to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The reality was to be very different. In the countries which came under the domination of the USSR, the workers were led to support the creation of Stalinist regimes (for example during the Prague coup of 1948) which, once consolidated, hastened to disarm the workers and to exercise the most brutal terror over them. In countries dominated by the USA, such as France and Italy, the Stalinist parties took part in government, and called on the workers to give up their weapons, since the task in hand was not revolution, but "national reconstruction".

And so, throughout a Europe in ruins, hundreds of millions of proletarians suffered conditions of life and exploitation even worse than during World War I; famine roamed, capitalism wallowed in barbarism. The working class was unable to find the strength to engage a struggle of any importance against capitalist rule. World War I had won millions of workers to internationalism. World War II left them in the depths of the most abject chauvinism.

The proletariat had reached rock bottom. What it was told, what it thought, was its greatest victory - the triumph of democracy over fascism - was in fact its most utter historic defeat. Capitalist order was guaranteed by the workers' euphoric belief in their "victory", and their resulting belief in the "sacred virtues" of bourgeois democracy: the same democracy which had led them twice into imperialist butchery and crushed their revolution in 1920. And during the reconstruction period, the post-war economic boom, and the temporary improvement in the workers' living conditions, left them unable to appreciate the real defeat that they had suffered.

Once again, the working class had missed its appointment with history. But not this time because it had arrived too late or ill-prepared: this time, it was completely absent from the stage of history.

In the second part of this article, we will see how the proletariat has managed to return to the scene, but also what a long road it has still to travel.

Fabienne

[1] For a presentation of Bordiga's ideas, see our polemic with the IBRP in this issue.

[2] Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.

[3] Ibid. This sentence from the Manifesto also serves as a conclusion to Book 1 of Capital, the only one to be published in Marx's lifetime.

[4] 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: the expression at the end of the quotation is a reference to one of Aesop's fables, where a man boasted of a tremendous leap he had once made on the island of Rhodes; unimpressed, an onlooker answered: "Here is Rhodes, jump here".

[5] Order reigns in Berlin, in Selected Political Writings, Jonathan Cape, 1972, page 304-305.

[6] The Communist Manifesto, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.

[7] The passage is quoted in the "Resolution on the position towards the socialist currents and the Bern conference" of the 1st Congress of the Communist International.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg expressed this clearly when she wrote: "In Germany, for four decades we had nothing but ‘victories' on the parliamentary level; we flew literally from one victory to the next. And what was the result of the great historic test of 4th August 1914? A crushing moral and political defeat, an incredible collapse, an unprecedented bankruptcy".

[9] See our series of articles on the German revolution in the International Review, between nos.81 and 99.

[10] See our article on the first revolutionary wave in International Review no.80.

On several occasions, we have welcomed the emergence of revolutionary groups and elements in Eastern Europe, and in particular in Russia. They are clearly appearing within an international context. On every continent, the proletarian political groups that represent the tradition of the communist left have in the last few years been making contact with this kind of element. We should therefore understand this as a characteristic medium-term tendency of the present period. Ever since the collapse of the USSR and its imperialist bloc, the bourgeoisie has been triumphantly proclaiming the bankruptcy of communism and the end of the class struggle. Already unsettled by these events, the working class could not but retreat under the hammer blows of the bourgeoisie's ideologica the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns. But outside period of counter-revolution, a historic class cannot help reacting against attacks which call so deeply into question its own being and perspective. If it is unable to defend itself through the generalisation of its economic demands, then it will do so by strengthening its political vanguard. The isolated elements, discussion circles, nuclei and little groups should not look to themselves or to coincidence to find the reason for their existence. They are a product of the international working class, and a heavy responsibility lies on their shoulders. They must first recognise the historic process of which they are a product, and fight to the utmost for their consciousness and their political clarity, without being put off by the difficulty of the task.

In the countries at the periphery of the great capitalist powers, these small minorities are confronted with innumerable difficulties: geographical dispersal, language problems, economic backwardness. To these material difficulties are added political ones, resulting from the weakness of the workers' movement and the absence of a solid tradition of revolutionary marxism. In Russia, the “land of the great lie” as Anton Ciliga put it (in his book Au pays du grand mensonge, published in 1938), where the Stalinist counter-rhe Stalinist counter-revolution was at its most terrible, the destruction and distortion of the communist programme was pushed to the limit. The potential contained in these new revolutionary energies can be measured by the way in which they strive to overcome these difficulties:

• by the assertion of proletarian internationalism, as we can see in their denunciation of the war and all the imperialist camps in the wars in Chechnya and ex-Yugoslavia,

• in their search for international contacts,

• through their rediscovery of the political currents which were the first, during the 1920s, to take up the fight in the name of communism, against the degeneration of the communist movement, and the rise of Stalinism and opportunism.

This has always been the terrain for the development of revolutionary marxism: international, internationalist, and developing a historical viewpoint.

The demarcation with leftism

This approach reveals the truly proletarian nature of these groups, which were rapidly confronted with the need to set themselves apart from present-day Trotskyism - which can always find good reasons to invite the workers to take part in imperialist war - and Maoism, that pure offspring of Stalinist “national-communism”. This is a class frontier sepa class frontier separating the internationalist communist left from “leftism” [i].

Obviously, all these proletarian elements, produced by the same situation, are very heterogeneous. To refuse to accept the identification of Stalinism and communism, to denounce the most outrageous assertions of the enemy's propaganda, is not the most difficult, since their bourgeois nature comes quickly to the surface. “It was Lenin that laid the foundations for the regime which was later to be called 'Stalinist'”. For the less subtle journalists, the proof “is that Lenin was the founder of the Communist International, whose aim was 'world socialist revolution'. By his own confession, Lenin only undertook the October revolution because he was convinced of the inevitability of a European revolution, starting with Germany” (from L'Histoire, n°250, p.19). But the bourgeoisie's offensive is not limited to this caricature. We still have to identify and defend the fundamental significance of the Russian revolution and Lenin's work. Here we come up against, not just the subtle degradation of marxist theory by leftism, but also a series of dangerous confusions, or programmatic points which remain th which remain the object of fierce discussion within the proletarian political movement.

There is thus a whole process of clarification to be undergone, which all these elements have not necessarily taken to its conclusion. In order to understand Stalinism, it is necessary to confront the Trotskyist theory of a “degenerated workers' state”, the anarchist idea that this is nothing but the inevitable product of an “authoritarian socialism”, or the perfectly mechanistic marxism of the councilists, which sees Bolshevism as an instrument adapted to the needs of capitalism in Russia. Behind these questions, lies the problem of the communist programme's historic descent and coherence. The rejection of activist impatience, and confrontation with this problem, is a condition for joining the ranks of those anonymous militants, who today continue the struggle for the same communism that Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto presented to the proletariat 150 years ago.

But what is the thread linking the proletarian struggle yesterday, today, and tomorrow? To pick it up, we must always start from the proletariat's last revolutionary experience. Today, this means starting from the revolution of October 1917. It is not a matter of religious respect for the past, but a critical evaluation of the revolution, it of the revolution, its magnificent steps forward but also its errors and its defeat. The Russian revolution itself would have been impossible without the lessons drawn from the Paris Commune. Without the critical balance-sheet of the Commune, drawn up in the “Addresses” to the General Council of the IWA, and Lenin's superb synthesis in State and Revolution, the Russian proletariat could not have conquered. Here lies the profound unity of theory and practice, of the communist programme and action. And it was the Fractions of the Communist Left which undertook the heavy task of drawing up a balance-sheet of the Russian revolution. A balance-sheet which will be every bit as vital for the next revolution as it was in the past.

This is why we warmly welcome, and support with all our strength the efforts aimed at reappropriating this balance-sheet. On our side, we have tried not only to make available all the documents of the communist left that these comrades need, but also to make known their own most important positions when the problems of translation could be overcome, to take part, in a militant spirit, in the controversies on the most important political questions, with that openness and solidarity which characterises discussion among communists.

We have already given an account of the evolution of the he evolution of the proletarian political milieu in Russia, in the International Review n°s 92 and 101, and in our territorial press. In this article, we intend to make public our correspondence with the Southern Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party. The MLP places itself within the continuity of the workers' movement, and in this sense the term “Labour” refers directly to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this correspondence, the comrades are writing in the name of the Southern Bureau, since they cannot commit the whole MLP to all the details of their positions, given that the discussion is still continuing within the MLP itself. But let us leave them to present, themselves, their political struggles since their first congress in March 1990, which decided on the formation of the “MLP - The party of the dictatorship of the proletariat”[ii].

“A general good humour presided at the creation of a new communist party, which clearly distinguished it from Gorbachev's CPSU, which still existed in the USSR at the time. But the ideological make-up of the participants at this first congress was as varied as it was unstable,as it was unstable, and a first split took place, with a small group of 12 people (who thought that Russia was a “feudal state” with a large-scale developed industry, and that the USSR would therefore have to go through a bourgeois revolution before arriving at the socialist revolution); immediately after the split, they met in an adjacent room and set up a committee for the formation of a 'democratic (marxist) labour party'. But they came to nothing and dissolved” (letter of 10/07/1999).

“There were no Trotskyists as this first congress, but there remained a few Stalinists and supporters of the 'industrial feudalism' idea who, unlike the splitters, did not think that a bourgeois revolution was necessary. Nonetheless, all the participants united around the slogans: 'The working class must organise itself' and 'The power of the soviets is the workers' power'. The second congress also took place in Moscow in September 1990. It adopted several texts of the party, including the programme. The idea of the state capitalist nature of the USSR was adopted. It goes without saying that the remaining defenders of “industrial feudalism in the USSR' left the party during this congress, and formed their own 'Party of the dictatorship of the proletariat (Bolshevik)'. The Stalinists, of whom there were very few, there were very few, also left the party” (idem).

“The MLP's first conference in February 1991 dropped the term 'The party of the proletarian dictatorship' from the group's name. In 1994-95, a little fraction formed inside the party, which thought that the mode of production in the USSR had been neo-asiatic. In early January 1996, this fraction split and joined the (Argentine) Morenist Trotskyists of the International Workers' Party, who are quite active in Russia and the Ukraine” (idem).

The programme adopted at the Second Congress included in particular, the following basic principles:

• “The necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat for the transition to communism (socialism), and the necessity of this transition itself;

• more precisely, the dictatorship of the urban working class is necessary, but not of the party of the proletarian dictatorship or that of 'all the workers', still less of 'all the people';

• the ruin of the Russian party of the proletariat in the 1920s, and the necessity for its creation today;

• the recognition that the 'dictatorship of the class' and the 'dictatorship of the party' as a vanguard of the class, are not one and the same thing”.

And the comrades end by saying that: “Although the 1990 programme did not contain a criticism of the theory of 'socialism in one country', or the necessity for the world revolution, these ideas for us are a commonplace, and were understood as being self-evident” (idem).

We can see how bitter was the struggle in Russia, how vital it was to break with the defrocked Stalinists who still took themselves for revolutionaries. We can also see the pressure exerted by a whole panoply of Trotskyist sects, each trying to sell its own patented revolutionary recipe. In 1980, the Western trades unions (CFDT in France, AFL-CIO in the USA) hastened to contribute their logistic support to Solidarnosc, against the struggle of the Polish workers. Today, it is the Trotskyists who are rushing eastwards, with their good advice and their subsidies, to prevent the rebirth of a proletarian political milieu. For the moment, this rebirth can only concern a minority, faced with a multitude of expressions of a ruling ideology which is, by definition, omnipresent.

The question of a historical heritage

In their letters of the 15th March and 20th March 2000, the comrades took position on our polemic with the IBRP published in International Review n°100, on the class struggle in the countries ofle in the countries of the capitalist periphery, but above all they developed a series of official positions of the MLP's Southern Bureau.

The author of the two letters is explicit: “The other members of the SB of the MLP agree with the main positions of this commentary. You can therefore consider the above as our joint position” (20/03).

Let us explain first of all that the comrades were somewhat disconcerted by the polemic between the ICC and the IBRP, simply because they had not yet had the possibility of examining closely the fundamental positions of each organisation. This is why they had some difficulty in identifying the real disagreements, and saw them as mere squabbles, emphasising one aspect of reality rather than another, “since they are very often two sides of the same dialectical unity”, as they say. In the end, “You are all right”, depending on one's viewpoint. We think that experience and discussion will allow them to get a clearer view of what the proletarian camp has in common, and where the disagreements lie. The comrades write: “We think that the weakness of the Communist Left in Western Europe is this: instead of co-operating successfully as equals, either you ignore each other, or else you 'unmask' the others by 'pulling the blanket to youing the blanket to your side of the bed', as the Russians say (...) For us, the SB of the MLP, all the Left Communists, the 'statecapists' [ie those who recognise the state capitalist nature of the USSR], should work together as scientific collaborators in the same research institute!” (15/03).

We are not afraid of irony, which all the great revolutionaries enjoyed, for our purpose in putting forward the real positions of our adversaries is to show where they lead, and to defend firmly what we consider to be marxism's untouchable principles. Our attack is not directed at any particular person or group, but an opportunist approach or a theoretical error which we will pay for dearly tomorrow. This is why revolutionary intransigence never contradicts the need for solidarity among communists.

On the basis of this first impression, the comrades conclude that the whole Communist Left is weak, as a historic current. And it is above all this idea that we want to criticise. Seeing that the IBRP and the ICC disagree on the questions of imperialism and the decadence of capitalism, the comrades consider that this is an error of method, that it is not a matter of “either ... or”, but of “both ... and”. Indeed, the same reproach is often made of the communist left. It is obvious that we havevious that we have not adopted all the positions of the Communist Left as it began to emerge from the Communist International. By contrast, it has been wrongly accused of being anti-party, characterised by an activist impatience, a facile radicalism unable to make concessions, and leanings towards anarchism, leading in the end to a sterile purism which was unable to see questions other than in terms of black and white: one thing or the other. All the leading members of the Communist Left were profoundly marxist and deeply attached to the idea of the party. Their aim was precisely to defend the party against opportunism. This was the job at hand. “Comrade”, wrote Gorter in his Reply to comrade Lenin, “the formation of the Third International has by no means done away with opportunism in our own ranks. We can see it here and now in all the communist parties, in every country. Moreover, it would have been a miracle, and contrary to all the laws of development, if the disease of which the Second International died had not survived it inside the Third International!”. Bordiga took up the same idea: “It would be absurd, sterile, and extremely dangerous to claim that the party and the International are mysteriously safe from any relapse into opportunism or any tendency to return to it!” (Dn to it!” (Draft Theses of the Left, Congress of Lyon, 1926). This was a sign that it was necessary to work as a fraction, not simply as an opposition, which was to lead Trotsky's current to a dead-end, then to complete bankruptcy. The Left thereby asserted itself as the true heir to the marxist current in the history of the workers' movement. It returned to the task that Lenin had begun in 1903 against opportunism within the 2nd International, which had allowed the Bolsheviks to denounce both imperialist camps in 1914, to remain faithful to the principles of communism, and so allow the party to play its part to the full in the insurrection of October. It was a work for the party, not against the party. They had to fight to the end despite the exclusions, and all the barriers put in their way by the formal discipline of the leadership. This was the true spirit of Lenin, which inspired the left. In 1911, Lenin gave systematic expression to the notion of the fraction, using the experience that the Bolsheviks had gained since the formation of their fraction at the Geneva conference of 1904: “A fraction is an organisation within the party, which is united not by the workplace, nor by language or any other objective condition, but by a system of common conceptions on the problems posed to the party” (On the new fraction of conciliators, the virtuous). Revolutionary intransigence is absolutely not opposed to realism, it alone can really take account of the concrete situation. What could be more realistic than the Italian Left's rejection of Trotsky's position, that 1936 saw the opening of a new revolutionary period?

The fraction is central to the question of a historical heritage. It is the fraction that ensures the link between the old party and the new, provided that it is able to draw the lessons of the working class' experience, and translate them into a new enrichment of the programme. For example, revolutionaries had seen, since the First World War, that the role of the bourgeois parliament had been completely transformed. But it was the communist left which drew the consequences on the level of principles: the rejection of revolutionary parliamentarism and any participation in the elections of bourgeois democracy. It was the Italian Communist Left which worked out the role of the fraction in greatest depth:

• “The transformation of the fraction into a Party is conditioned by two elements which are intimately linked:
• The elaboration, by the fraction, of the new political positions capable of giving a solid framework to the proletariat's struggle for the revols struggle for the revolution in its new, more advanced phase (...)
• The overthrow of the class relationships within the present system (...) with the outbreak of revolutionary movements which will make it possible for the Fraction to take the leadership of the struggle with a view to the insurrection” (Bilan n°1).

• The comrades of the MLP remind us that for dialectical materialism, the movement of reality is a complex phenomenon where a multitude of factors enter into motion. But they forget that the system of contradictions that produces reality opens at certain moments onto a clear-cut alternative. Then it is either one thing, or another, either socialism or barbarism, either a proletarian policy or a bourgeois policy. The centrist drift of the leadership of the International, from the slogan of “conquering the masses” onwards, lies entirely in the search for immediatist short-cuts which profoundly altered its class policy; both the councils and the unions, both the extra-parliamentary struggle and revolutionary parliamentarism, both internationalism and nationalism... And it was a disaster. Each political innovation was a step further into defeat. Far from strengthening the parties anning the parties and communist nuclei, the alliances with Social-Democracy did nothing but drain the forces which could only develop on the basis of a clearly communist programme. Lenin's book, Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder, symbolises this centrist turn. He set out to criticise what he considered the inevitable and passing errors of an authentically revolutionary current: “Obviously, the error represented by left doctrinairism in the workers' movement is, at the present moment, a thousand times less dangerous and less serious than the error represented by right doctrinairism...”. But he ends up mixing the positions of the Left with those of anarchism, while at the same time he raises the prestige of the right on the grounds that it still dominates large sections of the proletariat. That is centrism. And the right made extensive use of the authority thus conferred on it to isolate the Left.

  Wage labour and world market, two fundamental characteristics of capitalism

  The comrades write: “We consider that the 21st century will witness new battles for national independence. Despite capitalism's power (and even decadence, according to you), in the highly developed countries, capitalism in the backward countries continues to develop, to grow at its own pace, so to say. And this is not a question of principles, it's objective reality!” (15/03).

  This is indeed an important point of disagreement within the proletarian political milieu. As the comrades know, we think that Lenin was mistaken when he answered Rosa Luxemburg: “National wars in the colonies and semi-colonies are not only likely, they are inevitable in the epoch of imperialism” (On the Junius pamphlet, October 1916). but it is important to insist that this does not lead the comrades to abandon proletarian internationalism, even if - in our opinion - it weakens it. Their concern is to define under what conditions the unity of the international proletariat is possible, not to hide behind Lenin to support one or other imperialist power as the leftists do.

  “You have doubtless remarked how little Leninist we are. Nonetheless, we think that Lenin's position was the best on this question. Each nation (attention! Nation, not nationality or national or ethnic group, etc...) has a complete right to self-determination within the framework of its ethnico-historic territory, to the point of a separation and creation of an independent state (...) What interests marxists is the question of the proletariat's free disposal of its self-determination within this or that nation, in o or that nation, in other words the possibility to dispose freely of itself, if it exists already as class for itself, or else the possibility for the pre-proletarian elements to form themselves as a class within the framework of the new bourgeois national state. This is the case in Chechnya. Chechnya-Ingushetia was industrialised under the Soviet power, but more than 90% of the workers were of Russian origin; the Chechens were petty-bourgeois peasants, intellectuals, state functionaries etc. Let the new Chechen bourgeoisie create the national Chechen proletariat, let it begin to exploit its national proletariat, its peasants, its indigenous population (the Russian workers won't come back now to be decapitated by the nationalists), and then we'll see what will become of the 'solid unity of the Chechen nation'! The unity of Russian and Chechen proletarians will become an objective possibility then, and not before” (15/03).

  Nonetheless, this position leads to a series of contradictions which the comrades fail to solve simply by declaring that “For us, the recognition of the objectivity of the national struggle does not mean to 'justify' it (and by the way, what does the term 'justify' mean?), or even to call for an alliance with fractions of the national bourgeoisie!” (20/03).

  The whole problem is to know what is this objective reality that the comrades are talking about. In fact, it corresponds to a past epoch, the epoch of the formation of bourgeois nations against feudalism. Have the comrades really analysed the nationalist motivation of the Chechen bourgeoisie? If they had, then they would have realised that these national demands no longer have the same content as they did at a previous stage of social development. Rosa Luxemburg sums it up thus: “During the great revolution, the French bourgeoisie had the right to speak as the Third Estate in the name of the 'French people', and even the German bourgeoisie could consider itself, up to a certain point in 1848, as the representative of the German 'people' (...) In both cases, that meant that the revolutionary cause of the bourgeois class, at that stage of social development, coincided with that of the people as a whole, since the latter was still, in relation to the bourgeoisie, an undifferentiated mass opposed to feudal domination” (The national question and autonomy). What the comrades fail to see is that the stage of social development is not determined by the local Chechen situation, but by the social environment, the general situation. Caught up in the bloody game of imperialism, completely depe, completely dependent on the world market, Chechnya has long since shed the main characteristics of a feudal society.

  According to the comrades, a progressive bourgeoisie exists in a certain number of countries: “because national capitalism continues to arise spontaneously from the traditional sectors, in conformity with the general laws of the development of peoples in the epoch of the second social super-formation, that of private property. There are three of these formations: the formation of the primitive community (n°1); then the formation of private property - including the slavery of antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism (n°2) - and finally the formation of an authentic communism (n°3). This is the triad according to Marx (see the drafts of his reply to Vera Zassoulitch, 1881). But there are few countries - and there will be fewer and fewer - where a self-developing national capitalism predominates. Where this does happen, the progressive bourgeoisie can come to power with the support of the people (including the workers, especially since they are at a pre-proletarian stage!). But all that is very temporary, since more and more depends on the world imperialist bourgeoisie, as the case of Afghanistan shows us (...) Capitalism can be compared to a wave in the 'sea' ave in the 'sea' of the second super-formation (see above) and not to a wave but to the process of waves! The second super-formation (Marx also called it 'economic') engenders these waves itself from within! But the limits, the boundaries of this 'sea' of the 'economic super-formation' are at the same time the limits of capitalism, they are the coast on which capitalism's undulation 'breaks'.

  The essential characteristic of this 'sea' of the economic social formation (the second in the triad) is the law of value. But the 'wave process' begins, is excited by and receives its impetus from... the small owner-producer! He was, is, and will be the active agent of the law of value over the whole extent of the economic social formation (the 'second', that of private capital). This is why capitalism cannot destroy the small producer! And this is why state monopolism cannot be either complete or long-lasting. The wave will ebb! If the Left Communists had analysed things from this point of view, they would have avoided many problems, including in their own relationships! And the place and the role of the world social proletarian revolution would have been much more comprehensible” (20/03).

  How are we to explain this perspective of n this perspective of a regression in state capitalism that the comrades defend? Every day confirms the tendency towards the management of the economy by a single collective capitalist, as Engels anticipated in his Anti-Dühring. Everywhere, it is the state that regulates the mergers of the great multinational corporations and imposes on them its orientations. Any state that abandoned such a control would immediately find itself in a position of weakness in the trade war. Their position is doubtless to be explained by the collapse of the USSR. In this case, the comrades are generalising from a specific situation. The USSR was marked by its economic weakness, and what collapsed was not state capitalism, but its most caricatural form, where the vast majority of the economy was nationalised. Direct state ownership of its enterprises is always a sign of weakness. In the most developed countries, state capitalism is just as real, but it is far more flexible since the state only has part ownership in some companies, or else satisfies itself with laying down the economic regulation which every company must obey.

  One can understand why the comrades present state capitalism as a passing phenomenon, since for them it is the small independent producer who best symbolises private property and the law of value. It is true thatvalue. It is true that capitalism took off within a society characterised by private property and commodity exchange; indeed capitalism is its logical conclusion, its high point, when commodities are transformed into capital. It is also true that capitalism will never be able to eradicate completely the small producer. But it is equally true that the small producer is constantly under attack from competition. Today, when overproduction has become generalised and permanent, a part of the bourgeoisie is ejected into the petty-bourgeoisie, but at the same time innumerable small proprietors are ruined and become unemployed, or survive with a small business which is often at the limit of legality. The small producer is therefore not characteristic of capitalism, but rather a survival of pre-capitalist societies, or of the first stage of capitalism's development. In bourgeois mythology, the capitalist is always presented as a small producer who has become a big producer thanks to his own efforts. The small artisan of the Middle Ages has become the great industrialist. Historical reality is quite different. In decomposing feudalism, it was not the urban artisans who emerged as the capitalist class, but rather the merchants. Moreover, the first proletarians were often none other than these same artisans subjected to the formal domination of capitmination of capital. The comrades forget that before being a producer, the capitalist is first and foremost a merchant, a trader. He is a merchant who trades mainly in labour power.

  It seems that the comrades have drawn their inspiration from a passage in Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder. Lenin explains that the bourgeoisie's power “lies, not only in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production. Unfortunately, small-scale production is still widespread in the world, and small-scale production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale” (published on https://www.marxists.org [147]). Let us remember the context. We are in 1920, and since 1918 a controversy has been developing within the Bolshevik party between Lenin and the Left Communists who published the paper Kommunist. The Left's leading figure, Bukharin, soon rejoined the majority of the party, after finding himself in the minority over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. But the group continued the controversy over the question of state uestion of state capitalism, which Lenin presented as a stage on the way to socialism, and therefore to a step forward. It is true that the victorious proletariat was confronted not just with the fury of the old ruling classes, but also with the dead weight of the vast peasant masses, who had their own reasons for resisting any further advance of the revolutionary process. But these social strata weighed on the proletariat above all through the state which, with its natural tendency to defend the social status quo, tended to become an autonomous power in its own right. All the revolutionaries knew that isolation would be fatal to the Russian revolution. The problem was whether bourgeois power would be re-established through a military victory of the White armies, or under the enormous pressure of the petty-bourgeoisie. From this standpoint, the party was unable to see the process that was to lead to a rebirth of the Russian bourgeoisie through the formation of a state bureaucracy. The Left's criticisms contained many weaknesses (how indeed could it be otherwise in the heat of events?), and Lenin often rightly put his finger on them. But the Communist Left demonstrated its full strength when it denounced the danger of state capitalism. We find the same approach later on, in the German Left which was the first to analyse Stalinist Ruyse Stalinist Russia as state capitalist. In the passage quoted above, Lenin expresses profound confusions on capitalism's nature, which were already present in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. On this point as on others, today it is possible to synthesise the contributions of all the Communist Left, despite its diversity and sometimes contradictory positions, because it remained fundamentally faithful to the marxist method and communist principles: “State capitalism is not an organic step towards socialism. In fact it represents capitalism’s last form of defence against the collapse of its system and the emergence of communism. The communist revolution is the dialectical negation of state capitalism” (International Review n°99).

  In our opinion, it is a mistake to present the small independent producer as the agent of the law of value. More generally, it is not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse: capitalism engenders capitalists. Applying this marxist approach to Russia, we can understand why “the state did not function as we intended”, to use Lenin's words. The power that imposed its direction on the Russian state was far greater than the NEP-men, or private capitalism, or small property: it was the vast impersonal power of wimpersonal power of world capital which inexorably determined the course of the Russian economy and the Soviet state. If the comrades have difficulty in grasping the fundamental nature of capitalism, or of state capitalism as an expression of a decadent system, it is doubtless also because they are looking at things in the very long term, at the same level as Marx in his letter to Vera Zassoulitch when he divides humanity's history into three periods: the archaic social formation (primitive communism), the secondary social formation (class society), and modern communism, which re-establishes collective production and appropriation at a higher level. For Marx, the examples of primitive societies were one more proof that the family, private property, and the state are not inherent to human nature. These texts are also a denunciation of a fatalistic interpretation of economic evolution, and of the bourgeois vision of a linear progress, without contradictions. But if we remain on this terrain, then it becomes impossible to examine precisely what is specific about capitalism, and above all to see that capitalism itself has a history, that it changes from being a progressive system to become a serious barrier to the development of the productive forces. Not that the foundations of such an analysis are not already present in the Communist Manifesto, as in other texts by Marx. After the Paris Commune and the end of the great national struggles of the 19th century, Marx was able to see that the bourgeoisie in the major capitalist countries no longer played a revolutionary role on the historical stage, even if capitalism still had a vast field of expansion before it. A new period, of colonial conquest and imperialism, was opening up. This approach made it possible for marxism to anticipate historical evolution, and to foresee capitalism's entry into its period of decadence. This is very clear in this passage in the second draft: “The capitalist system is past its apogee in the West, approaching the point where it will no longer be anything but a regressive social system” (quoted in Tedor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian road, January 1985)

  Marx's reflections on the Russian rural commune were to be travestied by certain leftists. The American Shanin, for example, sees them as the proof that socialism could be achieved through peasant revolutions on capitalism's periphery. Without sharing his admiration for Ho Chi Minh and Mao, Raya Dunayevskaya and the News and Letters group have taken the same approach. They consider that the Marx of the 1880s is looking for a new revolutionary subject, other than the workinother than the working class. A part of leftism thus presents the working class as one revolutionary subject amongst others: primitive tribes, women, gays, blacks, youth, the peoples of the “Third World”.

  October 1917, a product of the world situation

  Such aberrations have nothing in common with the ideas of the Russian comrades. But as we will see, their defence of the possibility of national wars today leads them to an original analysis of the October 1917 revolution.

  “As for ourselves [the SB of the MLP], we think that history has already refuted this cornerstone Leninist conception of the 'weak link'! But attention, in a very original manner: it has sown that it was possible to break 'the chain of imperialism' and even to 'build socialism' in backward countries (or 'retarded' as you call them, although I would make a distinction here: socialism began to be 'built' not only in capitalistically retarded countries, in Russia for example, but also in Mongolia, Vietnam, etc, which are really backward). And we see: yes, it is possible to break the chain, to make a 'socialist revolution', it is even possible to build socialism in separate countries and to set it up (in other words, 'finish building it')... But! But all this does not in any way lead to communism! Never and in no way>! Never and in no way [in English in the original]! Why, from a theoretical point of view, were the Bolsheviks able to take this path, why were they able to deceive themselves and many others, including the Left Communists? The cause of all that lies in... just one word (and the question, the problem is not my subjectivism: under this word is hidden a whole incorrect, fundamentally anti-marxist conception!), this word (this 'order' of the day!) is 'the socialist revolution'! When Marx, and above all Engels, accepted such a travesty of the concept of 'the social revolution of the proletariat', of the world communist revolution! As for the 'socialist revolution', it ends sooner or later in 'building socialism', and then it turns out that this 'socialism', whether 'state' or 'market' or 'national', etc, in reality does not break with capitalism!” (15/03).

  “Where the exogenous capitalist sector exists, the progressive bourgeoisie plays a role and has an influence inversely proportional to the sector's degree of maturity: the bourgeoisie of the imported capitalist sector weighs on the progressive national bourgeoisie and corrupts it, without speaking of the world (transnational) imperialist bourgeoisie. These two sectors were present in Russia at the beginning oia at the beginning of the 20th century, and Russian marxism was the expression of relationships within the exogenous capitalist sector. But then the Bolsheviks decided to speak for all the exploited: in the sector of imported developed capitalism, in that of national capitalism (and even in the agricultural sector with its surviving rural community). And so, they became 'social-jacobins' and proclaimed the 'socialist revolution'” (20/03).

  “You deal with the problem of the objective and the subjective in the world proletarian revolution, and this is correct. But why do you not have the slightest doubt that 'objectively the revolution has been possible since the world imperialist war of 1914', etc? Did not Marx and Engles also, in their time, think that 'the revolution was objectively possible'? Remember the categories of the dialectic: possibility and reality, necessity and eventuality! As we know, it is necessary to distinguish abstract (formal) from practical (concrete) possibility. Abstract possibility is characterised by the absence of the main obstacles to the object's becoming, nonetheless not all the necessary conditions are present for its realisation. Practical possibility possesses all the conditions necese conditions necessary for its realisation: latent in reality, it becomes a new reality under certain conditions. The change in these conditions as a whole determine the transition from abstract to practical possibility, and this latter is transformed into reality. The numerical measure of the possibility is expressed in the notion of probability. Necessity, as we know, is the mode of (the) transformation of possibility into reality, for which there is only one possibility in a certain object, that which is transformed into reality. And, on the contrary, eventuality is the mode of (the) transformation of possibility into a reality for which there are several different possibilities within a certain object (under certain circumstances, of course), which can be transformed into reality, but only one of which will actually be realised” (15/03).

  We do not understand why we should say that the construction of socialism in one country is both possible and impossible because it does not break in any way with capitalism. We prefer to stick to the assertion that socialism in one country was a mystification which had no relationship with reality, a weapon of the counter-revolution. What the comrades seem to be saying is that at some point the Bolsheviks ceased to defend the interests of the proletariat. That the proletariat. That was indeed the Stalinist counter-revolution. The whole difficulty of the problem, which many revolutionaries have struggled with since the 1930s, is that the counter-revolution only comes at the end of a whole process of degeneration and opportunist drift. In such a long, and sometimes imperceptible process, we have in some sense a transformation of quantity into quality. What was at first no more than a problem within the workers' movement has become the bourgeois counter-revolution. But the break in the nature of the Soviet regime is no less clear for all that: it takes place through Stalin's elimination of the Bolshevik old guard, the replacement of the perspective of world revolution by the defence of Russian national capital. The weakening of the power of the workers' councils, and of a Bolshevik party undermined by opportunism, followed parallel paths until the establishment of the power of the Russian state bourgeoisie. The memory of the real movement of class confrontations at the end of the 1920s in Russia arms us not only against bourgeois propaganda, but also against any weakening of revolutionary theory such that it might see a continuity, whether objective or subjective, between Lenin and Stalin.

  The comrades end up with just such a weakening when they lose sight of the Stalinist counter-revolutiinist counter-revolution, and introduce the idea that “ the Bolsheviks decided to speak for all the exploited”. When and why such a decision? Do the terms “all the exploited” mean all the workers, in other words several classes including non-exploiting classes like the peasantry and the rest of the petty bourgeoisie, which are exploited classes under capitalism, as well as the proletariat? If that is the case, then they are accepting as a reality the talk of Stalin, and Mao in particular, on the “bloc of four classes”. At all events, we cannot follow them in their assertion that Marx and Engels accepted (?) the concept of a socialist revolution which “does not break in reality with capitalism”. It is true that some of Marx and Engels' formulations can lead to a confusion between the nationalisation of capitalism and socialism. This is readily understood, at an epoch when the proletariat could still, under certain circumstances, support the progressive bourgeoisie against the remnants of feudalism. Consciousness and programme are the result of a constant battle against the ideology of the ruling class. When revolutionaries sharpen, make more precise, the letter of the programme, they thus remain, and must remain, faithful to the spirit of the previous generation of marxists. Thation of marxists. The definitive correction of the surviving “state capitalist” errors in marxist doctrine was made possible by the experience of the 1917 Russian revolution. But its premises are already present in Marx, through his definition of capital as a social relationship, and of capitalism as a system founded on wage labour, the extraction and realisation of surplus value. Seen like this, the transformation of individual capital property into collective state property in no way changes the nature of society. Moreover, the germ of their critique of the progressive nature of collective state property is already contained in Marx and Engels' struggle against Lassalle's state socialism, which wanted the workers to use the state against the capitalists, and against the Liebknecht/Bebel current within the German social-democracy, who allowed Lassallean formulations to pass through into the Gotha programme.

  We might summarise the comrades' thinking as follows. Bolshevism was at first a marxist current expressing the interests of the proletariat in the framework of developed capitalist relationships. But these were foreign in origin, while there existed within Russia a less developed young capitalism which needed an anti-feudal revolution. Thus, the Bolsheviks did not succumb to the Stalinist counter-revolution: they haer-revolution: they had already succumbed to the charm of national capital, and had decided to become “social-jacobins”. Here we see the difference between their vision and that of councilism. For the latter, the Russian revolution could only end in state capitalism, and the Bolsheviks were a reflection of this destiny from the outset. This discovery came late, since it dates from the 1930s when Pannekoek, who by this time had become a councilist, managed the tour de force of revealing Bolshevism's original sin in Lenin's book Materialism and empirio-criticism, written in 1908: “He is clearly and exclusively in the image of the Russian revolution, for which he exerted all his strength. This book is so far in conformity with bourgeois materialism that, had it been known and correctly interpreted in Western Europe... it would have been possible to foresee that in one way or another the Russian revolution could only finish in a kind of capitalism founded on the workers' struggle” (Lenin as philosopher).

  The marxist method is based on the concept of the whole, whence it “rises” to comprehend more concrete situations. By starting from the small independent producer, or from a local situation, the comrades are moving away from the marxist method and end up by mistaking a few vesti mistaking a few vestiges of feudalism for a general characteristic. It is useful to remember that in 1917, Russia was the world's fifth industrial power and inasmuch as capitalism's development had largely by-passed the development of artisan production and manufacture, Russian capitalism had already adopted the most modern and concentrated forms: the Putilov factory for example, with more than 40,000 workers, was the world's largest. It is this tendency which gives the key to the situation in Russia, not the opposition between an exogenous and an endogenous capitalism. The development of economic relationships had arrived at a point which had nothing in common with the epoch of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. “Since the Crimean war, and its modernisation through reform, the Russian state apparatus survives largely thanks to foreign, mostly French, capital (...) For the last two decades, French capital has served essentially two aims: railway construction thanks to state guarantees, and military spending. To meet these two needs, a powerful large-scale industry has been born in Russia since the 1870s, sheltered by a system of reinforced customs duties. French capital has given rise in Russia to a young capitalism which in turn needs to be constantly supported by substantial imports of machines and other means of production from the leading industrial nations, Britain and Germany” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to political economy). The example of Poland is equally significant. “The great majority of the Polish bourgeoisie is foreign in origin (it settled in Poland at the beginning of the 19th century), and has always been hostile to the idea of national independence. All the more so in that during the 1820s and 30s, Polish industry was focused on exports, even before the creation of a domestic market. The kingdom's bourgeoisie, instead of seeking a national reunification with Galicia and the Principality, always looked to the East for support, since the massive export of textiles to Russia was the foundation of Polish capitalism's growth” (Rosa Luxemburg: The national question and autonomy). The formation of the world market is a major feature of the capitalist mode of production, it is this process that destroys pre-capitalist relationships. It is this dynamic process that creates the conditions for the unity of the international proletariat, not the autonomous development of a national capital. The 1905 revolution gave the first practical demonstration of this process. By contrast, the slogan of the “right of peoples to self-determinationelf-determination”, which the Bolsheviks tragically supported, has only reinforced the division of the proletariat. Has this not been confirmed in practice during the 1920s?

  The decadence of a social formation

  Neither the Bolsheviks, nor any modern bourgeoisie, can be compared with the Jacobins. The end of the formation of the world market, and the crisis of overproduction, have eliminated the possibility of any real development. The Chechen bourgeoisie will never create a national proletariat. Where would it find an outlet for its commodities? Only the proletarian revolution can lay the foundations for an industrialisation of the backward countries. The Communist Manifesto describes very well how the bourgeoisie creates a world in its own image, by exporting cheap commodities and expanding its commercial relationships. But it reaches its limits long before industrialising the whole planet. Marx and Engels had already shown how the insoluble contradictions springing from the relations of wage labour could only lead capitalism to its decadence. Charles Fourier's penetrating critique had already sketched an outline of this idea: “Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable hbout illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race” (https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877-ad/p3.htm#c1 [148]). Marx explains this phenomenon. At a certain moment in capitalism's development, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall can no longer be compensated by an increase in the mass of surplus value, due to the saturation of the world market. “Now, [the capitalist] has all the more need to find outlets in that his production has increased. Indeed, the more powerful and costly means of production that he has set in motion allow him to sell his commodities more cheaply, but they also force him to sell more, to conquer an incomparably greater market for his commodities (...) Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lowe gods of the lower world -- in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and there the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market” (Marx, Wage labour and capital, https://www.marxists.org [147]). It remained for the Left Fractions, with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in the lead, to show how the outbreak of the first imperialist world war was the sign that capitalism had entered into its declining phase. The communist revolution was no longer only necessary, it had at last become possible.

  At the end of this first response to the comrades of the MLP, while we regret that we have been unable to translate their texts[iii] from the Russian, we call for the development of the debate and reflection.

  We hope that the discussion, and mutual criticism, will continue. But we also urge that this debate should not be limited to ourselves: it should be opened to include be opened to include other comrades in Russia, as well as to the other groups of the proletarian political milieu throughout the world.

   

  Pal

  ---

  iSince May 1968, the term “leftism” has passed into common usage to describe, not the oppositions within the Communist International which Lenin criticised fraternally and which were expressions of the Communist Left, but all those extra-parliamentary currents which, like the Trotskyists and the Maoists (here we should distinguish the “Maoists” of the western countries which we describe as “leftists” from Mao himself who, in theorising a sort of “peasant national communism” never had anything to do with the workers' movement. His was more an “oriental” version of Stalinism), betrayed internationalism, and critically supported the parties of the bourgeois left (socialists and Stalinists) and the unions. It is therefore a term to describe a political tendency which belongs clearly to the bourgeoisie's political apparatus.

   

  iiThis correspondence was originally written in French. The translations are ours, and we have of course done our best not to distort the comrades' meaning, as we understand it.

  iiiMost of the texts that we possess, in English or in French, are letters.

  ODY>

There is not one international organisation of the bourgeoisie – World Trade Organisation, World Bank, OECD, IMF – which doesn’t proclaim its intention to do everything it can for “sustainable development”, so concerned are they for the future generations. There’s not one state which doesn’t proclaim its deep respect for the environment. There’s not one ecologically-oriented Non-Government Organisation (NGO) which hasn’t organised all sorts of demonstrations, petitions or memorandums. There’s not one bourgeois newspaper which hasn’t featured a pseudo-scientific article on global warming. All these fine people, with all their fine intentions, had their representatives at the conference in The Hague from the 13 to the 25 November 2000, which had the aim of defining the ways in which the Kyoto protocol (1) would be put into effect. No less than 2000 delegates, representing 180 countries, surrounded by 4000 observers and journalists, had the job of concocting the miracle recipe for putting an end to climatic abnormalities. Result: Nothing. Strictly zero. Or rather, there was one result: one more proof that for the bourgeoisie, considerations about the survival of humanity fall a very long way behind the defence of the national capital.

Ten years ago, in our article “Ecology: It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the Earth” (International Review n°63), the ICC declared: “The ecological disaster is now tangibly threatening the very life-support system of the planet”. Today we have to say that capitalism is carrying out this threat. Throughout the 90s, the plundering of the planet has continued at a frenzied rhythm: deforestation, soil erosion, toxic pollution of the air, water tables and oceaables and oceans, pillage of natural fossil resources, dissemination of chemical or nuclear substances, destruction of animal or plant species, explosion of infectious diseases, and finally the steady increase in average temperatures over the surface of the planet (seven of the hottest years for millennia were in the 90s). Ecological disasters are becoming more combined, more global, often taking on an irreversible character, with long term consequences that are hard to predict.

And while the bourgeoisie has proved itself incapable of doing the slightest thing even to slow down this destructive folly, it has done a great deal to hide its own responsibility for it behind a multitude of ideological covers. What the ruling class has to do is present ecological calamities – when it cannot purely and simply ignore them – as outside the sphere of capitalist social relations, outside the class struggle. It thus produces all the false alternatives, from government measures to the anti-globalisation speeches of the NGOs, to obscure the only real perspective for taking humanity out of this nightmare: the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production by the working class.

For revolutionaries, the real issue here is capitalism's own productionist logic, as Marx analysed in Capital: sed in Capital: “Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. But what avails lamentations in the face of historical necessity?” (Vol 1. Chapter XXIV). Here lies the logical and the unlimited cynicism of capitalism: the accumulation of capital and not the satisfaction of human needs is the real goal of capitalist production, and therefore the fate of the working class, or of the environment, is of little import. With the saturation of markets which became evident in 1914, capitalism entered into decadence. In other words, the accumulation of capital increasingly became a source of conflict and convulsions. During this period, “capital's ruthless destruction of the environment takes on a different scale and quality…This is the epoch in which all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch, therefore, of a permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, the rise of the megacities the development of forms of agriculture that have been no less ecologically damaging than most forms of industry” (International Review n°63). This tendency has taken a further step in the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, in which the system has been rotting on its feet for two decades because neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie has been able to impose their solution to the crisis: proletarian revolution or generalised war.

Capitalism has put chaos and destruction on the agenda of history. The consequences for the environment are catastrophic. This what we are going to illustrate (in a very partial way, because there are so many examples of the damage being done), while also showing how at every stage the bourgeoisie sets up ideological firebreaks to head off all those who are legitimately asking the question of whether this barbaric cycle of destruction can be stopped.

Capitalism throws the ecosystem out of joint…

Because of its global character and implications, the question of climate change is of primary importance. It’s no accident that the bourgeoisie has made it one of the major axes of its media campaigns. The pedants may claim that “in matters of meteorology and climatology, man has a decidatology, man has a decidedly short memory (Le Monde 10.9.2000), or talk about classic millenarian fears, but such an attitude – which the bourgeoisie itself doesn’t wholly share anyway – is an implicit defence of the status quo, of a dominant position in which one feels oneself to be well-protected. The proletariat can’t afford such a luxury. Physically, it’s always the workers and the poorest sections of the world population who are hit the hardest by the apocalyptic consequences of the disruption in the cycles of terrestrial life which the capitalist apprentice sorcerer has brought about.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is in charge of synthesising scientific work on climatic change, in its ‘Report to the Decision-makers’ dated 22 October 2000, summarised the basic elements which had been observed, all of which show a qualitative rupture in the evolution of the climate: “Average surface temperature has increased by 0.6% since 1860…New analyses indicate that the 20th century has probably seen the most significant warming in all the centuries for the last thousand years in the northern hemisphere…The area of snow cover has diminished by about 10% since the end of the 1960s and the period in which lakes and rivers are under ice inrivers are under ice in the northern hemisphere has diminished by about two weeks in the 20th century…..the thickness of the Arctic ice has diminished by 40%….Average sea levels have risen by between 10 and 20 cm during the 20th century…the rhythm of these rising sea levels during the 20th century has been about 10 times higher than in the previous three thousand years…Precipitation has increased by between 0.5 and 1% by decade during the 20th century on most continents in the middle and higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Rain has diminished in most of the inter-tropical regions”

This rupture is even clearer when we look at the concentration of so-called greenhouse gases (2), seeing that “since the beginning of the industrial era, the chemical composition of the planet has been through an unprecedented evolution” (3), a point that the IPCC doesn’t deny: “Since 1750, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has grown by a third. The present concentration has never been superseded for 420,000 years and probably not for 20 million years…The level of concentration of methane in the atmosphere has multiplied by 2.5 since 1750 and continues to grow”. s to grow”. In fact it’s essentially in the 20th century, especially in the last few decades, and not since 1750, that these changes have been observed.

The simple fact that you can place in one column the period of the decadence of capitalism, and in the other column periods lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, is in itself the most striking condemnation of the insane irresponsibility of capitalism as a mode of production. It is an undeniable fact that these mutations are the direct result of the savage and anarchic activity of industries and transport systems based on the burning of fossil fuels. It goes without saying that although in the same period capitalism has considerably developed its productive capacities, the working class and the majority of the planet’s population has not reaped the fruits. From this point of view, the overall human and social balance-sheet of capitalist decadence, with all its accompanying war and poverty, is far more sombre than the ”climatic” balance-sheet in itself, and therefore cannot provide any attenuating circumstances (4).

Furthermore, the IPCC report points out that the “proofs of human influence on the global climate are stronger today than at the time of the second report” in d report” in 1995. This is further evidence against the bourgeoisie, which has not ceased manipulating scientific discourse throughout the 90s, always trying to pose the wrong questions. Thus, once global warming was admitted (still very late in relation to the scientific studies), the bourgeoisie’s question has been: what is the formal proof that global warming is linked to industrial activity and not to a natural cycle? Posed in this direct manner, it is difficult to respond scientifically. On the other hand, what has always been particularly flagrant is that we have this qualitative rupture in the observed evolution of the climate as described above, at a time when the cyclical tendencies in the climate (which are well known and can be easily modelled because they are determined by astronomical parameters such as the variations in the terrestrial orbit, the inclination of the Earth’s axis, etc.) place us in a period of relative glaciation over the last 1000 years and for the next 5000 years. And if that weren’t enough, two other parameters would also point towards things getting colder: the cycle of solar activity and the increased amount of particles in the atmosphere – an increase also due to industrial pollution (but also to volcanic eruptions). This says quite enough about the hypocrisy of the bourgeois of the bourgeoisie waiting for ”proof”! Now that it is difficult to deny the capitalist origin of global warming, the new question occupying the media is: can it be demonstrated formally that there is a link between global warming and the extreme climatic phenomena we have seen recently (cyclones Mitch and Eline, storms in France, floods in Venezuela, Britain, etc)? Again, the scientific community is hard placed to answer this not very scientific question, whose sole aim is to instil the idea that perhaps global warming won’t have very tangible consequences. Official organisms like Météo-France have come up with some delectably Jesuitical formulations: “It has not been shown that the recent extreme events are signs of climatic change, but when this climatic change is fully perceptible, there is no doubt that it will be accompanied by extreme events!”

And between now and 2100 the expected climatic change are extremely grave. Again according to the IPCC: “the average rise in surface temperature is estimated to be between 1.5 and 6%…such an increase is without precedent in the last ten thousand years”; meanwhile the rise in sea levels will be an average of 0.47 meters, “which is two to four times the rate observed during the 20th century”

century”. Again, these predictions don’t take into account the real rhythm of deforestation (at its present rate, all the forests will have gone in 600 years). The probable consequences of these climatic variations and will be terrible and murderous: floods and cyclones in some regions and drought in others; scarcity of drinking water, the disappearance of animal species, and more. But for Dominique Frommel, the research director at INSERM, “the main danger is not there. It resides in man’s dependence on the environment. Migrations, the over-concentration of human beings in the urban milieu, the diminution in water supplies, pollution and poverty have always [but capitalism has developed mega-cities, poverty and pollution far more than any other system!] created conditions which facilitate the diffusion of infectious micro-organisms. We know that the reproductive and infectious capacities of insects and rodents, the vectors of parasites or viruses, is connected to the temperature and humidity of their surroundings. In other words, a rise in temperature, even a modest one, gives the green light to the expansion of numerous agents which are pathogenic to man and animals. This is why parasitic diseases – such as malaria, schistosomiasis) and sleeping sickness, or viral infections like dengue ions like dengue fever, certain forms of encephalitis or haemorrhaging fevers – have gained ground in recent years. Either they are reappearing in areas from where they had previously disappeared, or they are now hitting regions which had previously been spared…The projections for the year 2050 show that malaria will menace 3 billion human beings…In the same way, the number of diseases transmitted by water is also spiralling. The warming of fresh waters facilitates the proliferation of bacteria. The warming of salt waters – particularly when they are enriched by human effluent - allows phytoplanctons, which are the real breeding grounds for the cholera bacillus, to reproduce at an accelerating rate. After virtually disappearing from Latin America around 1960, cholera claimed 1,368, 053 victims between 1991 and 1996. Meanwhile, new infections are appearing or have begun to advance beyond the ecological niches in which they had previously been confined…Medicine remains disarmed, despite the progress that has been made, faced with this explosion of so many unexpected pathologies. The epidemiology of infectious diseases….could in the 21st century take on a new visage, notably with the expansion of zoonoses, those infections which can be passed from vertebrate animals to humans, and vice versa”d vice versa” (Manière de Voir, no.50, p77).

...and does everything it can to hide its responsibility

At this level of historical responsibility, the ideological response of he bourgeoisie has been to organise gigantic media rodeos, from the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 to The Hague via Kyoto and Berlin, aimed at making us believe that the ruling class has finally become aware of the dangers menacing the planet. The mystification operates at several levels.

First it aims to give the impression that if the objectives fixed at Kyoto had been attained, that would be a significant first step. But by all the evidence, not only have these objectives not been attained, but, even if they had, the targets were quite derisory and would not have much effect on global warming. All the NGOs and all the ecological parties who take part in the discussions about how to apply the Kyoto protocol are thus part of this mystification. Not even a step sideways has been achieved, let alone a step forwards.

Secondly, to make us believe that if the states still don’t understand each other, it’s because they have a different vision of the way to reach the common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, each state knows quite well what it’s doing when it defends its natwhen it defends its national interests and thus uses the negotiations to impose production norms which best suit its own levels of production, technological capacities, energy sources, etc. For example, neither France nor the USA have kept to the Kyoto agreements (since 1990 carbon emissions have gone up by 11% in the US and 6.5% for France), but when president Chirac declared that “it is above all to America that we look for hope for an effective limitation on greenhouse gases ( Le Monde 20.11.2000), we should translate this as: in the trade war between us, we would really like to put a ball and chain around your feet. It’s the same when it comes to setting up an ”observation” system as demanded by the European Union, involving taxes on those who exceed their pollution quotas (here again, it’s not a question of preventing pollution). You might as well ask the USA to finance the European Airbus and to limit the production of Boeings! For the countries of the third world, it’s even more simple: the weight of the crisis, of debt and of poverty result in the systematic pillage of natural resources and a laissez-faire attitude to the big western companies, who feed local corruption. All this is the unavoidable reality of capitalism. In this framework, any support for one measure against another boils down to plther boils down to playing the game of one or several states.

Finally, the last mystification, one dear to reformists of all stripes: the idea that we should struggle for a clean capitalism that respects the environment, a capitalism without competition – an imaginary capitalism. This holy crusade is being carried on today in the name of anti-globalisation and addresses its humble supplications to the state, asking it to legislate against, tax, and otherwise reign in the nasty multinationals. But just as labour legislation does not in any way limit capitalist exploitation, unemployment and poverty, and above all does not prevent such legislation being bypassed when needs must, so any legislation, fiscal constraint or other measure which claims to have an ecological value can only do things which are perfectly acceptable to capitalism, in fact which are favourable to the modernisation of the productive apparatus. Either this, or it’s purely and simply a disguised form of protectionism or a convenient justification for anti-working class measures (lay-offs when you close polluting factories, wage cuts to absorb the cost of anti-pollution measures, etc). From this point of view, eco-taxes (‘I pollute, but I pay for it….a bit”) and the market in greenhouse gas emission permits, whose principle has beenose principle has been accepted, show the way forward for capitalist realism when it comes to fighting pollution and global warming!

It’s for this reason that the most coherent ideologues of political ecology always try to justify the measures they advocate in terms of capitalist profitability; and that’s why you often see them working as consultants in the centres of bourgeois decision making. This is clear with the ‘Green’ parties which participate in a number of governments (France, Germany) but also for the NGOs like the World Conservation Monitoring Centre which has become an antenna of the UN and argues that “policies and measures concerning climate change must have a relationship with efficiency and cost so that they ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost”. In the same way, the main peddler of anti-globalisation (concretely, anti-US) ideology in France, Le Monde Diplomatique, is outraged that “the combined impact of the social cost of automobile transport – noise, air pollution, traffic congestion, use of space and lack of safety – could represent up to 5% of Gross National Product” (Maniere de Voir no. 50, p70). This conversion to ecological realism can also take the form of an effective aid to the state, as we saw when Greenpeace offew when Greenpeace offered its services after the sinking of the chemical transport ship Levoli-Sun off the French coast in November 2000.

It’s characteristic of all the ecological currents, parties or NGOs to make the capitalist state the guarantor of common interests. Their mode of activity is fundamentally a-classist (since “we are all concerned”) and democratic (they are in particular champions of local democracy, and insist that through popular pressure, citizens’ action, we can oblige the state, which is imagined to be sincerely moved by such demonstrations, to take measures in favour of the environment). It goes without saying that such a form of protest, which puts into question neither the foundations of the capitalist mode of production nor the power of the ruling class, can be totally assimilated by the bourgeoisie. And for those who don’t believe in such fairytales, their demoralisation is also a victory for the bourgeoisie.

We have seen that it’s quite illusory to think that there can be mechanisms within capitalism that would enable us to put an end to ecological disasters (5), since the latter are the result of the most basic functioning of capitalism. It is therefore the social relations of capital which have to be wiped out if we are to estabout if we are to establish a society in which the satisfaction of human needs, which would become the motive of production, is not achieved at the expense of the natural environment, since the two are intimately connected. Such a society, communism, can only be brought about by the proletariat, the only social force that can develop a consciousness and a practise that can “revolutionise the existing world”, “practically transform the present state of affairs” (Marx, The German Ideology).

Since its appearance as the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, marxism affirmed itself against bourgeois ideology, including its most advanced materialist conceptions, which saw nature as an object external to man, and not as a historical nature. The mastery of nature , for the proletariat, has thus never meant the pillage of nature: “At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all the other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly” (Engels, Dialectics of Natls, Dialectics of Nature).

It remains the case that the development of an awareness about the gravity of the ecological situation cannot in itself be a factor for mobilising the struggles which the working class has to wage between now and the communist revolution. As we said in IR 63, and as has been confirmed over the past 10 years: “the issue as such doesn’t allow the proletariat to affirm itself as a distinct social force. Indeed…it provides an ideal pretext for the bourgeoisie’s inter-classist campaigns…The working class will only be able to deal with the ecological issue as a whole when it has conquered political power on a world scale”. But the aberrations of this decomposing capitalist system also directly touch the workers (health, food, housing, etc) and at this level can serve to radicalise future economic struggles.

As for all the elements from outside the proletariat who are sincerely rebelling against the horrible spectacle of the massacre of the planet, the only constructive way forward for their indignation is to make a critique of ecologist ideology, and, as the Communist Manifesto invites them, to raise themselves to a general understanding of the history of the class struggle and to join the combat of the proletariat in its revolutionary organisations. organisations.

The destruction of the environment is not a technical problem, but a political one: more than ever, capitalism is a mortal danger for the survival of humanity; more than ever the future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat. This is in no way a mechanical or abstract vision. It’s a necessity which has its roots in the reality of the capitalist mode of production. To cut the knot between communist revolution or a plunge into barbarism, the proletariat must act quickly. The more time passes, the more the accelerating decomposition of capitalist society will leave an apocalyptic inheritance to the communist society of the future.

BT

Notes

1. The Kyoto protocol (December 97) is the list of principles agreed by the states which signed the convention of climate change at Rio in 1992, committing themselves to a 5.2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010

2. The greenhouse effect is a process which brings about a considerable role to gases which are a minority in the atmosphere (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone): by preventing infrared radiation from leaving the planet freely, they retain enough of the sun’s heat to make the planet habitable (otherwise it would have an average temperature of –18 e temperature of –18 degrees centigrade)” (Herve Le Treut, research director at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique in Paris – Le Monde 7.8.00

3. Herve Le Treut, ibid

4. See the article ‘The most barbaric century in history’ in IR 101

5. We don't have the space here to develop on the other facets of the ecological disaster: uncontrolled desertification and deforestation, disappearance of animal species with the potential medicinal losses that this implies (between now and 2010 20% of known species will have disappeared, a third of them domestic species), poisoning of food as in the dioxin scandal, massive use of toxic pesticides, scarcity of drinking water (a child dies every 8 seconds because of lack of water or because of poor quality water), military and civil nuclear contamination, pillage of entire regions for oil exploitation, exhaustion of marine resources, all the damage created by local wars, etc. As for global warming, the ‘solutions’ of the bourgeoisie are aimed at hiding reality, while things continue to worsen.

ICC Introduction

The article by Josep Rebull on “The May Days of 1937”, which we are publishing here, is a contribution to reflection about the war in Spain1. In particular, it contains important elements of clarification about the political attitude of the anarchists and the POUM2 during these tragic events.

The 1937 May Days were a new and dramatic experience for the working class. They provided the opportunity for the Stalinists and “official” anarchists to carry out an anti-working class policy and showed that they had become ardent defenders of the interests of capitalism.

During these struggles, only a few Trotskyists around G Munis and the anarchist group The Friends of Durruti clearly placed themselves on the side of the workers of Catalonia.

Rebull’s article shows a lot of foresight about the result of the May Days and on the general course of the class struggle. It is to be saluted above all because of its political courage, especially considering that the violent criticisms of the POUM leadership are made from the inside, by a militant of the party.

Josep Rebull3 was a member of the POUM during the 1930s. We should recall that this party was created in 1935 on the basis of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc4 led by Joaquin Maurin5, in conjunction with elements like Andres Nin6. The latter had broken with the International Left Opposition, and thus with Trotsky, in 1934. In the POUM, Maurin held the post of general secretary while Nin became the political secretary7. During the war in Spain, while Maurin festered in Franco’s jails, Nin was Minister of Justice in the Generalidad government in Catalonia along with the CNT and the parties of the Republican and Catalan nationalist bourgeoisie, such as Josep Tarradella’s Esquerra Catalana.

Despite profound disagreements with the policies of the POUM during the war in Spain, and although afterwards he had a certain rapprochement with the positions of the communist left, Josep Rebull was never able to make a formal break with this party.

During the period between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1940s, revolutionary energies were particularly reduced and isolated from the working class. Among these was the Italian Left, which had the huge merit of understanding the real dynamic of the situation. In doing so, they found themselves at odds with other revolutionary political tendencies. The Italian Left had a marxist, historical grasp of the real balance of forces between the classes and its evolution; this was at the core of its analysis of the historic course. It saw that the course was not favourable to the working class, that it had definitively changed at the end of the 1920s and that, since that point, the international political situation had been determined by the triumph of the counter-revolution and the march towards a generalised imperialist war.

This general vision is the main lack in Rebull’s approach, and it means that his article has serious political limitations. The most important of these is his illusion that the proletarian revolution was possible in Spain in 1936 and even in 1937. In effect he defends the view that if there had been a real revolutionary leadership during the May Days of 1937, the situation could have gone in a different direction. But these political confusions aside, we want to salute Rebull’s article and point to a number of elements of political clarification which go well beyond the simple understanding of the Barcelona events in May 1937.

What can we retain from this article?

In May 1937, the Spanish and international bourgeoisie definitively succeeded in putting down the last vestiges of proletarian resistance in Spain. After May 1937 the repression really got underway and crushed the Spanish working class before the outbreak of the Second World War. Rebull shows that the May Days had ended in a grave defeat for the working class and “a triumph for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie”.

Rebull moves towards a historic vision of flux and retreat in the class struggle. Like Marx at the time of the Paris Commune8, like Lenin during the Russian revolution9, or Rosa Luxemburg during the German revolution10, he analyses the actual situation of the class struggle. He is one of the only elements in the POUM, but also among other Spanish revolutionaries, to warn about the imperious necessity to pass into clandestinity after the 1937 May Days. The appreciation of “where is the class struggle”, which is always the most complex for a revolutionary to diagnose, is something that only marxists can develop. It is their role and function to understand the rhythm of the class struggle and to explain it to their class. No one else can do it in their place, and if they don’t do it, they lose all usefulness.

Rebull criticises not only the Spanish Communist Party but also the CNT which acted as a support for the Republican power dominated by the Stalinists and the ‘left’ fraction of the Republican bourgeoisie. On the CNT leadership, he writes that “the May movement has shown the real role of the anarcho-syndicalist leaders. Like reformists in any era, they have been – consciously or unconsciously – instruments of the enemy class in the workers’ ranks”.

He draws the lessons about the real function of the Popular Fronts: “In the future, the working class will not be able to have any doubts about the function reserved for the Popular Fronts in every country”.

Rebull shows a way forward in the new situation created by the failure of the May Days. Unlike the POUM, which saw in these events a victory for the working class, he sees the reality of the defeat and thus the necessity for revolutionaries to take measures of clandestinity in order to survive.

Rol.

“The May days”11

Background

Once the second power had disappeared in its organised form, that is to say, once the organs born in July in opposition to the bourgeois government had disappeared, the counter-revolution - presently represented by the petty-bourgeois and reformist parties - attacked the proletariat’s revolutionary positions one by one, principally in Catalonia, because it is the region which has given the most momentum to the revolution. This was done cautiously at first and then aggressively.

The power of the working class had partly been neutralised before these attacks, on the one hand by the counter-revolutionary dictatorship of the leaders of the UGT12 in Catalonia and, on the other, by the CNT’s collaboration in the governments in Valencia and Barcelona.

In spite of this handicap13, the proletariat was convinced bit by bit – separating itself from the reformist leaders, collaborators of the bourgeoisie - that only its energetic action in the street could hold back the advances of the counter-revolution. The armed clashes that took place in various parts of Catalonia during the month of April, were in fact the prelude to the May events in Barcelona.

The struggle was posed (and continues to be posed) in general terms, between the revolution and the counter-revolution, in the following conditions, as regards Catalonia.

Since July the revolutionary sectors of CNT-FAI and the POUM had the support of most of the armed proletariat, but they lacked concrete objectives and an effective tactic. The revolution therefore lost its initiative.

The counter-revolutionary forces of the PSUC-Esquerra, which had an almost non-existent developed base in July – have followed clearly defined objectives since the beginning and thus been able to carry out a consistent tactic. Whilst the CNT – the numerically most decisive force - has become embroiled in the labyrinth of bourgeois institutions; all the time talking about nobility and loyalty in its relationships [with the other component parts of these institutions – translators’ note], its enemies and collaborators have step-by-step carefully prepared and carried out a plan of provocation and denigration, whose first phase was the elimination of the POUM. The POUM as much as the leadership of the CNT have found themselves on the defensive faced with these at first sly and then brazen attacks. They have thus allowed the counter-revolution to go onto the offensive.

It was in these conditions that the May events took place.

The struggle

The struggle that began on (Monday) the 3rd May was provoked, in the immediate, by the reactionary forces of the PSUC-Esquerra, who tried to capture the Barcelona telephone exchange. The most revolutionary part of the proletariat responded to this provocation by taking hold of the streets, thus increasing its strength. The strike spread like wild fire and was total.

Despite its headless birth, this movement can in no way be seen as a “putsch”. All the armed workers were on the barricades. The movement was sympathetically received, during its first two days, by the working class in general – this is proved by the extent, rapidity and unanimity of the strike – and it threw the middle class, which was of course terrified, into an attitude of expectant neutrality.

The workers brought all of their combativity and enthusiasm into play, until due to a lack of coordination and final objectives for the movement, vacillation and demoralisation spread amongst the various sectors of combatants. Only these psychological factors can explain why these same workers, against the orders of their leaders, stopped with within a few meters of the Palacio de la Generalidad.

On the government side was to be found only a part of the forces of Public Order, the Stalinists, Estat Català, Esquerra – these latter forces were hardly combative. Some Public Order companies declared themselves neutral, refusing to repress the workers, whilst others allowed themselves to be disarmed. The Control Patrols were overwhelmingly on the side of the proletariat.

The revolutionary organisations did not createa coordinating and directing centre. However, the city was in the hands of the proletariat, to the point where by Tuesday the different concentrations of workers were perfectly able to link up. Only some of these remained isolated, but overall there was enough force to carry out an offensive concentrating on the official centres for the city to fall, without great effort, completely into the workers’ hands14.

In general, on both sides of the struggle, the attitude was one of “wait and see”. The government forces had not the forces necessary to take the initiative. The workers’ forces lacked leadership and objectives.

As for forces outside of the city and which could at one moment or the other be incorporated into the struggle, there were the forces at the front, willing to march on the capital – the forces of the revolutionary sectors had already begun to cut the road against the Karl Marx Division – and the forces sent by the government in Valencia, were not certain to arrive. By Wednesday various French and English boats appeared off Barcelona, probably ready to intervene.

The proletarian forces controlled the streets for four and a half days: from Monday afternoon to Friday. The organs of the CNT participated in the movement for one day – the Tuesday. The organs of the POUM participated for three days. Each considered the movement over as soon as they gave the order to withdraw. But in reality it was only WELL AFTER these orders were issued, that the workers withdrew, due to a lack of a leadership capable of ordering a progressive withdrawal and, above all, faced with the treason of the leaders of the CNT: some of whom made pathetic statements over the radio whilst other collaborated with Companys, according to whose own statement “In the face of this indescribable attack on the government, the latter found itself with small means of defence; very small, not because it had not foreseen this development, but because of the impossibility of forestalling it. In spite of this the government put down the subversive movement without hesitation, utilising the small forces at its disposal, aided by popular fervour, and by conversations held in the Generalitat with different trade union representatives, and with the assistance of several delegates from Valencia, commencing thus the return to normality” (Hoja Oficial 17th May).

Such were the general lines of the May insurrection.

The leaders of the CNT

The proletariat spontaneously and instinctively launched this movement, without firm leadership, without a positive concrete aim for decisively advancing it. The CNT-FAI had already decapitated the movement before it was born, because it had not explained clearly to the working class the meaning of the April events.

At first not all the CNT leaders were against the movement. The Barcelona committees not only supported it, but also tried to coordinate it at the military level. But without having already agreed realisable political aims, they could not do this. Caught between the will of the base and the capitulation of the higher committees, the doubts and vacillations of these committees led in practice to a series of ambiguous and equivocal instructions.

The only thing the National and Regional Committees expressed firmly was the decision to withdraw. This retreat, ordered unconditionally, without gaining control of Public Order, without obtaining the guarantee of the Security Battalions, without practical organs of the workers’ front, and without a satisfactory explanation to the working class, putting all those involved in the struggle – revolutionary and counter-revolutionary - into the same sack, remains one of the greatest capitulations to the bourgeoisie and treasons against the workers’ movement.

The leaders and the led were not long in suffering the grave consequences of the Revolutionary Workers’ Front not becoming reality15 .

The leadership of the POUM

Faithful to its line of action since July 19th, the leadership of the POUM went along with events. At the same time as these events were unfolding, our leaders were endorsing them, despite not having anything whatsoever to do with either with the declaration of the movement or its subsequent dynamic. It cannot present itself as putting forewards (late and in bad conditions for distributing it) the demand for defence committees, since it did not say a single word about the antagonistic role of these committees faced with the bourgeois governments.

From the practical point of view, all of the merit for the action belongs to the lower committees and the base of the party. The leadership did not edit a single manifesto or leaflet in order to orientate the armed proletariat.

When our leading comrades understood – as did those struggling on the barricades - that concretely the movement was not going to achieve any final objective,they gave the order to retreat16. Given the course of events, without the decision to lead it from the beginning and faced with the capitulation of the CNT leaders, the order to retreat was clearly necessary in order to avoid a massacre.

In spite of the lack of orientation on the part of our leaders, reaction presents them as directors and initiators of the movement. This of course is an honour they do not deserve, even though they reject it and call it a slander17.

The Popular Front

For all those who believed that the Popular Front was the salvation of the working class, this movement has been very enlightening. This movement was deliberately provoked by components of the Popular Front (PF) and has been used to strengthen the bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus. It is also convincing proof that the PF is a counter-revolutionary front which, when it stopped the overthrow of capitalism – the cause of fascism - prepared the way for the latter. It has also repressed all efforts to take the revolution forwards.

The CNT which was a-political until 19th July, fell into the trap of the Popular Front when it entered the political arena. The cost of this unfortunate experience has been a new blood-letting in the proletarian ranks.

As for the political positions of the POUM before 19th July, this violent evolution of the Popular Front was clearly a theoretical victory, since they had forecast and warned against it.

As for Stalinism, for the first time it was unmasked as an open enemy of the proletarian revolution, placing itself on the other side of the barricades, struggling against the revolutionary workers and in favour of the bourgeois Popular Front, of which Stalinism is the creator and main defender.

{In the} future the working class cannot have any doubts about the role of the Popular Front in any country.

The danger of intervention

The fear amongst certain sectors during the May events concerning the danger of armed intervention by England and France, shows a lack of understanding of the role played by these powers up until now.

Anglo-French intervention against the Spanish proletarian revolution has been going on, more or less openly, for months, This intervention is carried out by means of the domination exercised by these imperialisms, through Stalinism, over the governments in Barcelona and Valencia. This was seen in the recent struggle – as always involving the Stalinists - within the government in Valencia which ended with the elimination of Largo Caballero18 and the CNT. It can also be seen in the “non intervention” agreements which have only been observed and carried out in order to weaken the Spanish proletariat. The open intervention of war ships and occupying troops will only change the form of the intervention. This open or hidden intervention will have to be defeated or it will defeat us.

Like any workers’ revolution, our’s will have to eliminate our national exploiters, but it will also have to wage the inevitable struggle to defeat all the interventionist efforts of international capitalism. No revolution can be victorious without confronting and overcoming this aspect of the war. Trying to avoid this, amounts to renouncing victory, because the imperialists will never willingly stop trying to intervene in our revolution.

A correct international policy on the part of revolutionary Spain could arouse in our favour the proletariat of those countries which want to mobilise against the Spanish proletariat, and even turn them against their own government, as in the example of the 1917 Russian revolution.

Discussion of the movement

Faced with the spontaneous movement, there were two principle positions that can be taken (we exclude inhibition):

1. Consider it as a protest movement, in which case it was necessary to rapidly show its short term nature and take the necessary measures to avoid useless sacrifices. In July 1917, the Bolshevik leaders exerted themselves to stop the premature movement of the proletariat of the capital and this didn’t lessen their prestige, since they knew how to justify their decision.

2. Consider the movement as decisive for the conquest of power, in that case the POUM, since it was the only revolutionary Marxist party, should have firmly, resolutely, and unswervingly taken the leadership of the movement in order to lead and coordinate it. Naturally, in this case it was not enough to hope to become the revolution’s leadership by accident: it was necessary to act quickly, extending the struggle, spreading it to the whole of Catalonia, unhesitatingly proclaiming that the movement was to be directed against the Reformist government, making it clear from the outset that Defence Committees and their Central Committee had to be formed without delay, organising them so that at all costs they became organs of power against the government of the Generalitat, and attacking the strategic places without delay taking full advantage of the long hours of disorder and panic that afflicted our adversaries.

However, the POUM leadership’s fear of confronting the CNT leaders from the beginning - afterwards it was too late - was a surrender to the detriment of the Party, that is to say, it went against the initial measures taken up when the movement broke out and against the political independence of the POUM. The possible excuse that the party was not in a condition to take up the leadership, is no less against the interests of the party, since the POUM could only play the role of a real Bolshevik party, taking up the leadership and precisely not declining the resolute orientation of the working class movement out of "modesty". It is not enough for the party which calls itself revolutionary to be on the side of the workers in struggle, rather it must be in the vanguard.

The POUM would have come out of the battle enormously strengthened if it had not vacillated and waited, once again, for the opinion of the “Trentist” (the openly reformist – translator’s note) elements of the CNT’s leadership, even in the case of defeat, persecution and illegality.

The only group that tried to take a vanguard role was the Friends of Durruti, which without adopting totally Marxist slogans, had and has the indisputable merit of having proclaimed that they were struggling - and calling on others to struggle - against the government of the Generalitat.

The immediate results of this workers' insurrection represent a defeat for the working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie19.

Nevertheless, if the leadership of our party had carried out a more effective and practical activity, this could have led to at least a partial workers' victory. In the worst case, it could have organised a Central Defence Committee, based on representatives from the barricades. For this it would have been enough to first have held an assembly of delegates from the POUM and some of CNT-FAI barricades, in order to elect a provisional Central Committee. This Central Committee, through a short manifesto could have called a second meeting inviting delegations from the groups not represented at the first assembly, and so establish a central defence organ. In a situation where it was thought there was a need to call a retreat, it would have been possible to conserve this Central Defence Committee as an embryonic organ of dual power, that is to say, as a provisional committee of the Revolutionary Workers' Front, which through its democratisation by means of the creation of Defence Committees in the work place and the barracks, could have continued the struggle with better advantage than now against the bourgeois governments20.

But we cannot exclude an infinitely more favourable situation. Once a Central Defence Committee had been constituted, in the manner indicated, it could have perhaps taken political power. The forces of the bourgeoisie - demoralised and surrounded in the centre of Barcelona - could have been defeated through a rapid and organised offensive.

Naturally, this proletarian power in Barcelona, would have repercussions throughout Catalonia and many places in Spain. All the forces of national and international capital would have been used to defeat it. Its destruction would have been inevitable, however, if the following measures to strengthen it were not carried out: a) the unhesitating determination of the POUM to act as a revolutionary Marxist vanguard, capable of orientating and leading the new power in collaboration with the other active sectors of the insurrection; b) the organisation of the new power on the basis of worker's, peasants' and soldiers' councils, or at a minimum, based on the democratically and properly centralised Defence Committees; c) the extension of the revolution throughout Spain, by means of a rapid offensive in Aragón; d) the solidarity of workers in other countries. Without these measures the Catalonian working class would not be able to maintain themselves in power for long.

In order to finish this part, we want to say that the hypothesis put forward here are a contribution to the general discussion that May Days are going to cause in the revolutionary milieu for a long time to come.

Conclusions

1. The working class is still in a defensive situation but is now in worse conditions than before the May insurrection. It could have begun its offensive in May, if it had not been for the partial defeat caused by the betrayal and capitulation, though this is not [yet] a definitive defeat for the present revolution. The workers now have more arms than before May, and if they can avoid being pulled into a premature struggle caused by provocation, they could once again be in a condition, within a few months, to could take the offensive.

2. The class didn't know how to take power in July 1936, in May 1937 it undertook a second insurrection. The defeat suffered now, has made a new armed struggle inevitable and we have to prepare for this. As long as the bourgeois state has not been overthrown, against which we have to direct our revolutionary struggle, the armed proletarian insurrection remains something for the future.

3. The May movement demonstrated the real role of the Anarcho-syndicalist leaders. Like all the other reformists, in all epochs, they are - consciously or unconsciously - tools within the workers’ ranks of the enemy class. The revolution in our country can only triumph through a simultaneous struggle against the bourgeoisie and the reformist leaders of all colours, including the CNT-FAI.

4. We have seen that a real vanguard Marxist party doesn't exist in our revolution and that this indispensable instrument for the definitive victory still remains to be forged. The party of the revolution cannot have a vacillating and continually waiting leadership; it has to have a firmly convinced leadership which will go to the head of the working class, orientating it, impulsing it, conquering with it21. It cannot base itself only on accomplished facts, but has to have a revolutionary political line that will act as the basis for its activity and stop opportunist and capitulatory tendencies22. It cannot base its activity on empiricism and improvisation, but has to use to its advantage modern principles of organisation and technique. It cannot allow the slightest shallowness at the top, because this will spread painfully throughout the base, leading to indiscipline, a lack of abnegation and a loss of faith amongst the least strong, in the triumph of the proletarian revolution.

5. Once more the inevitable necessity of the Revolutionary Workers' Front has been demonstrated; this can only be formed on the basis of a profound struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state, and against Fascism on the fronts. If the leaderships of the workers' revolutionary organisations don't accept these bases23 - which would certainly clash with their actions since July - it will be necessary to push for its formation through pressure from below.

6. None of the lessons that have been learnt will be of any use, if the proletariat and above all the marxist revolutionary party, do not enter into an intense practical work of agitation and organisation. It is the same for the struggle against the threats and restrictions of clandestinity, this requires an untiring activity, if we don’t want to be hopelessly defeated. The idea that the party must not be plunged into clandestinity, this can only be understood as the expression of the intention once again to adapt and renounce the revolutionary struggle in these moments24, an intention which may prove decisive.

J. Rebull

Whether for or against "globalisation", whether reassuring or alarming, all the commentaries on the international situation and its perspectives are unanimous on one point: democracy is the only system which will allow society to progress and prosper, and capitalism is the final form of humanity's social, political, and economic organisation. "2000 was not really the first year of the 21st century. In substantive terms, the 21st century began in 1991 with the fall of Soviet communism, the collapse of the bipolar order and the rise of global capitalism as the uncontested ideology of our age" ("Ideas: No, Economics Isn't King", F. Zakaria, Newsweek Jan. 2001).

But what about the spread of local wars and massacres? What about the undeniable spread of poverty throughout the world? Why the rise in unemployment and the degradation of the proletariat's living conditions? How are we to understand the famines, the reappearance of epidemics, the growing corruption and insecurity? Why the so-called "natural disasters", and what about the threat hanging over the planet's environment? Where do all these catastrophes come from, if not from the survival of capitalism, of those social and production relations which care not a jot for human needs, and have only one aim: the pursuit of profit: "not just the pursuit of tangible profit, but of ever-growing profit" (Rosa Luxemburg, "Critique of the critiques: what the epigones have done to marxist theory", published with L'accumulation du capital, Maspéro).

There are a whole series of attempts to explain this situation

"Globalisation" and the fairytale of "democracy" to hide capitalism's chaos

From liberal capitalism's supporters, the usual answer is that all this is nothing but the exaggerations of a few Cassandras, refusing to recognise the benefits of the present system. The disastrous consequences of capitalism's survival are the normal price the normal price to pay in this social system, the inevitable result of a law of nature which determines the elimination of the weak, and salvation only for the strong.

For the left wing of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus - the social-democrats, the one-time Stalinists, the ecologists - all these scourges of the modern world at the dawn of the 21st century are real enough, but seen above all as excesses or imperfections, the consequences of errors committed by rulers too eager for gain, too unconcerned for the general welfare of all. They are the result of "uncontrolled" capitalism. What is needed, then, is control: well thought out regulations, organised by the appropriate governments, states, local, national, or international bodies (by the famous NGOs - non-governmental organisations - for example). This would be enough to eradicate the system's devastating effects, to make it a real organisation of "citizens", a haven of peace and prosperity for all. This is the conception of the "anti-globalisation" movement, where we also find leftist currents who tone down their traditional revolutionary phrase-mongering to make a radical contribution to the concert in defence of democracy. It is the case with all kinds of Trotskyists, ex-Maoists, anarchists or libertarians: all the more or: all the more or less defrocked currents of the socialist, communist, and libertarian leftism of the 1970s and 80s. Irrespective of their differences, everybody today, from the extreme right to the extreme left, defends democracy.

Those who once contested the parliamentary circus have revealed their true nature as ardent defenders of the bourgeois democracy they used to decry. Indeed, many are now at the helm of state, in positions of responsibility in honourable institutions, organisms, and enterprises, thoroughly integrated into the system. Those who have kept up a more or less radical opposition to the governments and institutions[i], denounce the system's errors and excesses, but fundamentally they never pose the question of its real nature.

One of the best examples of this ideology is regularly offered us by the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. In its January 2001 issue, we are told that "The new century is beginning in Porto Alegre [the town in Brazil where the 1st World Social Forum is being held at the end of January, in a sort of answer to the Davos meeting]. All those who, in one way or another, contest or criticise neo-liberal globalisation will meet there (...) Not to prhere (...) Not to protest, as at Seattle, Washington, Prague or elsewhere, against the injustice, inequality, and disasters that the excesses of neo-liberalism are causing around the world. But to try, this time in a positive and constructive spirit, to propose a theoretical and practical framework which would make it possible to envisage a new kind of globalisation, and to declare that another world, with more solidarity and less inhumanity, is possible[ii].

In the same issue, we find an article by Toni Negri, the leading light of Potere Operaio[iii], who develops the idea that today there is no longer any imperialism, but rather a capitalist "Empire"!? The words seem faithful to the "class struggle" and "the battle of the exploited against the power of capital". But this is only in appearance. Above all, the article claims to invent a sort of new perspective for the class struggle. This leads it straight onto the tired old theme of the necessary defence of democracy, instead of "revolution"; the identification of citizens instead of the class entity of the proletariathe proletariat. "These struggles demand, apart from a guaranteed wage, a new expression of democracy in the control of the political conditions of the reproduction of life (...) most of these ideas were born during the Parisian demonstrations of the winter of 1995, the 'Paris Commune in the snow' [sic!!] which exalted (...) the subversive self-recognition of the citizens of the great towns".

Whatever the subjective intentions of these protagonists of the contestation of the capitalist system, these defenders of the democratic perspective, all this serves objectively, first and foremost, to maintain illusions in the possibility of reforming this system, or of transforming it gradually.

What the working class needs to understand, against these old reformist ideas dressed up in more fashionable guise, is that imperialism, this "highest stage of capitalism" as Lenin said, still reigns supreme. That it affects "every state, from the greatest to the smallest", as Rosa Luxemburg said. That it underlies the proliferation of local wars and massacres all over the world. Faced with a multitude of questions as to the insanity and absurdity of the world today, with the absence of any perspective which colours the whole society, faced with the individaced with the individualist attitude of "look after number one", the decomposition of the social fabric, the disintegration of collective solidarity, the working class needs to understand that capitalism's perspective is not a world of citizens living in peace, abundance, and prosperity under a good democracy. It needs to understand that the present society is and will remain a class society, a system of exploitation, whose motive force is profit and whose functioning obeys the dictates of capital accumulation. That democracy is bourgeois democracy, the most developed form of the dictatorship of the capitalist class.

What has changed since 1991 is not that capitalism has triumphed and imposed itself as the only viable system possible. What has changed is that the capitalist and imperialist regime in the Soviet bloc has collapsed under the blows of the economic crisis, and faced with the military pressure of its enemy, the Western bloc. What has changed is the imperialist configuration which has dominated the planet since World War II. It was not communism that collapsed in the East, or even a system in transition towards communism. Real communism, which has never yet existed, remains on the historical agenda. It can only be created by the revolutionary overhe revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule by the international working class. This is the only alternative to what capitalism's survival promises us: a plunge into indescribable chaos, which could eventually lead to humanity's definitive destruction.

The "new economy" takes a dive, the crisis continues

The Year 2000 celebrations were held under the auspices of "new economy" euphoria. The year 2001 starts with a serious concern for world capitalism's economic health. The new and prodigious profits we were promised never turned up. On the contrary, after a year of trip-ups and disillusionment, the champions of "e-business" and the "net-economy" have produced nothing but bankruptcies and unemployment, in a context of widespread gloom. A few examples: "As the new economy has cooled, there has been a steady drumbeat of layoff announcements. More than 36,000 dotcom employees were cut in the second half of last year, including some 10,000 last month" (Time, January 10, 2001, "This Time It's Different").

We have already analysed the situation of the economic crisis several times in these columns[iv]. We will not return in detail to theurn in detail to these analyses, whose conclusions are once again being confirmed today. Last December, two major reviews of the international press were headlined "Chaos"[v] and "A hard landing?"[vi]. Whatever its reassuring, grandiloquent talk, the bourgeoisie needs to the truth about the profit it can expect from investment. And there is no getting away from the fact that the "new economy" is nothing but an avatar of the "old economy", in other words a product not of growth, but of the capitalist economy's crisis. The development of telecommunications via the Internet is not the "revolution" we have been promised. The widespread use of the Internet, both for commerce and financial transactions, as well as inside companies and administrations, changes nothing in the laws of capital accumulation, which demand profitability, net profit, and market competitiveness.

As with any other technical innovation, the competitive advantage gained from the use of the Internet disappears very quickly as soon as its use becomes generalised. Moreover, in the domain of electronic transactions ronic transactions and telecommunications, for the technique to work it is necessary for every company to be connected, so that the innovation of the Internet itself puts an end to the advantage that it is supposed to confer!

At first, the great Internet "technology revolution" was supposed to allow a colossal development of the "B2C" (ie "Business to Consumer" - shopping on the Internet) model. In fact, this is nothing but looking up electronic catalogues and placing orders over the Internet rather than by post. Some revolution! B2C was soon abandoned in favour of "B2B" ("Business to Business" - electronic transactions between companies). The first "model" counted on the profits to be made from catalogue shopping by e-mail, whose profitability is limited because it is essentially directed towards household consumption. The second was supposed to put companies directly in touch with each other, and the gains were supposed to come from two "outlets". On the one hand, companies could make profits - or rather reduce their costs - by eliminating intermediaries from their relationships. Already, this is not a real outlet but merely a reduction in costs! On the other hand, this was supposed to open a fabulous "market", made up of the need to provide all the neco provide all the necessary services over the Internet (directories, lists, catalogues, computer software, payment processing, etc); which in fact meant that... the intermediaries who had just been kicked out the door came straight back in through the window. Thank you Internet! There again, there is no getting away from the facts that the profits simply didn't turn up. These economic "models" were quickly abandoned: 98% of the last three years' start-ups, these companies of the new economy supposed to exemplify the glorious future of capitalist development, have gone bust. In those that have survived, there is disenchantment among the workers, who were once so euphoric at their (virtual!) enrichment by generous stock options that they worked round the clock. Significantly, the trade unions, which until lately ignored this sector of the work force, are now arriving in force. Not that they have suddenly become defenders of the working class[vii]. Rather it is because it would be dangerous to allow any reflection to develop amongst workers so abruptly disenchanted.

This ideology of the "net-economy" is a clear illustration of the dead end in which the bourgeois economy finds itself, of the historic decline in capioric decline in capitalist relations of production. According to this ideology, profit was henceforth supposed to be driven by the development of trade, and no longer directly by the development of production. In a sense, the merchant had become more important than the producer. But this ideology is nothing but an aspiration to return to the mercantile capitalism which existed at the end... of the Middle Ages. At that time, capitalism was beginning to develop thanks to the blossoming of commerce, which broke down the barriers of feudal relations of production that restricted the productive forces within the straitjacket of serfdom. Today, it is more than a century since capitalism completely conquered the world market, and world production is gorged with a generalised overproduction unable to find adequate outlets. Capitalism's salvation will not come from a new blossoming of trade, which is completely impossible in today's historic conditions.

In this article, we have only considered the "net-economy", because its collapse during 2000 was the aspect of the capitalist crisis to receive the greatest media attention. But as the article in Time goes on to say "the firings went well beyond dotcomland. There were more than 480,000 layoffs through November. General Motors is laying off 15,000 workers with the corkers with the closing of Oldsmobile. Whirlpool is trimming 6,300 workers; Aetna is letting go 5,000". Indeed, 2001 has begun with a considerable acceleration in the crisis. In the USA, Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, has had to adopt emergency measures to try to banish the spectre of recession. The "new economy" is long gone, and the crisis of the "old economy" continues its inexorable advance. Gigantic debts at every level, ever-increasing attacks on working class living conditions internationally, inability to integrate the growing masses of unemployed into capitalist relations of production, etc: these are the fundamental consequences of the capitalist economy. States, central banks, stock exchanges, the IMF, all the financial and banking institutions and all the "actors" of world politics in general are try to regulate the chaotic functioning of this casino economy[viii], but facts are stubborn and capitalism's laws always end up imposing their rule.

Just as in the economic domain, where differences of language only serve to hide capitalism's historic decline and the depth of the crisis, in the imperialist domain, so all the talk about peace only hides a growing chaos ans a growing chaos and antagonisms proliferating at every level. The present situation in the Middle East is a clear illustration.

Peace at a dead end in the Middle East

By the time this International Review is published, the plan that Clinton has been trying to push through at any cost will have remained a dead letter, as forecast.

The protagonists of the “peace process” do not themselves know how to deal with the situation. Each is trying to defend his positions without any of them being capable of proposing a stable and viable way out of the endemic warfare dragging on in the region. The Israeli state is determined to give up as little as possible of its prerogatives, while the Palestinian Authority under Arafat cannot accept anything that would look as if it were abandoning its ambitions.

Israel is defending a position of strength gained since its foundation in 1947, through several wars against its Arab neighbours (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt), and with the unfailing support of the United States. Thanks to its role as bastion of the Western imperialist bloc's resistance to the 1950s offensive by the Russian imperialist bloc, via the Arab states that had declared allegiance to the USSR, Israel has won a position as regional policeman which it is not ready to give up in a hurry.

But since the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc ten years ago, the situation has changed. The United States has modified the orientation of its policy towards the Middle East. The 1991 Gulf War aimed to impose the recognition of the USA's world super-power status, to discourage its allies in the Western bloc - Britain, France, but above all Germany - from leaving the orbit of their overbearing godfather. The discipline of the bloc was no longer so easily tolerated once the threat of the opposing bloc had disappeared. But the Gulf War's second objective was to impose a total US control on the Middle East.

When the world was divided into two great imperialist blocs, the US could tolerate its allies occupying influential positions on the imperialist scene in certain regions of the world. It could even delegate to some of them a foreign policy which, though it sometimes opposed American interests, was always obliged to remain within the orbit of the Western bloc. In the Middle East, Britain could thus have a preponderant influence in Kuwait and certain Gulf Emirates, France in Lebanon and Syria, Germany and France in Iraq, etc. In 1991, the Gulf War gave the signal that the US intended to take complete control of the enforcement of the pax Americana. The Madrid conference in 1991, then the Oslo ne991, then the Oslo negotiations at the beginning of 1993 were to lead to the signature of the Israeli-Palestinian declaration of principles in Washington in September 1993, under the sole authority of the US, without any help from its old allies. In Cairo in May 1994, Arafat and Rabin signed the agreement on the autonomy of Gaza and Jericho, and the Israeli army began its withdrawal, to allow Yasser Arafat's triumphant arrival in Gaza in July 1994.

But this turn of events caused a significant fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie to break with US policy, for the first time in the country's short history. In November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish “extremist”. The elections that followed brought the Likud party led by Benjamin Netanyahu to power, and the new government began to be a serious hindrance to the plans of American diplomacy. The US took things in hand with the return to power of the Labour Party, with Ehud Barak as Prime Minister, and this led to the Sharm-el-Sheikh agreement between Arafat and Barak in September 1999. Nonetheless, the July 2000 Camp David summit, which was supposed to crown the USA's ability to impose a peace settlement on the Middle East, fell apart and ended without agreement. During this episode, French policy was an open attempt to sabotage the policy of its American ex-ally - whican ex-ally - which the latter moreover openly denounced as such. In Israel itself, resistance to the peace process returned to the fore in September 2000, with the provocative visit to the esplanade of the el-Aqsa mosque by Ariel Sharon, a long-standing hawk of the Likud party; this was to be the signal for new and violent confrontations, which spread rapidly through the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In October, a new summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh was supposed to put an end to the violence, create a commission of enquiry, and restart the negotiations. It had no effect on the ground, where the Intifada and the repression continued.

The situation today is thus not the same as it was during the Six Day war of 1967, or the Yom Kippur war of 1973, when the Israeli army directly confronted the armies of the Arab states, within which were included units of the various Palestinian liberation movements. Nor is it the same as during the 1982 war, when Israel invaded the south Lebanon and encouraged the massacres (more than 20,000 dead in a few days) perpetrated by its allies in the Christian militias. Then, the situation was still dominated by the fundamental division between the two great imperialist blocs, whatever the secondary divisions that might exist within each one. And even if Yasser Arafat, ever since his first appearance at the tst appearance at the tribune of the United Nations in 1976, had been trying to attract American diplomatic support, in US eyes he remained forever suspect of conniving with the USSR.

Today, there is division everywhere. The Israeli bourgeoisie is no longer unswervingly loyal to the US. During the 1991 Gulf War, a significant fraction, especially in the army, protested at the Americans' ban on Israeli counter-attacks against Iraqi missiles. For the Israeli army, the most operationally effective in the region, the humiliation of being forced to remain passive and rely on the US High Command for its defence, was a bitter pill to swallow. The “peace process”, which virtually put Israel and the Palestinians on an equal footing, forced the Israeli army to withdraw from the south Lebanon, and envisaged the abandonment of the Golan Heights, was not at all to the taste of the most “radical” fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie. Nor was this “peace process” easy for Barak's Labour Party to accept. The Labour Party is closer than Likud to the United States, and above all has a more realistic long-term view of the Middle East situation; it is nonetheless the war party, the party which has led the army and conducted the main military campaigns. It is even the Labour Party which has presided over the greatest extener the greatest extension of Jewish colonies in the Occupied Territories! Contrary to what is commonly supposed, the Labour Party is not more in favour of “peace” than the Likud right. There may be differences of opinion, but there is no fundamental disagreement between the two fractions of the Israeli bourgeoisie. National unity has always been maintained in both war and “peace” (it was the right that signed the peace agreements with Egypt at the end of the 1970s).

Israel is not the only country tempted to play its own game, and free itself from American tutelage. Syria was able to lay hands on Lebanon in exchange for its “neutrality” during the Gulf War in 1991. Nonetheless, it is not prepared to accept Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, conquered in 1967. Here too there is cause for friction. Within the Palestinian bourgeoisie itself, Arafat's Fatah and the more radical organisations are far from being in agreement amongst themselves. Like the rest of the world, the whole region is prey to a rise in unbridled self-interest. The wholly dominant influence of American diplomacy is in fact thoroughly superficial, since it is trying to keep a lid down on a whole series of powder kegs just waiting to explode, in a region whose protagonists are all heavily armed.

As for the other great As for the other great imperialist powers, they cannot openly sabotage the US initiatives if they are not to be completely excluded from the game - as is the case currently with France's diplomacy. Officially, they are all toeing the line in support of the “peace process”. However, this does not exclude the possibility of them acting underhand to sabotage the Clinton plan, or any other American plan. Arafat himself sometimes calls for the European Union's involvement in the negotiations, since he would like to avoid a complete dependence on the US for his political survival. That being said, it is not with the EU that he is discussing, but with the US administration.

In today's world where each is “looking after number one”, only two of the great powers are capable of a long-term vision: the United States, which is doing its utmost to maintain its status as the planet's only military super-power; and Germany, which is pursuing in the background a discreet imperialist policy aimed at increasing its influence, completely straitjacketed ever since the end of World War II. The less powerful states are less capable of long-term vision. Each tries to defend its national interests, to defend itself when it is attacked, in particular by undermining its adversaries and sowing disorder in their camp. None today are capable of aoday are capable of a constructive, long-term policy. The Middle East situation is not likely to stabilise. Even the kind of “armed peace” that Eastern Europe experienced during the Cold War is no longer possible today.

As for the possibility of creating a Palestinian state, the fantastic absurdity of its proposed frontiers almost makes the South African Bantustans look like a rational project! There are territories under exclusive Palestinian control - the Gaza Strip, and a few big blots on the map of the West Bank; then there territories under joint control - a few more blots on the West Bank - where Israel is responsible for security. And the whole thing is situated within the environment of the West Bank Territories under exclusive Israeli control, with special roads to protect the Jewish settlements... How could anybody believe that such an aberration contains an ounce of progress, an iota of satisfaction of the needs of the population, anything whatever to do with any kind of “right of peoples to self-determination”?

The whole history of capitalism's decadence has shown that the national states which failed to reach maturity during capitalism's ascendant phase have been unable to constitute a solid and viable political and economic framework in the long term; the disintegration of the USSR andgration of the USSR and Yugoslavia is a demonstration. In Africa, the states inherited from the period of decolonisation are in tatters. War rages in Indonesia (Aceh...). Terrorism is rife in southern India and Ceylon is riven by civil war. There is extreme tension on the frontier between India and Pakistan, between Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. In South America, Columbia suffers from permanent destabilisation. War is endemic between Peru and Ecuador. Frontiers everywhere are in dispute, since they have never really been recognised and accepted since the 19th century.

In this context, not only will “the Palestinian state never be anything but a bourgeois state in the service of the exploiting class, oppressing the same masses with its cops and prisons”[ix], it will never be anything but an aberration, a rump state, the symbol not of a nation but of the decomposition caused by capitalism's survival in the present historic period. Sharing out sovereignty over an indescribable entanglement of zones, towns, villages, roads attributed to one or the other is not a “peace process”, but a minefield for today and tomorrow, where any incident can at any moment provoke a new conflict. It is the irratiot is the irrationality of the world today pushed to the extreme.

The 21st century is beginning with a new acceleration of the dramatic consequences for humanity of the capitalist system's continued survival. Neither the promised prosperity of the “new economy”, nor the promised peace in the Middle East have put in an appearance. Nor could they, for capitalism is a decadent system, a sick body politic whose decomposition can only bring chaos, poverty, and barbarism in its wake.

MG

Eighty years ago in March 1921, four years after the successful seizure of power by the working class in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik Party forcibly suppressed an insurrection at the Kronstadt garri­son of the Baltic Fleet on the small island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland 30 kilometres from Petrograd.

The Bolshevik Party had had several years’ experience in fighting a bloody civil war against the counter revolu­tionary armies of the Russian and foreign bourgeoisies. But the revolt of the Kronstadt garrison was new and different: it was a revolt from within by the working class support­ers of the soviet regime, who had been in the vanguard of the October Revolution, and were now raising class de­mands to correct various intolerable deformations and abuses of the new power.

The violent crushing of this struggle has ever since provided a reference point for understanding the meaning of the revolutionary project. Never more so than today when the bourgeoisie is doing all it can to prove to the working class that there is an unbreakable thread linking Marx and Lenin to Stalin and the Gulag.

Our intention is not to go over all the historical de­tails. Previous articles in the International Review have already encompassed the event in detail (International Review n°3 “The lessons of Kronstadt” and International Review n°100 “1921: The proletariat and the transitional state”).

By contrast, we will take the opportunity of this anniver­sary to concentrate polemically on two kinds of argument about the Kronstadt revolt:firstly the anarchist use of the events to prove the au­thoritarian counter-revolutionary nature of Marxism and the parties that act in its name; secondly the idea, that still exists in the proletarian camp today, that the crushing of the rebellion was a “tragic necessity” to defend the gains of October.

The anarchist view

According to the anarchist historian Voline:

"Lenin understood nothing - or rather, did not want to understand anything - about the Kronstadt movement. The essential thing for him and his party was to maintain themselves in power at all costs. (...)

As Marxists, authoritarians and statists, the Bolsheviks could not permit any freedom or independent action of the masses. They had no confidence in the free masses. They were convinced that the fall of their dictator­ship would mean the destruction of all the work that had been done, and the endangering of the Revolution, which they confused with themselves. (...)

Kronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the people to liberate itself from all yokes and achieve the Social Revolution, an attempt made directly, reso­lutely, and boldly by the working masses themselves with­out political shepherds, without leaders or tutors. It was the first step towards the third and social revolution.

Kronstadt fell. But it had accomplished a task and that was the important thing. In the complex and shadowy labyrinth which opens out to the masses in revolt, Kronstadt is a bright beacon that lights up the right road. It matters little that in the circumstances in which they found themselves the rebels still spoke of power (the power of the Soviets) instead of he Soviets) instead of getting rid of the word and the idea altogether and speaking instead of co-ordination, organisa­tion, administration. It was a last tribute paid to the past. Once full freedom of discussion, organisation and action have been completely won by the working masses them­selves, once the true road of in independent popular activ­ity is found the rest will come automatically and in­evitably” (p534-538 The Unknown Revolution, Black Rose Books, 1975).

For the anarchists then, whose views Voline expresses succinctly, the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt was the natural, logical consequence of the Marxist conceptions of the Bolsheviks. The substitutionism of the Party, its iden­tification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dic­tatorship of the party and the creation of a transitional state was the expression of a overriding lust for power, authority, over the masses in whom they had no confidence. Bolshevism, according to Voline, meant the replacement of one form of oppression by another.

But for him, Kronstadt was not merely a revolt but a model for the future. If the Kronstadt soviet had restricted itself to economic and social tasks (co-ordination, organi­sation, administration) and forgot about political tasks (its talk of the powets talk of the power of the soviets) it would have com­pleted a picture of what the true social revolution should be: a society without leaders, without parties, without a state, without power of any kind, a society of immediate and complete freedom.

Unfortunately, for the anarchists, the first of the lessons coincides very closely with the prevailing ideol­ogy of the world bourgeoisie, that a communist revolution can only lead to a new form of tyranny.

This coincidence of views between the anarchists and the bourgeoisie isn't accidental. Both measure history ac­cording to the abstractions of equality, solidarity and fra­ternity against hierarchy, tyranny and dictatorship. The bourgeoisie used these moral principles cynically and hypocritically against the October Revolution to justify the brutality of the counter-revolutionary forces between 1918 and 1920 when it led armed interventions against Russia and blockaded it eco­nomically. The anarchists' practical alternative to Bolshevism on the other hand is a naive utopia where the historical difficulties that the proletarian revolution had to confront have mysteriously melted away.

But as the events of Spain in 1936 confirm, anarchist naivety, after rejecting the Marxist historical conception of revolution, is obliged to capitulate before the bour­geoisie's practical counter-revolution.

If the Bolsheviks were fundamentally motivated by a mania for complete power, as Voline claims, anarchism by contrast is incapable of an­swering a whole series questions that emerge from the his­torical reality. If the Bolsheviks’ ultimate objective was power why - unlike the majority of Social Democracy - did it condemn itself to a period of ostracism between 1914 and 1917 by denouncing the imperialist war and demanding that it be turned into a civil war? Why did it refuse to join, unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the provisional government with the Russian liberal bour­geoisie after the February 1917 revolution, and call for all power to the soviets instead?

Why did it trust in the capacities of the Russian work­ing class to begin a world proletarian revolution in October, unlike most of the rest of international Social Democracy who deemed it too backward and small in numbers to over­throw the bourgeoisie ?

Why did it trust in, win, and retain the support of, the working class to make all the sacrifices necessary to sur­vive the allied blockade and resist arms in hand the counter-revolutionary armies?

Why did it inspire the world working class to follow the Russian lead in revolutionary attempts throughout Europe and the rest of the world? How could the Bolshevik Party take the initiative in the creation of a new Communist International on a world scale?

Finally why did the process of the integration of the party into the state machine, and its usurpation of the mass organs of workers’ power - the soviets and the factory com­mittees - and finally the use of force against the class struggle, not occur overnight, but only after a protracted period?

The theory of the Bolsheviks’ inherent nastiness does not explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in general nor the Kronstadt episode in particular.

By 1921 the revolution in Russia, and the Bolshevik Party which led it, was confronted by a very difficult situation. The spread of the revolution to Germany and other countries looked much less likely than it had in 1919. The world economic situation had stabilised relatively and the pivotal Spartacist uprising in Germany had failed. Inside Russia, despite victory in the civil war, the situation was dramatic, due to the repeated assaults by counter-revolutionary armies, and the economic strangulation consciously organised by the international bourgeoisie. The in­dustrial infrastructure was in ruins and the working class was decimated by its sacrifices on the battlefields first of the world and then of the civil war, or because it had been forced to leave the cities in droves for the countryside, in order to survive. The Bolsheviks were also faced with the growing un­popularity of the regime not only amongst the peasantry who launched a series of insurrections in the provinces, but above all within the working class that unleashed a strike wave in Petrograd in mid-February 1921. And then came Kronstadt.

How could Russia remain a bastion of the world revolution, survive the working class disaffection and economic disin­tegration, while waiting for the delayed help from working class revolution in other countries, and especially in Europe? The anarchists have no explanation for the degeneration of the revolution, except to close their eyes to the problem of the political supremacy of the proletariat, the centralisa­tion of its power, the international extension of the revolu­tion, and of the transitional period to a communist society. This does not alter the fact that the Bolsheviks made a catastrophic error by giving a military answer to the Kronstadt revolt, and treating working class resistance to them as an act of treachery and counter-revo­lution. But the Bolshevik Party did not have the benefit of hindsight as revolutionaries need to have today. It could only make use of the acquisitions of the workers' movement of the time: a movement that had never before had to confront the immensely diffi­cult task of holding onto power in a hostile capitalist world. The relationship of the soviets to the party of the working class after the successful seizure of power was not understood, nor was the relationship of both these class or­gans to the transitional state that would inevitably succeed the smashing of the bourgeois state.

In taking the helm of the state, and gradually incorporating into it the workers’ councils and factory com­mittees, the Bolshevik Party was stumbling in the dark. And, accord­ing to prevailing opinion within the workers’ movement at the time, the main danger to the revolution came from outside the new state apparatus: from the international bourgeoisie and from the peasantry and the Russian bourgeoisie in exile. None of the tendencies in the communist movement at the time, not even the left wing, had an alternative perspective, although there were those, including inside the Bolshevik Party who warned against the bureaucratisation of the regime. But their prescriptions were limited and con­tained other dangers. The Workers' Opposition of Kollontai and Shliapnikov called for the trade unions to defend the workers against the excesses of the state, forgetting that the workers’ councils had transcended them as mass organs of the revolutionary proletariat.

There were some inside the Bolshevik Party who op­posed the crushing of the revolt: the Party members in Kronstadt who joined the movement and elements like Gavriil Miasnikov who would later form the Workers’ Group and opposed the military solution. But the existing left tendencies in the party, and in the Communist International, despite their critiques of the Bolshevik regime, nevertheless supported the use of violence. The Workers’ Opposition even volunteered for the assault force. The German Communist Workers Party, the KAPD, which opposed the dictatorship of the party, nevertheless agreed with the military action against the Kronstadt rebellion (this does not prevent some anarchists today, like the Anarchist Federation in Britain, from trying to claim the KAPD for their an­cestry!).

Finally the demands of the Kronstadt Soviet, contrary to Voline's opinion, did not provide a coherent alternative perspective either, since they are framed mainly within an immediate and local context and don't take up the wider im­plications of the proletarian bastion and the world situa­tion. In particular they don't give an answer to what the role of the vanguard party should be (1)

It was only later, much later, that revolutionaries, try­ing to draw all the lessons from the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary wave that it initiated, could point to the real lessons of this tragic episode.

"It may be that in certain circumstances the proletariat - and we will even concede that they may be the uncon­scious victims of manoeuvres by the enemy - enters into struggle against the proletarian state. What is to be done in such a situation? We must start from the principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the prole­tariat by violence and force. It would have been bet­ter to have lost Kronstadt than to have kept it from the ge­ographical point of view, since substantially this victory could only have one result: that of altering the very bases, the substance of the action carried out by the proletariat." (Octobre, 1938, published by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left).

The Communist Left had put its finger on the essential problem: the Bolshevik Party, in using the violence of the state against the working class was putting itself at the head of the counter-revolution. The victory at Kronstadt ac­celerated the tendency for the Bolshevik Party to become an instrument of the Russian state against the working class. From this insight, the communist left was able to draw another daring conclusion. The communist party, in order to remain a vanguard of the proletariat, must protect its au­tonomy from the post-revolutionary state that reflects an inevitable tendency to preserve the status quo and prevent the advance of the revolutionary process.

The Bordigist view

However, in today's communist left, this conclusion is far from universally held. In fact, some parts of it, especially the Bordigist current, have returned to the justifications of Lenin and Trotsky for the repression of Kronstadt, in complete contradiction to the position of the Italian fraction in 1938:

"It would be pointless to discuss the terrible circum­stances that obliged the Bolsheviks to crush Kronstadt with someone who refused on principle that a proletar­ian power in the process of birth or consolidation can fire on the workers. The examination of the terrible problem the proletarian state must confront reinforces the critique of a vision of the revolution through rose tinted glasses and the understanding that the crushing of this rebellion was, according to Trotsky, 'a tragic necessity', but a necessity and even a duty" (“Kronstadt: a tragic necessity”, Programme Communiste n°88, theoretical organ of the International Communist Party, May 1982).

Bypassing the tradition that they claim to belong to, the Bordigist current may defend the in­transigent internationalism of the Bolshevik Party, but it also defends, just as vehemently, its mistakes, and so is left unable to learn from all the reasons for the degenera­tion of the party and the revolution (2).

According to them the relationship of the party to the class and to the post-revolutionary state in the revolution­ary process doesn't pose a problem of principles but only of expediency, of how best in each situation the revolu­tionary vanguard carries out its function:

“This titanic struggle can only provoke within the proletariat itself terrible tensions. In effect, it is obvious that the party cannot make the revolution nor direct the dic­tatorship against nor even without the masses, the revolu­tionary will of the proletariat is not manifested by electoral consultations or opinion polls to find a 'numerical majori­ty' or, even more absurd, a unanimity. It expresses itself by a rise and ever more precise orientation of the strug­gles where the most determined fractions draw along the hesitant and undecided, and sweep aside its opponents if necessary. In the course of the vicissitudes of the civil war and the dictatorship, the positions and relationships of the different layers may change. And far from recognising by virtue of some 'soviet democracy' the same weight and the same importance to all the layers of workers, semi-workers or petit-bourgeoisie, explains Trotsky in Terrorism or Communism, their right even to participate in the soviets, that is the organs of the proletarian state, depends on their attitude in the struggle.

No 'constitutional rule' no 'democratic principle' can harmonise relations within the proletariat. No recipe can resolve the contradictions between the local needs and the demands of the international revolution, between the immediate needs and the demands of the historic struggle of the class, contradictions which find their expression in the opposition of various fractions of the proletariat. No for­malism can codify the relations between the party, the most advanced fraction of the class and organ of its revolu­tionary struggle, and the masses who are affected to differ­ent degrees by the pressure of local and immediate condi­tions. Even the best party, that which can 'observe the spirit of the mass and influence it' as Lenin said, must sometimes demand the impossible from the masses. More ex­actly, it only finds the ‘limit’ to what is possible by trying to go forward.” (ibid.).

In 1921 the Bolshevik Party chose the wrong path without any previous experience or parameters to guide them. Today, the Bordigists, absurdly, make a virtue out of Bolsheviks' mistakes and declare: “there are no principles”. The Bordigists conjure away the problem of the exercising of proletarian power by deriding formalistic and abstract methods for arriving at a common position of the whole class. While it is very true there can never be a perfect means for establishing a consensus in an extremely fluid situation the workers’ councils or soviets have been shown to be the most adequate means of reflecting and carrying out the evolving revolutionary will of the proletariat as a whole, even though the experience of Germany in 1918 and elsewhere shows that they can be vulnerable to recuperation by the bourgeoisie. Although the Bordigists are generous enough to admit that the party cannot make the revolution without the masses, the masses then have no means of expressing their revolutionary will as an entire class, except through the party and with the permission of the party. And the party can, if necessary, correct the proletariat with machine guns, as at Kronstadt. According to this logic the proletar­ian revolution has two contradictory slogans: before the revolution “All power to the soviets”; after the revolution: “All power to the party”.

The Bordigists, unlike Octobre, have forgotten that, contrary to the bourgeois revolution, the tasks of the pro­letarian revolution cannot be delegated to a minority, but must be carried out by the self-conscious majority. The emancipation of the workers is the task of the working class itself.

The Bordigists reject both bourgeois democracy and workers democracy as though they were the same fraud. But the soviets or workers' councils - the means by which the proletariat mobilises itself for the overthrow of capitalism - must be the organs of the prole­tarian dictatorship that reflect and regulate the tensions and differences within the proletariat and retains its armed power over the transitional state. The party, the indispens­able vanguard, however clear and in advance of the rest of the proletariat at a particular time, cannot substitute itself for this power

However, having demonstrated the right of the party - in practice, if not “in principle” - to shoot down workers, the Bordigists, as if shrinking from the horror of this con­clusion, then proceed to deny that the Kronstadt revolt had a proletarian character anyway. Following one of Lenin's definitions of the time, the Kronstadt was a ”petty-bourgeois counter-revolution” that opened the door to white guard reaction.

It was certainly true that all sorts of confused and even reactionary ideas were expressed by the rebels of Kronstadt, and some were reflected in its platform. It is also true that the organised forces of the counter-revolution were trying to use the rebellion for their own ends. But the workers of Kronstadt continued to consider themselves in continuity with the revolution of 1917 and as an integral part of the proletarian movement on a world scale:

“Let the workers of the entire world know that we, the defenders of the power of the soviets, protect the conquests of the social revolution. We will win or perish on the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just cause of the proletarian masses” (the Kronstadt Pravda , p82).

Whatever confusions were expressed by the Kronstadt rebels, it is absolutely undeniable that their demands also reflected the interests of the proletariat faced with terrible living conditions, the growing oppression of a state bu­reaucracy and the loss of its political power in the atro­phied soviets. The attempt at the time by the Bolsheviks to brand them as petty-bourgeois and potential agents of the counter revolution was of course a pretext to solve a situa­tion of terrible danger and complexity within the prole­tariat by force.

With the advantage of historical hindsight and the theoretical work of the communist left, we can see the basic error of their reasoning: the Bolsheviks crushed the Kronstadt revolt and nevertheless an anti-proletarian dicta­torship still massacred the communists - Stalinism, the ab­solute power of the capitalist bureaucracy. In fact, in crush­ing the efforts of the workers of Kronstadt to regenerate the soviets, in identifying themselves with the state, the Bolsheviks were paving the way for Stalinism without knowing it. They helped the acceleration of a counter-revo­lutionary process which was to have far more terrible and tragic consequences for the working class than the restoration of the Whites. In Russia the counter-revolution won, proclaiming itself communist. The idea that Stalinist Russia was the living embodiment of socialism, and in di­rect continuity with the October revolution sowed a terrible confusion and an incalculable demoralisation in the ranks of the working class all over the world. We are still living with the consequences of this distortion of reality as the bourgeoisie since 1989 continues to equate the death of Stalinism with the death of communism.

But the Bordigists, despite this experience, are still identifying with the tragic mistake of 1921. It is hardly a “tragic” necessity for them but a communist duty that will have to be repeated !

Like the anarchists, the Bordigists don't see any con­tradiction between the Bolshevik Party in 1917, that led but also deferred to and depended on, the armed will of the revolutionary proletariat organised in the soviets, and the Bolshevik Party of 1921, that had reduced the soviets to a shadow of their former power and turned the violence of the state against the working class. But while the anarchists help the bourgeoisie in their present campaigns by por­traying the Bolsheviks as machiavellian tyrants, the Bordigists celebrate this fraudulent image as the very acme of revolutionary intransigence.

But a Communist Left, worthy of the name, while iden­tifying with the Bolshevik heritage must be also able to criticise its mistakes. The crushing of the Kronstadt revolt was one of the most harmful and terrible of these.

Como 8.1.2001

1) See International Review n°3, p51, for the platform of the Kronstadt revolt.

2) The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party , another branch of the Communist Left has an am­biguous position on Kronstadt. An article published in Revolutionary Perspectives No 23 (1986) reaffirms the proletarian character of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Party that led it, and rejects the anarchist ideali­sations of the Kronstadt revolt, underlining that the revolt reflected profoundly unfavourable conditions for the prole­tarian revolution and that it contained many confused and reactionary elements. At the same time the article criticises the Bordigist idea that the assault on Kronstadt was a ne­cessity to preserve the dictatorship of the party. It affirms that one of the basic lessons of Kronstadt is that the dicta­torship of the proletariat must be exercised by the class it­self, through its workers' councils, and not by the party. It also shows that the errors of the Bolsheviks concerning the relation between the party and the class, in the overall context of the isolation of the proletarian bastion, acceler­ated the internal degeneration of the both the party and the soviet state. Nevertheless the article doesn't characterise the revolt as proletarian and doesn't answer the fundamental question: is it possible that a proletarian dictatorship uses violence against the discontent of the working class? They even say that as a result of the manipulation of the counter-revolu­tion - even if it opened up a chapter of slow agony in the workers movement - the repression of the revolt was more than justified.

The coming century will be decisive for human history. If capitalism continues to rule the planet, then before 2100 society will be plunged into such barbarism that it will make the 20th century look like a minor headache and either reduce human-kind to the stone-age, or destroy it altogether. If humanity does have a future, then it is wholly in the hands of the world proletariat, whose worldwide revolution alone can overthrow the domination of the capitalist mode of production whose historic crisis is responsible for today's barbarity. But to do so, the proletariat must find in the future the strength to carry out its task, which has been lacking up to now.

In the first part of this article, we tried to understand why the proletariat's past revolutionary endeavours failed, and above all its greatest, the revolution that began in Russia in 1917. We showed that the terrible defeat it suffered at the end of this attempt caused it to miss the appointment with history that followed: capitalism's great crisis in the 1930s, and World War II. In particular, we showed that at the end of the last war, "The proletariat had reached rock bottom. What it was told, what it thought, was its greatest victory - the triumph of democracy over fascism - was in fact its most utter historic defeat. Capitalist order was guaranteed by the workers' euphoric belief in their "victory", and their resulting belief in the "sacred virtues" of bourgeois democracy: the same democracy which had led them twice into imperialist butchery and crushed their revolution in 1920".

In Europe, the main battleground of both the war and the revolution, the Allied victory paralysed the class struggle for several years. The workers' bellies were empty, but their heads filled with the euphoria of "victory". Moreover, the state capitalist policies of every government in Europe provided a further means of mystification. These policies corresponded to the fundamental needs of European capital with its economy laid to waste by the war. Nationalisations, and a certain number of "social" measures (such as the state's taking charge of the health system), were all completely capitalist measures. They allowed the state better to plan and co-ordinate the reconstruction of a productive potential in ruins. At the same time, they allowed a more efficient management of labour power. For example, the capitalists had every interest in the good health of the workforce, especially when the workers were being asked to make an exceptional effort, in difficult conditions and with a shortage of labour power. But these capitalist measures were presented as "workers' victories", not only by the Stalinist parties whose programmes included the complete nationalisation of the economy, but also by the social-democrats, in particular the British Labour Party. This explains why throughout Europe, the left parties, including the Stalinists, were to be found in government after the war, either in coalitions with parties of the democratic Right (such as the Christian Democracy in Italy), or alone (in Britain, the Labour leader Attlee replaced Churchill as prime minister, despite the latter's immense popularity and his inestimable services to the British bourgeoisie).

Two years after the war, the promises of a better future, with which the socialist and Stalinist parties had persuaded the workers to accept the most terrible sacrifices, had been broken. The workers undertook a series of struggles. In the spring of 1947, a strike at Renault, the biggest factory in France, forced the Stalinist party (whose leader Maurice Thorez constantly called on the workers throughout industry to "work first, make demands afterwards") to leave the government. The party, through the CGT union which it controlled, then launched a series of strikes both to allow the workers to "let off steam" before they got out of hand, but also to put pressure on the other fractions of the bourgeoisie in order to force their way back into the government. But the other bourgeois parties turned a deaf ear. They had no doubts about the Stalinists' loyalty in defence of the national capital - but the Cold War had begun, and the bourgeoisie's ruling fractions throughout Europe had lined up behind the United States. Wherever the Stalinists took part in government, they either seized power completely if they were in the Russian zone, or were thrown out altogether in the Western zone.

From this time on, workers' conditions in the Western zone slowly began to improve. Needless to say, this had nothing to do with any bourgeois generosity. The billions of dollars of the Marshall Plan, which had just begun to arrive, were designed to tie the West European bourgeoisie firmly to the US bloc, and to undermine the influence of the Stalinist parties, which were henceforth at the head of the workers' struggles.

In Eastern Europe, the Stalinist parties under Moscow's orders refused the American manna, and the situation took longer to improve slightly. However, the workers' anger could not be expressed in the same way. At first, the workers were called to support the communist parties, which promised them the moon, all the more so because the communists not only took part in the governments set up after the "Liberation" (as in most of the Western countries), but also took the lead in these governments thanks to the support of the Red Army, and eliminated the "bourgeois parties". The workers were presented with the mystification of the "construction of socialism". This mystification had a certain success, as for example in Czechoslovakia, where the February 1948 "Prague coup" - in other words the Stalinists' seizure of government power - was carried out with the support of many workers.

Nonetheless, in the "people's democracies" the main instrument of control over the working class soon became brute force and repression. The workers' uprising of June 1953 in East Berlin and many other towns in the Soviet occupation zone was bloodily crushed by Russian tanks[1]. In Poland, the workers' anger, which first found expression in the great Poznan strike of June 1956, was defused by the return to power on 21st October of Gomulka (a Stalinist leader expelled from the party in 1949 for "Titoism", and imprisoned between 1951 and 1955). In Hungary, however, the workers' rising which began a few days later was savagely put down by the Russians from 4th November onwards, leaving 25,000 dead and 160,000 refugees[2].

The workers' risings in the "socialist countries" between 1953 and 1956 were clear proof that these countries had nothing "working class" about them. But every sector of the bourgeoisie spoke the same language to prevent the workers from drawing the real lessons from events.

In the Eastern bloc, the "communist" propaganda, and the Stalinist leaders' constant references to "marxism" and "proletarian internationalism" were the best means to turn the workers' anger away from a class perspective and increase their illusions in bourgeois democracy and nationalism. On 17th June 1953, an immense procession of East Berlin workers headed down the great avenue Unter den Linden towards the West. Their aim was to seek the solidarity of the West Berlin workers, but they were also under the illusion that the Western authorities would help workers in the East. These same authorities closed off their sector, and with their usual cynicism changed the name of Unter den Linden to the Avenue of 17th June. Similarly, while the Polish workers' demands in June 1956 obviously included many class economic demands, they were also strongly coloured with democratic, and above all nationalist and religious illusions. This is why Gomulka, who presented himself as a patriot who had stood up to the Russians, and who freed Cardinal Wyszynski (interned in a monastery since 1953) immediately after his return to power, was able to regain control of the situation by the end of 1956. The workers' insurrection in Hungary, despite organising in workers' councils, remained strongly marked by democratic and nationalist illusions. Indeed, the insurrection itself had been sparked off by the bloody repression of a students' demonstration demanding that Hungary adopt the "Polish way". The measures decided by Imre Nagy (an old Stalinist sacked from his post as party leader by the hard-liners in April 1955) were intended to exploit these illusions in order to regain control of the situation: he announced the formation of a coalition government and Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This last measure was unacceptable for the USSR, and it intervened with tanks.

The intervention of Russian troops gave nationalism a further impetus in the East European countries. At the same time, it was abundantly exploited by the "democratic" and pro-American fractions of the West European bourgeoisies, while their Stalinist parties used this very propaganda to portray the Hungarian workers' insurrection as a chauvinist, even a fascist, movement, in the pay of US imperialism.

Throughout the Cold War, even when it was tempered by the policy of "peaceful co-existence" after 1956, the division of the world into two opposing blocs was thus a primary mystification of the working class. As we saw in the first part of this article, during the 1930s the identification of the Stalinist USSR with communism provoked a profound demoralisation in some sectors of the working class, who wanted nothing to do with a "Soviet-style" society and turned back to the social-democrats. At the same time, most workers continued to hope for a proletarian revolution and followed the Stalinist parties in their claims to defend the "socialist fatherland" and the "anti-fascist struggle", thus making it possible for the latter to enrol them in World War II. During the 1950s, the same kind of policy continued to divide and disorientate the working class. A part of the class wanted to hear no more of communism (identified with the USSR), while the rest remained under the ideological domination of the Stalinist parties and trade unions. Thus, during the Korean War the confrontation between East and West was used to set different sectors of the class against each other, and to enrol millions of workers behind the Soviet camp in the name of the "anti-imperialist struggle". For example, on 28th May 1952, the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Peace Movement which it controlled organised a great demonstration in Paris against a visit by the American general Ridgway, commanding US forces in Korea. Ridgway was accused (wrongly as it turned out) of using bacterial weapons, and was greeted by a demonstration of tens of thousands of workers (mostly PCF militants) denouncing "Plague Ridgway" and demanding France's withdrawal from NATO. There were violent confrontations with the police, and the PCF's number two, Jacques Duclos, was arrested. The PCF's determination in confronting the police, and the arrest of its "historic" leader renewed the "revolutionary" image of a party which only five years earlier had occupied the palaces and ministerial positions of the bourgeois Republic. At the same time, the colonial wars provided a further opportunity to turn the workers away from their class terrain, once again in the name of the struggle against imperialism (not capitalism), against which the USSR was presented as the champion of "the peoples' rights and freedom".

This kind of campaign continued in many countries throughout the 1950s and 60s, especially with the USA's growing commitment to the war in Vietnam from 1961 onwards.

If there was one country where the world's division into two opposing blocs weighed especially heavily, and where the counter-revolution had been particularly crushing, it was Germany. For decades, the German proletariat had been the vanguard of the world working class. Workers all over the world knew that the fate of the revolution would be determined in Germany. And this was proved true between 1919 and 1923. The German proletariat's defeat determined the defeat of the world proletariat. And the terrible counter-revolution that followed, in the hideous guise of Nazism, was, with Stalinism, the clearest expression of the counter-revolution that battened on the working class in every country.

After World War II, Germany's division between the two great imperialist blocs made possible, on both sides of the iron curtain, a thorough destruction of consciousness within the working masses, leaving the German proletariat, no longer the vanguard but the rearguard of the European working class, in terms both of its combativeness and its consciousness.

However, what really paralysed the working class throughout this period, and maintained its ideological submission to capitalism, was the system's apparent prosperity as a result of the reconstruction of Europe's war-shattered economies.

Bourgeois economists and politicians call the period between 1945 and the serious world recession of 1975 the "glorious thirty years", since they ignore the difficulties that the world economy was already undergoing in 1967 and 1971.

We will not go into the causes here, either of the rapid economic growth during this period, or of its end; we have already dealt with both at length in the International Review[3]. What is important is that the open crisis which began to develop from 1967 onwards (with a slowdown in the world economy, recession in Germany, devaluation of sterling, rise in unemployment) was a new confirmation of marxism, which has always:

- declared that capitalism is unable to overcome definitively its economic contradictions, which in the final analysis are responsible for the convulsions of the 20th century (and in particular for the two World Wars);

- considered that capitalism is at its strongest politically and socially during its periods of prosperity[4];

- based the perspective of a proletarian revolution on the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production[5].

In this sense, the working class' ideological subjection to capitalism, and all the mystifications which kept the workers from any idea of putting capitalism into question, could only be overcome with the end of the post-war boom.

This is precisely what happened in 1968.

The end of the counter-revolution

In 1967, the bourgeoisie's ideologues were still singing the praises of the capitalist economy; some, who claimed to be revolutionaries and even marxists, talked of nothing but bourgeois society's ability to "integrate" the working class[6]; even the groups of the Communist Left which had emerged from the degenerating Third International could see no light at the end of the tunnel. Yet that year, a small review called Internacionalismo (later to become the ICC's publication in Venezuela) published an article entitled "1968, a new convulsion of capitalism is beginning", which ended thus:

"We are not prophets, and we do not claim to guess when and how future events will unfold. But we are certain and conscious that the process in which capitalism is engaged today cannot be stopped with reforms, devaluations, or any other kind of capitalist measures, and that this process is leading directly to the crisis. And we are equally sure that the inverse process of developing class combativeness, which can be seen all around us today, will the lead the working class to a direct and bloody struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".

The one great merit of our comrades who published this article, was to have remained faithful to the teachings of marxism which were to be strikingly verified a few months later. May 1968 in France saw the outbreak of the biggest strike in history, involving the largest ever number of workers (almost 10 million) stopping work at the same time.

An event of such size was the sign of a fundamental change in society: the terrible counter-revolution which had fastened on the working class at the end of the 1920s, and continued for two decades after World War II, had come to an end. And this was soon to be confirmed throughout the world by a series of struggles such as had not been seen for decades:

- the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969 saw massive struggles in all the main industrial centres, and an explicit questioning of trade union control;

- the uprising, during the same year, of the workers of Cordoba in Argentina;

- the massive strikes by the workers of the Baltic coast in Poland during the winter of 1970-71;

- a series of other struggles in the years that followed in virtually all the European countries, and especially in Britain (the world's oldest capitalist country), Germany (the most powerful country in Europe and the leading light of the workers' movement since the second half of the 19th century), and even Spain (still at the time in the grip of the ferocious Francoist dictatorship).

At the same time as this awakening of the workers' struggle, the idea of revolution returned in strength. It was discussed by many workers in struggle, particularly in France and Italy where the struggles had involved the greatest numbers. This proletarian reawakening was also expressed by a growing interest in revolutionary thought, for the writings of Marx and Engels, and of other marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, but also of the militants of the Communist Left like Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. This interest was concretised in the emergence of a whole series of little groups trying to renew the links with the Communist Left, and drawing their inspiration from its experience.

We will not deal here, either with the evolution of the workers' struggles since 1968, nor of the groups which claim the heritage of the Communist Left[7]. What we will try to do, is to show why the 1967 forecast by our comrades in Venezuela has still not come to fruition, three decades later, in "the direct and bloody struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".

Our organisation has highlighted the obstacles encountered by the proletariat throughout the last thirty years. What follows is thus essentially no more than a summary of what we have said on other occasions.

The first cause of the length of the road that leads today to the communist revolution is an objective one. The revolutionary wave, which began in 1917, and spread to many other countries, was a response to a sudden and terrible drop in working class living conditions: the world war. It took only three years for the proletariat, which had gone to war with a light heart and completely blinded by the bourgeoisie's lies, to open its eyes and raise its head against the barbarism confronting it in the trenches and the terrible exploitation on the home front.

The objective reason for the development of workers' struggles after 1968 was the aggravation of capitalism's economic situation, bringing workers' living conditions increasingly under attack. But contrary to the 1930s, when the bourgeoisie had completely lost control of the situation, the present open crisis did not develop over a period of a few years, but in a process covering several decades. The slow rhythm of the crisis' development was a result of the ruling class' ability to learn the lessons of its past experience, and systematically put into operation a whole series of measures which have allowed it to "manage" the descent into the abyss[8]. This does not alter the insoluble nature of the crisis, but it has allowed the ruling class to spread out over a whole period, both geographically and temporally, its attacks on the working class, and so to hide even from itself the fact that the crisis has no way out.

The second factor that explains the length of the road to proletarian revolution, is the ruling class' deployment of a whole series of political manoeuvres aimed at exhausting the struggle, and preventing the development of working class consciousness.

We can summarise the main features of the bourgeoisie's different strategies since 1968 as follows:

- faced with the first upsurge of workers' struggles, which took it by surprise, the bourgeoisie played the card of the "left alternative", calling on the workers to end their struggles in order to allow the left-wing parties to put in place a different economic policy which was supposed to put an end to the crisis;

- this policy paralysed the workers' combativeness for a while, until a new wave of struggles that began in 1978 (in 1979, for example, Britain went through the highest period of workers' struggle since the General Strike of 1926, with 29 million strike days lost); the bourgeoisie in the most advanced countries (particularly Germany, Britain, the USA, Italy) played the card of the left in opposition: the so-called workers' parties and the unions under their control adopted a more radical language aimed at sabotaging the workers' struggles from within;

- this policy largely explains the ebb in workers' struggles from 1981, but failed to prevent a renewal of large-scale combats that began in the autumn of 1983 (strikes in the public sector in Belgium, then in Holland, the British miners strike of 1984, the Danish general strike of 1985, massive strikes in Belgium in 1986, a series of strikes in Italy during 1987, notably in the education sector, etc).

The most striking characteristic of these movements, which expressed a profound development in working class consciousness, was the growing difficulty that the classic union apparatus had in controlling the struggle, which led to the more and more frequent use of organs that presented themselves as outside, or even against, the unions (such as the "coordinations" in France and Italy during 1986-88), but which in fact were nothing other than "rank-and-file" union structures.

Throughout this period, the bourgeoisie used a whole series of manoeuvres designed to contain workers' combativeness, and retard the development of their consciousness. But this anti-proletarian policy was given a powerful boost by the development of the decomposition of capitalist society. This was the result of the fact that although the proletariat's historic resurgence at the end of the 1960s had prevented the bourgeoisie from answering its systemic crisis in its own way - by world war, just as the crisis of 1929 had been the prelude to World War II - the working class could not prevent the continued development of the characteristics of capitalism's decadence without overthrowing the whole of capitalism itself.

"The world situation may be in a temporary stalemate, this does not mean that history has come to an end. For two decades, society has continued to suffer the accumulation of all the characteristics of decadence, exacerbated by a plunge into the economic crisis which the ruling class shows every day it is unable to overcome. The bourgeoisie's only project for society is to resist, on a day-to-day basis and with no hope of success, the irretrievable collapse of the capitalist mode of production.

Deprived of the slightest historic project capable of mobilising its strength, even the suicidal project of world war, capitalist society can only rot on its feet, plunging ever further into an advanced social decomposition and generalised despair"[9].

Capitalism's entry into decomposition, the final phase of its decadence, weighed more and more heavily on the working class throughout the 1980s:

"At the outset, ideological decomposition obviously affected first and foremost the capitalist class itself, and by rebound the petty-bourgeois strata which have no real autonomy. We can even say that the latter identify particularly well with this decomposition, inasmuch as their specific situation - the absence of any historic future - echoes the major cause of ideological decomposition: the absence of any immediate perspective for society as a whole. Only the proletariat bears within itself a perspective for humanity, and in this sense it is within the ranks of the proletariat that the greatest capacity for resistance to decomposition lies. However, the proletariat itself is not immune from decomposition, all the more so in that the workers live in close proximity to the petty-bourgeoisie, which is decomposition's main vehicle. The elements which constitute the proletariat's strength are in direct opposition to the various aspects of ideological decomposition:

- collective action, solidarity, confront atomisation, ‘"every man for himself', and the search for individual solutions;

- the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the destruction of the relationships which form the basis of life within society;

- the proletariat's confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly undermined by the general despair invading society, of nihilism and 'no future';

- consciousness, lucidity, coherence and unity of thought, the taste for theory, have to make their way with difficulty through the mirages of drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection of reflection and the destruction of thought characteristic of our epoch.

An aggravating factor in this situation is obviously the fact that a growing proportion of the young generations of the working class suffer the devastating effects of unemployment even before they have had the opportunity to experience the collective life of the class, in the workplace and in the company of their comrades in work and struggle. Unemployment, is a direct result of the economic crisis, and not in itself an expression of decomposition. Nonetheless, its effects in this phase of decadence make it a major element of decomposition. Although in general it helps to unmask capitalism's inability to offer a future to the proletariat, it is also today a powerful factor that tends to "lumpenise" certain sectors of the class, particularly amongst the young workers, which weakens correspondingly its present and future political capacities. Throughout the 1980s, which saw a sharp rise in unemployment, this situation was expressed in the absence of significant movements or attempts at organisation by unemployed workers. The contrast with the proletariat's ability during the 1930s, notably in the US, to organise the unemployed, illustrates only too well decomposition's effect in preventing unemployment becoming a factor in the development of proletarian consciousness"[10].

In 1989, in a situation where the working class was finding great difficulty in developing its consciousness, came an immense historical event, itself a sign of capitalism's decomposition: the disintegration of the East European Stalinist regimes, which the entire bourgeoisie had always presented as "socialist":

"The events presently shaking the so-called ‘socialist' countries, the de facto disappearance of the Russian bloc, the patent and definitive bankruptcy of Stalinism on the economic, political and ideological level, constitute along with the international resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the sixties, the most important historic facts since the end of the Second World War. An event on such a scale cannot fail to have its repercussions, and indeed is already doing so, on the consciousness of the working class, all the more so because it involves an ideology and a political system that was presented for more than half a century by all sectors of the bourgeoisie as ‘socialist' or ‘working class'.

The disappearance of Stalinism is the disappearance of the symbol and spearhead of the most terrible counter-revolution in history.

But this does not mean that the development of the consciousness of the world proletariat will be facilitated by it. On the contrary. Even in its death throes, Stalinism is rendering a last service to the domination of capital: in decomposing, its cadaver continues to pollute the atmosphere that the proletariat breathes. For the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, the final collapse of Stalinist ideology, the ‘democratic', ‘liberal' and nationalist movements which are sweeping the Eastern countries, provide a golden opportunity to unleash and intensify their campaigns of mystification.

The identification which is systematically established between Stalinism and communism, the lie repeated a thousand times, and today being wielded more than ever, according to which the proletarian revolution can only end in disaster, will for a whole period gain an added impact within the ranks of the working class. We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the consciousness of the proletariat; the signs of this can already be seen in the unions' return to strength. While the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which capitalism cannot help but mount on the proletariat will oblige the workers to enter the struggle, in an initial period this will not result in a greater capacity in the class to develop its consciousness. In particular, reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions"[11].

Our forecast in 1989 was wholly confirmed during the 1990s. The ebb in consciousness within the working class could be seen in a loss of confidence in its own strength, provoking a general ebb in its combativeness whose effects can still be felt today.

In 1989, we defined the conditions which would make it possible for the working class to recover:

"Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland. Having said this, we cannot foresee in advance its breadth or its length. In particular, the rhythm of the collapse of Western capitalism - which at present we can see accelerating, with the perspective of a new and open recession - will constitute a decisive factor in establishing the moment when the proletariat will be able to resume its march towards revolutionary consciousness.

By sweeping away the illusions about the ‘revival' of the world economy, by exposing the lie which presents ‘liberal' capitalism as a solution to the historic bankruptcy of the whole capitalist mode of production - and not only of its Stalinist incarnation - the intensification of the capitalist crisis will eventually push the proletariat to turn again towards the perspective of a new society, to more and more inscribe this perspective into its struggles"[12].

And indeed, the 1990s were marked by the ability of the world bourgeoisie, especially its most important fraction in the United States, to slow the rhythm of the crisis and even to create the illusion of "light at the end of the tunnel". One of the fundamental causes of the low level of combativeness in the working class today, as well as its difficulty in developing its self-confidence and consciousness, lies in the illusions that capitalism has succeeded in fostering as to its economic "prosperity".

This being said, there is another, more general element which explains the difficulties in the proletariat's politicisation, which would allow it to understand, even embryonically, what is at stake in its struggles, in order to increase their extent:

"To understand all the data of the present period, and the period to come, we must also take account of the characteristics of the proletariat which is in struggle today:

- it is made up of workers' generations which have not suffered defeat, unlike those which grew up in the 1930s and during World War II; consequently, unless they suffer a decisive defeat, which the bourgeoisie has not yet succeeded in inflicting on them, they will keep their reserves of combativeness intact;

- these generations benefit from the irretrievable exhaustion of those great themes of mystification (the fatherland, democracy, anti-fascism, the defence of the USSR), which were used in the past to enrol the proletariat in imperialist war.

It is these essential characteristics which explain why today's historic course is towards class confrontations and not imperialist war. However, the proletariat's present strength is also its weakness: precisely because only undefeated generations have proved capable of finding the road to class struggle once again, an enormous rift lies between this generation and the one that fought the decisive battles of the 1920s, for which the proletariat is paying a heavy price:

- a great ignorance about its own past and the lessons of that past;

- backwardness in the formation of the revolutionary party.

These characteristics explain the extremely uneven nature of the present course of workers' struggles. They allow us to understand the moments of the proletariat's lack of self-confidence, because it is unaware of its potential strength against the bourgeoisie. They also show the long road that stretches before the proletariat, which will only be able to make the revolution if it has concretely integrated the experience of the past, and created its class party.

The proletariat's historic resurgence at the end of the 1960s put the formation of the party on the agenda. It did not happen, because:

- of the half-century gap that separates us from the old revolutionary parties;

- of the disappearance, or the more or less pronounced atrophy of the left fractions which emerged from them;

- of many workers' distrust towards any political organisation (whether bourgeois or proletarian) ... an expression of the proletariat's historic weakness faced with the need to politicise its struggle"[13].

We can see, then, just how long is the proletariat's road to communist revolution. The length and depth of the counter-revolution, the almost total disappearance of the communist organisations, capitalism's decomposition, the collapse of Stalinism, the ruling class' ability to control the collapse of its economy, and to sow illusions in it: it would seem that during the last thirty years, indeed since the 1920s, nothing has been spared the proletariat on its road to revolution.

The fundamental nature of the proletariat's difficulties on the road to revolution

At the end of the first part of this article, we mentioned the different appointments with history that the proletariat has missed during the 20th century: the revolutionary wave which put an end to World War I, but which ended in defeat, the collapse of the world economy in 1929, the Second World War. We have seen that the proletariat did not miss its appointment with history at the end of the 1960s, but at the same time we have measured how many obstacles it has encountered since, which have slowed down its road towards proletarian revolution.

The revolutionaries of the last century, Marx and Engels first among them, thought that the revolution would take place during their century. They were mistaken, and were the first to recognise their mistake. In reality, the conditions for proletarian revolution only came together at the beginning of the 20th century, to be confirmed by the first worldwide imperialist slaughter. In their turn, the revolutionaries of the early 20th century thought that, now the objective conditions for communist revolution were met, the revolution would take place during their century. They too were mistaken. When we go back over all the historic events which have prevented the revolution from taking place to date, we might be left with the impression that the proletariat has suffered from "bad luck", that it has been confronted with a series of catastrophes and unfavourable circumstances, none of which were inevitable. It is true that history was not written in advance, and that it could have evolved differently. The Russian revolution, for example, could have been crushed by the White armies, which would have prevented the development of Stalinism, the proletariat's greatest enemy during the 20th century, the spearhead of history's most terrible counter-revolution, whose negative effects are still with us, thirty years after it came to an end. Nor was it inevitable at first sight that the Allies would win World War II, thus relaunching for a long time to come the ideology of democracy which, in the developed countries, has been one of the most effective poisons against the development of working class consciousness. Similarly, another outcome to the Second World War could have been the disappearance of the Stalinist regime, which would have avoided the antagonism between two blocs being presented as a struggle between capitalism and socialism. We would never have experienced the collapse of the "socialist" bloc, whose negative ideological consequences weigh so heavily on the working class today.

That being said, the accumulation of obstacles that have confronted the proletariat during the 20th century cannot on the whole be considered as a mere succession of "misfortunes". Fundamentally they are an expression of the enormous difficulty of the proletarian revolution.

An aspect of this difficulty is the bourgeoisie's ability to make use of the different situations it finds itself in, and to turn them systematically against the working class. This is the proof that the bourgeoisie - despite the long death agony of its mode of production, despite the barbarism whose development all over the world it is quite unable to prevent, despite the rot eating away at its society and despite its ideological decomposition - remains vigilant and capable of great intelligence when it comes to preventing the proletariat's advance towards revolution. One reason that the predictions of past revolutionaries as to the timing of the revolution failed to come about, is that they under-estimated the strength of the ruling class, and particularly its political intelligence. Revolutionaries today will only really be able to contribute to the proletarian struggle for revolution if they are able to appreciate this political strength of the bourgeoisie - and notably the Machiavellianism it is capable of when necessary - and warn the workers against the traps laid by the enemy class.

But there is another, still more fundamental reason for the proletariat's immense difficulty in carrying out the revolution. It has already been pointed out in this oft-quoted passage from Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Proletarian revolutions (...) constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course (...) they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!"[14].

And indeed, one reason for the great difficulty for the vast majority of workers in turning towards the revolution lies in the vertigo that seizes them when they think that the task is so enormous as to be impossible. The task of overthrowing the most powerful class that history has ever known, the system which has allowed humanity to take gigantic steps forward in its material production and mastery of nature does indeed seem to be impossible. But what makes the working class dizzier still is the immensity of the task of building a radically new society, liberated at last from the woes which have crushed human society ever since it existed, from scarcity, exploitation, oppression, and war.

When prisoners and slaves constantly wore shackles on their feet, they sometimes became used to the constraint to the point where they felt as if they would be unable to walk without their chains, and sometimes even refused to have them removed. What has happened to the proletariat is not dissimilar. It bears within itself the ability to free humanity, and yet it lacks the self-confidence to march consciously towards that goal.

But the time is coming when "the conditions themselves [will] cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!". If it remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, human society will never reach the next century, other than in shreds, nothing human any longer left in it. As long as this extreme has not been reached, as long as a capitalist system survives, there will necessarily be its exploited class, the proletariat. And there will therefore remain the possibility that the proletariat, spurred on by capitalism's total economic bankruptcy, will at last overcome its hesitations and take on the enormous task that history has confided to it: the communist revolution.

Fabienne

[1] See our article on the 1953 insurrection published in the International Review no.15

[2] See our article on the class struggle in Eastern Europe between 1920 and 1970, in the International Review no.27.

[3] See also our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism

[4] "Thereby what he had hitherto deduced, half a priori, from gappy material, became absolutely clear to him from the facts themselves, namely, that the world trade crisis of 1847 had been the true mother of the February [Paris] and March [Vienna and Berlin] revolutions, and that the industrial prosperity, which had been returning gradually since the middle of 1848 and attained full bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the revitalising force of the European reaction" (Engels, Introduction to Marx's ‘The Class Struggles in France', 1895, in Marx-Engels, Lawrence and Wishart, p.643).

[5] "A new revolution is only possible as the result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself" (Marx, The class struggles in France, in Surveys from exile, Pelican, p.131).

[6] This was particularly the case with Herbert Marcuse, ideologue of the 1960s student revolts, who considered that the working class could no longer constitute a revolutionary force, and that the only hope for the overthrow of capitalism lay in the marginal sectors such as the blacks and students in the US, or the poor peasants in the Third World.

[7] We have already done so in many articles in the International Review. See in particular the report on the class struggle to the ICC's 13th Congress, published in International Review no.99.

[8] See our series of articles "Thirty years of capitalism's open crisis", in International Review nos.96 and 98.

[9] Communist revolution or the destruction of humanity, Manifesto of the 9th ICC Congress. On this question, see in particular our article "Decomposition, the final phase of capitalist decadence", in International Review no.62

[10] ibid.

[11] "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the Eastern countries", in International Review no.60

[12] Ibid.

[13] Resolution on the international situation at the ICC's 6th Congress, published in International Review no.44.

[14] In Marx, Surveys from Exile, Pelican. The Latin phrase comes from one of Aesop's fables. It is the reply made to a boaster who claimed he had once made an immense leap in Rhodes: "Here is Rhodes: leap here and now". But the German phrase, "Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!" (here is the rose, dance here) is Hegel's variant, in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The Greek Rhodos can mean both Rhodes and rose.

Eight years after his father, George W Bush has begun his term as president of the USA. His father promised us "peace and prosperity" after the disintegration first of the Eastern bloc, then of the USSR. The son inherits a situation of widespread war and poverty, which has proliferated and deepened throughout the 1990s. The state of the world is truly catastrophic, and this is not merely a temporary transition before the promised land prophesied by Bush Senior. All the signs are that capitalism is dragging humanity down into a vicious circle of bloody military conflicts on every continent, of increasing imperialist antagonisms especially between the great powers, a new and brutal aggravation of economic crisis and poverty, and a series of disasters of every kind. These three elements - war, economic decline, and the destruction of the planet - are making conditions ever more intolerable for today's generations, and are endangering the very survival of the generations to come. It is becoming ever clearer that capitalism is leading the human species to extinction.

The illusion of peace collapsed quickly enough, following the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 and then the interminable slaughter in the Balkans. The illusion of prosperity, on the other hand, has been given several new leases of life thanks to America's positive growth rates during the 1990s, the increasing value of stocks and shares, and the mirage of the "new economy" linked to the Internet. American growth rates and the rising stock market have not prevented a dramatic increase in world poverty and hunger - indeed quite the contrary. As for the "new economy", it is long gone, and the illusion of a coming prosperity for all lies shattered.

An economy in virtual bankruptcy

In this Review we have already denounced many times the lies about the "good health" of the capitalist economy based on positive growth rates. The bourgeoisie has established criteria for defining a recession, which is only considered to exist after two consecutive quarters of negative growth. By these criteria of bourgeois propaganda - let us note in passing - Japan has been "officially" in recession for the last ten years. Nonetheless, and quite apart from all the cheating with the figures and the ways of calculating the recession, the reality of a positive "official" growth rate does not mean that the economy is in good health. The increasing poverty in the US itself under the Clinton presidency, despite "exceptional" growth rates, is an illustration of this.

Worse than 1929

In order to define a catastrophic economic crisis, and to show that everything today is going well by comparison, economists, historians, and the media generally always refer to the great crisis of 1929. But the experience of 1929 itself gives the lie to this assertion: "In the lives of most men and women, although the central economic experience of the time was certainly cataclysmic, and crowned by the Great Crisis of 1929-1933, economic growth did not stop during these decades. It simply slowed down. In the biggest and richest economy of the day, the USA, the average growth in GNP per person between 1913 and 1938 did not exceed a modest 0.8% per annum. At the same time, world industrial production grew by slightly more than 80%, in other words about half the growth rate of the previous quarter-century (WW Rostov, 1978, p662). (...) The fact is that had a Martian observed a graph of economic movement from far enough away not to see ups and downs that earth-bound humans have suffered, he would undoubtedly have concluded that the world economy had undergone a continuous expansion" (EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes).

Our rulers and their economists are not Martians, but defenders of capitalist order, which is why they spend so much effort in trying to conceal the reality of the economic disaster. Only rarely, and in more confidential publications, does a partial recognition of this reality confirm what we are saying: "Nonetheless, economic growth will remain insufficient to reduce the level of poverty or improve the well-being of the population", admits The Economist with regard to Latin America (The World in 2001). But of course the same is true for the rest of the world's population. And what will it be like if Fred Hickey's forecast, cited by The Wall Street Journal, comes true, of a coming recession?

Since the collapse of the world's stock markets at the beginning of 2001, it is hard to make believe that all is well in the realm of finance and the "new Internet economy". "Since their historic high point of 5132 points on 10th March 2000, technology values have fallen by almost 65%. A sorry anniversary, since in the same period some $4.5 trillion have evaporated from US stock markets" (Le Monde, 17/03/01).

It is not just Internet values, but the whole stocks and shares market which is affected by the decline in values. For the moment, contrary to the market crises of the 1980s and 1990s in America, Russia, and Asia, the decline seems to be under control, although it is certainly a major crash. One question remains posed however: the Japanese financial and banking system, seriously undermined by bad debts, is on the verge of bankruptcy. According to Le Monde of 27th March, "The rout of the Japanese banking system threatens the rest of the world". If Japan withdraws its money from the US, then the whole credit financing of the US economy will be at risk: "If foreign investors no longer want to supply the necessary capital, then the impact on growth, the stock market, and the dollar, could be substantial" (The World in 2001). All the more so in that US household savings are nil, while individual and company debt for stock market speculation has reached impressive heights. As we have shown many times, the world capitalist economy is based on a mountain of debt which will never be repaid. After deferring the consequences of the crisis in space and time, by pushing them onto the "emerging" countries, these debts are now coming home to roost, to deepen and accelerate these same consequences. The world's largest economy, the USA, is also its most endebted, and its growth rates are being paid for by "a colossal trade deficit, and massive foreign debt" (idem). Even the experts have their doubts. "In short, the US economy in 2001 will need intelligent management and above all, a good dose of luck" (idem). Who would travel by plane if they were warned in advance that the pilot would need intelligence, "and above all, a good dose of luck"?

At the same time, after the different financial crises which have shaken Russia, Asia, and Latin America on several occasions, each time due to an inability to meet debt repayment deadlines, it is now Turkey's turn to go virtually bankrupt, and to see the IMF run to its sickbed. Unable to meet a $3 billion repayment deadline on 21st March, Turkey has received $6 billion in aid from the IMF, in exchange for a drastic plan of economic attacks on the population. The Argentine economy has suffered another relapse. This winter, it had to be propped up in extremis "by an exceptional financial package of $39.7 billion, intended above all to prevent it defaulting on its foreign debt of $122 billion (42% of GNP)" (Le Monde economic supplement, 20/03/01). These local crises might appear in themselves to express merely the fragility of the countries concerned. In fact, they express the fragility of the world economy, since in each case - and there have been many of them since the Latin American crisis of 1982 - where an "emerging" country is unable to meet its debt repayments, it has immediately endangered the whole world financial system. Whence the hurried interventions by the governments of the great powers and by the IMF, bearing new and ever greater credits.

In this situation, what is at stake - and has been for several years - for the world bourgeoisie, is to keep the inevitable decline in the North American economy under control. "The excess of demand over supply symbolises the other side of this miracle [of US growth]. This is also a danger, since it is accompanied by a colossal trade deficit, and massive foreign debt. If this deficit and debt were to continue, then the collapse would become inevitable. But this will not happen. In 2001, American growth will return to a more modest rhythm, no longer miraculous but merely impressive, and the foreign trade and balance of payments deficits should diminish" (The World in 2001). The first journalist we quoted counts on good luck. This one counts on a miracle (in an article entitled "The golden age of the world economy"). But for the different sectors of the world bourgeoisie - leaving aside their antagonistic imperialist, political, and commercial interests - the crucial question remains the success or otherwise of the "soft landing" of the US economy. In other words, one that avoids any excessive crises which would run the risk of revealing to the world population, and especially to the international working class, the irreversible bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The perspective for the world's population, North America and industrialised Europe included, is one of growing poverty.

The "agricultural crisis" is the crisis of capitalism

In the industrialised countries, the crisis of agricultural overproduction will lead to the ruin of thousands of small and medium farmers and an accelerated concentration in this branch of the capitalist economy. "Mad cow" disease, and the foot-and-mouth epidemic, are not natural, but social disasters caused by the capitalist mode of production. They are the consequence of sharpening economic competition and the race for productivity. In short, they are an expression of worldwide agricultural overproduction. At the same time, they provide the opportunity to "solve" this overproduction temporarily by the mass slaughter of livestock... when a large part of the world's population does not get enough to eat. And when it would suffice... to vaccinate the animals. "The agricultural crisis emphasises yet again that hunger in the South can perfectly well exist alongside waste and excess of supply in the North" (Sylvie Brunel of "Action contre la faim", in Le Monde, 10/03/01). This crisis will also have serious consequences for the peasants in the countries of the capitalist periphery, in other words for a large part of the world's population. "Another disastrous consequence for the Third World of the collapse of the meat trade is looming: an overproduction of cereals" (idem). What clearer expression of the irrationality of the capitalist world, of the absurdity of its survival, than these healthy animals condemned to slaughter and destruction when millions of human beings have not enough to eat? "The world's food problem lies not in its production, which is amply suffiicient for all, but in its distribution: those who suffer from under-nourishment are too poor to nourish themselves" (idem). This is why capitalism cannot even offer itself the "luxury" of vaccinating cows and sheep: prices would collapse, all the more so if the animals destined for slaughter were offered free to the world's hungry populations.

As long as capitalism's economic laws, and especially the law of value, survive, it will be impossible to give away the animals that are to be slaughtered. The same is true of agricultural overproduction as it is of any other kind, whence the land lying fallow in the industrialised countries, and their unsold stocks of milk and butter. Only a society where the law of value, and so wage labour and social classes, have disappeared, will be able to resolve these questions, because it will be able to give rather than destroy.

But it is not only the population involved in agricultural production, whether small farmer, day-labourer, or farm worker, that will be hit by the brutal deceleration of the world economy.

Attacks against the working class

Redundancies are being announced in every branch of industry. In the USA, "new economy" companies like Intel, Dell, Delphi, Nortel, Cisco, Lucent, Xerox, and Compaq are laying off by the tens of thousands, but so are traditional industries such as General Motors and Coca-Cola. In Europe, lay-offs and shop and factory closures have abruptly taken off: Marks & Spencer and Danone, in the armaments industry at EADS and Giat Industries (builders of Leclerc tanks). Job reductions are hitting major companies and state employees.

In these industrialised countries, the national bourgeoisie is aware of the danger of a reaction from a concentrated working class with a strong historical experience of struggle, and so takes a maximum of political precautions to carry out its attacks. In countries where the working class is younger, less experienced, or more dispersed, the attacks are far more brutal. Amongst many other examples, it is clear that the working class will suffer particularly in Argentina and Turkey.

These massive attacks in every country and every branch of industry are dealing a serious blow to the lie of the "healthy economy", and above all to the idea that lay-offs in a particular company are exceptional, because elsewhere, everything is going fine. The whole international working class is affected, every branch of industry is undergoing redundancies, wage cuts, job insecurity and precariousness, speed-ups and longer working hours, a deterioration in living conditions, etc.

Bush Senior, accompanied by a chorus of states, governments, politicians, ideologists, journalists, and intellectuals, spoke of prosperity. Instead we have had, we have now, and all the signs are that we will continue to have more, and more widespread, poverty.

Humanity is faced with a historic log-jam. On the one hand, capitalism has nothing to offer but crisis, war, destruction, poverty, and increasing barbarism. On the other, the international working class, the only social force able to offer a perspective of an end to capitalism and a different society, remains unable to assert this perspective openly. In this situation, capitalist society is decomposing, rotting on its feet. Apart from the wars, the urban violence, the generalised insecurity, the most dramatic consequences threaten humanity's future and its very survival as a result of the destruction of the environment and the proliferation of all kinds of disasters.

The rottenness and irrationality of capitalist society

Holes in the ozone layer, the pollution of seas, rivers, the soil, the cities and the countryside, adulteration of foodstuffs, epidemics amongst human beings and livestock: this non-exhaustive list is a demonstration that the planet is becoming less and less livable, and that its very equilibrium is in danger.

Up till now, catastrophes and the deterioration of the environment appeared as simply the "mechanical" results of the deepening economic crisis, of capitalist competition and the frantic search for maximum productivity. Today, environmental questions have become stakes in the imperialist confrontations between the great powers. The US' breaking of the Kyoto agreements on the emission of greenhouse gases has been an opportunity for the other powers, especially the Europeans, to denounce American irresponsibility. "The European Union sees no solution to the climate problem outside the Kyoto protocol, and remains determined to apply it, with or without the United States" (Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, Le Monde, 6th April 2001). Like "humanitarian" causes and the "defence of human rights", the environment and environmental disasters have become an area of competition between states. The "humanitarian interference" in Bosnia was a terrain for confrontations between the powers, just as it was during the intervention in Somalia. Humanitarian aid is in the same situation: whenever there is an earthquake, American and European teams compete to pull the most corpses from the ruins.

More and more, the link is becoming clear between capitalism's economic impasse, the exacerbation of imperialist tensions provoked on the historic level by the economic crisis, and all the consequences for the whole of social life, which in their turn sharpen imperialist rivalries and conflicts, and weigh still more heavily on the economic crisis. The capitalist world is dragging humanity and the planet down in an infernal spiral.

The proliferation of war

"Not the least tragic aspect of this catastrophe, is that humanity has learnt to live in a world where massacre, tortures, and mass exile have become daily experiences that we no longer even notice" (EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes).

The world today presents a terrifying panorama. The world is bloody with a multitude of interminable military conflicts, on every continent: the ex-USSR, especially its one-time Asian republics and the Caucasus; the Middle East from Palestine to Pakistan, via Iraq and Afghanistan; Africa; Latin America, especially Colombia; and the Balkans. Today, those countries or regions which are still untouched in one way or another by open or latent conflict, are islands of "peace" in an ocean of warfare.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the situation in the Lebanon was the clearest expression of the capitalist world's entry into its phase of decomposition. "Lebanisation" became an expression to describe countries prey to the dislocation caused by interminable war. Today, whole continents are "Lebanised". How many African countries? It is hard to count them all, but most have become new Lebanons. Afghanistan is doubtless one of the most extreme examples, after 20 years of continuous fighting.

And let there be no mistake, the primary responsibility in the aggravation of all these wars lies with imperialism in general, and with the great powers in particular. The wars have been started and stoked by the rivalries among the great imperialist powers: this is the case in Afghanistan since its invasion by Russia in 1980, and America's subsequent support for the Islamic guerrillas, including the Taliban, in the days of imperialist blocs. It is obviously the case in the Balkans, where Germany supported Croat and Slovene independence in 1991, and today supports the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia, while Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Spain and the USA - to name only the major powers - have intervened actively to counter Germany. The same is true in Africa. The great powers continue to stoke the flames even when the conflicts no longer represent any great interest for them, as is the case today for Africa and Afghanistan.

In general, the direct imperialist rivalries between the powers have been more discreet, especially since the end of the blocs in 1989. Today, however, tensions are rising. The USA has adopted a particularly aggressive attitude towards China, as in the case of the collision between the Chinese fighter and the American spy plane on 1st April 2001, towards Russia with the expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats at the end of March 2001, and towards Europe with the American rejection of the Kyoto accords on reducing greenhouse gases and with the proposed national missile defence system.

Bush Senior, accompanied by a chorus of states, governments, politicians, ideologists, journalists, and intellectuals, spoke of peace. Instead we have had, we have now, and all the signs are that we will continue to have more, and more widespread, war.

Wars in the period of capitalism's decadence

Capitalism seems to be irrational from a historic standpoint. It is leading the human species to destruction, and no longer has any economic or historical "rationality".

"During the 20th Century, more human beings have been killed or left to die than ever before in history (?) It has undoubtedly been the most murderous century for which records exist, both by the scale, the frequency, and the duration of the wars which have filled it (and which barely paused for an instant during the 1920s), but also by the incomparable extent of the disasters which it has produced - from history's greatest famines to systematic genocide. Unlike the 19th century, which seemed to be, and indeed was, a period of almost uninterrupted material, intellectual, and moral progress (that is to say, progress in civilised values), since 1914 we have seen a marked regression in those values once considered as normal in the developed countries and the bourgeois milieu, which it was once thought would spread to the most backward regions of the planet and the least enlightened strata of the population" (Hobsbawm, op. cit.).

It is true that capitalism has a history which allows us to understand its present dynamic. There are historical reasons for its irrationality. The most important is its entry into its period of historic decline, of decadence, at the beginning of the 20th Century - the 1914-18 war being the proof, the product, and an active factor in this decadence. It is with the period of decadence that wars ceased to be national or colonial wars - in other words with rational aims such as the conquest of new markets, or the formation and consolidation of new nations, aims which moreover were globally part of a process of historical development - to become imperialist wars caused by the lack of markets and the search for a new imperialist division of the world, objectives which could not contribute to historical progress. Imperialist wars have become ever more barbarous, bloody, and destructive. In the period of decadence, wars are no longer at the service of the economy: the economy is at the service of war, whether in war or in "peace". The whole period from 1945 to today thoroughly illustrates the phenomenon.

"During the 20th Century, warfare has increasingly targeted states' economy and infrastructure, as well as the civilian population. Ever since World War I, the number of civilian war victims has greatly exceeded the military in all the belligerent countries, with the exception of the United States (?) Under these conditions, why did the ruling powers conduct World War I as if it could only be totally won or totally lost? (?) In fact, the only war aim that counted was total victory, with what was called in World War II 'unconditional surrender' as the only fate for the enemy. This was an absurd and self-destructive objective, which ruined both victors and vanquished. It dragged the latter into revolution, the former to bankruptcy and physical exhaustion" Hobsbawm, op.cit.).

These specific characteristics of 20th Century warfare have been dramatically confirmed in all the conflicts from World War II onwards. Since 1989, and the disappearance of the imperialist blocs formed around the USA and the USSR, the threat of a world war has disappeared. But the disappearance of the bloc system and the discipline that went with it has opened the way to the explosion of a multitude of military conflicts provoked, stoked, and exacerbated by the great powers, even though the latter have difficulty controlling them once they are started. The characteristics of warfare in decadence have not disappeared with the disappearance of imperialist blocs, quite the reverse. They have been aggravated still further by the development of an attitude of "every man for himself" unbridled by bloc discipline, with every imperialist power, great or small, playing a lone suite against all the others. The capitalist world has entered into a particular phase of its historic decadence: a phase which we have defined as being its phase of decomposition. But whatever one's analysis, or the name one gives it, "there can be no serious doubt that a world historical era closed at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, and that a new one began (?) The last part of the century has been a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis - and for much of the world, such as Africa, the ex-USSR, and the old socialist Europe, it has been one of catastrophe" (idem).

Wars in the period of capitalist decomposition

Today's imperialist tensions must be understood within this unprecedented historical situation.

"In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist and take measures in consequence: war economy, armaments, etc. This is why the aggravation of the world economy's convulsions can only sharpen the antagonisms between different states including, increasingly, on the military level. The difference with the period that has just come to a close is that these antagonisms, which previously were contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs, are now going to come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist cop, and the resulting disappearance of its American counterpart as far as the latter's main 'partners' of yesteryear are concerned, will unleash a whole series of more local rivalries. At the present time, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into world war (even supposing that the proletariat were unable to oppose it). By contrast, given the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the existence of the blocs, they are likely to be more frequent and more violent, especially in those areas where the proletariat is weakest" (International Review n°61, 10th February 1990).

As long as capitalism exists, the Balkans and the Middle East will continue to be subject to endless war and conflict. In recent weeks, however, we have seen a proliferation of direct inter-imperialist tensions among the great powers. The attitude of the US has been particularly aggressive: "The motive remains mysterious for what seems gratuitous brutality in the Bush administration's approach not only to Russia and China, but also to South Korea and the Europeans" (W. Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, 28/03/01). It would be simplistic to blame this new aggressiveness solely on Bush Junior. True, a change in president and in the governing team provides an opportunity for a change in policy. But the underlying tendencies of US policy remain the same. The policy of "muscle-flexing" and "hold me back or I'll do something I'll regret" has nothing to do with the intellectual failings of the Bush family, as the European and even sometimes the US media try to tell us. It is a fundamental tendency imposed by the historic situation.

"With the disappearance of the Russian threat, the 'obedience' of the other great powers was no longer guaranteed (this is why the Western bloc fell apart). To obtain obedience, the US has had to adopt a systematically offensive stance on the military level" ("Report on the international situation, 9th ICC Congress, 1991", International Review n°67). This fundamental characteristic of US imperialist policy has remained unchanged ever since, for "Faced with this irresistible rise of 'every man for himself', the USA has had no choice but to wage a constantly offensive military policy" ("Report on imperialist conflicts, 13th ICC Congress, 1999", International Review n°98).

Increasing imperialist antagonisms

The US has all the more need to show its muscles when it finds itself in diplomatic difficulty. The Balkan wars' spread to Macedonia is an expression of the US' difficulty in controlling the situation there. The US has no real power base in the region, unlike the French, British and Russians traditionally allied to Serbia, or the Germans with the Croats and Albanians, and is therefore forced to adapt its policies to events. It is therefore no accident that "NATO has permitted a partial return by the Yugoslav army to the 'security zone' around Kosovo (?) There is clearly a desire to associate Belgrade to the effort to prevent a new conflict in the region" (Le Monde, 10th March 2001). As Serbia's ally, the US is interested in maintaining the stability of Macedonia "which has always been considered a weak link which must be preserved, if the whole of south-east Europe is not to be destabilised" (idem). The only power to profit from the extension of war to Macedonia, and the only power not interested in the maintenance of the status quo, is Germany. With an independent Croatia, a Croat province in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a greater Albania created at the expense of Macedonia and Montenegro, Germany would have achieved its historical geo-strategic goal of a direct opening to the Mediterranean. Obviously, this perspective would give new life to Greece and Bulgaria's temporarily stifled appetites in Macedonia. And indeed, the Macedonian president is under no illusions as to who is really responsible for the Albanian guerrilla offensive. This was before the change in US policy. "Nobody in Macedonia today believes that the US and German governments don't know who are the terrorist leaders, and could not put a stop to their activity if they wanted" (Le Monde, 20th March 2001).

As in Afghanistan, in Africa, as in all the other regions of the world subjected to wars and conflicts typical of decomposing capitalism, there will be no peace in the Balkans until capitalism is overthrown.

The same is true of the Middle East. As we said in the previous issue of this Review, "the plan that Clinton has been trying to push through at any cost will have remained a dead letter, as forecast". The new Bush administration seems to be trying to take account of the US' inability to impose its pax americana. In fact, it seems to have come to terms with the idea that the region will always be subject to war, or at least that there will be no end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Colin Powell, the new US Secretary of the State Department and ex-Chief of General Staff during the Gulf War, recognises that there is no "magic formula", especially since Israel no longer hesitates to formulate its own policy, expressing the reign of "every man for himself" characteristic of the present period, even when this goes against US policy. As for Palestine, where the population is economically strangulated, poverty-stricken and oppressed, the bourgeoisie there can only express its despair in a suicidal anti-Israeli nationalism, supported by the European powers. France in particular has no hesitation in encouraging anything that counters US policy in the region.

America responded to its own impotence with the bloody bombardment of Baghdad as soon as Bush took office. The message is aimed at the Arab states, as well as the other powers: the US may not be able to impose its peace, but it will strike militarily whenever necessary, whenever it thinks that "the line has been crossed". Not only will there be no peace between Palestinians and Israeli, there is the danger that war, at least in latent form, will spread throughout the region.

The capitalist world's own laws inevitably exacerbate imperialist rivalries, spread military conflict on every continent; equally inevitable is the aggravation of the economic crisis. Capitalism in its death throes cannot offer peace and prosperity. It can only offer endless war and poverty.

What is the alternative to capitalist barbarism?

Only marxist theory was able, in 1989, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and even before the disintegration of the USSR, to understand the significance of these events and foresee their consequences for the capitalist world and the international working class. This is not the result of the superiority of a few individuals, nor of blind and mechanistic faith in some Bible. If marxism is farsighted, it is because it is the theory of the international proletariat, the expression of its revolutionary being. It is because the proletariat is the revolutionary class that marxism exists and is able to apprehend the main lines of historical development, and in particular capitalism's inability to resolve the dramatic problems that its continued existence causes.

Even if the bourgeoisie tries to minimise its consequences and the attacks against the international working class, the avowed deterioration of the world economy can only help to awaken workers to the myth of capitalism's present prosperity and bright future. Already, there is a certain tendency towards a development of workers' militancy which the trade unions are doing everything to channel, to contain, and to derail. However slow their development, however timid the international working class' response to the present situation, these struggles bear the seeds of the overcoming of this daily barbarism, and of humanity's survival. The overthrow of capitalism demands the working class' refusal to accept economic attacks, and its refusal of all participation in imperialist war through the assertion of proletarian internationalism. It demands the widest possible development and extension, whenever possible, of workers' struggles. This is the only possible road towards a revolutionary perspective and the possibility for the whole human species to create a society without war, without poverty. There is no other solution. There is no other alternative.

RL, 7th April 2001

IR105, 2nd Quarter 2001

We are publishing below a letter that we have received from one of our close contacts, in disagreement with our position on the economic foundations of capitalism’s decadence. The letter is followed by our reply, and we will publish the second part of this correspondence in the next issue.

The Method of Capital

a)   General Considerations

One of the supposedly most telling criticisms Luxemburg makes about Capital is that, since it is an incomplete work, it is necessarily a flawed one. Though it is true that Capital is unfinished insofar as Marx clearly intended to extend it further, what he did write is, with Engels’ assistance, in its essentials, a unified, coherent and consistent analysis. [1] [161] This becomes apparent if you grasp that Marx’s theory of crisis is based uniquely on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. What critics such as Luxemburg fail to grasp is that Marx had already worked out the contradictions of capitalist accumulation prior to writing Capital in the collection later known as the Theories of Surplus Value.

In fact, to argue that Capital has such serious deficiencies as Luxemburg does is to reduce Marx’s analysis to a mere description rather than a critique of capitalist political economy, that is, to fall into an empiricist perspective.[2] [162] It means that Luxemburg does not understand the nature of the method of presentation Marx uses in Capital. This is borne out by her inability to heed Marx’s warning that “it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (1976), p102). She cannot grasp that Marx chose the particular method of presentation he did for Capital so as to enable the proletariat to pierce through the world of appearances, of commodity fetishism that the capitalist relations of production necessarily create; so that the basic contradictions, the “real movement can be appropriately presented” (ibid.).

This method “abstracts from all the less essential and continuously changing surface phenomena of the market economy” (Paul Mattick, ‘Value and Capital’, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie, Merlin Press, London (c.1983), p74). Capital is therefore not intended to “tell the whole story of capitalistic development” (ibid., p.75) or “to predict the actual course of capitalist development” (ibid., p.94), but to “lay bare the dynamics of that development” (ibid., p.74); that is, it reveals the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation from the perspective of the revolutionary transformation of society, from the point of view of the totality.

Capital does NOT consist of a series of progressively detailed descriptions of concrete capitalist reality, analogous to a series of photographs of successively greater magnification. Although explanations in Capital proceed from those of a more abstract and general nature to those of a more concrete and particular one, this is not a simple linear progression; rather at each stage, on the basis of simplified conditions, a provisional analysis is made. At a subsequent stage this provisional analysis is extended and concretised. The levels therefore do not contradict either each other or empirical capitalist reality, as they might seem if simply compared [3] [163], as Luxemburg mistakenly does. Marx removes the apparent contradictions between the different levels in the following way. First, he draws all the logical conclusions that follow on the basis of the assumptions of the lower level. By then showing that “these conclusions lead to a logical absurdity” (I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Black Rose Books, Montreal (1975) p.248) he thereby demonstrates that the “analysis is not yet finished and has to be continued further” (ibid.); that is, the previous assumptions need to be modified to remove the contradictions. These modified assumptions define the next level. Examples of this in Capital are the transition from the value of commodities to the value of labour-power in Chapter 4 of vol.1, and the transition from different rates of profit in different spheres of production to the formation of the average rate of profit in Chapter 8 in vol.3.

“The impossibility of surplus value in Chapter 4 of Volume 1, and the possibility of different profit rates in Chapter 8 of Volume III, do not serve as necessary links for his constructions, but as proofs of the opposite. The fact that these conclusions lead to a logical absurdity shows that the analysis is not yet finished and has to be continued further. Marx does not determine the existence of different profit rates, but on the contrary, the inadequacy of any theory which is based on such a premise” (ibid.).

Fundamental to an understanding of Marx’s method is the distinction between the ‘inner’ or ‘general’ nature of capital [4] [164] and its empirical and historical reality; the “general and necessary tendencies” (Marx, op.cit. p.433) as distinct from the “forms of their appearance” (ibid.). To fail to grasp this crucial difference risks a headlong flight into empiricism, an acceptance of mere appearances for the truth. Conversely, ignoring the “necessary links” between this inner nature and the forms of appearance turns Capital into a mere abstract ideal divorced from reality.

There is nothing mystical or scholastic about this distinction; Marx clearly regarded it as vital to an understanding of capitalist accumulation.

“ …a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses” (ibid.).

b) Marx’s Reproduction Schemes, the Crisis and the Falling Rate of Profit

In his reproduction schemes Marx merely intends to show the reproduction of total capital in its fundamental form; they lay “no claim to presenting a picture of concrete capitalist reality” (H. Grossmann, quoted in Paul Mattick, ‘Luxemburg versus Lenin’, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Merlin Press, London (1978), p.37).

“But the essential, important point is seen clearly from these reproduction schemes: for production to expand and steadily progress given proportions must exist between the productive sectors; in practice these proportions are approximately realised; they depend on the following factors: the organic composition of capital, the rate of exploitation, and the proportion of surplus value which is accumulated” (Anton Pannekoek, ‘The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism’, Capital and Class 1, London (Spring 1977), p.64).

They are NOT intended to reveal the cause of the crisis. The real cause of the crisis is investigated at a later stage in Marx’s analysis.

“Neither the possibility of overproduction nor the impossibility of overproduction follows from the schemas themselves. What must be remembered is that these schemas are only a particular stage, represent a certain level of abstraction, in the development of Marx’s theory. The production process and the circulation process, the problem of production and realisation, have to be seen within the total process of capitalist production as a whole...” (David S. Yaffe, ‘The Marxian theory of crisis, capital and the state’, Economy and Society, vol.2 no.2, p.210).

Marx explains the falling rate of profit as a consequence of the unity of the production, circulation and distribution of capital, i.e., the “capitalist accumulation process has three distinct but inter-related moments: extraction of surplus value; realisation of surplus value; capitalisation of surplus value” (‘Correspondence: Saturated Markets & Decadence’, Internationalism 20, p.19). He explains the capitalist crisis uniquely in terms of the falling rate of profit because this embodies the whole process of capitalist accumulation. He shows that, eventually, this causes a crisis because of the overproduction of capital. Moreover, this overproduction of capital is not absolute or permanent, but relative to a given rate of profit and recurrent.

“Periodically, however, too much is produced in the way of means of labour and means of subsistence, too much to function as means for exploiting the workers at a given rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced for the value contained in them, and the surplus-value included in this value, to be realised under the conditions of distribution given by capitalist production, and to be transformed back into new capital, i.e. it is impossible to accomplish this process without ever-recurrent explosions” (Karl Marx, Capital vol.3, p.367, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (1981).

c) Capital and the Historical Evolution of Capitalism

To understand how the unfinished and abstract analysis of Capital can be applied to the historical evolution you need to grasp the following. First, that the abstract analysis of Capital is applicable to all phases of capitalism:

“Marx’s formulas deal with a chemically pure capitalism which never existed and does not exist anywhere now. Precisely because of this, they revealed the basic tendency of every capitalism but precisely of capitalism and only of capitalism” (Leon Trotsky, quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today, Pluto Press (1975), p.132).[5] [165]

Secondly, that:

 “Although the actual crisis has to be explained out of the real movement of capitalist production, credit and competition, it is the general tendencies of the accumulation process itself and the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall that form the basis of that explanation” (D.S. Yaffe, op. cit., p.204).

Lastly, that this “real movement of capitalist production, credit and competition” cannot be reduced to pure economics, but needs to be seen from the viewpoint of the evolution of capitalism as a whole.

“Moreover, the crisis cannot be reduced to ‘purely economic’ events, although it arises ‘purely economically’, that is, from the social relations of production clothed in economic forms. The international competitive struggle, fought also by political and military means, influences economic development, just as this in turn gives rise to the various forms of competition. Thus every real crisis can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole” (Paul Mattick, ‘Marx’s Crisis Theory’, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Merlin Press, London (1981), p.76).

Herein lies the great contribution of Luxemburg to the Marxism. Even though her economic theory is seriously flawed, by proceeding from the viewpoint of the totality, Luxemburg arrives at the insight that:

“Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states, but is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will” (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, quoted in Nation or Class? International Communist Current, (autumn 1979), p.25).

The nature of capitalist decadence and the crisis theories of Marx, Luxemburg and Grossmann

The lynchpin to understanding the decadence of capitalism is, as Bukharin stresses in Imperialism and World Economy[6] [166], the formation of the world economy. Thus the decadence of capitalism is synonymous with the creation of the world economy.

“The existence of a world economy, implies the intensification of the international division of labour and commodity exchange to the point where whatever happens at one point in the economic chain directly influences all the other points. International competition levels prices and conditions of production, and tends towards the equalisation of the rate of profit at the international level, (though of course this is always modified by the existence of capitalism in its nation-state form). The industrialised countries are now so inter-dependent in terms of trade and investments, that crises are a phenomenon that spreads like wildfire from one to another. As for the under developed areas, they have no internal dynamic, and are totally circumscribed by the formal domination imposed on them by capitalism. The existence of the world economy doesn’t mitigate, rather it intensifies imperialist antagonisms, and its consequences are world economic crises and world wars.” (‘The Meaning of Decadence’, Revolutionary Perspectives 10 (Old Series), p.12).

Even though the creation of the world economy results in the “hellish cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis” (‘The Platform of the ICC’, in Platform and Manifesto, International Communist Current, Winter (1980), p.3), this does not mean that decadence is characterised by a total halt to the growth of the productive forces. Rather, “Since the beginning of the century we have witnessed a massive arrestation of the growth of the productive forces, compared with what is objectively possible, given the level of scientific knowledge, technical progress and level of proletarianisation in society” (Revolutionary Perspectives 10 (Old Series), op. cit., p.7).

This is of course in keeping with the outline of the decadence of class societies in Marx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

During the reconstruction period after World War II, many workers, mainly those in the Western countries of course, did experience substantial improvements in their material conditions. But in no way could these improvements in living conditions be considered real reforms because of the material costs associated with them. That is, these improvements occurred because of the massive destruction of the productive forces during World War II, and their profound shackling during the ‘Cold War’. During reconstruction capitalism was destroying humanity’s future in advance at the same time as it was preparing for even greater destruction in the future.

The material reality of decadence therefore gives the lie to the idea of a final, death crisis. And Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories are unquestionably those of the death crisis as they both set an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation; that is, they predict that, eventually, capitalism must breakdown because accumulation becomes literally impossible. (Specifically, Luxemburg argues that capitalism is prone to crisis because it is impossible to realise surplus value within capitalism [7] [167]; Grossmann that crises occur because capitalist accumulation inevitably leads to an absolute lack of surplus value [8] [168].)

It is true that Luxemburg and Grossmann believe that well before capitalist accumulation becomes impossible, the intensification of the class struggle resulting from growing economic difficulties would have disrupted capitalist accumulation anyway[9] [169]. Nonetheless, as they still see an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation, they argue that capitalism would eventually breakdown regardless of the class struggle.

The virtual zero growth of capitalism between the World War I and World War II at the time seemed to vindicate both Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s theories as they both tend to identify the decadence of capitalism with a permanent economic crisis. However, the expansion of capitalism after World War II is the strongest possible refutation of these theories. According to Luxemburg, solvent pre-capitalist markets, without which capitalist accumulation is impossible, were exhausted globally by World War I. And it is clear that there has since been an ongoing destruction of these markets. Logically, capitalist growth CANNOT thereafter attain let alone surpass that reached prior to World War I. Seen in the light of her theory, it is therefore inexplicable that capitalist growth after World War II reached substantially greater levels than that before World War I, even taking into account unproductive capitalist production, as the ICC themselves admit. As Grossmann shares Luxemburg’s mechanistic idea of an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation, logically his theory can account for the expansion of capitalism after World War II ONLY if capitalism was still a progressive system, that is, it was NOT yet decadent.

The impossibility of real reforms and national self-determination, the imperialist nature of all nations, the rise of state capitalism, the reactionary nature of all factions of the bourgeois and the world-wide nature of the communist revolution; in short, the decadence of capitalism, CANNOT be reduced to the impossibility of capitalist development as Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories imply, but “can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole” (Paul Mattick, ‘Marx’s Crisis Theory’, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Merlin Press (1981), p.76).

Thus the permanent crisis DOES NOT mean a permanent economic crisis, that it is only in relation to “social development as a whole” that one can talk about a permanent crisis; but this is exactly what Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories imply.

The actual course of capitalist development contradicts the crisis theories of Luxemburg and Grossmann. The attempt to reconcile these theories with the actual evolution of capitalism can but lead to explanations that are ad hoc, inconsistent and contradictory. In particular, it is a flagrant error to argue that the view that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation is a non sequitur to these theories. The Marxist view of decadence as a fetter on the productive forces and the notion of an absolute economic limit to capitalism are totally incompatible; you cannot coherently subscribe to both ideas at the same time.

Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s distortion of Capital

Because the world economic crisis coincides with the geographical division of the whole world, it could appear that a lack of external markets is the cause of this crisis. Luxemburg accepts this appearance for reality and proceeds to revise [10] [170] Capital in the light of her empiricist vision. In particular, after examining Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction, she concludes that capitalist accumulation inevitably gives rise to an absolute excess of surplus value. [11] [171]

“The problem which seemed to have been left open was who was to buy the products in which surplus value was contained. If Departments I [means of production] and II [means of consumption] buy from each other more and more means of production and means of subsistence this would be a pointless circular movement from which nothing would result. The solution would lie in the appearance of buyers situated outside capitalism…” (Pannekoek, op.cit., p.64).

However, this is a “pointless circular movement” to Luxemburg only because of her profound misunderstanding of the process of capitalist accumulation; she constructs her ‘proof’ upon some of the most elementary theoretical errors ever made by a revolutionary Marxist. (This criticism is made by Left-wing Social Democrats such as Lenin and Pannekoek in their contemporary reviews of Luxemburg’s, The Accumulation of Capital.)

“Luxemburg’s basic mistake is that she takes the total capitalist as an individual capitalist. She underrates this total capitalist. Therefore she does not understand that the process of realisation occurs gradually. For the same reason she portrays the accumulation of capital as an accumulation of money capital.” (Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, p.201-202).

Luxemburg confuses the total capitalist with the individual capitalist because she carries over to Marx’s scheme of expanded reproduction the assumption from his scheme of simple reproduction that the “total amount of variable capital, and hence the also the consumption of the workers, must remain fixed and constant” (Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy, Monthly Review Press, New York (1964), p.204).

“But to except such an assumption means to exclude expanded reproduction from the very beginning. If, however, one has excluded expanded reproduction from the start in one’s logical proof, it naturally becomes easy to let it disappear at the end of it, for here one is dealing with the simple reproduction of a simple logical error.” (Bukharin, op.cit., p.166).

Luxemburg makes the incredible argument that the total surplus value to be accumulated has to be matched by an equal amount of money for its realisation to occur. [12] [172]

 “In each given moment, the total surplus value destined for accumulation appears in various forms: in the form of commodity, money, functioning means of production and labour-power. Therefore, the surplus value in money form should never be identified with the total surplus value.” (Bukharin, op.cit., p.180).

“From this - as we believe - results the manner in which she explains imperialism. Indeed, if the total capitalist is equated with the typical individual capitalist, the first of course cannot be his own consumer. Furthermore, if the amount of gold is equivalent to the value of the additional number of commodities, this gold can only come from abroad (as it is obvious nonsense to assume a corresponding production of gold). Finally, if all capitalists have to realise their surplus value at once (without it wandering from one pocket to another, which is strictly forbidden), they need ‘third persons’, etc” (ibid. p.202).

However, even if she did succeed in showing that an excess of surplus value arose on the basis of this schema, she would prove NOTHING because she would be drawing conclusions that were “derived from a schema having no objective validity” (Paul Mattick, ‘Luxemburg versus Lenin’, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Merlin Press (1978), p.38). That is, Luxemburg’s principal mistake is to think that Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction is supposed to portray concrete capitalism (ibid. p37).

“In a reproduction scheme built on values, different rates of profit must arise in each department of the schema. There is in reality, however, a tendency for the different rates of profit to be equalised to average rates, a circumstance which is already embraced in the concept of production prices. So that if one wants to take the schema as a basis for criticising or granting the possibility of realising surplus value, it would first have to transformed into a [production] price schema.” (Henryk Grossmann, quoted in Paul Mattick, op. cit., p.37).

And this has the following consequences: “If one takes into account this average rate of profit, Rosa Luxemburg’s disproportionality argument loses all value, since one department sells above and the other under value and on the basis of production price the undisposable part of the surplus value may vanish.” (Paul Mattick, op.cit. p.38).

Superficially, Grossmann would seem to follow Marx’s falling rate of profit theory because he uses Otto Bauer’s schema, which has a rising organic composition of capital in both departments of social reproduction. However, the schema also assumes a fixed and constant rate of surplus value for the two departments; hence we have “two conditions which completely contradict and neutralise one another” (Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit. p.99), “an impossibility, nay an absurdity” (Paul Mattick, ‘The Permanent Crisis’, Council Correspondence, Nov. 1934, No.2, New Essays, vol.1, 1934-1935, Greenwood Reprint Corporation, Westport, Connecticut (1970), p.6). (Though these assumptions were adequate for showing the falseness of Luxemburg’s so-called realisation problem.)

Under these assumptions, eventually, “there will reach a point where the organic composition of total composition is so large and the rate of profit so small, that to enlarge on the existing constant capital would absorb the whole of the surplus value produced” (The Economic Foundations of Capitalist Decadence’, Revolutionary Perspectives 2 (Old Series), p.27).  Thus the crisis results from an absolute lack of surplus value.

In Grossmann’s analysis, therefore, the fall in the rate of profit is only an accompanying factor, not the cause of the crisis.

“How could a percentage, a pure number such as the rate of profit produce the breakdown of the real system? - A falling rate of profit is thus only an index that reveals the relative fall in the mass of profit.” (Grossmann, op.cit. p.103).

Though his argument is logically impeccable, it proceeds from false premises. Grossmann is unaware that, in using Bauer’s schema, he is committing the same fundamental error that he and Paul Mattick correctly criticise Luxemburg for: he derives conclusions from a schema that has no objective validity. For if one wants to take Bauer’s scheme as a basis for criticising or granting the possibility of an under-accumulation of capital, one would have to transform it into a production price schema. Grossmann fails to realise the importance of the fact that, in volume III of Capital, Marx analyses the fall in the rate of profit after he investigates the transformation of values into prices of production; namely that as the latter is responsible for the formation of the average rate of profit, capitalism’s tendency towards crisis cannot therefore be deduced independently of this process. What Grossmann overlooks is that Bauer’s schema, by virtue of its two contradictory assumptions, thereby excludes the average rate of profit; and that this consequently negates any conclusions he draws.

In addition, not only does Grossmann depart from Marx in ignoring the consequences of the average rate of profit, he also does so through his view that the capitalists are compelled to increase constant capital owing to the “growth of capital demanded by technology” (Pannekoek, op.cit. p.69). Grossmann argues that, “when the rate of profit becomes less than the rate of growth demanded by technical progress then capitalism must break down” (ibid., p.69). This concept, which is foreign to both Capital and Marxism in general, furnishes Grossmann with the principal reason why capitalist accumulation advances inevitably towards its collapse. In his theory, therefore, the falling rate of profit is not the cause of the crisis, merely an accompanying factor. He draws the logical conclusion that capital is exported because it is impossible to use it at home rather than because of higher profits abroad (ibid., p.73).

Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s conclusions about the cause of the capitalist crisis and the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation are therefore meaningless since they are derived from schemas that have no objective validity. These schemes are worthless for an analysis of these matters since they are based on assumptions that are historically and logically absurd for their resolution.

These erroneous crisis theories stem from fragmented and one-sided views of capitalist accumulation. Whereas Marx explains that the crisis arises from the unity of the production, circulation and distribution of capital, Luxemburg and Grossmann separate, respectively, the circulation of capital, and the production of capital from the capitalist production process as a whole.

 Luxemburg’s revision of Marx’s economics is cruder and more extreme than Grossmann’s. It is cruder because of the elementary mistakes she makes about capitalist accumulation; it is more extreme because she sees the fundamental barrier to capitalist accumulation being outside the capitalist economy whereas he at least agrees with Marx that the “true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself” (Karl Marx, Capital vol. III, p.358). Though Luxemburg succumbs to empiricism in her explanation of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation, she follows the Marxist method in analysing the historical development of capitalism from the viewpoint of the capitalist system as a whole. Rather than empiricism, Grossmann’s interpretation of the capitalist crisis reflects an idealist perspective. He argues that the real cause of the capitalist crisis is the mirror image of what it appears to be: the crisis appears as an overproduction of commodities, i.e., an absolute excess of surplus value, therefore the crisis is actually due to an absolute lack of surplus value. It is true that Grossmann has some insight into the method of Capital, but this insight is used to justify his idealist vision of capitalism.

Only Marx’s Capital explains the fundamental contradictions of capitalist accumulation, which underpin the historical evolution of capitalism. Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories explain neither.

Only Marx’s analysis explains the fundamental contradictions of capitalist accumulation and thus the economic foundations of capitalist ascendance and decadence.

Political Consequences

“We would say that any errors on the level of economics tend to reinforce errors deriving from the totality of a group’s politics. Any incoherence in a group’s analysis can open the door to confusions of a more general kind; but we are not dealing with irrevocable fatalities - an analysis of the economic foundations of decadence is part of a more global proletarian standpoint, a standpoint which demands an active commitment to ‘change the world’ - the political conclusions defended by revolutionaries do not derive in a mechanical way from a particular analysis of economics” (‘Marxism and Crisis Theory’, International Review 13, p.35).

In the light of this, I draw the following conclusions.

The principal strength of the analyses of imperialism of Bukharin [13] [173], Luxemburg, Bilan, Paul Mattick [14] [174], the FFCL and the ICC is their recognition of the global nature of capitalist decadence. Conversely, the principal weakness of Pannekoek’s, Lenin’s, the Bordigist’s and the IBRP’s analyses of imperialism is their tendency, in varying degrees, to view capitalist development from the point of view of each nation taken in isolation, to view the world economy as a mere sum of separate national economies. In other words, their analyses of imperialism are partially influenced by the erroneous mechanical stages theory of Social Democracy.

 Luxemburg’s flawed economics encourages a tendency to see an absolute as opposed to a qualitative difference between ascendant and decadent capitalism. This is because in her theory the exhaustion of pre-capitalist markets is logically an impassable barrier to capitalist accumulation. The ICC, for example, sometimes finds it difficult to “see that the tendencies which brought about capitalist decadence don’t just conveniently stop at the beginning of the First World War” (‘The Material Basis of Imperialist War: A Brief Reply to the ICC’, Internationalist Communist Review 13, p.13).

Grossmann’s crisis theory agrees with Luxemburg’s that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation. But as his theory argues that this absolute limit is entirely due to internal capitalist factors, then what the expansion of capitalism after World War II logically implies is that capitalism was still in its ascendant period. Hence his theory encourages a tendency to see mere quantitative differences between ascendant and decadent capitalism.

However, above all else it is the rigour and coherence of a current’s political program that is the determining influence on the clarity and insight of its analyses. Thus the ICC’s flawed economics has a much less adverse effect on the clarity of their analysis than it otherwise would owing to the strength of their political program, a program that draws out all the consequences of capitalist decadence.

Conversely, it is the political programs of the IBRP and, to a greater degree, the Bordigists, which embody incoherence, ambiguity and error. These weaknesses reflect the inability of the former current to draw out all the consequences of decadence [15] [175] and that of the latter to recognise that capitalism as a global system is decadent at all [16] [176]. These currents, particularly the Bordigists, therefore tend to see mere quantitative differences between ascendant and decadent capitalism.

CA.

IR105, 2nd Quarter 2001

The economic convulsions and avalanche of job losses that are sweeping over workers throughout the world and principally in the most industrialised countries are casting a clear shadow of doubt over the endless propaganda about the “good health” and “bright future” of this social system and generating a justified concern about the future.

Given this situation, it is of great importance to discuss the theories that exist in the revolutionary movement and to see which gives the most coherent explanation of the present state of things and the perspectives. The correspondence that we are publishing here is part of this process. The comrade does not have any doubts about the decadence of capitalism. The starting point for the comrade is the fundamental position put forward by the 1st Congress of the Communist International: “A new system has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the Communist revolution of the proletariat…the present period is that of the decomposition and collapse of the whole of the world capitalist system and this will mean the collapse of European civilisation in general if capitalism and its insoluble contradictions are not destroyed”. The comrade also shares the political positions derived from this historical analysis: “The impossibility of authentic reforms and national self-determination, the imperialist nature of all nations, the reactionary nature of all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, the worldwide nature of the proletarian revolution”. The comrade is also very clear that “ The principle strength of Bukharin’s, Luxemburg’s, Bilan’s, Paul Mattick’s, the Communist Left of France and the ICC is that they recognise the global nature of capitalist decadence”. The comrade insists that it is essential to see capitalism in its totality and not partially or abstractly and makes clear that despite the critique he directs at us: “above all else it is the rigour and the coherence of the political programme of the Current that has the determinant influence on the clarity and insight of its analysis”.

It is within this framework that the comrade rejects Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis concerning the theoretical explanation of the capitalist crisis, the comrade believes that the ICC falls into dogmatism about this question and asserts that Marx: “explained the capitalist crisis only in terms of the fall in the rate of profit because this encompasses the total process of capitalist accumulation”.

Our reply will not take up all the questions that are posed. We will limit ourselves to taking up the concrete problems responded to by the two main theories that have developed within the Marxist movement in order to explain the historic crisis of capitalism (the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and the tendency towards overproduction). We will try to demonstrate that they are not contradictory and that from the global and historic point of view it is precisely the second, which emerges from the work of Marx and was later developed by Rosa Luxemburg [1] [195], that provides a clearer explanation, which moreover coherently integrates the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In the same way, we intend to deal with a series of misunderstandings that exist about Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis.

The tendency towards a falling rate of profit

Capitalism has led to the prodigious development of the productivity of human labour in every domain of social activity. For example transport, which under feudalism was limited to the slow and uncertain methods of horse, cart and sail, has been increased to once unthinkable speeds by capitalism; successively by the railways, steam ships, aeroplanes or high-speed trains. The Communist Manifesto takes note of this enormous dynamism of the capitalist system: “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all the former exoduses of nations and crusades (…) The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood (…) The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. Therefore, whilst “the conservation of the old modes of production was the prime conditions of existence of all the proceeding classes”, the bourgeoisie on the contrary “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and, thereby, the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society” (idem)

The adorers of capital unilaterally highlight this feature of the system attributing it to the “enterprise spirit”, to the impetuous “innovator”, which “freedom of trade” has supposedly liberated in the individual. Marx clearly recognised the historic contribution of capitalism, but he also exposed these siren songs.

Firstly, he showed the material base of these prodigious transformations. Capitalism contains a permanent tendency for Constant Capital (machines, buildings, installations, raw materials etc.) to grow proportionately much more than Variable Capital (workers’ labour). The first is constituted by the coagulation of previously realised labour, that is to say, dead labour, whilst the second sets in motion the means for creating new products, that is living labour. Under capitalism the weight of dead labour tends to progressively increase to the detriment of living labour. That is, Constant Capital (dead labour) increases proportionately much more than Variable Capital (living labour). This is the dominant tendency in the growth of the organic composition of Capital.

What are the social and historical consequences of this tendency? Marx exposed the dark and destructive side of what the propagandists of capital unilaterally present as Progress, with a capital “P”. In the first place, it engendered a permanent tendency towards unemployment, which in the decadence of capitalism has tended to become chronic [2] [196]. But furthermore, he demonstrates that the increase in the organic composition of capital means that globally the mass of exploited living labour tends to diminish and with it the capitalists’ source of surplus value also diminishes: the surplus value extracted from workers thus, as Mitchell showed in the above cited work, “ONE CONSUMPTION ALONE excites its interest and passion, stimulates its energy and its will, gives it reason to exist: the CONSUMPTION OF LABOUR POWER!” (International Review no102, page 10).

In the words of Marx: “this gradual growth in the constant capital, in relation to the variable, must necessarily result in a gradual fall in the general rate of profit, given that the rate of surplus-value, or the level of exploitation of labour by capital remain the same” (Capital Vol. 3, Part 3, Chapter 13: “The Law Itself”, emphasis in the original, page 318, Penguin Books, 1981). That is to say, the development of the productivity of labour which is translated into an increase in the organic composition of capital has as it counterpart the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Therefore, Mitchell affirms that “ the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall generates cyclical crisis and will be a potent ferment of the decomposition of the decadent capitalist economy” [3] [197].

Limits to the tendency towards a falling rate of profit

In the historic epoch of the expansion and apogee of capitalism (the 19th century), where humanity underwent an amazing succession of endless inventions and developments that transformed every aspect of social life, Marx was able to see in this progress, in a rigorously scientific way, the factors of the historic crisis and decomposition of a system which was then at its peak. He was the first to discover this law and systemise its possible historical consequences. But it was precisely his rigour and meticulousness that led him to also see its limitations, the factors that counter-acted it and its own contradictions: “If we consider the enormous development in the productive powers of social labour over the last 30 years (…) then instead of the problem that occupied previous economists, the problem of explaining the fall in the rate of profit, we have the opposite problem of explaining why this fall is not greater or faster. Counteracting influences must be at work, checking and cancelling the effect of the general law and giving it simply the character of a tendency” (Capital vol. 3, Part 3, chapter 14: “The counteracting factors”, page 338).

This question heads up Chapter XIV of Part 3 of Vol. 3 of Capital, which is titled “Counteracting Factors”. In this chapter Marx enumerates six “counteracting factors”:

a)         more intense exploitation of labour

b)         reduction of wages below their value

c)         cheapening of the elements of constant capital

d)         the relative surplus population

e)         foreign trade

f)          the increase in share capital.

Within the limited framework of this reply we cannot make a profound analysis of these counteracting factors, their range and validity. But we must highlight the most important: while the rate of profits falls, the mass of surplus-value tends to increase [4] [198] that is, the capitalists try to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit by increasing workers’ exploitation. In response to the self-interested thesis of the bourgeoisie, trade-unionists and economists according to which the technical progress and productivity diminish exploitation, Marx showed that “The tendential fall in the rate of profit is linked with a tendential rise in the rate of surplus-value, i.e. in the level of exploitation of labour. Nothing is more absurd, then, than to explain the fall in the rate of profit in terms of a rise in wage rates, even though this too may be an exceptional case. Only when the relationships that form the rate of profit have been understood will statistics be able to put forward genuine analyses of wage-rates in different periods. The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive but rather because it becomes more productive”. (page 347, idem).

This is the reality of the whole of the 20th century where capitalism has intensified the exploitation of the working class in an incredible manner: “It is necessary to note that, despite a certain fall in relation to the last century, the present rate of profit has remained at around 10% - a level that is essentially due to the formidable increase in the rate of exploitation suffered by the workers: for the same working day of 10 hours; if the workers of the 19th century worked 5 hours for himself and 5 for the capitalist (figures frequently reported by Marx) today the worker works 1 hour for himself and 9 for the boss [5] [199]”( “The crisis, are we heading for a new 1929?”, which appeared in Révolution Internationale old series n°6 and 7).

Thus “this theory of crisis [i.e. which explains them by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall] seeks to put forwards the transitory character of the capitalist mode of production and the growing seriousness of the crisis shaking bourgeois society. With this vision one can thus partially interpret the qualitative change that has taken place between the 19th and 20th centuries in the nature of the crisis: the growing gravity of this crisis would be explained by the aggravation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. However this vision is not enough, in our opinion, to explain everything and particularly to provide a satisfactory answer to two questions:

-          Why do crises take the form of market crises?

-          Why, once a certain point has been reached, do crises lead to war, when previously they could be resolved peacefully?”.

The role of the market

Capitalism is not only characterised by its capacity for increasing the productivity of labour. In reality its essential feature is the generalisation of commodity production: “Although commodities have existed in nearly all societies, the capitalist economy is the first to be fundamentally based on the production of commodities. Thus the existence of an ever-increasing market is one of the essential conditions for the development of capitalism. In particular the realisation of surplus-value which comes from the exploitation of the working class is indispensable for the accumulation of capital which is the essential motor-force of the system” (Point 3 of the ICC Platform). Capitalism was not born from the artisan’s intelligence, nor from the inventor’s genius, but from the merchant class. The bourgeoisie arose as a class of traders and throughout its history it has resorted, and continues to resort, to forms of labour of very low productivity:

-          until well into the 19th century slavery was still used;

-          today there is massive use of forced labour by prisoners, for example in the main industrial concentration in the world: the USA6;

-          the continuing exploitation of domestic labour;

-          throughout large epochs diverse forms of forced labour have been used;

-          today child labour is increasingly widespread;

Capitalism’s driving force is to maximise profit and this finds its global framework in the market. However, when we talk about the “market” and “commodity production” it is necessary to be precise. Bourgeois economists present the market as a world of “producers and consumers”, as if capitalism were a regime of simple interchange of commodities where each sells in order to buy the necessities of life. The basis of capitalism is wage labour, i.e. the exploitation of a special commodity, labour power, with the aim of obtaining the largest profit. This determines a specific form of exchange characterised by the following features:

-          the wide scale breaking up of the narrow local or even national framework;

-          the losing of all links with barter or the simple exchange of the commodities of more or less self-sufficient small local communities, in order to take a universal form based on money;

-          it is at the service of the formation and accumulation of capital;

-          it needs, as a condition of its existence, to constantly expand, without ever reaching a point of equilibrium.

It is certain that the market is not the aim of capitalist production. Manufacture is not carried out to satisfy the needs of solvent buyers but rather, in order to obtain surplus-value on an ever-increasing scale. However, surplus-value can only be materialised through the market and there is no other means of obtaining ever growing surplus value apart from through the expansion of the market.

Within the revolutionary movement those who explain the crisis exclusively by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as is the case with the comrade, tend to play down or purely and simply deny the role of the market in the crisis of capitalism. They claim that the market is nothing but the reflection of what takes place in the sphere of production. According to them, the proportional relations between the distinct departments of capitalist production (essentially, department 1 is the means of production and department 2 is the means of consumption) are expressed by an equilibrium or disequilibrium in the market.

This abstract schema totally bypasses the historical conditions in which capitalism has grown and developed. If the market could be compared to a medieval fair where the producers offer their crops or their craft production to consumers who are seeking to obtain or barter for what they need to sustain themselves, then indeed, “the market is a reflection of what happens in the sphere of production”. However, the capitalist market is nothing like this deformed image. Its main foundation is the expropriation of the producers by separating them from their means of livelihood and production, transforming them into proletarians and progressively subjecting them on this basis to the regime of commodity exchange. This struggle against pre-capitalist forms was carried out in the market and for the market and could expand itself without meeting decisive obstacles whilst existing within territories of sufficient size that had not been fully subjected to capitalist production.

Marx and the question of the market

Those who support the “falling rate of profit” explanation usually say that Marx did not consider the question of the market when analysing the cause of the crisis of capitalism. A brief analysis of what Marx really said in Capital and other works shows that this is not the case.

1. He begins by asserting the necessity for commodities to be sold in order for surplus value to be realised and capital valorised. “With the development of this process as expressed in the fall in the profit rate, the mass of surplus-labour thus produced swells to monstrous proportions. Now comes the second act in the process. The total mass of commodities, the total product, must be sold, both the portion which replaces constant and variable capital and that which represents surplus-value” (Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 15 “The development of the law’s internal contradictions”, page 352, our emphasis). He went on to say that: “If this does not happen, or happens only partly, or only at prices that are less than the price of production, then although the worker is certainly exploited, his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist and may even not involve any realisation of the surplus-value extracted, or only a partial realisation; indeed, it may even mean a partial or complete loss of his capital” (idem).

The extraction of surplus value does not finish the process of capitalist production; commodities have to be sold in order to realise the surplus value and to be able to valorise capital. This second part Marx called “The somersault of commodities”, in Volume 1. The extraction of surplus-value (which determines the average rate of profit on the basis of the organic composition of capital) forms a unity with the realisation of surplus-value whose determinant is the general situation of the world market.

2. He defines the market as the global framework for the realisation of surplus value. What are the conditions of this market? Is it merely an external manifestation, a superficial form of an internal structure determined by the proportionality between the different branches of production and general organic composition? This is the idea defended by those who talk of “Marx’s abstract method” and who brand as “empiricism” any efforts to talk about the “market” and such prosaic things as “selling” commodities. But Marx’s response does not go in that direction: “The conditions for immediate exploitation and for the realisation of that exploitation are not identical. Not only are they separate in time and space, they are also separated in theory. The former is restricted only by society’s productive forces, the latter by the proportionality between the different branches of production and by society’s power of consumption” (idem).

3. He made it clear that the capitalist relations of production, based on wage labour, determine the historical limits of the capitalist market. What determines ‘society’s power of consumption’? “This is determined neither by the absolute power of production nor by the absolute power of consumption but rather by the power of consumption within a given framework of antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the vast majority of society to a minimum level, only capable of varying within more or less narrow limits” (idem).

Capitalism is a society of commodity production based on wage labour. This determines a certain limit to the capacity of consumption of the great majority of society – the wage earners: wages have to oscillate more or less around the cost of the social reproduction of labour power. Therefore Marx affirmed clearly in Capital that “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them” (Capital Vol. 3, part 5, Chapter 30 “Money capital and real capital: 1”, page 615). The masses’ capacity to consume is “further restricted by the drive for accumulation, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on a larger scale. This is the law governing capitalist production, arising from the constant revolutions in methods of production themselves, from the devaluation of the existing capital which is always associated with this, and from the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and extend its scale, merely as a means of self-preservation, and on the pain of going under” (Capital Vol. 3, part 3, Chapter 15, “The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit”, page 352).

4. He understood the necessity for the constant expansion of the market within the perspective of the formation of the world market. Marx saw the constant expansion of the market as inevitable, and as an essential condition of capitalist accumulation: “The market, therefore, must be continually extended, so that its relationships and the conditions governing them assume ever more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and becomes ever more uncontrollable. The internal contradiction seeks resolution by extending the external field of production. But the more productivity develops, the more it comes into conflict with the narrow basis on which the relations of consumption rest. It is in no way a contradiction, on this contradictory basis, that excess capital coexists with a growing surplus population; for although the mass of surplus-value produced would rise if these were brought together, yet this would equally heighten the contradiction between the conditions in which this surplus-value was produced and the conditions in which it was realised” (idem page 353).

He saw the formation of the world market as the fundamental historical task of capitalism: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (Communist Manifesto). In the same sense, Lenin said that: “What is important is that capitalism cannot exist and develop without constantly expanding the sphere of its domination, without colonising new countries and drawing old non-capitalist countries into the whirlpool of the world economy” (“The Development of Capitalism in Russia”. Collected Works Vol. 3, page 594).

5. He gave great importance to the market in the development of the crisis. Due to its own relations of production based on wage labour this tendency leads to the aggravation of its contradictions at the same time: “If the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production and for creating a corresponding world market, it is at the same time the constant contradiction between this historical task and the social relations of production corresponding to it” (Marx, Capital Vol. 3, page 359).

Therefore, the evolution of the market is central to the explosion of the crisis: “However, the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense (…) For it is then possible – since the market and production are two independent factors - that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended rapidly enough for production, or that new markets – new extensions of the market – may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 2, pages 524-25. Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1969).

In the Communist Manifesto he puts the question: “In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. How does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented” (The Revolutions of 1848, The Pelican Marx Library, 1978, page 73).

The latter element is very important for understanding the causes of the historic crisis of capitalism, its irreversible decadence. Whereas in previous modes of production the crises were due to under-production (starvation, droughts, epidemics) the crises of capitalism, for the first time in history, have the character of crises of overproduction. The poverty of the majority is not born from the lack of the means of consumption but from their excess. Unemployment and factory closures are not due to the lack of stores or the lack of machinery, but from their abundance. Destruction, stagnation and the threat of the collapse of humanity into barbarity, arise from over-production. This shows us the basis of communism, the task of the new society: to direct the forces of production towards the full satisfaction of human needs freed from the yoke of wage labour and the market.

The contribution of Rosa Luxemburg

Marx analysed the two sides of the coin of the capitalist system as a totality. On one side is the production of surplus value, this determines the rate of profit, the development of productivity of labour and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The other side is the realisation of surplus value and it is on this side of the scales that the market intervenes: the limits of production imposed by capitalism’s relations based on wage labour and the necessity to conquer new markets in order as much to realise surplus value as to obtain new sources of labour (the separation of the producers from their means of production and life and their incorporation into wage labour).

These two sides or to put it more precisely these two contradictions, contain the premises for the convulsions that led capitalism to its decadence and the necessity for the working class to destroy it and to establish communism. Overall, Marx developed a more elaborate formulation of the first “side” but, as we have seen, he did give the second great importance.

One can easily understand this imbalance if one analyses the historical conditions in which Marx lived and struggled. Between 1840 and 1880, the period in which Marx developed his militant activity, the dominant feature of capitalist production was the prodigious acceleration of its technical discoveries, the increasingly vast development of industry. After the exaggerations of 1848 when the Manifesto foresaw a practically definitive crisis, Marx and Engels developed a more circumspect analysis, taking into consideration all factors and beginning a large-scale investigation of the social structure.

On the one hand, the main political battle against the economists and ideologues of the bourgeoisie had two axes: to demonstrate the material bases of production – the exploitation of the workers, the extraction of surplus value - and to demonstrate the historical limits to capitalist production. In relation to the latter aspect, they concentrated on demonstrating that the tendency that the supporters of capitalism praised most – the progress of the productive force of labour- contained within it the germ of the crisis and the decisive convulsions of the system – the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

On the other hand, the problem of the realisation of surplus value, although it raised its head during the cyclical crises, was not directly presented as the decisive historical problem. In 1850 only 10% of the world population lived under the capitalist regime, the system’s capacity for expansion appeared infinite and vast and each cyclical crisis unleashed a new extension of the capitalist terrain. Despite this, Marx understood the gravity of the dynamic contained within these conditions and he highlighted the underlying contradiction between capitalism’s tendency to unlimited production and the inherent necessity of its own social structure to confine the consumption of the great majority of the population within narrow limits.

The situation changed radically at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. The phenomenon of imperialism and worsening imperialist wars appeared and led to the terrible slaughter of 1914. With this, the fundamental theoretical question for understanding the historical crisis of capitalism became the realisation of surplus-value and not simply its production: “it is certain that the overwhelming tendency of capitalist production to penetrate into the non-capitalist countries has acted, since it first set foot on the historical stage, as an incessant spur throughout its development, increasingly gaining in importance, until finally in the phase of imperialism, it has become the predominant and decisive factor in social life for the last quarter of a century” (Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, an Anti-critique).

Rosa Luxemburg used an historical method to elaborate this problem. She did not pose it – as her critics say - as a circumstantial question – how to find “third persons” distinct from capitalists and workers in order to find markets for the commodities they could not sell – but as a global question: what are the historical conditions for capitalist accumulation? Her answer was that: “Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang - the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns - and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-European civilisation ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. This is the setting for the accumulation of capital” (Rosa Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital, page 368, Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).

She distinguishes three parts to this process: “the struggle against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation” (idem, page 368). Although these three parts are present throughout the life of capitalism, nevertheless one of them has more preponderance in each of its historical phases. Thus in the phase of primitive accumulation – the genesis of English capital between the 16th and 17th centuries so brilliantly studied by Marx – the dominant feature was the struggle against the natural economy. The period from the 17th century to the first third of the 19th century was generally dominated by the second aspect – the struggle against commodity economy. In the last thirty years of the 19th century the crucial factor was the third aspect: the worsening competition over the division of the planet.

With this analysis she underlined that: “The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system” (idem).

From this historical and global point of view she put forwards a critique of the schemas of expanded reproduction that Marx had used in order to represent the regular process of capitalist production. She did not question their validity in relation to the concrete and immediate aim that Marx had given them. Marx demonstrated against Adam Smith and the classical bourgeois economists that expanded reproduction was possible and exposed the error that they committed in denying the existence of constant capital. In effect, not recognising the existence of constant capital makes it impossible to understand the continuity of production and the role of accumulated labour in this and consequently the accumulation of capital.

Neither did she criticise Marx’s schemas because they do not represent immediate reality – in contrast to what the comrade thinks when he attributes a “basic error” to Rosa Luxemburg. She understood perfectly well the legitimacy of the abstract model that Marx developed with the concrete aim of demonstrating that expanded reproduction was possible.

What Luxemburg criticises is the assumption that all the extracted surplus value is consumed within the ambit formed by the capitalists and workers. This assumption could be valid if you only wanted to explain that the accumulation of capital is possible in a general way, but it does not help if you are trying to understand the process of historical development and consequently the general crisis of the capitalist system.

Therefore, Rosa Luxemburg argued that there was a fraction of the total surplus-value extracted from the workers that is not consumed by the capitalists and explained that its realisation took place through the struggle to incorporate pre-capitalist territories into the commodity system and capitalist wage labour. In this way she was trying to respond to a very concrete reality of capitalism in its climactic period (1873-1914): “If capitalist production constituted a sufficient market for itself and allowed the expansion of the total of accumulated value, it would mean that another phenomenon of modern development – the struggle for distant markets and for the exportation of capital, that are such significant expressions of imperialism – are totally incomprehensible. Why so much ruin? Why conquer the colonies and why the present struggles for the swamps of the Congo and the deserts of Mesopotamia? It would be much more convenient for capital to stay at home and lead the good life. Krupp could produce happily for Thyssen, Thyssen for Krupp, they would not have to worry about anything but investing capital at one time or another in their operations and mutually expanding indefinitely. The result is that the historical movement of capital is simply incomprehensible and with it, present-day imperialism”  (Rosa Luxemburg, The Anti-critique). 

Marx posed exactly the same problem when he wrote: “to say that only the capitalists can exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves is to completely forget the character of capitalist production and to forget that it is a question of the valorisation of capital, not consuming it” (op cit).

It is necessary to make it clear that Rosa Luxemburg did not see the pre-capitalist territories as the “third persons” that the capitalists need in order to get rid of their surplus commodities as some of her critics reproach her for:

“In detail, capital in its struggle against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends:

1.   to gain immediate possession of important resources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc

2.   to ‘liberate’ labour power and to coerce it into service.

3.   to introduce a commodity economy.

4.   to separate trade and agriculture” (The Accumulation of Capital, page 369)

The apologists for the capitalist system pretend that it is a system based on the regular exchange of commodities, which depends on a gradual equilibrium of sale and demand that develops with the growing economy. In response to this Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that: “…capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced – the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light, accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and wage labourer. In both its phases, however, it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the limits of commodity exchange. Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialects of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule” (op cit chapter XXXI, page 452).

The exposing of this ultimate aspect – to reveal the world of violence and destruction that the simple regular exchange of commodities contained - was Marx’s aim in Capital, but faced with the imperialist epoch and the entry of the system into its decadence it was essential to polarise around: “The other aspect of the accumulation of capital [that] concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loans system – a policy of spheres of interest - and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed” (idem).

In the second part of this correspondence, we will publish a further letter that we have received from the comrade, containing his explanation of the reconstruction periods and his criticism of the ICC’s dogmatism on economic questions. Our reply will further develop our defence of Luxemburg’s analyses, and respond to these criticisms.

Adalen 2.4.2001

The Franco-German public TV channel Arte recently ran a long documentary with the eloquent title: "Les dessous de la guerre du Golfe" (which translates something like "The truth behind the Gulf War). At the same time as the documentary, a number of articles appeared in various weeklies full of "revelations" about the preparation and execution of the war. The title of the French weekly Marianne (22/28 January 2001) was even more explicit: "The lies about the Gulf War". Why are these "revelations" coming out now, ten years after the event? Why, after the tons of lies during the war, that accompanied the tons of bombs, are some fractions of the bourgeoisie bringing into the open the criminal manoeuvring by the elder Bush's administration in the preparation, setting up, and conduct of the war, from the outset in the summer of 1990 until February 1991 and even to this very day?

The official version

"The Gulf War was a military operation carried out during January and February 1991 by the United States and their Allies, acting under the authority of the United Nations, against Iraq, with the aim of ending the occupation of Kuwait by the troops of Saddam Hussein's army, which had invaded the country on 2nd August 1990. The United Nations Security Council demanded the withdrawal of Iraqi troops immediately, on 2nd August, then declared an economic, financial, and military embargo ("Operation Desert Shield"), which then became a blockade. On 29th November, a further resolution by the Security Council authorised member states to use force, if Iraqi troops had not withdrawn from Kuwait by 15th January 1991. On 17th January, the anti-Iraqi coalition, based in Saudi Arabia under American command and made up of troops from the USA, Britain, France, and some twenty other allied countries, began Operation Desert Storm, bombing Iraqi and Kuwaiti military targets. From the 24th to 28th February a victorious ground offensive towards Kuwait City put an end to the war on the front. Iraq lost several tens of thousands of troops and civilians killed, against less than 200 casualties for the coalition. Two thirds of Iraqi military capacity were destroyed. The war ended officially on 11th April, 1991, with Saddam Hussein's acceptance of the conditions laid down by the Security Council, in particular the destruction of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, and its long and medium range missiles"1.

This is the kind of account that we can see flourishing in the school text books. Everything is there to make us think that so-called historical "objectivity" is being respected. This is more or less what we were told ten years ago (except for the casualty figures).

The war was justified by the defence of sacrosanct international law, trampled underfoot by the "evil" Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. This happened at the very moment when the collapse of the Eastern bloc was supposed to have opened up for humanity a radiant future of "peace and prosperity". At any rate, this is what we were promised, and this is what the US president of the day expressed in the phrase "a new world order". The warmonger and his refusal to respect international law had to be stopped by whatever means necessary. The UN, international forum of "peace", became the scene on which, from embargo to blockade, a sinister diplomatic farce was staged to condition the world's population (in other words the proletariat) to accept the coming war. Finally, the war itself, supposed to be a "clean" surgical war, where the only people killed were the "bad guys". Officially, the war came to an end in April 1991, but in reality its epilogue has not yet been written, since for ten years the American bourgeoisie has played the Lone Ranger (sometimes accompanied by its British acolyte), regularly using Saddam (or rather the Iraqi population) as a punching ball to flex its muscles, in a world which since the war has plunged ever deeper into barbarism2.

"The truth revealed"

Today, some parts of the bourgeois press recognise the truth of what the ICC was saying ten years ago. We are not "proud" of the fact - this is not what interests us. But what does interest us, is more than ever to put forward the need for revolutionaries to ground their analyses in the marxist method, to remain vigilant in the face of events, to subject our analyses to the test of reality, to be critical, and not to change our orientations like weather-cocks, with every shift in the wind. This is a precondition for the advance of the class struggle, and one of the main functions of the revolutionary organisation. We are also interested in understanding why the bourgeoisie has decided today to reveal what was previously hidden: to understand the workings of what one might call the "democratic Goebbels"3.

Washington's trap

This is what the Arte documentary, and the review Marianne, say: "Washington's trap: Washington barely reacted when Saddam spoke of invading his one-time province", the US insisted on the fact that it "had no defence agreement with the Kuwaitis". "It was a manoeuvre to trick him", and "'We can say that after the invasion, the US did not want a diplomatic solution', concludes Dr Halliday of the UN".

And this is what we said in early September 1990, one month after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam's troops and well before the outbreak of war: "But this is not the end of their hypocrisy and cynicism. It appears that the US, discreetly but deliberately, allowed Iraq to embark on this military adventure. True or false - and it is doubtless true - this enlightens us as to the habits and practices of the bourgeoisie, its lies and manipulation, the use it makes of events". "Iraq had no choice. The country was driven to carry out this policy. And the USA let it do so, encouraging and exploiting Saddam Hussein's military adventure, conscious of the growing chaos in the world situation, conscious of the need to make an example". In the summer of 1990, the bourgeois press itself had very discreetly revealed this information. And here we can see very well how the propaganda machine works under the democratic dictatorship: even after some papers had given a veiled account of the trap that the US had laid for Saddam Hussein, they then echoed the anti-Iraqi coalition's military propaganda almost to a man. These hypocrites recognise this today: "This time, the US Army ensured that the journalists would remain 'loyal'. 'The government succeeded in keeping the press at arm's length. In fact, you never knew what was going on', says Paul Sullivan, president of the help centre for Gulf War veterans (?) For four months, they played at frightening themselves with the idea that the Iraqi army, 'the world's fourth largest', remained a dangerous adversary?" (Marianne). "This gross blindness [sic] did not keep Western journalists from writing reams about [Saddam's] diabolical talents for manoeuvre? The Western press went on endlessly about the occupying army's real or supposed outrages. For example, it published the story of a 'young woman of the people', witness to unmentionable horrors. This 'survivor' was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington?". And so, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2nd August, everything was done to "condition" public opinion and make it accept what was to follow. And the journalists, whether with their agreement or more or less unbeknownst to them, played their part to the full.

But what the journalists, with their claims to be "honest" today, don't say, is that the US trap was laid above all for their "allies" of the day, in other words for the other great powers.

In an article in our International Review4 dated November 1990, we took position at greater length on the situation created by the Gulf crisis, before it turned to war. Our analysis was based on positions we had adopted previously, where we put forward the fact that the collapse of the Eastern bloc had brought about the disappearance of the Western bloc, and the development within it of centrifugal tendencies, a tendency of each of the major powers to "look after number one". The so-called "new international order" was thus nothing but a sinister farce. In laying its trap for Iraq, US policy was principally aimed not at Iraq, nor at the Middle East region, nor even at oil, but at the other major powers, above all at France - which was forced to confront its long-time Iraqi ally - while Germany and Japan were forced to cough up financial support for the war effort. The USSR was already in a state of disintegration, and a few diplomatic crumbs were enough to give it its orders. But at the end of 1990, "The US succeeded in creating a facade of unity among the 'international community' in August 1990 by provoking the 'Gulf Crisis' against the 'madman Saddam'. But barely two months later, every member of the 'international community' is openly out to defend their own interests" (International Review n°64). By the end of October, Saddam may have begun to understand the trap that the US government had drawn him into; at all events, perhaps "because he was aware of the rifts between the different countries" (International Review no.64), he played on the obvious disagreements within the Western coalition: at the end of October 1990, he freed all the French hostages, and around the same time received the visit of Germany's ex-chancellor Willy Brandt (also followed by the release of the German hostages).

In fact, the US used Iraq, at a moment when its status as the world's only super-power was bound to be called into question to "demonstrate its power and determination to the other developed countries" (ibid) by inflicting a brutal and bloody punishment on Iraq. In the same article, under the heading "The opposition between the US, seconded by Britain, and the others", we wrote: "With the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc, the planet's entire political-military and geo-strategic balance of forces has been overthrown. And this situation has not only opened a period of complete chaos in the countries and regions of the old Eastern bloc, it has also accelerated everywhere the tendencies to chaos, threatening the world capitalist 'order' whose main beneficiaries are the United States. The latter have been the first to react. They (?) provoked the 'Gulf crisis' in August 1990, not only in order to gain a definitive foothold in the region, but above all (?) to make an example intended to serve as a warning to any who might be tempted to oppose their position as the dominant super-power in the world capitalist arena" (idem).

War breaks out: the media stand to attention

By January 1991, the USA had succeeded in establishing its mastery of the UN coalition. A deluge of bombs rained down on Iraq. The cynicism of the gangsters running the coalition went so far as to call this a "clean war". "According to the Pentagon, these raids were extremely precise. That is completely untrue. In the space of 41 days, 85,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq, equivalent to 7½ Hiroshimas! Between 150,000 and 200,000 people were killed, mostly civilians" (Ramsey Clark, ex-US Attorney General, in Marianne and the Arte documentary). "In fact, the coalition did far more than wipe out the Iraqi war machine: it methodically destroyed its economic infrastructure".

The press collaborated, almost without hesitation, with the governments of the different countries at war. It was not enough for the press to accuse the Iraqi regime and its bloodstained dictator5: they put themselves under the command of the coalition's military. We should remember the TV documentaries, with their civilian and military experts and their erudite speeches on the "highly dangerous" Iraqi army, supposedly the world's fourth most powerful. These same journalists inundated us with details of Baghdad's terrifying weapons, capable of delivery throughout the "civilised" world. We were told how the bloodthirsty Saddam's armies were killing babies in the crèches of Kuwait. On the Western side, by contrast, our nice pilots would take care only to destroy the strategic targets of the hated power. Today the weekly review Marianne confirms the media's contemptible subjection and complicity: "For four months, they played at frightening themselves with the idea that the Iraqi army remained a dangerous adversary. They talked of converted pesticide factories, of purchases of enriched uranium, the range of the 'super-cannon'. Nobody, it seemed, dared to put forward the most obvious hypothesis: that this swaggering braggart [Saddam] was simply as stupid as he was stubborn. The real specialist military historians were not duped by all this conditioning: 'exposed in the open desert, the Iraqi army will not hold out for one hour against the coalition's firepower'. (?) Thoroughly conditioned, Western opinion swallowed the fiction of the 'smart bombs', and bombardments reduced to the strict minimum" (Marianne). Nor did the manipulation stop there. the US encouraged the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and the Shiites in the south, to rebel against Saddam. "On 3rd March, General Schwarzkopf accepted the Iraqi surrender, allowing them to keep their helicopters [in order to put down the rebellion]6. For weeks, the CIA radio had been calling for an insurrection, and yet the Allies didn't budge when Saddam attacked the rebels with the best units of the Republican Guard, miraculously spared by the bombers" (ibid).

Why are the media "revealing all" today?

In these quotes, Marianne speaks of "conditioning". This task fell to the media in general, and to the television in particular. We have been able to judge what the "democratic" bourgeoisie means by "freedom of the press", above all in vital moments like the Gulf War. All those defenders of "press freedom" unhesitatingly put themselves under military censorship for the duration. And should one of them be tempted to play at Tintin in search of the truth or a fabulous scoop, the army was always there to call him to order. As Marianne says in its own way: "Nobody, it seemed, dared to put forward the most obvious hypothesis".

We can clearly see the workings of the propaganda services in the democratic states. When events require silence, then nothing important filters out. Instead we are fed all kinds of lies, half-truths, manipulations, all tarted up with the opinions of "independent" experts, university specialists and the like, and made all the more credible by the free "tone" of the press in the democratic countries. After the events, little by little, "everything can be brought into the open", or almost. The most popular media (the TV) is inundated by an avalanche of dis-information. Ten years later, the "truth" can only be found in reviews of limited circulation, or on the low-audience TV channels. We have seen the same mechanism at work in 1995 during the genocide in Rwanda, and above all during the last war in ex-Yugoslavia (Kosovo), where the Gulf media model struck again.

Following the Gulf War, and after handing the Kurd and Shiite populations over to Saddam Hussein's hired killers, the "great democracies" had the incredible cynicism to launch their famous "humanitarian interventions", "flying to the rescue of innocent populations". We have been served up the "duty of humanitarian interference" ad nauseam. The Gulf War has been a kind of template for all the imperialist campaigns that have succeeded it around the world.

If a part of the truth is published today, it is essentially because the ruling class needs to justify its system. We are supposed to believe that such openness is only possible in "democratic" capitalism. The ability to "say everything in a democracy" is used to justify those occasions when everything must be manipulated, deformed, or hidden.

But there is another reason why certain media are publishing such facts today. All these articles and documentaries have one thing in common: the US state appears in them as the sole guilty party. Although all the great powers share the responsibility for the massacres caused by the war, it is true that it was the US that led the "crusade", that prepared the trap and sprang it, and that provided most of the coalition's armed power. Certain European powers - especially France and Germany, for whom the USA is the main rival on the world imperialist scene - have every interest today in minimising their own responsibility and exposing the savagery and cynicism of "American imperialism" (which of course are real enough).

Revolutionary intervention

Obviously, we also get our information from the bourgeois press. Even in 1990 some papers gave a limited coverage to the manipulation. Thereafter, the deluge of lies was such that what we said in our press made some people (including those in good faith, even including some militants of the Communist Left) think that we had gone completely off the rails, that we were obsessed with machiavellian plots.

But the news in itself is not the most important thing. What is important is the method used to analyse events, and we use the marxist method. If we were able to understand what was going on in the Middle East during 1990-91, it is because we had worked to analyse the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the decomposition of capitalism. Revolutionaries are not, and cannot have, "secret informers". Our strength lies in our attachment to our class, the proletariat, to its history, and to the marxist method which it has forged.

Nor should we be under any illusions. Revolutionaries today only publish under surveillance. Our only protection is not the "freedom of the press", but the strength and the struggle of our class.

During the events themselves, only revolutionaries were able to show what was at stake, and so to denounce the barbarity of the war and the ruling class' manipulation of the truth. Some fractions of the bourgeoisie denounced the barbarism visited on Iraq, but for nationalist (anti-American), or even frankly pro-Iraqi reasons (as was the case with certain leftist groups). Only the groups of the Communist Left defended the internationalist proletarian position during the war. And among these groups, only the ICC was able to highlight what was really at stake in the situation. The trap set for Iraq was pointless if all that was at stake was oil. But its purpose becomes clear when we consider that what was really at stake, was US leadership in the situation following the collapse of the bloc system7. And it is only in this context that the question of oil gains its full importance, as an element in overall imperialist policy.

In terms of its propaganda and "news" the bourgeoisie does everything it can to prevent the working class - which alone can put an end to the bourgeoisie and its system - from becoming aware of what is at stake. Its efforts are redoubled whenever the mortal economic crisis affecting the system for the last thirty years, or events like the Gulf War are involved. As far as their ideological capacities are concerned, their ability to lie, hide, and deform reality, the democratic bourgeoisie has nothing to learn from the propaganda specialists of totalitarian regimes. Revolutionaries have a duty to denounce, not only imperialist barbarism, but also the mechanisms whereby the bourgeoisie tries to anaesthetise the proletariat by stultifying it with mendacious propaganda.

PA, 30/03/2001

1 This quote is taken from the Encyclopaedia Universalis. Its articles are written by eminent historians, and we can suppose that the chapters in the school text books used to indoctrinate the young generations will be written in the same way.

2 This account does not mention the extras who served to complete the scenario: the so-called "anti-imperialists" and pacifists. Some fractions of the European bourgeoisie (from the extreme right to the extreme left, including in France the "national-republicans" and other "defenders of national sovereignty) stirred up anti-American feeling to express their disagreement with the policy of the right or left wing governments in power in Europe at the time. In general, all these bourgeois fractions that criticised the anti-Iraqi coalition pointed to oil as the main cause of the war.

France was then under President Mitterrand's socialist government. The only member of the government to express any reticence at the anti-Iraq coalition was the left national-republican Chevènement. In Spain, Felipe Gonzales' socialist government also took part in the anti-Iraqi coalition, despite the whining of certain socialists. It is worth noting that in Germany, the Greens were out-and-out pacifists. Today, they are in government. during the last war in Yugoslavia (1999), they were unhesitatingly in favour of the bombing of Serbia. One good thing about the German Greens, is that they save us the need for lengthy analyses of the real nature of pacifism. It is enough to look at their actions.

3 Dr Goebbels was the German Nazi regime's minister for propaganda and information. If we use this expression, it is because Goebbels has since become the archetypal mastermind of the bourgeois state's propaganda indoctrination and manipulation. But, as this article aims to show, there is no shortage of similar examples in Stalinist or democratic regimes.

4 "Against the spiral of military barbarism, there is only one solution: the development of the class struggle", in International Review no.64, 1st Quarter 1991.

5 Indeed, right up until the moment of the Gulf crisis, the Western press had sung Saddam's praises, depicting him as a "modern" ruler, and above all as someone who should be supported against the ambitions of the Iranian ayatollahs during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1988, Western governments supported Saddam's suppression of the Kurds using chemical weapons, because at the time he was a key element against Iran.

6 Marianne goes on to say that it was "a bit as if the Allies, in the winter of 1945, had stopped at the Rhine, leaving Hitler enough weapons to deal with any eventual uprisings". But it is not "a bit as if"; this is exactly what the Allies did in Italy in 1944: they stopped their northward advance, in order to leave the fascist regime's hands free to crush the workers' strikes and insurrection that had broken out there.

7 Read "The proletarian political milieu confronted with the Gulf War" (01/11/90), in International Review no.64, and our "Appeal to the proletarian political milieu" in no.67 (July 1991).

The Dutch communist left is one of the major components of the revolutionary current which broke away from the degenerating Communist International in the 1920s. Well before Trotsky's Left Opposition, and in a more profound way, the communist left had been able to expose the opportunist dangers which threatened the International and its parties and which eventually led to their demise. In the struggle for the intransigent defence of revolutionary principles, this current, represented in particular by the KAPD in Germany, the KAPN in Holland, and the left of the Communist Party of Italy animated by Bordiga, came out against the International's policies on questions like participation in elections and trade unions, the formation of 'united fronts' with social democracy, and support for national liberation struggles. It was against the positions of the communist left that Lenin wrote his pamphlet Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder; and this text drew a response in Reply to Lenin, written by one of the main figures of the Dutch left, Herman Gorter.

In fact, the Dutch left, like the Italian left, had been formed well before the first world war, as part of the same struggle waged by Luxemburg and Lenin against the opportunism and reformism which was gaining hold of the parties of the Second International. It was no accident that Lenin himself, before reverting to centrist positions at the head of the Communist International, had, in his book State and Revolution, leaned heavily on the analyses of Anton Pannekoek, who was the main theoretician of the Dutch left. The continuity and experience of the Dutch left in the combat for the defence of revolutionary positions led it to become the main theoretical inspiration for the German left (KAPD and AAU), which it survived in the 1930s in the shape of the GIK (Group of Internationalist Communists) animated by Pannekoek and Canne-Meijer. After the disappearance of the GIK in 1940, the 'council communist' (or 'councilist') current - a name which the German-Dutch left gave itself in opposition to 'party communism' or 'state communism' - had a certain renaissance with the formation of the Spartacusbond and to some extent of the group Daad en Gedachte. Spartacusbond disappeared at the end of the 1970s, while Daad and Gedachte suspended publication in 1998.

Despite its weaknesses, in particular its underestimation of the role of communist organisations which was to play a big role in the gradual disappearance of this current, the Dutch left made a vital contribution to the revolutionary movement during the terrible counter-revolution which descended on the working class after the revolutionary wave of 197-23. This contribution was taken up in the most complete way after the second world war by the Gauche Communiste de France, whose positions were the basis for those of the International Communist Current. The GCF emerged from the Italian left, which had achieved a high level of clarity thanks to its correct conception of the role of communist fractions in a period of counter-revolution. This is why this document is an indispensable complement to The Communist Left of Italy, already published by the ICC, for all those who want to know the real history of the communist movement behind all the falsifications which Stalinism and Trotskyism have erected around it.

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In the last article in this series (‘1924-28: The Thermidor of Stalinist state capitalism’, International Review 102) we looked at the attempts of the various currents on the left wing of the Bolshevik party to understand and combat the degeneration and demise of the October revolution. As these groups gradually succumbed to the merciless terror of the Stalinist counter-revolution, the focus of this political and theoretical struggle shifted to the international arena, particularly to western Europe. The next two articles will concentrate on the attempts of the international communist left to provide a clear marxist analysis of the regime which had arisen in the USSR on the ashes of the proletarian revolution.

Understanding the nature of the Stalinist system is a key aspect of the communist programme: without such an understanding, it would be impossible for communists to outline clearly what kind of society they are fighting for, to describe what socialism is and what it is not. But the clarity that communists have today about the nature of the USSR was not easily attained: it took many years of intensive debate and reflection within the proletarian political movement before a truly coherent synthesis could be achieved. Never before had revolutionaries been compelled to analyse a proletarian revolution that had perished from within. As a result, for a long time, the USSR appeared as a kind of enigma1, a problem unforeseen in the annals of marxism. Our aim in the following articles will therefore be to chronicle the main stages by which the groups of the marxist vanguard, in the dark years of the counter-revolution, gradually succeeded in unravelling the enigma and bequeathing the analysis of Stalinist state capitalism to their present-day heirs

Bordiga’s letter to Korsch

We take up the story in 1926. The Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, is being ‘Bolshevised’, ostensibly to bring all the Communist parties outside Russia into synch with the intransigent and disciplined methods of the Russian party. But the campaign of Bolshevisation launched by the Communist International in 1924-5 is in truth part of the process of the destruction of Bolshevism. The party which had led the revolution in 1917 is being turned into a mere annex of the Russian state; and the Russian state has become the axial point of the capitalist counter-revolution. Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’, first announced in 1924, is a declaration of war against the real internationalist traditions of the Russian party. By 1926, all the remaining Bolsheviks – including Zinoviev, under whose auspices the Bolshevisation campaign had been imposed on the International – have gone over to the opposition and shortly afterwards will be expelled from the party.

In Germany too there is widespread resistance to the increasing opportunism and bureaucratism of the KPD, to the attempt to silence all serious questioning about the internal situation within Russia and the foreign policy of the CI. The inability of the KPD apparatus to tolerate any real debate has resulted in the mass expulsion of nearly all of the most revolutionary elements within the party, of a whole series of groups influenced not only by the (today) better known opposition around Trotsky, but also by the German communist left. The KAPD, although far weaker than in its hey-day during the revolutionary wave, still exists and has carried out consistent work towards the KPD, which it defines as a centrist organisation still capable of giving rise to revolutionary minorities.

Our book on the German-Dutch left contains precise evidence of the scale and importance of this split, which involved the following groups:

• “the group around Schwarz and Korsch, the ‘Entschiedene Linke’ or Intransigent Left, which regrouped about 7000 members;

• The Iwan Katz group, which together with Pfemfert’s group formed an organisation of 6000 members, close to the AAUE. It operated in the name of a cartel of left communist organisations and published the journal Spartakus. This became the organ of the Spartakusbund mark II;

• the Fischer-Maslow group, which had 6000 militants;

• the Urbahns group, the future Leninbund, which regrouped 5000 members;

• the Wedding opposition, excluded in 1927-28 was later, with part of Urbahn’s Leninbund, to create the German Trotskyist opposition” (The Dutch and German Communist Left, chapter 6).

The Korsch group is the one which is most strongly influenced by the KAPD – later on a rather hasty and short-lived fusion will take place between them. The platform of this group is not widely known or available – a measure of the degree to which the German left has disappeared from history. Better known is the letter to Korsch, commenting on the platform, by Amadeo Bordiga, at that point the most important figure of the Italian communist left, which has been conducting a particularly powerful polemic against the growing opportunism of the CI. Our attention thus moves on to this correspondence because it gives us a valuable insight into the different approaches adopted by the German and Italian left communists towards the fundamental problems that confronted them at that time – understanding the nature of the regime in the USSR and defining a coherent policy towards the International and its component parties.

The first noticeable thing about Bordiga’s reply (dated 28th October 1926) is that there is no trace of the sectarianism which led him to consider himself the sole repository of truth, nor of the slightest refusal to discuss with other currents on the left. In short, we are very far away from the ‘Bordigism’ of today, which claims to be the true heir of the Italian left communist tradition, and which has theorised a refusal to hold any kind of debate with groups who do not fit into a very restricted definition of this tradition. It is certainly true that the Bordiga of 1926 does not consider that there is as yet sufficient political homogeneity for a regroupment or even for the publication of a common international declaration. But his whole emphasis is on the necessity for discussion and for a work of clarification in which the various currents of the international left will have a role to play: “I think in general that the priority today, rather than manoeuvring and forming organisations, is the preliminary work of elaborating a political ideology of the international left based on the eloquent experiences undergone by the Comintern” Later on he adds that parallel declarations about the situation in Russia and the Comintern by the different left groupings will contribute to this work, even if he is anxious to avoid “going as far as a fractionist ‘plot’”

Bordiga’s argument is founded on the conviction that “we are not yet at the moment of definite clarification”: ie, it is too early to write off the Communist Parties or the International. Revolutionaries must carry on the struggle within the Communist Parties as long as possible, in spite of the increasingly artificial and mechanical discipline which reigns within them: “we have to respect this discipline in all its procedural absurdities, without ever renouncing positions of political and ideological criticism and without ever solidarising with the dominant orientation”. Defending the decision of the Russian left opposition to submit to discipline and so avoid a split, he argues that “the objective and external situation is still such that, not only in Russia, the fact of being chased out of the Comintern leaves one with still less chance of influencing the course of the working class struggle than one could have from within the party”.

In hindsight we can take issue with some of Bordiga’s conclusions: while it was certainly true that struggle for the ‘soul’ of the Communist parties was far from over in 1926, his reluctance to recognise the necessity for forming organised fractions – including, when possible, an international fraction – goes some way to explaining why he was unable to play a part in the next phase in the history of the Italian left: the phase initiated precisely by the formation of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy in 1928. But what is important here is Bordiga’s method, which was without doubt handed on to those who did participate in the work of the Fraction. The priority he accords to the work of clarification in an unfavourable objective situation, the insistence on the necessity to fight to the end to save organisations which the proletariat has created with such difficulty – this was the hallmark of the Italian left and provides a key to understanding why it was destined to play the central role in “elaborating a political ideology of the international left” during the bleakest years of the counter-revolution. By contrast, the German left’s premature dismissal of the Communist Parties and the CI had been one of the weightiest causes of its rapid organisational disintegration.

The same can be said when Bordiga takes up the question of the nature of the regime in Russia, which is in fact the first issue addressed in the reply to Korsch. The ‘Intransigent Left’, like previous currents of the German communist left (Rühle as early as 1920, the KAPD from around 1922 onwards) had already declared that capitalism had triumphed over the revolution in Russia. But in both cases this conclusion, arrived at impressionistically and without a through-going theoretical inquiry, had resulted in the proletarian nature of the revolution being put into question, and in a de facto regression to the positions of the Mensheviks or the anarchists, many of whom had from the start denounced the October insurrection as a coup d’Etat by the Bolsheviks, installing a new variety of capitalism in place of the old. The KAPD, on the whole, did not go this far, but it did develop the theory of the “double revolution”, proletarian in the cities, bourgeois in the countryside, and it had tended to see the New Economic Policy introduced in 1921 as the point where a kind of “peasant capitalism” had gained supremacy over the remains of proletarian power.

Another irony for latter-day Bordigism: Bordiga’s reply to Korsch contains no hint of the “double revolution” theory which he elaborated after the second world war, and which defined the bourgeois economy of the USSR as the product of a “transition towards capitalism” which had taken place under the auspices of the Stalinist apparat. On the contrary: Bordiga’s overriding concern is to defend the proletarian character of October, no matter what subsequent degeneration has taken place:

“…your ‘way of expressing yourself’ on the subject of Russia does not seem right to me. One cannot say that the Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The 1917 revolution was a proletarian revolution even if it was an error to generalise its ‘tactical’ lessons; now the problem is posed as to what happens to the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country, if the revolution does not carry on in other countries. There can be counter-revolution, there can be a process of degeneration whose symptoms and reflections within the Communist Party have to be discovered and defined. One cannot simply say that Russia is a country tending towards capitalism. The thing is much more complex: it’s a question of new forms of the class struggle which have no precedent in history. It is a question of showing how the Stalinist conception of relations with the middle classes is equivalent to renouncing the communist programme. It would seem that you exclude the possibility of a policy by the Russian Communist Party which would not lead to the restoration of capitalism. This would end up justifying Stalin or supporting the unacceptable policy of ‘resigning from power’. On the contrary we must say that a correct class policy would have been possible in Russia, avoiding the series of grave errors in international policy committed by ‘The Leninist old guard in its entirety’”.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight it is possible for us to answer some of Bordiga’s conclusions: at the time of writing, capitalism – not based on concessions to the middle classes, but on the very state that had emerged out of the revolution – was indeed becoming the master of Russia, not only economically (since it had never been vanquished at this level) but also politically, and the longer the Communist Party tried to hang on to political power, the more it was separating itself from the proletariat and becoming subsumed to the interests of capital. But here again the essential thing is the method, the theoretical starting point: the revolution was proletarian, but it was isolated; now it is a question of understanding something that has never happened in history: the degeneration of a proletarian revolution from within. And here again, even if Bordiga’s heirs in the Fraction took a long time coming to the correct conclusions about the nature of the regime in the USSR, the solidity of their analytical method was to ensure that they did so with much greater depth and seriousness than those who had proclaimed the capitalist nature of the USSR much earlier on, but only by breaking solidarity with the October revolution. The German left was to pay heavily for this: cutting the roots that connected it to October and Bolshevism also meant cutting its own roots, and without roots a tree cannot survive. To this day it is evident that it is virtually impossible to maintain any organised proletarian political activity that is not grounded in the lessons both of the October victory and of its subsequent defeat.

The debate within the international left opposition

We move on to 1933. The defeat of the German proletariat has been sealed by Hitler’s assumption of power. The workers of the two other main centres of the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 – Russia and Italy – have also been crushed. The defeats result in the disappearance or dispersal of the revolutionary vanguard. The political life of the working class no longer takes place in the Communist parties, which have been thoroughly Stalinised and are on the verge of capitulating to the ideology of national defence. It survives nonetheless in a very much reduced milieu of opposition groupings and fractions. By now the crux of this oppositional activity has shifted to France, and in particular to Paris, the traditional city of European revolutions.

By 1933 some of these groups have already come and gone. Such had been the fate of one ‘wing’ of the Italian left in exile, the Reveil Communiste group around Pappalardi. Formed in 1927, this group had attempted a bold synthesis between the Italian and German lefts. Without rejecting the proletarian character of the October revolution, it had come to the conclusion that a bourgeois counter-revolution had taken place in Russia. And yet the group’s tendency towards impatience and sectarianism soon led it to lose its connection with the thorough-going methodology of the Italian left. By 1929 its synthesis had mutated into a wholesale conversion to the tradition of the German left, to its weaknesses as well as its strengths. This mutation was marked by the appearance of the paper L’Ouvrier Communiste, which worked closely with the Russian left communist exiled in Paris, Gavril Miasnikov2. Very quickly the new group had succumbed to anarchist influences and ceased publication in 1931.

In 1933, the majority of the ‘native’ oppositional groups are influenced by Trotsky, although the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, formed in the Paris suburb of Pantin in 1928, is extremely active within this milieu. The official section of the International Left Opposition is the Communist League, formed in 1929 on a very heterogeneous basis strongly criticised by the Italian Fraction. Already ‘Trotskyism’ has begun to adopt an unprincipled, activist approach to regroupment which is not founded on any solid programmatic agreement. Such approaches can only result in splits, especially because it is combined with an increasingly opportunist approach to such key questions as relations with the Communist and Socialist parties and the defence of democracy against fascism. The League has already been through a number of splits. The first, fuelled by but not limited to personal antagonisms and clan loyalties, had taken place after the feud between the Molinier group and the Rosmer-Naville group. Trotsky’s intervention in the situation from exile in Prinkipo had been unfortunate to say the least, since he was already growing impatient to form new mass organisations and had been taken in by the activist schemes of Molinier, who was in essence a political adventurer. Rosmer’s tendency had at least been more concerned with the need to reflect and develop a clearer understanding of the conditions facing the class, but Trotsky’s ‘Prinkipo peace’ led to Rosmer’s virtual withdrawal from militant life. But the split also gave rise to an organised current – the Gauche Communiste group around Collinet and Naville’s brother. It was followed in 1932 by another split, resulting in the formation of the Fraction de Gauche animated by the former Zinovievist Albert Treint, and by Marc, later of the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC. The cause of the split was the group’s rejection of a growing tendency within the League towards conciliation with Stalinism. By the beginning of 1933, the League is on the verge of another and even more damaging split, as a growing minority reacts against the politics of conciliation towards social democracy which will culminate in the ‘French turn’ of 1934 – the policy of ‘entrism’ into the social democratic parties, once denounced by the Communist International as instruments of the bourgeoisie.

It is at this point that another oppositional group known as the ‘15th Rayon group’, whose best-known militant is Gaston Davoust (Chaze) issue an invitation to all the oppositional currents to hold a series of meetings aimed at programmatic clarification and eventual regroupment. This initiative is warmly welcomed by the Italian Fraction, which had been manoeuvred out of the International Left Opposition by 1932, but which sees these meetings as the possible basis for the formation of a Left Fraction of the Communist Party of France, to use its terminology of the time. There is a positive response as well from virtually all the French groups, while some groups outside France also participate or send their support (Ligue Communiste Internationaliste in Belgium, the Austrian opposition group, etc). Over the next few months there is a series of meetings which involve an impressive list of groups: the Fraction de Gauche and the Gauche Communiste, Davoust’s group, the Communist League as well as a separate delegation of its latest minority; the Italian Left Fraction; a number of small (and ephemeral) groups such as Pour une Renaissance Communiste, made up of three elements who have split from the Italian Fraction over the Russian question, considering the USSR to be state capitalist; Treint’s new group Effort Communiste, which had left the Fraction de Gauche because it too no longer saw anything proletarian in the ‘Soviet’ regime, and had begun developing the theory that Russia was now under the sway of a new exploiting class; and a number of individuals such as Simone Weil and Kurt Landau.

The nature of the regime in the Soviet Union is one of the key issues on the agenda. At this point, the majority of the invited groups formally defend the view, enshrined in the 1927 platform of the Russian opposition and still vigorously advocated by Trotsky, that the USSR is a proletarian state, albeit in a condition of severe bureaucratic degeneration, because it has not done away with the state ownership of the principal means of production. But what is particularly interesting about the discussions at this conference is the way they provide us with an illustration of the evolution taking place on this question within the opposition milieu.

Thus for example the report on the Russian question is made by the Gauche Communiste group. This text is highly critical of Trotsky’s arguments: “Comrade Trotsky, in order to explain the bureaucracy’s offensive against the peasantry and Stalinism’s conversion to a policy of industrialisation, despite the ‘liquidation of the party as a party’, is led to argue that while the economic infrastructure of the proletarian dictatorship has got stronger, its political superstructure has continued to weaken and degenerate. A proposition that is hard to make sense of when you take into account the marxist thesis that ‘politics is only concentrated economics’, especially when we are talking about a regime where the essential political issue is the direction of the economy”. It concludes that the bureaucracy has indeed constituted itself into new class, neither proletarian nor bourgeois. But unlike Treint, and without any apparent consistency, the text also argues that this bureaucratic state still contains some proletarian vestiges and thus still needs to be defended by revolutionaries against any attack by imperialism. A resolution drawn up by the Chaze group expresses equally contradictory conclusions – the USSR remains a workers’ state, but the bureaucracy is “playing the role of a real class, whose interests are more and more opposed to those of the working class” More important, perhaps, than the actual content of these texts is the approach adopted by the conference, its open attitude to the question. Thus, when the ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist group, the Communist League, proposes a resolution excluding all those who deny the proletarian nature of the USSR, it is almost unanimously rejected.

The conference does not succeed in unifying all the groups that had taken part, nor in creating a French Fraction: in a period of defeat, the dominant tendency is inevitably towards dispersal and isolation. But a partial regroupment does take place and this too is significant: the Fraction de Gauche, Davoust’s group, and later on the minority of the Communist League – a minority of 35 members whose departure virtually crippled the League – unite to form the Union Communiste group which continued up until the war. Although it begins with a heavy baggage of Trotskyism, and is later found wanting when it comes to the ordeal of the Spanish civil war, a process of evolution does take place in this group: it calls the ideology of anti-fascism into question and by 1935 has concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new bourgeoisie. A similar position is adopted by the LCI in Belgium.

When we consider as well that the Italian Fraction, though still talking about the USSR as a proletarian state, also moves rapidly towards rejecting any defence of the USSR during this period, we can see that by the mid 1930s Trotsky’s position on the USSR has already been challenged or abandoned by an important component of the Trotskyist movement, just as it had been within the Russian opposition itself. And the importance of this component is both quantitative and qualitative: quantitative because by the mid-30s it is actually larger than the ‘official’ Trotskyist group in the country which is the ‘heartland’ of the International Left Opposition; and qualitative because it is generally the most intransigent and consistent elements, many of them formed during the revolutionary wave or soon afterwards, who have rejected the defence of the USSR and begin to grasp, albeit in an incomplete and often contradictory manner, that a capitalist counter-revolution has taken place in the ‘Land of the Soviets’. Small wonder that the history of these currents is systematically ignored by the Trotskyist historians.

Trotsky’s response to the left: The Revolution Betrayed

In order to understand the evolution of Trotsky’s position on the USSR, it is necessary to recognise these pressures on him from the left. If we look briefly at Trotsky’s most important statement on the nature of the USSR during this period – his book The Revolution Betrayed, written during his exile in Norway and published in 1936 – we can readily grasp that he was engaging in a polemic on two fronts: on the one hand, against the Stalinist deception that the USSR was a paradise for the workers, and on the other hand, against all those currents on the left who were converging towards the view that the Soviet Union had lost all connection with the proletarian power of 1917.

Let us state first of all that contrary to conclusions that have been put forward within the communist left, and even by the Italian Fraction at the time, the Trotsky of 1936 had not ceased to be a marxist, and The Revolution Betrayed contains ample proof of this. The main thrust of the book is aimed at refuting Stalin’s absurd claim that the USSR had already achieved full ‘socialism’ (though not yet ‘communism’) by 1936. Against this monstrous lie, Trotsky marshals the full force of his statistical knowledge, his acerbic wit and his political clarity to expose the absolutely miserable conditions of the working class and the peasantry, the deplorably shoddy character of the goods produced for mass consumption, the growing privileges of the bureaucratic elite, the increasingly reactionary, nationalistic, and hierarchical trends in the spheres of art and literature, education, the army, family life, and so on. Indeed Trotsky’s depiction of the mentality and practices of the bureaucracy is so sharp that he all but proves that we are in the presence of an exploiting class. In the article ‘The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky’, written for International Review n°92 by one of the comrades involved in the emerging proletarian milieu in Russia today, this point is made very clearly: “Trotsky is in fact describing the following picture [in The Revolution Betrayed]: there exists a fairly numerous social stratum which controls production, and therefore its produce, in a monopolistic manner, and which appropriates a large part of production (in other words, exercises a function of exploitation), which is united around an understanding of its common material interests, and is opposed to the producing class. What do marxists call a social stratum that displays all these characteristics? There is only one answer: this is the ruling social class in every sense of the term. Trotsky leads his reader to the same conclusion. But he does not come to it himself…Trotsky starts with ‘a’, but after describing the exploiting ruling class, Trotsky hesitates at the last moment, and refuses to go on to ‘b’”.

Trotsky’s book also poses an extremely important question about the nature of the transitional state, and why it is particularly vulnerable to the pressures of the old social order. Taking up Lenin’s suggestive phrase from State and Revolution that the transitional state is in a certain sense a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, Trotsky adds: “This highly significant conclusion, completely ignored by the present official theoreticians, has a decisive significance for the understanding of the nature of the Soviet state – or more accurately, for a first approach to such understanding. In so far as the state which assumes the task of socialist transformation is compelled to defend inequality – that is, the material privileges of a minority – by methods of compulsion, insofar does it also remain a bourgeois state, even though without a bourgeoisie…The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the growth of material power, ought to serve socialist aims – but only in the last analysis. The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialist in so far as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, in so far as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom. Such a contradictory characterisation may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics; we can only offer them our condolences” (Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder press, p 53-4). This line of questioning about the nature of the transitional state could, if properly developed have led Trotsky to understand how the state established after the October revolution had become the guardian of the statified capital; but again, Trotsky was unable to pursue the question to its final daring conclusions.

The more directly political conclusions embodied in the book – although Trotsky had already reached some of these by 1933 – also represent a certain advance on his previous thinking. In 1927, as we saw in the last article in this series, Trotsky had issued a warning about the danger of a Thermidor, a “counter–revolution on the instalment plan”, within the USSR. But he had as yet not accepted that this was already an accomplished fact. By the time he writes The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky has revised his view and concluded that Thermidor had already taken place under the aegis of the bureaucracy; as a result “the old Bolshevik party is dead, and no force will resurrect it” ibid, p100). And he concludes that the bureaucracy which had strangled Bolshevism can no longer be reformed – it must be forcefully overthrown in what he calls a “political revolution” by the working class. By this time he has also decided that the Communist International had also breathed its last and that the formation of new parties is on the agenda in all countries.

Finally, it is important to remember that Trotsky’s book does not completely close the question of the nature of the USSR. He considers that history has yet to determine this question, insisting that the reign of the bureaucracy cannot be a stable one: either it will be overthrown by the workers, or by an overtly bourgeois counter-revolution, or it will transform itself into a possessing class in the fullest sense. And as the world lurched towards a new world war, it became more evident to Trotsky in his final years that the role that the USSR played in the war would be a decisive factor in finally fixing its class nature.

Despite all these positive aspects, the book is also a vigorous defence of the thesis that the USSR remains a workers’ state because it has carried through the integral nationalisation of the means of production, thus “abolishing” the bourgeoisie. When his book talks about Thermidor, it is not used in quite the same sense as Trotsky had used it in 1927. Then Thermidor had meant a bourgeois counter-revolution. Now it leans more heavily on the ambiguity of this comparison with the French revolution. In France, Thermidor had not meant a feudal restoration, but the coming to power of a more conservative fraction of the bourgeoisie. By the same token, Trotsky argues that the Soviet Thermidor has not restored capitalism but installed a kind of “proletarian Bonapartism”, in which a parasitic bureaucratic stratum defends its privileges at the expense of the proletariat, but is still dependent for its survival on the continuation of the “proletarian property forms” ushered in by the October revolution. This is why he calls not for a complete social revolution in the USSR, but merely a political revolution which will eliminate the bureaucracy while retaining the basic economic form. And this too is why Trotsky remains entirely devoted to the “defence of the Soviet Union” against the hostile intentions of world capitalism, which, he argues, still sees the USSR as an alien body within its midst.

Here we come to the reactionary side of Trotsky’s work – and it is a thesis directed against the left. This becomes explicit in the latter part of the book when Trotsky poses, and dismisses, the question of whether the USSR could be seen as state capitalist or the bureaucracy as a ruling class. With regard to state capitalism, Trotsky is aware of the general trend towards state intervention in the economy within capitalism, and sees it as an expression of the historic decline of the system. He even accepts the theoretical possibility that the entire ruling class of a given country could constitute itself into a single trust via the state, and goes on to say that “the economic laws of such a regime would present no mysteries. A single capitalist, as is well known, receives in the form of profit, not that part of the surplus value which is directly created by the workers of his own enterprise, but a share of the combined surplus value created throughout the country proportionate to the amount of his own capital. Under an integral ‘state capitalism’, this law of the equal rate of profit would be realised, not by devious routes – that is, competition among different capitals – but immediately and directly through state bookkeeping”. But having described in a nutshell the operation of the law of value in the USSR, he quickly adds the disclaimer that “such a regime never existed, however, and, because of profound contradictions among the proprietors themselves, never will exist – the more so since, in its quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution” (Revolution Betrayed, p245). We could add that the most advanced bourgeoisies have also shunned the model of integral state capitalism because, as in the collapse of the ex-Stalinist countries confirmed, it has proved to disastrously inefficient. But what Trotsky entirely fails to do in this chapter is to ask this obvious question: could an integral state capitalism arise out of a unique situation where the proletarian revolution has expropriated the old bourgeoisie, and then degenerated due its international isolation?

As for Trotsky’s argument that the bureaucracy cannot be a ruling class, due to the fact that it has no stocks and shares or any right of inheritance enabling it to pass on property to its heirs, our Russian comrade AG writes a very lucid rejoinder: “In Revolution Betrayed Trotsky tries to refute theoretically the thesis of the bureaucracy’s bourgeois class nature with arguments as weak as the fact that ‘it has neither stocks nor bonds’ (p249). But why should the ruling class necessarily possess them? For it is obvious that the possession of stocks and bonds is of no importance in itself: the important thing is whether this or that class appropriates to itself a surplus product of the direct producers. If yes, then the function of exploitation exists whether the distribution of the appropriated product is done via dividends on shares, or through a salary and privileges attached to a job. The author of Revolution Betrayed is just as unconvincing when he says that the representatives of the leading stratum cannot bequeath their privileged status (…) it is highly unlikely that Trotsky thought that the children of the elite could become workers or peasants”. By attributing this decisive significance to the law of inheritance, Trotsky clearly deviates from the fundamental marxist axiom that juridical relations are only the superstructural expression of the underlying social relationships; equally, by insisting on finding such proof of personal membership of a ruling class, Trotsky forgets that marxists define capital as a wholly impersonal power; it is capitalism which creates capitalists, not the other way round.

Equally, behind Trotsky’s notion that the class nature of the Soviet state is determined in the last instance by its economic structure there is a deep confusion about the nature of the proletarian revolution. As an exploited class, the one and only way the working class can transform society towards socialism is by establishing and holding political power. It has no ‘property’ of its own, no economic laws functioning in its favour: its method of struggle against the laws of the capitalist economy is based entirely on its ability to impose conscious control and planning against the anarchy of the market, human needs against the needs of profit. But this ability can only derive from its organised strength and its political consciousness – from its ability to assert its programme at every level of social and economic life. There is no guarantee whatever that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the collectivisation of the means of production will automatically lead in the direction of new social relations. They are a mere starting point: the work of creating these new social relations can only be carried out through the mass social movement of the working class. Actually, Trotsky comes close to recognising this when he writes “The predominance of socialist over petty bourgeois tendencies is guaranteed, not by the automatism of the economy – we are still far from that – but by political measures taken by the dictatorship. The character of the economy as a whole thus depends upon the character of the state power” But, as with the rest of his thesis, Trotsky is unable to draw the essential conclusion – that if the proletariat no longer exerts the slightest control over the state power, then the economy will automatically go in one direction: towards capitalism. In sum, the existence of a ‘workers state’, or proletarian dictatorship to be more precise, depends not on whether the state formally owns the economy, but on whether the proletariat really holds political power.

The most serious result of Trotsky’s failure to recognise that the October revolution had indeed been definitively defeated is that it leads him to “theoretically” justify the radical apology for Stalinism, which was to be the ultimate function of the movement he founded. In The Revolution Betrayed this apologia is already explicit, in spite of all the criticisms of the real conditions facing the Russian working class: “With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface – not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity” (p 8). Thus, Trotsky insists that despite all the bureaucratic deformations, Stalinism’s “development of the productive forces” is progressive because it is laying the basis for a true socialist society; indeed, Trotsky could never escape from the idea that Stalin’s turn towards rapid industrialisation at the end of the 20s was a victory of sorts for the economic programme of the Left Opposition. But the real character of the industrialisation of the USSR must be judged within the context of the world-wide development of the productive forces. The Russian revolution of 1917 had been made on the premise that the world was already ripe for communism. The development that took place under Stalin was founded on the defeat of the first world wide attempt to create a communist society; it was predicated on the necessity to build up a war economy to prepare for the resulting imperialist re-division of the world. Seen in this light, the triumphs of Soviet industrialisation are in no way a factor of human progress, but an expression of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production; and Trotsky’s hymns to the production of concrete and steel are a justification for the ruthless exploitation of the working class.

Worse: the defence of the Soviet Union against world capitalism led to a policy of support for the imperialist appetites of Russian capital, a policy already put in practice in 1929 when Trotsky supported Russia’s dispute with China over possession of the Manchurian railway. As the world moved rapidly towards another war, and as the USSR increasingly took its part in the global imperialist arena, the official Trotskyist position of ‘defending the workers’ state’ would lead the movement closer and closer to the bourgeois camp.

As we pointed out in the article on Trotsky’s death in International Review n°103, the slide towards war led Trotsky himself to pose some very fundamental questions. Within the Trotskyist movement, he was to face further challenges to his notion of the degenerated workers’ state. This time it came not so much from the left but from the likes of Bruno Rizzi in Italy, and in particular Burnham and Schachtman in the US, all of whom developed different versions of the idea that the USSR represented an exploiting society of a new type, unforeseen by marxism. Trotsky was opposed to this conclusion, but his later writings show that he was quite strongly influenced by it, even though – because he was a marxist, and above all a far better marxist than the likes of Schachtman – he understood quite clearly that if a new system of exploitation could arise from the entrails of capitalist society, the whole marxist perspective, and above all the revolutionary potential of the working class, had to be put into question. “Taken to its historic conclusion, the historical alternative appears thus: either the Stalinist regime is an awful setback in the process of the transformation of bourgeois society into a socialist society. Or else the Stalinist regime is the first step towards a new society of exploitation. If the second forecast proved correct, then of course the bureaucracy would become a new exploiting class. However dire this second perspective may appear, should the world proletariat indeed prove itself unable to carry out the mission entrusted to it by the course of historical development, then we would be forced to recognise that the socialist programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, has finally turned out to be a utopia. It goes without saying that we would need a new ‘minimum programme;’ to defend the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society” (‘The USSR in the war’, 1939).

For Trotsky the outcome of the impending war would be decisive: if the bureaucracy revealed itself to be stable enough to survive the war, it would be necessary to conclude that it had indeed crystallised into a new ruling class; and if the proletariat failed to end the war by making the revolution, then this would prove that the socialist programme was indeed a utopia. Here we can see how Trotsky’s refusal to accept the capitalist nature of the USSR had led him to doubting the convictions that had inspired his whole life.

By the same token, the definition of the USSR as capitalist proved to be the only firm basis for the defence of internationalism during the second world war and its aftermath. The defence of the ‘degenerated workers’ state, coupled with the ideology of supporting democracy against fascism, led the official Trotskyist movement to capitulate directly to chauvinism and to integrate itself into the allied imperialist camp; after the war, it placed Trotskyism in the position of propagandists for the Russian imperialist bloc against its American rival. Those who put forward the theory of a new bureaucratic society soon concluded that western democracy was more progressive than the barbaric regime in Russia - or they simply ceased pretending that marxism had any further validity. By contrast, all the groups or elements which broke from Trotskyism in the 1940s because of its abandonment of internationalism had become convinced that Russia was a capitalist and imperialist state – the group around Munis, the German RKD, Agis Stinas in Greece…and of course Natalia Trotsky, who followed her husband’s political advice and had the courage to re-examine ‘Trotskyist’ orthodoxy in the light of the second world war and the preparations for a third that followed immediately afterwards.

***

The next article in this series will focus on the position of the Italian left on the Russian question, and will show why it was this current which provided the best framework for finally solving the “Russian enigma”.

Marxist and opportunist visions of building the party

A question of method in the discussion

A recent article of ours 1 was devoted "to replying to the thesis of the IBRP that organisations such as ours are 'estranged from the method and perspectives of the work that leads to the formation of the future party'. In order to do so we have taken into consideration the two levels at which the organisational problem is posed: 1) how the future International should be conceived; 2) what policy should be followed for the construction of the organisation and the regroupment of revolutionaries, and in terms of both we have shown that it is the IBRP, not the ICC, that has abandoned the tradition of the Italian and the international Communist Left. In fact the eclecticism that guides the IBRP's policy of regroupment is similar to that of Trotsky when he was taken up with building the IVth International; the vision of the ICC on the other hand is that of the Italian Fraction, which always fought for regroupment with clarity and on a basis that would make it possible to salvage elements of the centre and those with hesitations".

These conclusions, which came at the end of a seven page article, are not the fruit of irrational mind-games, but are rather the expression of an attempt to defend our method of working, and to criticise firmly but fraternally a political group that we consider to be definitely on the same side of the class line as us. In criticising the IBRP our starting point has always been the texts of the IBRP itself, which we have made a great effort to reproduce as far as possible in our article, and our arguments have been based on a confrontation with the common tradition of the Communist Left, to check the validity of the one hypothesis or the other in the difficult work of building a revolutionary vanguard.

In reply, Battaglia Comunista (BC), one of the two political components of the IBRP, has published an article 2 that raises a number of problems. In fact the article is a reply to the ICC, which however is named only when it's absolutely necessary; the whole article is superficial, completely devoid of quotations from our positions, which are instead synthesised by BC in a way that clearly distorts the meaning of some of them (we want to believe that this is due to a failure of understanding and not bad faith). There is also a tendency to develop the article more in the spirit of trying to catch the sympathy of the reader with jokes intended to have a certain effect, rather than openly confronting the questions at issue. But above all, in this article BC refuses to situate itself on the only level possible, the one on which our reply was based, that is on the historical level. It rather limits itself to giving an impromptu and elusive reply which in fact remains inconclusive. The view put forward that our article is "bilious" and that it contains "attacks and slanders" against the IBRP is symptomatic of this attitude 3 and we think that it confirms our criticism in the previous article of the IBRP's opportunism since, historically, opportunism has always tended to avoid political confrontation because this would obviously show it up for what it is. Of course we can do no more than refer all our readers to our previous article for them to judge to what extent this position of BC is false, if not actually in bad faith 4. But at the same time we don't want to follow BC's contortions in this article or in future ones because we don't want to get bogged down in sterile and endless polemics. However with this article we will try to further elaborate our view of the building of the revolutionary organisation, developing two points in particular:

a ) a reply to the argumentation given by BC in its article,

b ) a reply to the IBRP's critiques on our supposed idealism, which is the IBRP's pretext for declaring us unable to build a force worthy of participating in the construction of the world party.

Once more on building the party

The second part of BC's article tries to defend their own opportunist policy on building the international party, in contrast to our way of working. So let's recall the fundamental elements previously developed. This is the IBRP's criticism of how to create national sections of an international organisation:

"We reject, on principle, as well as on the basis of different congress resolutions, the idea of creating national sections as clones of one already existing organisation, even ours. National sections of the international party of the proletariat cannot be built in a largely artificial way in a country by creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere and, moreover, outside the real political and social struggles of the country itself" (our emphasis) 5.

To this we replied as follows:

"Our strategy for international regroupment is of course ridiculed by referring to it as 'creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere' ? so as to induce in the reader an automatic distaste for the strategy of the ICC. (...) For the IBRP, if a new group of comrades appears, let's say in Canada, who are moving towards internationalist positions, this group can benefit from critical fraternal contributions, even polemics, but it must grow and develop from the political context of its own country, inside 'the real political and social struggles of the country itself'. This means that for the IBRP the current and local context of a given country is more important than the international and historical framework furnished by the experience of the workers' movement. What, on the other hand, is the strategy for the construction of the organisation at an international level (...)? Whether there are one or one hundred aspiring militants in a new country, our strategy is not to create a local group that evolves locally, through the "real political and social battle of the country itself" but to integrate these new militants immediately into the international work of the organisation, one aspect of which is centralised intervention in the country in which these comrades live. This is why, even if our resources are small, our organisation makes the effort to be present immediately with a local publication under the responsibility of the new group of comrades because we hold that this is the most direct and effective way, on the one hand to extend our influence and, on the other to proceed directly to the construction of the revolutionary organisation. What is artificial about that, what sense does it make to talk about 'clones of one already existing organisation'? This has yet to be explained".

The really surprising thing is that BC is unable to oppose a minimum of political argument to this reasoning of ours except that... they don't believe it. This in fact is their position:

"Can a stronger and representative multi-national 'expansion' of the organisations be conceived? No.

Because revolutionary politics is a serious thing: you can't imagine that a 'section' of a few comrades in a country other than the 'mother' one can concretely constitute an element of real organisation [Why not?, we would like to know].

We must have the courage to recognise the difficulty in making an organisation really function on a national scale; the co-ordination of a 'campaign' on a national scale isn't always complete; the distribution of the press, given our organisational conditions of being 'few in number' reflects the smallest variation in the availability of militants and we could give other concrete organisational examples".

So that's the truth of the matter! BC doesn't believe in the possibility of putting together an international organisation simply because it's not even able to control its own organisation at a national level! But the fact that BC can't do it doesn't mean that it can't be done. The existence of the ICC clearly gives the lie to this way of arguing. BC talks of the difficulty distributing the press at a national level but doesn't take into account - just to give one example - that the English and Spanish language press of the ICC (the International Review in particular) is distributed in about twenty countries in the world. It doesn't take into account either that, when necessary, our organisation is able, and has demonstrated this whenever it has been necessary, to distribute the same leaflet immediately and simultaneously in every country in which it has a presence and also in others! Once more BC doesn't take into account a reality that is in front of its eyes, if only it made the effort to keep them open, which shows that the ICC really is a single international organisation, whatever the size of the sections existing in this or that country.

All this gives rather the impression that BC's argument that "We must have the courage to recognise the difficulty making an organisation really function" is developed merely to deny the possibility of constructing an international organisation today, without any scientific basis. But unfortunately there's more. In BC's article another unhealthy idea emerges of how a revolutionary organisation must be developed in a country:

"Moreover, a mini-section parachuted into a country doesn't have the possibility of implanting itself within that country's political scene, as does an organisation which - however small - arises from the political scene itself, orienting itself around revolutionary positions. (...) He who doesn't understand, or pretends not to understand, that political identity isn't enough to form a revolutionary organisation, either has no sense of organisation or is so lacking in organisational experience that he thinks that the topic is irrelevant. (...) You're not qualified for this task if you don't carry out the primordial task of putting down roots within the class, even if today they're unfortunately limited" 6.

The meaning of this passage is frankly worrying. What emerges from BC's exposition is that it's better to have a group that "arises from the political scene itself [ie locally, ed.), orienting itself around revolutionary positions", no matter how confused it is at the beginning, than to have in the same locality "a mini-section parachuted into a country". But the real "roots" of an organisation in the class are not to be judged on the basis of the momentary popularity of their positions among the workers. That is the immediatist and opportunist approach. The real laying down of roots is to be judged at an historic level (related to the past experience of the class and to its becoming). The main criteria for "putting down roots" is clarity at the level of the programme and the analyses, which makes it possible:

- to make a real contribution in the face of whatever confusions may exist among the workers,

- to build solidly for the future.

This was the whole point of the debate between Lenin and the Mensheviks, who wanted to have a bigger impact by opening the door of the party to confused and hesitant elements. It is also the point of the debate between the Italian Left and the majority of the Communist International (CI) on the constitution of the Communist Parties (on a "tight" or "loose" basis, since the CI wanted to have "roots" in the working masses as rapidly as possible). The Fraction argued the same position against the Trotskyists in the 1930s. The organisation can never root itself in the class by balancing its principles and watering them down. This is one of the great lessons of the Left's fight that the IBRP has forgotten today, just as the PCInt forgot it in 1945.

The inconsistency of BC's argumentation is a consequence of the fact that the group refuses to reply to the questions raised in our previous article, which are:

a) Does BC think that the position on the organisational question elaborated by the workers' movement is wrong, and why?

b) Or does it think that in relation to the period of Lenin, of Bilan, the historic period has changed and so requires a different type of organisation? And if so, why?

We're still waiting for a reply!

On our supposed idealism

It is well known that BC accuses us of being idealist and of having an analysis of the current situation that reflects this vision. Just recently, during a public meeting held by Battaglia Comunista in Naples, in reply to a request to explain our presumed idealism, BC replied thus:

"There are three points that characterise the idealism of the ICC.

The first is the concept of decadence: this is a concept that we too employ but it isn't possible to explain the economic concept of decadence on the basis of sociological factors alone. The question is that decadence can be explained by starting from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. We say that capitalism undergoes decadence not because of the existence of the crisis (there have always been cyclical crises) but because there is a particularly serious crisis. We say that the ICC is idealist because the concept of decadence is abstract, idealist.

The second is on the analysis of imperialism: when the USSR existed we were used to seeing imperialism with two faces: the USSR and the USA. With the diminishing of one of the two imperialist poles, the other dominates on the military, economic level etc. But within this new situation there's an attempt at an imperialist regroupment in Europe. How can the ICC explain this new phase by speaking only of chaos? The ICC confuses the lucid intention to dominate on the imperialist scene with chaos.

The third reason is in relation to the question of consciousness, and it is the most important one. We've heard some incredible things, such as that the working class has a level of consciousness that can prevent the 3rd World War".

We suppose that by criticising us for idealism BC intends to accuse our organisation of not following the real problems and of giving way to fantasies, to idealism in fact. We hold that on the contrary, as we will try to demonstrate, this critique on the part of BC is founded on a lazy and incorrect understanding of our political analyses that can be justified only by an uncontrollable desire to demarcate themselves from our organisation.

So we will try to give some elements in reply even if we obviously can't develop such broad topics in depth.

The decadence of capitalism: it is true that the ICC's analysis is different from that of BC but it's absolutely false to say that for us the "economic concept of decadence" can be explained "on the basis of sociological factors alone" The comrades of BC know quite well that, whereas their framework is based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the ICC makes reference to the later theoretical developments of Luxemburg 7 on the saturation of extra-capitalist markets, which doesn't however exclude the variable of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So our framework too has an economic basis and certainly not a sociological one and anyway, over and above the two different economic explanations, the fundamental aspect is that both analyses attempt to explain the same situation, that of the decadence of capitalism, on which we're completely agreed. So where is the idealism?

Imperialism and chaos: if the ICC did indeed defend the position described by BC, then it would not be very credible. But the question of chaos is not a phenomenon in itself: it is a consequence of the collapse of the two imperialist blocs in 1989 and the weakening of the discipline that they managed to impose on their member countries, which during the period of the cold war guaranteed on the whole and in spite of the danger of world war, a certain "pacification" within each individual bloc and on the international scene itself. "The ICC confuses the lucid intention to dominate on the imperialist scene with chaos"? Not at all! By starting from the lucid intention not only of the great, but also of the smaller powers to dominate on the world imperialist scene, the ICC sees in the present situation a tendency to increasingly diffuse and multi-directional conflicts, a tendency in which each one tends to come into conflict with all the others, in which there are no longer, or at least not for the moment, new imperialist blocs that could cohere and orient the imperialist ambitions of the individual countries; indeed, we have difficulty envisaging the prospect of their formation in the short term 8.

In this new situation, in which the aforesaid discipline diminishes, the individual countries leap into imperialist adventures coming increasingly into conflict with one another: this is what gives rise to chaos, that is, a situation without the previous control and discipline but whose basic dynamic is very clear. Is this position of ours really so foolish and ? idealist?

Lastly on the working class preventing war: we repeat yet again that when we say that the historic resurgence of the class struggle has prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its outcome to the capitalist crisis, that is the Third World War, we certainly don't mean that the working class is aware of the danger of war and so consciously opposes it. If this were the case we would certainly be in a pre-revolutionary situation and the evidence shows that this isn't so. What we do say however, is that the resurgence of the struggle has made the class more sensitive and less malleable than it was in the 1940s and 50s. The fact that they can't count on the complete control and support of the proletariat raises problems for the bourgeoisie and inhibits them from launching an imperialist conflict.

In fact, in the present period, even if the class' combativeness and consciousness are at a low level, the bourgeoisie does not have the capacity to mobilise the workers of the developed countries behind a war ideology (whether this be the nation, anti-fascism or anti-imperialism, etc). In order to wage war it's not enough to have workers who aren't very combative, it needs workers who are ready to risk their lives for some bourgeois ideal.

Although the IBRP now pretend to be very wise, they themselves have had (and have!) difficulties analysing the international situation. For example, at the time of the fall of the Eastern bloc, BC didn't have very clear ideas at the beginning and attributed the "collapse" to a process that had been piloted by Gorbatchev in order to re-shuffle the cards between the blocs and score points against American imperialism.

"What is exploding, or has already exploded, is the Yalta accord. The cards are being re-shuffled at the scene of a crisis which, although it's shattering the rouble zone dramatically, certainly hasn't hesitated to insinuate itself into the dollar zone (...). Gorbatchev is playing competently on both European tables and in his dealings with the other super power. The steps towards the rapprochement of Eastern and Western Europe isn't a phenomenon that contributes to the tranquillity of the US and Gorby knows it" (from "The cards between the blocs are re-shuffled: the illusions in existing socialism collapse" in Battaglia Comunista n°12, December 1989) 9.

At the same time, they talked of the opening up of new markets in the eastern countries which would be able to give a puff of oxygen to these countries.

"The collapse of the markets on the periphery of capitalism, Latin America for example, has created new problems of insolvency for the payment of capital? The new opportunities opened up in Eastern Europe could represent a safety valve for investment needs? If this great process of East-West collaboration is concretised it will act as a whiff of oxygen for international capital" (from "The western bourgeoisie applauds the opening up of the eastern countries" in Battaglia Comunista of October 1989) 10. When at the beginning of 1990, the Rumanian bourgeoisie decided to get rid of the dictator Ceaucescu, putting on an incredible drama to whet the appetite of the people for democracy (the worst form of bourgeois dictatorship) BC went so far as to speak of Rumania as a country in which there were "all the objective and almost all the subjective conditions to enable the insurrection to develop into a real social revolution but the absence of an authentic class force has left the terrain free for those forces that stand for the maintenance of bourgeois relations of production" (Battaglia Comunista n°1, January 1990) .

Finally, what are we to say about the article of the sympathisers in Colombia, which Battaglia publishes on its front page without so much as a comment or a criticism and which presents that country as being almost in a state of insurrection:

"In recent years the social movement in Colombia (...) has acquired a particular radicality and breadth. (...) Today the strikes are transformed into tumult; the cities are paralysed by revolt, the protest of the urban masses end in violent clashes on the streets. (...) To sum up: in Colombia there's an insurrectionary process taking place that is sparked off by capitalist mechanisms and by the exacerbation and extension of the conflict between the two bourgeois military fronts" (from Battaglia Comunista n°9, September 2000, our emphasis).

At this point we might ask where the idealism is really to be found, in our articles or in the fanciful analyses of the IBRP 11?

The most recent slips on decadence

Unfortunately there's more. For some time now, despite their contemptuous judgements on a proletarian political camp that has failed to come up to the needs of the period, it's actually BC that has more and more been questioning its (and our) basic analysis of the historic period. Their evaluation of reality is increasingly dependent on the impromptu interpretation of whoever happens to draft the article. Just recently we have criticised BC to correct a serious slip on the role of the unions in the present period 12 which is in contradiction with the BC's own historic position. But in the same article in Prometeo n°2 we find a series of passages which go back to the question (we won't quote our previous polemic) and which cast doubt on the concept of the decadence of capitalism itself, a position that unites the two organisations, the IBRP and the ICC, and which is a legacy of the workers' movement, from Marx and Engels, from the IIIrd International, to Rosa Luxemburg AND LENIN! (whom they follow), and to the Communist Left that emerged from the International after its degeneration following the revolutionary wave of the 1920s. The article in fact characterises the current situation by means of "ascending phases in the accumulation cycle" and "phases of decadence in the cycle" of accumulation rather than treating it as the historic period of the irreversible decadence of capitalism in contrast to a preceding historic phase which is generally one of development even though accompanied by crises.

"There (...) is a schema, that is, the division of capitalism's history into two main epochs: its ascendance and its decadence. Almost everything that was valid for communists during the former, is no longer so during the latter for the simple reason that there is no longer growth but rather decadence. An example? The unions: they were useful and it was right for revolutionaries to work inside them and try to control them previously but it's no longer valid. Not even the hint of reference to the unions' historic, institutional role of mediation; nor of the relationship between this role and the different phases of capitalism or of the objective relationship between the rate of profit and the room to bargain. (...) In the ascending phase of the accumulation cycle, the union, as 'lawyer' can get concessions on wages and conditions (which are however immediately reabsorbed by capital); in the decadent phase of the cycle the room for mediation is reduced to zero and the unions, continuing their historic function, are reduced to mediating indeed but in favour of conservation, functioning as agents of capitalist interests within the working class.

The ICC on the other hand divides history into two parts: when the unions are positive for the working class - without specifying how and on what ground - and when they become negative.

We see similar schematism on the question of wars of national liberation.

So the formal proposal of positions that are indubitable and so apparently shared, is accompanied by a substantial divergence, if not alienation, from historical materialism and an inability to examine the objective situation" 13.

As this part of the article is explicitly developed as a reply to the ICC, we must point out that BC really has a very short memory if it doesn't even remember the basic positions of the ICC on the unions developed in dozens and dozens of articles and in particular in a pamphlet specifically dedicated to the union question 14 which makes extensive "reference to the unions' historic, institutional role of mediation" and to "the relationship between this role and the different phases of capitalism". We invite comrades to read or re-read our pamphlet to check the inaccuracy of BC's assertions.

But we think it's useful to bear in mind what Marx and Engels said one and a half centuries ago: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution" (Marx-Engels, Introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy, Progress Publishers, pg 21.).

We want to believe that BC simply made a slip of the pen, that it used terms that are inappropriate in trying to reply to our arguments. Because if this isn't the case we have to ask what BC means by these phrases. Perhaps that, after a phase of recession and with the recovery of an accumulation cycle, the working class can go back to trusting in the unions to "get concessions on wages and conditions"? If this is the case we want BC to tell us what were, in its opinion, "the ascendant phases of the accumulation cycle" in recent decades and what have been the corresponding "concessions on wages and conditions" on the part of the unions to the working class.

Moreover, on national liberation struggles, on which the ICC expresses "similar schematism", what do the comrades of BC mean, that in this case too we can support Arafat or his like because the accumulation cycle of capital is assured and it's not in recession? If this isn't the correct interpretation, what does BC mean?

In conclusion

In this article we have shown that it isn't the ICC that has an idealist vision of reality but rather BC that lives in theoretic confusion and has an opportunist approach in its intervention. We have the strong impression that all the arguments developed by BC in polemic with "a proletarian political camp that is no longer up to its tasks and so has been superseded by the times" are no more than a smoke screen to hide its own opportunist slidings and also a certain deviation on a programmatic level, that is beginning to worry us. In particular, given the current tendency of the IBRP to see itself as "alone in the world" in the face of a proletarian political camp that is no longer up to its tasks, it would be opportune for the comrades to go back to the brochure and to the numerous texts that they've written in polemics against the Bordigists, where they rightly criticise the fact that each Bordigist group considers itself to be THE PARTY and rejects the others as worthless. For this reason we invite BC (and the IBRP) to take our criticisms seriously and not to hide themselves behind ridiculous accusations of biliousness or dishonesty. Let's try to be up to our tasks.

9th March 2001 Ezechiele

1 "The marxist and opportunist visions in the policy of building the party", International Review no.103, 4th quarter 2000.

2 "The New International will be the international party of the Proletariat" in Prometeo n°2, December 2000.

3 We should note that in the workers' movement accusations of "slander", "biliousness", etc were typically used by centrist and opportunist elements against the polemics directed at them by left currents (Lenin was seen as a "wicked slanderer" when he took up the fight against the Mensheviks, Rosa too was accused of being "hysterical" when she fought against Bernstein and later against Kautsky on the question of the mass strike). Rather than making this type of accusation, the IBRP should explain why our criticisms are false and even "slanderous". It's not enough to assert it as a fact, it must be demonstrated. On the other hand the IBRP is ill placed to level this kind of reproach at us as they're not backward in the use of such descriptions themselves, in particular the assertion, without any proof, that we are not part of the proletarian camp. This is a case of seeing the straw in your neighbour's eye while not seeing the beam in your own.

4 It's important to note that the comrades of BC reacted with particular rancour to our first reply in as far as they identified the description "opportunist" with that of "counter-revolutionary". This identification can be seen to be wrong and unfounded to anyone who knows the history of the workers' movement. Opportunism has always been understood as a deformation of revolutionary positions existing within the workers' movement. It's only the ambiguity and the lack of clarity of Bordigism (and of BC itself) that has allowed them to go on denoting as opportunist, political formations that have already gone over to the counter-revolution, such as the various Stalinist CPs, and so to identify opportunism with the counter-revolution.

5 IBRP; "Towards the new International"

6 From "The New International will be ?", pg 10.

7 See in particular the two main works of Rosa Luxemburg in which this theory is developed: The accumulation of capital and The accumulation of capital - an anti-critique, published by Monthly Review Press.

8 One of the main reasons why the reconstitution of the blocs isn't on the agenda today is that there is no country even remotely capable of challenging the United States in military terms. A country like Germany needs many long years (certainly more than a dozen) before it can possess a credible military potential.

9 For more details on this "swerve" see our aticle "The wind from the Eastern and the response of revolutionaries" in International Review n°61.

10 Idem.

11 We will mention again that, at the time of the strikes in Poland in August '80, the CWO raised the slogan "Revolution now!" in its paper, when the situation wasn't in fact a revolutionary one. The comrades of the CWO have told us that this was an accident, that the title and the article was produced by one militant, who hadn't got the agreement of the other members and that the paper was immediately withdrawn from circulation. We accept the explanation but even so it must be admitted that there wasn't great political or organisational clarity at the time if one of its members could think and write such a stupid thing and the organisation couldn't prevent it from being published. The militant concerned probably wasn't just anyone as the CWO gave him the responsibility to publish the paper without it first being controlled by the organisation or by a publications committee. It's only in anarchist circles that this type of serious individual error is possible or else in the Italian Socialist Party in 1914-15, when Mussolini published an article in Avanti calling for participation in the war, without informing anyone beforehand. But at the time Benito was at least the director of the paper (and had been bought secretly by Cachin with money from the French government). Anyway the internal organisation of the CWO at the time left a lot to be desired. We hope that it has improved since then.

12 See the article "I sindacati hanno cambiato ruolo con la decadenza del capitalismo?" in Rivoluzione Internazionale n°116

13 From "The New International will be?", pg 8-9.

14 Unions against the working class, now published in all the major European languages.

IR106, 3rd Quarter 2001

We are publishing below the second part of the correspondence begun in the previous issue of the Review [213], sent to us by one of our contacts in disagreement with our position on the economic explanation for capitalism’s decadence.

Following the letter, we publish the second part of our reply begun in the previous issue, and which is concerned above all with the method for coming to grips with this debate. In fact, we do not deal directly with the questions and criticisms that the comrade addresses to us. We will return to this in a future article, in particular to respond on the question of the post-war reconstruction during the 1950s and 60s. This cannot be explained purely by the devalorisation of constant capital and the increase in variable capital’s share in the organic composition of capital, despite what the comrade and the CWO (Communist Workers Organisation) may think. We agree that this is an important question to discuss and to clarify.

We will also return to the comrade’s view of our vision of the “economic interest” of imperialist war. We are far from rejecting the existence of an economic factor in imperialist wars during capitalist decadence. The question is: at what level does this factor operate? At the immediate level of the conquest of territories and markets, or in more general and historical terms? Above all, what is its role in exacerbating and unleashing imperialist antagonisms? And what is the determining factor in the dynamic of these rivalries? To be more concrete, why is it for example that imperialist and economic rivalries did not match during the period between 1945 and 1989 when the US imperialist bloc – which regrouped the world’s main economic powers and rivals – confronted the Russian imperialist bloc?

The Falling Rate of Profit, Imperialist War and the Reconstruction Period

How Marx’s falling rate of profit analysis explains the reconstruction period was convincingly shown by the CWO in its essay ‘War and Accumulation’ in Revolutionary Perspectives n°16 (Old Series), pp.15-17. (N.B. The CWO’s crisis theory eclectically combines Marx’s analysis of the falling rate of profit with that of Grossmann-Mattick. In this discussion, however, the CWO exclusively follows Marx’s analysis).

“During a war - we speak here of 20th century total wars - the existing mass of capital is devalued simply by being run into the ground and not replaced by new capital; in volume terms the productive apparatus is the same as that prior to the war, but in value terms it is not, due to age and over use. The direction of all production to the war effort ensures this; the production of Department I factories is switched from, e.g. machine tools, to armaments, and ageing machinery which is technically obsolete before all its value C is used up, is run into the ground, at a great saving for capital. In peacetime, capitalists who don’t keep raising this composition of their capital are driven to the wall, but NOT in wartime. State control of the economy and the war effort introduce such a limitation on competition, and such a system of guaranteed orders, that the capitalist has no incentive, and no obligation to constantly re-equip and improve his productive apparatus…

But not only was the existing mass of capital of less value in 1949 than it had been in 1939 (mainly due to devaluation than destruction), but the composition of capital had also fallen in the war years, due to the introduction of the reserve army of labour (unemployed, women) into production, usually on the basis of the widespread introduction of three shift working and the six day week; the composition of capital fell since the same C was utilised by a larger labour force, i.e. V rose…

On the basis of this high rate and mass of profit, the gradual re-equipment of the productive forces took place after World War 2 (…) In a situation where a mass of devalued capital existed, any re-equipment of the productive forces (even with similar machinery of no increased value) would lead to phenomenal increases in productivity. If this rises faster than the composition of capital, then the rate of profit will NOT fall, instead, it will rise (…) Therefore, the bourgeoisie didn’t have the problem of wondering why they should bother to accumulate in the 1950’s; the war had solved that problem for them by re-establishing the basis for profitable production”.

This clear explanation by the CWO demolishes the ICC’s muddled critique of the falling rate of profit as an explanation of capitalist reconstruction.

“The problem is that it’s never been proven that during the recoveries that have followed world wars, the organic composition of capital is lower than what it was before the war. In fact the contrary is the case. If you look at the Second World War, for example, it is clear that, in the countries affected by the destructions of the war, the average productivity of labour and thus the relationship between constant and variable capital very quickly (i.e. by the beginning of the 50’s), reached what it had been in 1939. Indeed, the productive potential that was reconstituted was much more modern than the one that had been destroyed. However, the period of ‘prosperity’ which accompanied the reconstruction went on long after that (in fact up to the mid-60’s), i.e. well after the point where the pre-war productive capacity had been reconstituted, taking the organic composition to its previous level” (“Rejecting the notion of Decadence demobilises the Proletariat in the face of War”, International Review n°77, pp.20.)

The real ‘problem’ is that the ICC, like its mentor Rosa Luxemburg, does not understand Marx’s analysis of falling rate of profit.

The Economic Confusions of the ICC

The ICC finds itself in a quandary because, on the one hand, it defends the Marxist position that decadence does not mean a total halt to the growth of the productive forces, but on the other, defends a crisis theory whose logical and inescapable conclusion is just this result. (In Rosa Luxemburg’s crisis theory pre-capitalist markets are the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation. Therefore, when these markets are exhausted capitalist accumulation has reached its absolute economic limit. Indeed, the ongoing destruction of pre-capitalist markets means that the total capital not only cannot exceed this limit but also must necessarily diminish.)

The ICC, however, ignores the blatant contradiction between the actual development of capitalism and the logical outcome of her economic analysis that there is a ceiling on capitalist growth, that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation. (This is also the logical conclusion to Henryk Grossmann’s analysis.)

This contradiction forces the ICC into a ludicrous conclusion about the nature of imperialist war; it believes that imperialist war does not have an economic function for decadent capitalism [1] [214]. The sheer absurdity of this idea is bewildering, on a par with the Bordigists’ ‘Invariance of the Programme’.

In other words, the ICC is saying that the Marxist position that in decadence capitalism ceases to fulfil a progressive function (economic, or otherwise) for humanity is identical with the position with that imperialist war does not have an economic function for capitalism. The ICC further confuses matters by also equating the latter view with the false notion of the IBRP that every war in decadence has an immediate economic motive [2] [215].

(The view that imperialist war does not have an economic function for capitalism is consistent with the ICC’s Luxemburgist pre-capitalist markets crisis theory. After all, in this theory, once pre-capitalist markets are exhausted, further accumulation at the level of total capital becomes impossible. And if capitalist accumulation has reached its absolute limit, then nothing, not even imperialist war can reverse the situation. Hence imperialist war cannot have an economic function.)

The ICC argues that imperialist war does not have an economic function. But if imperialist war does not have an economic function, what accounts for the reconstruction periods of capital, which the ICC believes happened, and which, in the case of that after World War II, it recognises as having led to an economic expansion that greatly exceeded that of pre-World War II capitalism?

Why is it that the ICC, which has the most coherent political program and practice of all the groups in the Communist Left, which is free of the sectarianism, opportunism and centrism that marks the IBRP and the Bordigists, descends into such profound confusion in the realm of economics? The answer is its Luxemburgist economics. Contrary to the illusions of the ICC, Rosa Luxemburg developed her alternative crisis theory because she misunderstood the method of Capital; in particular, she mistakenly thought that the reproduction schemes in vol. II of Capital were intended as a direct picture of concrete capitalist reality. The apparent contradiction between the schemes and historical reality led her to believe that the schemes were faulty. But what was at fault was the partial empiricism of her viewpoint; for her ‘discovery’ that capitalism could not accumulate without pre-capitalist markets derives from her mistakenly adopting the viewpoint of the individual capitalist. Her concessions to empiricism prevented her from grasping the validity of Marx’s falling rate of profit analysis, and caused her to arrive at a mechanistic, death crisis interpretation of capitalist accumulation.

I regard Rosa Luxemburg’s and Henryk Grossmann’s specific economic explanations of capitalist decadence as revisionist economics because they are based on a flawed understanding of the method of Capital:

“Orthodoxy in questions of Marxism relates rather exclusively to the method. It is only in the sense of its founder that this method can be expanded, extended and deepened. And this conviction rests on the observation that all attempts to overcome or ‘improve’ that method have led, and necessarily so, only to triteness, platitudinizing and eclecticism…”[3] [216].

Of course, despite their revisionist economics there was a class line separating Rosa Luxemburg and Henryk Grossmann: the former was a revolutionary Marxist owing to her political positions; Henryk Grossmann was a Stalinist reactionary.

The Dogmatism of the ICC

“There can be no dogmatism where the supreme and sole criterion of a doctrine is its conformity to the actual process of social and economic development” [4] [217].

The ICC refuses to acknowledge that because pre-capitalist markets are the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation in Luxemburg’s economics, this has specific and unavoidable consequences for the development of capitalism were it true. In other words, her crisis theory makes specific predictions about capitalist development. However, the “actual process of social and economic development” has shown unequivocally the falsity of these predictions and thus the falsity of her economics. Yet the ICC continues to defend the validity of these economics. This is DOGMATISM.

Furthermore, what else but dogmatism explains why the ICC continues to treat Henryk Grossmann’s analysis of the falling rate of profit as identical to that of Marx in Capital, when it has long been familiar with the critique of Henryk Grossmann in Anton Pannekoek’s The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism [5] [218], which clearly shows the fundamental differences between the two. Moreover, this article and the writings of the IBRP, particularly those of the CWO, should have made it clear to the ICC that the IBRP eclectically combines Grossmann’s crisis theory with that of Marx.

The ICC refers to the numerous articles it has written on economic theory as a sign of its commitment to clarity on this issue [6] [219]. However, in practice this has meant that the ICC merely repeats the same faulty arguments over and over again, ignoring and evading the cogent criticisms against its economics by other communist currents. It is true that the ICC responds with criticisms of these currents that are often correct per se, but are irrelevant to the validity of the specific criticisms that these currents raised in the first place. (For example, the ICC correctly observes that the IBRP and especially the Bordigists have a tendency to analyse capitalism from the point of view of each nation taken in isolation.)

That the ICC still defends its manifestly flawed Luxemburgist economics 25 years after its formation suggests that it has an internal political climate that discourages, or at least does not encourage, a theoretical deepening on the economic foundations of decadence. Its one thing to assert, as does the ICC, and rightly so, that differences over economic theory should not be a barrier to political unity and regroupment. However, for the ICC this has meant in practice avoiding maximum clarity on this issue; it has meant theoretical stagnation.

Quite frankly, the ICC, in defending its Luxemburgist economics, displays the same disregard for accuracy and rigour that the IBRP and the Bordigists do to justify their sectarian, centrist and opportunist political practice. Needless to say, the ICC’s impoverished economics lends credence to the attacks on its political program by the IBRP and the Bordigists, as many of the criticisms these currents make against the ICC’s economics are valid.

 The ICC’s dogmatic devotion to Rosa Luxemburg’s economics, which I find reminiscent of the Bordigists’ idolatrous attitude to Lenin, blinds the organisation to the disparity between her political insights into imperialism and her revisionist economics [7] [220].

If the ICC wishes to have a coherent Marxist economic foundation for its political program, then it MUST abandon Rosa Luxemburg’s fatally flawed crisis theory and replace it with that of the analysis of the falling rate of profit in Capital.

Eclecticism in the Crisis Theories of the IBRP and the ICC

As the CWO observed on the eclectic approach of the ICC to economics:

“Like Luxemburg, their references to the falling rate of profit are merely to explain away the facts (such as why capitalism sought markets further away from the metropoles during the period of primitive accumulation) or to explain elements of the development of capitalism which a purely markets approach cannot (e.g. why capital concentration preceded the rush for colonies or that the vast bulk of trade was carried on in this period between the advanced capitalist powers)” [8] [221].

However, the IBRP themselves arrive at an eclectic and confused theory as they combine Henryk Grossmann’s crisis theory with that of Marx. Indeed, they believe that Grossmann’s “contribution was to show the significance that the mass of surplus value played in determining the exact nature of the crisis” [9] [222]. The IBRP fails to grasp that this so-called insight of Grossmann is inextricably linked to his mechanistic and one-sided conception of capitalist accumulation. In contrast to Marx, he examines the falling rate of profit solely in terms of the production of surplus value, ignoring the role of the circulation and distribution of surplus value. As a result, he reaches the erroneous conclusion that capital is exported to foreign nations not, as Marx argued, for the maximisation of surplus value, but because of the “lack of investment opportunities at home” [10] [223] (which is the false view that capital is exported  “because it absolutely could not be applied at home” [11] [224] that Marx criticised in vol. III of Capital), and thus to his mechanistic conception of a death crisis of capitalism.

The eclectic approach of both currents allows them to pick and choose from their crisis theories as if from a smorgasbord. However plausible this may seem, in reality they are defending two diametrically opposed perspectives: the mechanistic viewpoint of the bourgeoisie and the dialectical viewpoint of the proletariat. (It is true that the ICC and the IBRP criticise certain features of the crisis theories of Rosa Luxemburg and Grossmann-Mattick, respectively. But as they continue to defend the core economic analyses of these theories they therefore continue to defend the mechanistic conceptions on which they are based).

CA.

IR106, 3rd Quarter 2001

The so-called empiricism of Rosa Luxemburg

Bukharin, Raya Dunayeskavya and other critics of Rosa Luxemburg cited by the comrade, say that she was wrong to look for external reasons for the crisis of capitalism. [1] [236] However, the world market and the pre-capitalist economies are not external to the system: they are the environment for its development and confrontations. To claim that capitalism can realise its accumulation within its own limits, is to say that it is a system without historical limits and that it develops through the simple exchange of commodities alone. In the first volume of Capital and also in The Results of British Rule of India Marx demonstrated exactly the opposite: the genesis of capital, its progressive accumulation, took place by means of the battle to separate the producers from their means of livelihood, transforming them into the principle productive commodity – labour power – and, around this axis, through immeasurable suffering, constructing “peaceful” and “regular” commodity exchange. Using the same method, Rosa Luxemburg asks whether what was true of primitive accumulation is not also true in the later phases of capitalist development. Her critics believe that primitive accumulation is one thing, but that capitalist development is quite another, where there is no longer any role for the  “external market” and the “struggle against the natural economy”. However, this is utterly refuted by capitalism’s evolution in the 19th century especially, in its imperialist phase.

“At the time of primitive accumulation, i.e. at the end of the Middle Ages, when the history of capitalism in Europe began, and right into the 19th century, dispossessing the peasants in England and on the Continent was the most striking weapon in the large-scale transformation of means of production and labour power into capital. Yet capital in power performs the same task even today, and on an even more important scale – by modern colonial policy (…) Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to ‘peaceful competition’, i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy (…) The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation. Their means of production and their labour power no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary for capitalism” (The Accumulation of Capital, pages 369-71, Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).

Those within the revolutionary movement who want to explain the historic crisis of capitalism exclusively by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall only see one part - exchange within the already constructed capitalist market - but miss the other, the most dynamic historically and whose progressive limitation from the end of the 19th century has caused the growing chaos and convulsions that humanity has suffered since 1914.

This puts them in a very uncomfortable position faced with that central dogma of capitalist economic ideology – the idea that “production creates its own market”, that all supply eventually encounters a demand – which was criticised so severely by Marx who denounced: “The conception (…) adopted by Ricardo from the tedious Say (…) that over-production is not possible or at least that no general glut of the market is possible, based on the proposition that products are exchanged against products, or as Mill put it, on the ‘metaphysical equilibrium  of sellers and buyers’, and this led to [the conclusion] that demand is determined only by production” (Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 2, page 493).

In the same way he combated the conceptions that limited the disturbances of capitalism to mere disproportions between sectors of production.

If they exclude the pre-capitalist territories from the field of capitalist accumulation, if they think that capitalism can develop from its own social relations, how can the thesis that production creates its own market be avoided? The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is not a sufficient explanation since it operates within such an accumulation of counter-acting factors and over such a long period that it cannot explain the historical events that have unfolded since the last third of the 19th century and accumulated during the 20th: imperialism, world wars, the great depression, state capitalism, the reappearance of the open crisis from the end of the 1960s and the increasingly serious collapse of large parts of the world economy over the last 30 years.

But precisely because the tendential fall operates “in the long term”, is it not necessary to avoid ‘empiricism’ and ‘impatience’ and avoid being ‘misled’ by all these immediate catastrophes? This appears to be the method that the comrade proposes when he stresses the “apparent” coincidence of the “division of the world” with the “world crisis” or when he points out that the great depression appeared to confirm the theses of Grossman and Luxemburg but that these have since been disproved by the large scale growth after World War II or the growth in the 1990s.

We will return to this aspect later. What we want to highlight now is that behind the accusations of “empiricism” levelled at Rosa Luxemburg there is an important question of “method” which we think has escaped the comrade. The Revisionists in the Social Democratic movement began a crusade against Marx’s “underconsumptionism”. Bernstein was the first to put Marx’s analysis of the crisis on the same level as the pathetic Rodbertus. Tugan-Baranowsky calmly returned to Say’s theses about “production creating its own markets”, explaining with “Marxist” reasoning that the crisis arises from disproportions between the two departments of production. The Revisionist critiques of Rosa Luxemburg – Bauer, Eckstein, Hilferding etc – said with all the authority of “Marxist orthodoxy” - that the tables of expanded reproduction explained perfectly that there was not a problem of realisation. Bukharin – in the service of the Stalinisation of the Communist Parties – attacked Luxemburg’s work in order to “demonstrate” that capitalism does not have an “external” problem.

Why did the opportunists have this aversion to Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis? Simply because she put her finger on a tender spot, by showing the global and historical root of capitalism’s entry into its decadence. Fifty years previously the method of analysing the contradiction between the advance of the productivity and the necessity to maximise profit had proved very fruitful. However, now it was the question of the struggle of capitalism against the preceding social order in order to form the world market and the contradictions that arose from this (the growing poverty of the pre-capitalist territories) that provided a clearer and more systematic framework that integrated into a higher synthesis both the original contradiction, and the phenomena of imperialism, world war and the progressive decomposition of the capitalist economy.

Later on, following in the footsteps of the Revisionists but on a frankly bourgeois terrain, a whole gaggle of university “Marxologists” dedicated themselves to developing the idea of the “abstract” Marx. Cleverly separating his reflections on expanded reproduction, the rate of profit, etc., from those on the question of the market and the realisation of surplus value. By means of this fragmentation – in reality an adulteration - of Marx’s thought they conjured up the ghost of his “abstract method”, turning it into a explanatory “model” of the contractual functioning of capitalist economy: the regular exchange of commodities which Rosa Luxemburg talks of. Any attempt to confront this “model” with the realities of capitalism is seen as “empiricism” and expresses a lack of understanding of the fact that it is a question of an “abstract model”, etc. etc.

This enterprise, which turned Marx into an “inoffensive icon” – as Lenin would have said – aimed to eliminate the revolutionary thread of his work and to make it say what he never meant. The most shameless bourgeois economists who don’t adopt a “Marxist” façade also have this “long-term vision”. Are they not forever telling us not to be empiricists or immediatists: that we should look beyond the unemployment, the stock market cataclysms and instead understand the “general tendency” based upon “good fundamentals”. The Marxologists conveniently select and take out of context parts of Capital in order to achieve the same ends.

The comrade holds clearly revolutionary positions and in no way, shape or form shares in this business of confusion. However, in drawing on many of Bukharin’s “arguments”, and on those of various academics, instead of undertaking an examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s positions, [2] [237] he closes his eyes to those aspects of the question we have tried to draw out here.

The limits of capitalist accumulation

The comrade says that Rosa Luxemburg poses an “absolute limit” to the development of capitalism. First of all we will look at exactly what she said: “The more ruthlessly capitalism sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodic economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital” (op. cit chapter XXXII, page 466-467).

If the comrade is referring to “this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating”, it is clear that if interpreted literally it does give the impression of an absolute limit. Nevertheless, the same conclusion could be drawn from Marx’s assertion that: “In the way that the development of labour productivity involves a law, in the form of the falling rate of profit, that at a certain point confronts this development itself” (Capital Vol. 3, page 367). This formulation contrasts with others – which we have quoted above - where it is emphasised that this law is only a tendency.

Clearly we have to be careful not to use formulations that can lead to ambiguity or to take isolated phrases out of context. What is important to see is an analysis, dynamic and global orientation. At this level Luxemburg – like Marx – is very clear: what is most important is her assertion that the accumulation of capital “becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions”. This does not express an absolute limit but a general tendency that is going to get worse with the rotting of the situation.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx says that “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted” (Surveys From Exile, The Pelican Marx Library, page 146, 1977). The method that revolutionaries use consists, in accord with this argument, in understanding and putting forward the fundamental tendencies that mark “the circumstances with which [men] are directly confronted”. In the years before the explosion of war in 1914 Rosa Luxemburg correctly declared that there was a historical tendency that was going to mark - and how! - “men’s actions”

The conclusion to the first edition of The Accumulation of Capital clears up, in our opinion, any doubts about whether she was formulating an “absolute” tendency: “Capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy that is unable to live by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. Although it strives to become universal, and indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down - because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. The aim of socialism is not accumulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity’s wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe”.

What is our conception of the decadence of capitalism?  Have we ever mentioned a complete blockage in the development of the productive forces, or an absolute limit to capitalist production, a kind of definitive and mortal crisis?

The comrade recognises that we reject the idea formulated by Trotsky concerning an absolute blockage of the productive forces. In the same way, our conception is alien to certain conceptions which arose in the 20’s within tendencies of the KAPD which talked about the “mortal crisis of capitalism”, which they understood to mean an absolute stoppage of production and capitalist growth.

Our pamphlet on decadence responds to Trotsky’s position: “All social changes are the result of the deepening and prolonged collision of the relations of production with the development of the productive forces. If we defended the hypothesis of the definitive and permanent halt in this development, the deepening of this contradiction could only be demonstrated if the other bounds of the existing property relations were ‘absolutely’ receding. However, it happens that the characteristic movement of the different periods of decadence in history (including the capitalist system) tends rather in the direction of expanding these frontiers up to their final limits than towards their restriction.

Under the aegis of the state and under the pressure of economic and social necessities, the system’s carcass swells while casting off everything that proves superfluous to the relations of production, everything not strictly necessary to the system’s survival. The system is reinforced but at its last limits” (page 19-20 in the English edition).

Understanding how capitalism can “manage the crisis” through a policy of survival aimed at reducing its effects on the central countries falls entirely within the Marxist analysis of the decadence of modes of production. Did the Roman Empire not do the same when it withdrew to Byzantium and abandoned vast areas to the pressure of the invading barbarians? Was not the enlightened despotism of the ancien régime monarchies a response to the advancing capitalist relations of production?

“The freeing of the slaves under the Late Roman Empire; the freeing of the serfs at the end of the Middle Ages; the partial liberties which the declining monarchy had to grant to the new bourgeois cities; the reinforcing of the central power of the crown, and the elimination of the ‘nobility of the robe’ completely dominated by the King; and likewise, in the capitalist framework, the attempts at economic planning; the efforts to try to relieve the burden of national, economic frontiers; the tendency to replace bourgeois parasites with efficient  salaried ‘managers’ of capital; policies such as the New Deal and the continued manipulation of certain mechanisms of the law of value – all are evidence of this tendency to expand the juridical framework by laying bare the relations of production. There is no halt in the dialectical movement after a society has reached its apogee. This movement is qualitatively transformed but it does not end. The intensification of the contradictions inherent in the old society necessarily continues and for this reason the development of the imprisoned productive forces must continue even if it is at the slowest rate” (idem).

In the period of capitalism’s decadence we have seen an aggravation of its contradictions at all levels. There has been development of the productive forces, there have also been phases of economic growth, but this has taken place within a global framework that has become increasingly contradictory, convulsed and destructive. The tendency towards barbarism has not appeared in a linear procession of catastrophes and unending collapse, but rather disguised by phases of growth, by the increase in the productivity of labour, by greater or smaller periods of growth. State capitalism – especially in the central countries – has all the means at hand in order to control a potentially explosive situation, to attenuate and smooth over the most serious contradictions and, above all else, to maintain the appearance of “healthy functioning” and even “progress”. The system “is being stretched to its very limits”.

Between the 1st and 3rd century AD, the system of slavery was characterised by increasingly serious contradictions. Rome and Byzantium were being filled with the finest monuments in the history of Empire, the most advanced technologies of the time flourished in this period to the point that the principle of electrical energy was discovered during the 2nd century. But these dazzling developments took place within an increasingly degraded framework, the exacerbation of social struggles, the abandoning of territories to barbarian pressure, the massive deterioration of the transport infrastructure. [3] [238]

Are we not witnessing the same evolution today but of even greater magnitude due to the specific characteristics of decadent capitalism? [4] [239]

The comrade says that our theory is refuted by the growth after World War II and the growth that took place in the 1990s. We cannot develop a detailed argument [5] [240] here: however, in relation to the growth between 1945 and 1967, it is necessary to understand, over and above its statistical volume:

-    the powerful impact of armaments and the war economy, as the comrade recognises.

-    the importance of the Marshall Plan, the most gigantic expansion of debt ever known up to then. 

-    the consequences that this has had (and the comrade also appears to recognise this): a substantial part of this growth has evaporated in a dramatic process of dismantling – which in the central countries has particularly affected heavy industry – or of implosion as in the case of the Russian bloc.

As for the growth of the 90s: a minuscule level of growth, [6] [241] based on historically unprecedented levels of debt and speculation, was limited to the United States – and a few other countries – within the context of unprecedented setbacks for numerous countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. [7] [242] Moreover, the present collapse of the “New Economy” and the turbulence on the stock markets is revealing the reality of this growth.

When talking about the “growth figures” the comrade should reflect about their nature and composition. [8] [243] Growth that expresses the expansion of the system is not the same thing as growth that reflects a policy of survival and crisis management. Generally, for a Marxist, it is not possible to identify the growth of production with the development of capitalist production. They are two distinct ideas. The practice in Stalinist Russia of using recording breaking statistics for steel, cotton and cement to hide defective or non-existent production, was only the most extreme and grotesque illustration of a general tendency of decadent capitalism, stimulated by state capitalism, to increase the production figures of a system whose bases of reproduction are being slowly and progressively eroded. Rosa Luxemburg reminds us that: “the accumulation of capital is not about piling up increasingly large heaps of commodities, but of turning increasingly large volumes of products into money-capital. Between the accumulation of surplus-value in the form of commodities and the application of surplus-value for the development of production there is a decisive and difficult step, what Marx called the perilous leap of commodity production from the production of commodities to their sale for money. Perhaps this problem only exists for individual capitalists and does not affect the class or society as a whole? Nothing of the kind: ‘In speaking of the social point of view’, Marx said, ‘it is necessary to avoid falling into the habits of bourgeois economists, as imitated by Proudhon, i.e. to avoid looking at things as if a society based on the capitalist mode of production lost its specific historical and economic character when considered en bloc, as a totality. This is not the case at all. What we have to deal with is the collective capitalist’” (Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-critique, the quote from Marx is from Vol. 2 of Capital).

The nature of the growth in production during capitalism’s decadence – and above all during the last 50 years – has been marked by the tendency for it to be mediated through debt and state intervention. An intervention which at times has amassed enormous stores of commodities, only to destroy them years later since the problem is that they are not the products of a real development of the capitalist relations of production, an authentic expansion of the mass of wage earners and markets.

But, in any case, beyond their nature and particular composition the phases of relative and drugged growth have hidden a historical slowdown in the growth of production. This is the primary characteristic of the decadence of capitalism. Thus, there is no question of an absolute stoppage of growth, but this observation cannot obscure the fundamental tendency.

The same goes for other aspects of economic and social life. The fantastic discoveries in fields such as the human genome, telecommunications or transport, hide a profound deterioration in living conditions, health and the infrastructure of production. The restoration of facades in the great cities of Europe or America, the frantic building of useless glass monuments, illuminated skyscrapers, gives the illusory sensation that “all is well” obscuring an enormous, systematic and irreversible degradation of workers’ and the whole of humanity’s living conditions. It is the same with the functioning and maintaining of these dazzling cities: behind the bright shining lights we see the repeated power cuts in prosperous California and the proliferation of food, transport and ecological catastrophes etc.

It is essential to take the point of view of the totality, as the comrade himself emphasises. We cannot look at robotics and the genome, nor the phases of more or less sustained growth in themselves: it is necessary to see the contradictory and destructive framework within which they occur. The gravity of the system’s crisis is not measured by the volume of rises and falls in production but from a historical and global standpoint, by the worsening of its contradictions, the progressive reduction in its room for manoeuvre and above all by the deterioration in the living conditions of the working class.

In China at the same time as they constructed a dazzling artificial island of skyscrapers adjoining Shanghai, they forced school children to work in order to keep them open. Whilst a totally robotized factory was being opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the number of street children continued to grow, and more than 50% of the population still lives below the vital minimum. In Great Britain at the same time as Pharaonic works are being carried out in London’s old docklands, livestock in their hundreds of thousands are being sacrificed. Which of these two sets of facts reflect capitalism’s real situation? We don’t have any doubts about the answer. We hope that we have contributed to dissipating any doubts that the comrade, or our readers in general, may feel on the matter. 

Adalen 2.4.2001

14th Congress of the ICC

The alternative facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the same as the one which faced it at the beginning of the 20th: the descent into barbarism or the renewal of society through the communist revolution. The revolutionary marxists who insisted on this inescapable dilemma in the turbulent period 1914-23 could hardly have imagined that their political descendants would still be obliged to insist on it again at the start of the new millennium. Indeed, even the 'post-68' generation of revolutionaries, who emerged from the revival of proletarian struggles after the long counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s, did not really expect that a declining capitalism could be quite so adept at living with its own contradictions as it has proved to be since the 1960s.

For the bourgeoisie, all this is further proof that capitalism is the last and now the only possible form of human society, that the communist project was never more than a utopian dream. This notion, a necessary cornerstone of all bourgeois ideology, was granted an apparent historical verification by the collapse of the 'Communist' bloc in 1989-91. Ably presenting the downfall of a part of the world capitalist system as the final demise of marxism and communism, the bourgeoisie from this moment on concluded from this false premise that capitalism had entered a new and exciting phase in its life. According to this view:

- capitalism, for the first time, was a global system; the free operation of the laws of the market would no longer be fettered by the unwieldy 'socialist' obstacles raised by the Stalinist regimes and their imitators;

- computerisation and the Internet signalled not only a vast technological revolution but also an unlimited new market

- national competition and wars would become a thing of the past

- class conflict would also disappear because classes themselves were being superseded; above all, the working class was a thing of the past.

In this new dynamic capitalism peace and prosperity would be the order of the day. Barbarism would be banished and socialism would become a total irrelevance.

2. In reality, the decade since 1991 has systematically refuted all these fables. Every new ideological gimmick used to prove that capitalism could offer mankind a bright future has proved to be faulty, a cheaply made toy that breaks down almost as soon as you play with it. Future generations will surely look at the bourgeois rationalisations of this decade with the utmost contempt; they will certainly see this period as one of unprecedented blindness, stupidity, horror and suffering. The marxist prognosis that capitalism has outlived its usefulness to humanity - already confirmed by the world wars and world crises of the first half of the 20th century - is being further proven by the prolongation of this senile system into its phase of decomposition, which is the real 'new' period whose entry was marked by the events of 1989-91. Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the very premises of any future social regeneration. But contrary to the propaganda campaigns of the ruling class, the counter-force to the tendency towards barbarism - the communist revolution, logical culmination of the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation - is no utopia, but remains a necessity demanded by the death agony of the present mode of production, and at the same time a concrete possibility given that the working class has neither disappeared nor been decisively defeated.

The slow demise of the capitalist economy

3. All the promises made by the ruling class about the new age of prosperity inaugurated by the 'victory of capitalism over socialism' have one by one been exposed as insubstantial bubbles:

- first we were told that world capitalism would receive an immense boost from the collapse of 'Communism' and the opening up of vast new markets in the former Eastern bloc countries. In fact, these countries were not outside the capitalist system but merely backward capitalist states unable to compete with the countries of the western bloc in a saturated world market. The fact that there was no more room for any major new capitalist economies compelled these countries to shut themselves off behind protectionist barriers, while their bloc leader, the USSR, could only compete with its western rival at the military level. The 'opening up' of these economies to the capital of the more industrialised countries has only highlighted their inherent weaknesses and has served to plunge their populations into an even deeper misery than they experienced under the Stalinist regimes: collapse of whole sectors of production, massive unemployment, shortages of consumer goods, inflation, endemic corruption, wages unpaid for months on end, break-down of social services, growing financial convulsions and the repeated failure of all the western-imposed packages of economic 'reforms'. Far from being a boon to the western economies, the ex-Eastern bloc threatens to be a huge burden. This is evident in Germany where the eastern side is a sheer drag on the economy as a whole; but it also applies more broadly, given the gigantic amounts of capital that has been thrown into the bottomless pit of these economies with no tangible reward, and now the growing flood of refugees fleeing from economic or military chaos in the Balkans or the ex-USSR;

- then it was the turn of the far-eastern tigers and dragons who were going to show the way forward for the rest of the world with their phenomenal growth figures. These economies proved very quickly to be another mirage. They had initially been artificially built up by US capitalism in the period of the blocs as a firebreak against the spread of 'Communism'; their spectacular rise in the 80s and 90s was based on the same marshy ground as the rest of the world economy: the massive resort to credit, itself a product of a an insufficiency of new markets for global capital. The equally spectacular crisis of 1997 was proof of this: it only required the debts to be called in for the whole house of cards to come crashing down. And while a series of sticking-plaster measures, led by the US, have kept this crisis within certain bounds in the Far East and prevented it from provoking an open recession in the West, the long-drawn out stagnation of the once unbeatable Japanese economy is proof that there will be no new 'locomotive' provided by the Far East. Japan's economic condition is so dangerous that it periodically sends waves of panic across the world, as when the Japanese finance minister recently declared the country to be bankrupt. And despite the appearance of new versions of the old 'Yellow Peril' mythology of the early 20th century, there is even less chance that China can become a new beacon of economic development. Whatever economic development has taken place in China is also based on the massive resort to debt; moreover, this has not prevented millions of workers from languishing in unemployment while further millions of workers go with wages unpaid for long period;

- the most recent Great White Hope of capitalism has been the performance of the US economy, with its 'ten years of uninterrupted growth' and in particular with its leading role in the 'new economy' based on the Internet. But the 'Internet-driven economy' has proved to be such a short-lived promise that bourgeois commentators themselves scoff openly at it. 'dot.com' companies are going to the wall at a tremendous rate, many of them exposed as being no more than speculative frauds, symbolically summarising the real fraud: that capitalism could save itself simply by operating as a huge electronic department store. Furthermore, the downfall of the 'new economy' is itself a reflection of deeper problems now openly affecting the entire US economy. It is no longer any secret that the US 'boom' was based also on a flight into astronomical debts which are directly raised by enterprises and individuals, and which resulted in a negative savings rate for the first time in decades; the gigantic growth rates which the bourgeoisie has boasted about are based in reality on a financial system which has been made increasingly fragile by the madness of speculation, and on an accentuation of attacks against workers' living conditions, i.e. increase in precarious jobs, the cutting of the social wage, the diversion of a growing portion of workers' income into the casino of the stock exchange;

- in any case, the boom is now over and there is now increasing talk of the US tilting over into recession. Not only the dot.com companies, but key manufacturing sectors are also in deep trouble.

Despite these alarming signs, the bourgeoisie continues to prate about particular booms in Britain, France, Ireland? but these refrains are increasingly a form of whistling in the dark. Given the tight dependence of the other industrial countries on their investments in the US, the visible end of the 'ten years of US growth' cannot fail to have very serious effects throughout the industrialised world.

4. The capitalist mode of production entered into its historic crisis of overproduction at the beginning of the 20th century - the time when capitalism indeed became 'globalised', simultaneously reaching the limits of its outward expansion and laying the foundations for the world-wide proletarian revolution. But the failure of the working class to carry out the death sentence on the system has meant that capitalism has survived despite the growing weight of its inner contradictions. Capitalism does not simply cease to function once it is no longer a factor of historical progress. On the contrary, it continues to 'grow' and to function, but on a diseased basis which plunges mankind into a spiral of catastrophe. In particular, decadent capitalism entered into the cycle of crisis, war and reconstruction which marked the first two thirds of the 20th century. World wars permitted a redivision of the world market while the ensuing reconstruction provided a temporary stimulus for the latter. But the survival of the system has also demanded a growing political intervention by the ruling class, which has used its state apparatus to flout the 'normal' laws of the market, above all through the policies of deficit spending, of creating artificial markets through the use of credit. The crash of 1929 proved to the bourgeoisie that the war-reconstruction process in itself could only culminate in a spectacular world wide slump after a single decade; it was, in other words, no longer possible to restore capitalist production on a firm basis by returning to the 'spontaneous' operation of commercial laws. Capitalist decadence is precisely the expression of the clash between the productive forces and the commodity form; hence, in this epoch, the bourgeoisie itself is compelled to act more and more at variance with the natural laws of commodity production, even while being driven by them. Hence the reconstruction of 1945 was consciously financed by the US, using the apparently irrational mechanism of lending money to its customers so that they could constitute a market for its goods. And once the limits of this conundrum were reached in the mid-60s, the world bourgeoisie only took the interventionist line to further heights. During the period of the imperialist blocs, this intervention was in general co-ordinated by bloc-wide mechanisms; and the disappearance of the blocs, while introducing dangerous centrifugal tendencies at the economic as well as the imperialist level, still did not lead to the disappearance of these international mechanisms: in fact they were reborn and even reinvigorated as the institutions most often identified as the principle agents of 'globalisation', such as the World Trade Organisation. And even though these organisms operate as a battle ground between the main national capitals or as coalitions between particular geo-political groupings (NAFTA, EU, etc), they express the fundamental necessity for the bourgeoisie to prevent the total paralysis of the world economy. This has been concretised, for example, in the persistent efforts of the USA to bail out its principal economic rival, Japan - even though it has also meant fuelling Japan's enormous debts with even more debts.

This organised cheating of the law of value via state capitalism does not do away with the convulsions of the system; it merely postpones or displaces them. It postpones them in time, particularly for the more advanced economies, by continually avoiding the slide into recession; and it displaces them in space by pushing the worst effects onto the peripheral regions of the globe, which are more or less abandoned to their fate except as pawns in inter-imperialist games. But even in the advanced countries this postponing of open recessions or depressions still makes itself felt through inflationary pressures, financial 'mini-crashes', the dismantling of whole swathes of industry, the break-down of agriculture and the accelerating decay of the infrastructure (roads, rail, services,) etc. This process also includes official recessions, but for the most part the real depth of the crisis is deliberately masked by the conscious manipulations of the bourgeoisie. The perspective for the coming period therefore continues to be a long slow descent into the abyss, punctuated by increasingly violent, but by no means final downward plunges. But there is no absolute point of no return for capitalist production in purely economic terms: long before such a theoretical point could be reached, capitalism would have been destroyed either by the generalisation of its tendency towards barbarism, or by the proletarian revolution.

The descent into barbarism

5. At the beginning of the 90s, we were told that the disappearance of aggressive 'Communism' from the face of the earth would usher in a new era of peace, since capitalism in its democratic form had long since ceased to be imperialist. This ideology was later combined with the myth of globalisation, arguing that national rivalries were a thing of the past.

It is true that the collapse of the Russian bloc and the subsequent break-up of its western counter-part removed a fundamental condition for world war, leaving aside the question of whether the social prerequisites for such a conflict existed. But this development did not alter the essential reality that national capitalist states cannot go beyond the relentless struggle to dominate the globe. Indeed, the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world's greatest powers to the meanest local warlords. This has taken the form of a growing number of local and regional wars around which the major powers continually jockey for advantage.

6. From the start the USA, as the world's policeman, recognised the danger of this new tendency and took immediate action to try to counter-act it. This was the essential significance of the Gulf war of 1991, which was a massive display of US military superiority aimed first and foremost not at Saddam Hussein's Iraq but at cowing the USA's great power rivals into submission. But although by obliging the other powers to take part in its anti-Saddam coalition the USA temporarily succeeded in strengthening its 'world leadership', the real success of this endeavour can be judged by the fact that ten years later, the USA is still being obliged to use the 'tactic' of bombing Iraq but each time it does so it is subjected to more and more criticism from the majority of its 'allies', and by the fact that it has been compelled to make similar displays of force in other arenas of conflict, in particular the Balkans.

The military superiority of the US has over the past decade shown itself to be completely incapable of halting the centrifugal development of imperialist rivalries. Instead of the US-run new world order promised by his father the new President Bush is confronted with a growing military disorder - with a proliferation of war all over the planet:

- in the Balkans, which, despite massive US-led intervention in 96 and 99, remains a chessboard of tension between the major powers and their local agents; in 2001, 'pacified' Kosovo is still a daily killing field and this brutal 'ethnic' bloodletting has now spilled over into Macedonia, threatening the involvement of several regional powers;

- in the Middle East where the Oslo peace agreement now lies in utter ruin. The escalation of the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a body blow to the USA's hopes for a 'pax Americana' in the region, providing opportunities for other great powers which, however, have no ability whatever to impose an alternative order of their own;

- in Chechnya where despite enjoying the support of the other great powers, who have no desire to see the Russian Federation being split up by a plethora of nationalist movements, the Kremlin has been unable to bring the war to a close;

- in Afghanistan where different Muslim factions vie for control with the Taliban;

- in Africa where wars are not only endemic and chronic, stretching from Algeria in the north to Angola in the south, but have also widened in scope to become true regional wars dragging in the armies of a number of neighbouring states, as in the Congo;

- in the Far East where countries like Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia continue to be wracked by internal fighting, and China is more and more asserting its claim to be a major regional power;

- on the Indian subcontinent where India and Pakistan have rattled nuclear sabres at each other and where Sri Lanka is still torn apart by the war against the Tamil separatists;

- in Latin America where tension is being increased by the USA's new 'war against drugs', which is in effect another attempt to re-impose US authority in its own backyard faced with the growing interference of its European rivals (e.g. through their open support for the Zapatistas);

- in Ireland where another 'peace process' has been punctuated by the sound of exploding bombs and assassins' bullets, and in the Basque country where the 'truce' has been broken and ETA has escalated its terrorist activities.

The list could be extended but the picture is clear. Far from bringing peace and stability, the break-up of the bloc system has considerably accelerated capitalism's slide into military barbarism. The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close.

7. In all these conflicts, the rivalry between the US and its former great power 'allies' has been more or less masked. More in the Gulf and the Balkans where the conflicts have taken the form of an 'alliance' of democratic states against local 'tyrants'; less in Africa where each country has acted more openly and more separately to protect its own national interests. Officially, the USA's main 'enemies' - those who are cited as justification for its ever-increasing military budgets - are either local 'rogue' states like North Korea or Iraq, or its former direct rival from the Cold War era, Russia, or its one time rival, then ally from the same period, China. The latter in particular is increasingly identified as the main potential rival to the USA. And in fact the recent period has seen a real build-up in tension between the US and these two powers - over the issue of NATO's extension into Eastern Europe, over the exposure of Russian spy-network based on a former FBI supervisor, and in particular over the spy plane incident in China. There also exists within the US bourgeoisie an important faction which is convinced that China is indeed the USA's main enemy. But perhaps a more significant development in the recent period is the accumulation of declarations by sections of the European bourgeoisie about the 'arrogance' of the US, in particular over its decision to repudiate the Kyoto agreement on carbon dioxide emissions, and to press ahead with its 'Son of Star Wars' anti-missile project. This latter indeed represents a formidable offensive by US imperialism to transform its technological advantage into an unprecedented planetary domination. This project represents a new stage in an increasingly aberrant arms race and can only sharpen antagonisms with its principal rivals.

These antagonisms have been further exacerbated by the decision to form a 'Euro-Army' separate from NATO. Although there is a strong tendency to blame the growing US-European rift on the new Bush administration, this 'new anti-Americanism' in Europe is only the explicit acknowledgement of a trend that has been in operation since the disappearance of the Western bloc at the beginning of the 90s. Ideologically, it reflects a tendency which, along with the trend towards every man for himself, was also unleashed by the break-up of the blocs - the tendency towards a new anti-American bloc based in Europe.

8. We are still however a long way from the formation of new imperialist blocs, for both military/strategic and social/political reasons:

- no state or even combination of states is able to measure up to the US at the level of military firepower. Germany, which has benefited most from the process of decomposition, advancing its interests into its traditional spheres like Eastern Europe, has no nuclear weapons and because of its past is obliged to take a very low key approach to its strategy of expansion. France, by far the most openly anti-American European power, is not able to pose itself as a potential bloc leader;

- 'Europe' is far from united, and the tendency towards every man for himself operates on this continent as much as any other. Though France and Germany would be the central axis of a European bloc, there are both historic and more immediate sources of tension between them. Britain meanwhile still tends to play both off against each other to prevent either becoming too powerful, and still plays the USA against both. It is important not to confuse the development of economic cooperation between European states with the immediate formation of a bloc structure, since there is no mechanical relationship between immediately economic and strategic/military interests;

- at the social level it is not possible to cohere society around a new war ideology comparable to anti-fascism in the 30s or anti-communism in the post-war period, because the working class is not mobilised behind the banners of the nation. The ideological basis for the formation of new blocs is thus not yet established even if the new anti-Americanism gives us a glimpse of what form it might take in the future.

World war thus remains off the agenda for the foreseeable future. But this in no way minimises the dangers contained in the present situation. The proliferation of local wars, the development of regional conflicts between nuclear-armed powers like India and Pakistan, the spread of these conflicts towards the heartlands of capital (as witness the Balkans war); the necessity for the USA to throw its weight around more and more to reassert its declining leadership, and the reactions this could provoke from other powers - all this could become part of a terrible spiral of destruction which could undermine the bases of a future communist society, even without the active mobilisation (behind capitalist ideology) of the proletariat in the centres of world capital.

9. The ruling class tends to reduce the global significance of these mounting tensions by looking for specific local, ideological, and economic causes of each particular conflict: 'ingrained' ethnic hatreds here, religious schisms there, oil in the Gulf or the Balkans, diamonds in Sierra Leone, etc. In this they are often echoed by the confusions of the proletarian political milieu, which easily mixes up a materialist analysis with the effort to explain each imperialist conflict in terms of the immediate economic profit that can be made from it. Although many of these economic and ideological factors are real, they cannot explain the general characteristics of the period which capitalism has entered. In decadence, war has more and more become an economic disaster for capitalism, a sheer loss. The costs involved in maintaining each particular conflict far outweigh the immediate economic benefits which can be drawn from it. Thus while severe economic pressures certainly played a key part in driving Zimbabwe to invade the Congo, or Iraq Kuwait, the ensuing military entanglements have brought these countries further towards the abyss of ruin. More generally, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction, which gave the appearance of conferring a certain rationality on world war in the past, is now over, since after any new world war there would be no reconstruction to follow it. But none of these calculations of profit and loss enable imperialist states to abstain from the necessity to defend their imperialist presence around the globe, to sabotage the ambitions of their rivals, or to increase their arms budgets. On the contrary, they are all caught up in a logic which escapes their control and which makes less and less sense even in capitalist terms, and this is precisely what makes the situation facing mankind so dangerous and unstable. To overestimate the rationality of capital is to underestimate the real menace of war in this period.

10. The working class today thus faces the possibility that it could be engulfed by an irrational chain reaction of local and regional wars. But this is only one aspect of the threat posed by decomposing capitalism. The last decade has seen all the consequences of decomposition becoming more and more deadly:

- at the level of social life, particularly in the growing phenomenon of 'gangsterisation': corruption of state officials at the highest levels, growing involvement of the mafia and international drug cartels in the political and economic life of the bourgeoisie, the enrolment of the exploited and the oppressed in local gang structures, which in the peripheral countries have become veritable instruments of imperialist wars; connected to this is the spread of extremely retrograde ideologies selling ethnic or religious hatred and the 'banalisation' of genocide after the inter-ethnic massacres in Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia or Borneo;

- through the break-down of the infrastructures of transport and housing, making ever-larger masses of people victims of all kinds of accidents and disasters (rail crashes, floods, earthquakes, etc); closely linked to this is the crisis in agriculture which has resulted in new outbreaks of disease that further intensify the crisis that gave rise to them;

- more generally, at the level of the planetary eco-system: more and more evidence piles up for the reality of global warming (rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps, violent fluctuations in the weather, etc) while the repeated failure of international climate conferences demonstrate the total incapacity of the capitalist nations to do anything about it.

Capitalism today is therefore painting a clearer and clearer picture of what the descent into barbarism would look like: a civilisation in full disintegration, torn apart by storms, drought, plague, starvation, irreversible poisoning of air, land and water; society turned into a hecatomb by murderous internecine conflict and wars that leave entire countries, even continents, in ruins; wars which further poison the atmosphere and which can only be made more frequent and devastating by the desperate struggle by nations, regions, or local fiefs to preserve their cache of dwindling resources and necessities; a nightmare world where the last remaining castles of 'prosperity' clang iron gates against the encroaching hordes of refugees fleeing from war and catastrophe; in short, a world where the rot had set in so far that there would be no turning back and where capitalist civilisation finally sank beneath a quicksand of its own making. This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today; the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes. The only question remaining is whether socialism, the proletarian revolution, still remains a living alternative.

The working class still holds the key to the future

11. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the struggle of the working class in response to the resurfacing of capitalism's historic crisis was a barrier to the outbreak of a third world war - the only real barrier, because capitalism had already formed the imperialist blocs which would launch the war, and the economic crisis was already pushing the system into this 'solution'. But for a number of connected reasons, some historic, some more immediate, the working class found it extremely difficult to pass from the defensive level to an open affirmation of its own political perspective (the weight of the previous decades of counter-revolution which had decimated its organised political expressions, the long drawn-out nature of the economic crisis which made it hard to see the truly catastrophic situation facing world capitalism, and so on). The inability of the two major social classes to impose their solution to the crisis gave rise to the phenomenon of decomposition; and this in turn was greatly accelerated by its own product, the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which marked decadent capitalism's entry into a phase in which decomposition would be the centrally defining characteristic. In this new phase, the struggle of the working class, which over the course of three successive international waves had revealed visible lines of advance at the level of consciousness and self-organisation, was thrown into a profound reflux, both at the level of consciousness and of militancy.

Decomposition posed both material and ideological difficulties for the working class:

- at the economic and social level, the material processes of decomposition have tended to undermine the proletariat's sense of identity - traditional working class industrial concentrations have been broken up more and more; social life has become increasingly atomised (which further reinforces the tendency towards gangsterisation as a false 'communal' alternative); long-term unemployment, especially among the youth, reinforces this atomisation and further severs the link with traditions of collective struggle;

- these objective processes are in turn made more effective by the incessant ideological campaigns of the ruling class, selling nihilism, individualism, racism, occultism and religious fundamentalism, all of which help to obscure the reality of society whose fundamental division remains a class division; these campaigns are crowned by the brainwashing that accompanied the collapse of the Eastern bloc and has been maintained ever since: communism has failed, marxism has been refuted, the working class is finished. This theme has in turn has been boosted by all the ideologies about 'newness' which also 'explain' how capitalism has now superseded its old class divisions ('new economy'. 'globalisation', 'recomposition of the working class', etc).

The working class today is thus faced with a serious loss of confidence - not only in its capacity to change society, but even in its capacity to defend itself at the day to day level. This has allowed the trade unions, which in the 80s had been more and more exposed as instruments of bourgeois order, to renew their hold over workers' struggles; at the same time, it has increased capitalism's ability to divert the workers' efforts to defend their specific interests into a patchwork of 'popular' and 'citizens' movements for greater 'democracy'.

12. The real difficulties confronting the working class today are obviously exploited by the ruling class to intensify its message about the end of the class struggle. This message is taken up by many who are not blind to the barbaric future that capitalism is preparing for us, but who do not believe that the working class is the subject of revolutionary change, and are searching for some 'new' movement to create a better world (this is the case with many elements involved in the 'anti-capitalist' mobilisations). Communists, however, know that if the working class is truly finished, there is no other barrier to capitalism's drive towards the destruction of humanity. But they are also able to affirm that this barrier has not been removed; that the international working class has not said its last word. This confidence in the working class is not some species of religious faith. It is based:

- on a historic vision of the working class, which is not an immediate, photographic snapshot but which recognises the real link between the past, present and future struggles of the class and its organisations;

- on an analysis of the last decade in particular, which enables them to conclude that for all the difficulties it has experienced, the working class has not suffered a defeat of world-historic proportions, comparable to what it experienced at the end of the first revolutionary wave.

13. The evidence for this conclusion is provided by:

- the fact that despite undeniable difficulties in the last decade (isolation and discontinuity of struggles, and consequently the absence of class struggle on the overall social scene), the working class of the main concentrations still conserves large reserves of militancy and has not accepted the austerity plans which capitalism tries to impose on it. This militancy is set to undergo a slow, tortuous but real development in response to the degradation of proletarian living and working conditions;

- the signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness within the working class. Contrary to idealist visions which see consciousness being brought to the class from the outside, or mechanistic theories which see consciousness developing only in the immediate, visible struggle, communists have always been keenly aware that mass strikes or revolutions do not spring from nowhere, but have their source in 'underground' processes which build up over long periods and which are often only discernible in sudden outbursts or in the appearance of combative minorities within the class. In the recent period it has been particularly clear that such a minority has been emerging, taking the form both of a considerable enlargement of the zone of political transition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and of the development of a small but important minority which is relating to the proletarian political milieu. It is especially significant that many of these 'searching' elements derive not only from those who have been politicised for a long time, but from a new generation of people who are asking questions about capitalism for the first time;

- evidence of the 'negative' weight that the working class still exerts on the ruling class. This expresses itself, among other things, in the bourgeoisie's reluctance to admit the real scope of imperialist rivalries between the major powers, to dragoon the workers of these powers directly into its military adventures; in the concern of the ruling class not to reveal the true level of the economic crisis, to avoid overt economic slumps that could provoke a massive class reaction; in the enormous amount of time and energy devoted to its ideological campaigns against the proletariat, not least those devoted to showing that the latter is a spent force.

Communists can thus continue to argue that the historic course towards massive class confrontations, opened by the international wave of struggles in 1968-72, has not been overturned. The working class has proved itself to be a barrier to world war. And while the danger remains that the more insidious process of decomposition could gradually overwhelm the class without capitalism having to inflict a frontal defeat upon it, the class still represents a historic obstacle to the full working out of capitalism's slide into military barbarism. More than this: it still retains the capacity to resist the effects of social decomposition through the development of its struggles and the consequent strengthening of its sense of identity and solidarity, which can offer a real alternative to the atomisation, the self-destructive violence and despair typical of this rotting system.

14. On this difficult path towards the working class rediscovering its fighting spirit and renewing its acquaintance with past traditions and experiences of struggle, it comes up against the anti-proletarian strategy of the bourgeoisie:

a) First, the use of the left parties in government, where they are still generally better placed than the right to:

- present the obvious signs of capitalism's downward plunge as results only of the action of particular sectors of capitalism (egoistic, irresponsible companies etc) - the only alternative being the action of the democratic state in defence of the interests of all citizens;

- present the spiral of wars and militarism as the result only of the war policy of 'hawkish' sections of capitalism (Sharon, Bush, etc.), which should be countered by 'international law' based on 'human rights';

- stagger the attacks on workers' living conditions, above all in the main industrial concentrations, in order to try to postpone and disperse the militancy of the workers, to create division in the ranks of the proletariat, between 'privileged' sectors (workers with a fixed contract, western workers, etc.) and disadvantaged ones (those on precarious contracts, immigrants, etc.);

- mask these attacks as though they were steps towards a more just society.

b) In complete coherence with this, the activities of the leftists as well as of radical unionism are aimed at neutralising the distrust of the workers towards the centre-left parties and diverting it into a radical defence of bourgeois democracy. The development of the Socialist Alliance in Britain is a clear illustration of this function.

c) Last but not least, we have the activities of the anti-globalisation movement, which is frequently presented by the media as the only possible form of anti-capitalism. The ideology of these movements, when it is not an expression of the 'no-future' of the petty bourgeoisie (defence of small-scale production, cult of desperate violence which deepens the feeling of desperation, etc.) is only a more radical version of what is put forward by its big brothers on the so-called 'traditional' left: the defence of the interest of national capital vis-à-vis its rivals.

These ideologies serve to block the evolution of new 'searching' elements within the population and the working class in particular. As we have seen, these ideologies do not contradict the more general propaganda about the death of communism - which will continue to be used in spades - but are an important complement to it.

15. The responsibilities facing the working class are immense: nothing short of the fate of humanity is in its hands. This in turn confers tremendous responsibilities on the revolutionary minority, whose essential task in the coming period will be:

- to intervene in the day to day struggles of the class, insisting on the need for solidarity and the involvement of the widest possible number of workers in any movement to resist capitalism's attacks;

- to explain with all the means available to it (press, leaflets, meetings etc), and in a manner that is both accessible and profound, why capitalism is bankrupt, why all its 'solutions' - particularly those touted by the left and extreme left - are a fraud, and what the real proletarian alternative is;

- to assist the efforts of radical minorities - struggle groups at the workplace, discussion circles, etc - to draw the lessons of recent experience, prepare for new struggles to come, while at the same time renewing the links with the proletariat's historic traditions ;

- to intervene within the proletarian political milieu, which is entering a period of significant growth, insisting that the milieu acts as a real reference point for serious debate and clarification for all the new elements coming towards it.

The historic course towards class confrontations also provides the context for the formation of the world communist party. The proletarian milieu of today provides the matrix of the future party, but there is no guarantee that it will actually engender it. Without responsible and rigorous preparation by today's revolutionaries, the party will be still-born, and the massive class conflicts we are heading for will not take the vital step from revolt to revolution.

May 2001

The "communist left" is to a very large extent the product of those sections of the world proletariat who posed the greatest threat to capitalism during the international revolutionary wave that followed the 1914-18 war: the Russian, the German, and the Italian. It was these "national" sections which made the most telling contribution to the enrichment of marxism in the context of the new epoch of capitalist decline inaugurated by the war. But those who rose the highest also fell the lowest. We saw in previous articles in this series how the left currents of the Bolshevik party, after their first heroic attempts to understand and to resist the onset of the Stalinist counter-revolution, were almost completely wiped out by the latter, leaving the left groupings outside Russia to carry on the work of analysing what had gone wrong with the revolution in Russia and of defining the nature of the regime which had usurped its name. Here again, the German and Italian fractions of the communist left played an absolutely key role, even if they were not unique (the previous article in this series, for example, looked at the emergence of a left communist current in France in the 1920s-30s, and its contribution to understanding the Russian question). But while the proletariat in both Italy and Germany had suffered important defeats, the proletariat in Germany - which had effectively held the fate of the world revolution in its hands in 1918-19 - had certainly been crushed more brutally and bloodily by the interlocking efforts of social democracy, Stalinism and Nazism. It was this tragic fact, together with certain vital theoretical and organisational weaknesses that went back to the revolutionary wave and even before, which contributed to a process of dissolution hardly less devastating than that which had befallen the communist movement in Russia.

Without entering into a discussion about why it was the Italian left which best survived the shipwreck of the counter-revolution, we want to refute a legend maintained by those who not only claim to be the exclusive heirs of the historic Italian left, but who also reduce the communist left, which was above all an international expression of the working class, to its Italian branch alone. The Bordigist groups, which most clearly express this attitude, do of course recognise that there was an important "Russian" component of the marxist movement during the revolutionary wave and its aftermath, although here they amputate many of the most significant left currents within the Bolshevik party (Ossinski, Miasnikov, Sapranov, etc) and tend to refer approvingly only to the "official" leaders like Lenin and Trotsky. But as for the German left, Bordigism merely repeats all the distortions heaped upon it by the Communist International precisely at the time when the latter first began to open the door to opportunism - that it was anarchist, syndicalist, sectarian, etc. From this logically flows the conclusion that there can be no question today of debating with any currents who derive from this tradition or who have attempted to make a synthesis of the contributions of the different lefts.

This was emphatically not the approach adopted by Bordiga, either in the early years of the revolutionary wave, when the paper Il Soviet opened its columns to articles written by those who were part of the German left or within its orbit, such as Gorter, Pannekoek and Pankhurst; or in the period of growing reflux, as in 1926, when, as we saw in the last article in this series, Bordiga responded very fraternally to the correspondence he received from the Korsch group.

This attitude was continued by the Italian Fraction during the 1930s. Bilan was highly critical of the CI's facile denigrations of the German and Dutch left, and was very willing to open its columns to contributions from this current, as it did on the question of the period of transition. Although it had very deep disagreements with the "Dutch internationalists", it respected them as a genuine expression of the revolutionary proletariat.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that on many crucial questions, the German/Dutch left arrived much faster at the correct conclusions than the Italian: for example, on the bourgeois nature of the trade unions, on the relation between the party and the workers' councils, and on the issue we are dealing with in this article - the nature of the USSR and the general tendency towards state capitalism.

In our book on the Dutch Left, for example, we point out that Otto Ruhle, one of the key figures of the German left, had reached very advanced conclusions about state capitalism by 1931.

"One of the first theoreticians of council communism to investigate the phenomenon of state capitalism in more depth was Otto Rühle. In a remarkable pioneering book, published in 1931 in Berlin under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle showed that the tendency towards state capitalism was irreversible and that no country could escape from it, because of the world wide nature of the crisis. The path taken by capitalism was not a change of nature, but of form, aimed at ensuring its survival as a system: 'The formula of salvation for the capitalist world today is: a change of form, transformation of the managers, renewing the façade, without renouncing the goal, which is profit. It is a question of looking for a way that will allow capitalism to continue on another level, another domain of evolution'.

Rühle envisaged roughly three forms of state capitalism, corresponding to different levels of capitalist development. Because of its economic backwardness, Russia represented the extreme form of state capitalism: 'the planned economy was introduced in Russia before the free capitalist economy had reached its zenith, before its vital processes had led to its senility'. In the Russian case, the private sector was totally controlled and absorbed by the state. At the other extreme, in a more developed capitalist economy, like Germany, the opposite had happened: private capital had seized control of the state. But the result was identical - the strengthening of state capitalism: 'There is a third way of arriving at state capitalism. Not through the usurping of capital by the state, but the opposite - private capital grabs hold of the state'. The second "method", which could be called "mixed", took place through the state gradually appropriating sectors of private capital: '[The state] conquers a growing influence in entire industries: little by little it becomes master of the economy'.

However, in none of these cases was state capitalism a "solution" for capitalism. It could only be a palliative for the crisis of the system: 'State capitalism is still capitalism (...) even in the form of state capitalism, capitalism cannot hope to prolong its existence for very long. The same difficulties and the same conflicts which oblige it to go from private to state capitalism reappear on a higher level'. No state capitalist "internationalisation" could resolve the problem of the market: 'The suppression of the crisis is not a problem of rationalisation, organisation, production or credit, it is purely and simply a problem of selling'. (The Dutch and German Left (English edition), p.276-7).

Although, as our book adds, Ruhle's approach contained a contradiction in that it also saw state capitalism as in some a sense a "higher" form of capitalism that was preparing the way for socialism, his book remains "a contribution to marxism of the first order". In particular, by posing state capitalism as a universal tendency in the new epoch, the ground was laid for overcoming the illusion that the Stalinist regime in Russia represented some total exception to the rest of the world system.

And yet Ruhle embodies the weaknesses of the German left as well as its undoubted strengths. The KAPD's first delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Ruhle saw first hand the terrible bureaucratisation which had already gripped the Soviet state. But, without pausing to consider the origins of this process in the tragic isolation of the revolution, Ruhle quit Russia without even attempting to defend the views of his party at the Congress, and quickly rejected any position of solidarity towards the beleaguered Russian bastion. Expelled from the KAPD for this transgression, he began to develop all the premises of "councilism": the Russian revolution was no more than a bourgeois revolution; the party form was appropriate only to such revolutions; all political parties being in essence bourgeois, it was now necessary to fuse the economic and political organs of the class into a single "unified" organisation. These ideas were certainly resisted by many within the German left in the 1920s, and even in the 1930s they were by no means universally accepted within the council communist movement, as can be seen from the text from Rate Korrespondenz we published in IR 105. But they certainly did wreak a great deal of havoc in the German/Dutch left and greatly accelerated its organisational collapse; at the same time, by denying the proletarian character of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party, they blocked any possible understanding of the process of degeneration to which both succumbed. These views really did reflect the weight of anarchism on the German workers' movement, and made it far easier for the entire German left communist tradition to be tarred with the anarchist brush.

The Italian left: slowly but surely

In the previous article in this series, we saw that, within the milieu around Trotsky's left opposition, including many of the groups who were moving towards the positions of the communist left, there was a great deal of confusion about the issue of the USSR in the late 20s and the 30s, not least the notion of the bureaucracy as some kind of new class unforeseen by marxism. Given the deep theoretical weaknesses which also predominated in the German and Dutch left on this question, it is hardly surprising that the Italian Fraction approached the problem with a considerable amount of caution. Compared to many proletarian groups, they were very slow in coming to recognise the real nature of Stalinist Russia. But because they were solidly anchored in the marxist method, their ultimate conclusions were more consistent and thorough going.

The Fraction approached the "Russian enigma" in the same way as they approached all the other aspects of the balance sheet that had to be drawn from the titanic revolutionary struggles in the period after the first world war - and above all, from the tragic defeats the proletariat had suffered: with patience and rigour, avoiding any hasty judgements, grounding themselves on the conclusions which the class had acquired once and for all before calling any hard-won positions into questions. With regard to the nature of the USSR, the Fraction was in direct continuity with Bordiga's reply to Korsch which we looked at in the last article: for them what was definitively established was the proletarian character of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik party which had led it. Indeed we can say that the Fraction's growing understanding of the epoch inaugurated by the war - the epoch of capitalist decadence - enabled them to see more clearly than Bordiga that only the proletarian revolution was on the agenda of history in all countries. They thus had no time for any of the speculations about the Russian revolution having been a "bourgeois" or "dual" revolution. An idea which, as we have seen, had taken an increasing hold on the German and Dutch left. For Bilan, rejecting the proletarian character of the October revolution could only result in a kind of "proletarian nihilism" - a real loss of confidence in the capacity of the working class ever to make its own revolution (the phrase is from Vercesi's article 'The Soviet state' in the series 'Party, International, State' in Bilan no. 21).

None of this meant that the Fraction was wedded to the notion of the "invariance of marxism" since 1848, which was to become an article of faith for latter-day Bordigists. On the contrary: from the start - the editorial in Bilan no. 1 in fact - they committed themselves to examining the lessons of the recent class battles "without dogmatism or ostracism"; and this soon led them to call for a fundamental revision of some of the basic theses of the Communist International, for example on the national question. With regard to the USSR, while insisting on the proletarian nature of October, they also recognised that in the intervening years a profound transformation had taken place, so that from being a factor in the defence and extension of the world revolution, the "proletarian state" had assumed a counter-revolutionary role on a world scale.

An equally crucial starting point for the Fraction was that the international needs of the proletariat always took precedence over any local or national expression, and that under no circumstances could the principle of proletarian internationalism be compromised. This is why the Communist Party of Italy had always argued that the International must consider itself as a single world party whose decisions were binding on all its sections, even those, like the Russian, which held state power in particular countries; this is also why the Italian left immediately sided with Trotsky's opposition in its combat against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Indeed, for the Fraction, "It is not only impossible to build socialism in one country, but even to establish its basis. In countries where the proletariat has been victorious, it cannot be a question of realising the conditions for socialism (through the free management of the economy by the workers), it can only be a matter of safeguarding the revolution, which requires the maintenance of all the proletariat's class institutions" ('Nature and evolution of the Russian revolution - response to comrade Hennaut', Bilan 35, September 1936, p 1171). Here the Fraction went further than Trotsky, who with his theory of "primitive socialist accumulation" considered that Russia had indeed begun to lay the foundations for a socialist society, even if he rejected Stalin's claim that such a society had already arrived. For the Italian left, the proletariat could only really establish its political domination in one country, and even this would inevitably be undermined by the isolation of the revolution.

Internationalism or the defence of the USSR?

And yet despite this fundamental clarity, the majority position within the Fraction was, in appearance at least, similar to that of Trotsky's: the USSR remained a proletarian state, even though profoundly degenerated, on the basis that the bourgeoisie had been expropriated and that property remained in the hands of the state which had arisen out of the October revolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy was defined as a parasitic stratum, but it was not seen as a class - whether a capitalist class or some new class unforeseen by marxism: "The Russian bureaucracy is not a class, still less a ruling class, given that there are particular rights over production outside the private ownership of the means of production, and that in Russia the essentials of collectivisation still survive. It is certainly true that the Russian bureaucracy consumes a large part of social labour, but this is the case for any social parasitism, which should not be confused with class exploitation" (, 'Problems of the period of transition, part 4' Bilan no. 37, November-December 1936).

In the early years of the Fraction's life, the question of whether to defend this regime was not fully resolved, and it remained ambiguous in the first issue of Bilan, in 1933, where the tone is one of alerting the proletariat to the possibility of a definitive betrayal: "The left fractions have the duty to alert the proletariat of the role which the USSR has already played in the workers' movement, to show right now the evolution that the proletarian state will follow under the leadership of centrism. From now on, there must be a flagrant desolidarisation with the policy centrism has imposed on the workers' state. The alarm must be sounded within the working class against the position that centrism will impose on the Russian state not in its interests, but against its interests. Tomorrow, and this must be said today, centrism will betray the interests of the proletariat.

Such a vigorous attitude has the task of focussing the attention of the proletarians, of freeing members of the party from the grip of centrism, of really defending the workers' state. It alone can mobilise energies for the struggle which will keep October 1917 for the proletariat" ('Towards the Two and Three Quarter International?' Bilan no. 1 November 1933, p.26).

At the same time, the Fraction was always keenly aware of the necessity to follow the evolution of the world situation and to judge the question of the defence of the USSR according to a simple but clear criterion: was it or was it not playing a completely counter-revolutionary role on the international level? Did any policy of defence undermine the possibility of maintaining a strictly internationalist role in all countries? If so, then this far outweighed the issue of whether there were any concrete "gains" surviving form the October revolution within the confines of Russia. And here their point of departure was radically different from that of Trotsky, for whom the "proletarian" character of the regime was in itself sufficient justification for a policy of defencism, regardless of its role on the world arena.

Bilan's approach to this problem was intimately linked to their conception of the historic course: from 1933 onwards the Fraction declared with growing certainty that the proletariat had suffered a profound defeat, and that the course was now open to a second world war. The triumph of Nazism in Germany was one proof of this; the enrolment of the proletariat of the "democratic" countries behind the flag of anti-fascism was another; but a further confirmation was precisely the "victory of centrism" - the term that Bilan still used to describe Stalinism - within the USSR and the Communist parties, and along with this, the increasing incorporation of the Soviet Union into the march towards a new imperialist re-division of the globe. This was evident to Bilan in 1933, when the USSR was first recognised by the USA (an event described as "a victory for the world wide counter-revolution" in the title of its article in Bilan 2, December 1933). A few months later, Russia was granted entry to the League of Nations. "Russia's entry into the League of Nations immediately poses the problem of its participation in one of the imperialist blocs for the next war" ('Soviet Russia enters the concert of imperialist brigands', Bilan no. 8, June 1934, p 263). The brutally anti-working class role of Stalinism was further confirmed by its role in the massacre of the workers in Spain, and by the Moscow trials, behind which an entire generation of revolutionaries was being wiped out.

These developments led the Fraction to reject once and for all any policy of defence of the USSR. This in turn marked a further stage in the break between the Fraction and Trotskyism. For the latter, there existed a fundamental contradiction between the "proletarian state" and world capital. The latter had an objective interest in uniting against it, and therefore it was the duty of revolutionaries to defend it from imperialist attack. For Bilan however it was clear that world capitalism could quite easily adapt to the existence of the Soviet state and its nationalised economy, both on the economic level and, above all, on the military level. They predicted with chilling accuracy that the USSR would be fully integrated into one or other of the two imperialist blocs that would engage in the forthcoming war, even if the issue of which particular bloc it would join had not yet been decided. The Fraction thus argued very explicitly that the Trotskyist position of defencism could only lead to the abandoning of internationalism in the face of imperialist war:

"? according to the Bolshevik-Leninists, in the case of an alliance between the USSR with an imperialist state or an imperialist grouping against another grouping, the international proletariat still has to defend the USSR. The proletariat of an allied country would maintain its implacable hostility towards its imperialist government, but in practise it could not in all circumstances act like the proletariat of a country opposed to Russia. Thus, it would be for example 'absurd and criminal', in a situation of war between the USSR and Japan, for the American proletariat to sabotage the sending of American arms to the USSR.

Naturally we have nothing in common with these positions. Once it had entered into an imperialist war, Russia must be considered, not as an object in itself, but as an instrument of the imperialist war; it must be considered in relation to the struggle for the world revolution, i.e. in relation to the struggle for the proletarian insurrection in all countries.

The position of the Bolshevik Leninists is little different from that of the centrists and left socialists. You have to defend Russia, even if it allied with an imperialist state, while carrying on a pitiless struggle against the 'ally'. But this 'pitiless struggle' already commits class treason as soon as it is a question of banning strikes against the 'allied' bourgeoisie. The specific weapon of the proletarian struggle is precisely the strike and to forbid its use against a bourgeoisie can only strengthen the latter and prevent any real struggle. How can the workers of a bourgeoisie allied to Russia struggle pitilessly against the latter, if they are not able to unleash strike movements?

We consider that in case of war, the proletariat of all countries, including Russia, would have the duty to concentrate itself with a view to transforming the imperialist war into a civil war. The USSR's participation in a war of pillage would not change the essential character of the war and the proletarian state could only end up falling under the blows of the social contradictions brought to a head by such participation" ('From the Two and Three Quarter International to the Second International', Bilan 10, August 1934, p 345-6). This passage is peculiarly prophetic: for the Trotskyists in the second world war, the 'defence of the USSR' became a mere pretext for the defence of the national interests of their own countries.

Far from being a force intrinsically hostile to world capital, the Stalinist bureaucracy was seen as its agent - as the force through which the Russian working class was subjected to capitalist exploitation. In a number of articles, Bilan indeed showed very cogently that this exploitation was precisely that - a form of capitalist exploitation: "...in Russia, as in other countries, the frenzied rush to industrialise leads inexorably to making man a cog in the wheel of industrial production. The dizzying level reached by technology demands the socialist organisation of society. The incessant progress of industrialisation should harmonise with the interests of the workers, otherwise the latter become prisoners and finally slaves of economic forces. The capitalist regime is the expression of this slavery because through economic and social cataclysms, it finds in it the source of its domination over the working class. In Russia, it is under the law of capitalist accumulation that the gigantic construction of workshops is taking place, and the workers are at the mercy of the logic of this industrialisation: railway accidents here, explosions in the mines there, factor catastrophes somewhere else?" ('The Moscow Trial', Bilan No. 39, January-February 1937, p1271). Furthermore, Bilan recognised that the utterly ferocious nature of this exploitation was determined by the fact that the USSR's "building of socialism", the accelerated industrialisation of the 1930s, was in fact the building of a war economy in preparation for the next world holocaust: "The Soviet Union, like the capitalist states to which it is linked, must work towards the war which is getting closer and closer: the essential industry of the economy must therefore be the arms industry, which demands a ceaselessly growing supply of capital" ('The assassination of Kyrov, the suppression of bread vouchers in the USSR' Bilan 14, January 1935,.p 467). Or again: "the centrist bureaucracy is extracting surplus value from its workers and peasants for the preparation of imperialist war. The October revolution, which came out of the struggle against imperialist war, is being exploited by its degenerated epigones to push the new generations into the future imperialist war" ('The Moscow butchery'. Bilan 34, August-September 1936, p 1117).

Here the contrast with Trotsky's approach is patently obvious: while Trotsky could not hold back, in The Revolution Betrayed, from singing hymns to the USSR's enormous economic "achievements", which had supposedly demonstrated the "superiority of socialism". Bilan retorted that in no sense could progress towards socialism be measured by the growth of constant capital, but only by real increases in the living and working conditions of the masses. "If the bourgeoisie establishes its bible on the necessity for a continuous growth of surplus value in order to convert it into capital in the common interest of all classes (sic), the proletariat by contrast must go in the direction of a constant diminution of unpaid labour, which inevitably has the consequences of a much slower rhythm of accumulation than in the capitalist economy" ('L'Etat Sovietique' Bilan 21, July-August 1935, p720). This view was, moreover, rooted in Bilan's understanding of capitalist decadence: the refusal to acknowledge that Stalinist industrialisation was a "progressive" phenomenon was based not only on the recognition that it was based on the absolute misery of the masses, but also on an understanding of its historic function as part of the build-up towards an imperialist war, the latter being the most overt expression of the regressive nature of the capitalist system.

When we also recall that Bilan was perfectly acquainted with the passage in AntiDuhring where Engels rejects the notion that statification in itself has a socialist character, and indeed more than once used this argument to refute the claims of the Stalinist apologists, (cf 'L'Etat Sovietique', op cit; 'Problems of the period of transition' in Bilan 37), we can see how very close Bilan came to seeing the USSR under Stalin as a capitalist and imperialist regime. Finally, it was also being compelled to recognise that capitalism everywhere was more and more relying on state intervention to save it from the effects of the world economic slump and to prepare for the coming war. The best example of this analysis is contained in the articles on the De Man plan in Belgium in Bilan nos. 4 and 5. It could hardly have ignored the similarities between what was happening in Nazi Germany, the democratic countries, and the USSR.

And yet still Bilan hesitated to jettison the concept of the USSR as a proletarian state. It was perfectly well aware that the Russian proletariat was being exploited, but it tended to express this as a relation directly imposed on it by world capital without the mediation of a national bourgeoisie: the Stalinist bureaucracy was seen as an "agent of world capital" rather than as an expression of Russian national capital with its own imperialist dynamic. This emphasis on the primary role of world capital was fully in line with its internationalist vision and its profound understanding that capitalism is first and foremost a global system of domination. But global capital, the world economy, is no abstraction existing outside the clash of competing units of national capital. It was this last piece of the puzzle that the Fraction didn't succeed in fitting into place.

All the same, its later writings seem to express a growing intuition about the contradictions in its position, and its arguments in favour of the proletarian state thesis were becoming increasingly defensive and shaky:

"Despite the October revolution, the whole edifice, which from the first to the last stone is being built on the basis of the martyrdom of the Russian workers, must be swept aside because this is the only condition that makes it possible to affirm a class position in the USSR. Necessity to negate the 'building of socialism' by the proletarian revolution - this is where the involution of the last few years has led the Russian proletariat. If you object that the idea of a proletarian revolution against a proletarian state is a nonsense and that phenomena must be harmonised by calling this state a bourgeois state, we reply that those who reason in this way are simply expressing a confusion on the problem already dealt with by our masters: the relations between the proletariat and the state. It's a confusion which leads them to the other extreme: participation in the Sacred Union behind the capitalist state in Catalonia. Which proves that both with Trotsky who under the pretext of defending the conquests of October defends the Russian state, and with those who talk about a capitalist state in Russia there is an alteration of marxism which leads these people to defend the capitalist state under threat in Spain"" ('When the butchers speak', Bilan no. 41, May-June 1937, p 1339). This argument was strongly marked by Bilan's polemic with groups like Union Communiste and the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes on the war in Spain; but it fails to show the logical link between defending the imperialist war in Spain and concluding that Russia had become a capitalist state.

In fact a number of comrades within the Fraction itself began to call the thesis of the proletarian state into question, and they were by no means identical to the minority which fell under the influence of groups like the Union or the LCI on the question of Spain. But whatever discussion took place within the Fraction on this issue in the second half of the 1930s was eclipsed by another debate provoked itself by the development of the war economy on an international scale - the debate with Vercesi, who had begun to argue that capital's resort to the war economy had absorbed the crisis and eliminated the necessity for another world war. The Fraction was literally consumed by this debate, and with Vercesi's ideas influencing the majority, the Fraction was thrown into total disarray by the outbreak of the war (see our book on the Italian left for a more developed account of this debate).

It had always been axiomatic that the war would finally clarify the problem of the USSR, and so it proved. It was no accident that those who had opposed Vercesi's revisionism were also the most active in calling for the reconstitution of the Italian Fraction and the formation of a French nucleus of the communist left. It was these same comrades who led the debate on the question of the USSR. In its initial statement of principles in 1942 the French nucleus still defined the USSR as an "instrument of world imperialism". But by 1944 the majority position was perfectly clear. "The communist vanguard will be able to carry out its task as the proletariat's guide towards the revolution to the extent that it is able to free itself of the great lie of the 'proletarian nature' of the Russian state and to show it for what it is, to reveal its counter-revolutionary, capitalist and imperialist nature and function.

It is enough to note that the goal of production remains the extraction of surplus value, to affirm the capitalist character of the economy. The Russian state has participated in the course towards war, not only because of its counter-revolutionary function in crushing the proletariat, but because of its own capitalist nature, through the need to defend its sources of raw materials, through the necessity to ensure its place on the world market where it realises its surplus value, through the desire, the need, to enlarge its economic spheres of influence and to ensure its access routes" ('The non-proletarian nature of the Russian state and its counter-revolutionary function', Bulletin international de discussion, no. 6, June 1944). The USSR had its own imperialist dynamic originating in the accumulation process; driven therefore to expand because accumulation cannot take place in a closed circle; the bureaucracy was thus a ruling class in the fullest sense of the word. These insights were amply confirmed by the USSR's ruthless imperialist expansion into eastern Europe at the end of the war.

The process of clarification continued after the war, again principally with the French group which took the name Gauche Communiste de France. The discussions also went on within the newly formed Partito Comunista Internazionalista, but unfortunately they are not well known. It would appear that there was a great deal of heterogeneity. Some of the comrades of the PCInt developed positions very close to those of the GCF; others however were sunk in confusion. The GCF article 'Private Property and collective property', Internationalisme no 10, 1946 (re-published in International Review 61) criticises Vercesi, who had joined the PCInt, for holding on to the illusion that, even after the war, the USSR could still be defined as a proletarian state; Bordiga for his part, was resorting to the meaningless term "state industrialism" at this point; and although he later came to see the USSR as capitalist, he never accepted the term state capitalism or its significance as an expression of capitalist decadence. The article in Internationalisme 10, by contrast, shows that the GCF had brought together all the essential strands of the problem. In its theoretical studies in the late 40s and early 50s, the GCF drew all the strands together. State capitalism was analysed as the "the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development"; moreover, it was not something restricted to Russia: "state capitalism isn't the speciality of a one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We've seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler's Germany, in 'Labour' Britain and 'Soviet' Russia". By going beyond the mystification that the abolition of individual 'private property' got rid of capitalism, the GCF was able to locate its analysis in the material roots of capitalist production: "The Russian experience teaches us and reminds us that it's not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse; it's capitalism which engenders capitalists?.The capitalist principle of production can continue to exist after the juridical, even the material disappearance of capitalists as the beneficiaries of surplus value. In this case, surplus value, just as under private capitalism, is reinvested in the production process in order to extract a greater mass of surplus value.

Before long, the existence of surplus value gives rise to men who form the class that appropriates surplus value. The function creates the organ. Whether they are parasites, bureaucrats or technicians who participate in production, whether surplus value is redistributed in a direct manner, or indirectly through the intervention of the state, in the form of high salaries or various types of privileges (as in the case of Russia), this changes nothing about the fact that we are dealing with the rise of a new capitalist class".

The GCF, in continuity with Bilan's studies of the transition period, also drew out the necessary implications for this with regard to the proletariat's economic policy after the seizure of political power: on the one hand, the refusal to confuse statification with socialism, and the recognition that, after the disappearance of private capitalists, "the real danger of a return to capitalism will come essentially from the state sector. All the more because here capitalism attains an impersonal, almost ethereal form. Statification can serve to camouflage, for a considerable period, a process opposed to socialism". And on the other hand, the necessity for a proletarian economic policy which radically attacks the basic process of capital accumulation: "The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society's members". This did not mean that it was possible to abolish surplus labour as such, especially in the immediate aftermath of the revolution when a whole process of social reconstruction would be required. Nevertheless, the tendency to overturn the capitalist ratio between what the proletariat produced and what it consumed would have to serve "as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production".