Frederick Engels predicted more than a century ago that capitalist society would ultimately drag human society down into barbarism if left to its own devices. Indeed, the evolution of imperialist war over the last hundred years has provided more and more horrifying details of how this prediction would be realised. Today, the capitalist world increasingly offers another route to the apocalypse, complementary to that of imperialist war, through a “man- made” ecological meltdown that in the span of a few generations could make the earth as inhospitable to human life as Mars. Despite the recognition of this perspective by the defenders of the capitalist order, there is absolutely nothing effective they can do to stop it, because both imperialist war and climate catastrophe have been brought about by the unnatural perpetuation of their dying mode of production.
The bloody fiasco of the invasion in 2003 of Iraq by the US-led “coalition” marks a defining moment in the development of imperialist war towards the very destruction of society. Four years on, Iraq, instead of being liberated, has been turned into what bourgeois journalists euphemistically call a “broken society”, where the population, already butchered by the Gulf war of 1991, and then bled white by a decade of economic sanctions,[1] is subjected to suicide bombings, to daily pogroms by various “insurgents”, to assassination by death squads of the Interior Ministry or arbitrary elimination by the occupying forces. And the situation in Iraq is only the focal point of a process of militarised disintegration and chaos that is also to be found in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Lebanon, Afghanistan and which constantly threatens to engulf new areas of the globe, not excluding the central capitalist metropoles as indicated by the spread of terrorist bombings to New York, Madrid, and London during the first decade of this century. Far from creating a new order in the Middle East, US military power has only brought a spreading militarised chaos.
In a sense none of this military carnage on a mass scale is new. The First World War of 1914-18 already took the first major step toward a barbaric “future”. The mutual slaughter of millions of young workers forced into the trenches by their respective imperialist masters, left in its wake a pandemic of “Spanish flu” that stole the lives of millions more, while the former European national powerhouses of capitalist industry were brought to their knees economically. After the failure of the 1917 October Revolution, and of the workers insurrections it inspired in the rest of the world in the 1920s, the way was open to a still more catastrophic episode of total warfare in the 2nd World War of 1939-45. Defenceless civilians of major cities were now a principal target of systematic mass killing from the air, and a multi-million genocide took place in the heart of European civilisation.
Then the “Cold War” from 1947-89 produced a whole series of equally destructive carnages, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and throughout Africa, while a global nuclear holocaust between the USA and the USSR remained a continual threat.
What is new in the imperialist war of today is not yet its absolute levels of destruction, since recent military conflicts, while waged with far more deadly firepower than before, at least on the part of the US, have still to engulf the major concentrations of people in the heartlands of capitalism as happened in the 1st and 2nd World Wars. What is different is that the ending of human society altogether by such war now appears in a much more clear form. In 1918 Rosa Luxemburg likened the barbarism of the 1st World War to the decline of Ancient Rome and the Dark Ages that followed. Today even this dramatic comparison seems inadequate to express the endless horror that capitalist barbarism has in store for us. While for all the brutality and mayhem of the previous two world wars last century, they still gave way to long periods of relative stability, there was still a perspective - even if ultimately illusory - of reconstructing social order in the interests of the dominant imperialist powers. All the military flashpoints of the contemporary situation, by contrast, offer no perspective from the warring factions except a further descent into social fragmentation at all levels, a real decomposition of the social order, of chaos without end.
Most of the American bourgeoisie has been forced to recognise that it’s imperialist strategy of the unilateral imposition of its world hegemony, whether at the diplomatic, military or ideological level, has backfired. The report of the Iraq Study Group to the US Congress doesn’t hide this obvious fact. Instead of strengthening the prestige of US imperialism the occupation of Iraq has weakened it at almost all levels. But what do the severest critics of the Bush policy within the dominant class in the US propose as an alternative? Withdrawal is impossible without further weakening US hegemony and helping accelerate the gathering chaos. A division of Iraq along ethnic lines would also have the same effect. Some even propose a return to the policy of containment as practised in the cold war. But its clear there can be no return to the world order of the two imperialist blocs. So the fiasco in Iraq is far worse than the one in Vietnam, since unlike in the latter war, the US is now trying to contain the entire world and not just its rival bloc of the USSR.
As a result, despite the scathing criticism by the ISG and the control of the US Congress by the Democratic Party, President Bush has been allowed to increase troops in Iraq by at least another 20,000, and embark on a new policy of diplomatic and military threats toward Iran. Whatever alternative strategies are being considered by the American ruling class, it will be obliged sooner or latter to make another bloody proof of its superpower status with even more dire consequences for the world’s populations, which will accelerate still further the spread of barbarism.
All this is not the result of the ineptitude and arrogance of the Republican Bush administration and the neo-conservatives as the bourgeoisies of other imperialist powers keep telling us. A return to the United Nations and multi-lateralism is not an option for peace as they and assorted pacifists claim. The UN, as Washington understands very well, had become a forum since 1989 for the frustration of US wishes: a place where its less powerful rivals could delay, water down or even veto American policy in order to prevent their positions being further weakened. In presenting the US as the only purveyor of war and chaos, France, Germany, and others only reveal their full part in the present destructive logic of imperialism: where each power is only out for itself and must oppose itself to all the others.
Not surprisingly the regular marches to “Stop the War” in the metropoles of the main powers usually give vociferous support to the smaller imperialist gangsters in the middle East, like the insurgents in Iraq or Hezbolla in the Lebanon who are fighting the US. In so doing they reveal that imperialism is a relationship from which no nation can hold aloof, and that war is not just the result of the aggression of the biggest powers.
Still others claim, despite all the evidence, that the US adventure in Iraq is a “war for oil”, thus completely obscuring the danger posed by its overriding geo-strategic objectives. This is a considerable underestimation of the gravity of the present situation. In reality the impasse in which American imperialism finds itself in Iraq is only a manifestation of the global impasse in which capitalist society finds itself. George Bush Senior announced that the dissolution of the Russian bloc would open into a new era of peace and stability, a “New World order”. Rapidly, with the first Gulf War then the barbaric conflict in Yugoslavia, in the heart of Europe, reality proved the opposite. The 1990s were not those of a world order but of a growing military chaos. Ironically it has fallen to George Bush junior to lead a new decisive step into irreversible chaos.
At the same time as capitalism in decomposition unleashed an imperialist trend towards a more clearly perceivable barbarism, so it also speeded up an assault of such ferocity on the biosphere that an artificially created climatic holocaust could also wipe out human civilisation, and human life. It is clear from the consensus of the world’s climate scientists in the February 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the theory that the over-warming of the planet by the accumulation of relatively high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is caused by the large scale burning of fossil fuels, is no longer merely a hypothesis but “very likely”. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere retains the sun’s heat reflected off the earth’s surface and radiates it in the surrounding air, leading to the “greenhouse effect”. This process of radiative forcing began to take significant effect from around 1750, at the beginning of the capitalist industrial revolution, and since then the rise in carbon dioxide emissions and the warming of the planet has increased. Since 1950 this dual increase has begun to accelerate in a steep upward curve, with new planetary temperature records established almost yearly in the past decade. The consequences of this anthropogenic warming of the planet have already started to appear on an alarming scale: changing weather patterns leading both to repeated droughts and widescale flooding, deadly heatwaves in Northern Europe and extreme climatic conditions of hugely destructive power, which in turn are already rapidly increasing famine and disease in the third world, and leading to the massive migration of populations from affected areas, and the ruination of whole cities like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Capitalism of course can’t be blamed with starting the burning of fossil fuels or acting on the environment in other ways to produce unforeseen and dangerous consequences. Indeed this has been going on since the dawn of human civilisation:
“The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus 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 other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”[2]
Capitalism is nevertheless responsible for enormously accelerating this process of environmental damage. Not by industrialisation per se, but as a result of capitalism’s overriding quest to maximise profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs, except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation. Furthermore the capitalist mode of production has other characteristics which contribute to the wanton destruction of the environment: the intrinsic competitiveness between capitalists, especially between each nation state which, at least in the last analysis, prevents any real co-operation at the world level; and, linked to this, the tendency of capitalism toward overproduction in its unquenchable search for profit.
In decadent capitalism, in its period of permanent crisis, this tendency towards overproduction becomes chronic. This has been particularly clear since the end of the Second World War when the expansion of the capitalist economies has taken place artificially, partly through the policy of deficit financing, by a huge expansion of debt of all kinds in the economy. This has not led to the satisfaction of the needs of the mass of the working population who remain mired in poverty, but to enormous waste: to mountains of unsold goods, to the dumping of millions of tonnes of food, to planned obsolescence in the production of huge numbers of products from cars to computers that soon become scrap, to an enormous “parity of products” produced by innumerable competitors for the same market demand.
In addition, while the rate of technological change and sophistication increases in decadence, the resulting innovations, contrary to the situation in the ascendant period of capitalism, tend to be stimulated by certain sectors of the economy, particularly the military sector. Meanwhile at the level of the infrastructure: buildings, sanitation, energy production, transportation systems we see very few revolutionary developments on the scale that characterised the emergence of the capitalist economy. In the period of capitalist decomposition, the final phase of decadence, there is an acceleration of the opposite tendency, of the attempt to reduce the cost of maintaining even the ageing infrastructure in the search for immediate profits. This process is seen in caricatural form in the current expansion of production in China and India, where an industrial infrastructure is largely absent. Instead of giving a new lease of life for capitalism, it is leading to astronomical levels of pollution: the destruction of whole river systems, enormous blankets of smog that cover several countries, etc.
This long process of decay and decomposition of the capitalist mode of production may help to explain why there has been such a dramatic acceleration in carbon dioxide emissions and the warming of the planet in recent decades. It also helps to explain why, in the face of such entrenched economic and climatic developments, capitalism and its “policy makers” will be unable to reverse the catastrophic effect of global warming.
Both these apocalyptic scenarios, which can destroy human civilisation itself, are to some extent recognised and publicised by the spokesmen and media of the elites of all the capitalist nations. That they recommend innumerable remedies to avoid these outcomes doesn’t mean that any of them therefore provide a realistic alternative to the barbaric perspectives outlined. On the contrary. In front of the ecological disaster and imperialist barbarity that it has generated, capitalism is equally powerless.
The governments of the world have generously funded the research of the IPCC since 1990 through the UN and have had their media widely publicise its most stark recent findings.
In turn the bourgeoisie’s major political parties in all countries are turning various shades of green. But on closer inspection the eco-policies of these parties, however radical they might appear, have deliberately obscured the seriousness of the problem, because the only solution to it threatens the very system whose praises they sing. The common denominator of all these green campaigns is that they have the effect of preventing a development of revolutionary consciousness amongst a population rightly horrified at the perspective of global warming. The constant eco-message from the governments is that “saving the planet is everyone’s responsibility” when the vast majority is deprived of any political or economic power and control over production and consumption, over what and how things are produced. And the bourgeoisie, which does have power in these decisions, has even less intention than ever in satisfying human and ecological needs at the expense of profit.
Al Gore, who narrowly failed to become US Democratic president in 2000, has put himself at the head of an international campaign against carbon emissions with the film “An inconvenient truth” that won a Hollywood Oscar for its graphic treatment of the danger of the rise in world temperatures, melting of the polar ice caps, the raising of sea levels and all the resultant devastation. But the film is also an election platform for Al Gore himself. He isn’t the only senior politician to realise that the justified fear of the populations with the ecological crisis can be harnessed in the scramble for power that characterises the democratic game in the major capitalist countries. In France the contenders in the presidential election have all signed the “ecological pact” of journalist star Nicolas Hulot. In Britain all the major political parties have vied with each other to see who is the greenest of them all. The Stern Report, commissioned by Gordon Brown of New Labour, has been followed by further government initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. David Cameron, leader of the Tory opposition, cycles to the Houses of Parliament (while his entourage brings up the rear in a Mercedes).
One only has to look at the results of previous government policies to cut down carbon emissions to see the inability of the capitalist states to be effective in this regard. Instead of a stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions at 1990s level by 2000, that the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol modestly committed themselves to in 1997, there was instead an increase of 10.1% in the major industrialised countries by the end of the century, and it is forecast that this pollution will have increased by 25.3% by 2010! (Deutche Umwelthilfe).
One only has to look at the complete negligence of the capitalist states towards calamities that have already occurred as a result of climate change to judge the sincerity of their endless good intentions.
There are those who, while recognising that the profit motive is a powerful disincentive to effective limitation of such pollution, believe that the problem can be solved by replacing liberal policies with state organised solutions. But it’s clear, above all at the international level, that the capitalist states, however organised internally, are unable to co-operate on this question because each one would have to make different economic sacrifices as a result. Capitalism is competition, and today, more than ever, is dominated by the rule of every man for himself.
The capitalist world is unable to unite in a common project as massive and costly as the complete transformation of industry and transport to drastically reduce the use of carbon burning energy. On the contrary the main concern of each capitalist nation is to try and use this problem to further its own sordid ambitions. As on the imperialist and military levels, so on the ecological level, capitalism is riven by insuperable national divisions, and so cannot answer in a meaningful way the most pressing needs of humanity.
But it would be quite wrong to take a resigned attitude and think human society must necessarily sink into oblivion as a result of these powerful tendencies - of imperialism and eco-destruction - towards barbarism. Fatalism in front of the fatuity of all the capitalist half-measures proposed to bring about peace and harmony with nature is just as mistaken as the naive belief in these cosmetic cures.
Capitalist society, as well as sacrificing everything to the pursuit of profit and competition has also, inadvertently, produced the elements for its destruction as a mode of exploitation. It has created the potential technological and cultural means for a unified and planned world system of production attuned to the needs of human beings and nature. It has produced a class, the proletariat, which has no need for national or competitive prejudices, and every interest in developing international solidarity. The working class has no interest in the rapacious desire for profit. In other words capitalism has laid the basis for a higher order of society, for its supercession by socialism. Capitalism has developed the means to destroy human society, but it has also created its own gravedigger, the working class, that can preserve human society and take it to a higher level.
Capitalism has given rise to a scientific culture that is able to identify and measure invisible gases like carbon dioxide both in the present atmosphere and in the atmosphere of 10,000 years ago. Scientists can identify the specific isotopes of carbon dioxide that result from the burning of fossil fuels. The scientific community has been able to test and verify the hypothesis of the “greenhouse effect”. Yet the time has long gone when capitalism as a social system was able to use the scientific method and its results for the benefit of human progress. The bulk of scientific investigation and discovery today is devoted to destruction; to the development of ever more sophisticated methods of mass death. Only a new order of society, a communist society, can put science at the service of humanity.
Despite the past 100 years of the decline and putrefaction of capitalism, and severe defeats for the working class, these building blocks for a new society are still intact.
The resurgence of the world proletariat since 1968 proves that. The development of its class struggle against the constant pressure on proletarian living standards over the ensuing decades prevented the barbaric outcome promised by the cold war: of an all-out confrontation between the imperialist blocs. Since 1989 however and the disappearance of the blocs, the defensive posture of the working class has been unable to prevent the succession of horrific local wars that threaten to spiral out of control, drawing in more and more parts of the planet. In this period, of capitalist decomposition, the proletariat no longer has time on its side, particularly as a pressing ecological catastrophe must now be added into the historic equation.
But we cannot say yet that the decline and decomposition of capitalism has reached the “point of no return” – the point at which its barbarism could never be reversed.
Since 2003 the working class has begun to re-enter the struggle with renewed vigour after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc brought about a temporary halt to the resurgence begun in 1968.
In these conditions of developing class confidence, the increasing dangers represented by imperialist war and ecological catastrophe instead of inducing feelings of impotence and fatalism, can lead to a greater political reflection on, and consciousness of, the stakes of the world situation, and on the necessity for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society. It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to participate actively in this coming to consciousness.
Como 3.4.07
[1]1. Infant mortality in Iraq rose from 40 per 1000 in 1990 to 102 per 1000 in 2005. The Times, March 26, 2007.
[2]. Frederick Engels: “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25.
We have recently had an exchange of correspondence with a reader in Quebec which has led us once again to present our view not only of “national liberation” struggles, a subject we have dealt with at some length in our publications, but also of “democratic demands” in general which we have not previously dealt with in a specific, developed text on our part. To the extent that the arguments we present here have a general import and respond to a real questioning within the working class, especially because of the influence of the parties of the left and far left, we thought it would be useful to publish large extracts from this correspondence.
In one of his first letters, our reader asked what the ICC thought about the Quebec national question.
Here is our first reply:
"As regards the Quebec national question, it's no different from all the other questions by movements for national independence for over a century now: these movements reinforce nationalist illusions and weaken the workers' struggle. We consider that any organisation which, in Quebec, supports the demand for the independence of the "Belle Province" helps, whether consciously or not, to weaken the Quebecois, Canadian and North American proletariat."
As regards the specific question of Quebec and the attitude to adopt towards the independence movement, you write in your message of January 1st: "Concerning Quebec, I understand your opposition to the independence of Quebec and to Quebec nationalism, but I don't believe that Canadian nationalism is more ‘progressive', far from it. I believe that we have to resolutely oppose all the campaigns for the defence of the Canadian state and for the maintenance of the ‘national unity' of Canada. Canada is an imperialist, oppressor state which has to be destroyed from top to bottom. I'm not saying that we should support the independence of Quebec and the native peoples, but we also have to reject any appeal to Canadian-English chauvinism, which is dominant within the Canadian state."
Clearly it is out of the question for communists to give the slightest support to Canadian-English chauvinism, or to any form of chauvinism. However, you talk about "Canadian-English chauvinism" and "Quebec nationalism". What is the significance of this difference in terminology? Do you think that Quebec nationalism is less pernicious for the working class than Canadian-English nationalism? This is certainly not our view. And to illustrate that, we can envisage a situation which is hypothetical but by no means absurd, in which there is a powerful movement of the working class in Quebec which does not at first spread to the Anglophone provinces. It is clear that the Canadian bourgeoisie (including in Quebec) will do all it can to prevent it spreading to these provinces and one of the best ways of doing that is for the workers of Quebec to mix up proletarian class demands with autonomist or separatist demands. In this way we can see that Quebec nationalism is the worst kind of poison for the proletariat in Quebec and Canada as a whole, probably more dangerous than Canadian-English nationalism, since it seems unlikely that a class movement of Anglophone workers would be inspired by opposition to Quebecois independence.
In a situation which has some similarities with that in Quebec, Lenin wrote about the question of Polish independence:[1]
"The situation is, indeed, bewildering, but there is a way out in which all participants would remain internationalists: the Russian and German Social democrats by demanding for Poland unconditional ‘freedom to secede'; the Polish Social democrats by working for the unity of the proletarian struggle in both small and big countries without putting forward the slogan of Polish independence for the given epoch or the given period."[2]
Thus, if we really wanted to be loyal to Lenin's position, communists would have to defend the independence of Quebec in the Anglophone provinces but reject such a position in Quebec itself...
For our part, we don't share Lenin's position: we think that we have to speak the same language to all workers no matter what their nationality or their language. This is what we do in Belgium for example where our paper Internationalisme publishes exactly the same articles in French and Flemish. This said, we do recognise that Lenin's position, even though mistaken, was inspired by a deep-seated internationalism, which is certainly not the case if you don't vigorously denounce nationalism and demands for independence in Quebec.
"I think that you have a profoundly mistaken view of the relationship between Quebec nationalism and Canadian-English chauvinism. The latter is DOMINANT within the Canadian state and nourishes anti-Quebec and anti-Francophone racism. The existence of this chauvinism and its deep roots in the Anglo-Canadian working class prevents any Pan-Canadian unity of the working class. It encourages the development of nationalist tendencies among the Quebecois workers. One of its aspects is the rejection of bilingualism, which in any case is more a myth than a reality in Canada. Most Francophones are obliged to speak English and most Anglophones don't speak or refuse to speak French.
"Contrary to what you say the workers' movement in English Canada is based on the defence of Canadian unity and the ‘integrity' of the Canadian state, to the detriment of the Quebecois and the First Nations. There will NEVER be working class unity in Canada as long as the oppression of national minorities and Anglo-Chauvinist racism lasts...
"It's one thing to reject Quebec nationalism and to consider that Quebecois independence is an impasse and even a deception for the working class, but to go from there to claiming that it is more ‘dangerous' than Anglophone chauvinism, which is quite similar to Protestant Orangeism in Northern Ireland, there is a huge gulf.
"The Canadian government does everything in its power to keep Quebec in the Confederation, including the threat not to recognise a positive result in the 1995 referendum and even to carve up an independent Quebec along ethnic lines, which amounts to calling for the partition of Quebec. Then there was the law on referendum clarity where the federal government gave itself the right to decide on the rules of the next referendum on sovereignty, whether at the level of the way the question was posed or the size of the majority needed to carry through with the independence of Quebec.
"Above all, don't tell me that Anglo-Canadian nationalism is less pernicious for the unity of the working class. I strongly invite you to educate yourselves more about the Quebec national question."
You have replied particularly vigorously to our suggestion that, in certain ways, Quebec nationalism could be "more dangerous than Canadian-English nationalism".
We don't contest the facts you put forward to support your critique of our position, in particular that "Canadian-English chauvinism...is DOMINANT within the Canadian state and nourishes anti-Quebec and anti-Francophone racism" and that it "encourages the development of nationalist tendencies among the Quebecois workers". We are also ready to accept that "Anglophone chauvinism is quite similar to Protestant Orangeism in Northern Ireland."
In fact, we are going to base our reply on this latter argument.
To begin with, we think that there is here a false interpretation of our analysis. When we write that Quebec nationalism may prove more dangerous for the working class than Anglophone nationalism, this in no way means that we see the latter as a kind of "lesser evil" or that it is less hateful than the former. In fact, it's true that, given that the Francophone population is subjected to a form of national oppression by the Canadian state, pro-independence demands can be presented as a sort of struggle against oppression. And it's true that the class struggle of the proletariat is also a struggle against oppression. And it's here that the greatest danger lies.
When the Anglophone workers enter into struggle, in particular against attacks launched by the federal government, there is not much chance that their fight could be portrayed as a demand for maintaining the national oppression of the Francophone workers because the latter would also be victims of the government attacks. Even if the Anglophone workers don't have a great deal of sympathy for the Francophones in normal times, it would be surprising if, during a conflict with their bourgeoisie, they were to treat the Francophones as scapegoats. History shows that when the workers enter into struggle (a real struggle and not a typical union action aimed at derailing and sabotaging workers' militancy), there is a strong tendency for them to express their solidarity with other workers with whom they share a common enemy.
Once again, we don't know the situation in Canada very well, but we have had many experiences of this kind in Europe. For example, despite all the nationalist campaigns aimed at the Flemish and Francophone workers in Belgium, despite the fact that the political parties and unions are organised on a communitarian basis, we have seen that when there are important struggles in this country the workers are not much bothered about their linguistic or geographical origins and that they actually gain a real satisfaction from finding themselves shoulder to shoulder with workers from other linguistic groups, even though in "normal" times they are constantly being set against each other. Another example was provided a year ago in one of the countries where nationalism has been a huge weight, Northern Ireland. In February 2006 the Catholic and Protestant postal workers came out on strike together and held demonstrations in both Catholic and Protestant areas against the common enemy.[3]
You write:
"There will NEVER be working class unity in Canada as long as the oppression of national minorities and Anglo-Chauvinist racism lasts..." You seem to be saying that this means that the rejection of their own chauvinism by the Anglophone workers is a sort of precondition they have to fulfil before they can engage in struggle against the Canadian bourgeoisie. In fact, all the historical examples give the lie to such a schema: it's during the course of the class combat, and not as a precondition for it, that workers are led to go beyond all the mystifications, including nationalist ones, that the bourgeoisie uses to maintain its grip on society.
In the final analysis, if we say that Quebec nationalism may prove to be more dangerous than Anglophone nationalism, it's precisely because there is a form of national oppression against the Francophone workers. When the latter enter into struggle against the federal state, they run the risk of being more receptive to arguments that present the class struggle and the struggle against national oppression as two complementary struggles.
This question is analogous to the question of democracy and fascism. They are two forms of class rule, two forms of class dictatorship. The latter is more brutal in the way it exercises this dictatorship, but this doesn't mean that communists have to choose the "lesser evil" between the two. In fact, the history of the Russian and German revolutions between 1917 and 1923 teaches us that the greatest danger for the working class was represented not by the openly reactionary parties but by the "social democrats", those who benefited from the workers having much more confidence in them.
Let us take one final example of the danger of the nationalism of oppressed nations: Poland.
The independence of Poland from Czarist oppression was one of the central demands of the 1st and 2nd Internationals. However, from the end of the 19th century on, Rosa Luxemburg and her Polish comrades began to question this demand, showing in particular that the socialists' demand for Polish independence ran the risk of weakening the proletariat of that country. In 1905, the proletariat in Poland was in the vanguard of the revolution against the Czarist regime. By contrast, in 1917 and afterwards, it didn't follow the same path. On the contrary: one of the most successful methods used by the British and French ruling classes to paralyse and undo the Polish proletariat was to give their support to Polish independence. The workers in Poland were then caught up in a nationalist whirlpool which made them turn away from the revolution unfolding on the other side of their eastern frontier, and in some cases even led them to enlist in the troops sent to fight against the revolution.
In the end, which nationalism proved to be the most dangerous? The odious "Great Russian" chauvinism which Lenin denounced, full of contempt for the Poles and other nationalities, but left behind by the Russian workers at the moment of the revolution, or the nationalism of the workers in the oppressed nation par excellence, Poland?
The answer is self-evident. But we should also mention the tragic consequences of the fact that the majority of Polish workers followed the sirens of nationalism after 1917. Their non-participation in the revolution, even their hostility towards it, prevented the Russian and German revolutions from joining up geographically. And if this junction had taken place, it is probable that the world revolution would have been victorious, sparing humanity from all the barbarism of the 20th century, which continues to this day.
"Concerning the national question, I can understand that you are opposed to national demands, but I don't think this should make you close your eyes to national oppression. For example in the 60s and 70s one of the main demands of the Quebecois workers was the right to speak French at work, since a large number of enterprises and shops, above all in the Montreal region, functioned solely in English. Much progress has been made at this level, but there is still much to do. In my opinion it is vital to support this kind of democratic demand. We can't say to the workers ‘wait until the coming of socialism to sort that out', even if capitalism is by its nature incapable of putting an end to national oppression...
"I don't think that this kind of (democratic) demand, while not being revolutionary, can undermine the unity of the proletariat. On the contrary! The right to work in your own language, even if it doesn't put an end to exploitation, is an indispensable right for the workers. In the 1960s, the Quebecois workers didn't even have the right to speak to foremen in French in certain companies in the Montreal region. Certain restaurants in the west of Montreal only had their menus in English and the big stores in this area only operated in English.
"As I mentioned in my message, the situation has improved a lot, but there is still progress to be made, especially in the small companies with less than 50 employees. At the all-Canada level, bilingualism is far from being a reality despite all the fine official speeches.
"Concerning the Quebec national question, you asked me why I use the term chauvinism for Canadian-English nationalism and I don't use it to describe Quebec nationalism. Generally the organisations of the left use the word chauvinism to describe Canadian-English nationalism, because it is the dominant nation within the Canadian state. This doesn't mean that Quebec nationalism is more ‘progressive' than its Canadian-English counter-part.
"The Canadian-English workers' movement already raised the banner of Canadian unity during the 1972 general strike in Quebec. The NDP (New Democratic Party) and the CTC (Canadian Labour Congress) denounced this strike for being ‘separatist' and ‘undermining Canadian unity'. In my view an internationalist position has to resolutely and without compromise oppose both bourgeois camps and both nationalisms (Canadian-English and Quebecois). Even if today a movement of the working class in English Canada has little chance of being based on the defence of the oppression of the Quebecois, Anglophone chauvinism is still present all over Canada and is prejudicial to the unity of the working class. Any defence of the Canadian state and its so-called ‘unity' is at least as reactionary as promoting the independence of Quebec."
We wrote a long reply to the comrade's various letters on this question of demands against linguistic oppression, which we will see in the sections that follow.
[1]. With a significant difference in scale: the oppression meted out to the different nationalities in the Russian empire cannot be compared to the attitude of the Ottawa government to the different nationalities in Canada.
[2]. "The discussion on self-determination summed up", July 1916, Collected Works, Vol. 22.
[3]. See https://en.internationalism.org/wr/292_solidarity.html [5].
Dear comrade,
With this letter, we want to continue our discussion on the national question, in particular the question of Quebec. The first thing we want to say is that we absolutely agree with you when you say:
"...we have to be clear that opposition to the Quebec independence movement has nothing to do with the defence of the Canadian imperialist state and that it completely rejects Canadian nationalism. The federal Canadian camp deserves no more support than the Quebec independence camp."
And also:
"...an internationalist position has to resolutely and without compromise oppose the two bourgeois camps and the two nationalisms (Canadian/English and Quebecois)."
Indeed, internationalism today means that you cannot give support to any national state. We have to be precise about the fact that we're talking about today because this wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, it was possible for internationalists to support not only certain struggles for national independence (classically, the struggle for Polish independence for example), but also certain nation states. Thus, during the different wars that took place in Europe in the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels often took the side of one or other camp when they considered that the victory of this nation or the defeat of another would serve to advance the bourgeoisie against feudal reaction (symbolised by Czarism). Similarly, in December 1864, in the name of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, Marx sent the US president Abraham Lincoln a message of congratulations on his re-election and of support for his opposition to the efforts of the southern states to secede (in this case, Marx and Engels vigorously opposed a demand for national independence!).
And here we come to the heart of the question of "democratic demands" that you raise:
"... in the 60s and 70s one of the main demands of the Quebec workers was the right to work in French...In my view it is indispensable to support this kind of democratic demand. We can't say to the workers ‘wait for the dawn of socialism to sort that out', even if capitalism is by its nature incapable of putting an end to national oppression". And again: "...I don't think that these kinds of demand, while not being revolutionary, can undermine the unity of the proletariat."
In order to be able to deal correctly with the specific case of "linguistic" demands (in particular the Canadian authorities' ostracism of French speakers), we have to go back to the general question of "democratic demands".
The formula is itself significant:
demand: this is something expressed (including by violent means) to an authority which is called on to grant it, whether willingly or under duress. It presupposes that the power of decision does not belong to those who express it, even if they can obviously "force the hand" of those who do hold this power through a favourable balance of forces (for example: a wage increase or the withdrawal of anti-working class measures obtained through a massive mobilisation of the workers that obliges the bosses to step back - which doesn't mean that they have been deprived of their decision-making power in the enterprise);
democracy: etymologically, "power of the people". It was Athens which invented "democracy" (which was very limited since slaves, foreigners and women were excluded) but it is the bourgeoisie which has "enthroned" it, so to speak.
The rise of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by the development of the different attributes of "democracy". This was obviously no accident but corresponded to the necessity for the bourgeois class to abolish the political, economic and social privileges of the nobility. For the latter, and in particular for its supreme representative, the King, power was essentially divine in origin. In the final analysis it was accountable only to the Almighty, even if, in France, for example, between 1302 and 1789 there were 21 meetings of the Estates General, representing the nobility, the clergy, and the "Third Estate", to give advice on financial matters or the mode of government. It was indeed during the last meeting of the Estates General that, under the pressure of peasant and urban revolts and the financial bankruptcy of the monarchy, the Third Estate launched the French revolution (notably by abolishing the privileges of the nobility and the clergy and limiting the power of the King). Following the example set by the English bourgeoisie a century and half earlier, the French bourgeoisie went on to establish its political power, which was hardly very "democratic" (especially of you think about the autocratic power of Napoleon the First, even though he was the heir of the revolution of 1789).
While it considered that the nobility should no longer be allowed to run things, the bourgeoisie only saw democracy in its own terms. Its slogan was "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and it declared that "men are born free and remain free and equal in their rights". However, although universal suffrage was written into the Constitution of 1793, this only became effective on 2nd March 1848, in the heat of the February revolution. And it was some time later that universal suffrage was established in other "advanced" countries: Germany 1871; Holland 1896; Austria 1906; Sweden 1909; Italy 1912; Belgium 1919...just after the very "democratic" England in 1918. In fact, in the majority of European countries, in the 19th century, universal suffrage was not the basis of bourgeois democracy: since the right to vote was determined by a certain level of taxation (in some cases, a high level of taxation gave one a right to multiple votes), the workers and other poor people, in other words the great majority of the population, were excluded from the electoral process. This is why universal suffrage was one of the main demands of the workers' movement during this period. This was notably the case in Britain where the world's first mass working class movement, Chartism, was formed around the question of universal suffrage. If the bourgeoisie opposed this demand for so long, it was obviously because it feared that the workers would use the vote to challenge its power within the state. This fear was particularly strong among the more archaic fractions of the bourgeoisie, especially those who were closest to the aristocracy (which, in a number of countries, had abandoned its economic privileges, such as exemption from taxes, but had conserved a strong position within the state, above all in the military and the diplomatic corps). This is why this period witnessed alliances between the working class and certain sectors of the bourgeoisie. This was for example the case in Paris in February 1848 when the revolution was supported by the workers, the artisans, the "liberal" bourgeoisie (for example the poet Lamartine) and even "legitimist" monarchists who saw King Louis-Philippe as a usurper. Having said this, the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat came rapidly to the surface with the "June Days" when, following the workers' uprising against the closure of the National Workshops, 1,500 of them were massacred and 15,000 deported to Algeria. In fact, it was at this point that some of the more dynamic sectors of the bourgeoisie understood that they could make use of universal suffrage against the archaic sectors that were standing in the way of economic progress. Furthermore, during the ensuing period, the French bourgeoisie became quite accustomed to a political system which combined a form of autocracy (Napoleon III) with universal suffrage, thanks in particular to the weight of a reactionary peasantry. It was in fact an assembly elected by universal suffrage dominated by deputies from the countryside (the "rurals") which decided on the repression of the Paris Commune of 1871 and gave full power to Thiers to direct the slaughter of 30,000 workers during the "bloody week" at the end of May.
Thus, two decades of universal suffrage in France were proof that the ruling class could definitely accommodate itself to this method of organising its institutions.
In the whole period that followed, Marx and Engels often warned against "parliamentary cretinism", and, drawing the lessons from the Commune, they underlined the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state. Nevertheless, along with the whole workers' movement with the exception of the anarchists, they continued to see universal suffrage as one of the main demands of the proletarian struggle.
And indeed, despite the dangers contained within it, support for this "democratic demand" was totally justified:
In connection with the demand for universal suffrage, the foundation stone of bourgeois democracy, the working class also fought for other rights such as freedom of the press and freedom of association. These were demands that the working class put forward at the same time as the progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie. For example, one of the first political texts by Marx dealt with the censorship exerted by the Prussian monarchy. As the editor both of the Rheinische Zeitung, (1842-43) which was still inspired by radical bourgeois ideas, and of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49) which was influenced by communism, Marx constantly denounced the official censorship. This in a sense epitomises the fact that at this time there was a convergence around democratic demands between the workers' movement and the bourgeoisie, which was still a revolutionary class trying to get rid of the vestiges of the feudal order.
As regards freedom of association, there was a similar convergence between the interests of the proletariat and those of the progressive bourgeoisie. Furthermore, freedom of association, like the freedom of the press, was one of the fundamental preconditions for the functioning of bourgeois democracy founded on universal suffrage, since political parties are an essential element in this mechanism. This said, what applied to freedom of association on the political level did not at all apply at the level of the workers organising themselves for the defence of their economic interests. Even the most revolutionary of bourgeoisies, the one which led the French revolution of 1789, was ferociously opposed to this right despite all its grand principles of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". Thus, in a law promulgated on 14th June, workers' combinations were forbidden as "an affront to freedom and the Declaration of the Rights of Man", and it was not until the 1848 revolution that this law was amended (with many reservations, since the new formulation still denounced "attempts to restrict the free exercise of industry and the freedom to work"). In the end, it was not until 1884 that trade unions could be formed freely. As for that Motherland of Liberty, Britain, trade unions were not legally recognised there until June 1871 (and it has to be said that the union leaders, especially those who sat on the General Council of the IWA, had been opposed to the Paris Commune).
The national demands which took on a good deal of importance around the mid-19th century (they were at the heart of the 1848 revolutions across Europe) were an integral part of these "democratic demands", especially where there was a convergence between the old empires (Russian and Austrian) and the domination of the aristocracy. One of the basic reasons for the workers' movement supporting certain of these demands is that they weakened these empires and thus the feudal reaction, while opening the door to the formation of viable nation states. During this period, supporting the demand for national independence was a key issue for the working class. One of the best illustrations of this was the fact that the IWA was formed in 1864 by English and French workers at an assembly held in support of Polish independence. But the support given by the workers' movement didn't apply to all national demands. Marx and Engels condemned the national demands of the small Slav people (Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks) because they were not in a position to set up a viable nation state and were an obstacle to modern capitalism, being caught up in the games of the Russian empire and holding back the development of the German bourgeoisie.[1]
[1]. See the 1849 article by Engels' "Democratic Pan-slavism" https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm [6].
The support the workers' movement gave to democratic demands was based essentially on a historic situation in which capitalism was still progressive. In this context, certain sectors of the bourgeoisie could still act in a "revolutionary" or "progressive" manner. But the situation changed radically at the beginning of the 20th century, above all with the First World War. From then on, all sectors of the bourgeoisie became reactionary because capitalism had completed its fundamental historic task of subjecting the whole planet to its economic laws and developing the productive forces of society on an unprecedented scale (starting with the most important productive force, the working class). The system was no longer a condition for human progress but an obstacle to it. As the Communist International put it in 1919, we had entered "the epoch of wars and revolutions". And if we look again at the main democratic demands mentioned above, we can see how they have ceased to be a terrain for the struggle of the proletariat.
Universal suffrage (which had not in fact been accorded in all the developed countries, as we saw above) became one of the principal means used by the bourgeoisie to preserve its domination. We can take two examples from the countries where the revolution went furthest: Russia and Germany.
In Russia, after the seizure of power by the soviets in October 1917, elections to a Constituent Assembly were organised on the basis of universal suffrage (the Bolsheviks had raised this demand before October in order to unmask the Provisional Government and the bourgeois parties who were against the election of a Constituent Assembly). These elections gave a majority to those parties, in particular the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had participated in the Provisional Government and served as a final rampart of bourgeois order. This Constituent Assembly raised great hopes in the ranks of the Russian and international bourgeoisie who saw it as a means to deprive the working class of its victory and return themselves to power. This is why at the first meeting of the Assembly, the Soviet power dissolved it.
A year later, in Germany, the war had, as in Russia, given birth to the revolution. At the beginning of November, workers' and soldiers' councils were formed throughout the country, but (as at the beginning of the Russian revolution) they were dominated by the majority social democrats, the same people who had participated in the imperialist war. These councils handed power over to a "Council of Peoples' Commissars" run by the SPD but also the "Independents" of the USPD who served as a left cover for the real bosses. All of a sudden, the SPD called for the election of a constituent assembly for 15 February 1919:
"He who wants bread, must want peace. He who wants peace, must want the Constituent, the freely elected representation of the whole German people. He who acts against the Constituent or who procrastinates about it, is depriving you of peace, freedom and bread, is robbing you of the first fruits of the victory of the revolution...such a person is a counter-revolutionary" (thus the Spartacists were "counter-revolutionaries". The Stalinists didn't invent anything new when a few years later they used the same term against those who had remained loyal to the revolution).
"Socialisation will take place and must take place... through the will of the labouring people who, fundamentally, want to abolish this economy animated by the search for profit by particular elements. But this will be a thousand times easier to impose if it is the Constituent which decrees it rather than being ordered by the dictatorship of some revolutionary committee."[1]
This was obviously a way of disarming the working class and leading it onto a terrain which was not its own, of emptying the workers' councils of any reason for existing (since they are presented as no more than a provisional institution until the next Constituent Assembly) and of preventing the councils from heading in a similar direction to that taken by the soviets in Russia, where the revolutionaries had gradually won a majority within them. At the same time as making grand "democratic" declarations to send the workers off to sleep, the socialists were getting together with the army HQ to plan the "cleaning out of the Bolsheviks", i.e. the bloody repression of insurgent workers and the liquidation of the revolutionaries. This is what they did in mid-January, following a provocation which pushed the workers of Berlin into a premature insurrection. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (accused of being counter-revolutionaries because they were opposed in advance to the Constituent Assembly), were murdered, along with hundreds of workers, on 15th January. On 19th January the anticipated elections to the Constituent Assembly were held. This was the triumph of universal suffrage...against the working class.
With regard to freedom of the press, in most European countries it was gradually won by the working class newspapers by the end of the 19th century. In Germany for example, the anti-Socialist laws which hindered the social democratic press (it had to be published in Switzerland) were lifted in 1890. However, although the workers' movement could express itself with almost complete freedom by the eve of the First World War, these gains were abolished overnight as soon as the war broke out. The only position that could be freely expressed in the papers was the one supporting national unity and the war effort. In the countries which participated in the war, revolutionaries had to publish and distribute their press illegally and clandestinely, as in Czarist Russia. This was true to such a point that Russia, after the February 1917 revolution, suddenly became "the freest country in the world". This sudden abolition of press freedom for the workers' movement, this overnight cancelling out of the gains of decades of struggle, undertaken not by the most archaic sectors of the ruling class but by the most "advanced" bourgeoisies, was one of the signs that a new period had begun, one in which there could no longer be the slightest common interest between the proletariat and any sector of the bourgeoisie. What was revealed by this assault on the workers' organisations' freedom of expression was not the great strength of the bourgeoisie but a great weakness, a weakness springing from the fact that the bourgeoisie's rule over society no longer corresponded to humanity's historic needs but was now the open and definitive antithesis of these needs.
Of course, after the First World War, freedom of the press was re-established for the former workers' organisations in the advanced countries. But this freedom of the press was no longer the result of struggles of the working class coinciding with the interests of the most dynamic sectors of the bourgeoisie, as had been the case during the course of the 19th century. On the contrary, it corresponded to the fact that the bourgeoisie had managed to gain the upper hand over the proletariat during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. And one of the major elements in the victory of the bourgeoisie had been its ability to take over the old organisations of the workers' movement, the Socialist parties and the trade unions. These organisations obviously continued to present themselves as defenders of the working class and used an "anti-capitalist" language which obliged the ruling class to organise the freedom of the press in order to create the appearance of a "democratic debate". We should also remember that in the wake of the Russian revolution, the bourgeoisie set up a cordon sanitaire around it in the name of democracy, accusing it of killing freedom. However, it soon became clear that this love for democratic freedoms could easily be set aside even by the bourgeoisie's most modern factions and not just by its most archaic ones. This is what happened with the rise of fascism in the early 1920s in Italy and at the beginning of the 1930s in Germany. Contrary to the view of the Communist International, which was criticised by the Italian communist left, fascism in no way represented a kind of "feudal reaction" (even if it was supported by certain aristocrats who were all for law and order). On the contrary, it was a political orientation supported by the most modern sectors of the bourgeoisie, who saw it as a means for advancing the country's imperialist interests. This can be seen very clearly in the case of Germany where Hitler, even before he came to power, received massive support from the dominant and most modern sectors of industry, particular the steel industry (Krupp, Thyssen) and the chemical industry (BASF).
Concerning the question of "freedom of association", it is obviously connected to the question of freedom of the press and universal suffrage. In most of the advanced countries, the workers' organisations could meet where they liked. But again we have to point out that this "freedom" was the other side of the coin to the integration of the former workers' parties into the state apparatus.[2] Furthermore, after the First World War, now that these parties had shown how effective they could be in dealing with the working class, the bourgeoisie showed them much more confidence and put them in power in several European countries during the 1930s, as part of the policy of the "Popular Fronts". It turned not only to the Socialist parties but also to the "Communist" parties who had in their turn betrayed the proletariat. The latter indeed played the role of spearheads of the counter-revolution, especially in Spain where they distinguished themselves in the murder of the most militant workers. And in a number of other European countries they served as the recruiting sergeants for the Second World War and the main protagonists for the "Resistance", particularly in France and Italy. We should also note that the defence of internationalist and revolutionary ideas had become particularly difficult during this period. Thus Trotsky was denied political asylum in most countries of the world (which had become a "planet without visa" as he put it in his autobiography) and was along with his comrades subjected to permanent police surveillance and persecution. The difficulties facing revolutionaries were even greater at the end of the Second World War, when those who had remained loyal to internationalist principles were denounced - above all by the Stalinists - as "collaborators", persecuted and in some cases (such as Italy) murdered.
Again in relation to freedom of association, we should make a special mention of the trade unions. After the First World
War they also benefited from a good deal of solicitude on the part of the bourgeoisie. During the 1930s, they took part in the sabotage of struggles and above all in channelling workers' discontent towards support for the bourgeois parties who were leading the way in the preparations for imperialist war (support for Roosevelt in the USA, in Europe support for the Popular Fronts that were preparing to provide cannon-fodder in the name of anti-fascism). We should also note that it was not only the democratic sectors of the bourgeoisie that drew strength from the unions. Fascism also appealed to them once it had understood the need to keep control over the working class at the "rank and file" level. Obviously, in the fascist regimes, as in the Stalinist regimes, the unions' role as state organs and auxiliaries to the police was much clearer than in the democratic regimes. But even in the latter, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the unions overtly presented themselves as defenders of the national economy and played the role of police in the factories in order to incite the workers to make sacrifices in the name of reconstruction.
The "right" to participate in elections, which workers had fought for in the 19th century, became in the course of the 20th century an "electoral duty" orchestrated by vast media campaigns by the bourgeoisie (in some case, like Belgium, the vote has even become compulsory). In the same way, the "right" to belong to a union that workers once fought for became the obligation to join a union (in those sectors which practised the "closed-shop" system), or to go through the union to raise demands or go on strike.
One of the great strengths of the bourgeoisie in the 20th century, as shown during the First World War, was its ability to take the "democratic rights", which the working class had fought for so bitterly in the previous century, often at the cost of its own blood, and turn them against the class.
And this applies particularly to the "democratic demand" for national self-determination or the rights of oppressed national minorities. We saw earlier that this demand in itself was not at all proletarian, but could rightly be supported in specific cases by the working class and its vanguard. In contrast to what happened to the trade unions, "national" demands didn't acquire a bourgeois character when capitalism entered its phase of decadence, since they had been bourgeois from the start. But because the bourgeoisie had ceased to be a revolutionary or even a progressive class, these demands became totally reactionary and counter-revolutionary, a real poison for the proletariat.
There are plenty of examples. Thus, one of the main themes invoked by the European bourgeoisie to justify imperialist war in 1914 was the defence of oppressed nationalities. And since the war was fought between empires which inevitably oppressed various peoples, there was no lack of arguments: Alsace and Lorraine, against the wishes of its population, under the heel of the German Empire; southern Slavs dominated by the Austrian Empire; peoples of the Balkans oppressed by the Ottoman empire; Finland and the Baltic countries (without counting the dozens of nationalities in the Caucasus and central Asia) trapped in the "prison-house of nations" (as the Czarist Empire was called), etc. To this list of peoples oppressed by the main protagonists of the world war, we can obviously add the multitude of colonial populations in Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Similarly, we have already seen in our previous letter how the independence of Poland was to be a decisive weapon against the world revolution at the end of the First World War. We can add that the slogan "the right of peoples to self-determination" had no better defender at this time than the American president Woodrow Wilson. If the bourgeoisie that was about to take the leading role in the world showed such concern for oppressed peoples, it obviously wasn't out of "humanism" (whatever Wilson's personal feelings may have been) but because it had its own interests in mind. And that's not hard to understand: the majority of the world was still under the domination of the European powers who had won the war (or who had kept out of it, like Holland, Spain and Portugal), and the decolonisation of these areas would leave them open to a take-over by American imperialism (through less costly means than direct colonial administration), which was singularly lacking in colonies of its own.
One last word on this subject: although in the 19th century national emancipation had been associated with democratic demands against the feudal empires, the European nations who won their "independence" at the end of the First World War were for the most part led by fascist-type dictatorships. This was notably the case in Poland (with the Pilsudski regime) but also in the three Baltic countries and Hungary.
The Second World War, and the process which led up to it, also saw the extensive use of national demands. For example, it was in the name of the rights of the German minority in the Sudetenland that the Nazi regime took over part of Czechoslovakia in 1938 (the Munich accords). Similarly, it was in the name of Croatian independence that the Nazi armies invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, an operation supported by Hungary which came to the rescue of the "national rights" of the Hungarian minority of Voivodina.
In fact, what has happened all over the world since the First World War has totally confirmed the analysis originated by Rosa Luxemburg at the end of the 19th century: the demand for national independence has ceased to have the progressive role that it could once play in certain cases. Not only has it become a demand that is particularly harmful to the working class, but it is easily integrated into the imperialist designs of the different states and has served as a flag for the most reactionary and xenophobic bourgeois cliques.
[1]. SPD leaflet - see our series of articles on the German revolution in International Review n° 82.
[2]. In one of your messages you write that "the Canadian-English workers' movement has already raised the banner of Canadian unity during the general strike of 1972 in Quebec. The National Democratic Party and the Canadian Congress of Labour denounced this strike as ‘separatist' and ‘undermining Canadian unity'". In fact it's not the "Canadian-English workers' movement" which adopted this attitude but bourgeois parties with a workerist language and trade unions in the service of capital.
Having said this, are we to conclude that the working class today can still support "democratic demands"?
We have seen what has become of the "democratic demands" won by the workers' struggles of the 19th century:
universal suffrage has become one of the prime means of masking the dictatorship of capital behind the idea of the "sovereign people"; it's one of capital's favourite tools for sterilising and derailing the discontent and the hopes of the working class;
Today "democratic rights" and more generally "human rights" have become the major theme of most sectors of the bourgeoisie.
In was in the name of defending these "rights" that the Western bloc waged the Cold War for over 40 years against the Russian bloc. It was for the defence of "democratic rights" against "terrorist barbarism and Islamic fundamentalism" or the Saddam dictatorship that the US government launched the devastating wars in the Middle East. We will pass over many other examples, but it is also worth recalling that the defence of "democracy", before it was the flag of American imperialism and its allies after 1947, had already served as the theme for dragooning the workers into the biggest massacre in history, the Second World War. It is worth noting here that as long as it was an ally against Germany, the Stalinist regime, which could certainly vie with the fascists when it came to police terror and the massacre of whole populations (and in fact preceded them in this respect) didn't seem to bother the western governments in their crusade for democracy.
With regard to the parties of the left, i.e. the bourgeois parties who have more impact on the working class, the demand for "democratic rights" is in general an excellent way of drowning class demands and preventing the proletariat from affirming its class identity. What applies to "democratic demands" also applies to pacifism: faced with war, we regularly see mobilisations orchestrated by all sorts of political sectors from the extreme left to certain elements of the chauvinist right who consider that this or that war is not opportune for the interests of the nation (this is fairly common in France today where even the right is, in its majority, opposed to American policies). Behind the banner of "no to war" the workers, and above all their class interests, are completely drowned in a sea of democratic and pacifist consciences (when it's not out and out chauvinism: it's not at all rare to see bearded Muslims and veiled women taking part in the demonstrations against the war in the Middle East).
Since the First World War the position of revolutionaries towards pacifism has been to combat the petty bourgeois illusions it spreads. Revolutionaries have always been in the front line of denouncing imperialist war but this is never based on purely moral considerations. They have shown that it is capitalism as a whole which is responsible for wars, which are inevitable as long as the system survives, and that the only force in society which can really struggle against war is the working class, which has to preserve its class independence in the face of all the pacifist, humanist and democratic sermons.
The first thing to say here is that the workers' movement has never considered the persistence of native languages, and thus demands for them to persist, to be "progressive" or "democratic". In fact, one of the characteristics of the revolutionary bourgeoisie was that it carried through the unification of viable nations, which involved going beyond provincial or local particularities linked to the feudal period. The imposition of a single national language was in many cases one of the instruments of this national unification (in the same way as the unification of systems of weights and measures, for example). This unification of the language usually took place through force, repression, bloodbaths: in fact, the classic methods which capitalism used to spread its hold over the world. Throughout their lives, Marx and Engels obviously denounced the barbaric methods through which capitalism established its hegemony over the planet, whether during the phase of primitive accumulation (see the admirable pages in the last section of Volume One of Capital)[2] or during colonial conquests. At the same time, they always explained that, despite its barbarism, the bourgeoisie was the unconscious agent of historic progress by creating a world market, by liberating the productive forces of society, by generalising associated labour through the wage system, in short by preparing the material conditions for the coming of socialism.[3]
Much more than all the other social systems put together, capitalism has destroyed all the civilisations, cultures, and thus languages around it. There's no use deploring this or trying to return to the past: it's an accomplished and irreversible historical fact. You can't turn the wheel of history back. It's as if you tried to go back to artisan labour or the small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural production of the Middle Ages.[4]
This irresistible march of capitalism has selected a certain number of dominant languages, not on the basis of any linguistic superiority, but simply on the basis of the military and economic superiority of the peoples and states who use them. Some of these national languages have become international languages, spoken by the inhabitants of a number of countries. There are not that many of them: today, we're essentially talking about English, Spanish, French[5] and German. With regard to German, which is of great richness and rigour, and which was the language of many fundamental works of world culture (the philosophical works of Kant, Fichte, Hegel etc, the works of Freud, Einstein's theory of relativity and...the works of Marx) it is only used in Europe and it is already well past its heyday.
In fact, when it comes to real international languages used as a main language by more than a hundred million people, there is only Spanish, and of course English. The latter is today the real international language. This is the inevitable consequence of the fact that the two nations which have successively dominated capitalism were Britain and then America. Anyone who doesn't know English today is handicapped either when travelling or surfing the net, or doing serious scientific studies, especially in leading fields like IT. This is obviously not the case with French (which was in the past the international language of the European courts and of diplomacy, but evidently this didn't involve that many people).
To return to a remark you made in your messages: this is why, even if it is actively promoted by the Federal Canadian State, bilingualism will never be a reality in Canada. We have an edifying example of this in the case of Belgium. In Antwerp or Ghent, the Flemish workers often have a boss who speaks French. This has led many of them to feel that in refusing to speak French, they are in some way resisting the boss and the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, while it has never existed in an integral way for either of the two communities, bilingualism is much more common among the Flemish than the French-speaking Walloons. For several decades, Wallonia, the birthplace of Belgium's large-scale industry, has been losing the race at the economic level in relation to Flanders. One of the themes of the Flemish nationalists today is that this region, with its high rate of unemployment and its outdated industries, is a burden on Flanders. They tell the Flemish workers that they have to work and pay taxes to subsidise the Walloon workers: this is one of the themes of the extreme right independence party, Vlaams Belang.
The fact that the Flemish workers today are now much more often able to speak Flemish with their boss obviously doesn't change their exploited condition. This said, the population of Flanders is more and more bilingual, but the second language which is now developing is not French, which would allow a better communication with the Francophone population of the country, but English. This is also the case with the Francophone population. And the fact that, in their speeches, the King and the head of government express themselves in French and Flemish in a very equitable way doesn't change this.
We can take another example, that of Catalan.
Historically, Catalonia is the main industrial region of Spain and the most advanced on many levels: living standards, culture, and education for example. The working class of Catalonia has since the 19th century represented the most conscious and combative sector of the Spanish proletariat. In this region, the question of linguistic demands has been posed for a long time because the official language of all regions of Spain has been Castillian even though the current language, the language you speak with your family, your friends, in the street, is Catalan. This question has obviously been raised within the workers' movement. Among the anarcho-syndicalists who dominated it for a long time, this was often a thorny question since some of them, in the name of the "federalism" so beloved of the anarchists, were in favour of the pre-eminence of Catalan in the workers' press. Others argued, rightly enough, that while the boss of the enterprise may have been Catalan, many workers were not and spoke Castillian (a language also spoken by the Catalan workers). The use of Catalan was an excellent means for the boss to divide the workers.
During the Francoist period, where Catalan was not favoured in the media, or schools, and even less in the administration, using it seemed to a large part of the population of Catalonia a way of resisting the dictatorship. Far from weakening the use of Catalan, Franco's policies essentially had the opposite effect, to the point where immigrants from other regions were learning the language, as much as to be accepted by the natives[6] as to take part in this "resistance".
With the end of Francoism and the advent of "democracy" in Spain, the autonomist movement faded out. The regions, and especially the Catalan region, regained the prerogatives they had lost in the past. One of these prerogatives was to make Catalan the official language of the region, i.e. the administration could now only work in Catalan and this language was used exclusively in the schools, Castillian being taught only as a foreign language.
Parallel to this, in the universities of Catalonia, more and more courses were taught in Catalan, which obviously penalised students coming from other regions or from abroad (who may have learned Spanish because it is an international language but had not learned a regional language like Catalan). Result: while the Catalan universities had a good reputation, especially the University of Barcelona, and because of this attracted the best Spanish, European or South American students, the latter tended more and more to chose universities where they didn't run the risk of stubbing their foot on a language they didn't know. The process of opening up to Europe and the world, which Catalonia was so proud of, could only be undermined by Catalan being the hegemonic language, and in the ancestral rivalry between Barcelona and Madrid, the latter was threatening to gain a decisive advantage - not, as in the days of Franco, because of forced centralisation, but on the contrary because of the "democratic conquests" of Catalonia. This said, if the Catalan bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie have adopted a policy of shooting themselves in the foot, this is not a particular concern for internationalist revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the business of teaching only in Catalan does have much more serious consequences. The new generations of proletarians in Catalonia will have more difficulty communicating with their class brothers in the rest of the country and they will no longer have help from their parents in the international language of Spanish, even though they know it better than they know Catalan grammar.
Going back to the linguistic insults which existed in the past in Quebec and which you mention in your messages (and which do resemble the situation in Flanders a while back), they are typical of the behaviour of all bourgeoisies and are yet another means to affirm their strength in front of the workers, to show who's in charge. At the same time, it's an excellent way of dividing the workers between those who speak the language of the bosses (who are told that they are "privileged") and those who don't or who speak it badly. Finally, it's a way of channelling the discontent of the workers towards a terrain that is not theirs and which can only sap their class unity. Even if not all the bourgeoisie are intelligent enough to do all the necessary Machiavellian calculations, the existence of situations where, as well as their classical exploitation, workers also have to put up with added indignities, provides an excellent safety valve when the social pressure starts to build up. Rather than giving way on the essential questions, the bourgeoisie is ready to give way on issues that don't cost it anything, such as the language question. Here they are helped by the political forces - especially those of the left and far left - who have included linguistic demands in their programme and who present the satisfaction of these demands as a victory, even if other demands have not been satisfied (above all if these demands are considered to be the principal ones, as you note in your message of 18th February). In reality, while this problem of linguistic disadvantages for the workers has tended to diminish in Quebec, it's not only because of the policies of the nationalist parties. It's also a consequence of the workers' struggles which have developed all around the world, including Canada, since the end of the 1960s.
In the face of such a situation, what approach should revolutionaries adopt? It can only be to tell workers the truth, to say what we've said here. They must encourage workers' struggles for the defence of their living conditions and in doing this they don't simply talk about the revolution which will abolish all forms of oppression. But their role is also to warn the workers against all the traps being laid for them, all the manoeuvres aimed at sapping class solidarity; they must not be afraid of criticising demands when they consider that they do not contribute to the unity of the class.[7] Otherwise they will not play their role as revolutionaries:
"1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole."[8]
While waiting for your comments on this letter, please accept our best communist greetings,
For the ICC.[1]. In fact at first this demand was not at the top of the list: economic demands and the issue of repression took precedence. But it was the political "experts" inside the movement, the people coming out of the "democratic" milieu (Kuron, Modzelewski, Michnik, Geremek...) who insisted on this being the put at the top.
[2]. "This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, ‘to decree universal mediocrity'. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital" (Chapter 32, "Historical tendency of capitalist accumulation")
"Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into ‘free labouring poor', that artificial product of modern society. If money, According to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Chapter 31, "Genesis of industrial capital").
[3]. "Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.... England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
"Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:
‘Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?'"
[From Goethe's "An Suleika", Westöstlicher Diwan]
(Marx, "The British Rule in India", New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853)
[4]. This was in fact the dream of a certain number of rebellious elements after the May 68 events in France. Trying to escape capitalism and the alienation it engenders, they went off to found communes in the Ardeche, in villages deserted by their inhabitants, attempting to live by weaving and raising goats. For the most part this was a disaster: forced to produce at the lowest cost to sell their production, they lived in poverty, which often led to conflicts between the communards, to witch-hunts against "layabouts who live off the backs of others", and to the reappearance of petty chiefs concerned with doing things on the cheap. The most efficient of them were simply reintegrated into the commercial circuits of capitalism.
[5]. We should note that French was imposed by eliminating a number of local dialects, such as Breton, Picard, Occitan, Provencal, Catalan, and many others.
[6]. We should note that even in the Franco era, whenever you were lost in Barcelona, it was not well-regarded to ask the way in Castillian. Paradoxically, the person you asked for help understood the latter language much better if it was spoken with a strong French or English accent than with a Spanish one.
[7]. Revolutionaries must not hesitate to take up this fundamental idea of Marx: the oppression and the barbarism for which capitalism is responsible, and which has to be denounced, don't only have a negative side. They create the conditions for the future emancipation of the working class and even for the success of its present struggles. If they are obliged to learn English or to make progress in this language to find a job or simply to buy things, the Quebec workers will also draw advantage from it: it can help them communicate with their Anglophone class brothers in the same country and even in their great North American neighbour. It's not the job of revolutionaries to excuse the odious, xenophobic behaviour of the Anglophone bourgeoisie but to explain to the French workers that they have the possibility of turning these weapons of the bourgeoisie against them. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, born in the area of Poland dominated by Russia, was forced to learn Russian. She never complained about it, on the contrary. It helped her to communicate with her comrades in Russia (for example Lenin with whom she had long discussions after the 1905 revolution, which allowed the two revolutionaries to get to know each other, to understand and appreciate each other). It was also an opportunity for her to know and appreciate Russian literature. In fact she translated certain works into German to make them accessible to German speakers.
[8]. Communist Manifesto.
In this issue of the International Review we are re-publishing the second article in the series “Problems of the Period of transition” by Mitchell, published in Bilan n° 31, in May-June 1936. Having laid out the general historical conditions of the proletarian revolution in the first article in the series (re-published in IR n°128 [7]), Mitchell traces the evolution of the marxist theory of the state, linking it closely to the most important moments in the struggle of the working class against capitalism – 1848, the Paris Commune, and the Russian revolution. Following in the footsteps of Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917), he shows how the proletariat progressively clarified its relationship to the state in the course of these fundamental experiences: from the general notion that the state, as an instrument for the oppression of one class by another, would necessarily disappear in communist society, to the more concrete steps in understanding how the proletariat would progress towards this outcome, by destroying the existing bourgeois state and erecting in its place a new form of state that was destined to wither away after a more or less long period of transition. However, Mitchell’s study takes us beyond the point reached by Lenin’s book by incorporating the crucial lessons learned through the October revolution and the terrible difficulties it faced as a result of its international isolation: above all, the necessity to avoid any identification between the proletariat, its specific class organs (defined by Mitchell as soviets, party, and trade unions) and the general apparatus of the transitional state, which by its nature as an “evil” inherited from the old society is inevitably more vulnerable to the danger of corruption and degeneration. From this standpoint, the Bolshevik party had been fundamentally mistaken both in identifying the proletarian dictatorship with the transitional state, and in allowing itself to be increasingly fused with the latter.
The product of an intense process of reflection and clarification, Mitchell’s text contains some of the weaknesses of the Italian/Belgian communist left in the 1930s as well as it strengths: thus, while arguing that the party should not be merged with the state, the text still holds that the task of the party is to exercise the proletarian dictatorship; or again, while beginning with the clear statement that the collectivisation of the means of production is not identical to socialism, at the end the article continues to defend the notion that the contemporary USSR, because the economy was “collectivised”, was not a capitalist state even though it accepts that the Russian proletariat was indeed subjected to capitalist exploitation. We have examined these contradictions at greater length in previous articles (see “The Russian enigma and the Italian communist left, 1933-1946” [8] , IR n° 106, and “The 1930s, debate on the period of transition” [9] in IR n° 127), but these weaknesses do not detract from the overall clarity of this text, which remains a fundamental contribution to the marxist theory of the state.
In our introductory study, we tried to show that there is not and cannot be a direct simultaneity between the historic maturity of the proletarian revolution and its material and cultural maturity. We are living in the epoch of proletarian revolution because social progress can now only take place after the disappearance of the very class antagonisms which, in what we might call the prehistory of the human race, have been the motor-force of all progress until now.
But the collective appropriation of the wealth developed by bourgeois society simply does away with the contradiction between the social form of the productive forces and their private appropriation. It is simply the “sine qua non” for the further development of society. In itself it doesn’t lead automatically to a higher stage of development. In itself it doesn’t contain all the constructive solutions of socialism, nor does it immediately wipe out all forms of social inequality.
The collectivisation of the means of production and exchange is not socialism - it is a point of departure, a fundamental precondition for socialism. It is still only a juridical solution to social contradictions and doesn’t eliminate all the material and spiritual deficiencies that the proletariat will inherit from capitalism. In a sense history will “surprise” the proletariat and force it to carry out its mission in an unprepared state which no amount of revolutionary idealism and dynamism can immediately transform into an ability to resolve all the formidable and complex problems the revolution will pose. Both before and after the conquest of power, the proletariat will have to make up for the historical immaturity of its consciousness by relying on its party, which will remain its guide and educator in the period of transition from capitalism to communism. At the same time the proletariat will only be able to overcome the temporary insufficiency of the productive forces bequeathed to it by capitalism by having recourse to a state, to an:
“…evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worse sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.”[1]
The necessity to “tolerate” a state during the transition period between capitalism and communism derives from the specific character of this period, which Marx defined in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:
“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges” (our emphasis).[2]
Later on we will examine these birth marks when we analyse the economic and social categories which the proletariat will inherit from capitalism and which are going to have to “wither away” alongside the proletarian state.
It would obviously be a mistake to cover up the mortal danger which the survival of this instrument of servitude, this state, will pose to the proletarian revolution, even though it’s a workers’ state. But to conclude that the revolution is bound to degenerate simply because this state will exist would be to ignore the dialectic of history and to abandon the revolution itself.
Similarly, to delay the unleashing of the revolution until the masses have fully acquired the capacity to wield power would be to run away from the reality of the historical problem, to negate the necessity of the transitional state and of the party. This idea is the logical accompaniment to the notion of basing the revolution on the “maturity” of material conditions, which we examined in the first part of this study.
Later on we will consider the problem of the ability of the proletarian masses to run the state and the economy.
While the victorious proletariat will be forced by historical conditions to tolerate a state during a more or less prolonged period, it is important that it understands what kind of state this will be.
The marxist method allows us on the one hand to uncover the meaning of the state in class society, to define its nature; and, on the other hand, by analysing the revolutionary experiences of the proletariat last century, to determine what attitude the proletariat must have with regard to the bourgeois state.
Marx and above all Engels succeeded in ridding the idea of the state of all idealist excrescences. Laying bare the real nature of the state, they showed that it was nothing but an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class of a given society; that its only function was to safeguard the economic and political privileges of this class: through coercion and violence, its role was to impose the juridical rules which corresponded to the forms of property and mode of production upon which these privileges were based. They also showed that the state was the expression of the domination of the majority of the population by a minority. The backbone of the state, the concrete expression of the fact that society was divided into classes, was its armed force and coercive organs, which were placed above and against the mass of the people, and which prevented the oppressed class from maintaining its own “spontaneous” forms of armed defence. The ruling class could never tolerate the existence of an armed force of the people alongside its own instruments of repression.
To take just one example from the history of bourgeois society: in France the revolution of February 1848 armed the workers “who were now a power in the state” (Engels). The bourgeoisie had but one concern: to disarm the workers. So it provoked them by liquidating the national workshops and crushed them during the June uprising. Again in France, after September 1870, a national guard mainly composed of workers was formed to defend the country.
“…almost at once the antagonism between the almost completely bourgeois government and the armed proletariat broke into open conflict…To arm Paris was to arm the revolution. Thiers…was compelled to realise that the supremacy of the propertied classes was in constant danger so long as the workers of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was to attempt to disarm them.”[3]
Thus came March 18th and the Commune.
But once it had penetrated the “secret” of the bourgeois state (whether monarchical or republican, authoritarian or democratic) the proletariat still had to clarify its own policy towards this state. The experimental method of marxism gave it the means to do this.
At the time of the Communist Manifesto Marx clearly recognised the necessity for the proletariat to conquer political power, to organise itself as the ruling class, but he was less clear about the fact that the proletariat had to create its own state. He had already foreseen that all forms of state would disappear when classes had been abolished, but this remained a general and somewhat abstract formulation. The French experience of 1848-51 provided Marx with the historical evidence which allowed him more firmly to grasp the idea of the destruction of the bourgeois state, but it did not enable him to trace the contours of the proletarian state which would arise in its place. The proletariat had appeared on the scene as the first revolutionary class in history destined to annihilate the increasingly centralised police and bureaucratic machine, which all exploiting classes had used to crush the exploited masses. In his 18th Brumaire Marx stressed that up till now “all revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”[4] The centralised power goes back to the absolute monarchy; the rising bourgeoisie used it to struggle against feudalism; the French revolution simply rid it of its feudal vestiges, and the First Empire completed the formation of the modern state. A developed bourgeois society transformed the central power into a machine for oppressing the proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx explained why all previous revolutionary classes had conquered the state instead of destroying it: “the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built up, were generated in feudal society.”[5]
Having gradually conquered economic power, the bourgeoisie had no need to destroy a political organ in which it had already installed itself. It didn’t have to do away with the bureaucracy, the police, or the armed forces, but simply to subordinate these instruments of oppression to its own interests, because its political revolution was only a juridical replacement of one form of exploitation by another.
In contrast to this the proletariat is a class which expresses the interests of humanity rather than any particular interest; it cannot therefore embed itself in a state based on exploitation. “The proletarians…have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurance of, individual property.”[6]
Despite its limitations, the Paris Commune was the first historical response to the question of the difference between the proletarian state and the bourgeois state. The rule of the majority over a minority deprived of its privileges eliminated the need for a specialised bureaucratic and military machine in the service of particular interests. The proletariat replaced this machine with its own armament - to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie - and a political form which allowed it to progressively assume the task of managing society In this sense “the Commune…was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word” (Engels). Lenin stressed the fact that the Commune had “the gigantic achievement of replacing certain institutions by institutions in principle essentially different”.
Nevertheless, the proletarian state still has the essential character of all states. It is still an organ of coercion and, although it ensures the rule of the majority over a minority, it can still only express the temporary impossibility of doing away with bourgeois right. In Lenin’s phrase it is a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie, and unless it is constantly subjected to the direct control of the proletariat and its party it will always tend to turn against the class.
***
The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, already developed in the Manifesto but finding a historical elaboration in the Commune of 1871, juxtaposed the idea of the destruction of the bourgeois state with that of the withering away of the proletarian state. With Marx, the idea of the final disappearance of the state can be found in embryonic form in The Poverty of Philosophy; it was mainly developed by Engels in The Origins of the Family and Anti-Duhring, while later on Lenin commented on the problem brilliantly in his State and Revolution. The fundamental distinction between the destruction of the bourgeois state and the dying away of the proletarian state was rigorously drawn by Lenin and we don’t have to go into it here, especially because our previous considerations have dealt with any doubt about this question.
What we must keep in mind is that the hypothesis of the withering away of the state is bound to become the touchstone of the content of proletarian revolutions. We have already indicated that the revolution breaks out in a historical milieu which obliges the proletariat to tolerate the existence of a state. But this can only be: “a state in the process of withering away, that is, a state so constituted that it begins to wither away from the start and cannot but wither away” (Lenin).
The great achievement of marxism is to have shown irrefutably that the state has never been an autonomous factor in history, but is simply the product of a society divided into classes; the existence of classes preceded the state, and the latter will disappear when classes themselves disappear. After the dissolution of primitive communism the state has always existed in a more or less developed form, since it is inevitably superimposed on any form of exploitation of man by man; but at the same time it will inevitably die out at the end of a period of historical evolution which will make all oppression and constraint superfluous, since “bourgeois right” will have been eliminated and, in Saint-Simon’s phrase, “politics will be entirely reabsorbed into the economy”.
But marxist science has still not elaborated a solution to the problem of how exactly the state will wither away, a problem which is directly linked to the question of the relationship between the proletariat and “its” state.
The Commune was the first attempt to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat and was an experience of enormous importance, but it couldn’t avoid defeat and confusion, because, on the one hand, it took place in a period of historical immaturity; and, on the other hand, because it lacked the theoretical guide, the party. It can thus provide us only with a vague outline of the relationship between the state and the proletariat.
In 1875, in the Critique of the Gotha Progamme Marx was still posing the question: “…what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? [Marx is talking about the period of transition here - ed. Note] In other words, what social formation will remain in existence there that are analogous to the present functions of the state. This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state” (our emphasis - ed. note).[7] For Marx, the Commune was: “a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive…it was… the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”[8]
The Commune simply provided a framework for solving the fundamental problem of the education of the masses, who had the task of progressively freeing themselves from the burden of the state and ensuring that the state would finally disappear with the creation of a classless society. In this sense, the Commune was a signpost on the road to emancipation. It showed that although the proletariat could not immediately do away with the system of delegation, it had to: “safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment”. And, for Marx: “Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage [in the election of deputies - ed. note] by hierarchic investiture.”[9]
The theoretical elaboration of the problem had to stay at this point. Forty years later, Lenin was unable to go any further in this sphere. In State and Revolution he was limited to a few summary and even banal formulae which emphasised the necessity to: “transform the functions of the state into functions of control and checking that are so simple that they can be carried out by the enormous majority of the population and little by little by the entire population.”[10]
Like Engels, he was limited to the assertion that the state would disappear in an era of real freedom, as would democracy, which would have lost all social meaning. As for the exact process whereby all the habits of servitude left over from capitalism would be eliminated, Lenin said that: “the question of the concrete way in which the state will die out remains an open one, since we don’t have the historical data that would allow us to settle it.”[11]
Thus the problem of the management of a proletarian state and economy in the interests of the international revolution remained unsolved. In October 1917, when the Russian proletariat embarked upon the most crucial of historical experiences, the class found that it lacked the political principles to define the relationship between the state and proletariat. The Bolsheviks inevitably suffered from the crushing weight of this theoretical deficiency.
Taking a step back and looking at the Russian experience, it seems probable that if the Bolsheviks and the International had been able to acquire a clear vision of this fundamental question, the reflux of the revolution in the West, despite being a considerable obstacle to the October revolution, would not have altered the latter’s internationalist character and provoked it to break with the world proletariat by straying into the impasse of “socialism in one country”.
But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider the Soviet state as “an evil inherited by the proletariat… whose worst sides the victorious proletariat…cannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible”, but as an organism which could be completely identified with the proletarian dictatorship, i.e. with the party.
The result of this important modification was that the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer to be the party, but the state; and through the ensuing reversal of roles the latter found itself in a course of development which led not to the withering away of the state but to the reinforcement of its coercive and repressive powers. Once an instrument of the world revolution, the proletarian state was inevitably converted into a weapon of the global counter-revolution.
Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilised them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance.
Even in Lenin’s thought, the idea of the “dictatorship of the state” began to predominate. At the end of 1918, in his polemic against Kautsky, (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky[12]) he was unable to distinguish between two conflicting concepts: the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He replied resoundingly to Kautsky on the definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on its basic class meaning (all power to the soviets), but he made a connection between the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state and crush the ruling class and the idea of transforming the proletariat’s organisations into state organs. It’s true, however, that this position wasn’t an absolute for Lenin, since he was referring to the period of civil war, of the overthrow of bourgeois rule, during which time the main function of the Soviets was to be instruments of oppression against the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus.
The enormous difficulty in finding the right answer to the question of the relationship between the state and the proletariat, a question which Lenin was unable to resolve, derives from this dual, contradictory necessity: the need, on the one hand, to retain the state, an organ of economic and political coercion controlled by the proletariat (and thus by the party), while at the same time ensuring a greater and greater participation of the masses in the running and administration of the proletarian social order, even though this participation can for a whole period only take place through state organs, which by their very nature tend to lead to corruption.
The experience of the Russian revolution shows just how difficult it is to produce a social climate which will allow the maximum development of the activity and culture of the masses.
The controversy about democracy and dictatorship centres round this problem, whose solution is crucial to the success of future proletarian revolutions. Here we should emphasize the fact that despite Lenin and Luxemburg’s differences about “proletarian democracy”, they showed a common pre-occupation - the desire to create the conditions for an incessant expansion of the capacities of the masses. But for Lenin the concept of democracy, even proletarian democracy, always implies the oppression of one class by another - whether it is the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, or the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. And as we have said “democracy” will disappear with the abolition of classes and the state, i.e. when the concept of freedom becomes a reality.
Against Lenin’s idea of a “discriminatory” democracy, Luxemburg (in the Russian Revolution) defended the idea of “unlimited democracy”, which for her was a precondition for: “the unobstructed participation of the popular masses” in the dictatorship of the proletariat.[13] This could only be realised through the total exercise of “democratic” freedoms: unlimited freedom of the press, full political freedom, parliamentarism (even though later on, in the Spartacus programme, the future of parliamentarism was subordinated to the needs of the revolution).
Luxemburg’s overriding concern not to see the organs of the state machine getting in the way of the political life of the proletariat and its active participation in the tasks of the dictatorship prevented her from grasping the fundamental role of the party, since she ended up opposing the dictatorship of the class to the dictatorship of the party. However, she had the tremendous achievement of showing the difference in social context between the rule of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the proletariat, as Marx had done for the Commune: “the class rule of the bourgeoisie has no need for the political instruction and education of the mass of the people, or at least for no more than an extremely limited amount; but for the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is the vital element, the oxygen without which it cannot live.”[14]
In the programme of Spartacus, she dealt with the crucial problem of the education of the masses (which has to be solved by the party), saying that: “history is not going to make our revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions. In those revolutions it sufficed to overthrow that official power at the centre and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority. But we have to work from beneath.”[15]
Caught up in the contradictory process of the Russian revolution, Lenin nevertheless continued to emphasize the need to pose a proletarian “corrective”: organs of workers’ control, against the corrupting tendencies of the transitional state.
In his report to the Congress of Soviets in April 1918, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government”, he underlined the necessity to constantly supervise the functioning of the Soviets and the Soviet power:
“There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into ‘parliamentarians’, or else into bureaucrats. We must combat this by drawing all members of the Soviets into the practical work of administration.”[16]
In order to achieve this Lenin said it was necessary:
“to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, and all steps that are taken in this direction -the more varied they are, the better - should be carefully recorded, studied, systematised, tested by wider experience and embodied in law. Our aim is to ensure that every toiler, having finished his eight hours’ ‘task’ in productive labour, shall perform state duties without pay; the transition to this is particularly difficult, but this transition alone can guarantee the final consolidation of socialism. Naturally, the novelty and difficulty of the change lead to an abundance of steps being taken, as it were, gropingly, to an abundance of mistakes, vacillation - without this, any marked progress is impossible. The reason why the present position seems peculiar to many of those who would like to be regarded as socialists is that they have been accustomed to contrasting capitalism with socialism abstractly, and that they profoundly put between the two the word ‘leap’.”[17]
The fact that in the same report Lenin was led to justify giving dictatorial powers to individuals was the expression not only of the grim contingent situation which gave rise to War Communism, but also of the contradiction between a necessary coercive regime imposed by the state machine, and the need to safeguard the proletarian dictatorship, to immerse the regime in the growing activity of the masses.
“The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy.”[18]
But three years of civil war and the vital necessity to restore economic life prevented the Bolsheviks from finding a clear political solution to the problem of the relationship between the proletariat and state organs. Not that they were unaware of the mortal dangers which threatened the whole development of the revolution. The programme of the 8th Congress of the Russian Party in March 1919 talked about the danger of a political rebirth of bureaucracy within the Soviet regime, despite the fact that the old Tsarist bureaucratic machinery had been destroyed from top to bottom. The 9th Congress in December 1920 also dealt with the question of bureaucracy. And at the 10th Congress, which saw the beginning of the NEP, Lenin discussed the question at great length and came to the following conclusion: that the economic roots of the Soviet bureaucracy were not implanted in the military and juridical apparatus as in the bourgeois state, but that they grew out of the services; that the bureaucracy had sprung out of the period of War Communism and expressed the “negative side” of this period. The price paid for the necessarily dictatorial centralisation of this period was the increasing authority of the functionaries. At the 11th Congress, after a year of the “New Economic Policy”, Lenin vigorously emphasised the historic contradiction involved in the proletariat being forced to take power and use it before being fully prepared ideologically and culturally:
“We have sufficient, quite sufficient political power, we also have sufficient economic resources at our command, but the vanguard of the working class which has been brought to the forefront to directly supervise, to determine the boundaries, to demarcate, to subordinate and not be subordinated itself, lacks sufficient ability for it. All that is needed here is ability, and that is what we do not have…Never before in history has there been [such] a situation.”[19]
Concerning the state capitalism that it was necessary to put up with, Lenin urged the party thus:
“You Communists, workers, you, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which undertook to administer the state, must be able to 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 this past year?…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…”[20]
By saying that the task was to “build communism with non-communist hands” Lenin was only restating one of the fundamental problems of the proletarian revolution. By pointing out that the party had to lead an economy managed by “others” in the direction that it wanted it to go, he was simply showing that the function of the party is not the same as that of the state machine.
The safeguard of the Russian revolution, the guarantee that it would stay on the tracks of the world revolution, was therefore not the absence of all bureaucracy - which is an inevitable excrescence of the transition period - but the vigilant presence of proletarian organs in which the educational activity of the party could be carried out, while the party itself retained a vision of its international tasks through the International. Because of a whole series of historical circumstances and because of a lack of indispensable theoretical and experimental equipment, the Bolsheviks were unable to resolve this basic problem. The crushing weight of contingent events led them to lose sight of the importance of retaining the Soviets and trade unions as organs which could be juxtaposed to the state, controlling it but not being incorporated into it.
The Russian experience doesn’t allow us to see the extent to which the Soviets could have been, in Lenin’s phrase, “the organisations of the workers and the exploited masses which will allow them to organise and govern the state themselves”; the extent to which they could have concentrated “the legislative, the executive, and, the judiciary” into themselves if centrism had not emasculated their revolutionary potential.
In any case, the Soviets appeared as the Russian form of the dictatorship of the proletariat rather than having an international validity. What makes them an acquisition from the experimental point of view is the fact that during the phase of the destruction of Tsarist society, the soviets were the backbone of the armed self-organisation which the Russian workers put in place of the bureaucratic and military machine and the autocracy, and then used against the reaction of the dispossessed classes.
As for the trade unions their function was altered in the process of the degeneration of the whole apparatus of the proletarian dictatorship. In his Infantile Disorder (early 1920) Lenin underlined the importance of the trade unions: “by means of which the Party is closely linked up with the class and with the masses, and by means of which, under the leadership of the Party, the dictatorship of the class is exercised.”
After the seizure of power: “the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the old way, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable “school of Communism” and a preparatory school that trains the proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to separate trades), and later to all the working people.”[21]
The question of the role of the trade unions really came into its own at the end of 1920. Trotsky, basing his position on his experience in the sphere of transportation, considered that the unions had to become state organs responsible for maintaining labour discipline and the organisation of production. He even went so far as to propose that the unions be done away with, claiming that, in a workers’ state, they simply duplicated the tasks of state organs!
The discussion gathered pace at the 10th Congress of the party in March 1921 under the pressure of immediate events (Kronstadt) Trotsky’s ideas were opposed both by the Workers’ Opposition led by Shliapnikov and Kollontai, who called for management of production by the unions, and by Lenin, who considered that the statification of the unions was premature and that since “the state is not a workers’ state, but a workers’ and peasants’ state with numerous bureaucratic deformations”, the unions had to defend the workers’ interests against such a state. But Lenin emphasised that his disagreement with Trotsky was not over a question of principle, but simply over contingent considerations.
The fact that Trotsky was defeated at this Congress did not mean that the confusion about the role of the unions under the proletarian dictatorship had been cleared up. In fact the theses of the 3rd Congress of the CI repeated this confusion, on the one hand saying that: “before, during, and after the seizure of power, the unions remain a broader, more massive, more general form of organisation than the party, and in relation to the latter, to some extent play the part of the circumference to the centre.”
And also that: “the communists and sympathising elements must form within the unions communist groupings entirely subordinated to the communist party as a whole.”
While on the other hand saying that: “after the seizure and strengthening of proletarian power, the activity of the trade unions will be concerned mainly with the tasks of economic organisation and they will dedicate nearly all their energy to the building of the economy on a socialist basis, thus becoming a truly practical school of communism.”
We know that, after this, the unions not only lost any control over the management of enterprises, but also became organs responsible for stimulating production and not for defending the interests of the workers. In “compensation” for this, trade union leaders were recruited into the administration of industry and the right to strike was maintained in theory. But in fact strikes broke out in opposition to the trade union leadership.
***
The clearest criterion which marxists can use to back up their affirmation that the Soviet state is a degenerated state, that it has lost any proletarian function and has become an instrument of world capitalism, is the historical evolution of the Russian state between 1917 and 1936. In this period the state, far from tending to wither away, has become stronger and stronger, a process which could only lead it to becoming an instrument of oppression and exploitation against the Russian workers. This is an entirely new historical phenomenon, the result of an unprecedented historical situation: the existence within capitalist society of a proletarian state based on the collectivisation of the means of production, but one in which we are seeing a social process determining a frenzied exploitation of labour power; and at the same time this exploitation cannot be ascribed to the domination of a class which has juridical ownership of the means of production. We do not think that this social “paradox” can be explained by saying there is a bureaucracy which has become a ruling class (from the standpoint of historical materialism, these two notions mutually exclude each other); it can only be seen as the expression of a policy which has delivered the Russian state into the hands of world capitalism, whose laws of evolution are driving it towards imperialist war. In the part of this study dedicated to the question of the management of the proletarian economy, we will come back to the concrete aspects of this essential characteristic of the degeneration of the Soviet state, which has meant that the Russian proletariat is at the mercy not of a national exploiting class but of the world capitalist class. Such a political and economic relationship obviously contains within it all the conditions for the restoration of capitalism in Russia in the turmoil of a new imperialist war, unless the Russian proletariat, with the aid of the international proletariat, manages to overthrow the forces which threaten to lead it into another massacre.
Bearing in mind what we have said about the historic conditions in which the proletarian state is born, it is clear that the withering away of this state cannot be seen as an autonomous process limited to the national framework, but only as a symptom of the development of the world revolution.
It became impossible for the Soviet state to begin withering away as soon as the party and the International stopped seeing the Russian revolution as a step towards the world revolution and assigned to it the task of building “socialism in one country”. This explains why the specific weight of the state organs and the exploitation of the Russian workers have increased with the development of industrialisation and the economy; why the “liquidation of classes” has led not to a weakening of the state, but to its reinforcement, as expressed by the re-establishment of the three forces which have always been the backbone of the bourgeois state: the bureaucracy, the police and the standing army.
This phenomenon in no way indicates the falsity of marxist theory, which bases the proletarian revolution on the collectivisation of the productive forces and on the necessity for a transitional state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is simply the bitter fruit of a historic situation which prevented the Bolsheviks and the International from imposing an internationalist policy on the state, and which on the contrary made them the servants of the state against the proletariat by leading them onto the path of national socialism. In the face of economic difficulties which confronted them, the Bolsheviks were unable to formulate a policy which would have immunised them from confusing the apparatus of repression (which should only have been used against the dispossessed classes) with the class organs of the proletariat, which should have exercised control over the administration of the economy. The disappearance of these organs obliged the proletarian state, in its efforts to carry out a national programme and keep the economic apparatus going, to use its repressive organs against the proletariat as well as against the bourgeoisie. The state, that “necessary evil”, turned against the workers, despite the fact that, while the “principle of authority” will have to be recognised during the transitional phase, bureaucratic coercion can never be justified.
The whole point was to try not to widen the gap between the political and cultural immaturity of the masses and the historic necessity for them to run society. The solution that was aimed at, however, tended to exacerbate this contradiction even further.
We are with Rosa Luxemburg in saying that in Russia the question of the life of the proletarian state and the building of socialism could only be posed and not answered. It is up to the marxist fractions today to draw from the Russian revolution the essential lessons which will allow the proletariat to resolve the problem of the world revolution and of the building of communism in the next revolutionary wave.
Mitchell (to be continued)
[1]. Engels, “Introduction to The Civil War in France”, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27.
[2]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[3]. Engels, “Introduction to The Civil War in France”, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27.
[4]. 1852. Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[5]. 1848, Collected Works, Vol. 6.
[6]. Manifesto. Ibid.
[7]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[8]. The Civil War in France, 1871, Collected Works, Vol. 22.
[9]. Ibid.
[10]. 1917, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.25.
[11]. Ibid.
[12]. 1918. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28.
[13]. In: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder press 1970.
[14]. Ibid.
[15]. “Speech to the founding congress of the German Communist Party” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.
[16]. 1918. Collected Works, Vol.. 27.
[17]. Ibid.
[18]. Ibid.
[19]. “Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP (B)” , 1922. Collected Works, Vol. 33.
[20]. Ibid.
[21]. Left-wing communism: An infantile disorder, 1920. Collected Works, Vol. 31
The first 14 years of the 20th century, known as the Belle Époque, marked capitalism’s high-point. An atmosphere of optimism pervaded society as the economy endlessly prospered and inventions and scientific discoveries followed one upon the other. The workers’ movement was infected with this atmosphere, accentuating tendencies towards reformism and illusions about to the possibility of reaching socialism peacefully through a series of gradual conquests.[1]
The explosion of the First World War thus came as a brutal blow, a tremendous electric shock. The beautiful hopes of uninterrupted progress, which had dulled minds so much, were replaced by an awful nightmare: a war of unheard of brutality and destructiveness. Men fell like flies on the battlefronts, while at the rear there was rationing, the state of siege, the militarisation of labour. Boundless optimism gave way to paralysing pessimism.
Proletarian organisations were put to a dramatic test. Events unfolded at a vertiginous speed. In 1913 – despite the gathering storm clouds of imperialist tensions – everything appeared rosy. In 1914 the war exploded. In 1915 the first proletarian responses against the war began. 1917 produced the revolution in Russia. From the historical point of view, all this happened in an extremely short space of time. This was an enormous challenge to proletarian consciousness, which cannot respond to such events according to some ready-made recipe, but rather needs to go through a profound process of reflection and discussion. The test of war and revolution – the two decisive events in contemporary life – was posed in barely three years.
In the first article in this series [13] on the history of the CNT,[2] we highlighted the backwardness of Spanish capital and the contradictions that threatened it. When the war began Spain declared itself neutral and some sections of the national capital (above all in Catalonia) made some very lucrative deals selling all sorts of products to both sides. However, the world war hit the workers and the labouring masses in general very hard, above all through inflation. At the same time, the elementary sense of solidarity faced with the suffering affecting their brothers in other countries provoked a strong unease among the Spanish workers. All this demanded a response from the workers’ organisations.
However, the two great workers’ organisations that then existed – the PSOE[3] and the CNT – reacted in very different ways. The majority of the PSOE hastened their definitive integration into the capitalist state. The majority of the CNT by contrast adopted an internationalist and revolutionary position.
The PSOE had already begun to degenerate profoundly prior to the war;[4] it openly took the side of the Entente[5] gang (the Franco-British axis) and made the national interest its watchword.[6] With revolting cynicism, the report of the 10th Congress (October 1915) declared that “In relation to the European war, from the outset we have followed the stand of Iglesias[7] and of the circulars from the National Committee: the allied nations are defending democratic principles against the military crimes of German imperialism, and therefore, whilst not denying the capitalist origins of the war and the germ of imperialism and militarism that exists in all nations, we propose the defence of the allied countries”. Only a timid and confused minority put forward an internationalist position. Verdes Montenegro declared in a special vote that “the cause of the war is the ruling capitalist regime and not militarism nor the decisions of the crowned or uncrowned heads of various countries” and demanded that the Congress “call upon all the Socialist Parties of all those involved in the struggle to fulfil their duties towards the International”.
When the world war broke out, the CNT was legally dissolved. Nonetheless, workers’ societies in Barcelona maintained their tradition by publishing a manifesto against militarism in May 1914. Anselmo Lorenzo, a worker militant from the period of the First International and a founder of the CNT denounced – in an article published posthumously[8] – the treachery of German Social Democracy, the French CGT and the English trade unions for “having sacrificed their ideals on the altar of their respective fatherlands, denying the fundamental international nature of the social problem”.[9] The solution to war was not “a hegemony subscribed to by the victors and losers”, but the rebirth of the International: “animated by a rational optimism, the wage labourers who defend the tradition of the International Workingmen’s Association, with its historical and inviolable programme, present themselves as the saviours of human society”.
In November 1914, a manifesto signed by anarchist groups, unions and workers’ societies from all over Spain, developed the same ideas: denouncing the war and the two opposing gangs, defending the need for a peace without victors or vanquished which “could only be guaranteed by the social revolution”. In order to achieve this they called for the urgent constitution of an International.[10]
The unease and reflection faced with the problem of the war led the Ateneo Sindicalista de Ferrol[11] to make an appeal in February 1915 “for all the workers’ organisations of the world to organise an international congress” against the war. The organisers did not have the means to carry this out: the Spanish authorities immediately prohibited the Congress and made arrangements to arrest all the foreign delegates. The PSOE also launched a campaign against this initiative. However, the Congress did succeed in meeting, despite everything, on the 29th April 1915 with the participation of anarcho-syndicalists from Portugal, France and Brazil.[12]
At the second session, the discussion about the cause and nature of the war was very thin: making “all the peoples”[13] responsible for the war and including only a formal reference to the evils of the capitalist system. Everything centred on the question of “what to do?” At this level it posed “as the means for concluding the European war the calling of the revolutionary general strike”.
There was no real attempt to understand the causes of the war from the historical and international perspective, nor was there any effort to understand the situation of the world proletariat. It had total faith in the activist, voluntarist call for the “revolutionary general strike”. Despite its weaknesses the congress came to very concrete conclusions. It organised an energetic campaign against the war which was carried out through a multitude of meetings, demonstrations and manifestos; it called for the constitution of a Workers’ International “with the aim of organising all those who struggle against Capital and the State”; and, above all, it agreed to reconstitute the CNT, which was indeed reorganised in Catalonia by a nucleus of young participants at the Ferrol Congress who decided to renew publication of La Soli (Solidaridad Obrera – Workers’ Solidarity – the traditional organ of the Confederation). By the summer of 1915 the CNT already had 15,000 militants and from then on it grew spectacularly.
It is significant that the driving force behind the reconstitution of the CNT was opposition to the war. The central activity of the CNT in this period was the struggle against the war, which it linked to enthusiastic support for the economic struggles that proliferated from the end of 1915.
The CNT showed a clear will to discuss and a great openness to the positions of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences, which it welcomed enthusiastically. It discussed and collaborated with the minority Socialist groups in Spain who opposed the war. There was a great effort of reflection in order to understand the causes of the war and the way to struggle against it. Contrary to the idealist view that “all the peoples are to blame” which had been expressed in Ferrol, the editors of La Soli were much clearer; showing the responsibility of capitalism and its governments, supporting the positions of the Zimmerwald Left (Lenin) and showing that “the allies of the capitalist class want peace to come from a military triumph; for us and all workers, the only thing that can put an end to the war is the uprising of the proletariat of the countries involved in the war.”[14]
An important and determined polemic took place within the CNT against positions in favour of participation in the war, which came from a part of the anarchist movement led by Kropotkin and Malato (authors of the famous Manifesto of the 16 where they declared their support for the Entente gang) and from a minority that supported these within the CNT itself. Soli and Tierra y Libertad clearly pronounced themselves against the Manifesto of 16 and systematically refuted its positions. The CNT openly broke with the French CGT, whose position they called “a devious orientation that did not respond to internationalist principles”.
In 1916, a La Soli editorial categorically reaffirmed the internationalist principle:
“What is the strength of internationalism? Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin showed us it in all its robustness. We defend it no matter what the consequences are,
and we understand that with the war the principles of internationalism have become the stimulus of the Social Revolution (...) We, the Spanish workers, have more in common with the workers of France, Germany, Russia, etc, than with our bourgeoisie. This is our enemy, for whom there can be no quarter; as for the proletariat of other countries, we defend identical interests and aspirations, they are our allies, our compatriots in the International that aims for the disappearance of the capitalist regime (...) We cannot have any solidarity with the state, nor with the defence of national integrity.”[15]
The revolution of February 1917, although it was seen as being of a bourgeois nature, was welcomed joyfully; “The Russian revolutionaries have not abandoned the interests of the proletariat which they represented by leaving them in the hands of the bourgeoisie, as the Socialists and Syndicalists of the Allied countries have done”. La Soli emphasised the importance of the “Soviet, that is, the workers’ and soldiers’ council” whose power opposed that of the bourgeoisie, represented by the Provisional Government, which “has been forced to give in [to the Soviet], to recognise its distinct personality, to accept its direct and effective participation... the only real power resides in the proletariat”[16]
The soviets were identified with the revolutionary unions: “The soviets in Russia today represent what in Spain are the workers’ federations, although their composition is more heterogeneous than the former since they are not class organisms, even though the majority of their members are workers and the so-called maximalists, anarchists, and pacifists that follow Lenin and Maxim Gorky have a preponderant influence in them.”[17] The identification of the soviets with revolutionary syndicalist unions had, as we will see in the next article, negative consequences; however, what is important is that they saw the Soviet form as the expression of the revolutionary force of the international proletariat. The 5th National Congress of Farm Workers,[18] held in May 1917, clearly laid out the perspective: “capitalism and the political state are heading towards ruin; the present war is causing revolutionary movements such as in Russia and others that will inevitably follow it, accelerating their downfall.”
The October revolution generated enormous enthusiasm. It was seen as a genuine triumph of the proletariat. Tierra y Libertad declared in its 7th November 1917 issue that “anarchist ideas have triumphed” and on the 21st November it wrote that the Bolshevik regime was “guided by the spirit of anarchist maximalism”. The arrival of Lenin’s book State and Revolution stimulated a very serious study, leading to the conclusion that this book “establishes a bridge for the integration of marxism and anarchism”. An editorial in La Soli declared that October was “the road to follow”: “The Russians have shown us the road to follow. The Russian people have triumphed: we need to learn from their action in order to be victorious in our turn, wrenching hold of what is denied us”.
As Buenacasa, a remarkable anarchist militant of the time, recalled in his work El movimiento obrero español 1886-1926:[19] “What anarchist in Spain scorned being called a Bolshevik?”. With the aim of drawing a balance sheet of one year of the revolution, Soli published on its front page nothing less than an article by Lenin, called “One year of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 1917-1918: the social and economic work of the Russian Soviets”; accompanied by a note by La Soli in which it defends the dictatorship of the proletariat, showing the importance of the transforming work “of every aspect of life carried out by the Russian workers, in the year that they have held power” and it also described the Bolsheviks as heroes “ sincere idealists, but at the same time practical men and realists, the least that we can hope for is that in Spain there is a transformation as profound as that in Russia: therefore it is necessary that the Spanish workers, manual and intellectual, follow the example of these Bolshevik heroes.”[20] It added in an opinion article that “Bolshevism represents the end of superstition, dogma, slavery, tyranny, crime, (...) Bolshevism, is the new life that we are yearning for, it is peace, harmony, justice, equality, it is the life that we want and that we will impose in the world.”[21]
Tierra y Libertad, in December 1917, even wrote that a revolution means violent confrontation, and requires “leaders and authority”.
Lest there be any doubt that this was the official position of the CNT, Bar’s book refers to a Manifesto published by the National Committee of the CNT on
the occasion of the end of the World War, titled Peace and revolution which has as its subtitle a slogan by Lenin “Only the proletariat should hold power” (12th November 1918). The Manifesto argues that the Russian Revolution had abolished private property, the exploitation of man by man and had established the laws of communism, freedom and justice.[22]
From the beginning of the revolution, the CNT realised that an international revolutionary wave was in progress and was in favour of the formation of an International that would lead the world revolution: “The First and Second Internationals have been broken by the treason of their most important representatives. It is necessary to form a Third, based exclusively on powerful organisations of the class, in order to put an end, through revolution, to the capitalist system and its loyal supporter the state”;[23] and in the Manifesto: “The workers’ International, and nobody else, has to have the final word, to fix the date for continuing the social war on all fronts against universal capitalism, a war which has already triumphed in Russia and which is spreading to the central empires, on all fronts and against capitalism. Spain’s turn will also come. Fatally for capitalism”.
Likewise, the CNT followed the revolutionary events in Germany with great interest: denouncing the Social Democratic leadership as “opportunists, centrists and nationalist socialists”, at the same time it welcomed the “maximalist ideology” of the Spartacists as “a projection of the triumph in Russia and whose example, as that of Russia, has to be followed in Spain”. The CNT’s Manifesto also referred to the German Revolution “Look at Russia, Look at Germany. We have to imitate these champions of the Proletarian Revolution”.
It is important to note the intense discussions at the 1919 congress of the CNT which discussed two separate reports, one on the Russian Revolution, and above all, one on participation in the Communist International (CI).
The first report affirmed “That the Russian Revolution, in principle, incarnates the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism. That it has abolished class and caste privilege, giving power to the proletariat, finally gaining it the happiness and well being to which it has a undeniable right, installing the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat in order to ensure the victory of the revolution...”. The Congress declared that the CNT “unconditionally, supports all of the necessary moral and material measures needed for its advance”.[24]
One of the members of the committee on the Russian Revolution declared emphatically; “The Russian Revolution embodies the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism, that is to give the proletariat power, all the elements of production and the socialisation of riches; I am in absolute agreement with the revolutionary action in Russia, which is more important than words. Once the proletariat has taken hold of power, everything it has decided will be carried out by its different unions and assemblies”. Another intervention: “I propose to demonstrate that the Russian Revolution, by adopting from the moment that it made the second revolution in October a complete reform of its socialist programme, is in accord with the ideals embodied in the Spanish CNT”.
In fact, as Bar says, “In relation to the Russian Revolution there was only one reaction; absolutely all the interventions were laudatory and expressed admiration for the revolutionary events in Russia... The great majority of the interventions were clearly favourable to the Russian revolution, highlighting the identity between the principles and ideals of the CNT and those embodied in that revolution; the report expressed itself in this sense”.
However, there was not the same unanimity on the adhesion to the Communist International. There were many who hesitated to see it as the prolongation of the Russian Revolution and an instrument for its international extension, and considered it a priori as an “authoritarian” body. The report on membership of the CI proposed the formation of a Syndicalist International and considered that the CI “although adopting methods of revolutionary struggle, pursues aims that are fundamentally opposed to the anti-authoritarian and de-centralising ideal in the life of the people proclaimed by the CNT”.
The congress was divided on membership of the CI. There were three fundamental tendencies:
The “pure” syndicalist one, which considered the CI a political organ and although not seeing it as hostile, preferred to organise a “revolutionary Syndicalist International”. Segui – a militant who had a real weight within the CNT at this time – did not oppose entry into the CI but saw this as a “tactical move”: “We support entry into the Third International because it will give greater authority to the Spanish CNT’s appeal to the syndicalist organisations of the world to construct the true, unique, and genuine workers’ International.”[25]
A second tendency, dedicated to full integration into the CI, was represented by Arlandis Buenacasa and Carbo who saw it as a product and emanation of the Russian Revolution.[26]
A third, more anarchist one that was in support of fraternal collaboration but which considered that the CI did not share anarchist principles.
The motion finally adopted by the Congress said:
“To the Congress:
The National Committee, summarising the ideas expressed by the different comrades who participated in the session of the 17th on the question of the Russian Revolution, proposes the following;
First: that the National Confederation of Labour declares itself a firm defender of the principles of the First International, upheld by Bakunin.
Second: that it declares its provisional adherence to the Third International, because of its revolutionary character, whilst it organises and holds in Spain an International Congress that will put in place the foundations for the true workers’ International”.[27]
This necessarily rapid survey of the reaction of the CNT faced with the First World War and the first international revolutionary wave demonstrates the deeply striking difference between the French anarcho-syndicalist CGT and Spanish CNT of that time. While the CGT sank in treason and support for the bourgeoisie’s war effort, the CNT worked for the internationalist struggle against the war and declared itself on the side of the Russian Revolution.
In part this difference is the result of the specific situation in Spain. The country was not directly involved in the war, and the CNT was therefore not directly confronted with the need to take position faced with invasion; likewise, the national tradition in Spain was clearly not as strong as in France, where even revolutionaries had a tendency to be obsessed by the traditions of the Great French Revolution of 1789.
One can compare the Spanish situation to that in Italy which was not implicated in the war in 1914 and where the majority of the Socialist party continued to defend class positions.
Similarly, and contrary to the French CGT, the CNT was not a well established legal union which risked losing its funds and apparatus due to the wartime state of emergency. Here one can make a parallel with the Bolsheviks in Russia, equally inured by years of clandestinity and repression.
The uncompromising internationalism of the CNT in 1914 is a glowing demonstration of its proletarian nature at that time. Likewise, faced with the Russian and German revolutions, it showed a capacity to learn from the revolutionary process and the practice of the working class itself in a way that appears astonishing today. Thus the CNT took a clear position in support of the revolution without trying to impose the organisational schemas of revolutionary syndicalism: the Russian revolution “embodied, in principle, the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism”; it recognised the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and sided firmly and explicitly with the Bolsheviks. From this position, there is no doubt about its loyal collaboration and open-minded discussion with internationalist organisations, without any sectarian considerations. The militants of the CNT did not see the Russian revolution through the prism of distrust of “politics” and “authority”, but knew how to appreciate the collective struggle of the proletariat. They expressed this attitude with a critical spirit, without renouncing in any way their own convictions. The proletarian behaviour of the CNT in the period 1914-1919 constituted without a doubt one of the best expressions of the working class in Spain.
Nevertheless, one can distinguish certain specific weaknesses of the anarcho-syndicalist movement that were to weigh heavily on the later development of the CNT and its commitment to the revolution in Russia. It is necessary to underline that the CNT in 1914 found itself in essentially the same situation as Monatte, of the internationalist wing of the French CGT. Neither the anarcho-syndicalists nor the revolutionary syndicalists had succeeded in building an International within which a revolutionary left could appear, comparable to the left of the Social Democracy notably around Lenin and Luxembourg. The reference to the International Workingmen’s’ Association was an historic reference to a past period, which was no longer applicable to the new situation. In 1919, the only International that existed was the new Communist International. The discussion within the CNT on adhesion to the CI and, notably, the tendency that preferred a Syndicalist International which in 1919 did not exist (a Red Trade Union International was created in 1921 in an effort to compete with the unions that had supported the war), showed the danger of the anarchists’ rejection of everything that had to do with “politics”.
The CNT in the period 1914-1919, was clearly based on an internationalist terrain and open to the Communist International (actively pushed forward, as we have seen, by some remarkable anarchist militants and groups), Faced with the barbarity of the First World War which revealed the threat that capitalism posed to humanity, faced with the beginning of a proletarian response to this barbarity through the Russian Revolution, the CNT showed itself to be with the proletariat, with oppressed humanity, and with the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of the world.
The CNT’s attitude changed radically from the middle of the 1920’s. It was to witness a return towards syndicalism, apoliticism, the rejection of political action and a powerfully sectarian attitude faced with revolutionary marxism. Even worse, by the 1930s the CNT was no longer a resolutely internationalist and proletarian organisation as it had been in 1914. It had become an organisation that participated in the Catalan government and the Spanish Republic and, in this position, participated in the massacre of workers, notably during the events of May 1937.
How and why this change took place will be the object of the next article in this series.
RR and CMir (30th March 2007)
[1]. The resistance to this tide was expressed, on the one hand, by the revolutionary wing of Social Democracy and on the other, more partially, by revolutionary syndicalism and some tendencies within anarchism.
[2]. See International Review n° 128: “CNT; the birth of revolutionary syndicalism in Spain (1910-1913)” [13] .
[3]. Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).
[4]. It is not the aim of this article to analyse the evolution of the PSOE. However, this Party – as we demonstrated in the previous article – was one of the most right-wing in the 2nd International. It followed a profoundly opportunist course which threw it into the arms of capital. The formation of the Republican-Socialist Alliance of 1910, an electoral pact that placed its leader Pablo Iglesias on the parliamentary stage, was one of the decisive moments in this process.
[5]. The Entente cordiale was the name commonly given to the alliance between Britain and France in the years leading up to World War I. It sprang from the series of partially secret diplomatic agreements signed on 8th April 1904 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entente_cordiale [14] ).
[6]. Fabra Ribas, a member of the PSOE critical of this direction, but still clearly a warmonger, lamented that Spanish capital did not participate in the war: “if the military and navel power of Spain had an effective value, it could contribute to the defeat of Kaiserism, and if the Spanish army and navy were truly national institutions, we would be fervent supporters of armed intervention on the side of the allies (from his book: Socialism and the European Conflict, published in Valencia, without a date but probably about 1914).
[7]. Pablo Iglesias, leader of the PSOE. See the previous article in this series.
[8]. He died on the 30th November 1914
[9]. This appeared in the annual Almanac of Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Freedom”) in January 1915. Tierra y Libertad was an anarchist review close to the CNT.
[10]. The convergence of this idea with that defended by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and other internationalist militants from the very beginning of the war is clear.
[11]. Syndicalist cultural circle of Ferrol. Ferrol is an industrial city in Galicia, based on shipyards and the navel arsenals, with an old and combative proletariat.
[12]. These were only able to participate in the first session because they were detained by the Spanish authorities and immediately expelled
[13]. “There should be an end to criticisms about the fact that the German socialists bear their share of the responsibility, or the French, or that Malato or Kropotkin are traitors to the International. Belligerents or neutrals, we all share responsibility for the conflict for having betrayed the principles of the International” (text for the convocation of the congress published in Tierra y Libertad, March 1915).
[14]. “Sobre la paz dos criterios” (“Two criteria concerning peace”), in Solidaridad Obrera June 1917.
[15]. Quoted by A Bar, page 433-4.
[16]. Cited in A Bar, La CNT en los anos rojos, (‘The CNT in the Red Years’) p 438. We have already quoted this well documented book in the previous article in this series.
[17]. Buenacasa in La Soli, November 1917.
[18]18. Closely linked to the CNT.
[19]. The Spanish workers’ movement published in Barcelona in 1928.
[20]. Soli, 24th November 1918.
[21]. J. Viadiu, “Bolsheviki! Bolsheviki!”, Soli 16th December 1918.
[22]. Bar, op.cit, p 445.
[23]. Soli, October 1918.
[24]. Bar, op cit, p 526.
[25]. Segui quoted in A. Bar page 531.
[26]. The delegation of the engineering union of Valencia declared “If there exists a clear and concrete affinity between the Third International and the Russian Revolution (and the CNT’s supports this), how can we be separate from the Third International?”.
[27]. The Confederal Committee. Madrid 17 December 1919. We can add that when in the summer of 1920 Kropotkin sent a “Message to the workers of Western Europe”, opposing the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, Buenacasa, who was then editor of Solidaridad Obrera in Bilbao and the official spokesman for the CNT, denounced this “Message” and took the side of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/canada
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/292_solidarity.html
[6] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/bilan-period-of-transition
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_enigma.html
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/cnt-rev-syndicalism
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entente_cordiale
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/271/revolutionary-syndicalism
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/revolutionary-syndicalism