Not for the first time, capitalism is justifying its march towards war by invoking the idea of a 'clash between civilisations'. In 1914 workers were marched off to war to defend modern 'civilisation' against the Russian knout or German kaiserism; in 1939 it was to defend democracy against the new dark age represented by Nazism; from 1945 to 1989 it was to fight for democracy against Communism, or for the socialist countries against the imperialist ones. Today the refrain is 'the Western way of life' against 'Islamic fanaticism', or 'Islam' against the 'crusaders and Jews'.

All these slogans are rallying cries for imperialist war; in other words, for the military struggle between competing bourgeois factions in the epoch of capitalist decay. The article that follows is a contribution towards demystifying the idea that militant Islam is something outside of and even against bourgeois civilisation In it we shall attempt to demonstrate that, to the exact contrary, it can only be understood as a product, a concentrated expression, of the historical decline of this same civilisation.

A second article will look at the marxist approach to the problem of fighting religious ideology within the proletariat.

Marx: capitalism undermines religion

Marx saw religion as the "self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has not yet found himself or has already lost himself again". Religion is thus a "reversed world-consciousness ... the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality"[1] However it is not merely false consciousness, but a (distorted and self-defeating) response to real oppression:

"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the sprit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people" (ibid).

In contrast to those eighteenth century philosophers who denounced religion as simply the handiwork of imposters, Marx insisted that it was necessary to expose the real, material, roots of religion in given economic relations of production. He was confident that humanity would eventually succeed in emancipating itself from all false consciousness, and reach its full potential in a classless world communism.

Indeed, Marx stressed the degree to which religion was already being undermined due to capitalist economic development. In The German Ideology, for instance, Marx states that capitalist industrialisation was successfully reducing religion to a transparent lie. To liberate itself, the proletariat needed to shed the illusions of religion and all such obstacles to its own self-realisation; but the fog of religion was being rapidly dispersed by capitalism itself. In fact, Marx thought that capitalism itself was undermining religion to such an extent that he sometimes even spoke of religion being already dead for the proletariat.

Limits of bourgeois materialism

Later marxists noticed that once capitalism ceased being a revolutionising force in society by 1871, the bourgeoisie tended to turn back to idealism and religion. In their text The ABC of Communism (an extensive elaboration of the 1919 programme of the Russian Communist Party), Bukharin and Preobrazhensky explain the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the old feudal Tsarist state. Under the Tsars, they explain, the principal content of 'education' was religion: "the maintenance of religious fanaticism, the maintenance of stupidity and ignorance, was regarded as a matter of great importance to the State" (ibid., p250). Church and state were "compelled to join forces against the labouring masses, and their alliance served to strengthen their domination over the workers" (ibid.p249). The emergence of the bourgeoisie in Russia saw this newcomer eventually pushed into headlong conflict with the feudal nobility - which included the church, because the bourgeoisie coveted the fabulous revenues extracted from the workers by the church: "The real basis of the demand was a desire for the transfer to the bourgeoisie of the revenues allotted by the State to the church" (ibid.).

Like the young bourgeoisie in Western Europe, the rising Russian bourgeoisie pursued its campaign for the complete separation of church and state with great vigour. Yet nowhere was this fight carried through to the end, and in each case - even in France, where the conflict was particularly bitter - the bourgeoisie eventually reached a compromise with the church: provided the latter now acted as a buttress of capitalism, is was permitted to join the bourgeoisie and conduct its religious activities. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky attribute this to the fact that

"everywhere the struggle being carried on by the working class against the capitalists was growing more intense... The capitalists thought it would be more advantageous to come to terms with the church, to buy its prayers on behalf of the struggle with socialism, to utilise its influence over the uncultured masses in order to keep alive in their minds the sentiment of slavish submissiveness to the exploiting State".

The bourgeoisie of Western Europe thus made their peace with the religious establishment, while privately remaining materialists of sorts, in many cases, for a time. As Bukharin and Preobrazhensky put it, the key to this contradiction "lies in the exploiters' pockets". In his 1938 text Lenin as Philosopher, the Dutch left communist Anton Pannekoek explains why the 'natural-science materialism' of the rising bourgeoisie had a very short life expectancy:

"Only so long as the bourgeoisie could believe that its society of private property, personal liberty, and free competition, through the development of industry, science and technique, could solve the life problems of all mankind - only so long could the bourgeoisie assume that all theoretical problems could be solved by science, without the need to assume supernatural and spiritual powers. As soon, however, as it became evident that capitalism could not solve the life problems of the masses, as was shown by the rise of the proletarian class struggle, the confident materialist philosophy disappeared. The world was seen again full of insoluble contradictions and uncertainties, full of sinister forces threatening civilisation. So the bourgeoisie turned to various kinds of religious creeds, and the bourgeois intellectuals and scientists submitted to the influence of mystical tendencies. Before long they were quick to discover the weakness and shortcomings of materialist philosophy, and to make speeches on the 'limitations of science' and the insoluble 'world-riddles"".[2]

While this trend was already occasionally noticeable during capital's ascendant phase, it became the rule with the dawning of capital's decadent epoch. Because it has reached the limits of its capacity to expand, capitalism in decadence has essentially been unable to create a world fully in its image: it has left whole regions backward and undeveloped. This economic and social backwardness is the basis for the grip that religion still exerts in such areas. The Bolsheviks themselves were confronted with this, noting in their 1919 programme that the fact that they felt compelled to include a section in this document specifically addressing the problem of religion was "an expression of the backwardness of Russian material and cultural conditions".

The bourgeoisie's reliance upon idealism and religion is particularly apparent in the decadent epoch when bourgeois optimism has been exposed; we can see this in the case of Nazism, which reveals a tendency towards profound irrationalism. In the final stage of capitalist decadence - capitalist decomposition - these tendencies are writ large, with even some members of the bourgeoisie (such as the billionaire Osama bin Laden) apparently believing in the obscurantist reactionary creeds they espouse. As Bukharin and Preobrazhensky note, appropriately: "if the bourgeois class begins to believe in God and the heavenly life, this merely means it has realised that its life here below is drawing to a close!"

The flowering of irrationalist movements among the masses in the most deprived regions is increasingly acute in the period of decomposition, where the lack of any future for the system becomes apparent, and social life under capitalism in the weaker peripheries tends to disintegrate. All over the world, as in the last days of previous modes of production, we have the rise of sects, apocalyptic suicide cults, and the various 'fundamentalisms'. 'Islamism' is very clearly an expression of this general tendency. But before charting its rise, we need to look back at the historical origins of Islam as a world religion.

On the historical origins of Islam

At its point of foundation in seventh century western Arabian Hejaz region, Islam, to express it very briefly, was the product of the synthesis of Judaism and Byzantine and Assyrian Christianity with ancient Persian religions and local monotheistic creeds, such as the Hanifiyya. This rich mix was adapted to the needs of a society in the midst of an immense social, economic and political turmoil. Dominated by the city of Mecca, the Hejaz was a major trading crossroads for the Middle East of this period. Arabia as a whole stood between the great Persian (Sassanid) and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empires. The Meccan ruling class of this society encouraged visiting traders to place idols of their personal pagan gods in the Ka'ba, a local religious shrine, and to worship there whenever they visited. Wealthy Meccans made a comfortable living from this idolatry.

For about 100 years, Mecca was a prosperous society run by a tribal aristocracy and making some use of slave labour, vigorous far-reaching trade and the additional revenue from the Ka'ba. By the time Muhammad reached maturity, however, Meccan society was in a deepening state of crisis. It began to openly break up, threatening to collapse into a war without end of its constituent tribes.

Just outside Mecca and the region's second city Yathrib (today's Medina), were the fiercely independent and austere Bedouin nomadic tribes, who had initially benefited from the enrichment of the region's urban centres; they were able to borrow from rich townsfolk and increase their own standard of living. Eventually, however, they were increasingly unable to repay such loans - a situation that was to have explosive consequences. The disintegration of the tribes now really gathered pace, in both the cities and the desert oases, as the Bedouin were "sold into slavery or at any rate reduced to a dependent status... The tribal limits had been overstepped".[3] To elaborate:

"Inevitably, along with this economic and social transformation, there came intellectual and moral changes. Shrewd men were seen to prosper. The traditional virtues of the sons of the desert [the Bedouin] were no longer the sure road to success. Greed, and an eye to the main chance, were much more useful. The rich became proud and overbearing, glorying in their success as a personal thing - no longer a matter for the whole tribe. The ties of blood grew weaker, giving way to others based on common interest" (ibid.).

Furthermore: "wickedness triumphed at home. The rich and powerful oppressed the poor. The immemorial laws of tribal solidarity were broken daily. The weak and the orphan were sold into slavery. The old unwritten code of decency and morality was trampled underfoot. The people no longer even knew which gods to worship" (ibid.).

In a society where religion was the only possible means of rationalising daily existence, this last statement is highly significant - indicating that the society was in a serious social crisis. Islam refers to this period in Arabia as the jahiliyya, or era of ignorance, in which, it claims, there were no limits on debauchery, cruelty, unlimited polygamy and widespread female infanticide.

Arabia at this time was riven by the rivalries of both its own warring tribes and the feuds and ambitions of neighbouring civilisations. There were also other, more global, factors at work. It was known in Arabia that the mighty Persian and Roman empires were in serious trouble both internally and externally, and might fall; and many in Arabia "thought it heralded the end of the world" (ibid., p65). Much of the civilised world also stood on the brink of chaos.

Engels analysed the rise of Islam as "a Bedouin reaction against the settled but degenerating" townspeople, "who at that time has also become very decadent in their religion, mingling a corrupt nature-cult with Judaism and Christianity".[4] Born in Mecca in 570 AD, but partially raised in the desert by Bedouin, and profoundly influenced by the range of worldviews that Arabia - especially the Hejaz - was awash with, the thoughtful Muhammad was the ideal vector for the resolution of the crisis of social relations his city and region faced. He was the 'man of the moment', when his ministry began in 610.

All Arabia was ripe for change; its condition called out for the emergence of a pan-Arabian state, capable of overcoming tribal separatism, placing society on a new economic and therefore social and political foundation. Islam proved to be the perfect vehicle for achieving this. Muhammad told Arabians that the growing chaos of their society was the result of them turning away from God's laws (Shari'a). They must submit to these laws if they were to escape eternal damnation. The new religion denounced the cruelty and internecine squabbling of the tribes, proclaiming all Muslims not only as brothers, but also as men and women who had the obligation to unite. Islam (literally submission to God) declared that God (Allah) demanded this. Islam also outlawed debauchery (alcohol, swearing and gambling were prohibited); cruelty was prohibited (slave-owners were encouraged to free their slaves, for instance); polygamy was limited to four wives per male believer (all of whom must be treated equally in all respects - leading some to argue that in reality the practice was outlawed); men and women were given distinct social roles, but a woman was permitted to work and to chose her own husband; and murder was strictly prohibited, including infanticide. Islam also taught Arabians that it was not enough to pray and avoid sin; submission to God meant that all spheres of existence must submit to God's will - i.e., that there was an Islamic framework for everything, including the economics and politics of a society.

In the conditions of the time, it is not surprising that the new religion soon attracted masses of adherents, once the initial attempts of the Meccan ruling class to physically eliminate it had failed. It was the perfect instrument for the overthrow of Arabian and other nearby societies. This Muslim 'golden epoch' could not last forever. Muhammad's successors, the caliphs - selected to rule the Islamic world due to their supposed fidelity to Muhammad's message - were eventually replaced by increasingly corrupted dynastic rulers, whose principal claim to rulership was hereditary. This transformation was complete with the accession to the Caliphate of the 'Umayyad dynasty (680-750 AD). Nevertheless, it is clear that the rise of Islam did originally express a forward-movement in historical evolution, and it is from this that it derives its original strength and depth of vision. And even if the Islamic civilisation of the mediaeval period inevitably failed to live up to Mohammed's ideals, it still provided a framework for many dazzling advances in medicine, mathematics and other branches of human knowledge. Although the oriental despotism upon which it was founded was eventually to reach the sterile impasse to which this mode of production was condemned, at its high point it made western feudalism appear crude and obscurantist in comparison; classically, this was symbolised by the huge gulf in culture between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the days of the crusades. We might add that there is an even greater gulf between the zenith of Islamic culture and the ignorance-worshipping fundamentalism of today.[5]

The Bolsheviks and 'Muslim nationalism'

But if marxists can recognize a progressive side to Islam in its origins, how have they analysed its role in the period of the proletarian revolution, when all religions have become a reactionary obstacle to human emancipation? A brief examination of Bolshevik policy in this regard is instructive.

Less than one month after the victory of the October 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks issued a proclamation, To All the Working Muslims of Russia and the East, which declared that it was on the side of the "working Muslims ... whose mosques and prayer-houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled upon by the by the Tsars and oppressors of Russia". The Bolsheviks pledged:

Your beliefs and usages, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the Revolution and its organs, the Soviet of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants.

Such a policy marked a distinct change from that of the Tsarists, who had attempted to systematically and forcibly (often violently) assimilate the Muslim population, following the conquests of Central Asia from the sixteenth century onwards. Not surprisingly, this caused the Muslim populations of these lands to cling firmly to their Islamic heritage. With a few notable exceptions, the Central Asian Muslims did not actively participate in the October revolution, which was overwhelmingly a Russian affair: "The Muslim national organisations remained onlookers, indifferent to the Bolshevik cause".[6] The prominent 'Muslim communist', Sultan Galiev, of whom more in a moment, stated some years after the revolution:

"In making the balance sheet of the October revolution and of the participation of the Tatars in the latter, we must admit that the working masses and the Tatar disinherited layers did not take any part".[7]

The Bolsheviks' attitude to the Central Asian Muslims was formed by both internal and external forces. On the one hand, the new system had to come to terms with the situation in the overwhelmingly Muslim lands of the old Tsarist empire. The Bolsheviks were convinced that these Central Asian lands were both strategically and economically essential to revolutionary Russia's survival. When some Muslim nationalists revolted against the new government in Moscow, the response of the authorities was in many cases to take the most brutal measures. A rebellion in Turkestan, for instance, resulted in the city of Kokand being razed by military units of the Tashkent Soviet. Lenin sent a special commission there in November 1919, "to restore", as Lenin put it, "correct relations between the Soviet regime and the peoples of Turkestan".[8]

One example of this approach towards the Muslim regions was the formation of Zhendotel (the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women) to work among Muslim women in Soviet Central Asia. Zhendotel focussed especially on the problem of religion in this extremely economically backward region. In its initial period, Zhendotel was noteworthy for its patient and sensitive approach to the delicate problems it attempted to deal with. Women organisers for Zhendotel even donned the paranja (an extreme form of Islamic veiling, completely covering the head and face) during discussion meetings with Muslim women.

While some 'Muslim nationalist' organisations rallied briefly to the counter-revolution during the 1918-1920 Civil War, most came to grudgingly 'accept' the Bolshevik regime as the lesser of two evils, from their point of view, after suffering the depredations of Deniken's counter-revolutionary Whites. Many of these 'Muslim nationalists' joined the Communist Party, and not a few soon occupied senior governmental posts. Yet only a small number seem to have been convinced of the validity of marxism. The famous Tatar Sultan Galiev was the Bolshevik representative on the Central Muslim Commissariat (formed in January 1918), a member of the Inner College of the People's Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), chief editor of the review Zhizn' Natsional'nostey, a professor at the University of the Peoples of the East, and led the left wing of the 'Muslim nationalists'. Yet even this leading figure among those recruited from the 'Muslim nationalists' was at best a 'national communist', as he himself testified in the Tatar newspaper Qoyash (The Sun) in 1918, explaining his adherence to the Bolshevik Party in October 1917: "I come to Bolshevism pushed by the love of my people which presses so heavily on my heart" (Sultan Galiev?, op.cit.).

On the other hand, the Bolsheviks understood that their revolution needed to be joined by those of workers in other countries, if it were to survive. The failure of the revolutions in developed Western countries (especially Germany) caused them increasingly to turn towards the possibility of a 'revolutionary nationalist' wave in the Eastern hemisphere. They recognized that this would not be proletarian, but, as the first signs of the retreat of the world revolutionary wave, and the growing isolation of the Russian revolution emerged, the Bolsheviks increasingly inclined towards the opportunist notion that it could in some way prepare the way for proletarian revolution. For the moment, though, the 'Eastern question' - 'national liberation' struggles in the Middle East and Asia - was seen as the means to pry the foot of British imperialism off the neck of Soviet Russia.

The Comintern and Pan-Islam

This is the context in which Bolsheviks led the Comintern to form its evolving attitude towards the movements of Pan-Islam. At its Second Congress in 1920, the Comintern signalled that it was beginning to bend to the tremendous pressures exerted upon it by the forces of counter-revolution both inside and outside Russia. Opportunistic concessions were made all along the line, in the vain hope of lessening the hostility of the capitalist world to Soviet society. Communists were ordered to organise in the bourgeois trade unions, to join the openly pro-imperialist Socialist and Labour parties and to support the so-called 'national liberation movements' in the underdeveloped countries. The 'Theses on the National and Colonial Question' - justifying support for 'national liberation movements' - were drafted by Lenin for the congress and adopted with only three abstentions.

Nevertheless, the Second Congress drew the line at collaborating with Islamists. Lenin's 'Theses' declared:

"It is necessary to struggle against the Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asiatic movements and similar tendencies, which are trying to combine the liberation struggle against European and American imperialism with the strengthening of the power of Turkish and Japanese imperialism and of the nobility, the large landlords [khans], the priests [mullahs], etc".[9]

Although he voted for the resolution, Sneevliet, representing the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia), asserted that a radical mass Islamist organisation existed in the Dutch East Indies. Sneevliet claimed that Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union) had 'taken on a class character', by adopting an anti-capitalist programme. These "communist hajjis" [those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca] were vital for the communist revolution, he stressed.[10] This was merely the continuation of the policy developed by the old Indonesian Social-Democratic Union (ISDV) that later formed the major portion of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), formed in May 1920. Indonesian marxists had an ambiguous relationship with radical Islam, right from the start, as the ICC has pointed out elsewhere:

"Indonesian members of the ISDV, like Samoen, were simultaneously members, and even leaders, of the Islamic movement. During the war [World War I], the ISDV recruited a considerable number of Indonesians from Sarekat Islam, which had some 20,000 members... This policy prefigured, in embryonic form, the policy adopted in China after 1921 - with the encouragement of Sneevliet and the Comintern - of a united front even to the point of a fusion of nationalist and communist organisations (The Kuomintang and the Chinese CP)...

Significantly, within the Comintern, Sneevliet represented the PKI and the 'left wing' of Sarekat Islam. This alliance with the classic indigenous Islamic bourgeoisie was to last until 1923".[11]

Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East

The first application of the 'Theses on the National and Colonial Question' was the so called Baku (Azerbaijan) Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in September 1920, more or less immediately after the conclusion of the Second Congress of the Comintern. At least one-quarter of the conference delegates were not communists, including open anti-communists, bourgeois nationalists and Pan-Islamists. Presided over by Zinoviev, it called repeatedly for a 'holy war' (Zinoviev's phrase) against foreign and domestic oppressors and for workers' and peasants' governments throughout the Middle East and Asia, as a means of weakening imperialism, especially British imperialism.

The Bolsheviks' scheme was to form an 'unbreakable alliance' with these disparate elements, with the principal aim of loosening the imperialist ring around Soviet Russia. The opportunist core of this policy was showed by Zinoviev at the opening session of the congress, when he described the conference delegates and the movements and states they represented as Russia's 'second sword', whom Russia was 'approaching as brothers, as comrades in struggle'.[12] This was the first ever 'anti-imperialist' (i.e., inter-classist) conference held in the name of communism.

The pioneer US communist, John Reed, who attended the congress, was sickened by its proceedings. Angelica Balabanova relates (in My Life as a Rebel, p. 318) that "Jack spoke bitterly of the demagogy and display which had characterised the Baku Congress and the manner in which the native population and the Far Eastern delegates had been treated".[13] An Appeal from the Communist Party of Netherlands to the Peoples of the East Represented in Baku appears in the French language edition of the Comintern's record of congress proceedings and was presumably distributed to the delegates. This asserted that 'thousands of Indonesians' had been 'united for the common struggle against the Dutch oppressors' by the Pan-Islamist Sarekat Islam, and the Appeal was certain that this Pan-Islamist organisation joined with it in greeting the congress.

At the congress, the Bolshevik Party's Radek openly evoked the image of the conquering army of the former Ottoman Muslim sultans, declaring: "We appeal, comrades [sic], to the warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of the East when those peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced upon Europe".[14] Within three months of the Baku Congress, which had lauded the Turkish nationalist Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), the latter had murdered the entire leadership of the Turkish Communist Party.

By its Fourth Congress in 1922, the Comintern had revised its programme even further. Introducing the 'Theses on the Eastern Question' that were unanimously adopted by the congress, the Dutch delegate van Ravesteyn declared that 'the independence of the Eastern world as a whole, the independence of Asia, the independence of the Muslim peoples ... means in itself the end of Western imperialism'. Earlier at the same congress, Malaka, the delegate from the Dutch East Indies, had repeated that communists there had worked closely with Sarekat Islam, until the two groups quarrelled in 1921. Malaka declared that the hostility to Pan-Islam expressed in the theses adopted by the Second Congress had damaged the position of communists. Adding his own support for close collaboration with Pan-Islam, the delegate from Tunis argued that, unlike the British and French CPs, who were inactive on the colonial question, at least the Pan-Islamists united all Muslims against their oppressors.[15]

The fruits of opportunism

The opportunist drift of the Bolsheviks and the Comintern on the colonial question had largely been based on the idea of finding allies against the imperialist encirclement of Soviet Russia. Leftist apologists for these policies argue that they did help the Soviet Union to survive; but, as the Italian communist left recognized by the 1930s, the price paid for this survival had been the transformation of the very function of the Soviet power; from bastion of the world revolution it had now become a player in the games of world imperialism. The alliances with the colonial bourgeoisies had helped to drag Soviet Russia into the game, and this at the expense of the exploited and the oppressed in those regions, as the fiasco of Comintern policy in China in 1925-27 illustrated so clearly.

The abandonment of Marxist rigour on the question of Islam was thus part of this general opportunist course. It has also served as a theoretical justification for the overtly counter-revolutionary attitudes of modern leftism, which has argued again and again that the likes of Khomeini and bin Laden are somehow combating imperialism (even if they perhaps combat it with the wrong methods and ideas).

It should be noted that the Bolsheviks' attempt to flatter the Muslim nationalists could also be combined with a false radicalism which sought to stamp out religion through demagogic campaigns. This was particularly characteristic of Stalinism during its 'left turn' at the end of the 20s.

During this period the patience and sensitivity of Zhendotel were thrown out the window, as frantic campaigns for divorce and against veiling were initiated. In 1927, according to one Trotskyist account:

"mass meetings were held at which thousands of frenzied participants, chanting 'Down with the paranja!' tore off their veils, which were drenched in paraffin and burned... Protected by soldiers, bands of poor women roamed the streets, tearing veils off wealthier women, hunting for hidden food and pointing out those who still clung to traditional practices which had now been declared crimes? On the following day the price for these impatient, sectarian actions was paid in blood, as hundreds of unveiled women were massacred by their kinsmen, and this reaction, fanned by Muslim clergy, who interpreted recent earthquakes as Allah's punishment for the unveilings, grew in strength. Remnants of the Basmachi rebels reorganized themselves into Tash Kuran (secret counter-revolutionary organisations) which flourished as a result of their pledge to preserve Narkh (local customs and values)".[16]

This was as far from the original methods of the October revolution as was the Baku Congress with its gibberish about Holy War. The great strength of Bolshevism in 1917 had been its commitment to fighting alien ideologies by developing the class consciousness and class organisation of the proletariat. This remains the only basis for countering the influence of religious or other reactionary ideologies.

'Islamists': from the margins to the mainstream

From the above we can see that the question of 'political Islam' is not a new one for the proletariat. Indeed, many of the 'modern' Islamist groups can be traced back to the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimuun), which was founded in Egypt in 1928, and has since expanded to over 70 countries. The Ikhwan's founder, Hassan al-Banna, proclaimed the need for Muslims to 'return' to the 'straight path' of orthodox Sunni Islam, as the antidote for both the corruption that had grown up since the 'Umayyad caliphs and as the path towards the 'liberation' of the Islamic world from Western domination. This struggle would make possible the establishment of an 'authentic' Islamic state, which alone could resist the West.

The Ikhwan claims to follow in the footsteps of Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (1260-1327) who opposed the attempts of Hellenised Islamic thinkers who attempted to reduce Islam and Islamic government to a function of human reason. Ibn Taymiyyah argued that an Islamic ruler had an obligation to impose God's laws on his subjects, if necessary. Ibn Taymiyyah's Islam claimed to be very pure, stripped of all modern accretions. The Ikhwan modelled itself on the puritanical Salafiyyah (purification) movements of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, who also attempted to apply ibn Taymiyyah's ideas.

In practice, however, the key to the Ikhwan's success has been its extreme tactical flexibility, being prepared to work with any institution (parliament, trade unions) or movement (Stalinists, liberals) that might advance its project of 're-Islamicising' society. Al-Banna made it clear nevertheless, that the Islamic state his movement sought would prohibit all political organisations. Sayyid Qutb, who succeeded al-Banna as leader in 1948,[17] equally denounced "socialist or capitalist 'idolatry'" - i.e., putting political goals before God's laws. He explained further:

it is necessary to break with the logic and customs of surrounding society, to construct a prototype of the future Islamic society with the "true believers", then, at the opportune moment, engage in battle with the [new] jahiliyya.

By 1948 the movement had grown tremendously, having between 300,000 to 600,000 militants in Egypt alone. Fiercely repressed by the state in late 1948/early 1949, the movement survived and rebuilt. It briefly allied itself with Nasser's Free Officers Movement, which staged a successful coup d'êtat in July 1952. Once in power, Nasser imprisoned vast numbers of the Ikhwan and outlawed the movement. Although technically still outlawed, the movement has been permitted to successfully stand for parliament and controls a number of Islamic NGOs. It has accrued much support among poor urban masses through the provision of social services not supplied by the state.

The Ikhwan's success is an ongoing reference point to more recent 'fundamentalist' groups - many of whom have split from it, claiming that it has moderated its rhetoric and actions since achieving mass support and parliamentary seats. Groups inspired by the Ikhwan exist throughout the 'Islamic world' - not just in the Middle East, but in Indonesia and the Philippines and even in other countries where Muslims do not form a majority of the population. Overwhelmingly, however, these groups resemble more the Ikhwan as it was originally (a violent terrorist outfit), rather than the comparatively 'moderate' force it has evolved into. And, in all cases, these groups are able to exist only due to the material support of one or other state which is manipulating them for their own foreign policy ends. Thus, the foundation of HAMAS (the Islamic Resistance Movement) in Gaza was funded by Israel, which hoped it would counter-balance the PLO. But both HAMAS and the Islamic Jihad organisation (which in recent years has apparently merged with al-Qa'ida) have co-operated with the PLO and other Palestinian nationalist organisations - which have themselves, in turn, been manipulated by outside powers such as Syria and the former Soviet Union. The Algerian Islamist GIA (Armed Islamic Group) has been more or less openly funded and supported by the US, in an effort to weaken French challenges to the sole remaining superpower. In Indonesia in the recent period, Islamist groups have been manipulated by military political factions to alternatively help bring to power and dethrone the country's president. And, most notorious of all, Afghanistan's Taliban was created in Pakistan by the US, which successfully pitted them against its former Islamist allies, the disparate mujahedeen fractions, who were dragging Afghanistan towards utter chaos. The United States actively supported the activities of Osama bin Laden against Russian imperialism providing a platform for the group now known as al-Qa'ida. Ironically then, Islamism is in no small part a creature of the very thing it claims to combat the most: the hated USA.

Further variants on the original model are provided by groups drawn from members of the Shi'a sect of Islam. As the most populous Shi'ite state, Iran has been the source of this variant, which includes groups in many countries, but most notably in Lebanon and Iraq. Iran itself has been described as 'fundamentalism in power', but this is misleading, for the regime came to power more by default than by the actions of an 'Islamist' group. Certainly, in the early years of the Khomeini regime, there were successful attempts to build support for the state through mass mobilisations in support of an impossible 'return' to the conditions of seventh century Arabia. However, it is important to understand that Iran's mullahs (clergy) only came to power due to the tremendous political weakness of the Iranian proletariat; Iran's oil workers, for instance, had struck for an overall total of six months in the country's pivotal oil industry to break the power of the Shah's regime. As the only 'opposition' force that was politically clear in its objectives, and able to legally function, the mullahs were able to seize control of the confused mobilisations against the Shah. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the Khomeniites could only take power after fundamentally distorting the Shi'ite doctrine that all worldly authority is to be resolutely opposed by Shi'ite believers, following the disappearance of the twelfth Shi'ite religious leader several hundred years ago.[18]

Once in power in February 1979, the mullahs used every opportunity to expand their influence in other countries, by training, arming and supporting a host of Shi'ite Islamist groups outside the country, such as the Hezballah (Party of God) militia in Lebanon, which has always been Khomeniite. It has been rewarded for this with strong material support from Iran from 1979 onwards, as well as from Syria, Iran's ally.

Afghanistan provides further variants - more than one for each of that country's major ethnic groups. Despite the commitment of all these Afghan groups to the notion of one united Islamic (in fact, 'Islamist') state, all of them have found it extremely difficult to unite for very long - especially when they succeed in eliminating common opponents. Murderous infighting, following the collapse of the pro-Russian regime in 1992, convinced US imperialism to cease supporting them, and to produce a new, more single-minded force, the Taliban, whom it hoped would provide a more stable pro-US regime. Not a single one of Afghanistan's disparate 'Islamist' fractions is innocent of mass murders and the most horrendous acts of cruelty, including rape, torture, mutilations and the massacre of children - not to mention their role in the international drug trade, which has made Afghanistan the biggest single exporter of raw opium (unprocessed heroin) in the world.

Space limitations make it impossible to survey all the various permutations that abound. As we have seen, however, the Ikhwan created the paradigm, the model of the modern 'Islamic fundamentalism'. 'Shi'ite' as well as 'Sunni' versions of these groups exist, but not one of them is opposed to capitalism and imperialism, but are totally integrated into the existing world 'civilisation'.

'Fundamentalism': Spawn of dying capitalist civilisation

Faced with the bourgeois propaganda about a 'clash of civilisations', a mortal struggle between the 'West' and 'militant Islam', which is spread as much by the 'Western' side as by the followers of bin Laden, it is very important to show that present-day Islamism is a pure product of capitalist society in its epoch of decay.

This is all the more crucial in that the nature of Islamist movements is not fully understood by the groups of the proletarian political milieu. A recent article, for instance - 'Islam and Capitalism', in the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party's journal Revolutionary Perspectives[19]- agrees that Islamism reflects the inability of capitalism to entirely eliminate pre-capitalist vestiges, and also that there was never any real 'bourgeois revolution' in the Islamic world. The article then goes on to argue:

contrary to some assumptions that Islamism is the pure reflection of the capitalist mode of production, it is not. It is the confusing expression of the co-existence of at least two modes of production.

The article also states that Islamism "evolved into an ideology capable of maintaining the capitalist order with non-capitalist ideological and cultural measures". It is asserted:

"Contrary to Christianity, Islam did not go through a long process of secularisation and enlightenment... The Moslem world remained relatively untouched in a historic sense and succeeded even in the era of capitalism to guard its old identity die to the inability and unwillingness of capitalism to eliminate the pre-capitalist structures of the society: consequently, God did not die in the Orient".

As proof of these claims, the article reports on the continued existence of what it terms the "ancient community of clergies with strong links to the Bazaar", which "managed to stay unshattered" by modernising pressures. As a result, the article argues, "the Islamic periphery has to contain two modes of production and cultures in its heart". Islamism derives its strength from this duality, which enables it to appear as an alternative to state capitalism. Despite being "the masterpiece of the capitalist order", the article adds, Islamism is this "ironically in contradiction with the same order in certain levels". This is mistaken. It is true that no mode of production exists in a pure form. Slavery has existed at various times in all forms of class society. Britain, the oldest capitalist state, is yet to finish off its aristocracy completely, to give just two examples. It is also true that capitalism's entry into the regions dominated by the Muslim religion was late and incomplete, and that there was no equivalent of a bourgeois revolution there. But whatever vestiges of the past hang on and encumber these regions, they are totally dominated by the world capitalist economy, and are part of it.

The Bazaar in the modern 'Islamic world' is not outside capitalism, any more than that living relic the Queen of England or that other leftover from feudalism, Pope John Paul II, are. Indeed, the bazaaris, the capitalist merchants of the Tehran bazaars, were a vital bulwark of the Khomeiniite push in 1978-1979 in Iran, and remain a vital capitalist fraction. The disagreements - at times expressed physically - between the bazaaris and more Western-oriented, even secularising fractions in the Iranian regime are contradictions within capitalism. Although these conflicts can have a debilitating effect on the country's capitalist economy, they are immensely beneficial politically for the bourgeoisie as a whole, since they draw Iran's proletarians off their own class terrain, and into the false game of supporting either the 'reformist' or the 'radical' fractions of Iranian capital. This is very far from the 'non-capitalist ideological and cultural measures' of the article in the IBRP journal.

Moreover, the bazaaris' relationship to direct political rule is nowhere as strong as it is in Iran, due to that country's distinctive history and even brand of Islam, so the Iranian case cannot be used to prove that Islamism is somehow 'pre-capitalist'. Rather, the common feature of all the lands of Islam is the very effective harnessing of aspects of society emanating from the pre-capitalist past to serve the needs of present day capitalists. Thus, the Saudi royals, Gamal Nasser, Indonesian political fractions and others have alternatively used and discarded thoroughly reactionary but nonetheless capitalist Islamist groups that talked of reintroducing pre-capitalist society, in order to pave their own way to power as a wealthy capitalist class. In no way, furthermore, can it be any different. Capitalist factions everywhere are never shy - especially in the era of capitalist decadence - of mobilising the most backward-looking elements for their own, very modern, purposes. German capitalism proved that with Hitler. Just like the Islamic Brotherhood, the Khomeiniites and Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler dredged up a hotch-potch of reactionary remnants of pre-capitalism, to serve the interests of his ruling class. Islamism is not different in this respect. (Indeed, Islamism borrows heavily from Nazi ideology, particularly with its wholesale adoption of the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy. Furthermore, this scraping of the racist barrel is another mark of the contrast between Islamism and the original teachings of the Koran, which preached tolerance towards other 'Peoples of the Book').

In all its forms, Islamism is in no way in contradiction with capital. It certainly reflects the economic and social backwardness of the lands of Islam, but it is completely a part of the capitalist system and, above all, of capitalism's decadence and decomposition. We can also add that, far from being in opposition to state capitalism, the idea of the Islamic state, which justifies state interference in every aspect of social life, is a perfect vehicle for totalitarian state capitalism, which is the characteristic form of capital in the decadent epoch.

So-called Islamic fundamentalism developed as an ideology of a part of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, in their struggle against the colonial powers and their collaborators. It remained a mostly minority movement until the late 1970s, since it was overshadowed by nationalist and Stalinist ideologies and movements. These movements have attained real force in countries where, in general, the working class is relatively small, young and inexperienced. The Islamists proclaim themselves "the champion of all oppressed people" (Khomeini). In Iran, for instance, the Khomeiniites succeeded in drawing the mass of destitute Tehran slum dwellers into their movement in the late 1970s, by falsely claiming to champion their interests and referring to them as mustazifeen, a religious term for the destitute and oppressed. Decadent capital's descent into the further, ever deepening misery of decomposition has only magnified the plight of such layers. The Islamists' earlier marginalisation now works in their favour, since they can now appear credible when they claim that the reason that all secular creeds (from democracy through to nationalism and marxism) have all 'failed' is that the masses ignored God's laws. The same explanation has been used by Islamists in Turkey, to 'explain' the August 1999 earthquake in that country, and was used earlier by Egyptian Islamists following an earthquake there in the 1980s.

Such an appeal often has a galvanising appeal on layers of the population most subjected to poverty and despair. To the ruined petty bourgeois, to the slum dwellers with no hope of a job, even to elements from the working class, it offers the mirage of a 'return' to the allegedly pure state founded by Muhammad, which supposedly protected the poor and prevented the rich from making too much profit. In other words, this state is presented as an 'anti-capitalist' social order. Typically, Islamist groups assert that they are neither capitalist nor socialist, but 'Islamic', and fight for an Islamic state on the model of the old Caliphate. But this whole argument makes a mockery of history: the original Muslim state existed long before the capitalist epoch. It was based on a form of class exploitation, but, like western feudalism, had not perfected the enslavement of man to profit in the way that capitalism has, nor could it have done within its historical limitation. Today, however, whenever radical Islamic groups take control of a state, they have no alternative but to become the overseers of capitalist social relations and thus to strive for the maximisation of national profit. Neither the Iranian mullahs nor the Taliban could escape from this iron law.

This perverted 'anti-capitalism' goes along with an equally perverted 'Muslim internationalism': the radical Islamic groups of the world claim to owe no allegiance to any particular nation state and call for the unity of all Muslim brothers across the world. Here again both these groups and their bourgeois opponents portray them as something unique - as an ideology and a movement that transcends national frontiers to form a fearsome new 'bloc', threatening the West in a similar way to the old 'Communist' bloc. In part, this is because they are virtually inseparable from the international criminal networks: gun-running (which now almost certainly includes the trade in 'weapons of mass destruction' - chemical and nuclear means) and the drug trade. Afghanistan in particular is a pivotal link here, as shown earlier. Within this, bin Laden's 'imperialist warlordism' might be seen by some as a new offshoot of 'globalisation' (i.e., transcending national barriers). But this is true only in so far as it expresses a certain tendency towards the disintegration of the weakest national units. The 'global' Muslim state can never exist, for it will always founder on the rock of competing Islamic bourgeoisies. This is why, in order to fight for this chimera, the 'mujahadeen' are always obliged to join in with the imperialist great game, which remains one of competing national states.

The 'holy war' proclaimed by the Islamic gangs is really a cover for the old unholy war fought by competing imperialist powers. The real interests of the exploited and the oppressed of the world lie not in a mythical Muslim brotherhood, but in the class war against exploitation and oppression in all countries; not in an impossible return to the rule of God or the Caliphs, but in the revolutionary creation of the first really human society in history.

Dawson

6/1/2002

Military operations had barely ended in Afghanistan, when another round of carnage began in the Middle East. As the bloodshed continues in the West Bank and Jerusalem, another military operation is being prepared against Iraq. Inexorably, capitalism is plunging into chaos and military barbarism. With each new bloodbath, the murderous folly of this system stands more starkly revealed.

Once again, the Middle East is engulfed in war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose roots lie in the imperialist division of the region between Britain and France in 1916, has already been marked by four openly declared wars: in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. But since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, violence and blind slaughter has taken on a new dimension. Under its pressure, the laboriously constructed Oslo Accords and the years of peace negotiations that followed have burst asunder. The endless spiral of military folly reveals a situation where war is no longer the result of a conflict between two rival imperialist camps, but the expression of a general social breakdown and a descent into chaos of international relations.

Since 11th September, this tendency has seen a vertiginous acceleration. Each of the protagonists is pushed into the same logic as the Al Qaida attacks on the twin towers, where the attacker is also an expression of his own death-wish. On the one hand, the proliferation of suicide bombings by fanatical kamikazes - often no more than 18 years old - whose only aim is to surround themselves with as many victims as possible. These acts of terrorist despair are remote-controlled by this or that bourgeois nationalist fraction - Hamas, the Al-Aqsa Brigades, Hezbollah - when they are not being deliberately manipulated by Mossad (the Israeli secret service). At the same time, the different states try to defend their own imperialist interests by launching themselves into dead-end military adventures. Israel's attitude of bellicose arrogance is copied from the United States - and Sharon uses exactly the same arguments as Bush to justify his "crusade against terrorism". The result is the occupation and blockade of West Bank towns by Israeli tanks, an Israeli army that fires on anything that moves, shoots up hospitals and ambulances, systematically ransacks and pillages civilians' houses, dynamites whole districts, destroys vital infrastructure, terrorises and starves the civilian population.

Other states - and especially the US' great power rivals - are trying to exploit the situation as much as they can in order to destabilise their imperialist competitors' efforts. The European powers' feigned indignation, their "pacifist" mask, their attempts at "mediation", do nothing but fan the flames.

This is true in particular for those fractions of the bourgeoisie which try to present the spiral of war and militarism as being purely the result of "hawks" like Sharon and Bush, who should be held in check by "international law" based on "human rights". Whatever their proclaimed intentions, the great demonstrations organised around the world for or against the policy of Sharon (and Bush) can have no other result than to push the population to "choose their camp", to feed the tension and to maintain the hatred between the different communities.

In fact, the bourgeoisie is always trying to make believe that this disaster is the fault of this or that statesman, this or that nation, this or that camp, this or that people. With immeasurable hypocrisy every bourgeoisie claims to act in the interests of "peace", for the "defence of democracy", or "civilisation". And all with the sole aim of covering and excusing its own crimes.

When opportunity offers, it judges and condemns its peers in the eyes of History, as "war criminals". After World War II, the essential function of the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war leaders (1945-49) conducted by the winning side, was to justify the monstrous crimes of the great democracies in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The International Tribunal in the Hague is sitting in judgement on Milosevic today, in order to legitimise the NATO bombardments of Serbia and Kosovo, and to hide the great powers' complicity in the crimes committed during the wars in ex-Yugoslavia.

Similarly, the "international community" is trying today to justify the war in Afghanistan as having "liberated" the country from the Taliban yoke: the pseudo-liberation of women, a return to "freedom" of trade and leisure (television, radio, sport?). The argument is all the more derisory, when at the same time a large part of the population is starving, while the innumerable local fractions and cliques fight over the country's remains.

The bourgeoisie's claim to serve the cause of peace is nothing but a lie.

Its activity inevitably aggravates military barbarity world wide, and this is one expression of capitalism's historic bankruptcy, of the fact that as it rots it threatens the very existence of humanity. Capitalism as a whole is responsible for the chaos of militarism, because war has become its permanent mode of existence.

The only social force that bears any future for humanity is the working class. Despite all the obstacles it confronts today, it is the only class able to put an end to the chaos and barbarity of capitalism, to create a new human society at the service of all the human species.

As capitalism does its best to push the most violent contradictions of its system and the effects of its economic crisis onto the peripheral countries, the example of Argentina shows how great are the difficulties facing the working class in rediscovering and reasserting its class identity, as its struggles are being derailed into an inter-classist dead-end (see the following article). At another level, the class is confronted with the trap of pacifism sowing the same inter-classist illusions - thanks notably to the "anti-globalisation" movement: this is nothing but another means of drawing the workers behind the defence of the bourgeoisie's national interest. The proletariat has a vital responsibility before it: that of struggling against the bourgeoisie's onslaught on its living conditions, and of integrating into the struggle an understanding of the mortal danger threatening humanity under capitalism. In the end, this must reinforce its determination to continue, develop, and unite its class struggle: "The coming century will be decisive for human history. If capitalism continues to rule the planet, then before 2100 society will be plunged into such barbarism that it will make the 20th century look like a minor headache and either reduce human-kind to the stone-age, or destroy it altogether. If humanity does have a future, then it is wholly in the hands of the world proletariat, whose worldwide revolution alone can overthrow the domination of the capitalist mode of production whose historic crisis is responsible for today's barbarity" (International Review n°104, 1st quarter 2001, "Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism").

GF, 7th April 2002

Argentina: Only the proletariat fighting on its own class terrain can push back the bourgeoisie

The events of December 2001 to February 2002 in Argentina have awoken a great interest amongst politically aware elements all over the world. They have provoked discussion and reflection in workplaces among combative workers. Some Trotskyist groups have even spoken of "the beginning of the revolution".

In the Communist Left, the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) has devoted several articles to these events and has published a Declaration according to which "In Argentina the ravages of the economic crisis have stimulated a powerful and determined proletarian movement on a class terrain and self-organisation, which expresses a class rupture".[1]

The interest aroused by the social upheavals in Argentina is understandable and totally legitimate. Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, the international situation has not seen any massive proletarian movements on the same scale as the strike in Poland in 1980, or the struggles in Argentine Cordoba in 1969. The scene of world events has been dominated by war (the Gulf War in 1991, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, the Middle East?), by the ever more devastating effects of the advancing world economic crisis (mass redundancies, unemployment, falling wages and pensions), and by the different expressions of capitalist decomposition (destruction of the environment, proliferation of "natural" and "accidental" disasters, the development of religious and social fanaticism, of criminality, etc).

This situation - whose causes we have already analysed of in detail[2] - is one reason why politicised elements are paying close attention to the events in Argentina, which seem to mark a break in this uninterrupted series "bad news": in Argentina, street protests have caused an unprecedented merry-go-round of presidents (five in fifteen days), they have take the form of "self-organised" neighbourhood assemblies and have loudly rejected "all the politicians".

Revolutionaries have a duty to follow closely such social movements, in order to take position and to intervene wherever the working class finds an expression. It is certainly true that the workers have taken part in the wave of mobilisations in Argentina, and that some isolated struggles have adopted clear class demands and confronted official trade-unionism. We express our solidarity with these combats, but the best contribution we can make as a revolutionary organisation is to analyse events as clearly as we are able. This clarity will determine the ability of revolutionary organisations to intervene adequately, by referring constantly to the historic and international framework defined by the marxist method. The worst thing that the vanguard organisations of the world proletariat could do would be to sow illusions within the working class, encouraging its weaknesses and letting it mistake its defeats for victories. Far from helping the proletariat to regain the initiative, to develop its struggles on its own class terrain, to assert itself as the only social force in total opposition to capitalism, this could only make such a recovery much more difficult.

From this perspective the question we have to ask ourselves is: what is the class nature of events in Argentina? Is it a movement where the proletariat is developing its "self-organisation" and "breaking" with capitalism as the IBRP says? Our answer has to be a resolute NO. The proletariat in Argentina has been drowned and diluted in a movement of inter-classist revolt, a movement of popular protest which has expressed not the proletariat's strength, but its weakness. The class has been unable to assert either its political autonomy or its self-organisation.

The proletariat has no need to console itself or to clutch at illusions. What it does need, is to rediscover the path of its own revolutionary perspective, to assert itself on the social stage as the sole class able to offer humanity a future, and in doing so to draw behind itself the other non-exploiting strata of society. To do so, the proletariat must look reality in the face, it cannot be afraid of reality. In order to develop its consciousness, and to raise its struggle to match what is at stake in the historical situation today, it cannot spare itself the deepest criticism of its own weaknesses and mistakes, a profound reflection on the difficulties it encounters on the way. The events in Argentina will serve the world proletariat - and the proletariat in Argentina whose combative capacities have not been exhausted, far from it - as a clear lesson: inter-classist revolts do not weaken the power of the bourgeoisie but of the proletariat itself.

The collapse of the Argentine economy is a clear manifestation of the worsening of the crisis

We will not embark here on a detailed analysis of the economic crisis in Argentina. We refer readers to our territorial press (see in particular Révolution Internationale n°s319 and 320).

Of particular significance in this situation is the brutal rise in unemployment from 7% in 1992 to 17% in October 2001 and then to 30% in the space of only 3 months (December 2001), and the appearance, for the first time since the Spanish colonial era, of hunger in a country which until recently was considered to be very near a "European level" and whose principle products are precisely meat and wheat.

Far from being a local phenomenon, caused by corruption or a desire to "live like Europeans", the Argentine crisis is a new episode in the aggravation of the capitalist economic crisis. This crisis is world-wide and affects all countries. But that does not mean it affects all of them in the same way or at the same level. "While it does not spare any country, the world crisis exerts its most devastating effects not on the most powerful, developed countries, but on the countries which arrived too late in the world economic arena and whose path towards development has been definitely barred by the old powers" ("The proletariat of Western Europe at the centre of the generalisation of the class struggle" International Review no31). Furthermore, faced with the worsening of the crisis the more powerful countries have taken measures to defend themselves from its effects, and to deflect them onto the weakest countries ("liberalisation" of world trade, "globalisation" of financial transactions, investments in the key sectors of the weakest countries by means of privatisation, the policies of the IMF etc, i.e., all that which has been called "globalisation"). This is nothing other than the application to the whole world economy, by the largest countries, of a series of state capitalist policies designed to protect themselves from the crisis and to make its worst effects fall upon the weakest (See International Review no106, "Report on the economic crisis"). The figures supplied by the World Bank (World Development Indicators 2001) are eloquent in this respect: between 1980 and 2000 private creditors received from all the countries of Latin America $192 billion more than they had lent them, whereas in 1999-2002, in only two years, this difference was no less than $86.2 billion, that is to say, nearly half the amount paid in the previous 20 years. For its part, the IMF between 1980 and 2000 granted $71.3 billion in credits to the countries of South America whilst in the same period these countries repaid it £87.7 billion!

And the situation in Argentina is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind Argentina there are other of countries, equally important for various reasons -their supply of oil, their strategic position, etc - who are potential candidates for the same economic and political collapse: Venezuela, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia ?

An autonomous proletarian movement or a blind and chaotic inter-classist revolt?

As the IBRP states tersely in its Italian publication: capitalism responds to hunger with more hunger. They also make it clear that the various "economic solutions" proposed by governments, oppositions or "alternative movements" such as the Social Forum of Porto Alegre, offer no alternative. These demagogues' ingenious concoctions have been discredited one after the other by the facts of 30 years of crisis (see the report on the crisis in International Review no106 and "30 years of capitalist crisis" in International Review n°s 96 to 98). They therefore correctly conclude that "It is useless deluding oneself: at this stage of the crisis capitalism doesn't have anything else to offer beyond generalised poverty and war. Only the proletariat can halt this tragic course" (IBRP web site, op.cit.).

And yet, the IBRP evaluates the protest movements in Argentina as follows: "Spontaneously proletarians went out onto the streets, drawing with them young people, students and substantial sections of the proletarianised petty bourgeoisie who are pauperised like themselves. Together they directed their anger against capitalist sanctuaries: banks, offices, but above all the supermarkets and shops in general, which were attacked like the bakeries in medieval bread riots. The government, hoping to intimidate the rebels, couldn't find any better response than to instigate a savage repression, resulting in dozens of deaths and thousands wounded. The revolt wasn't extinguished but instead spread to the rest of the country and increasingly began to assume a class character."

We can distinguish three components in the social movements in Argentina:

• Firstly, the attacks on supermarkets essentially carried out by marginals, lumpens and also by the young unemployed. These movements have been ferociously repressed by the police, private vigilantes and the store owners themselves. In several cases they have degenerated into the robbing of houses in poor neighbourhoods or the looting of offices, warehouses,[3] etc. The main consequence of this "first component" of the social movement has been tragic confrontations between workers, as was illustrated by the bloody confrontation between piqueteros who wanted to take away food and the porters of the Central Market of Buenos Aires on the 11th January (see Révolution Internationale no320). For the ICC, these expressions of violence within the working class (an illustration of the methods specific to the lumpenised layers of the proletariat) are an expression of its weakness, not its strength. These violent confrontations between different parts of the working class are a barrier to its unity and can only serve the interests of the ruling class.

• The second component has been the "cacerolas [saucepan beaters] movement". This is essentially composed of the "middle classes", exasperated by the sequestration and devaluation of their savings in the so-called "little bank holiday" (the corralito). These layers are in a desperate situation. "In Argentina, poverty is combined with high unemployment, into which are falling the 'new poor', ex-members of the middle classes, due to a declining social mobility, the inverse of the wave of immigration into the country at the beginning of the 20th century" (from a web site containing summaries of the Argentine press). Employees of the public sector, pensioners, some sectors of the industrial proletariat, have shared with the petty-bourgeoisie the same terrible blow of the corralito: the efforts of a life's work, intended to supplement a wretched state pension, have practically gone up in smoke. However, none of these characteristics gives the cacerolas movement a proletarian character: it remains a popular inter-classist revolt dominated by nationalist and "ultra-democratic" thinking.

• The third component is formed by a series of workers struggles. There have been strikes by teachers in most of Argentina's 23 provinces; a combative movement by railway workers at a national level and the struggle of the bank workers. The struggles at the Ramos Mejias hospital in Buenos Aires, and at the Bruckmann factory in Gran Buenos Aires led to clashes with both the uniformed police and the trade unions;. During the last two years, there have been numerous mobilisations by the unemployed with those involved blocking roads throughout the country (the famous "piqueteros").

Obviously, revolutionaries cannot but salute the immense combativity displayed by the working class in Argentina. But as we have always said, the workers' combativity, however, strong, is not the only or even the main criterion that allows us to see clearly the balance of forces between the two fundamental classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The first question we need to answer is this: could the dynamic of these workers' struggles, breaking out all over the country and in many different branches of industry, rise to a massive movement capable of leaping the fire-breaks put in place by the ruling class (notably the democratic opposition and the unions)? The reality of events obliges us to answer: no. It is precisely because these workers' struggles remained scattered, and proved unable to develop into a massive unified movement of the whole working class, that the proletariat in Argentina proved incapable of putting itself at the head of a movement of social protest, and drawing the rest of the non-exploiting strata in its wake. On the contrary, because the workers' were unable to take the lead in the movement, their own struggles were drowned and polluted by the hopeless revolt of other social strata. While they may themselves be the victims of the collapse of the Argentine economy, these latter have no historic future. For marxists, the only method that allows us to see clearly in such a situation is summed up by the question: Who is leading the movement? What class has taken the initiative and imprinted its dynamic on events? Only if they can answer this question correctly can revolutionaries contribute to the proletariat's advance towards its own liberation, and therefore the liberation of humanity from the tragic course that capitalism is leading it down.

And here the IBRP makes a serious error of method. It is not the proletariat that has pulled along the students, the young and large sections of the petty-bourgeoisie: on the contrary, it is the desperate, confused and chaotic revolt of a mixture of popular layers that has drowned and diluted the working class. Even a superficial examination of the positions, demands and type of mobilisation of the neighbourhood assemblies that have proliferated in Buenos Aires and which have spread throughout the country demonstrates this with brutal clarity. What was said in the announcement of the "world cacerolazo" on 2nd/3rd February 2002 which found a widespread echo in more than 20 cities on 4 continents? Well: "Global cacerolazo. We are all Argentines - everybody into the street in New York - Porto Alegre - Barcelona - Toronto - Montreal ( add your city and your country) the thieving world bank - Alca - multinationals - away with them all! Governments and politicians are corrupt, none of them should remain, not one of them! Long live the popular assemblies! People of Argentina arise!". This "programme" for all its anger against "politicians" is the same as that defended everyday by those self-same politicians, from the extreme right to the extreme left, and even by "ultra-liberal" governments, all of which know how to "criticise" ultra-liberalism, the multinationals, corruption etc.

Moreover, this movement of "people's protest" has been strongly marked by extreme and reactionary nationalism. In all the demonstrations of the neighbourhood assemblies the same aim has been repeated ad nauseam: "create another Argentina", "rebuild our country on its own foundations". On the Internet sites of the various neighbourhood assemblies there are nationalist debates such as: "Should we pay the foreign debt?"; "Should we use the peso or the dollar?". One web site commendably proposes the "education and the becoming conscious" of the people and the opening of a debate on Rousseau's Social Contract[4] and calls for a return to the Argentine classics of the 19th century such as San Martin or Sarmiento. One would have to be blind (or prefer reassuring fairy tales to reality) not to see that this nationalism has also infected the workers' struggles: the TELAM workers lead their demonstrations with Argentine flags; in a workers' neighbourhood of Gran Buenos Aires the assembly held against the payment of a new municipal tax began and ended by singing the national anthem.

Because it was inter-classist and without perspectives, this movement could do nothing else but demand the same reactionary solutions that have led to the tragic situation in which the population is plunged. But this repetition of the old, this search for its poetry in the past, is the most eloquent testimony to the character of this impotent and futureless social revolt. As is shown with all sincerity by a participant in the assemblies "Many have said that we do not make proposals, that all we can do is to oppose. And with pride we can say that this is true, we are opposed to the established system of neo-liberalism. Like a bow drawn taut by oppression, we are arrows unleashed against the totalitarian domination of ultra-liberal thinking, Our action will be sustained by our people, inch by inch, in order to exercise the oldest people's right, popular resistance" (taken from the web site www.cacerolazo.org) [6].

In Argentina in 1969-73 the events in Cordoba, the Mendoza strike, the tide of strikes that inundated the country, were the key to social evolution. Although they were far from being insurrectionary in character, these struggles marked the reawakening of the proletariat, which conditioned all the political and social agenda of the country.

But in the Argentina of December 2001, with the worsening decomposition of capitalist society, the situation is no longer the same. The proletariat is confronted today by new difficulties, obstacles which it still has to overcome in order to assert itself and develop its class identity and autonomy. Unlike the period at the beginning of the 1970s, the social situation in Argentina today has been marked by an inter-classist movement, which has diluted the proletariat's strength and proven impotent to affect the political situation any more than ephemerally. The movement of the cacerolas has certainly achieved an exploit worthy of the Guinness Book of Records, with the overthrow of five presidents in fifteen days. But all this is shortlived. Whatever the clique in government, it is still the bourgeoisie that holds power in Argentina, as elsewhere. Now, the web sites of the popular assemblies bitterly argue about how the movement has dissipated itself as if by magic to such an extent that the astute Duhalde has managed to re-establish order without having to lessen, in the least, galloping poverty and without his economic plan leading to even the most minimal solution.

The lesson from events in Argentina

In the present historical period, which we have defined as the phase of capitalism's decomposition,[5] the proletariat runs a serious risk: that it will lose its class identity, lack confidence in itself, in its revolutionary capacity for establishing itself as an autonomous and determining social force in the evolution of society. This danger is the product of several interconnected factors:

• The blow to the proletariat's consciousness as a result of the collapse of the Eastern countries and the bourgeoisie's ability to identify this with the "collapse of communism" and "the historic failure of Marxism and the class struggle";

• The weight of the capitalist system's decomposition, that is eroding social ties and encouraging an atmosphere of competition even between sectors of the proletariat itself;

• The fear of politics and politicisation which is a consequence of the form taken by the counter-revolution (by means of Stalinism "from within" the proletarian bastion and the parties of the revolutionary proletariat's own Communist International) and the enormous historical blow delivered by the successive degeneration of two of the best creations of the proletariat's political capacity and consciousness within the space of a generation: firstly the Socialist Parties and then, barely ten years later, the Communist parties.

This danger could end up stopping it taking the initiative faced with the profound collapse of the whole of society, which the historical crisis of capitalism is leading towards. Argentina clearly shows this potential danger: the general paralysis of the economy and important convulsions in the bourgeois political apparatus, have not been used by the proletariat in order to establish itself as an autonomous social force, struggling for its own aims and drawing the other layers of society along in its wake. Submerged in an inter-classist movement, typical of the decomposition of bourgeois society, the proletariat has been dragged into a sterile and futureless revolt.

For this reason the speculation, by the Trotskyists, autonomists, anarchists, and the "anti-globalisation" movement in general, about the events in Argentina representing the "beginning of a revolution", as "a new movement", or as "a practical demonstration that another society is possible" is very dangerous.

What is more worrying is that the IBRP should have echoed these confused ramblings by contributing its own illusions about the "strength of the proletariat in Argentina".[6]

These speculations disarm the young minorities, secreted globally by the proletariat, who are searching for a revolutionary alternative faced with a world that is falling apart. Therefore, for us it is important to explain the reasons for the IBRP's belief that it has encountered gigantic "class movements" which in reality are nothing but the windmills of inter-classist revolts.

First of all, the IBRP has always rejected the concept of the historic course with which we have tried to understand the evolution of the balance of forces between the proletariat and bourgeoisie in the present historical situation opened up by the historic resurgence of the proletariat since 1968. To the IBRP all this appears as idealist "prognostics and predictions".[7] Their rejection of this historical method leads them to an immediatist and empirical vision as much in regards to military events as to the class struggle. It is worth recalling the IBRP's analysis of the Gulf War, presented as "the beginning of World War III". The same photographic method led the IBRP to present the palace revolution which brought down the Ceausescu regime in Romania almost as a "revolution": "Romania is the first country in the industrialised regions where the world economic crisis has given birth to a real an authentic popular revolution, which has resulted in the overthrow of the government (?) in Romania are gathered all the objective, and almost all the subjective conditions for transforming the insurrection into a real and authentic social revolution" ("Ceausescu is dead, but capitalism still lives", in Battaglia Comunista, January 1990).

Clearly, rejecting any kind of analysis of the historic course can only leave one at the mercy of immediate events. The absence of any method for analysing the world historic situation and the real balance of class forces leads the IBRP to the idea that we are on the verge of World War III one day, of the proletarian revolution the next. How - according to the IBRP's analytical "method" - the proletariat is supposed to pass from a situation where it is enrolled behind the flags of nationalism in preparation for a Third World War, to one where it is ready to launch a revolutionary assault, remains for us a mystery, and we are still waiting for the IBRP to give us a coherent explanation of its oscillations.

For ourselves, rather than this demoralising to-ing and fro-ing, we are convinced that only the lodestone of a global and historic vision can prevent revolutionaries being the playthings of events, and deceiving them into mistaking popular revolts for proletarian class struggle.

The IBRP endlessly ridicules our theory of the decomposition of capitalism, saying that "it is used to explain everything". Nevertheless, the concept of decomposition is very important in making precisely this distinction between revolts and the class struggle of the proletariat. Such a distinction is essential in our time. The present situation of capitalism does indeed lead to protest, tumult, clashes between classes, layers and fractions. Revolt is the blind and impotent fruit of the convulsions of a dying society. It does not help to overcome its contradictions but rather aggravates them. It is the expression of one of the outcomes of the general perspectives put forwards by the Communist Manifesto for the class struggle throughout history: "a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes". It is this second alternative, the "common ruin of the contending classes", which is the foundation for the concept of capitalism's decomposition. This is the contrary to the class struggle of the proletariat which, if it is able to find expression on its own class terrain and preserve its autonomy by advancing towards its extension and self-organisation, has the potential to become "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" (ibid). All the efforts of the most conscious elements of the proletariat and in a more general way of struggling workers must avoid confusing revolt with autonomous class struggle, must struggle to prevent the weight of general social decomposition dragging the proletariat into the dead end of blind revolt. Whilst the terrain of revolt leads to the progressive exhaustion of the capabilities of the proletariat, the terrain of the class struggle leads towards the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state in all countries.

The proletarian perspective

However, while the events in Argentina clearly show the danger facing the proletariat if it allows itself to be dragged onto the rotten terrain of "popular" inter-classist revolt, the endgame of social evolution towards barbarism or towards revolution will not be played out there, but in the world's great working class concentrations, and especially in Western Europe.

"A social revolution is not simply the breaking of a chain, the breakdown of the old society. It is also and at the same time an action for the construction of a new society. It is not a mechanical event but a social fact indissolubly linked to the antagonism of human interests, to the aspirations and struggle of classes" (International Review no31). The mechanical and vulgar materialist visions see in the proletarian revolution only the aspect of the explosion of capitalism but are incapable of seeing the most important and decisive aspect - its revolutionary destruction by the proletarian class's conscious action, that is, what Lenin and Trotsky called the "subjective factor". These vulgar materialist visions are a barrier to an awareness of the gravity of the historical situation, marked by capitalism's entry into the ultimate phase of its decadence: its decomposition. Moreover, mechanistic and contemplative materialism is "content" with the "objectively revolutionary" aspect: the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis, social convulsions, the rottenness of the ruling class. Vulgar materialism airily dismisses the dangers to the proletariat's consciousness and the development of its unity and self-confidence that are contained in capitalism's decomposition (as well as in its ideological use by the ruling class).[8]

But the key to the revolutionary perspective in our epoch is precisely the capacity of the proletariat to develop the "subjective" elements in its struggles (confidence, the confidence in its revolutionary future, unity and class solidarity) that will allow it progressively to counteract and eventually overcome the weight of the social and ideological decomposition of capitalism. And it is precisely in the great proletarian concentrations of Western Europe that the most favourable conditions exist for this development: "?Social revolutions did not take place where the old ruling class was weakest and its structures the least developed, but, on the contrary, where its structures had reached the highest point compared to the productive forces, and where the class bearing the new relations of production destined to replace the old was strongest (?) Marx and Engels looked for and based their perspective on the points where the proletariat was strongest, most concentrated and best placed to carry out the social transformation. Because, while the crisis hits the underdeveloped countries most brutally precisely as a result of their economic weakness and their lack of a margin for manoeuvre, we must not forget that the source of the crisis lies in overproduction and thus in the main centres of capitalist development. This is another reason why the conditions for a response to this crisis and for going beyond it reside fundamentally in the main centres" (ibid).

In fact, the IBRP's deformed vision of the class content of events in Argentina needs to be considered in conjunction with its analysis of the potential of the proletariat in the peripheral countries of capitalism, expressed in particular in its "Theses on communist tactics in the countries of the capitalist periphery", adopted by the 6th Congress of Battaglia Comunista (published in Italian in Prometeo n°13, June 1997, and in English in Internationalist Communist 16). According to these Theses, conditions in the countries of the periphery create there "a greater potential for the radicalisation of consciousness than in the great metropoles". As a result, "there remains the possibility that the circulation of the communist programme among the masses may be easier , and the 'level of attention' that revolutionary communists can attract higher, in relation to the social formations of advanced capitalism". We have already refuted this analysis in detail (see International Review n°100, "The class struggles in the countries of the capitalist periphery"), such that it is unnecessary to do so again here. What we will say though, is that the IBRP's distorted vision of the significance of the recent revolts in Argentina is an illustration not only of its inability to understand the ideas of capitalism's decomposition, or of the historic course, but of the incorrectness of these Theses.

Our analysis absolutely does not mean that we despise or under-estimate the struggles of the proletariat in Argentina, or in other zones where capitalism is weaker. It simply means that revolutionaries, as the advance guard of the proletariat, with a clear vision of the line of march of the proletarian movement taken as a whole, have the responsibility to contribute to the clearest and most exact vision of the strengths and limitations of the working class struggle, of who are its allies, and of the direction its struggle should take. To do so, revolutionaries must resist with all their strength the opportunist temptation - as a result of impatience, immediatism, or a historical lack of confidence in the proletariat - to mistake an inter-classist revolt (such as we have seen in Argentina) for a class movement.

Adalen, 10th March 2002

The previous articles in this series examined how the communist movement, during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the darkest years of the counter-revolution, struggled to understand what had become of the first proletarian dictatorship to establish itself on the scale of an entire country – the Soviet power in Russia. Future essays will look at the lessons revolutionaries have drawn from the demise of this dictatorship and have applied to any future proletarian regime. But before proceeding in that direction, we must return to the days when the Russian revolution was still alive, in order to study a key aspect of the communist transformation that was raised, though not of course resolved, during that decisive period. We refer to the question of ‘culture’.

We do not do this without a certain hesitation, because the issue is so vast, and the term culture so liable to abuse. This is above all true in this age of fragmentation that we call the decomposition of capitalism. In previous phases of capitalism, ‘culture’ was, it’s true, generally identified with ‘high culture’, with the artistic productions of the ruling class alone, a vision which ignored or dismissed all its more ‘marginalised’ expressions (consider, for example, the classical bourgeois contempt for the cultural expressions of conquered primitive societies). Today, by contrast, we are told that we live in a ‘multicultural’ world, where all cultural expressions are equally valid, and where virtually every partial aspect of social life itself becomes a ‘culture’ (the ‘culture of violence’, the ‘culture of greed’, the ‘culture of dependency’, etc, etc). Such simplifications make it impossible to arrive at any general, unified notions of culture as products of entire epochs of human history, or of human history as a whole. A particularly pernicious misuse of this attitude to culture today can be seen in the current imperialist conflict over Afghanistan: we are repeatedly asked to consider whether this is a conflict between cultures, between civilisations - more precisely between ‘western civilisation’ and ‘Muslim civilisation’. This is without doubt a question designed to hide the real issue: that there is only one civilisation on the planet today, the decadent civilisation of world capital.

In contrast to this, faithful to the monist approach of marxism, Trotsky defines culture as follows: “Let us recall first of all that culture meant originally a ploughed field, as distinct from virgin forest and virgin soil. Culture was contrasted with nature, that is, what was acquired by man’s efforts was contrasted with what was given by nature. This antithesis fundamentally retains its value today.

“Culture is everything that has been created, built, learned, conquered by man in the course of his entire history, in distinction from what nature has given, including the natural history of man himself as a species of animal. The science that studies man as a product of animal evolution is called anthropology. But from the moment that man separated himself from the animal kingdom – and this happened approximately when he first grasped primitive tools of stone and wood and armed the organs of his body with them – from that time there began the creation and accumulation of culture, that is, all kinds of knowledge and skill in the struggle with nature and subjugation of nature” (‘Culture and Socialism’, 1926). This is a very broad definition indeed - a defence of the materialist view that the emergence of man, and thus the evolution from nature to culture, is the product of something as basic and as universal as labour.

The problem remains, however, that under this definition, politics and economics in their widest sense are themselves expressions of human culture, and we could be in danger of losing sight of what we are talking about. However, in another essay, ‘Not by politics alone’ (1923), Trotsky points out that to understand the real relationship between politics and culture, it is necessary, alongside its broadest meaning, to provide a more ‘restricted’ definition of the political sphere, as “specifying a definite part of public activity, directly concerned with the struggle for power and opposed to economic work, to the struggle for culture, etc”; by implication, we can say the same about the term culture, which in this context we shall largely apply to domains such as art, education, and the ‘problems of everyday life’ (the title of the collection of essays containing the two articles cited above). Seen from this angle, the cultural aspects of the revolution may appear secondary, or at least dependent on the political and economic spheres. And this is indeed the case: as Trotsky shows in the text we are re-publishing below, it is folly to expect a real cultural renaissance until the bourgeoisie has been defeated politically and the material foundations of a socialist society have been built. All the same, and even if we further narrow down the problem of culture to the realm of ‘art’, the latter still raises the deepest questions about the nature of the society that the revolution aims to create. It is no accident, for example, that Trotsky’s most elaborated contribution to the marxist theory of art, Literature and Revolution, concludes with an extended vision of the nature of man in an advanced communist society. For if art is the expression par excellence of human creativity, then it provides us with an irreplaceable key to understanding what human beings will be like once the chains of class exploitation have been definitively broken.

In order to orient ourselves in this huge domain, we intend to stick closely to Trotsky’s writings on the matter, which are not so well known but which certainly provide the clearest framework to date for approaching the problem.1 [10] And rather than restating what has already been said by Trotsky himself, we will republish extended extracts from two chapters of Literature and Revolution. The second of these will concentrate on his inspiring portrait of the future society. But in this Review we are publishing an extract from the chapter ‘What is proletarian culture and is it possible’, which is a particularly important component of Trotsky’s contribution to the debate on culture within the Bolshevik party and the revolutionary movement in Russia. In order to situate this contribution, it is necessary to describe the historical background to it.

The debate on ‘proletarian culture’ in revolutionary Russia

The fact that the debate on culture was by no means a secondary one can be illustrated by the fact that it prompted Lenin to draft the following resolution, to be presented by the Communist fraction at the Proletkult congress of 1920:

“1. All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of its dictatorship, ie, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of classes, and the elimination of all forms of exploitation of man by man.

“2. Hence, the proletariat, both through its vanguard – the Communist Party – and through the many types of proletarian organisations in general, should display the utmost activity and play the leading part in all the work of public education.

“3. All the experience of modern history and, particularly, the more than half-century old revolutionary struggle of the proletariat in all countries since the appearance of the Communist Manifesto has unquestionably demonstrated that the marxist world outlook is the only true expression of the interests, the viewpoint, and the culture of the revolutionary proletariat.

“4. Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture. Only further work on this basis and in this direction, inspired by the practical experience of the proletarian dictatorship as the final stage in the struggle against every form of exploitation, can be recognised as the development of a genuine proletarian culture.

“5. Adhering unswervingly to this stand of principle, the All-Russia Proletkult Congress rejects in the most resolute manner, as theoretically unsound and practically harmful, all attempts to invent one’s own particular brand of culture, to remain isolated in self-contained organisations, to draw a line dividing the field of work of the People’s Commissiariat of Education and the Proletkult, or to set up a Proletkult ‘autonomy’ within establishments under the People’s Commissariat of Education and so forth. On the contrary, the Congress enjoins all Proletkult organisations to fully consider themselves in duty bound to act as auxillary bodies of the network of establishments under the People’s Commissariat of Education, and to accomplish their tasks under the general guidance of the Soviet authorities (specifically, of the People’s Commissariat of Education) and of the Russian Communist Party, as part of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship (Lenin, ‘On proletarian culture’, October 8, 1920, Collected Works, vol 31, p 316-317).

The Proletarian Culture movement, Proletkult for short, had been formed in 1917 with the idea of providing a political orientation for the cultural dimension of the revolution. It is most often associated with Aleksander Bogdanov, who had been a member of the Bolshevik fraction in its earliest years, but who had come into conflict with Lenin over a number of issues, not only the formation of the Ultimatist group after 1905,2 [11] but, more famously, over Bogdanov’s championing of the ideas of Mach and Avenarius in the realm of philosophy, and more generally, his efforts to ‘complete’ marxism with various theoretical systems, such as his notion of ‘tectology’. We cannot go into Bogdanov’s thinking in any detail here; from what little we know of it (only certain works have been translated from Russian), he was, despite his flaws, capable of developing some important insights - in particular, on the question of state capitalism in the epoch of capitalist decline. For this very reason, his ideas still require a much more developed critique, and from a clearly proletarian standpoint.3 [12] In any case, Proletkult was by no means limited to Bogdanov: Bukharin and Lunacharsky, to name but two leading Bolsheviks, were also involved with the organisation and did not always share Lenin’s views on it. Bukharin, for example, who was due to present the resolution at the Proletkult Congress, objected to certain elements in Lenin’s draft resolution, which was presented in a somewhat modified form.

Proletkult flowered during the heroic phase of the revolution, where the unchaining of revolutionary energies also gave rise to a huge surge of expression and experimentation on the artistic front, much of it explicitly identifying itself with the revolution. This phenomenon, moreover, was not limited to Russia, as witness the development of movements such as dada and expressionism in the wake of the revolution in Germany, or, slightly later on, of surrealism in France and elsewhere. During the years 1917-20, Proletkult’s membership soared to around half a million, with over 30 journals and around 300 groups. For Proletkult, the struggle on the cultural front was of equal importance to the struggle on the political and economic front. It saw itself leading the cultural struggle, while the party led the political struggle and the trade unions the economic. It provided numerous studios for workers to come together and engage in experiments in painting, music, drama, poetry and other areas of art, while at the same time encouraging new forms of communal living, of education, and so on. It should be emphasised that the explosion of social and cultural experimentation in Russia during this period was far wider than Proletkult itself, and came under many names; but the importance of discussing Proletkult in particular, then and now, is that it attempted to situate these phenomena within an interpretation of marxism. The guiding idea behind it, as its name implies, was that the proletariat, if it was to emancipate itself from the yoke of bourgeois ideology, had to develop its own culture, which would be based on a radical break with the hierarchical culture of the old ruling classes. Proletarian culture would be egalitarian and collective where bourgeois culture had been elitist and individualist: thus, for example, experiments were made with conductorless orchestras or collective poems and paintings. Along with the futurist movement, with which Proletkult had a close but sometimes critical relationship, there was a strong tendency to exalt everything that was modern, urban, and machine-based, in contrast to the rural mediaevalism which had dominated Russian culture hitherto.

The debate on culture became a burning issue in the party once the civil war had been won. It was at this point that Lenin began to emphasise the importance of the cultural struggle: “We have to admit that there has been a very radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this: formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organisational, ‘cultural’ work. I should say that the emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a world scale. If we leave that aside, however, and confine ourselves to internal economic relations, the emphasis in our work is certainly shifting to education” ‘On cooperation’, 1922, in Collected Works Vol 33, p 474).

But for Lenin, this cultural struggle had a very different meaning than it had for Proletkult, since it was connected to the shift from the civil war period to the reconstruction period of the NEP. For Lenin, the problem facing the Soviet power in Russia was not the construction of a new proletarian culture: this seemed to him perfectly utopian given the international isolation of the Russian state and the awful cultural backwardness of Russian society (illiteracy, predominance of religion and ‘Asiatic’ customs, etc). For Lenin, the Russian masses had to walk before they could run, which meant that they had yet to take the step of assimilating the essential achievements of bourgeois culture, let alone constructing a new proletarian one. This approach was parallel to his demand that the Soviet regime had to learn how to trade: in other words, it had to learn from the capitalists in order to survive in a capitalist environment. At the same time, Lenin was increasingly concerned that the growth of bureaucracy was a direct result of Russian cultural backwardness: the struggle for cultural advance was thus seen as part of the struggle against the rising bureaucracy. This was because only an educated and cultured proletariat could hope to take the management of the state into its own hands; at the same time, the new stratum of bureaucrats was largely seen as an outgrowth of Russia’s peasant conservatism and lack of modern culture.

The resolution submitted to the Proletkult congress, although written before the adoption of the NEP, seems to anticipate these concerns. Its strongest point is where it insists that marxism did not reject the cultural achievements of the past, but had in fact assimilated all that was best in them. This was a very clear repudiation of Proletkult’s ‘iconoclasm’, its tendency to reject all previous cultural developments. Although Bogdanov himself had a much more sophisticated approach to this issue, there is no doubt that the immediatist and workerist attitude was very influential in Proletkult. At its first conference, for example, the view was expressed that “all culture of the past might be called bourgeois, that within it – except for natural science and technical skills…there was nothing worthy of life, and that the proletariat would begin the work of destroying the old culture and creating the new immediately after the revolution” (cited on p 71 of Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution by Richard Stites, OUP 1989 – a very detailed survey of the numerous cultural experiments in the early years of the revolution). In Tambov in 1919, “local Proletkultists planned to burn all the books in the libraries in the belief that the shelves would be filled on the first of the new year with nothing but proletarian works” (ibid).

Against this vision of the past, Trotsky insisted in Literature and Revolution that “we marxists have always lived in tradition and we have not because of this ceased to be revolutionaries….” . The exaltation of the proletariat as it is at any given moment has never been the marxist attitude, which sees the proletariat in its historic dimension, embracing the remotest past, the present, and the future, when the proletariat will have dissolved into the human community. By an irony of language Proletkult often became a ‘cult of the proletariat’, which is radical only in appearance and can be easily recuperated by opportunism, which thrives on a restricted and immediate vision of the class. This same workerism was expressed by Proletkult’s tendency to assume that proletarian culture could only be the product of industrial workers. But as Trotsky argued in Literature and Revolution, the best artists were not necessarily workers; the social dialectic which produces the most radical works of art is more complex than the reductionist view that it has to come from individual members of the revolutionary class. The same, we might add, is true of the relationship between the social and political revolution of the proletariat and new artistic breakthroughs: there is an underlying connection, but it is neither mechanical nor national. For example: while Proletkult was trying to create a new ‘proletarian’ music in Russia, one of the most striking developments in contemporary music took place in capitalist America, with the eruption of jazz.

Lenin’s resolution also expresses his antagonism to Proletkult’s tendency to organise itself in an autonomous manner, almost as a parallel party, with congresses, a central committee, and so on. And indeed this mode of organisation does seem to be based on a real confusion between the political and the cultural sphere, a tendency to conflate the two, and, in Bogdanov’s case, even a temptation to see the cultural sphere as the most crucial.

On a more critical note, however, we should bear in mind that this was the period when Lenin was becoming hostile to any form of dissent in the party. As we noted in previous articles in this series, in 1921 ‘fractions’ were banned and left wing groups or currents within the party came under open attack, culminating in the physical repression of left communist groups in 1923. And one of the reasons for Lenin’s antagonism towards Proletkult was that it tended to be a rallying point for certain dissenting elements within or around the party. Proletkult’s emphasis on egalitarianism and the spontaneous creativity of the industrial workers intersected with the views of the Workers’ Opposition; and in 1921 a group calling itself the Collectivists circulated a text at the Proletkult congress, claiming adherence to the Workers’ Opposition and Proletkult; it also defended Bogdanov’s views on philosophy and his analysis of state capitalism, which was used to criticise the NEP. A year later, the Workers’ Truth group put forward very similar views; Bogdanov was briefly imprisoned for involvement with the latter group, although he denied supporting it in any way. (Following this episode, Bogdanov withdrew from active involvement in politics and concentrated on scientific work). Thus Lenin’s insistence that Proletkult more or less dissolve itself into the state’s ‘cultural’ institution, the People’s Commissariat for Education, has to be seen in this light.

In our view, the direct subordination of artistic movements to the transitional state is not the correct answer to confusion between the artistic and the political spheres; indeed, it tends to compound it. According to Zenovia Sochor in Revolution and Culture, Trotsky was opposed to Lenin’s efforts to liquidate Proletkult into the state, even though he agreed with many of Lenin’s criticisms of Proletkult (see p154). In Literature and Revolution, he puts forward a clearer basis for determining the communist policy towards art: “The marxist method affords an opportunity to estimate the development of the new art, to trace all its sources, to help the most progressive tendencies by a critical illumination of the road, but it does not do more than that. Art must make its own way and by its own means. The marxist methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the entire process of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly. It can and must give the additional credit of its confidence to various art groups, which are striving sincerely to approach the revolution and so help an artistic formulation of the revolution. And at any rate, the party cannot and will not take the position of a literary circle which is struggling and merely competing with other literary circles” (chapter 7, ‘Communist policy towards art’). In 1938, in response to the Nazi and Stalinist project of reducing art to a mere adjunct of state propaganda, Trotsky was even more explicit: “If, for the better development of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralised control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above!” (Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, New York, 1970, p 119)

Trotsky also went deeper than Lenin on the general problem of proletarian culture; while Lenin’s resolution leaves space for this concept, Trotsky rejected it altogether; and he did this on the basis of a searching reflection on the nature of the proletariat as the first revolutionary class in history to be a class without property, an exploited class. This understanding, a key to grasping virtually every aspect of the proletarian class struggle, is elaborated very clearly in the extract from Literature and Revolution published below. There is also a very succinct summary of his thesis on proletarian culture in the short introduction to the book: “It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The historic significance and moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human”.

Literature and Revolution was written in the period 1923-24 – in other words, the very period in which the struggle of the left against the rising Stalinist bureaucracy was beginning in earnest. Trotsky wrote the book on his summer holiday. In some ways, it provided a relief from the stresses and strains of the day-to-day ‘political’ combat within the party. But at another level, it was part of the struggle against Stalinism. Although the original Proletkult had gone into a sharp decline following the party controversy of 1920-1, the middle 20s saw parts of it reincarnated in the false radicalism which is one of the faces of Stalinism. Thus, in 1925, one of its offshoots, the group of Proletarian Writers, provides an explicit ‘cultural’ apology for the bureaucracy’s campaign against Trotskyism: “Trotsky denies the possibility of a class proletarian culture and art on the grounds that we are moving towards a classless society. But on that very basis, Menshevism denies the necessity of a class dictatorship, of a class state, and so on…The views of Trotsky and Voronsky cited above are ‘Trotskyism applied to questions of ideology and art’. Here the ‘left’ phraseology about classless art is interwoven with, and serves to disguise, opportunistic limitations of the cultural tasks of the proletariat”. Later in the same text, it is claimed that “This significant success of proletarian literature has been possible only on the basis of the rapid political and economic growth of the working masses of the Soviet Union” (‘Resolution of the First All-Union Conference of Proletarian Writers’, published in Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, part 2, edited by William G Rosenberg, University of Michigan, 1990). But this “political and economic growth” was now to be carried out under the banner of ‘socialism in one country’. Stalin’s monstrous ideological revision, which merged the proletarian dictatorship with socialism in order to undermine both, thus allowed certain strands of Proletkult to claim that a new proletarian culture was actually being built on the foundations of a socialist economy.

Bukharin also rejected Trotsky’s critique of proletarian culture on the grounds that he failed to understand that the transition period to the communist society could be an extremely long-drawn out process. Owing to the phenomenon of uneven development, the period of proletarian dictatorship might well last long enough for a distinctive proletarian culture to emerge. This too was the theoretical basis for abandoning the perspective of world revolution in favour of building ‘socialism’ in isolated Russia.4 [13]

The bloody and oppressive record of the Stalinist states at the economic and political level is proof enough that what was being built in these countries had nothing whatever to do with socialism. But the utter cultural vacuity of these regimes, their suppression of all real artistic creativity in favour of the most nauseating kind of totalitarian kitsch, provides further confirmation that they were never an expression of an advance towards a truly human culture, but a particularly brutal product of this senile and moribund capitalist system. The way the Stalinist apparatus in Russia from the 1930s onwards did away with all ‘avant-garde’ experimentation in art and education, together with the so-called ‘cultural revolution’ in China in the 1960s, are perhaps the most compelling examples of this. The sorry history of the Stalinist/Maoist leviathans offers no lessons whatever about the cultural issues confronting the working class in the future revolution.

CDW

The ICC recently held an Extraordinary International Conference principally devoted to questions of organisation. We will return to the work of the Conference in the next issue of this Review, and in our territorial press. This being said, given that the questions treated bore a strong similarity to those we have had to deal with in the past, we consider it worthwhile to publish extracts of an internal document[1] [20] (adopted unanimously by the ICC) which served as a basis for the combat for the defence of the organisation that we undertook in 1993-95, and which was described in the International Review n°82 on the 11th Congress of the ICC.

The activities report of the October 1993 IB[2] [21] Plenum noted the existence, or the persistence, within the ICC of organisational difficulties in a large number of sections. The report for the 10th International Congress had already amply dealt with these difficulties. It had in particular insisted on the necessity for a greater international unity of the organisation, of a more vital and rigorous centralisation of the latter. The present difficulties prove that the effort realised by this report and the debates of the 10th Congress, while indispensable were still insufficient. The malfunctioning through the last period shows the existence within the ICC of latenesses, gaps in the comprehension of questions, a loss of sight of the framework of our organisational principles. Such a situation gives us the responsibility to go still further to the root of the questions that were raised at the 10th Congress. It means in particular that the organisation, the sections and all the militants examine once more, basic questions and in particular the principles that underpin an organisation that struggles for communism (...).

A reflection of this type took place in 81-82 after the crisis that had gripped the ICC (loss of half the section in GB, haemorrhage of 40 members of the organisation). The basis of this reflection was given by the report on the "Structure and functioning of the organisation" adopted by the extraordinary conference of January 1982. In this sense this document still remains a reference for the whole of the organisation.[3] [22] The following text sees itself as a complement, an illustration and an actualisation (based on subsequent experience) of the text of 1982. In particular, it proposes to draw the attention of the organisation and the militants to the living experience not only of the ICC but also of other revolutionary organisations in history.

The importance of the problem in history

The question of the structure and functioning of the organisation has been posed at all stages of the workers' movement. Each time, the implications of such questioning have assumed the greatest importance. This is no accident. The question of organisation concentrates a whole series of essential aspects that are fundamental to the proletariat's revolutionary perspective:

• the fundamental characteristics of communist society and of the relations between the members of the latter;
• the being of the proletariat as a class which is the bearer of communism;
• the nature of class consciousness, the characteristics of its development and deepening and extension within the class;
• the role of the communist organisation in the coming to consciousness of the proletariat.

The consequences of the development of disagreements on organisational questions are often dramatic, even catastrophic for the life of political organisations of the proletariat. This is for the following reasons:

• such disagreements are, in the last resort, the revelation of the penetration within the organisation of ideological influences foreign to the proletariat, coming from the bourgeoisie or petit-bourgeoisie;
• more than disagreements on other questions they necessarily have implications for the functioning of the organisation, even affecting its unity, or existence;
• in particular they tend to take a more personalised and thus emotional form.

• the conflict between the General Council of the IWA and the ‘Alliance';
• the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in the course of and following the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP in 1903.

In the first example, it is clear that the constitution within the IWA of the "International Alliance of Socialist Democracy" was a sign of petit bourgeois influence, which the workers' movement has been regularly confronted with since its beginning. It was thus no accident that the Alliance recruited principally from professions close to the artisans (the watchmakers of Jura in Switzerland for example) and in the regions where the proletariat was still weakly developed (as in Italy and particularly in Spain).

Moreover the constitution of the Alliance presented a particularly grave danger for the whole of the IWA to the extent that:

• it was an "international within the international" (Marx) existing within and without the latter, which, in itself put its unity in question;
• it was, moreover, clandestine, including for the IWA, since it proclaimed its dissolution while continuing to function;
• it opposed the organisational conceptions of the IWA in particular its centralisation (it defended federalism) while being itself ultra-centralised around a "central committee" directed with an iron hand by Bakunin and imposing on its members "the most severe discipline founded on a total abnegation and the gift of oneself by each and every one" (Bakunin).

The Alliance was a living negation of the basis on which the International was founded. If the latter had fallen into the hands of the Alliance it would have been destroyed, and so Marx and Engels were right, at the Hague Congress of 1872, to propose and obtain the transfer to New York of the General Council. They knew that this transfer would lead the IWA towards a progressive extinction (in 1876) but, to the extent that it was condemned anyway following the crushing of the Paris Commune (which had caused a profound reflux in the class), they preferred this end to a degeneration which would have discredited all the positive work that had been accomplished between 1864-72.

Finally it must be noted that the conflict between the IWA and the Alliance had taken a very personalised form between Marx and Bakunin. The latter, who had only joined the IWA in 1868 (following the setback to his attempt at cooperation with bourgeois democrats within the "League of Peace and Liberty"), accused Marx of being the "dictator" of the General Council and thus the whole of the IWA.[4] [23] This was completely false (its enough to read the proceedings of the General Council meetings and the International Congresses to be convinced of it). On the other hand Marx (rightly) denounced the intrigues of the secret chief of the Alliance, intrigues which were facilitated by the secret character of the latter and by the sectarian conceptions inherited from a past epoch of the workers' movement. It must be noted moreover that these sectarian and conspiratorial conceptions, coming from the charisma of Bakunin, favourised his personal influence on his followers and the exercise of his authority as a "guru". Finally the persecution of which he pretended to be victim was one of the means by which he sowed unease and won supporters among a certain number of ill-informed workers or those sensitive to petit bourgeois ideology.

One finds the same type of characteristics in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks that took place from the beginning around organisational questions.

As it became obvious later, the approach of the Mensheviks was determined by the penetration of Russian Social Democracy, by bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideologies (even if certain conceptions of the Bolsheviks were themselves the result of a bourgeois Jacobinist vision). In particular as Lenin noted "The bulk of the opposition has been formed by the intellectual elements of our party" which were one of the vehicles for petit-bourgeois conceptions on organisation.

In the second place, the conception of the organisation which the Mensheviks held at the 2nd Congress, and which Trotsky shared for a long time (although he was clearly separated from them, notably on the nature of the revolution in Russia and the tasks of the proletariat within it), turned its back on the necessities of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and carried within it the destruction of the organisation. On one hand, it was incapable of making a clear distinction between members of the party and sympathisers as was shown by the disagreement between Lenin and Martov, leader of the Mensheviks on point 1 of the statutes.[5] [24] On the other hand and above all it was the expression of a past period of the movement (as the Alliance had been marked by the sectarian period of the workers' movement): "Under the name of the ‘minority' heterogeneous elements are regrouped in the Party who are united by the desire, conscious or not, to maintain the relations of a circle, previous organisation forms to the party. Certain eminent militants of the most influential old circles, not having the habit of organisational restrictions that the Party must impose, are inclined to mechanically confuse the general interests of the Party and their circle interests which can coincide in the period of circles". (Lenin, One step forward, two steps back). In particular through their petit-bourgeois approach these elements "...naturally raise the standard of revolt against the indispensable restrictions of the organisation and they establish their spontaneous anarchism as a principle of struggle ... making demands in favour of ‘tolerance' etc" (ibid).

In the third place the spirit of the circle and the individualism of the Mensheviks led them to the personalisation of political questions. The most dramatic point of the congress, which created an irreparable gulf between the two groups, was that of the nomination to the different responsible positions of the party, and in particular to the Editorial Board of Iskra, which was considered as the party's real political leadership (the Central Committee being concerned essentially with organisational questions). Before the congress this editorship was composed of six members: (Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov, Axelrod, Starover (Potressov) and Vera Zassoulich). But only the first three were real editors, the latter three did practically nothing, or were content to send articles.[6] [25] In order to go beyond "the spirit of the circle" which animated the old editorship, and particularly its three least committed members, Lenin proposed to the Congress a formula permitting the nomination of a more appropriate Editorial Board without this appearing as a motion of distrust towards the three militants: the Congress elected an Editorial Board restricted to the three members who could later co-opt other militants in agreement with the central committee. Whilst this formula had been accepted initially by Martov and the other editors, the latter changed his mind at the end of the debate which had opposed him to Lenin on the question of the statutes (and which brought out the fact that these old comrades risked losing their positions): he asked (in fact Trotsky proposed a resolution in this sense) that the old Editorial Board of six members be "confirmed" by the congress. It was eventually Lenin's proposition that was carried and provoked the anger and lamentations of those who became Mensheviks (minority). Martov "in the name of the majority of the old Editorial Board" declared: "Since a committee of three has been elected, I declare in the name of my three comrades and myself that no one amongst us will join it. Personally I take it as an insult to be a candidate for this function and the simple supposition that 1 would consent to work there would be considered by me as a stain on my political reputation."

For political considerations, Martov substituted the sentimental defence of his old friends, victims of the "state of siege in the party", the defence of "slighted honour". For his part, the Menshevik Tsarev, declared: "How can the non-elected members of the editorhip behave if the congress no longer wants them to participate in the editorship?". The Bolsheviks denounced the conspiratorial way of presenting the problems.[7] [26] Later the Mensheviks refused and sabotaged the decisions of the congress, boycotting the central organs elected by the latter and launching systematic personal attacks against Lenin. For example, Trotsky called him ‘Maximillian Lenin', accusing him of wishing to "take on the role of the incorruptible" (Robespierre) and of instituting a "Republic of Virtue and Terror'" (Report of the Siberian delegation). One is struck by the resemblance between these accusations launched by the Mensheviks against Lenin and that of the Alliance against Marx and his "dictatorship", Faced with this attitude of the Mensheviks, the personalisation of political questions, the attacks which took him as the target and the subjectivity of Martov and his friends, Lenin replied: "When I consider the approach of the friends of Martov after the congress (...) 1 can only say that it is unworthy of members of the party, destroying the party ... And why? Originally because one is unhappy with the composition of the central organs, because objectively it is only this question which separates us, subjective appreciations (like offence, insult, expulsion, being put to one side, stigmatising, etc.) which are nothing but the fruit of wounded self-love and a sick imagination. This imagination and this wounded self-love lead straight to the most shameful gossip: without having taken knowledge of the activity of the new centres, nor having seen them at work, gossip is spread on their ‘deficiencies', on the ‘iron fist' of Ivan Nikiforovitch etc (...) This is the last and difficult step for Russian Social Democracy to take, from the circle spirit to the party spirit; from the petit-bourgeois mentality to the consciousness of  revolutionary duty; from gossip and the pressure of circles, considered as means of action, to discipline" ("Report on the Second Congress of the RSDLP", Works, vol.7).

Organisational problems in the history of the ICC

As with the other organisations of the proletariat (...) the ICC has been affected by organisational difficulties similar to those we have just dealt with above. Among these difficulties we can mention the following moments:

• 1974: the debate on  centralisation in the group Révolution Internationale (the future section of the ICC in France),  the formation and departure of the "Berard tendency".
• 1978: the formation of the "Sam-MM tendency" which founded the GCI in 1979.
• 1981: the crisis of the ICC, the formation and departure of the "Chenier tendency".
• 1984: appearance of the minority which, in 1985 constituted a "tendency" then left the ICC to form the EFICC (so-called "External Fraction of the ICC").
• 1987-88: difficulties in the Spanish section leading to the loss of the Northern section.
• 1988: dynamic of contestation and demobilisation in the Paris section, brought out by the 8th Congress of RI (Révolution Internationale, the ICC's section in France) due to the weight of decomposition in our ranks.

(...) From these moments of difficulty one may identify, despite their differences, a series of common characteristics which connect them to the problems encountered before in the history of the workers movement:

• the weight of petit-bourgeois ideology, particularly individualism;
• putting into question the unitary and centralised framework of the organisation;
• the importance taken by personal and subjective questions.

It would take too long to review all these difficult periods. We must be content to bring out the characteristics that have always been present in them to different degrees.

a) The weight of petit-bourgeois ideology

This weight is clear when we examine what became of the tendency of 1978: the GCI has fallen into a sort of anarcho-Bordigism, exalting terrorist actions and distrusting the struggles of the proletariat in the advanced countries while glorifying imaginary proletarian struggles in the Third World. Moreover, in the dynamic of a group of comrades who formed the EFICC, we have identified striking similarities with those that animated the Mensheviks in 1903 (see the article "External Fraction of the ICC" International Review no45) and in particular the weight of the intellectual element. Finally, in the dynamic of contestation and demobilisation which affected the Paris section in 1988, we have brought out the importance of the weight of decomposition as a factor stimulating the penetration of petit-bourgeois ideology in our ranks, particularly under the form of "democratism" (...).

b) Putting in question the unitary and centralised framework of the organisation

This is a phenomenon we have encountered in a systematic and marked way during the different organisational difficulties of the ICC:

• The starting point of the dynamic, which led to the "Berard tendency", was the decision of the section of Paris to create an organisation commission. A certain number of comrades, particularly the majority of those who had militated in the Trotskyist group "Lutte Ouvrière" saw in this embryonic central organ a "grave threat of bureaucratisation" for the organisation. Berard ceaselessly compared the OC to the Central Committee of LO (the organisation of which Berard had been a member for several years), identifying RI with this Trotskyist organisation, an argument which had a strong impact on the other comrades of his "tendency" given that all of them (except one) had come from LO.
• At the time of the crisis of 1981, a vision developed (with the contribution of the suspicious element Chenier, but not just him) which considered that each local section could have its own policy as far as intervention was concerned, which violently contested the IB and the IS (reproaching them with their position on the left in opposition and of provoking a Stalinist degeneration) and who, while defending the necessity of central organs, attributed to them the role of a mere post box. (...).
• In the whole dynamic that led to the formation of the EFICC the putting in question of centralisation came out, but under a different form, notably to the extent that 5 out of the 10 members of the "tendency" were on the IB, It was essentially by repeated acts of indiscipline vis-à-vis the latter, but also in relation to other expressions of the organisation, that it was put into question: a sort of aristocratic attitude, certain members of the tendency considered that they were "above the law". Confronted with the necessary discipline of the organisation, these militants saw a "Stalinist degeneration", adopting the arguments of the Chenier tendency that they had combated three years before.
• The difficulties encountered by the section in Spain in '87-'88 were directly linked to "the problem of centralisation"; the four new militants of the San Sebastian section entered into a contestationist dynamic with the section in Valencia which played the role of central organ. Within the "Basque" section a certain number of disagreements and political confusions existed, notably on the question of unemployed committees, confusions which revealed in good part the leftist origins of certain elements of this section. But instead of the disagreements being discussed in the organisational framework they were the occasion for the putting forward the policy of "an Englishman's (or in this case a Spaniard's) home is his castle", and the rejection on principle of all the orientations coming from Valencia. Following this dynamic the section in Spain lost half its forces (...)
• In the dynamic of contestation and demobilisation that developed in 1988 in the section in France and particularly in Paris, the putting in question of centralisation was expressed essentially against the central organ of the section. The most elaborated form of this putting in question was expressed by a member of the organisation who had developed in both texts and in behaviour an approach close to anarcho-councilism. In particular, one of the first contributions put forward a critique of the central organs and defended the idea of a rotation in the nomination of militants within these organs.

The rejection or contestation of centralisation has not been the only form of challenging the unitary character of the organisation during the different difficult moments we have mentioned. One must add a manifestation of the dynamic that could be described, as it was by Lenin in 1903, as a "circle" or even of a "clan". That is to say a  regroupment, even informal, of a certain number of comrades on the basis, not of political agreement, but on other criteria like personal affinities, discontent vis-a-vis this or that orientation of organisation or the contestation of a central organ,

In fact all of the "tendencies" which, up until now, have been formed in the ICC obey, more or less, such a dynamic. This is why they all have led to splits. It is something that we have raised each time: tendencies form themselves not on the basis of putting forward a positive alternative orientation to a position taken by the organisation, but as the collection of "discontents" who put their divergences in a common pot and try as a result to give themselves a certain coherence. On such bases, a tendency can give nothing positive to the extent that the dynamic does not consist in trying to reinforce the organisation through the greatest clarity possible, but expresses on the contrary, an approach (often unconscious) destructive of the organisation. Such tendencies were not the organic product of the life of the ICC and of the proletariat but on the contrary, express the penetration within it of foreign influences: in general petit-bourgeois ideology. Consequently, these tendencies appear like foreign bodies in the ICC; that is why they pose a danger to the organisation and why they almost inevitably led to a split.[8] [27]

In some ways the "Berard tendency" had the most homogeneity. But the latter did not have a common understanding of the questions at their origin. This "homogeneity" was essentially based on:

• the common origin (LO) of the members of the tendency who had converged spontaneously towards a similar approach and notably the rejection of centralisation;
• the charisma of Berard, who was a very brilliant individual and whose interventions dazzled less experienced elements who as a whole, didn't understand much and who adhered "blindly" to his approach;
• it is for this reason that one finds in this "tendency" very academic tendencies (...) at the same time as more activist elements, the "Communist Tendency" constituted after the split didn't survive the first issue of its publication.

Concerning the other "tendencies" in the ICC, each contained a bric-a-brac of positions:

• Sam-MM Tendency: tendency for the rate of profit to fall as explanation of the economic crisis (Sam) plus proletarian nature of the state in the period of transition (Sam), plus a Bordigist vision of the role of the organisation (MM), plus overestimation         of the struggles in the Third World (Ric).
• Chenier Tendency: rejection of the analysis of the left in opposition, plus assimilation of union organisations to organs of the class struggle, plus "Stalinist degeneration" of the ICC (plus the hidden manoeuvres of an individual perhaps in the service of the state).
• EFICC Tendency: a non-marxist vision of class consciousness (ML) plus councilist weaknesses (JA and Sander), plus disagreements about the interventions of the ICC in actions led by the unions to immobilise the working class (Rose), plus rejection of the notion of centrism and opportunism (Macintosh).

Considering the diverse character of these tendencies, one can ask what their approach was really founded on.

At root there were undoubtedly incomprehensions and confusions on general practical questions as well as on organisational questions. But all the comrades who had disagreements on these questions did not adhere to these tendencies. On the other hand, certain comrades who, from the beginning had no disagreement "discovered" it en route in order to join the formation of a tendency (...). This is why its necessary to remind ourselves, as Lenin did in 1903, of another aspect of organisational life: the importance of "personal" questions and of subjectivity.

c) The importance of "personal" questions and of subjectivity

The questions concerning attitudes, behaviour, the subjective and emotional reactions of militants and the personalisation of certain debates, do not have a "psychological" nature but are eminently political. Personality, individual history, childhood, emotional problems etc do not allow us, either in themselves or fundamentally, to explain the aberrant attitudes and behaviour that certain members of the organisation may adopt at this or that moment. Behind such behaviour one always finds, directly or indirectly individualism or sentimentalism, that is manifestations of classes foreign to the proletariat: the bourgeoisie or the petit bourgeoisie. One can say, at most, that certain personalities are more fragile than others faced with the pressure of such ideological influences.

That doesn't mean that "personal" aspects may not play an important role in the life of the organisation as one can see in numerous instances:

• Berard Tendency: It's enough to signal the fact that some days after the vote installing the Organisation Commission, to which Berard was opposed, the same Berard proposed to MC[9] [28] the following deal: "I will vote in favour of the OC if you propose me for it, otherwise I will fight". MC sent Berard packing with a flea in his ear, but did not make it public in order not to "crush" Berard publicly and to allow the debate to go to the roots. Thus the CO only represented a danger of "Bureaucratisation" because Berard was not put on it. No comment!
• Sam-MM Tendency: it was constituted by three groups (in part familial) whose "leaders" had different preoccupations but who all found themselves in contestation of the central organs. (...) Since "there isn't room for several male crocodiles in the same creak" (as the African proverb says) the three little crocodiles separated later: Sam split the first from the GCI to found the ephemeral "Fraction Communiste Internationaliste", later MM left the GCI to form "Movement Communiste".
• Chenier Tendency: Personal conflicts and personalities were involved in the division of the British section into two groups who didn't talk to each other and who, for example, ate in different restaurants during general meetings of the section. The militants from abroad who came to these meetings were monopolised by one or other clan and treated to all sorts of gossip (...). In the end, the crisis was made even worse by all the manoeuvres of Chenier who systematically added oil to the fire.[10] [29]
• EFICC Tendency: Beside political divergences (which were disparate) one of the major sources of the route of the group of comrades who founded the EFICC, and explains in particular their incredible bad faith, was the wounded pride of some (notably JA and ML), little used to being criticised (by MC in particular) and the "solidarity" that their old friends wanted to show them (...). In fact when one studies the history of the second congress of the RSDLP, and lived through the affair of the "EFICC Tendency" one can only be struck by all the similarities between the two events. But as Marx said, "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, secondly as farce".

It is not only at the time of the formation of the ‘tendencies' that personal questions have played, in different ways, a very important role. Thus, at the time of the difficulties in the Spanish section from 87-88, there developed among the comrades of San Sebastian, who had been integrated on insufficiently solid political foundations and with a large degree of subjectivity, a very strong animosity to certain comrades in Valencia. This personalised road was accentuated notably by the unhealthy and twisted spirit of one of the elements in San Sebastian and above all by the agitation of Albar, animator of the Lugo nucleus, whose behaviour was similar to that of Chenier: clandestine contact and correspondence, denigration and calumnies, use of sympathisers to "work on" the comrade of Barcelona who finally left the ICC. (...)

This examination, inevitably too rapid and superficial, of the organisational difficulties encountered by the ICC in the course of its history reveals two essential facts:

• these difficulties are not unique to it, but have existed throughout the history of the workers' movement;
• it has been confronted with these types of difficulties repeatedly and frequently.

This last element must incite the whole organisation and all the comrades to study in depth the organisational principles which were honed at the time of the extraordinary conference in 1982 in the "Report on the structure and functioning of the organisation" and in the Statutes.

The principle points of the 1982 Report and the statutes

The cornerstone of the 1982 report is the unity of the organisation. In this document, this idea is firstly treated from the angle of centralisation before treating it from the angle of the relations between militants and the organisation. The choice of this order corresponded to the problems encountered by the ICC in 1981 where the weaknesses showed themselves by a challenging of the central organs and centralisation. Today, most of the difficulties confronted by the sections are not directly linked to the question of centralisation but much more to the organisational tissue, to the place and responsibilities of militants within the organisation. And even when difficulties concerning problems of centralisation do arise, like in the French section, they go back to the preceding problem. That is why, in the assessment of different aspects of the report of 1982, it is preferable to begin with the last point (pt 12) which rightly touches on the relationships between the organisation and militants.

Relations between the organisation and the militants

a) The weight of individualism

"A fundamental precondition for a communist organisation being able to carry out its task in the class is a correct understanding of the relations that should exist between the organisation and its militants. This is a particularly difficult question to understand today, given the weight of the organic break with past fractions and of the influence of elements from the student milieu in the revolutionary organisations after 1968. This has allowed the reappearance of one of the ball-and-chains carried by the workers' movement in the 19th century - individualism". (Report of 1982, point 12)

Today, it is necessary to add the weight of decomposition to these causes for the penetration of individualism in our ranks, identified a long time ago. In particular decomposition fosters atomisation and "each for himself". It is important that the whole organisation is fully aware of this constant pressure that rotting capitalism exercises in the heads of militants, a pressure which can only increase outside an open revolutionary period. In this sense the following points, which respond to the difficulties and dangers already encountered in the organisation in the past, are even more valid today. That obviously must not discourage us but on the contrary encourage us toward a still greater vigilance toward these difficulties and dangers.

b) The "fulfilment" of militants

"The same relations which exist between a particular organ (group or party) and the class exist between the organisation and the militant. And just as the class does not exist to respond to the needs of the communist organisation, so communist organisations don't exist to resolve the problems of the individual militant. The organisation is not the product of the needs of the militant. One is a militant to the extent that one has understood and adheres to the tasks and functions of the organisation.

"Following on from this, the division of tasks and of responsibilities within the organisation is not aimed at the ‘fulfilment' of individual militants. Tasks must be divided up in a way that enables the organisation as a whole to function in the most efficient way. While the organisation must as much as possible look to the well-being of each of its militants, this is above all because it's in the interests of the organisation that all of its ‘cells' are able to carry out their part in the organisation's work. This doesn't mean ignoring the individuality and the problems of the militants it means that the point of departure, and the point of arrival, is the capacity of the organisation to carry out its tasks in the class struggle" (ibid).

It is a point that we must never forget. We are in the service of the organisation, not the other way round. In particular, the latter is not a sort of clinic to heal the ills, notably psychological, that its members may suffer. That does not mean that becoming a revolutionary does not help to put the personal difficulties which everyone has into context, if not to overcome them altogether. Quite the contrary, becoming a fighter for communism means that one gives a profound significance to one's existence, far superior to that which other aspects of life may give (professional or family success, bringing up a child, scientific or artistic creation, all satisfactions which everybody can share and which anyway are denied to the greater part of humanity). The greatest satisfaction that a human being can experience in life is to make a positive contribution to the good of his fellows, of society and humanity. What distinguishes the communist militant and gives a sense to his life is that he is a link in the chain that leads to emancipation of humanity, its accession to the "reign of liberty" a chain which continues after his own death. Thus what each militant may accomplish today is incomparably more important than what the greatest genius could do, such as the discovery of the cure for cancer or an inexhaustible source of non-polluting energy. In this sense the passion of his commitment must allow him to overcome and go beyond the difficulties that each human being encounters.

That is why, faced with the particular difficulties that members of the organisation may encounter, the attitude that must be adopted is above all political and not psychological. It is clear that psychological givens may be taken into account to confront this or that problem affecting a militant. But that must be put in an organisational framework and not the reverse. Thus when a member of the organisation frequently fails to accomplish his tasks, the organisation must respond in a fundamentally political way and in accord with its principles of functioning, even if, obviously, it must be able to recognise the specificities of the situation in which the militant in question finds himself. For example, when the organisation is confronted with a militant who is sliding toward alcoholism, its specific role is not to play at psychotherapy (a role for which it has no qualification anyway and in which it risks being a "sorcerer's apprentice") but to react on its own terrain:

• raising the problem to discuss within the organisation and with the militant concerned;
• forbidding the use of alcoholic drinks in the meetings and activities of the organisation;
• obliging each militant to arrive sober to the latter.

Experience has amply shown that this is the best way of overcoming this type of problem.

For the same reasons, militant commitment must not be seen as a routine like one can find in the workplace, even if certain tasks are not stimulating in themselves. In particular, it is necessary that the organisation divides these tasks, like all its tasks in general, in the most equitable way possible, in order that some are not burdened with work while others have practically nothing to do. It is important too that each militant banishes from his thoughts and behaviour any attitude of being a "victim" of the organisation, which treats him badly or gives him too much work. The great silence which, too often in certain sections, greets the call for volunteers to accomplish this or that task, is something shocking and demoralising particularly for young militants.[11] [30]

c) Different types of tasks and work in the central organs

"Within the organisation there are no ‘noble' tasks and no ‘secondary' or ‘less noble' tasks. Both the work of theoretical elaboration and the realisation of practical tasks, both the work in central organs and the specific work of local sections, are equally important for the organisation and should not be put in a hierarchical order (it is capitalism which establishes such hierarchies). This is why we must completely reject, as a bourgeois conception, the idea that the nomination of a militant to a central organ is some kind of ‘promotion', the granting of an ‘honour' or a privilege'. The spirit of careerism must be completely banished from the organisation as being totally opposed to the disinterested dedication which is one of the main characteristics of communist militant activity" (ibid).

This affirmation doesn't apply only to the situation in 1981 in the ICC but has a general and permanent application.[12] [31] In a way the phenomena of contestation in the ICC are often linked to a  "pyramidal" or "hierarchical" view of the organisation which is the same vision that sees accession to the responsibilities in the central organs as being a sort of "goal" for each militant (experience has shown that the anarchists are often excellent - so to speak - bureaucrats).

Moreover, you only have to see the reluctance in the organisation to relieve a militant of his responsibilities on a central organ, or the trauma that such a measure provokes when adopted, to understand that this isn't a false problem. It is clear that such trauma is a direct tribute paid to bourgeois ideology. But it is not sufficient to be fully convinced of this to be able to escape it totally. Faced with such a situation, it is important that the organisation and its militants fight everything which could encourage the penetration of such ideology:

• members of the central organs must not benefit, nor accept, any particular privilege, notably the avoidance of tasks or the discipline which is valid for all members of the organisation;
• in their behaviour, attitudes, their way of expressing themselves they should not make other comrades "feel" their membership of this or that central organ: such membership is not a medal to be arrogantly paraded, but a specific  task that must be assumed with the same sense of responsibility and modesty as all the others;
• there is no "promotion by seniority" within the central organs, a sort of "career structure" as in bourgeois firms or administrations where their employee is supposed to climb the ladder to success through the hierarchy; on the contrary, the organisation in order to prepare its future, must be concerned to confer responsibilities even on the most global level, to young militants when they have shown their capacity to assume such responsibilities, (let us recall that Lenin proposed to integrate Trotsky, aged 22, to the editorship of Iskra, against the wishes of the "old hand" Plekhanov. We know what became of the one and the other);
• if for the needs of the organisation, it is necessary or useful to replace a militant in the central organ, that must not be seen or presented as a sanction against the militant, like a sort of degradation or the loss of confidence in him; the ICC doesn't demand like the anarchists the rotation of tasks, nor does it recognise the life attachment of people to the same responsibilities like the Académie Française or the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

d) Inequalities between militants

"Although there do exist inequalities of ability between individuals and militants, and these are maintained and strengthened by class society, the role of the organisation is not, as the utopian communists thought, to pretend to abolish them. The organisation must try to ensure the maximum development of the political capacities of its militants because this is a precondition for its own strengthening, but it never poses this in terms of an individual, scholarly training, nor of an equalisation of everyone's education.

Real equality between militants consists in giving the maximum of what they can give for the life of the organisation (‘from each according to his means', a quote from St Simon which Marx adopted). The true ‘fulfilment' of a militant, as a militant, is to do all he can to help the organisation carry out the tasks for which the class has engendered it" (ibid).

The sentiments of jealousy, rivalry, competition or inferiority complexes which may appear between militants, and are linked to their inequalities, are typically the manifestation of the penetration of dominant ideology in the ranks of the communist organisation.[13] [32] Even if it is illusory to think that one can chase such sentiments out of the heads of all members of the organisation, it is important however that each militant has the permanent concern not to be dominated by such sentiments in his behaviour and to fight them in the organisation.

Contestation is often the result of such sentiments and frustrations. In effect, contestation, when it applies to the central organs or to certain comrades supposed to have "more weight" than others (such as, precisely, the members of these organs) is typically the approach of militants or parts of the organisation which have "complexes" in relation to others. That is why it often takes the form of criticism for the sake of it (and not for what is said or done) towards whatever may represent ‘authority' (classic behaviour of an adolescent who revolts against the father). Like individualism, contestation is in exact symmetry with the other expression of individualism which is authoritarianism, the "taste for power".[14] [33] It should be noted that contestation can also take silent forms, which are no less dangerous than the others, on the contrary, since they are more difficult to see. It may equally express itself by looking to take the place of whatever (militant or central organ) is contested: in substituting oneself one hopes to put an end to the object of their complexes.

Another aspect to understand in a period where new comrades are arriving is the expression of the hostility of some of the old militants fearing the new ones will "put them in the shade". Particularly if the latter show important political capacities. It is not a false problem: it is clear that one of the major reasons for Plekhanov's hostility towards Trotsky becoming one of the editors of Iskra was fear that his own prestige would be affected by the arrival of this extremely brilliant individual.[15] [34] What was valid at the beginning of the century is still more so today. If the organisation (and its militants) are not capable of getting rid of, or at least neutralising these types of attitudes it will not be capable of preparing its future in the revolutionary combat.

Finally, concerning the question of "individual education" evoked in the report of 1982, it is equally important to be precise that the entrance into a central organ cannot be considered in any way as the means of "training" militants. The place where militants form themselves is their activity within the "base cells of the organisation" (statutes), the local section. It is fundamentally in this framework that they acquire and perfect, with the concern of making a better contribution to the life of the organisation, their capacities as militants (theoretical capacities, organisational or practical questions, sense of responsibility, etc). If the local sections are not capable of playing this role, it means that their functioning, their activities and discussions are not up to the level they should be. While it is necessary that the organisation regularly train new militants for the carrying out of the specific tasks of the central organs or of specialised commissions (for example, in order to be capable of facing up to the neutralisation of these central organs as a result of repression) it is never to satisfy any "need of formation" for the militants concerned but so as to allow the organisation as a whole to face up to its responsibilities.

e) Relations between militants

"The relations between militants, while they necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society, (...) cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goal pursued by revolutionaries; and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism" (ICC Platform).

This means in particular that the attitude of militants to each other must be marked by fraternity and not by hostility. In particular:

• the application of a political and organisational not a psychological approach towards a militant who experiences difficulties, must not be understood as the functioning of an impersonal or administrative machine; the organisation and the militants must know how to show, in such circumstances, their solidarity, while knowing that fraternity does not mean indulgence;
• the development of sentiments of hostility of one militant to the other to the point that he considers him as an enemy shows the loss of sight of the organisation's raison d'être, the struggle for communism; it is the sign that it is necessary to re-appropriate the basic foundation of militant commitment.

Outside of this extreme case, which has no place in the organisation, it is clear that dislikes can never disappear totally within the latter. In the latter case the functioning of the organisation must not foster, but on the contrary attenuate or neutralise, such dislikes. In particular the necessary frankness, which must exist between comrades in struggle, is not synonymous with rudeness or lack of respect. Moreover, insults must be absolutely proscribed in relations between militants.

That said, the organisation must not see itself as a "group of friends" or as a collection of such groups.[16] [35]

In fact, one of the grave dangers which permanently threatens the organisation, which put its unity in question and risks destroying it, is the constitution, even if it is not deliberate or conscious, of "clans". In a clan dynamic, common approaches do not share a real political agreement but rather links of friendship, loyalty, the convergence of specific personal interests or, shared frustrations. Often such a dynamic, to the extent that it is not founded on a real political convergence, is accompanied by the existence of "gurus", "leaders of the gang",[17] [36] who guarantee the unity of the clan, and who may draw their power from a particular charisma, can even stifle the political capacities and the judgement of other militants as a result of the fact they are presented or present themselves, as "victims" of such or such policy of the organisation. When such a dynamic appears, the members or sympathisers of the clan can no longer decide for themselves, in their behaviour or the decisions that they take, as a result of a conscious and rational choice based on the general interests of the organisation, but as a result of the interests of  the clan which tends to oppose itself to those of  rest of organisation.[18] [37]

In particular, all interventions which take a position that challenges a member of the clan (about what has been said or done) are seen as the "settling of personal scores" with him or the whole of the clan. Moreover, in such a dynamic, the clan often tends to present a monolithic front (it prefers to wash its dirty linen in the family) accompanied by a blind discipline, rallying without discussion to the orientations of the "gang leader".

It is a fact that certain members of the organisation may acquire, as a result of their experience, of their political capacities or of the correctness, verified by practice, of their judgments, a greater authority than that of other militants. The confidence that other militants accord them spontaneously, even if they are not immediately sure of sharing their point of view, is a normal thing in the life of the organisation. It can even happen that the central organ, or even some militants, ask that they be accorded a temporary confidence when they cannot immediately produce all the elements to firmly establish their conviction, or when the conditions for a clear debate don't yet exist in the organisation. What is by contrast abnormal is to be definitively in agreement with such a position because comrade X put it forward. Even the greatest names of the workers' movement made mistakes. In this sense the adhesion to a position can only base itself on a real agreement for which the indispensable conditions are the quality and depth of the debates. That is also the best guarantee of the solidity and of the durability of a position within the organisation which cannot be put in question just because comrade X has changed his mind. The militants should not "believe" once and for all and without discussion what is said to them even by a central organ. Their critical thought must be constantly at work (which doesn't mean that they must constantly criticise). This also confers on the central organs, as well as the militants who have the most "weight", the responsibility of not using at every turn and indiscriminately the "arguments of authority". On the contrary, they must fight any tendency to "tail-endism", to superficial agreements, without conviction and without reflection.

A clan dynamic may be accompanied by an approach which is not necessarily deliberate, of "infiltration", that is the designation of key positions in the organisation (like the central organs for example but not only) to members of the clan or to persons that they can win over. It is a current practice and often systematised within bourgeois parties and which a communist organisation, for its part, must firmly reject. It must be particularly vigilant on this subject. In particular, while in the nomination of the central organs "it is necessary to take account (...) of the capacity [of candidates] to work in a collective manner" (Statutes), it is important also to be careful in the choice of militants who will work in such organs, in order to ensure the least possible conditions for the appearance of a clan dynamic due to the affinities or personal links that may exist between the militants concerned. That is why the organisation must especially avoid, as far as possible, nominating two members of a couple to the same commission. A lack of vigilance in this domain could have particularly injurious consequences, as such for the political capacities of the militants or the organ as a whole. At best, the organ in question, whatever the quality of its work, may be resented by the rest of the organisation as a mere "gang of friends", which would result in a significant loss of authority. At worst, this organ may end up behaving like a particular clan, with all the dangers that this implies, or even being totally paralysed by the conflicts between clans within it. In either case it is the existence of the organisation itself that could be affected.

Finally, a clan dynamic constitutes the ground upon which practices closer to those of the bourgeois electoral game could develop rather than those of communist militantism:

• campaigns of seduction of those they wish to win to the clan or to solicit their votes or support for such or such nomination to specific responsibilities.[19] [38]
• campaigns of denigration against those who may offend the clan, or who occupy "posts" coveted by members of the latter, or who may simply be an obstacle to its objectives

Warnings about the danger of behaviour foreign to communist militantism within revolutionary organisations, should not be considered as tilting at windmills. In fact, throughout its existence, the workers' movement has been frequently confronted with this type of behaviour, bearing witness to the pressure of the dominant ideology in its ranks. The ICC itself has clearly not escaped this. To think that it would be henceforth immunised against such scourges is not political clear-sightedness but religious faith. On the contrary, the growing weight of decomposition, to the extent that the latter reinforces atomisation (and thus the search for a cocoon) irrationality, emotional approaches, demoralisation can only increase the threat posed by such behaviour. And that must make us still more vigilant against the danger that this represents.

That doesn't mean that a permanent distrust between the comrades should develop. On the contrary: the best antidote against distrust is precisely the vigilance toward situations that best feed distrust. This vigilance must be exercised against all behaviour and any attitude that could lead to such dangers. In particular the practice of informal discussions between comrades, notably on questions touching the life of the organisation, if they are inevitable to a certain extent, must be limited as much as possible and in any case done in a responsible way. While the formal framework of the organisation, beginning with the local sections, is the most suitable for responsible proceedings and discussion as well as really conscious and political reflection, the "informal" framework is the one that leaves the most room to irresponsible attitudes, marked moreover by subjectivity. In particular, it is important to shut the door on any campaign of denigration of a member of the organisation (as of a central organ obviously). Vigilance against such behaviour must be exercised against oneself as much as against others. In this domain, as in many others, the most experienced militants, and particularly members of the central organs, must behave in an exemplary way, always considering the impact of what they say. And what they say is still more important and serious when we consider new comrades:

• who, not knowing the victims of denigration well, may easily take what is said literally;
• who risk being moulded by this type of behaviour or be sickened and demoralised by the image that it gives of the organisation.

To conclude this part on the relations between the organisation and the militants, it is necessary to emphasise and remember that the organisation is not the sum of its militants. In the historic struggle for communism, the collective being of the proletariat gives rise to, as part of itself, another collective being, the revolutionary organisation. Communist militants are those who dedicate their lives to make it live and progress, and defend this collective and unitary being that their class has entrusted them with. All other conceptions, notably that of the organisation as a sum of militants, are influenced by bourgeois ideology and constitute a mortal danger to the existence of the organisation.

It is only from this collective and unitary vision of the organisation that one can understand the question of centralisation.

The centralisation of the organisation

This question was at the centre of the activities report presented to the 10th International Congress. Moreover, the difficulties, which most sections are confronted with, don't directly concern the question of centralisation. Finally, when one clearly understands the question of the relations between the organisation and its militants, it is much easier to understand that of centralisation. That's why this part of the text will be less developed than the preceding part and will be composed largely of extracts from fundamental texts to which will be added comments made necessary by the incomprehension which have developed recently.

a) Unity of the organisation and centralisation

‘'Centralism is not an optional or abstract principle for the structure of the organisation. It is the concretisation of its unitary character. It expresses the fact that it is one and the same organisation which takes positions and acts within the class" (The 1982 Report, point 3). "In the various relations between the parts of the organisation and the whole, its always the whole which takes precedence (...) We must absolutely reject the conception according to which this or that part of the organisation can adopt, in front of the organisation or of the working class, the positions or attitudes which it thinks correct instead of those of the organisation which it thinks incorrect (...) if the organisation is going in the wrong direction, the responsibility of the members who consider that they defend the correct position is not to save themselves in their own little corner, but to wage a struggle within the organisation in order to help put it back in the right direction" (Ibid,. point 3).

"In a revolutionary organisation the whole is not the sum of the parts. The latter are delegated by the whole organisation to carry out a particular activity (territorial publications, local interventions), and are thus responsible in front of the whole for the mandate they have been given." (Ibid., point 4).

These brief reminders from the report of 1982 show clearly that insistence on the question of the unity of the organisation is the principal axis of the document. The different parts of the organisation can only be conceived as parts of a whole, as delegations and instruments of this whole. Is it necessary to repeat once more that this conception must be permanently present in all parts of the organisation?

Only on the basis of this insistence on the unity of the organisation does the report introduce the question of the congress (which is not relevant here) and the central organs.

"The central organ is a part of the organisation and as such responsible to it, when it meets at its Congress. However it's a part whose specificity is that it expresses and represents the whole, and because of this the positions and decisions of the central organ always take precedence over those of other parts of the organisation taken separately." (point 5),

" ... the central organ is an instrument of the organisation, not the other way round. It is not the summit of a pyramid as in the hierarchical and military view of revolutionary organisation. The organisation is not formed by a central organ plus militants, but is a tight, unified network in which all its component parts overlap and work together. The central organ should rather be seen as the nucleus of the cell which co-ordinates the metabolism of a living organic entity." (ibid).

This last image is fundamental in the comprehension of centralisation. It alone, in particular, allows a full comprehension of why in a unitary organisation there can be several central organs having different levels of responsibility. If one considers the organisation as a pyramid, where the central organ is the summit, we would be confronted by an impossible geometric figure: a pyramid having a summit and composed by pyramids each having their own summit. In practice, such organisation would be as aberrant as this geometric figure and couldn't function. It is the administrations and enterprises of the bourgeoisie which have a pyramidal architecture: for the latter to function, the different responsibilities are necessarily distributed from top to bottom. This is not the case for the ICC which has central organs elected at different territorial levels. Such a mode of functioning precisely corresponds to the fact that the ICC is a living entity (like that of a cell in an organism) in which different organisational moments are the expression of a unitary totality.

In such a conception, which is expressed in a detailed way in the statutes, there shouldn't be conflict, or opposition between different structures of the organisation. Disagreements may obviously arise anywhere in the organisation, but that is part of its normal life. However, if disagreements end up in conflicts this means that somewhere this conception of the organisation has been lost, and in particular a pyramidal vision has been introduced which can only lead to opposition between different "summits". In such a dynamic, which leads to the appearance of several "centres", and therefore to an opposition between them, it is the unity of the organisation which is put in question, and thus its very existence. (...)

If the questions of organisation and of functioning are of the highest importance, they are also the most difficult to understand.[20] [39] Much more than other questions, their comprehension is linked to the subjectivity of militants and they can constitute an important channel for the penetration of ideologies foreign to the proletariat. As such they are questions which, par excellence, are never definitively acquired. It is therefore important that they are the object of sustained vigilance on the part of the organisation and all its militants. (...)

14th October, 1993

[1] [40] A brief note should be made on the translation of this text. An organisation spread across 13 countries and 4 continents undertakes an enormous task of translation, both for its press and its internal bulletins. Given the pressures of time, internal documents often suffer in terms of their readability or strict adherence to grammatical rules. While we have done our best to render this text legible and intelligible, we ask our readers' indulgence for any violence we may have done to the language of Shakespeare in reproducing this text.

[2] [41] Like the 2nd International and the Communist International, the ICC has an international central organ composed of militants from the different territorial section, the International Bureau (IB). This meets in regular plenary sessions (IB plenum) and between these meetings, there is a permanent commission, the International Secretariat(IS), that assures the continuity of its work

[3] [42] "Even less than other fundamental texts of the ICC, those of the extraordinary conference are not to be buried in the bottom of a drawer or tinder a pile of papers. They must he a constant reference for the life of the organisation." (Activities Resolution of the 5th Congress of the ICC)

[4] [43] It didn't prevent him either from referring to the hated characteristics of Jews and Germans: "Its a collection ( ... ) of all the absurd and dirty tales that the most perverse wickedness of German and Russian Jews, his friends, his agents, his disciples [of Marx] (...) have propagated against us, but above all against me ( ... ) You remember the article of the German Jew (NI Hess in the Reveil), reproduced and developed  by Borkheim and other German Jews of the Volkstaat?" (Reply of Bakunin to the circular of the General Council of March 1872 on the "Alleged splits in the International"). It must equally be noted that Bakunin, who the anarchists present as a kind of irreproachable and fearless hero had shown a good dose of hypocrisy and duplicity. Thus at the moment when he began to intrigue against the general council and against Marx, he wrote to the latter: "I will now do the same as you have for the past twenty years (...) My fatherland is now the International, of which you are one of the principle founders. You can see then, my friend, that 1 am your disciple and proud to be so". (22.12.1868)

[5] [44] Formulation defended by Lenin: "A member of the party is someone who agrees with its programme and support., the party materially as well as working personally in one of its organisations". Formulation proposed by Martov (and adopted by the Congress thanks to the vote of the Bund): " a member of the party is someone who agrees with its programme and supports the party both materially and in working under the control and direction of one of its organisations."

[6] [45] It is significant that these 3 militants, including Plekhanov who joined the Mensheviks some months after the Congress, were social chauvinists during the war, and opposed to the 1917 revolution. Only Martov adopted an internationalist position but he took a position against the power of the Soviets

[7] [46] Here is the response of the Bolshevik Roussov (cited and saluted by Lenin in One step forward, two steps back): "In the mouth of revolutionaries one hears peculiar things which are in sharp disagreement with the notion of party work, of the ethic of the party (...) in placing ourselves within this point of view which is foreign to the party, petit-bourgeois, we find ourselves at each election with the question whether Petrov has been replaced by Ivanov ( ... ) Where will that lead us comrades? If we are together here its not to make agreeable speeches to each other, or exchange pleasantries but to create a party, we cannot accept this point of view. We have to elect delegates and it is not a question here of a lack of confidence in those who are un-elected; the only question is to know it is in the interest of the cause and if the person elected is fit for the designated post." In the same pamphlet Lenin recalled the stakes of this debate: "The struggle of the petit-bourgeois spirit against the party spirit, of the worst ‘personal considerations' against political function, wretched speeches against the elementary notions of revolutionary duty, here is the struggle around point 6 and 3 at the thirtieth session of our congress". (Lenin's emphasis)

[8] [47] On several occasions, certain comrades in disagreement with the orientations of the ICC on organisational matters have affirmed that this systematically "tragic" destiny of the tendencies we have known reveals a weakness of our organisation, and notably an erroneous policy of the central organs. On this question it is appropriate to point out the following elements:

- the appearance of a tendency (we are talking of a real tendency based on "clearly expressed positive and coherent positions and not on a collection of points of opposition and recriminations" - as the statutes say) is not in itself a "positive" phenomenon: such a phenomenon is at best "the manifestation of an immaturity of the organisation" as the statutes also say;

- the only positive character of a tendency is to permit the most clear and coherent elaboration of an alternative orientation to that of the majority of the organisation when it appears, in the course of the debates in the latter, when such an orientation is emerging: that is why, in general, tendencies are constituted at the approach of congresses in order to present, on one or several points on the agenda, texts and amendments defending a different orientation to that which appears in the documents submitted to the congress by the central organ;

- in this sense, a tendency is all the more necessary when the orientation given by the central organ is erroneous or insufficient. However , until now, while the central organs of the ICC (and notably the IS) may make mistakes, the latter have been, in general, limited and/or corrected by the central organs themselves rapidly enough.

- the latter, which is true of the past, must not be understood as the expression of a sort of infallibility of these central organs for the future: on the contrary it is the responsibility of the whole organisation and of all the militants to maintain a permanent vigilance with regard to the orientations, positions and activities of these central organs.

- Consequently, one cannot say that it is a proof of the specific weakness of the central organs if the organisation hasn't known, until now, a real tendency

- However, this fact reveals in effect the existence in the whole of the organisation of a certain number of incomprehensions and weaknesses, and notably a certain superficiality in the agreement given to the orientations elaborated by the ICC at its congresses and territorial meetings: it is a problem which has often been raised by the central organs in their activity reports, but it is not in their capacity to resolve them by themselves; its the whole of the organisation and all the militants who must do it.

[9] [48] MC was a comrade who had militated since the revolutionary wave that followed the First World War. He was excluded from the French Communist Party at the end of the 20s as a Left oppositionist and militated in different organisations of the Communist Left, notably the Italian Fraction from1938. He was the principle founder of the French Communist Left, the political ancestor of the ICC. He died in December 1990 (see the articles on this subject that we published in International Review n°65 and n°66)

[10] [49] "It wasn't Chenier who founded the tendency and the crisis, but the latent crisis in the ICC permitted Chenier to catalyse and manipulate it for motivations which, if they could not be fully seen, were more a question of pathological ambition than politics. The commission can reply neither in one sense nor the other to the question if his actions obeyed orders from the outside - as several witnesses have suggested - but it can affirm that he was a deeply suspicious and hypocritical element, perfectly capable of serving any cause looking to destroy from the inside the whole organisation in which be was able to infiltrate." (Report of the Inquiry Commission). For the comrades who don't know this period of the life of the ICC, one can give several illustrations of the behaviour and personality of Chenier:

- in secret correspondence and in the wings, he worked on the feelings of comrades and pushed them to "go into action" in the meetings of the organisation while he himself was particularly  moderate and conciliatory in these same meetings;

- with the members of the organisation he was always very fraternal, charming even, because he wished to enrol them in his tendency, because lie tried to dissipate any mistrust on the part of those who, in the wings, he had made the worst calumnies;

- he used women as an instrument of his manoeuvres: he pushed his companion K into the arms of JM a founder member of WR and who had a large influence amongst the comrades of the section; playing on the heart strings, he sent orders to K to carry out his manoeuvres ; moreover, he seduced Jo, ex-companion of JM, who came to join him in Lille and who he put to work (notably in translating into English his public or secret documents and as an agent amongst her friends in GB) and who he threw into the street when he no longer needed her, in other words when his attempted putsch in the British section was thwarted.

This is the sort of person the ICC had the weakness to let into its ranks by lack of vigilance. It should be noted that this element became a member of the French section's Executive Commission, and it is not absurd to think that, if he had not been unmasked rapidly enough, he would even have become a member of the International Bureau.

[11] [50] In a text written in 1980, comrade MC already raised this question: "I won't waste my time on this type of recrimination because I find it indecent. When one knows a little of the lives of revolutionary militants, not only in exceptional moments, like war or revolution, but in ‘normal'  life, when one thinks for example of the lives of the militants of the Italian Fraction in the 30s, all immigrants a good part of whom were deported, illegal, unskilled workers, unemployed and with unstable work and housing, with children (without any family support) who, often, went hungry, these militants continued their activity in these conditions 20, 30, 40 years...one can only find the complaints and recriminations of certain ‘critiques' purely and simply indecent. In place of jeremiads, we must be aware that the group and the militants live today in exceptionally favourable conditions. Until now we haven't known repression, nor illegality, nor unemployment, nor major material difficulties. That's why today, even more than in other conditions. the militant has not to make demands of a personal character, but to always offer the most he can give, without waiting for an invitation". (MC "Revolutionary organisation and the Militant" 1980)

[12] [51] "It is nonsensical to see the nomination of comrades to commissions as a ‘promotion` and to consider it as an honour and a privilege. To he nominated to a commission is a supplementary responsibility and many comrades would like to he liberated from it. In so far as that is not possible, it is important that they carry it out as conscientiously as possible. It is very important not to replace this real question of accomplishing well the tasks which have been conferred on them with another, false, typically leftist question: the quest for honorary positions" (MC 1980).

[13] [52] "The proletarian vision is otherwise. Because it is a historic and the last class of history, its vision tends to be global and in the latter the diverse phenomena are only aspects, moments of a whole. That's why the proletarian militant is not conditioned by: ‘what position do 1 occupy', nor motivated by any individual ambition. Whether it is writing, theoretical questions, or typewriting, printing a leaflet, demonstrating in the street, or selling the paper that other comrades have written, it's always the same militant, because the action he participates in is always political and whatever the particular activity, it comes from a political choice and expresses his sharing of this unity, to the political body: the political group". (MC 1980)

[14] [53] "1t is not only the fact of the division between theoretical work and practical work, between theory and practice, between the leadership which decides and the base which carries out, which is the manifestation of the division of society into antagonistic classes, but equally the intellectual obsession which is preoccupied with this fact, expressing the inability to go beyond this level, situating still on the same level simply turning the coin over, but conserving it nonetheless." (ibid)

[15] [54] It was the proof that Pleckhanov was being won by bourgeois ideology (he who had written the excellent book on the ,role of the individual in history): in the final analysis the difference of attitude between Lenin and PIeckhanov on this question prefigured, in a certain way, the attitude they would have faced with the revolution of the proletariat

[16] [55] "In the second half of the 60s, small circles of friends, were constituted by elements for the  most part very young with no political experience, living in the student milieu. On the individual level their existence seemed purely accidental. On the objective level - the only one where a real explanation can be found - these circles corresponded to the end of the post-war reconstruction, and the first signs that capitalism was returning to the open phase of its permanent crisis, giving rise to a resurgence of class struggle. Despite what the individuals composing these circles might have thought, imagining that their group was based on friendship, the attempt to realise their daily life together, these circles only survived to the extent that they were politicised, became political groups, and accomplished and assumed their destiny. The circles who didn't become conscious of this were swallowed up and decomposed in the leftist or modernist swamp or disappeared into nature. Such is our own history. And it is not without difficulties that we have survived this process of transformation from a circle of friends into a political group, where unity based on affection, personal sympathy, the same life style, gave way to a political cohesion and a solidarity on a conviction that one is engaged in the same historical combat: the proletarian revolution (...) One must not confuse the political organisation that we are with the cherished communities of the student movement, where the only raison d'être is the illusion of some discontented individuals that together they can overcome the constraints that decadent society imposes and mutually realise their personal life." (MC 1980).

[17] [56] We have some difficulty in translating the original French expression "chef de bande", which may mean either a gangster boss or the leading figure in a group of friends. The expression "gang leader" should here be taken in the latter sense (translator's note).

[18] [57] "...in a bourgeois organisation, the existence of divergences is based on the defence of this or that orientation to manage capitalism, or more simply on the defence of this or that sector of the dominant class or this or that clique, orientations or interests which sustain themselves in a durable way and which must he conciliated by an ‘equal sharing' of posts between the representatives. In a communist organisation, by contrast, the divergences don't express the defence of material or personal interests or particular pressure groups, but are the translation of a living and dynamic process of clarification of problems which pose themselves to the class and destined, as such, to be re absorbed with the deepening of the discussion and in the light of experience". (Report of 1982, point 6).

[19] [58] "On this question, it is important that the practice of invitations to meals or personal gatherings has a sense of responsibility. Comrades getting together around a good meal may be a good occasion to reinforce the links between members of the organisation and develop sentiments of fraternity between them, overcoming the atomisation which today's society engenders (notably amongst the more isolated comrades). However it is necessary to be sure that this practice is not turned into ‘clan politics':

- by selective invitations with the objective of winning the friendship and confidence of those who could join the clan or ‘influential group';

- by discussions which aggravate the cleavages within the organisation, undermining the confidence between militants and groups of militants".

[20] [59] A revolutionary of the stature of Trotsky had, on numerous occasions, shown that he didn't understand these questions well. Enough said!

Every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art. History has known the slave-owning cultures of the East and of classic antiquity, the feudal culture of medieval Europe and the bourgeois culture which now rules the world. It would follow from this that the proletariat has also to create its own culture and its own art.

The question, however, is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Societies in which slave owners were the ruling class, existed for many, many centuries. The same is true of feudalism. Bourgeois culture, if one were to count only from the time of its open and turbulent manifestation, that is, from the period of the Renaissance, has existed five centuries, but it did not reach its greatest flowering until the nineteenth century, or, more correctly, the second half of it. History shows that the formation of a new culture which centres around a ruling class demands considerable time and reaches completion only at the period preceding the political decadence of that class.

Will the proletariat have enough time to create a “proletarian” culture? In contrast to the regime of the slave owners and of the feudal lords and of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat regards its dictatorship as a brief period of transition. When we wish to denounce the all-too-optimistic views about the transition to socialism, we point out that the period of the social revolution, on a world scale, will last not months and not years, but decades - decades, but not centuries, and certainly not thousands of years. Can the proletariat in this time create a new culture? It is legitimate to doubt this, because the years of social revolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which destruction will occupy more room than new construction. At any rate the energy of the proletariat itself will be spent mainly in conquering power, in retaining and strengthening it and in applying it to the most urgent needs of existence and of further struggle. The proletariat, however, will reach its highest tension and the fullest manifestation of its class character during this revolutionary period and it will be within such narrow limits that the possibility of planned, cultural reconstruction will be confined.

On the other hand, as the new regime will be more and more protected from political and military surprises and as the conditions for cultural creation will become more favourable, the proletariat will be more and more dissolved into a socialist community and will free itself from its class characteristics and thus cease to be a proletariat. In other words, there can be no question of the creation of a new culture, that is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of dictatorship. The cultural reconstruction, which will begin when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in history will have disappeared, will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture. We frequently seem to forget this.
The formless talk about proletarian culture, in antithesis to bourgeois culture, feeds on the extremely uncritical identification of the historic destinies of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie. A shallow and purely liberal method of making analogies of historic forms has nothing in common with Marxism. There is no real analogy between the historic development of the bourgeoisie and of the working class.

The development of bourgeois culture began several centuries before the bourgeoisie took into its own hands the power of the state by means of a series of revolutions. Even when the bourgeoisie was a third estate, almost deprived of its rights, it played a great and continually growing part in all the fields of culture. This is especially clear in the case of architecture. The Gothic churches were not built suddenly, under the impulse of a religious inspiration. The construction of Cologne cathedral, its architecture and its sculpture, sum up the architectural experience of mankind from the time of the cave and combine the elements of this experience in a new style which expresses the culture of its own epoch which is, in the final analysis, the social structure and technique of this epoch. The old pre-bourgeoisie of the guilds was the factual builder of the Gothic. When it grew and waxed strong, that is, when it became richer, the bourgeoisie passed through the Gothic stage consciously and actively and created its own architectural style, not for the church, however, but for its own palaces.

With its basis on the Gothic, it turned to antiquity, especially to Roman architecture and the Moorish, and applied all these to the conditions and needs of the new city community, thus creating the Renaissance (Italy at the end of the first quarter of the fifteenth century). Specialists may count the elements which the Renaissance owes to antiquity and those it owes to the Gothic and may argue as to which side is the stronger. But the Renaissance only begins when the new social class, already culturally satiated, feels itself strong enough to come out from under the yoke of the Gothic arch, to look at Gothic art and on all that preceded it as material for its own disposal, and to use the technique of the past for its own artistic aims. This refers also to all the other arts, but with this difference, that because of their greater flexibility, that is, of their lesser dependence upon utilitarian aims and materials, the ‘free’ arts do not reveal the dialectics of successive styles with such firm logic as does architecture.

From the time of the Renaissance and of the Reformation, which created more favourable intellectual and political conditions for the bourgeoisie in feudal society, to the time of the revolution which transferred power to the bourgeoisie (in France), there passed three or four centuries of growth in the material and intellectual force of the bourgeoisie. The Great French Revolution and the wars which grew out of it temporarily lowered the material level of culture. But later the capitalist regime became established as the ‘natural’ and the ‘eternal.’ Thus the fundamental processes of the growth of bourgeois culture and of its crystallisation into style were determined by the characteristics of the bourgeoisie as a possessing and exploiting class. The bourgeoisie not only developed materially within feudal society, entwining itself in various ways with the latter and attracting wealth into its own hands, but it weaned the intelligentsia to its side and created its cultural foundation (schools, universities, academies, newspapers, magazines) long before it openly took possession of the state. It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.

But one may answer: it took thousands of years to create the slave-owning art and only hundreds of years for the bourgeois art. Why, then, could not proletarian art be created in tens of years? The technical bases of life are not at all the same at present and therefore the tempo is also different. This objection, which at first sight seems convincing, in reality misses the crux of the question. Undoubtedly, in the development of the new society, the time will come when economics, cultural life and art will receive the greatest impulse forward. At the present time we can only create fancies about their tempo. In a society which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one’s daily bread, in which community restaurants will prepare good, wholesome and tasteful food for all to choose, in which communal laundries will wash clean everyone’s good linen, in which children, all the children, will be well-fed and strong and gay, and in which they will absorb the fundamental elements of science and art as they absorb albumen and air and the warmth of the sun, in a society in which electricity and the radio will not be the crafts they are today, but will come from inexhaustible sources of superpower at the call of a central button, in which there will be no ‘useless mouths’, in which the liberated egotism of man’s mighty force will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of the universe-in such a society the dynamic development of culture will be incomparable with anything that went on in the past. But all this will come only after a climb, prolonged and difficult, which is still ahead of us. And we are speaking only about the period of the climb.

But is not the present moment dynamic? It is in the highest degree. But its dynamics is centred in politics. The war and the revolution were dynamic, but very much at the expense of technology and culture. It is true that the war has produced a long series of technical inventions. But the poverty which it has produced has put off the practical application of these inventions for a long time and with this their possibility of revolutionising life. This refers to radio, to aviation, and to many mechanical discoveries.
On the other hand, the revolution lays out the ground for a new society. But it does so with the methods of the old society, with the class struggle, with violence, destruction and annihilation. If the proletarian revolution had not come, mankind would have been strangled by its own contradictions. The revolution saved society and culture, but by means of the most cruel surgery. All the active forces are concentrated in politics and in the revolutionary struggle, everything else is shoved back into the background and everything which is a hindrance is cruelly trampled underfoot. In this process, of course there is an ebb and flow; military communism gives place to the NEP, which, in its turn, passes through various stages.

But in its essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organisation for the production of the culture of a new society, but a revolutionary and military system struggling for it. One must not forget this. We think that the historian of the future will place the culminating point of the old society on the second of August, 1914, when the maddened power of bourgeois culture let loose upon the world the blood and fire of an imperialistic war. The beginning of the new history of mankind will be dated from November 7, 1917. The fundamental stages of the development of mankind we think will be established somewhat as follows: prehistoric ‘history’ of primitive man; ancient history, whose rise was based on slavery; the Middle Ages, based on serfdom; capitalism, with free wage exploitation; and finally, socialist society, with, let us hope, its painless transition to a stateless commune. At any rate, the twenty, thirty, or fifty years of proletarian world revolution will go down in history as the most difficult climb from one system to another, but in no case as an independent epoch of proletarian culture.
At present, in these years of respite, some illusions may arise in our Soviet Republic as regards this. We have put the cultural questions on the order of the day. By projecting our present-day problems into the distant future, one can think oneself through a long series of years into proletarian culture. But no matter how important and vitally necessary our culture-building may be, it is entirely dominated by the approach of European and world revolution. We are, as before, merely soldiers in a campaign. We are bivouacking for a day. Our shirt has to be washed, our hair has to be cut and combed, and, most important of all, the rifle has to be cleaned and oiled. Our entire present-day economic and cultural work is nothing more than a bringing of ourselves into order between two battles and two campaigns. The principal battles are ahead and may be not so far off. Our epoch is not yet an epoch of new culture, but only the entrance to it. We must, first of all, take possession, politically, of the most important elements of the old culture, to such an extent, at least, as to be able to pave the way for a new culture.

This becomes especially clear when one considers the problem as one should, in its international character. The proletariat was, and remains, a non-possessing class. This alone restricted it very much from acquiring those elements of bourgeois culture which have entered into the inventory of mankind forever. In a certain sense, one may truly say that the proletariat also, at least the European proletariat, had its epoch of reformation. This occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, when, without making an attempt on the power of the state directly, it conquered for itself under the bourgeois system more favourable legal conditions for development.

But, in the first place, for this period of ‘reformation’ (parliamentarism and social reforms), which coincides mainly with the period of the Second International, history allowed the working class approximately as many decades as it allowed the bourgeoisie centuries. In the second place, the proletariat, during this preparatory period, did not at all become a richer class and did not concentrate in its hands material power. On the contrary, from a social and cultural point of view, it became more and more unfortunate. The bourgeoisie came into power fully armed with the culture of its time. The proletariat, on the other hand, comes into power fully armed only with the acute need of mastering culture. The problem of a proletariat which has conquered power consists, first of all, in taking into its own hands the apparatus of culture - the industries, schools, publications, press, theatres, etc. - which did not serve it before, and thus to open up the path of culture for itself.
Our task in Russia is complicated by the poverty of our entire cultural tradition and by the material destruction wrought by the events of the last decade. After the conquest of power and after almost six years of struggle for its retention and consolidation, our proletariat is forced to turn all its energies towards the creation of the most elementary conditions of material existence and of contact with the ABC of culture - ABC in the true and literal sense of the word. It is not for nothing that we have put to ourselves the task of having universal literacy in Russia by the tenth anniversary of the Soviet regime.

Someone may object that I take the concept of proletarian culture in too broad a sense. That if there may not be a fully and entirely developed proletarian culture, yet the working class may succeed in putting its stamp upon culture before it is dissolved into a communist society. Such an objection must be registered first of all as a serious retreat from the position that there will be a proletarian culture. It is not to be questioned but that the proletariat, during the time of its dictatorship, will put its stamp upon culture. However, this is a far cry from a proletarian culture in the sense of a developed and completely harmonious system of knowledge and of art in all material and spiritual fields of work. For tens of millions of people for the first time in history to master reading and writing and arithmetic is in itself a new cultural fact of great importance. The essence of the new culture will be not an aristocratic one for a privileged minority, but a mass culture, a universal and popular one. Quantity will pass into quality; with the growth of the quantity of culture will come a rise in its level and a change in its character. But this process will develop only through a series of historic stages. In the degree to which it is successful, it will weaken the class character of the proletariat and in this way it will wipe out the basis of a proletarian culture.

But how about the upper strata of the working class? About its intellectual vanguard? Can one not say that in these circles, narrow though they are, a development of proletarian culture is already taking place today? Have we not the Socialist Academy? Red professors? Some are guilty of putting the question in this very abstract way. The idea seems to be that it is possible to create a proletarian culture by laboratory methods.
In fact, the texture of culture is woven at the points where the relationships and interactions of the intelligentsia of a class and of the class itself meet. The bourgeois culture - the technical, political, philosophical and artistic, was developed by the interaction of the bourgeoisie and its inventors, leaders, thinkers and poets. The reader created the writer and the writer created the reader. This is true in an immeasurably greater degree of the proletariat, because its economics and politics and culture can be built only on the basis of the creative activity of the masses.

The main task of the proletarian intelligentsia in the immediate future is not the abstract formation of a new culture regardless of the absence of a basis for it, but a definite culture-bearing, that is, a systematic, planned and, of course, critical imparting to the backward masses of the essential elements of the culture which already exists. It is impossible to create a class culture behind the backs of a class. And to build culture in cooperation with the working class and in close contact with its general historic rise, one has to build socialism, even though in the rough. In this process, the class characteristics of society will not become stronger, but, on the contrary, will begin to dissolve and to disappear in direct ratio to the success of the revolution. The liberating significance of the dictatorship of the proletariat consists in the fact that it is temporary - for a brief period only -that it is a means of clearing the road and of laying the foundations of a society without classes and of a culture based upon solidarity.

In order to explain the idea of a period of culture-bearing in the development of the working class more concretely, let us consider the historic succession not of classes, but of generations. Their continuity is expressed in the fact that each one of them, given a developing and not a decadent society, adds its treasure to the past accumulations of culture. But before it can do so, each new generation must pass through a stage of apprenticeship. It appropriates existing culture and transforms it in its own way, making it more or less different from that of the older generation. But this appropriation is not, as yet, a new creation, that is, it is not a creation of new cultural values, but only a premise for them. To a certain degree, that which has been said may also be applied to the destinies of the working masses which are rising towards epoch-making creative work. One has only to add that before the proletariat will have passed out of the stage of cultural apprenticeship, it will have ceased to be a proletariat.

Let us also not forget that the upper layer of the bourgeois third estate passed its cultural apprenticeship under the roof of feudal society; that while still within the womb of feudal society it surpassed the old ruling estates culturally and became the instigator of culture before it came into power. It is different with the proletariat in general and with the Russian proletariat in particular. The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture. The working class strives to transform the state apparatus into a powerful pump for quenching the cultural thirst of the masses. This is a task of immeasurable historic importance. But, if one is not to use words lightly, it is not as yet a creation of a special proletarian culture. ‘Proletarian culture,’ “proletarian art,” etc., in three cases out of ten are used uncritically to designate the culture and the art of the coming communist society, in two cases out of ten to designate the fact that special groups of the proletariat are acquiring separate elements of pre-proletarian culture, and finally, in five cases out of ten, it represents a jumble of concepts and words out of which one can make neither head nor tail.

Here is a recent example, one of 6 hundred, where a slovenly, uncritical and dangerous use of the term ‘proletarian culture is made. “The economic basis and its corresponding system of superstructures,” writes Sizoy, “form the cultural characteristics of an epoch (feudal, bourgeois or proletarian).” Thus the epoch of proletarian culture is placed here on the same plane as that of the bourgeois. But that which is here called the proletarian epoch is only a brief transition from one social-cultural system to another, from capitalism to socialism. The establishment of the bourgeois regime was also preceded by a transitional epoch. But the bourgeois revolution tried, successfully, to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie, while the proletarian revolution has for its aim the liquidation of the proletariat as a class in as brief a period as possible. The length of this period depends entirely upon the success of the revolution. Is it not amazing that one can forget this and place the proletarian cultural epoch on the same plane with that of feudal and bourgeois culture?

But if this is so, does it follow that we have no proletarian science? Are we not to say that the materialistic conception of history and the Marxist criticism of political economy represent invaluable scientific elements of a proletarian culture?

Of course, the materialistic conception of history and the labour theory of value have an immeasurable significance for the arming of the proletariat as a class and for science in general. There is more true science in the Communist Manifesto alone than in all the libraries of historical and historico-philosophical compilations, speculations and falsifications of the professors. But can one say that Marxism represents a product of proletarian culture? And can one say that we are already making use of Marxism, not in political battles only, but in broad scientific tasks as well?

Marx and Engels came out of the ranks of the petty bourgeois democracy and, of course, were brought up on its culture and not on the culture of the proletariat. If there had been no working class, with its strikes, struggles, sufferings and revolts, there would, of course, have been no scientific communism, because there would have been no historical necessity for it. But its theory was formed entirely on the basis of bourgeois culture, both scientific and political, though it declared a fight to the finish upon that culture. Under the pressure of capitalistic contradictions, the universalising thought of the bourgeois democracy, of its boldest, most honest, and most far-sighted representatives, rises to the heights of a marvellous renunciation, armed with all the critical weapons of bourgeois science. Such is the origin of Marxism.

The proletariat found its weapon in Marxism not at once, and not fully even to this day. Today this weapon serves political aims almost primarily and exclusively. The broad realistic application and the methodological development of dialectical materialism are still entirely in the future. Only in a socialist society will Marxism cease to be a one-sided weapon of political struggle and become a means of scientific creation, a most important element and instrument of spiritual culture.

All science, in greater or lesser degree, unquestionably reflects the tendencies of the ruling class. The more closely science attaches itself to the practical tasks of conquering nature (physics, chemistry, natural science in general), the greater is its non-class and human contribution. The more deeply science is connected with the social mechanism of exploitation (political economy), or the more abstractly it generalises the entire experience of mankind (psychology, not in its experimental, physiological sense but in its so-called philosophic sense), the more does it obey the class egotism of the bourgeoisie and the less significant is its contribution to the general sum of human knowledge. In the domain of the experimental sciences, there exist different degrees of scientific integrity and objectivity, depending upon the scope of the generalisations made. As a general rule, the bourgeois tendencies have found a much freer place for themselves in the higher spheres of methodological philosophy, of Weltanschauung. It is therefore necessary to clear the structure of science from the bottom to the top, or, more correctly, from the top to the bottom, because one has to begin from the upper stories.

But it would be naive to think that the proletariat must revamp critically all science inherited from the bourgeoisie before applying it to socialist reconstruction. This is just the same as saying with the utopian moralists: before building a new society, the proletariat must rise to the heights of communist ethics. As a matter of fact, the proletarian will reconstruct ethics as well as science radically, but he will do so after he will have constructed a new society, even though in the rough.

But are we not travelling in a vicious circle? How is one to build a new society with the aid of the old science, and the old morals? Here we must bring in a little dialectics, that very dialectics which we now put so uneconomically into lyric poetry and into our office bookkeeping and into our cabbage soup and into our porridge. In order to begin work, the proletarian vanguard needs certain points of departure, certain scientific methods which liberate the mind from the ideological yoke of the bourgeoisie; it is mastering these, in part has already mastered them. It has tested its fundamental method in many battles, under various conditions. But this is a long way from proletarian science. A revolutionary class cannot stop its struggle because the party has not yet decided whether it should or should not accept the hypothesis of electrons and ions, the psychoanalytical theory of Freud, the new mathematical discoveries of relativity, etc. True, after it has conquered power, the proletariat will find a much greater opportunity for mastering science and for revising it. This is more easily said than done.

The proletariat cannot postpone socialist reconstruction until the time when its new scientists, many of whom are still running about in short trousers, will test and clean all the instruments and all the channels of knowledge. The proletariat rejects what is clearly unnecessary, false and reactionary, and in the various fields of its reconstruction makes use of the methods and conclusions of present-day science, taking them necessarily with the percentage of reactionary class-alloy which is contained in them. The practical result will justify itself generally and on the whole, because such a use when controlled by a socialist goal will gradually manage and select the methods and conclusions of the theory. And by that time there will have grown up scientists who are educated under the new conditions. At any rate, the proletariat will have to carry its socialist reconstruction to quite a high degree, that is, provide for real material security and for the satisfaction of society culturally before it will be able to carry out a general purification of science from top to bottom. I do not mean to say by this anything against the Marxist work of criticism, which many in small circles and in seminars are trying to carry through in various fields. This work is necessary and fruitful. It should be extended and deepened in every way. But one has to maintain the marxian sense of the measure of things to count up the specific gravity of such experiments and efforts today in relation to the general scale of our historic work.

Does the foregoing exclude the possibility that even in the period of revolutionary dictatorship, there might appear eminent scientists, inventors, dramatists and poets out of the ranks of the proletariat? Not in the least. But it would be extremely light-minded to give the name of proletarian culture even to the most valuable achievements of individual representatives of the working class. One cannot turn the concept of culture into the small change of individual daily living and determine the success of a class culture by the proletarian passports of individual inventors or poets. Culture is the organic sum of knowledge and capacity which characterises the entire society, or at least its ruling class. It embraces and penetrates all fields of human work and unifies them into a system. Individual achievements rise above this level and elevate it gradually.

Does such an organic interrelation exist between our present-day proletarian poetry and the cultural work of the working class in its entirety? It is quite evident that it does not. Individual workers or groups of workers are developing contacts with the art which was created by the bourgeois intelligentsia and are making use of its technique, for the time being, in quite an eclectic manner. But is it for the purpose of giving expression to their own internal proletarian world? The fact is that it is far from being so. The work of the proletarian poets lacks an organic quality, which is produced only by a profound interaction between art and the development of culture in general. We have the literary works of talented and gifted proletarians, but that is not proletarian literature. However, they may prove to be some of its springs.

It is possible that in the work of the present generation many germs and roots and springs will be revealed to which some future descendant will trace the various sectors of the culture of the future, just as our present-day historians of art trace the theatre of Ibsen to the church mystery, or impressionism and cubism to the paintings of the monks. In the economy of art, as in the economy of nature, nothing is lost, and everything is connected in the whole. But factually, concretely, vitally, the present-day work of the poets who have sprung from the proletariat is not developing at all in accordance with the plan which is behind the process of preparing the conditions of the future socialist culture, that is, the process of elevating the masses.