Introduction

The following articles were originally published in 1936 in issues 31 and 32 of Bilan, the organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. The Fraction was obliged to outline the marxist position on the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine following the Arab general strike against Jewish immigration, which had degenerated into a series of bloody pogroms. Although a number of the specificities of the situation have since changed, what is striking about these articles is how profoundly applicable they are to the situation in the same region today. In particular, they demonstrate with a great deal of precision how the ‘national’ movements of both Jews and Arabs, though engendered by a real experience of oppression and persecution, had become inextricably entangled with the clash of rival imperialisms; and by the same token, how both were being used to obscure the shared class interests of Jewish and Arab proletarians, driving them into mutual slaughter for the interests of their exploiters. The articles thus demonstrate that:

• the Zionist movement only became a realistic project once it had received the backing of British imperialism, which was seeking to create what it called “a little loyal Ulster” in the Middle East, a zone of increasing strategic importance since the development of the oil industry;

• Britain, while backing the Zionist project, was also playing a dual game. It had to reckon with a huge Arab/Muslim component in its colonial empire; and it had made cynical use of Arab national aspirations during the First World War, when its main concern had been to finish off the crumbling Ottoman empire. It had therefore made all kinds of promises to the Arab population of Palestine and the rest of the region. This classic policy of ‘divide and rule’ had a double aim: to balance out the conflicting national and imperialist aspirations in the areas under its domination, while at the same time keeping the exploited masses of the region from recognising their common material interests;

• The Arab ‘liberation movement’, though opposed to British support for Zionism, was thus by no means anti-imperialist – any more than were those elements within Zionism who were already turning to military action against the British. Both nationalist movements operated entirely inside the overall imperialist game. If a nationalist faction turned against its former imperialist backers, it could only seek support from another. By the time of the Israeli war of Independence in 1948, virtually the whole Zionist movement had become openly anti-British, but in doing so had already become a tool of the newly triumphant American imperialism, which was willing to use any instrument at hand to thrust aside the old colonial empires. Similarly, Bilan shows that when Arab nationalism entered into open conflict with the British, this merely opened the door to the ambitions of Italian (and also German) imperialism; and from our vantage point, we can see that the Palestinian bourgeoisie would later turn to the Russian bloc, and then France and other European powers, in its conflicts with the USA.

The principal changes that have come about since these articles were written, of course, is that Zionism succeeded in establishing its state, which fundamentally shifted the balance of forces in the region; and the leading imperialist power in the region is no longer Britain but the US. But even here the essence remains the same: the establishment of the state of Israel, which resulted in the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians, only brought to its culminating point the tendency towards the expropriation of the Palestinian peasants which, as Bilan had noted was inherent in the Zionist project; and the USA, is itself compelled to maintain a contradictory balance between its support for the Zionist state on the one hand, and the necessity to keep as much as possible of the ‘Arab world’ under its influence on the other. Meanwhile the USA’s rivals continue to make whatever they can of the USA’s difficulties in keeping all these balls in the air at the same time.

Most relevant of all is Bilan’s clear denunciation of the way that both Arab and Jewish chauvinism was used to keep the workers at each others’ throats; in spite, indeed because of this, the Italian Fraction refused to make any compromise in its defence of authentic internationalism: “For real revolutionaries, naturally, there is no ‘Palestinian question’, but only the struggle of all the exploited of the Near east, Arabs and Jews included, which is part of the more general struggle of the all the exploited of the entire world for the communist revolution”. It thus totally rejected the Stalinist policy of supporting Arab nationalism as an alleged means of combating imperialism. The policies of the Stalinist parties of the day are now carried on by the Trotskyists and other leftists, who make themselves the mouthpieces of the ‘Palestinian Resistance’. These positions are as counter-revolutionary today as they were in 1936.

Today, when the masses of both sides are more than ever being whipped up into frenzy of mutual hatred, as the toll of massacre rises way beyond the levels reached in the 1930s, intransigent internationalism remains the only antidote to the nationalist poison.

ICC

Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine (part 1)

The aggravation of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine, the accentuation of the anti-British orientation of the Arab world, which during the world war was a pawn of British imperialism, has induced us to consider the Jewish problem and that of the pan-Arab nationalist movement. Here we will try to treat the first of these two problems.

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and the dispersion of the Jewish people, the different countries where they came from, when they weren't expelled from their territories (less for the religious reasons invoked by the Catholic authorities than for economic reasons, notably the confiscation of their goods and the annulment of their credit), in regulating their conditions of life after the Papal Bull in the mid-16th century, which was the rule in every country, obliged them to live confined in closed quarters and obliged them to wear the infamous insignia.

Expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, they emigrated to Germany, Italy and Poland; expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1498, they took refuge in Holland, Italy and above all in the Ottoman Empire which then occupied north Africa and the greater part of south east Europe; there they formed, and even form today, this community talking a Jewish-Spanish dialect, whereas those emigrants in Poland, Russia, Hungary, etc., talk the Jewish-German dialect (Yiddish). The Hebrew language, which during this epoch remains the language of the Rabbis, was drawn out from the domain of dead languages to become the language of the Jews in Palestine with the present nationalist Jewish movement.

While the Jews of the west, the least numerous, and partially those of the United States, acquired an economic and political influence through their weight on the money markets and their intellectual weight through the number of them found in the liberal professions, the great masses were concentrated in eastern Europe and already, at the end of the 18th century, grouped 80 percent of the European Jews. Through the first departure from Poland and the annexation of Bessarabia (area around Ukraine - trans.), they came under the domination of the Czars who, at the beginning of the 19th century, had the two layers of Jews on their territories. From the beginning, the Russian government adopted a repressive policy dating from Catherine II and this found its cruellest expression under Alexander III who envisaged the solution to the Jewish problem in the following way: a third must be converted, a third must emigrate and a third must be exterminated. They were confined to a certain number of districts of the north-west provinces (White Russia), of the south-east (Ukraine and Bessarabia) and in Poland. They could not live outside of the towns and above all they could not live in the industrial areas (mining and metal working regions). But it's above all amongst the Jews who made a way for themselves in the penetration of capitalism in the 19th century and that determined a differentiation of the classes.

It was the pressure of Russian governmental terrorism which gave the first impulsion to Palestinian colonisation. However the first Jews had already returned to Palestine following expulsion from Spain at the end of the 15th century and the first agricultural colony was constituted close to Jaffa in 1870. But the first serious immigration only began after 1880, when police persecution and the first pogroms led to emmigration towards America and Palestine.

This first "Alya" (Jewish immigration) of 1882, the so-called "Biluimes", was mostly composed of Russian students who could be considered as the pioneers of Jewish colonisation in Palestine. The second "Alya" happened in 1904-05 as a repercussion of the crushing of the first revolution in Russia. The number of Jews established in Palestine which was some 12,000 in 1850, rose to 35,000 in 1882 and to 90,000 in 1914.

These were all Jews from Russia and Romania, intellectuals and proletarians, because the Jewish capitalists of the west, like the Rothschild's and the Hirsch's, limited themselves to a financial support which gave them a benevolent reputation as philanthropists, without it being necessary for them to give up their precious persons.

Among the "Biluimes" of 1882, the socialists were still few in number and that because in the controversy of the time it was a question of going towards Palestine or America and they were for the latter. In the first Jewish emigration to the United States, the socialists were thus very numerous and so this constitutes a good time for organisations, journals and even attempts at communist colonisation.

The second time that the question of seeing where Jewish immigration was leading was posed, as we have said, after the defeat of the first Russian revolution and following the aggravation of the pogroms characterised by those of Kitchinew (Chisinau, Moldavia - trans.).

The Zionism which attempted to assure the Jewish people a place in Palestine and which had just set up a National Fund for acquiring territory, was, at the time of the 7th Zionist Congress in Basle, divided between the traditionalist current which remained faithful to the constitution of the Jewish state in Palestine and the territorialists who were for colonisation elsewhere and, concretely, in Uganda which was offered by the British.

Alone a minority of socialist Jews, the Poales Zionists of Ber Borochov, remained faithful to the traditionalists, all the other Jewish socialist parties at the time, as the Zionist Socialists (S.S.) and the Serpistes - a sort of reproduction in the Jewish milieu of the Russian Social-Revolutionaries - declared themselves for territorialism. The oldest and the most powerful Jewish organisation of the time, the Bund, was, as we know, quite negative on the subject of the national question, at least in this period.

A decisive moment for the movement for national renaissance was opened with the world war of 1914. After the occupation of Palestine by British troops, to which the Jewish Legion of Jabotinsky rallied, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was promulgated which promised the constitution of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.

This promise was given its assent at the San Remo Conference of 1920 which put Palestine under British mandate.

The Balfour declaration led to a third "Alya" but it was above all the fourth, the most numerous, which coincided with the remit of the Palestinian mandate to Britain. This "Alya" already involved quite numerous layers of petty-bourgeois. We know that the latest immigration in Palestine which followed the rise of Hitler to power and which is certainly the most important already contained a strong percentage of capitalists.

If the first census made in 1922 in Palestine had regard to the ravages of the world war, only registering 84,000 Jews, 11% of the total population, that of 1931 already registered 175,000 of them. In 1934, the statistics give 307,000 out of a total population of one million, one hundred and seventy one thousand. Presently the figure given is of 400,000 Jews.

Eighty per cent of the Jews are established in the towns whose development is illustrated by the rapid appearance of the mushrooming town of Tel-Aviv; the development of Jewish industry is also rather rapid: in 1928 one could count 3,505 firms of which 782 had more than 4 workers, that's to say a total of 18,000 workers with a capital invested of 3.5 million pounds sterling.

The Jews established in the countryside represented only 20% faced with the Arabs who formed 65% of the agricultural population. But the Fellahs worked their land with primitive means, while the Jews in their colonies and plantations worked according to the intensive methods of capitalism with Arab labourers on very low wages.

The figures we have given already explain one side of the present conflict. For 20 centuries the Jews had abandoned Palestine and other populations were installed on the banks of the Jordan. Although the declarations of Balfour and the decisions of the League of Nations pretended to give respect to the rights of the occupants of Palestine, in reality the growth of Jewish immigration meant driving the Arabs out of their lands even if they were bought at a low price by the Jewish National Fund.

It is not through humanity towards "a persecuted people without a country" that Great Britain choose a pro-Jewish policy. It is the interests of high British finance where Jews have a predominant influence which determined this policy. On the other hand, from the beginning of Jewish colonisation one notices a contrast between Jewish and Arab proletarians. At the beginning the Jewish colonists had employed Jewish workers because they exploited their national fervour in order to defend themselves against Arab incursions. Afterwards, with the consolidation of the situation, the industrial and Jewish landed proprietors preferred Arab, to the more demanding Jewish labour.

Jewish workers, by setting up their unions, much more than the class struggle, took up in competition against the low Arab wages. That explains the chauvinist character of the Jewish workers' movement which is exploited by Jewish nationalism and British imperialism.

There are also naturally reasons of a political nature which are at the base of the present conflict. British imperialism, despite the hostility of the two races, wanted to make the two different states cohabit under the same roof and even create a bi-parliamentarism which envisaged a distinct parliament for Jews and Arabs.

In the Jewish camp, aside from the procrastinating directive of Weissman there are the revisionists of Jabotinsky who in fighting official Zionism, accused Great Britain of absenteeism, if not failing in its commitment, and who wanted to open Jewish immigration up to Trans-Jordan, Syria and the Sinai Peninsula.

The first conflicts which appeared in August 1929 and which unfolded around the Wailing Wall, provoked, according to the official statistics, the death of two hundred Arabs and a hundred and thirty Jews, figures certainly lower than reality, because if in the modern installations the Jews succeeded in repulsing the attacks, in Hebron, Safit and in some suburbs of Jerusalem, the Arabs went on to carry out some real pogroms.

These events marked a halt to the pro-Jewish British policy because the colonial British empire comprised many Muslims, India included, which was sufficient reason for it to be prudent.

Following this attitude of the British government towards the Jewish national homeland, the majority of the Jewish parties: the orthodox Zionists, the general Zionists and the revisionists went into opposition while the staunchest support for British policy managed at this time by the Labour Party, was represented by the Jewish Labour movement which was the political expression of the General Confederation of Labour, organising almost the totality of the Jewish workers in Palestine.

There was recently expressed. on the surface only, a common movement of Jewish and Arab struggle against the mandatory power. But the fire smouldered under the ashes and the explosion was composed on the the events of May last.

***

The Italian fascist press has been up in arms against the accusation of the "sanctionnist" press, that fascist agents had fomented the struggles in Palestine, an accusation already made regarding recent events in Egypt. Nobody can deny that fascism has a great interest in fanning the flames. Italian imperialism has never hidden its designs towards the Near-East, that's to say its desire to substitute itself for the mandatory powers in Palestine and Syria. Moreover, in the Mediterranean it possesses a powerful naval and military base represented by Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese (12 islands of the Aegean). British imperialism on the other hand, if it finds itself advantaged by the conflict between Arabs and Jews, because according to the old Roman formula divide et impera, it must divide in order to rule, it must however take account of Jewish financial power and the threat of the nationalist Arab movement.

This latter movement of which we will talk more another time, is a consequence of the world war which led to an industrialisation in India, Palestine and Syria and which strengthened the indigenous bourgeoisie which posed its candidature for government, that's to say for the exploitation of the indigenous masses.

The Arabs accuse Britain of wanting to make Palestine the Jewish national homeland, which would mean stealing the land from the indigenous population. They have again sent emissaries to Egypt, Syria and Morocco in order to lead an agitation in the Muslim world in favour of the Palestinian Arabs, so as to try to intensify the movement with a view of a national pan-Islamic union. They are encouraged by recent events in Syria where the mandatory power, France, has been obliged to capitulate in front of a general strike, and also by events in Egypt where agitation and the constitution of a single national front has obliged London to treat the government of Cairo as an equal. We don't know if the general strike of the Arabs in Palestine will obtain a similar success. We will examine this movement at the same time as the Arab problem in the next article.

Gatto MAMMONE

The Arab-Jewish Conflict in Palestine (Part 2)

As we saw in the first part of this article, when, after 2,000 years of "exile", the "Biluimes" acquired a sandy plain of territory to the south of Jaffa, they found other tribes, the Arabs, who took the place of those in Palestine. These latter were only some hundreds of thousands, either Arab Fellahs (peasants) or Bedouins (nomads); the peasants worked the soil with very primitive means, a soil belonging for the most part to the ground landlords (Effendi). British imperialism, as we know, in pushing these latifundists and the Arab bourgeoisie to join a struggle on its side during the world war, had promised them the constitution of an Arab national state. The Arab revolt was, in fact, of a decisive importance in the collapse of the Turko-German front in the Near-East, because it reduced to nothing the appeal from the Ottoman Calif to Holy War and held at bay numerous Turkish troops in Syria, without mentioning the destruction of the Turkish armies in Mesopotamia.

But if British imperialism had led this Arab revolt against Turkey, thanks to the promise to create an Arab state composed of all the provinces of the old Ottoman Empire (including Palestine), it didn't hesitate in the defence of its own interests to solicit, as a counter-point, the support of the Jewish Zionists by telling them that Palestine would be in their remit as much from the point of view of administration as for colonisation.

At the same time, it gained the support of French imperialism for it to cede the mandate over Syria, thus detaching this region, which formed with Palestine, an indissoluble historic and economic historical unity.

***

The letter that Lord Balfour addressed to Rothschild, president of the Zionist Federation of England on November 2 1917, communicated to him that the British government would look favourably on the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people and that he would use all his efforts for the realisation of this objective. Lord Balfour added that: "nothing would be done which could either harm the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish collectives existing in Palestine, or the rights and the political statute that the Jews enjoy in other countries".

Despite the ambiguous terms of this declaration, which allowed a new people to install themselves on their soil, the whole of the Arab population remained neutral at the beginning and even favourable to the setting up of a national Jewish homeland. The Arab proprietors, in fear that an agrarian law would be instituted, showed themselves willing to sell land. The Zionist leaders, solely absorbed with the preoccupation of the political order, did not profit from these offers and went as far as approving the defence of the Allenby government over the sale of land.

Soon, the Zionist bourgeoisie manifested tendencies to totally occupy (from the territorial and political point of view) Palestine by depossessing the native population and pushing it towards the desert. This tendency is shown today among the "revisionist" Zionists, that's to say in the pro-fascist current of the nationalist Jewish movement.

The area of arable land of Palestine is about 12 million metric "dounams" (one dounam = one tenth of a hectare) of which 5 to 6 million are currently under cultivation.

Here's how the area of land cultivated by the Jews in Palestine since 1899 has been established:

1899: 22 colonies, 5,000 inhabitants, 300,000 dounams.

1914: 43 colonies, 12,000 inhabitants, 400,000 dounams.

1922: 73 colonies, 15,000 inhabitants, 600,000 dounams.

1934: 160 colonies, 70,000 inhabitants, 1,200,000 dounams.

In order to judge the real value of this progression and the influence which comes from it, we mustn't forget that even today Arab cultivation of the land is of a primitive fashion, while the Jewish colonies employ the most modern cultivation methods.

Jewish capital invested in the agricultural enterprises are estimated at more than 100 million gold dollars, of which 65% is in the plantations. Although the Jews only possess 14% of the cultivated land, the value of products reaches a quarter of the total production.

For the orange plantations, the Jews manage 55% of the total crop.

***

It's in April 1920, in Jerusalem, and in May 1921, in Jaffa, that, under the form of pogroms, the first symptoms of Arab reaction occurs. Sir Herbert Samuel, High-Commissionaire in Palestine up to 1925, tried to appease the Arabs by stopping Jewish immigration, while promising to the Arabs a representative government and to assign to them the best land in the domain of the state.

After the great wave of colonisation of 1925, which reached its maximum with 33,000 immigrants, the situation worsened and ended up giving rise to the movements of 1929. It is at this time that the Bedouin tribes joined up with the Arab populations of Palestine, called for by Muslim agitators.

Following these events, the parliamentary commission of inquiry sent to Palestine and which is known as the Shaw Commission, concluded that the events were due to Jewish workers' immigration and the "scarcity" of land and it proposed to the government to buy land in order to compensate the Fellah removed from his land.

Afterwards, in May 1930, the British government accepted in their entirety, the conclusions of the Shaw Commission and again suspended Jewish workers' immigration to Palestine, the Jewish workers' movement - that the Shaw Commission had even refused to listen to - responded with a 24 hour protest strike, while the Poale-Zionists, in every country, as well as the large Jewish unions in America, protested against this measure through numerous demonstrations.

In October 1930, a new declaration concerning British policy in Palestine appeared and was known under the name of the "White Book".

It was equally unfavourable to Zionists arguments. But, faced with the ever-growing protests of the Jews, the Labour Government responded in February 1931, with a letter from MacDonald, which reaffirmed the right to work, to Jewish immigration and colonisation and authorised Jewish employers to hire Jewish labour when it preferred the latter rather than the Arabs - without taking into account the eventual increase of unemployment among the Arabs.

The Palestinian workers' movement hastened to put its trust in the British Labour government, whereas all the other Zionist parties remained in distrustful opposition.

We have demonstrated, in the preceding article, the reasons for the chauvinist character of the Palestinian workers' movement.

The Histadrut - the main Palestinian union - only included Jews (80% of Jewish workers are organised). It is only the necessity to raise the standard of life of the Arab masses, in order to protect the high wages of Jewish labour, which has lately determined its attempts at Arab organisation. But the embryonic unions grouped in "The Alliance" remain organically separate from Histadrut, the exception being the lorry drivers' union which includes the representatives of both races.

***

The general strike of Arabs in Palestine is now going into its fourth month. The guerrilla war continues, despite the recent decree which imposes the death penalty on anyone responsible for an attack; each day sees ambushes and raids against trains and cars, without counting the destruction and arson of Jewish property.

These events have already cost the mandatory power close to half-a-million pounds sterling, through the maintenance of the armed forces and through the reduction of budgetary duties, a consequence of the passive resistance and the economic boycott of the Arab masses. Recently, in the Commons, the Minister of the Colonies has given figures on the victims: 400 Muslims, 200 Jews and 100 police. Up to now, 1,800 Arabs and Jews have been judged and 1,200, of which 300 are Jews, condemned. According to the Minister, a hundred Arab nationalists have been deported to concentration camps.

Four communist leaders (2 Jews and 2 Armenians) are detained and 60 communists are under surveillance by the police. These are the official figures.

It is evident that the policy of British imperialism in Palestine naturally draws its inspiration from a colonial policy proper to any imperialism. This consists of basing itself on certain layers of the colonial population (by opposing races or different religious persuasions against each other, or again by arousing jealousies between chiefs or clans), which allows the imperialism to solidly establish its super-oppression over the colonial masses themselves without distinction between races or religions.

But if this manoeuvre was able to succeed in Morocco and in central Africa, in Palestine and in Syria the Arab nationalist movement presents a very compact resistance. It relies on the more or less independent countries which surround it: Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Irak, the Arab States and, moreover, is linked to the whole of the Muslim world which accounts for 300 million individuals.

Despite some contrasts between the the different Muslim states and despite the Anglophile policies of certain among them, the great danger for imperialism would be the constitution of an eastern bloc capable of imposing itself - this would be possible if the strengthening of a nationalist sentiment of the the indigenous bourgeoisie could prevent the awakening of the class revolt of the colonial exploited who would have had enough of their exploiters as much as European imperialism - and which would find a rallying point around Turkey which has again just affirmed its rights over the Dardanelles and which could again take up its pan-Islamic policy.

But, Palestine is of capital importance for British imperialism. If the Zionists thought they could obtain a "Jewish" Palestine, in reality they would only ever get a "British" Palestine. The Palestinian transit routes link Europe to India. They could replace the maritime route from Suez whose security has just been weakened by the establishment of Italian imperialism in Ethiopia. Nor should we forget that the pipe-line from Mosul ends up at the Palestinian port of Haifa.

Finally, British policy will always have to take account of the 100,000,000 Muslims of the British empire. Up to now, British imperialism has succeeded in Palestine in containing the threat represented by the Arab national independence movement. It opposes Zionism to the latter which, in pushing for the Jewish masses to emigrate to Palestine, dislocates the class movement of their country of origin where they would have found their place and, finally, it makes sure of a solid support for British policy in the Near-East.

The expropriation of land at derisory prices has plunged the Arab proletarians into the blackest misery and pushes them into the arms of the Arab nationalists, the big landowners and the nascent bourgeoisie. The latter evidently profited from this in order to direct the discontent of the Fellahs and proletarians against the Jewish workers in the same way that the Zionist capitalists have directed the discontent of the Jewish workers against the Arabs. From this contrast between exploited Jews and Arabs, British imperialism and the leading classes of the Jews and Arabs can only come out stronger.

Official communism helps the Arabs in their struggle against a Zionism which is qualified as an instrument of British imperialism.

Already, in 1929, the nationalist Jewish press published a "blacklist" from the police in which communists agitators figured alongside the Grand Mufti and some Arab nationalist chiefs. At present, numerous communist militants have been arrested.

Having launched the slogan for the "Arabisation" of the party - the latter, as the C.P. of Syria and even of Egypt, has been founded by a group of intellectual Jews which was fought as "opportunist" - the centrist have today launched the slogan "Arabia for the Arabs" which is only a copy of the slogan "Federation of all the Arab peoples", a nationalist Arab slogan, that's to say of the big planters (Effendi) and of the intellectuals who have the support of the Muslim clergy, controlled by the Arab Congress and channelling, in the name of their interests, the reactions of the exploited Arabs.

For real revolutionaries, naturally, there is no "Palestinian" question, but solely the struggle of all the exploited of the Near-East, Arabs and Jews included, which is part of a more general struggle of all the exploited of the entire world for the communist revolution.

Gatto MAMMONE

At the beginning of this year, the ICC decided to transform the 15th Congress of its section in France into an Extraordinary International Conference. The decision was motivated by the open outbreak of an organisational crisis immediately following its 14th International Congress in April 2001. This crisis has led to the departure from our organisation of several militants, who have recently regrouped in what they call the "Internal Fraction of the ICC". As we shall see, the Conference took note of the fact that these militants had deliberately set themselves outside the organisation, even if today they proclaim to whoever is prepared to listen that they have been "excluded".

While most of the Conference was focused on organisational issues, it also discussed the analysis of the international situation, and adopted the resolution which is published in this issue of the International Review.

The aim of this article is to give an account of the conference's most important work, the nature of its discussions, and its decisions on organisational issues, since this was its main purpose. It will also set out our analysis of the self-styled "internal fraction" of the ICC, which presents itself today as the real continuity of the ICC's organisational gains, but which in reality is nothing other than a new parasitic grouping, such as the ICC and other organisations of the proletarian political milieu have had to confront in the past. But before we deal with these questions, it is necessary to consider another, which has been the object of much misunderstanding in today's proletarian political milieu: the importance of questions of functioning for communist organisations.

We say this because we have often heard or read the comment that "the ICC is obsessed with organisational questions", or that "it's articles on the question are of no interest, it's just their own internal affairs". This kind of judgement is understandable enough on the part of non-militants, even when they sympathise with Left Communist positions. When one is not a member of a proletarian political organisation, it is clearly difficult to measure fully the problems that such an organisation can encounter in its functioning. That said, it is much more surprising to meet with this kind of comment on the part of members of organised political groups. This is one of the expressions of the weakness of the present proletarian political milieu, resulting from the organic and political break between today's organisations and those of the past workers' movement, as a result of the counter-revolution which crushed the class from the end of the 1920s until the end of the 1960s.

For this reason, and before we deal with the questions which concerned the conference, we will begin with a brief reminder of some organisational lessons of the past workers' movement, on the basis in particular of two of the most well-known amongst them: the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), or 1st International (in which Marx and Engels were militants), and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), whence emerged the Bolshevik Party that in 1917 took the lead of the only victorious proletarian revolution, before it degenerated as a result of its international isolation. We will look more particularly at these organisations' two congresses where organisational issues took centre stage: the IWA's 1872 Hague Congress, and the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP which gave rise to the formation of the Bolshevik and Menshevik fractions, which were to play directly opposing roles in the revolution of 1917.

The IWA was founded in September 1864 in London, on the initiative of a number of French and English workers. It adopted a centralised structure straight away, with a central Council, which after the 1866 Geneva Congress was known as the General Council. Marx was to play a leading role within the Council, since it fell to him to write a large number of its basic texts, such as the IWA's founding address, its statutes, and the address on the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France, May 1871). The IWA (or "The International", as the workers called it) quickly became a "power" in the advanced countries (above all in Western Europe). Up till the 1871 Paris Commune, it regrouped a growing number of workers and was a leading factor in the development of the proletariat's two essential weapons: its organisation and its consciousness. This is why, indeed, the International was subjected to increasingly bitter attacks by the bourgeoisie: slander in the press, infiltration by informers, persecution of its members, etc. But the IWA ran the greatest danger from the attacks of some of its own members against the International's very mode of organisation.

Already, when the IWA was founded, the provisional rules were translated by the Parisian sections, strongly influenced by Proudhon's federalist conceptions, in a way that considerably weakened the International's centralised character. But the most dangerous attacks were to come later, with the entry into its ranks of the "Alliance de la démocratie socialiste" founded by Bakunin. This latter was to find fertile ground within important sections of the International, due to its own weaknesses, which were in turn the result of the weaknesses of the proletariat at the time, characteristic of its previous stage of development.

This weakness was especially marked in the most backward sectors of the European proletariat, where it had only just emerged from the peasant and artisan classes. Bakunin, who entered the International in 1868 after the collapse of the "League for Peace and Liberty", used these weaknesses to try to subject the International to his anarchist conceptions, and to bring it under his control. The tool for this operation was to be the "Alliance de la démocratie socialiste", which he had founded as a minority in the League for Peace and Liberty.

The latter was an organisation of bourgeois republicans, founded on the initiative notably of Garibaldi and Victor Hugo, one of whose main objectives was to compete with the IWA for the support of the working class. Bakunin was a member of the League's leadership, which he claimed gave it a "revolutionary impetus", and urged it to propose a merger with the IWA, refused by the latter at its Brussels congress in 1868. Following the failure of the League for Peace and Liberty, Bakunin decided to enter the IWA, not just as a militant but as part of the leadership.

"To be recognised as leader of the International, he had to present himself as the leader of another army, whose absolute devotion to his person was to be assured by a secret organisation. After openly implanting his society in the International, he intended to spread its ramifications into every section, and so to take over an absolute authority. With this aim, he founded the (public) Alliance for Socialist Democracy in Geneva (?) But this public Alliance hid another, which in its turn was directed by the still more secret Alliance of the international brotherhood, the Centurion Guards of the dictator Bakunin".1

The Alliance was thus both a public and a secret society, which in fact intended to form an International within the International. Its secret structure and the collusion this allowed amongst its members was supposed to ensure its "influence" over as many of the IWA's sections as possible, especially those where anarchist conceptions encountered the greatest echo. In itself, the existence of several different trends of thought within the IWA did not pose any problem. By contrast, the activity of the Alliance, aimed at replacing the official structure of the International, was a serious factor of disorganisation, and endangered the latter's very existence. The Alliance first tried to take control of the International at the Basle Congress in September 1869 by trying to have a motion adopted in favour of the abolition of the right of inheritance, against the motion proposed by the General Council. With this aim in view, its members, in particular Bakunin and James Guillaume, warmly supported an administrative resolution strengthening the powers of the General Council. Failing in this, however, the Alliance (which itself had adopted secret statutes based on an extreme centralisation) began a campaign against the "dictatorship" of the General Council, which it aimed to reduce to the role of a "statistical and correspondence bureau" to use the Alliancists terms, or to a mere "letter-box" as Marx answered them. Against the principle of centralisation as an expression of the proletariat's international unity, the Alliance preached "federalism", the complete "autonomy of the sections", and the non-obligatory nature of Congress decisions. In fact, the alliance wanted to do whatever it liked in the sections that had come under its control. The way would be open to the complete disorganisation of the IWA.

This was the danger faced by the Hague Congress in 1872. This congress was essentially devoted to organisational questions. As we wrote in the International Review n°87 "after the fall of the Paris Commune, the absolute priority for the workers' movement became to shake off the weight of its own sectarian past, to overcome the influence of petty bourgeois socialism. It is this political framework which explains the fact that the central question dealt with at the Hague Congress was not the Paris Commune itself, but the defence of the statutes of the International against the plots of Bakunin and his supporters" ("The Hague Congress of 1872: The struggle against political parasitism").

After confirming the decisions of the London Conference, which had been held one year previously, in particular those concerning the necessity for the working class to create its own political party and on the strengthening of the authority of the General Council, the Congress debated the question of the Alliance on the basis of a report by an enquiry commission, and finally decided on the exclusion of Bakunin and James Guillaume, the leader of the Jura Federation of the IWA, which was completely under the control of the Alliance. It is worth highlighting certain aspects of the attitude of members of the Alliance at or on the eve of the Congress:

- several sections controlled by the Alliance (in particularly the Jura Federation, and certain sections in Spain and the United States) refused to pay their dues to the General Council, and their delegates only paid their debt (of their back dues) under the threat of seeing their mandate invalidated;

- the delegates from sections controlled by the Alliance undertook a veritable blackmail of the Congress, demanding that it violate its own rules by taking account solely of votes based on imperative mandates, and threatening to withdraw if the Congress did not meet their demands;2

- the refusal by certain members of the Alliance to co-operate with the Commission of Enquiry established by the Congress, or even to recognise it, accusing it of being a "Holy Inquisition".3

This Congress was the IWA's high point (it was the only Congress that Marx attended, which gives an idea of how important he considered it), but also its swan song because of the crushing defeat of the Paris Commune and the demoralisation that this provoked within the proletariat. Marx and Engels were aware of this reality. This is why, along with the measures aimed at keeping the IWA out of the hands of the Alliance, they also proposed that the General Council be moved to New York, far from the conflicts that were dividing the International. This was also a means for allowing the International to die a natural death (confirmed by the 1876 Philadelphia Conference), without its prestige being hijacked by the Bakuninist intriguers.

The latter, and the anarchists have perpetuated this legend, claimed that Marx and the General Council excluded Bakunin and Guillaume because of their different vision of the question of the state (when they did not explain the conflict between Marx and Bakunin by questions of personality). In short, Marx was supposed to have wanted to settle a disagreement on general theoretical questions with administrative measures. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Hague Congress took no measures against the members of the Spanish delegation, who shared Bakunin's ideas and had belonged to the Alliance, but who declared that they no longer did so. Similarly, the "anti-authoritarian" IWA formed after the Hague Congress from the Federations which refused to accept its decisions was not made up solely of anarchists, since it also included the German Lassalleans, who were great defenders of "state socialism" to use Marx's words. In fact, the real struggle within the IWA was between those who stood for the unity of the workers' movement (and therefore the binding nature of Congress decisions), and those who demanded the right to do whatever they pleased, each isolated from the others, treating the Congresses as mere assemblies, where everyone could exchange "points of view" without taking any decisions. With this informal mode of organisation, it would fall to the Alliance to carry out, in secret, a real centralisation of the Federations, as indeed Bakunin's correspondence explicitly stated. Putting these "anti-authoritarian" conceptions to work in the International would have been the best way to deliver it up to the intrigues, and the hidden and uncontrolled power of the Alliance, in other words the adventurers who led it.

The 2nd Congress of the RSDLP was the occasion for a similar confrontation between the defenders of a proletarian conception of the revolutionary organisation, and the petty-bourgeois conception.

There are similarities between the situation in the West European workers' movement at the time of the IWA, and the movement in Russia at the turn of the century. In both cases, the workers' movement was still in its youth, the separation in time being due to Russia's late industrial development. The IWA's purpose was to regroup in a united organisation, the different workers' societies that the proletariat's development had created. Similarly, the aim of the RSDLP's 2nd Congress was to unite the different committees, groups and circles of the social democracy which had developed in Russia and in exile. Following the disappearance of the Central Committee, which had been formed by the RSDLP's 1st Congress in 1897, there had been almost no formal links between these different formations. The 2nd Congress thus saw, as with the IWA, a confrontation between a conception of the organisation representing the movement's past, that of the "Mensheviks" ("minorityites") and a conception expressing the requirements of the new situation, that of the "Bolsheviks" ("majorityites").

The Mensheviks' approach, as it became clear later (very quickly in the revolution of 1905, and still more of course during the revolution of 1917, when the Mensheviks stood alongside the bourgeoisie), was determined by the penetration of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology, in particular of the anarchist variety, within the Russian social-democracy. In particular, as Lenin noted, "Most of the opposition [ie the Mensheviks] was made up of our Party's intellectual elements", who thus became the bearers of petty-bourgeois conceptions of the organisational question. These elements, as a result, "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" (Lenin, op cit). And indeed, there are many similarities between the behaviour of the Mensheviks and that of the anarchists in the IWA (Lenin speaks on several occasions of the Mensheviks "aristocratic anarchism").

Like the anarchists after the Hague Congress, the Mensheviks refused to recognise and apply the decisions of the 2nd RSDLP Congress, declaring that "the Congress is not divine" and that "its decisions are not sacred". In particular, just as the Bakuninists went to war against the principle of centralisation and the "dictatorship of the General Council" after failing to take control of it, one reason that the Mensheviks began to reject centralisation after the Congress was the fact that several of them had been removed from the central organs elected by the Congress. There are even likenesses in the way the Mensheviks campaigned against Lenin's "personal dictatorship" and "iron fist", which echo Bakunin's accusations of Marx's "dictatorship" over the General Council.

"When I consider the approach of the friends of Martov after the Congress (...) I can only say that this is an insane attempt, unworthy of Party members, to tear the Party apart (...) And why? Solely because one is discontented at the makeup of the central organs, because objectively this is the only question which separated us, since the subjective appreciations (such as offence, insults, expulsions, pushing aside, casting slurs, etc) were nothing but the fruit of wounded pride and a sick imagination. This sick imagination and wounded pride led straight to the most shameful gossiping: without waiting to find out about the activity of the new centres, nor having seen them in action, some go about spreading gossip about their "inadequacy", or about the "iron glove" of Ivan Ivanovitch, or the "fist" of Ivan Nikiforovitch, etc (...) Russian social-democracy still has a difficult step to take, from the circle spirit to the party spirit; from a petty-bourgeois mentality to a consciousness of its revolutionary duty; gossip and the pressure of circles considered as a means of action, against discipline" (Lenin, Report on the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP).

It is worth noting that the weapon of blackmail used in their day by Guillaume and the Alliance was also part of the Mensheviks' arsenal. Martov, the Mensheviks' leading figure, refused to take part in the editorial committee of the party's publication Iskra, to which he had been elected by the Congress, on the grounds that his friends Axelrod, Potressov and Zassoulich had not been appointed to it.

Given the examples of the IWA and the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, we can see the importance of questions linked to the mode of organisation of revolutionary formations. In fact, these were the questions that were to produce the first decisive decantation between the proletarian current on the one hand, and the bourgeois and petty bourgeois currents on the other. This importance is no accident. It springs precisely from the fact that one of the main channels for the infiltration of ideologies foreign to the proletariat - bourgeois or petty-bourgeois - is precisely that of their functioning.

Marxists have thus always paid the greatest attention to the organisational question. Within the IWA, Marx and Engels themselves took the lead in the fight to defend proletarian principles. And it was no accident that they played a decisive role in the decision by the Hague Congress to devote most of its labours to organisational questions, at a time when the working class had just been confronted with two of the most important events of the period, which received much less attention: the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. This choice has led most bourgeois historians to consider this Congress as being the least important of the IWA's history, whereas it was in reality the most important since it made it possible for the 2nd International to make new advances in the development of the workers' movement.

Within the 2nd International, Lenin was also seen as "obsessed" with the organisational question. The quarrels that agitated Russian Social Democracy were incomprehensible within the other socialist parties, and Lenin was seen as a "sectarian" who dreamed of nothing but splits. In fact, it was Lenin who drew the deepest inspiration from Marx and Engels' struggle against the Alliance. The validity of his combat was to be brilliantly demonstrated in 1917, by his party's ability to take the lead in the revolution.

The ICC, for its part, has followed the tradition of Marx and Lenin in paying the greatest attention to organisational questions. In January 1982, the ICC devoted an Extraordinary Conference to the question following the crisis of 1981.4 Finally, between late 1993 and 1996, our organisation undertook a fundamental battle to strengthen its organisational tissue, against the "circle spirit" and for the "party spirit" as Lenin defined them in 1903. Our International Review n°82 gives an account of the ICC's 11th Congress, which was essentially devoted to the organisational questions that we confronted at the time.5 We followed this with a series of articles on organisational questions devoted to the struggles within the IWA (International Review n°85-88), and two articles entitled "Have we become Leninists?" (International Review n°96-97) on the fight by Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the organisational issue. Finally, in our previous issue, we published substantial extracts from an internal document on the question of functioning within the ICC, which served as an orientation text for the struggle of 1993-96.

A transparent attitude vis-à-vis the difficulties encountered by our organisation has nothing to do with any 'exhibitionism' on our part. The experience of communist organisations is an integral part of the experience of the working class. This is why Lenin devoted an entire book, One step forward, two steps back to the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. By giving an account of its organisational life, the ICC is thus doing nothing other than assuming its responsibility in the face of the working class.

Obviously, when a revolutionary organisation publicises its problems and internal discussions, this is a choice dish for all the adversaries waiting to denigrate it. This is also, and even especially, the case for the ICC. As we wrote in International Review n°82, "we won't find any jubilation in the bourgeois press over the difficulties that our organisation is going through today: the ICC is still too small, both in its size and in its influence amongst the working masses, for the bourgeoisie to have any interest in talking about it and trying to discredit it. It is preferable for the bourgeoisie to erect a wall of silence around the positions and even the existence of revolutionary organisations. This is why the work of denigrating them, and sabotaging their intervention, is undertaken by a whole series of groups and parasitic elements whose function is to drive away individuals who are coming towards class positions, to disgust them with any participation in the difficult task of developing a proletarian political milieu (?) Within the parasitic movement, we find fully-fledged groups like the 'Groupe Communiste Internationaliste' (GCI) and its splits (such as 'Contre le Courant'), the defunct 'Communist Bulletin Group" (CBG) or the ex-"External Fraction of the ICC", which were all formed from splits from the ICC. But parasitism is not limited to such groups. It is also spread by unorganised elements, who may meet from time to time in ephemeral discussion groups whose main concern is to circulate all kinds of gossip about our organisation.6 These elements are often ex-militants who have given in to the pressure of petty-bourgeois ideology and have proven unable to maintain their commitment within the organisation, or who have been frustrated that the organisation failed to give them the recognition they thought they deserved, or again who could not stand being the object of criticism (?) Obviously, these elements are absolutely incapable of building anything whatever. By contrast, they are often very effective, with their petty agitation and their concierge's chatter, at discrediting and destroying what the organisation is trying to build" ("11th Congress of the ICC").

However, it is not the wriggling of the parasites that will prevent the ICC from setting before the whole proletarian milieu the lessons of its own experience. In the preface to One step forward, two steps back, in 1904, Lenin wrote: "They [our adversaries] exult and grimace at the sight of our discussions; obviously, they will try, to serve their own purposes, to brandish my pamphlet devoted to the defects and weaknesses in our Party. The Russian social-democrats are sufficiently tempered in battle not to be troubled by such pinpricks, and to continue in spite of everything with their task of self-criticism, mercilessly unveiling their own weaknesses, which will be overcome necessarily and without fail by the growth of the workers' movement. Let our adversaries try to give us an image of the situation in their own 'parties' which comes close to that presented by the minutes of our 2nd Congress!".

We intend to adopt the same approach in giving an account of the problems of functioning which have affected our organisation lately, and which were at the centre of the work of the Conference.

The origins of the ICC's recent organisational difficulties

The ICC's 11th Congress adopted a resolution on its activities which drew the main lessons from the crisis our organisation underwent in 1993, and from the struggle for its recovery. We published large extracts in International Review n°82, and we reproduce some of them here since they throw a light on our recent difficulties.

"The framework of analysis the ICC adopted for laying bare the origins of its weaknesses was in continuity with the historic struggle waged by marxism against the influence of petty bourgeois ideology that weighed on the organisation of the proletariat (...) In particular, it was vital for the organisation to have as its central concern, as it was for the Bolsheviks after 1903, the struggle against the circle spirit and for the party spirit (...) It is in this sense that becoming aware of the weight of the circle spirit in our origins was an integral part of a general analysis elaborated long before, the one which saw the basis of our weaknesses in the break in the organic continuity with previous communist organisations, the result of the counter-revolution which descended on the working class at the end of the 20s. However, this realisation allowed us to go further than we had done before and to go to the deeper roots of our difficulties. In particular, it allowed us to understand the phenomenon - already noted in the past but not sufficiently elucidated - of the formation of clans in the organisation: these clans were in reality the result of the decomposition of the circle spirit which kept going long after the period in which circles had been an unavoidable step in the reconstruction of the communist vanguard" (11th Congress Resolution on activities, point 4).

On the question of clans, our article on the 11th Congress made this point: "This analysis was based on previous experiences of the workers' movement (for example, the attitude of the former editors of Iskra grouped around Martov who, unhappy with the decisions of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, had formed the Menshevik fraction), but also on precedents in the history of the ICC. We can't go into detail here but what we can say is that the 'tendencies' which have appeared in the ICC corresponded much more to such a clan dynamic than to real tendencies based on an alternative positive orientation. The principal motor of these 'tendencies' was not the divergences their members may have had with the orientations of the organisation. Instead they were based on an agglomeration of elements frustrated and discontented with the central organs, of those 'loyal' to individuals who saw themselves as being 'persecuted' or insufficiently recognised".

The article emphasised that the whole ICC (including the militants most directly involved in it) recognised that it was faced with a clan which occupied a particularly important position in the organisation and which, while it was not simply an organic product of the ICC's weaknesses, had "concentrated and crystallised a great number of the deleterious characteristics which affected the organisation and whose common denominator was anarchism..." (Activities resolution, point 5).

The resolution continued "The ICC's understanding of the phenomenon of the clans and their particularly destructive role has allowed it to put its finger on a large amount of the bad functioning which affected most of the territorial sections" (idem, point 5).

It drew up a balance sheet of our organisation's struggle: "... the Congress notes the overall success of the combat engaged by the ICC in the autumn of 1993 (...) the - sometimes spectacular - redressment of some of the sections with the greatest organisational difficulties in 1993 (...), the deepening that has come from a number of sections in the ICC (...), all these facts confirm the full validity of the combat both in its theoretical bases and its concrete application".

However, the resolution also warned against any kind of triumphalism: "This does not mean that the combat we have conducted to date should come to an end. (...) The ICC will have to continue this combat through a permanent vigilance, the determination to identify every weakness and to confront it without delay. (...) In reality, the history of the workers' movement, including that of the ICC, teaches us, and the debate has fully confirmed this, that the struggle for the defence of the organisation is a permanent one, and without respite. In particular, the ICC must remember that the Bolsheviks' struggle for the party spirit, and against the circle spirit continued for many years. It will be the same for our organisation, which will have to watch for and eliminate any demoralisation, any feeling of impotence as a result of the length of the combat." (ibid, point 13).

And precisely, the ICC's recent Conference pointed out that one of the major causes of our organisational problems during the last decade was a relaxation in our vigilance faced with a reappearance of the difficulties and weaknesses which had affected the organisation in the past. In reality, the greater part of the organisation had lost sight of the warning which concluded the resolution of the 11th Congress. It consequently had the greatest difficulty in identifying the reappearance of clannism within the Paris section and within the International Secretariat (IS)7, in other words the two parts of the organisation which had been the most affected by this disease in 1993.

The development of the crisis at the heart of the ICC and the formation of the "internal fraction"

The slide into clannism got under way in March 2000, when the IS adopted a document on questions of functioning which was criticised by a small number of comrades. While they recognised the entire validity of most of the ideas in the text, notably on the need for a greater confidence among the different parts of the organisation, they considered that it made certain concessions to a democratist vision, and tended to call into question our conceptions of centralisation. To summarise, they considered that the document led to an idea that "more confidence means less centralisation". It has never been a problem for the ICC that some parts of the organisation should criticise a text adopted by the central organ. On the contrary, the ICC and its central organ have always insisted that every disagreement or doubt should be expressed openly within the organisation in order to reach the greatest possible clarity. The attitude of the central organ towards disagreements has always been to answer them as seriously as possible. But in the spring of 2000, the majority of the IS adopted a quite different attitude from what had been its habit in the past. For this majority, the fact that a tiny minority of comrades criticised a text of the IS could only spring from a spirit of opposition for opposition's sake, or from the fact that one of them was affected by family problems while another was suffering from depression. One argument used by the IS members was to say that the text had been written by a particular militant, and would have had a different reception had it been the work of a different author. The response to the arguments of the comrades in disagreement was therefore not to put forward counter-arguments, but to denigrate the comrades or even to try to avoid publishing their texts on the grounds that they would "spread crap in the organisation", or that comrades who had been affected by the pressure brought to bear on them would not be able to stand the pressure of responses by other ICC militants to these texts. In short, the IS developed a completely hypocritical policy of stifling debate in the name of "solidarity".

This political attitude, totally foreign to the ICC's methods up till then, suddenly underwent a further degeneration when a member of the IS in turn began to support some of the criticisms made of the document adopted by the commission in March 2000. Relatively immune from denigration till then, this militant himself now became the target of a campaign aimed at discrediting him: if he adopted this or that position, it was because he was being "manipulated by someone close to him". At the same time, the attitude of the IS was to reduce the discussions on the question as far as possible to a banality, declaring that it was not "the debate of the century". And when more developed and critical contributions began to appear, the majority of the IS tried to push the whole of the ICC's central organ into declaring the debate closed. The International Bureau refused to follow the IS. It also decided, against the will of the latter's majority, to create a Delegation for Information, mostly made up of comrades who were not members of the IS, and charged with examining the problems of functioning which were developing in and around the commission.

These decisions prompted a new "radicalisation" among the majority of the IS' members. They addressed to the Delegation for Information all kinds of accusations against the comrades in disagreement, pointing out all kinds of particularly serious "organisational failings" on their part, "alerting" the Delegation to the "dubious" or "unworthy" behaviour of one of these militants. In short, those members of the IS who had considered the creation of the Delegation to be a waste of time now informed it of a cunning and destructive attack on the organisation, which should have made them the first to call for the formation of just such a Delegation in order to conduct an enquiry into these militants. One member of the IS - Jonas - not only refused to appear before the Delegation, but refused outright to recognise it.8 At the same time, he began - behind the scenes - to spread the idea that one of the militants in disagreement was a state agent manipulating those around her with the aim of "destroying the ICC". Other IS members tried different ways of putting pressure on the Delegation, and in early May 2001 several of them tried to intimidate the Delegation into renouncing its communication to the Congress of a "preliminary communication" laying down a framework for understanding the problems that were affecting the IS and the Paris section.9 On the very morning of the Congress, just before it began, the majority of the IS tried a final manoeuvre: they demanded that the International Bureau meet in order to adopt a resolution disavowing the work of the Delegation for Information. The DI had already been convinced of the existence of a clannish dynamic within the IS far more by the attitude of the majority of the latter's members than by the testimony of the comrades who had criticised the IS' policy. Similarly, the majority of the IB was convinced of the existence of the same dynamic fundamentally by the attitude of the IS members at this last meeting before the Congress. At the time, however, the IB counted on these militants' ability to come to their senses, as had already been the case of an important number of militants who had been caught in a clannish dynamic in 1993. This is why the IB proposed that all the militants belonging to the old IS should be re-elected to the central organ. At the same time, it proposed that the old Delegation for Information should be strengthened to include other comrades and become an Information Commission. Finally, it proposed to the Congress that it should not yet communicate the DI's preliminary conclusions, and asked the Congress to accord its confidence to the new Information Commission. The Congress ratified unanimously these proposals.

Two days after the Congress, a member of the old IS violated the Congress' decisions by revealing in the Paris section the information which the IB, with the Congress' approval, had decided to withhold until it could be communicated in full and in an appropriate framework. His aim was to set the Paris section against the rest of the ICC and against the International Bureau. The other members of the old IS majority supported him, and refused to condemn this outright violation of the organisation's statutes.

Inasmuch as the Congress is the organisation's sovereign body, the deliberate violation of its decisions (like the Mensheviks in 1903) is a particularly serious fault. At the time, however, the militant was not sanctioned beyond a verbal condemnation of his action: the organisation continued to count on the capacity of the clan's members to get a grip on themselves. In reality, this violation of the statutes was only the first in a long line of infractions by members of the old IS or those they persuaded to follow in their open war against the organisation. We have not the space to detail all these infractions here; we will limit ourselves to some characteristic examples, for which the members of the present "internal fraction" are responsible to varying degrees:

- the use and publication of the proceedings of the central organs without the latter's consent;

- campaigns of slander against members of the Information Commission, accused of being "liars" and "Torquemadas" (after a leader of the Spanish Inquisition, which is reminiscent of Alerini's denunciation of the Hague Congress Enquiry Commission as a "Holy Inquisition");

- systematic and slanderous campaigns behind the scenes against a member of the organisation, accused without a shadow of proof of "indignity", being an adventurer, or even a state agent (this latter accusation being explicitly put about by Jonas and another member of the present "fraction", but also suggested by other militants close to him), manipulating others in order to destroy the ICC;

- secret correspondence by members of the ICC's central organ with militants in other countries in order to spread slanders against those they now described as the "liquidationist faction", and to turn them against the International Bureau (in other words the same policy that Bakunin used to recruit for his "Alliance");

- holding secret meetings (five during August and September 2001), whose aim was not to work out political analyses but to hatch a plot against the ICC. When the militants involved in these meetings announced the formation of a "Working Collective", they declared amongst other things that "we are not holding secret meetings".

It was only by accident, and as a result of the clumsiness of one of this brotherhood's members, that the proceedings of one of these secret meetings came into the organisation's hands.

Shortly afterwards, a plenary session of the International Bureau adopted unanimously (in other words, including the votes of two members of the present "internal fraction") a resolution whose main passages we quote here:

"1. Having read () the proceedings of the meeting of 20/08 between the seven comrades forming the so-called 'working collective', and after examining its content where are expressed:

- an openly declared awareness that they are acting outside the statutes and have no preoccupation other than how to hide the fact from the rest of the organisation;

- the rest of the organisation considered as 'the others', 'them', in other words enemies who have to be 'destabilised' in the words of one of the participants;

- the intention of hiding their real thoughts and activity from the rest of the organisation;

- the establishment of a group discipline at the same time as they advocated violating the discipline of the organisation;

- the elaboration of a strategy to deceive the organisation and to impose their own policies;

the IB condemns this behaviour, which is in flagrant violation of our organisational principles and reveals an utter disloyalty towards the rest of the organisation (?)

2. The activity of the members of the 'collective' constitutes an extremely serious organisational fault and deserves the severest sanctions. However, inasmuch as the participants at this meeting have decided to disband the 'collective', the IB decides to forego the sanction, with the intention that the militants who have committed the fault should not merely disband the 'collective' but:

- should undertake a thorough critique of their behaviour;

- should undertake a reflection in depth on the reasons that led them to behave as enemies of the organisation.

In this sense, this resolution of the IB should not be interpreted as an under-estimation of the seriousness of the fault committed, but as an encouragement to the participants in the secret meeting of 20/08 to realise this seriousness".

Confronted with the destructive nature of their behaviour, the members of the "collective" took a step back. Two of those who had taken part in the secret meetings really did apply what the resolution asked: they undertook a sincere critique of their approach and are today loyal militants of the ICC. Two others, despite having voted in favour of the resolution, preferred to resign rather than undertake the required critique. As for the others, they all too quickly dumped their good intentions, only a few weeks later forming the "internal fraction of the ICC" and adopting the "Declaration" of the "working collective" which they had rejected a short time before.

No sooner was this self-styled "fraction" formed, than its members distinguished themselves by undertaking an escalation of attacks against the organisation and its militants, combining an utter vacuity of political argument, the most outrageous lies, the most disgusting slanders, and a systematic violation of our rules of functioning which obviously forced the ICC to sanction them.10 A resolution adopted on 18th November 2001 by the central organ of the section in France declared: "The militants of the 'fraction' say that they want to convince the rest of the organisation of the validity of their 'analyses'. Their behaviour, and their enormous lies, prove that this is just one more lie (?) With their present behaviour, they are certainly unlikely to convince anybody at all (?) In particular, the Executive Commission denounces the 'tactic' which consists of systematically violating the ICC's statutes, in order to be able - when the organisation is forced to take measures to defend itself - to shout about 'Stalinist degeneration' and so justify the formation of a self-styled 'fraction'".

One of "fraction's" endlessly repeated lies is that the ICC has sanctioned them in order to avoid debating the fundamental questions. The truth is that their arguments have been refuted repeatedly, often in depth, by numerous contributions from individual militants and sections of the ICC, whereas their own texts systematically avoid replying either to these contributions, or even to the official reports and orientation texts proposed by the central organs. This is in fact one of the "fraction's" favourite methods: attributing their own turpitude to the rest of the organisation, and more especially to those they describe as the "liquidationist faction". For example, in one of their first "founding texts", a "counter-report" on the ICC's activities for the September 2001 IB Plenum, they accuse the ICC's central organs of adopting "an orientation that breaks with that of the organisation hitherto (?) from the end of the combat of 1993-96 to the 14th Congress which has just been held". And to demonstrate just how much he agrees with the orientations of the 14th Congress, a few weeks later the author of this document? rejects en bloc the activities resolution adopted by the Congress, and which he himself had voted. In the same vein, the "counter-report" haughtily declares that "we refer to the combat which has always existed (?) for the rigorous, rather than the 'rigid' respect for the statutes. Without a firm respect for the statutes and their defence, there is no more organisation". And yet this document serves as a platform for secret meetings whose participants agree amongst themselves that they are outside the statutes, and only weeks later begin to write pages and pages of pretentious pseudo-theory with the sole aim of justifying the systematic violation of the statutes.

We could go on with more examples of the same kind, but the article would fill the entire Review. We will however cite one more, significant, example: the "fraction's" pretension to be the real defender of the continuity of our struggle for the defence of the organisation during 1993-96. This does not prevent the "counter-report" from declaring that "The lessons of 1993 are not limited to clannism. Indeed this is not their principal element". Better still, the "Declaration" of the formation of the "working collective" asks: "Clans and clannism: notions to be found in the history of sects and free-masonry, but not (?) in the workers' movement of the past? Why? Can the alpha and omega of organisational questions be reduced to the 'danger of clannism'?". In fact, the members of the "fraction" aim to put over the idea that the notion of the "clan" does not belong to the workers' movement (which is false, since Rosa Luxemburg already used the term to describe the coterie of the German social-democratic leadership). This is indeed a radical method for refuting the ICC's analysis that these militants' behaviour is the evidence of a clan dynamic: "the notion of the clan is invalid". And all that in the name of the struggle of 1993-96, whose most important documents we have cited at length and which all insist on the fundamental role of clannism in the weaknesses of the ICC!

The formation of a parasitic group

Like the Alliance within the IWA, the "fraction" became a parasitic organism within the ICC. And just like the Alliance, which declared open and public war on the IWA once it had failed to take control of it, the clan of the old majority in the IS and its friends has decided to attack our organisation publicly as soon as it realised that it had lost all control over it, and that its behaviour, far from rallying the hesitant had on the contrary allowed these comrades to understand what was really at stake in the struggle for our organisation. The decisive moment in this qualitative step in the "fraction's" war against the ICC was the plenary session of the International Bureau at the beginning of 2002. After serious discussion, this meeting adopted a certain number of important decisions:

a) the transformation of the French section's congress, planned for March 2002, into an international extraordinary conference of the whole ICC;

b) the suspension of the members of the "fraction" for a whole series of violations of the statutes (including the refusal to pay their dues in full); the organisation left them until the conference to reflect, and to commit themselves to respecting the statutes failing which the conference could only conclude that they had placed themselves deliberately and of their own accord outside the organisation;

c) a decision in principle to exclude Jonas, following a detailed report by the Information Commission which highlighted his behaviour, worthy of that of an agent provocateur, the definitive decision to be taken only once Jonas had been made aware of the accusation against him and had had an opportunity to present his defence.11

It is worth noting that the two members of the "fraction" who took part in the plenary session abstained on the first decision. This is a thoroughly paradoxical attitude on the part of militants who constantly declared that the militants of the ICC as a whole were being deceived and manipulated by the "liquidationist faction" and the "decisional organs". No sooner was the opportunity given to the whole organisation to discuss and decide collectively on our problems, than our valiant fractionists put up an obstruction. This is an attitude totally opposed to that of the left fractions in the workers' movement, who always demanded that congresses be held to handle problems in the organisation, something that the right systematically avoided.

As for the other two decisions, the International Bureau pointed out that the militants concerned could appeal against them to the conference, and proposed that Jonas should submit his case to a jury of honour formed by militants of the proletarian political milieu if he considered himself unjustly accused by the ICC. Their response was a new escalation. Jonas refused either to meet the organisation to present his defence, or to appeal to the Conference, or to ask to be heard by a jury of honour: so crushing is the evidence that it is clear for all the militants of the ICC, and for Jonas himself, that he has no honour to defend. At the same time, Jonas announced his entire confidence in the "fraction". The "fraction" itself began to spread slanders against the ICC in public, first by writing to the other groups of the Communist Left, then by sending several texts to our subscribers, thus revealing that the member of the "fraction" who had been responsible for the file of subscribers until the summer of 2001 had stolen the file even before the formation of the "collective", let alone the "fraction". In the documents sent to our subscribers, we can read in particular that the central organs of the ICC have conducted against Jonas and the "fraction" "ignoble campaigns to hide and try to discredit the political positions, which they are unable to answer seriously". The rest is of the same ilk. The "fraction's" documents distributed outside the ICC testify to the "fraction's" total solidarity with Jonas and call him to work with them. The "fraction" thus reveals itself for what it has been right from the beginning, when Jonas remained in the shadows: a camarilla of the friends of Citizen Jonas.

Despite their open and public war on the ICC by the Jonas camarilla, our organisation's central organ sent several letters to each Parisian member of the "fraction", inviting them to present their defence to the conference. The "fraction" at first pretended to accept, but at the last minute carried out its final and most wretched action against our organisation. It refused to appear before the conference unless the organisation recognised the "fraction" in writing and withdrew all the sanctions adopted in conformity with our statutes (including the exclusion of Jonas). To appeal against the sanctions adopted by the organisation, these militants simply demanded that we start by withdrawing the sanctions. This is obviously the simplest solution - they would no longer have anything to appeal against! Confronted with this situation, all the delegations of the ICC, although they were ready to listen to the arguments of these militants (indeed, on the evening before the conference the delegations had already formed an appeals commission composed of members from several territorial delegations with a view to allowing the Parisian members of the "fraction" to present their arguments), had no alternative but to recognise that these elements had put themselves outside the organisation. Faced with their refusal to defend themselves before the conference and to present their arguments to the appeals commission, the ICC noted their desertion and could thus no longer consider them as members of the organisation.12

The conference also condemned unanimously the criminal methods used by the Jonas camarilla, consisting of the "kidnapping" (with their agreement?) of two delegates of the Mexican section as soon as they arrived at the airport. These members of the "fraction" were delegated by their section to defend their positions at the conference, and their airfares had already been paid by the ICC. They were met by two Parisian members of the "fraction", who took them away and refused to allow them to attend the conference. When we protested, and demanded that the "fraction" should repay the price of the airfares should the Mexican delegates fail to attend the conference, a Parisian member of the "fraction" replied with incredible cynicism: "That's your problem"! All the militants of the ICC have expressed their profound indignation by adopting a resolution denouncing the embezzlement of the ICC's funds and the refusal to repay the money spent by the organisation, revelatory of the criminal methods used by the Jonas camarilla. These methods are on a par with those of the Chénier tendency (which stole equipment from the organisation in 1981), and finally convinced the last comrades who hesitated to recognise the parasitic and anti-proletarian nature of this self-styled "fraction". The "fraction" has since replied to the ICC, refusing to return the political material and the money belonging to our organisation. The Jonas camarilla has today become, not only a parasitic group whose nature the ICC has already analysed in its "Theses on parasitism" published in the International Review n°94,13 but a criminal gang, which not only practices slander and blackmail to destroy our organisation, but steals as well.

The transformation of longstanding militants of our organisation, most of whom had important responsibilities in the central organs, into a criminal gang, immediately raises the question: how is such a thing possible? The influence of Jonas has obviously played a part in constantly pushing the members of the "fraction" to "radicalise" their attacks on the ICC in the name of "rejecting centrism". That said, this explanation is far from adequate in explaining such a degeneration, and the Conference laid the basis for going further in our understanding.

The conference's political framework for understanding our difficulties

On the one hand, the conference recognised that the fact that longstanding militants of a proletarian organisation betray the struggle they have engaged in for decades, is not a new phenomenon in the workers' movement: militants of the first order such as Plekhanov (the founding father of marxism in Russia) or Kautsky (the marxist reference of the German social-democracy, the "pope" of the 2nd International) ended their militant lives in the ranks of the ruling class (the first supported the war in 1914, the second condemned the Russian revolution of 1917).

Moreover, the conference set the question of clannism within the wider question of opportunism:

"The circle spirit and clannism, these key questions posed by the orientation text of 1993, are but particular expressions of a more general phenomenon: opportunism in organisational questions. It is evident that this tendency, which in the case of relatively small groups such as the Russian Party in 1903 or the ICC has been closely linked to circle and clannish forms of affinitarianism, did not express itself in the same way for instance within the mass parties of the declining Second or Third Internationals.

"Nonetheless, the different expressions of this same phenomenon necessarily share certain principle characteristics. Among these, one of the most notable is the incapacity of opportunism to engage in a proletarian debate. In particular, it is unable to maintain organisational discipline as soon as it finds itself defending minority positions.

"There are two principle expressions of this incapacity. In situations in which opportunism is on the ascent within proletarian organisations, opportunism tends to downplay the divergences, either claiming them to be 'misunderstandings', as Bernsteinian revisionism did, or else systematically adopting the political positions of one's opponents, as in the early days of the Stalinist current.

"Where opportunism is on the defensive, as in 1903 in Russia or in the history of the ICC, it reacts hysterically to being in the minority, declaring war on the statutes and presenting itself as the victim of repression in order to avoid the debate. The two main characteristics of opportunism in such a situation are, as Lenin pointed out, the sabotage of the work of the organisation, and the staging of scenes and scandals.

"Opportunism is inherently incapable of the serene approach of theoretical clarification and patient persuasion which characterised the internationalist minorities during World War I, Lenin's attitude in 1917, or that of the Italian Fraction in the 30s and the French Fraction thereafter. (...)

"The present clan is a caricature of this approach. As long as it felt itself in control, it tried to play down the divergences emerging in RI, while concentrating on discrediting those who voiced disagreements. As soon as the debate began to develop a theoretical dimension, the attempt was made to prematurely close it. As soon as the clan felt itself in a minority,14 and even before the debate could develop, questions (...) were inflated into programmatic divergences justifying the systematic rejection of the statutes" (Conference Resolution on activities, point 10).

The conference also considered the ideological weight of capitalism's decomposition on the working class:

"One of the principle characteristics of the phase of decomposition is that the stalemate between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat imposes on society a painful and protracted agony. As a result, the process of the development of the class struggle, of the maturation of consciousness, and of the construction of the organisation becomes much slower, more torturous and contradictory. The consequence of this is a tendency towards the gradual erosion of political clarity, militant conviction and organisational loyalty, the principle counter weights to the political and personal weaknesses of each militant (?)

"Because the victims of such a dynamic have begun to share in the lack of any perspective which today is the lot of decomposing bourgeois society, they are condemned to manifest, more than any other clan in the past, an irrational immediatism, a feverish impatience, an absence of reflection, and the radical loss of theoretical capacities - in fact all the main aspects of decomposition" (idem, point 6).

The conference also pointed out that one of the underlying causes both for the IS' and the whole organisation's initial incorrect positions on the question of functioning, and the anti-organisational turn taken by the members of the "fraction" and the time that the ICC as a whole took to identify this turn, is the result of the weight of democratism in our ranks. It consequently decided to open a discussion on the question of democratism, on the basis of an orientation text to be drawn up by the ICC's central organ.

Finally, the conference insisted on the importance of the struggle under way in the organisation:

"The combat of revolutionaries is a constant battle on two fronts: for the defence and construction of the organisation, and the intervention towards the class as a whole. All the aspects of this work mutually depend on each other (?)

"At the centre of the present combat is the defence of the capacity of the generation of revolutionaries which emerged after 1968 to pass on the mastery of the marxist method, the revolutionary passion and devotion, and the experience of decades of class struggle and organisational combat to a new generation. It is thus essentially the same combat being waged within the ICC and towards the outside, towards the searching elements secreted by the proletariat, in the preparation of the future class party" (idem, point 20).

ICC

NOTES

1 The Alliance for Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen's Association, a report on the Alliance drawn up by Marx, Engels, Lafargue and other militants, on a mandate from the IWA's Hague Congress.

2 The reactions to these threats are significant: "Ranvier protests at the threat to leave the hall on the part of Splingard, Guillaume and others, who thereby only prove that it is THEY and not us who have taken position IN ADVANCE on the questions under discussion". "Morago [a member of the Alliance] speaks of the tyranny of the Council, but is it not Morago himself who wants to impose the tyranny of his mandate on the Congress?" (intervention by Lafargue).

3 "Alerini thinks that the Commission only has a moral conviction, and no material proof; he belonged to the Alliance, and is proud of it (?) you are the Holy Inquisition; we demand a public enquiry with conclusive and tangible proof".

4 See the articles, "Crisis in the revolutionary movement", "Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation", and the "Presentation of the ICC's 5th Congress", in International Review n°28, 33, and 35 respectively.

5 "The 11th Congress of the ICC: the struggle for the defence and construction of the organisation".

6 This is the case with the "Cercle de Paris", formed at the end of the 1990s by ex-militants of the ICC close to Simon (an adventurist element excluded from the ICC in 1995), which has published a pamphlet entitled "Que ne pas faire?" ("What is not to be done?"), consisting of a slew of slanders against our organisation, depicted as a Stalinist sect.

7 In other words, the permanent commission of the ICC's central organ, the International Bureau, which is made up of militants from all the territorial sections.

8 In other words, he adopted the same attitude as James Guillaume before the IWA's Hague Congress.

9 This attitude of intimidating an Information Commission is not new either: Utin, who had testified to the Hague Congress' Enquiry Commission on Bakunin's behaviour, was physically attacked by one of Bakunin's supporters.

10 In a circular to all the sections in November 2001, the International Bureau listed these violations of our statutes. Here is a short extract from the list:

- "leaking information on internal questions (...)

- refusal by three members of the central organs to take part in meetings where their attendance is required by the statutes (...);

- mailing a bulletin to comrades' home addresses, in total violation of our centralised rules of functioning and in violation of our statutes;

- refusal to pay their dues at the normal rate decided by the ICC [the members of the "fraction" had decided unilaterally to pay only 30% of their dues];

- refusal to make known to the central organs the content of a supposed 'History of the IS', which has circulated among certain militants and which contains absolutely intolerable attacks against the organisation and some of its militants;

- blackmail by threatening to publish, outside the organisation, internal documents of the organisation and notably of its central organs".

11 See the "Communiqué to our readers" published in World Revolution n°252

12 Just as the Bakuninists denounced the decision of the Hague Congress as a trick to prevent them from putting forward their positions, the Jonas camarilla denounced the ICC's taking note of their desertion as an exclusion in disguise aimed at silencing their disagreements.

13 For example, the "fraction" is now trying to set the groups of the proletarian milieu against each other, and to accentuate their divisions. In the same way, in its Bulletin n°11 it has launched a campaign of seduction and flattery towards elements of the parasitic milieu, like those of the "Cercle de Paris" which the "fraction's" members were not backward in condemning in the past. Once again, they adopt the same attitude of the thoroughly "anti-authoritarian" Bakuninists who allied themselves, after the Hague Congress with the "statist" Lassalleans.

14 Jonas expressed his view of the crisis as follows: "Now that we're no longer in the driver's seat, the ICC is screwed".

Introduction: Capitalism has no future to offer

Since the events of 11th September, the war in Afghanistan, and the renewed massacres in the Middle East, two more alarming events have come to the forefront of the world situation: the threat of war between India and Pakistan, who have been fighting for control of Kashmir ever since their creation and who now are armed with nuclear weapons, and the electoral success of far-right parties in Western Europe, which has provided the bourgeoisie with the opportunity to resurrect the fascist bogey and build up enormous campaigns in favour of "democracy".

On the face of it, these two widely separated and geo-politically totally distinct events have nothing in common. To understand their shared root causes, we must avoid taking a fragmented, photographic view of the world and analysing each event separately, in itself. Only marxism's global, historical and dialectical approach is capable of drawing together these two different expressions of capitalism's mechanisms to give them unity and coherence, integrating both into a common framework.

The threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan on the one hand, and the rise of the far right on the other, are both part of the same reality. They are both expressions of the impasse that the capitalist mode of production has reached. They demonstrate that capitalism has no future to offer humanity, and, in different forms, they illustrate the present phase of capitalism's decomposition: a social rot that menaces society's very existence. This decomposition is the result of a historic process where neither of society's antagonistic classes - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - has been able to impose its own response to capitalism's insoluble crisis. The bourgeoisie has been unable to drag humanity into a third world war because the proletariat of the central countries has not been prepared to sacrifice its own interests on the altar of the national interest. But neither has the proletariat been capable of asserting its own revolutionary perspective, and imposing itself as the only social force able to offer an alternative to the dead end of the capitalist economy. While they have been able to prevent the outbreak of World War III, the workers' struggles have thus failed to halt the bloody madness of capitalism. Witness the murderous chaos spreading day by day through the system's periphery, which has accelerated ever since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The endless escalation of war in the Middle East, and now the menace of nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, reveal clearly the apocalyptic future that capitalism offers us.

The proletariat in the great "democratic" countries has, moreover, suffered the full weight of the most spectacular expression of capitalism's decomposition: the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The bourgeoisie's campaigns on the so-called "failure of communism" have deeply affected the proletariat's class identity, its confidence in itself and in its own revolutionary perspective. Their weight has been the main obstacle to the proletariat's struggle, and to its asserting itself as the only force capable of offering humanity a future. In the absence of massive workers' struggles in the Western countries, able to offer a perspective for society, the rot of capitalism has found expression in the development of the most reactionary ideologies, which have encouraged the rise of the far right. Whereas in the 1930s, the rise of fascism and Nazism was part of capitalism's march towards world war, today the far right parties' programmes are completely aberrant, including from the standpoint of the ruling class.

Given the gravity of the present situation, it is up to revolutionaries to contribute to the proletariat's awareness of the responsibilities it bears. Only the development of the class struggle in the most industrialised countries can open a revolutionary perspective of the overthrow of capitalism. Only the world proletarian revolution can put an end forever to the blind frenzy of military barbarism, to xenophobia and to racial hatred.

The threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan

Since May, the threat of nuclear war has loomed over India and Pakistan. After the attack on the Indian Parliament (13th December 2001), relations between the two countries deteriorated sharply. The attack in Jammu, in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (May 2002), attributed to Islamic terrorists, was the immediate cause of the recent confrontations in Kashmir.

This conflict between the two countries, which has so far remained limited to what the media call "artillery duels" at the expense of a terrified civilian population, is not the first, and in particular not the first over Kashmir where previous fighting has already claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. However, the threat of nuclear conflict has never before been so serious. In an inferior position - Pakistan has 700,000 troops to India's 1.2 million, 25 nuclear missiles with a lesser range than India's 60 - "Pakistan has already made it clear that, in the face of a superior enemy, it would be prepared to initiate a nuclear confrontation" (The Guardian 23/5/02). On its side, India is deliberately pushing for a military confrontation with Pakistan. Pakistan aims to destabilise the situation in Kashmir in order to draw the latter into its camp thanks to the guerrilla actions of its infiltrated groups, while India has every interest in putting a stop to this process by direct confrontation.

The possibility of a catastrophe which would cause millions of deaths has indeed alarmed the ruling classes of the developed countries, especially the Americans and the British.1 After the failure of the conference of Central Asian countries in Kazakhstan, called this time by Putin at the behest of the White House, the US has had to throw its full weight into the balance to lower the tension, with the despatch of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Karachi and Bush's personal intervention towards the Indian and Pakistani leaders. But as the Western leaders themselves recognise, if the danger of war has been averted for the moment, none of the issues have been resolved.

India and Pakistan: an insoluble rivalry

When, in 1947, the British Raj in India was split to create the independent states of India and Pakistan2 (along with Sri Lanka and Myanmar, formerly Burma), the British bourgeoisie and its American ally knew very well that they were creating a congenital rivalry. Following the old principle of "divide and rule", the aim of this artificial separation was to weaken, on both eastern and western borders, the huge new state of India, whose leader Nehru had already declared its "neutrality" with regard to the great powers in the hope of transforming the country into a regional super-power. In the immediate post-war period, as the contours of the Eastern and Western blocs were already hardening, a ferociously anti-Russian Britain, and a US already intent on imposing its hegemony world wide, saw a real danger that India would go over to the Soviet camp.

During the "democratic" formation of the Indian "nation" under the leadership of its new Pandit Nehru, India annexed outright three regions which had been expected to fall under Pakistani control, one of them being the state of Jammu and Kashmir, thus sowing the first seeds of a permanent discord over territorial claims. The entire history of the two countries has thus been marked by repeated military confrontations, with India generally on the offensive as New Delhi tried to gain control of what it considered to be its "natural frontiers". This was as true of the 1965 war in Kashmir, and of the 1971 war with Pakistan (which transformed East Pakistan into the separate state of Bangladesh), as it is true of the conflict today.

But the interest of the Indian bourgeoisie does not lie solely in the desire for expansion inherent in any imperialism. It lies in the Indian state's need to be recognised as a regional power to be reckoned with, not just in the eyes of the "international community" of the great powers, but also vis-à-vis its main rival, China. Behind India's aggressive stance towards Pakistan lies its endemic rivalry with China for dominance in South-East Asia.

In 1962, Beijing's victory in the Sino-Indian war revealed to the Indian bourgeoisie both that China was its principal enemy, and its own military weakness. Ever since, India has tried to ensure its revenge against China. The 1971 war in East Pakistan was already a part of the imperialist rivalry between the two countries, and it is obvious that a conflict today between India and Pakistan, which would leave Pakistan exhausted if not wiped from the map altogether, could only be at the expense of China, which has always done its utmost to support Islamabad. It is no accident that when the USSR made nuclear weapons available to India as a guarantee of the "co-operation pact" between the two countries, it was China, with America's blessing, which did the same for Pakistan.

The hypocrisy of the Great Powers

There is no doubt that the Great Powers, with the US at their head, are indeed extremely alarmed at the possibility of nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, though not for any humanitarian reasons, far from it. They are concerned above all to prevent the development of a new escalation in the "every man for himself" which has dominated the planet since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the disappearance of its Western rival. During the Cold War that followed World War II, inter-state rivalries were controlled by the discipline imposed by the two blocs. Even a country like India, which tried to go it alone and benefit from Eastern military power and Western technology, did not have its hands free to impose its domination over South-East Asia. Today, states give free rein to their ambitions. Even in 1990, barely one year after the collapse of the Russian bloc, American pressure was necessary to defuse the threat of a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan.

An indication of the intensity of the antagonism between these two second-rate powers can be found in the difficulty that the US is having in imposing its authority. Only a few months after the US made a massive display of force in Afghanistan to compel other nation-states to line up behind it, two of its allies in this war are at each other's throats. Disaster is threatened in yet another region where the US thought it could impose its order through military means.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has launched massive military operations to show the world that it will not accept any challenge to its leadership. After the 1991 Gulf War, instead of the New World Order came the explosion of the Balkans, accompanied by all the horror of war and appalling poverty. In 1999 after the US' show of force against Serbia the European imperialist powers became increasingly open in their opposition to US policies such as Bush's all-out acceleration of "Son of Star Wars". It was in response to this challenge that the US laid waste to Afghanistan, using the convenient justification of 11th September.

Whether it be Great Powers like Germany, France or Britain, or regional powers such as Russia, China, India or Pakistan, all are being pushed to tear each other apart in ever more destructive struggles. The present conflict between India and Pakistan, like that in Afghanistan, is a flagrant demonstration.

In this situation of general chaos and "every man for himself", provoked first and foremost by the growing tensions between the Great Powers themselves, the latter's hypocrisy has been striking. Expressing the alarm of the "civilised" ruling classes at the prospect of nuclear war, their media point the finger of blame at the irresponsibility of the Pakistani president Musharaf and the Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee, considering that neither "appeared to be taking into account the sheer scale of the disaster that would follow if nuclear weapons were used, and that they seemed incapable of visualising the disaster that would overwhelm their countries as a result" (The Times, 1/6/2).

This is really the pot calling the kettle black! What of the "responsibility" of the Great Powers? They are indeed responsible: responsible for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II; responsible for the mind-boggling proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War; responsible for this accumulation under the pretext that "dissuasion" and the "balance of terror" (sic!) were the best guarantee for world peace. And it is still the developed countries which hold the most enormous stocks of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons!

The struggle against terrorism: a pretext and a lie

For most of the media, this situation is the fruit of "religious fundamentalism". For the Indian ruling class, those responsible for the terrorist attacks in Kashmir and against the Indian parliament are the Islamic fundamentalists supported by Pakistan. On the other side, the Pakistani ruling class denounces the nationalist excesses of India's ruling Hindu fundamentalist BJP, and especially its repression of the Kashmiri "freedom fighters".

The BJP in India uses terrorist attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India as justification for its military threats against Pakistan. Meanwhile the BJP has been implicated in the inter-communal massacres in the state of Gujarat where hundreds of Hindu fundamentalists were incinerated in a train by Islamic militants and in reply thousands of Muslims were slaughtered. Meanwhile the Pakistani bourgeoisie has not only been trying to destabilise India through its backing for the Kashmiri struggle against Indian rule, they also claim that India is backing terrorist groups in Pakistan.

By constantly stirring up the most virulent nationalism, the exploiters in each camp are drawing large fractions of the population into support for their imperialist ambitions. The use of such nationalisms in conjunction with religious prejudice and racial stereotyping is not new or confined to the peripheries of capitalism. The bourgeoisies of the main capitalist countries have developed this into a fine art. In the First World War both sides portrayed the other as "evil" and a "threat to civilisation". In the 1930s both the Nazis and Stalinists used anti-semitism and nationalism to mobilise their populations. The "civilised" Allies did everything to whip up anti-German and anti-Japanese hysteria, which culminated in the cynical use of the Holocaust to justify the bombardment and massacre of an "inhuman" enemy. During the Cold War similar hatreds were cultivated by both blocs to portray the enemy as power-hungry maniacs. And since 1989 the "humanitarian" leaders of the great powers have manipulated and stirred up the growth of the ethnic cleansing, religious and racial hatred that has penetrated so many areas of the planet in a cycle of wars and massacres.

A serious threat to the working class and to all humanity

It is because the working class poses a threat that capitalism needs to use all the lies in its armoury to hide the real nature of its imperialist wars, and to turn the workers away from the path of their own class struggle. At the local level in South-East Asia, the working class has not proved itself sufficiently combative to stop a war. Internationally, the working class finds itself impotent in the face of a capitalism that is tearing itself apart, threatening us with massive death and destruction over a whole region of the planet.

Nonetheless, the only historic force capable of stopping the destructive juggernaut of decomposing capitalism remains the international proletariat, above all in the heartlands of capitalism. Through the development of its struggles to defend its own interests it could show the workers on the sub-continent that there is a class alternative to nationalism, religious and ethnic hatred. This places a huge responsibility on the working class of the metropolitan heartlands. It has to see that while it must defend its interests as a class, it also has the future of humanity in its hands.

Confronted with the madness of decadent capitalism, the international proletariat must return to its old slogan: "Workers of all countries, unite!" Capitalism can only lead us to war, barbarism, and the complete destruction of humanity. The struggle of the working class is the key to the only possible alternative: world wide communist revolution.

ZG (18/06/2002)

1 It should nonetheless be noted that the US and British bourgeoisies exaggerated the real danger of nuclear war between India and Pakistan the better to justify their pressure on both nations by passing themselves off as the most "pacifist" countries, and to freeze out rivals, such as France, in the settlement of the conflict.

2 Pakistan was originally made up of West and East Pakistan, the two parts of the same country being separated by several thousand miles of Indian territory: in other words, a state that was non-viable right from the start.

The resolution on the international situation from the 14th congress, adopted in May 2001, focussed on the question of the historic course in the phase of capitalist decomposition. It correctly highlighted the acceleration both of the economic crisis and of the slide into war and barbarism across the planet, and examined both the problems and the potentialities of a proletarian response. The following resolution, proposed to the ICC's extraordinary conference of Easter 2002, is intended to supplement that report in the light of the events of 11th September and the ensuing "war against terrorism", which have largely confirmed the general analyses of the 2001 Congress.

1. Revolutionary Marxists can agree with US president Bush when he described the September 11 attacks as "an act of war". But they would add: an act of capitalist war, a moment in the permanent imperialist struggle that characterises the epoch of capitalist decadence. In its deliberate slaughter of thousands of civilians - the majority of them proletarians - the destruction of the Twin Towers was yet another barbaric crime against humanity to add to the long list that includes Guernica, London, Dresden and Hiroshima. The fact that the probable perpetrator of the crime was a terrorist group connected to a poverty-stricken state does not alter its imperialist character, because in this epoch all states - and petty warlords and proto-states - are imperialist.

But the criminal nature of September 11 resides not only in the act itself but in its cynical manipulation by the US state - a manipulation which clearly bears comparison with the conspiracy around Pearl Harbour, when Washington consciously allowed the Japanese attack to take place in order to have a pretext for entering the world war and mobilising the population behind it. The precise degree to which the US 'secret state' actively enabled the September 11 attacks to happen remains to be verified, although there is already a mass of elements pointing towards a ruthless Machiavellian intrigue. But what is beyond doubt is how the USA has taken advantage of the crime, using the real shock and outrage it provoked to mobilise support for an imperialist offensive of unprecedented reach.

2. Under the banner of anti-terrorism, American imperialism has spread the shadow of war across the entire planet. The USA's "war against terrorism" has devastated Afghanistan and threats to extend the war to Iraq are now becoming more and more explicit. But the long arm of the US is already reaching out towards other regions of the globe, whether or not they fall within Bush's 'Axis of Evil' (Iran, Iraq, North Korea). US troops have been dispatched to the Philippines to help the military combat 'Islamic insurgency', while less spectacular operations have already been launched in Yemen and Somalia. The new US defence budget is planned to rise by 14% this year and by 2007 will be 11% higher than the average cold war levels. These figures indicate the huge imbalance of global military spending: the USA now accounts for 40% of the world total; the current budget is well in excess of the combined annual defence budget of Britain, France, and 12 other NATO countries. In a recent Pentagon 'leak', the US has made it plain that it is quite prepared to use this terrifying arsenal - including its nuclear component - against a host of rivals. At the same time the war in Afghanistan has fired up tensions between India and Pakistan and in Israel/Palestine the carnage grows daily, with the US - again in the name of anti-terrorism - apparently backing Sharon's avowed aim of getting rid of Arafat, the Palestinian Authority and the possibility of any negotiated settlement.

In the immediate aftermath of 11 September, there was much talk about the possibility of a third world war. This term was much bandied about in the media and was generally conflated with the idea of a "clash of civilisations", a conflict between the modern "West" and fanatical Islam (mirrored in bin Laden's call for a Muslim jihad against the "Crusaders and Jews"). There were even echoes of this idea in certain sections of the proletarian political milieu, for example when the PCI (il Partito) wrote, in its leaflet responding to 11 September, "If the first imperialist war was propagandised according to the irredentist demagogy of national defence; if the second was anti-fascist and democratic; the third, all the more imperialist, is mystified into a crusade between opposed religions, against quixotic as well as unbelievable and doubtful figures of bearded Saladins".

Other sections of the proletarian milieu, such as the IBRP, more able to recognise that behind the US campaign against Islam lies the inter-imperialist conflict between the US and its principal great power rivals, in particular those in Europe, are nevertheless ill-placed to answer the media hype about world war three because they lack an understanding of the historical specificities of the period opened up by the disintegration of the two great imperialist blocs at the end of the 80s. In particular, they tend to assume that the formation of the imperialist blocs that would fight out a third world war is already well under way today.

Despite capital's contradictions, world war is not imminent

3. To understand what is new about this period, and thus to grasp the real perspectives facing humanity today, it is necessary to remind ourselves of what a world war actually means. World war is the expression of the decadence, the obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production. It is the product of the historic dead-end that the system reached when it established itself as a global economy at the beginning of the 20th century. Its material roots thus lie in an insoluble crisis as an economic system, although there is not a mechanical link between immediate economic indicators and the unleashing of such wars. On this basis, the experience of two open world wars, and the long preparations for the third world war between the American and Russian blocs, have demonstrated that world war means a direct conflict for control of the planet between military blocs made up of the leading imperialist powers. As a war between the most powerful capitalist states, it also requires the active mobilisation and support of the workers of those states; and this in turn can only be achieved once these main proletarian battalions have been taken on and defeated by the ruling class. A survey of the world situation shows that the necessary conditions for a third world war are absent for the foreseeable future.

4. This is not the case at the level of the world economic crisis. The wall blocking the advance of the capitalist economy is far higher and thicker today than it was in the 1930s. In the 1930s, the bourgeoisie was able to respond to the abrupt plunge into depression with the new instruments of state capitalism; today it is these very instruments which, while continuing to manage the crisis and prevent a total paralysis, are also profoundly aggravating the contradictions which ravage the system. In the 1930s, even if the remaining pre-capitalist markets could no longer allow for the 'peaceful' expansion of the system, there still remained large areas ripe for capitalist development (in Russia, Africa, Asia, etc). Finally, during that phase of capitalism's decline, world war, despite its terrible toll on millions of human beings and centuries of human labour, could still bring an apparent benefit (even though this was never the aim of the war on the part of the combatants): a long period of reconstruction which, in connection with the state capitalist policy of deficit spending, seemed to give the system a new lease of life. A third world war would mean quite simply the destruction of humanity.

What is striking about the course of the economic crisis since the end of the reconstruction period is that it has witnessed each "solution", each "miracle cure" for the capitalist economy being exposed as no more than quack medicines in an increasingly reduced lapse of time. The initial response of the bourgeoisie to the re-emergence of the crisis in the late 60s was to apply more of the same Keynesian policies, which had stood it in good stead during the reconstruction period. The "monetarist" reaction of the 1980s, presented as a "return to reality" (epitomised by Thatcher's dictum that a country, like a household, cannot spend more than it earns) completely failed to reduce the role of debt or state spending in the economy (speculation-fuelled consumer boom in the UK, Reagan's "Star Wars" programme in the US). The fictitious boom of the 80s based on debt and speculation, and accompanied by the dismantling of whole sectors of the productive, industrial economy, was brought to an abrupt halt with the crash of 1987. The crisis which followed this crash was in turn succeeded by a phase of "growth" fed by the debt that characterised the 90s. When the diseased nature of this growth was indicated by the collapse of the South East Asian economies towards the end of that decade, we were then treated to a panoply of new panaceas, most especially the "technological revolution" and the "new economy". The effects of these wonder-drugs were shortest lived of all: no sooner had the propaganda of the "internet-driven economy" been launched than it was exposed as a vast speculative fraud. Today the "ten glorious years" of US growth are officially over; the US has admitted it is in recession as have other powerhouses like Germany; and the state of the Japanese economy is causing increasing concern throughout the world's bourgeoisie, who even talk of Japan going the way of the USSR. In the peripheral regions, the catastrophic dive of the Argentine economy is itself only the tip of the iceberg: a whole queue of other countries are in precisely the same situation.

It is true that, in contrast to the 1930s, the onset of the crisis has not resulted in an immediate policy of "every man for himself" at the economic level, with each country sealing itself off behind protectionist battlements. This reaction undoubtedly accelerated the race towards war at that time. Even the break-up of the blocs, through which capitalism had also regulated its economic affairs in the 1945-89 period, had an impact essentially at the military/imperialist level. At the economic level, the old bloc structures were adapted to the new situation, and the overall policy has been to prevent any large scale collapse of the central economies (and to allow a "controlled" collapse of the most ailing peripheral ones) through massive recourse to loans administered by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. So-called "globalisation" to some extent represents the consensus of the most powerful economies to limit competition among themselves in order to keep themselves afloat and continue despoiling the rest of the world. Indeed the bourgeoisie frequently claims that it has learned its lesson from the 1930s and will never again allow a trade war to degenerate directly into a world war between the major powers; and there is a kernel of truth in this claim, insofar as the strategy of international "management" of the economy has been maintained in spite of all the national-imperialist rivalries between the great powers.

Nevertheless, the determination of the bourgeoisie to hold back the most destructive tendencies in the world economy (simultaneous depression and hyper-inflation, unrestrained competition between national units) is increasingly coming up against the contradictions inherent in this very process. This is most clearly the case with the central policy of debt, which is more and more threatening to blow up in capitalism's face. Despite all the optimistic humming about the next recovery, the horizon is shrinking and the future for the world economy becomes more uncertain every day. This can only serve to sharpen imperialist rivalries. The extremely aggressive stance now being adopted by the US is certainly linked to its economic difficulties. A US with an ailing economy will be compelled to rely more and more on its military strength to maintain its domination of the world's markets. At the same time, the formation of a "Euro-zone" contains the premises of a much keener trade war in the future, as the other major economies are compelled to respond to US commercial aggressiveness. The bourgeoisie's "global" management of the economic crisis is thus extremely fragile and will be increasingly undermined by both economic and military-strategic rivalries.

The absence of military blocs

5. At the level of the economic crisis alone, capitalism could have gone to war during the 1980s. During the period of the cold war, when the military blocs for such a conflict were certainly in place, the principal obstacle to world war was the undefeated nature of the working class. Today this factor remains, despite all the difficulties the working class has undergone in the period since 1989 - the phase we characterise as the decomposition of capitalism. But before re-examining this point, we have to consider a second historic factor which now stands in the way of a third world war: the absence of military blocs.

In the past, the defeat of one bloc in war has led rapidly to the formation of new blocs: the German bloc which fought the first world war had begun to re-form in earnest in the 1930s, while the Russian bloc formed itself immediately after the second world war. Following the collapse of the Russian bloc (through economic crisis rather than war directly), the inherent tendency of decadent capitalism to divide the world into competing blocs did reassert itself, with a newly re-united Germany arising as the only possible contender for leadership of a new bloc capable of challenging the hegemony of the USA. This challenge was marked in particular by German interference in the break-up of Yugoslavia, which precipitated almost a decade of warfare in the Balkans. However, the tendency towards the formation of a new bloc has been consistently held in check by other tendencies:

- the tendency towards each nation following its own "independent" imperialist policy since the break-up of the cold war bloc system. This factor has of course affirmed itself principally in the urge of the major powers of the former western bloc to free themselves from American domination; but it has also acted against the possibility of a new bloc cohering against the US. Thus, while it is true that the only candidate for such a bloc would be a German-dominated Europe, it is a mistake to argue that the present European Union or "Euroland" already constitutes such a bloc. The European Union is first and foremost an economic institution, even if it does have pretensions to playing a weightier political and military role; an imperialist bloc is primarily a military alliance. Above all, the European "Union" is very far from being united at this level. The two key players in any future Europe-based imperialist bloc, France and Germany, are constantly at loggerheads for deep-seated historical reasons; and the same goes for Britain, whose "independent" orientation is founded mainly on its efforts to play off Germany against France, France against Germany, the US against Europe, and Europe against the US. The strength of the tendency of "every man for himself" has been confirmed in recent years by the increasing willingness of third and fourth rate powers to play their own game, often in defiance of US policy (Israel in the Middle East, India and Pakistan in Asia, etc). Further confirmation of this trend is provided by the rise of "imperialist war-lords" like bin Laden, who are seeking to play a global rather than a merely local role even when they don't control a particular nation state;

- the overwhelming military superiority of the US, which has been increasingly obvious over the past decade, and which the USA has sought to reinforce through the major interventions it has carried out in this period: the Gulf, Kosovo, and now Afghanistan. Furthermore, through each of these actions, the US has increasingly discarded the pretence that it was acting as part of an "international community": thus, if the Gulf war was fought "legally" through the UN, the Kosovo war was fought "illegally" through NATO, and the Afghan campaign has been carried out under the banner of "unilateralism". The recent US defence budget has only underlined the fact that the Europeans are, in the words of NATO secretary general Lord Robertson "military pygmies", giving rise to numerous articles in the European press along the lines of "Is the US too powerful for its own good?" and explicit fears that the "transatlantic alliance" is now a thing of the past. Thus, while the "war against terrorism" was a response to growing tensions between the US and its major rivals (tensions which had expressed themselves in the row over Kyoto and "Son of Star Wars", for example), and is already further exacerbating these tensions, the results of American action has been to further underline how far away the Europeans are from being able to mount an effective challenge to US world "leadership". Indeed, the imbalance is so great that, in the words of our orientation text "Militarism and Decomposition", written in 1991, "the reconstitution of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again: either the revolution, or the destruction of humanity will come first" (IR 64). A decade later the formation of a real anti-US bloc still faces the same formidable obstacles;

- the formation of imperialist blocs also requires an ideological justification, above all for the purposes of getting the working class on board. Such an ideology is lacking today. "Islam" has proved to be a powerful force for mobilising the exploited in certain parts of the world, but it has no significant impact on the workers of the capitalist heartlands; by the same token "anti-Islam" is hardly a sufficient basis for mobilising American workers to fight their European counter-parts. The problem for America and its main rivals is that they share the same "democratic" ideology, as well as the closely-connected ideology that they are in fact allies rather than rivals. It's true that a powerful current of anti-Americanism is being stirred up the European ruling class, but it is in no way comparable to the themes of anti-fascism or anti-Communism which have served to enlist support for imperialist war in the past. And behind these ideological difficulties for the ruling class resides the more profound problem: the working class is not defeated, and is unwilling to march tamely behind the war-standards of its class enemy.

The course towards class confrontations remains

6. The huge displays of patriotism in the US following the September 11 attacks made it necessary to re-examine this central plank of our understanding of the world situation. The atmosphere of intense chauvinism in the US has swept across all social classes and has been adroitly used by the ruling class not only to launch its "war against terrorism" in the short-term but also to carry out a longer term policy of putting an end to the so-called "Vietnam syndrome", ie, the reluctance of the US working class to sacrifice itself directly for the USA's imperialist adventures. There is no doubt that American capitalism has made important ideological inroads in this respect, as well as using the events to reinforce its whole apparatus of surveillance and repression (an achievement also echoed in Europe). Nevertheless, they do not represent a world-historic defeat for the working class, for the following reasons:

• the balance of forces between the classes can only be determined at the international level, and above all, by examining the state of play between bourgeoisie and proletariat in the European heartlands where the fate of the world revolution has been and will be decided. At this level, while September 11 gave the European bourgeoisie the opportunity to launch its own version of the anti-terrorist campaign, there has been no outpouring of patriotism comparable to what took place in the US. On the contrary, the USA's war in Afghanistan gave rise to considerable disquiet within the population of Europe, a fact partly reflected in the scale of the "anti-war" movement on this continent. This movement was certainly launched by the bourgeoisie, in part as an expression of its own reluctance to go along with the US war campaign, but also as a way of preventing any class opposition to capitalist war;
• even within the US, we can see that the patriotic tide is not all-engulfing. Within weeks of the attacks there were strikes among a number of different sectors of the American working class, even when the latter were denounced as being "unpatriotic" for defending their class interests.

   

  Thus, the various factors identified as confirmations of the historic course towards class confrontations in the resolution on the international situation from the 14th ICC congress still stand:

• the slow development of class militancy, particularly in the central concentrations of the proletariat. This has been confirmed most recently by the railway strikes in Britain and the more widespread, if dispersed, strike movements in France
• the subterranean maturation of consciousness, expressed in the development of politicised minorities in numerous countries. This process continued and even developed during the Afghanistan war (eg, groups defending class positions against the war arising from the swamp in Britain, Germany, etc)
• the "negative" weight of the proletariat with regard to the drive to war. This is expressed in particular by the way the ruling class presents its major military operations. In the Gulf, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, the actual function of these wars is systematically hidden from the proletariat - not only at the level of the stated aims of the war (here, capitalism always hides its motives behind fine phrases) but even at the level of who the enemy really is. At the same time, the bourgeoisie is still very cautious about mobilising large numbers of the proletariat for these wars. Although the US bourgeoisie certainly scored some significant ideological successes at this level, even they were very concerned to minimise of US casualties in Afghanistan; in Europe, no attempt whatever was made to depart from the practise of sending professional troops only for the war.

War in capitalism's decomposition

7. For all these reasons, a third world war is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future. But this is no source of consolation. The September 11 events conveyed a strong sense of an impending apocalypse; and it remains the case that we are approaching the "end of the world" one way or another, if we mean by "world" the world of capitalism, a doomed system exhausting all possibilities of reform. The perspective announced by Marxism since the 19th century remains socialism or barbarism; but the concrete form which this threat of barbarism is taking is different from the one revolutionaries have grown used to during the 20th century, that is, the destruction of civilisation through a single world imperialist war. The entry of capitalism into the final phase of its decline, the phase of decomposition, is conditioned by the inability of the ruling class to "solve" its historic crisis in another world war; but it brings with it a new and more insidious danger, that of a more gradual slide into chaos and self-destruction. In such a scenario, imperialist war, or rather a spiral of imperialist wars, would still be the leading horseman of the apocalypse, but it would be riding alongside famine, disease, planet-wide ecological disaster and the unravelling of all social bonds. And unlike imperialist world war, for such a scenario to reach its conclusion, it would not be necessary for capital to take on and defeat the central battalions of the working class; we are already facing the danger that the working class could be overwhelmed by the whole process of decomposition in a more piecemeal fashion, little by little losing the capacity to act as a self-conscious force opposed to capital and the nightmare it is inflicting upon humanity.

8. The "war on terrorism" is thus very much a war of capitalist decomposition. While the economic contradictions of the system push inexorably towards a confrontation between the major centres of world capital, the path towards such a confrontation is blocked, and inevitably takes on another form, as in the Gulf , Kosovo and Afghanistan - that of wars in which the underlying conflict between the great powers is "diverted" into military actions against a much weaker capitalist power. In all three cases, the leading protagonist is the USA, the world's most powerful state, which, in contrast to the process which led to the two world wars of the 20th century, is compelled to go onto the offensive, precisely in order to prevent the emergence of a rival strong enough to oppose it openly.

9. At the same time, the "war against terrorism" is much more than a re-run of the previous US interventions in the Gulf and the Balkans. It represents a qualitative acceleration of decomposition and barbarism:

• it no longer presents itself as a short-lived campaign with clear aims in a particular region, but as an open-ended, almost permanent conflict which has the entire globe as its theatre of operations;
• it has much more global and grandiose strategic aims, which include a decisive US presence in central Asia aimed at ensuring its control not only of this region but of the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, and thus blocking off any possibility of European (especially German) expansion into this region. This amounts, in effect, to a strategy of encircling Europe. This explains why, in contrast to 1991, the US can now assume the task of toppling Saddam, since it no longer needs him as a local gendarme given its intention to impose its presence directly. It is within this context that US ambitions to control the oil and other energy supplies of the Middle East and Central Asia must be situated; this is not, as the leftists argue, a policy of short-term gain carried out on behalf of the oil companies by the US government, but a strategic policy aimed at ensuring undisputed control of essential energy routes in the event of future imperialist conflicts. At the same time, the insistence that North Korea is part of the "axis of evil" constitutes a warning that the US reserves the right to mount a major operation in the Far East as well - a challenge to both Chinese and Japanese ambitions in the region.

10. But if the "war against terrorism" reveals the urge of the USA to create a disciplined world order that is entirely, and perpetually, in line with its military and economic interests, it cannot avoid the destiny of all the other wars of this period: to be yet another factor in the aggravation of global chaos, this time on a much more advanced level than the previous wars.

• in Afghanistan itself, the US victory has done nothing to stabilise the country internally. Fighting has already broken out between the innumerable factions who have taken control since the collapse of the Taliban; US bombing raids have already been used to "mediate" in these disputes, while other powers have not hesitated to pour oil on the fire, most noticeably Iran, which directly controls some of the dissident factions;
• the "success" of the USA's campaign against Islamic terrorism has also led to a re-formulation of its policy towards the Arab countries; it feels much less inclined to placate them. Its support for Israel's ultra-aggressive attitude towards the Palestinian Authority has helped to finally bury the Oslo "peace process", taking military confrontations onto a new level. At the same time, disagreements over the presence of US troops on Saudi soil has led to sharp words with its once-docile client
• the defeat of the Taliban has placed Pakistan in a very difficult situation and the Indian bourgeoisie has tried to take full advantage of this. The heightening of war tensions between these two nuclear powers has the gravest implications for the future of this region, especially considering that Russia and China are also directly involved in its labyrinth of rivalries and alliances.

11. All these situations contain the potential of spiralling out of control, forcing the US to intervene again and again to impose its authority, but each time multiplying the forces which are ready to strike out on their own and contest this authority. This is no less true when it comes to the USA's main imperialist rivals. The "war against terrorism", after the initial charade of "standing shoulder to shoulder with the US", has already resulted in a visible aggravation of tensions between the US and its European allies. Concerns over the vast scale of the new US defence budget have been combined with open criticisms of Bush's "axis of evil" speech. Germany, France and even Britain have expressed their reluctance to get caught up in the USA's plans for an attack on Iraq, and have been particularly incensed by the inclusion of Iran in this "axis", since both Germany and Britain have used the Afghan crisis to increase their influence in Tehran. They cannot fail to recognise that while the US is angry with Iran for its efforts to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan, it is also using Iran as a stick with which to beat its European rivals. The next phase of the "war against terrorism", which seems likely to involve a major assault on Iraq, will widen these differences even more. We can see in all this a new manifestation of the tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs centred around America and Europe. For the reasons given above, the counter-tendencies are in the ascendant, but this will not make for a more peaceful world. Frustrated by their military inferiority and by the social and political factors which make it impossible to confront the USA directly, the other great powers will redouble their efforts to contest US authority through the means available to them: proxy wars, diplomatic intrigues and so on. The American ideal of a world united under the Stars and Stripes is as impossible of realisation as Hitler's dream of a thousand year Reich.

12. In the period ahead, the working class, and above all the working class of the main capitalist countries, will be faced by an acceleration of the world situation at all levels. In particular, it will show in practise the profound connection between the economic crisis and the growth of military barbarism. The intensification of the crisis and of attacks on working class living standards do not merely coincide with the development of war and imperialist tensions. They mutually reinforce each other: the deadly impasse facing the world economy increases the pressure towards military solutions; the dizzying ascent of arms budgets calls for new sacrifices on the part of the working class; the devastation caused by war, unrelieved by any real "reconstructions" cause further dislocations in the economic machinery. At the same time, the necessity to justify these attacks will result in new ideological onslaughts against the consciousness of the working class. Thus in their struggle to defend their living standards, workers will have no choice but to understand the inner link between crisis and war, to recognise the historic and political implications of their combat.

The danger of decomposition for capitalism

13. Revolutionaries can have confidence that the historic course towards class confrontations remains open, that they have a vital role to play in the future politicisation of the class struggle. But they are not there to console their class. The greatest danger facing the proletariat in the period ahead is the erosion of its class identity, as a result of the ebb in class consciousness that followed the collapse of 1989, and through the pernicious advance of decomposition at all levels. If this process continues unchecked, the working class will be unable to have a decisive influence on the social and political upheavals which are being inexorably prepared by the deepening of the world economic crisis and the slide into militarism. Recent events in Argentina give us a clear picture of this danger: faced with a serious paralysis not only of the economy but also of the ruling class political apparatus, the working class was unable to pose itself as an autonomous force. Instead its embryonic movements (strikes, unemployed committees, etc) were drowned in an inter-classist "protest" which can offer no perspective and which provides the bourgeoisie with every possibility of manipulating the situation in its favour. It is particularly important for revolutionaries to be clear about this because the leftist chants about the development of a revolutionary situation in Argentina have seen similar developments in parts of the proletarian milieu and even the ICC itself, expressing a slide towards immediatism and opportunism. Our position on Argentina is not the result of any "indifference" towards the struggles of the proletariat in the peripheral regions. We have always insisted on the capacity of the proletariat in these areas, when it acts on its own terrain, to provide a leadership to all the oppressed. For example, the massive workers' struggles of 1969 in Cordoba offered a clear perspective to the other exploited strata in Argentina, and was an exemplary struggle for the world working class. On the contrary, the recent events, which some have mistaken for an advanced proletarian insurrectionary movement, have shown a few embryonic proletarian expressions completely unable to provide an anchor and a leadership to a revolt which has been quickly brought under the control of bourgeois forces. The Argentinean proletariat still has a huge role to play in the development of class struggles in Latin America; but its recent experience should not be confused with its future potential, which more than ever will be determined by the development of the workers' struggles on their own class terrain in the capitalist heartlands.

The responsibility of revolutionaries

14. Society as a whole is affected by capitalism's decomposition, and the bourgeoisie first and foremost. The proletariat is not spared these effects, and its class consciousness, its confidence in the future, its class solidarity are constantly under attack by the ideology and social practice engendered by this decomposition: nihilism, escapism into irrational and mystical ideologies, atomisation and the dissolution of human solidarity in favour of the false collective of gangs or clans. The revolutionary minority itself is not immune from the negative effects of decomposition, in particular through the resurgence of political parasitism, which though not specific to the period of decomposition is nonetheless powerfully stimulated by it. The difficulty that the rest of the proletarian political milieu experiences in becoming aware of the problem, but also the ICC's own lack of vigilance towards it, are serious weaknesses.1 To this must be added a tendency to fragmentation and closed-mindedness on the part of other groups in the milieu, justified by new sectarian theories, which are themselves marked by this period. If sufficient consciousness and political will do not appear within the milieu to combat these weaknesses, then the potential represented by a whole new generation of searching elements around the world runs the risk of being undermined. The formation of the future party depends on the proletarian milieu's ability to rise to its responsibilities.

Far from being a diversion from real political questions, the ICC's understanding of the phenomenon of capitalism's decomposition is the key for grasping the political difficulties confronting the working class and its revolutionary minorities. It has always been a specific task of revolutionary organisations to undertake a constant theoretical effort to clarify, both for themselves and for the whole working class, the questions posed by the needs of the class struggle. The necessity is still more imperious today if the working class - the only social force which, through its consciousness, its self-confidence, and its solidarity has the means to resist decomposition - is to live up to its historic responsibility for the overthrow of capitalism.

1st April, 2002

1 See the article in this issue on the ICC's Extraordinary Conference

The first article in this series looked at the resurgence of Islam as an ideology mobilising massive numbers. It was seen how Islam has been adapted to the needs of decomposing capital in the underdeveloped countries, with forms of so called “political Islam” (“fundamentalism”) which have little in common with the creed of the founder Muhammad, but which have the ability to pose as the champion of all the oppressed. It was also shown how, unlike Marx, who thought that the fog of religion was being rapidly dispersed by capitalism itself, later marxists recognised that capitalism in its decadent phase has seen a resurgence of religion, which expresses the increasingly patent bankruptcy of bourgeois society. In the underdeveloped countries, especially, this has taken the form of a turn towards militant “fundamentalist” movements. In the developed countries, the picture is more complex; religious observance in the established denominations has more or less steadily declined over the past fifty or so years, while “New Age” and other alternative religious cults have been growing, side-by-side with a complete turn away from religion and belief in God by some sectors of the population on the one hand, and a resurgence in “fundamentalist” creeds on the other.

These trends are noticeable among persons with a background in all the great religions, except perhaps among Buddhists, although it is noticeable that people who have immigrated from Third World countries often tend to cling more tightly to their religions, not only as a form of solace, but also as a symbol of their “lost” heritage - as a way of maintaining their cultural identity in a cruel and hostile environment.

It is also noticeable that trends are not completely uniform throughout the developed countries, in spite of the clear trend towards secularism in these states. Reportedly, "only 5% of Americans say they have no religion" (Dominique Vidal, 'A Secular Society', Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2001); despite the inroads of secularism; it would unthinkable, for instance, for a US President not to intone “God bless America” at the end of every major address to the nation. In France, on the other hand, where secularism has been at the centre of the bourgeoisie's raison d'être since 1789, "half the population no longer belongs to a church, synagogue or mosque" (Vidal, Ibid), despite an upsurge of “fundamentalism” among some North African immigrants.

Despite a move away from established religion, therefore, religious observance continues. The end of capital's ascendant era and the advent of its decadent phase, particularly its final phase of generalised decomposition, has not only prolonged the life of religious irrationalism, but in many ways generated variations which are arguably more dangerous for humanity.

This article is an initial attempt to examine the marxist approach to the problem of fighting religious ideology in general within the proletariat, under present conditions. It will be seen that there is much that we can learn on this matter from the past history of the workers' movement.

Fighting religion

As we have shown in Part One, Marx saw that religion is simultaneously a dangerous, diversionary mystification of reality (the “opium of the people”) and the “sigh of the oppressed” - that is, a stifled cry against oppression. Lenin added to this the advice for communists to tread carefully with anti-religious propaganda - while not for one moment hiding our atheistic materialism. Lenin's general approach to this delicate question still remains a beacon of communist thinking and a guide to revolutionary practice. This is not because Lenin drew up this framework, basing himself exclusively on quotations from Marx and Engels (for that would be to degrade marxist science into a religion!), but because Lenin's framework on the question sensibly and scientifically addresses all the principal problems. An examination of Lenin's thinking on this question is therefore useful at this point in the discussion. We can then return to the present day situation and consider what the attitude of marxists to this should be.

Interestingly, Lenin's first comment upon religion, which exists in English translation, is a passionate defence of religious freedom. A 1903 Article addressed to Russia's rural poor states that marxists "demand that everybody shall have full and unrestricted right to profess any religion he wants". Lenin denounced the laws in Russia and in Ottoman Turkey ("the disgraceful police persecution of religion"), discriminating in favour of particular religions (Orthodox Christianity and Islam respectively), as particularly "shameful". All these laws are as unjust, as arbitrary and disgraceful as can be. Everyone must be perfectly free, not only to profess whatever religion they please, but also to spread or change their religion.

Lenin's ideas on many aspects of revolutionary politics changed over time, but not as far as this question is concerned. This becomes apparent if Lenin's first major statement on this question - a 1905 article ‘Socialism and Religion’ - is compared to his later writings on this issue.

‘Socialism and Religion’ set the essential framework for the Bolsheviks' attitude towards religion. The article summarised in a popular style conclusions already reached by Marx and Engels on religion - that religion is "a sort of spiritual booze", as Lenin put it, which "exhorts working people to suffer exploitation in the hope of heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven”.

The proletariat, Lenin confidently predicted, would fuse its struggle with modern science, break through "the fog of religion" and successfully "fight in the present for a better life on earth".

Lenin argued for religion to be a private affair, as far as the proletarian dictatorship was concerned. He said that communists demand that the state be absolutely independent of any religious affiliations and should materially contribute to no religious organisation's expenses. At the same time, discrimination must be outlawed against any religion and all citizens "must be free to profess any religion" or, for that matter, "no religion whatever".

As far as the marxist party was concerned, however, religion was never a private affair: “Our Party is an association of class conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth (...) And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat”.

Lenin added, however, that religion could not be overcome simply through empty, abstract propaganda.

“It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion ... is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No amount of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven”.

Communists, wrote Lenin, were adamantly opposed to any "stirring up of secondary differences" over religious questions, which could be utilised by reactionaries to split the proletariat. The true source of "religious humbugging", after all, was economic slavery. The same themes were restated at greater length during 1909, in an essay entitled ‘The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion’:

“The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism ... - a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion... Religion is the opium of the people - this dictate by Marx is the cornerstone of the whole marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class”.

At the same time, Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who desired to be "more left" or "more revolutionary" than the Social Democrats, to introduce into the programme of the workers' political organisation an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion. Engels condemned the Blanquists' war on religion, says Lenin, as "the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out":

“Engels blamed the Blanquists for being unable to understand that only the class struggle of the working masses could, by comprehensively drawing the widest strata of the proletariat into conscious and revolutionary social practice, really free the oppressed masses from the yoke of religion, whereas to proclaim that war on religion was a political task of the workers' party was just anarchistic phrase-mongering” (Lenin, 1909, Ibid).

The same warning was made in Engels' Anti-Dühring, and with relation to Bismarck’s war on religion:

“By this struggle Bismarck only stimulated the militant clericalism of the Catholics and only injured the work of real culture, because he gave prominence to religious divisions rather than political divisions, and diverted the attention of some sections of the working class and of the other democratic elements away from the urgent tasks of the class and revolutionary struggle to the most superficial and false bourgeois anti-clericalism. Accusing the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of wanting to repeat Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the workers' party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion... Engels ... deliberately underlined, that Social Democrats [all marxists called themselves Social Democrats at this time] regard religion as a private matter in relation to the state, but not in relation to themselves, not in relation to Marxism, and not in relation to the workers' party” (Lenin, 1909, Ibid).

The attitude towards religion: principled flexibility

This flexible but principled attitude towards religion by Marx, Engels and Lenin has been attacked by "anarchist phrasemongers" (Lenin's expression) who failed to grasp that the marxist attitude on this question is quite consistent. Lenin explains:

“It would be a profound mistake to think that the seeming 'moderation' of Marxism in regard to religion is due to supposed 'tactical' considerations, the desire 'not to scare away' anybody, and so forth. On the contrary, in this question too the political line of marxism is inseparably bound up with its philosophical principles.

“Marxism is materialism. ... We must combat religion - that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of marxism. But marxism is not a materialism that has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion” (Lenin, 1909, Ibid).

According to "the bourgeois progressist, the radical and the bourgeois atheist", says Lenin, religion maintains its hold due to "the ignorance of the people".

“The marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extraordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc.

“'Fear made the gods'. Fear of the blind force of capital - blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people - a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict 'sudden', 'unexpected', 'accidental' ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation - such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.

“Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social Democracy's atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task - the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters” (Lenin, 1909, Ibid).

Lenin insisted that this can only be understood in practice dialectically. Otherwise atheist propaganda can even be harmful in certain circumstances. (He gives the example of a labour strike led by a Catholic trade union. In this instance, the marxist must "place the success of the strike above everything", vigorously opposing any division of workers "into atheists and Christians", since it is the "progress of the class struggle" which "will convert Christian workers to Social Democracy and to atheism a hundred times better than bald atheist propaganda"):

“A marxist must be a materialist, i.e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i.e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could. A marxist must be able to view the concrete situation as a whole, he must always be able to find the boundary between anarchism and opportunism (this boundary is relative and changeable, but it exists).

“And he must not submit either to the abstract, verbal, but in reality empty 'revolutionism' of the anarchist, or to the philistinism and opportunism of the petty bourgeois or liberal intellectual, who boggles at the struggle against religion, forgets that this is his duty, reconciles himself to belief in God, and is guided not by the interests of the class struggle but by the petty and mean consideration of offending nobody, repelling nobody and scaring nobody - by the sage rule: 'live and let live', etc., etc” (Lenin, 1909, Ibid).

Lenin continually warned against the dangers of petty bourgeois impatience in combating religious prejudices. Thus, in a speech to the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women, in November 1918, he noted the young Soviet republic's astonishing success in pushing back women's oppression in the more urbanised areas, but added a warning:

“For the first time in history, our law has removed everything that denied women's rights. But the important thing is not the law. In the cities and industrial areas this law on complete freedom of marriage is doing all right, but in the countryside, it all too frequently remains a dead letter. There the religious marriage still predominates. This is due to the influence of the priests, an evil that is harder to combat than the old legislation.

“We must be extremely careful in fighting religious prejudices; some people cause a lot of harm in this struggle by offending religious feelings. We must use propaganda and education. By lending too sharp an edge to the struggle we may only arouse popular resentment; such methods of struggle tend to perpetuate the division of the people along religious lines, whereas our strength lies in unity. The deepest source of religious prejudice is poverty and ignorance; and that is the evil we have to combat” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 180-81).

In drafting the Russian Communist Party's Programme the following year, Lenin repeated the traditional call for the complete separation of church and state and continued to warn against "hurting the religious sentiments of believers, for this only serves to increase religious fanaticism".

Then, two years later at a meeting of non-Bolshevik delegates to the Ninth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, when Kalinin (later to be given control of education under Stalin) remarked that Lenin might issue an order to "burn all the prayer books", Lenin hastened to clarify the situation, stressing that he "never suggested such a thing and never could. You know that according to our Constitution, the fundamental law of our Republic, freedom of conscience in respect of religion is fully guaranteed to every person”.

Earlier in 1921, Lenin wrote to Molotov (another future leading Stalinist apparatchik), criticising slogans such as "expose the falsehood of religion" in a circular regarding May Day. "This is not right. It is tactless", wrote Lenin, underlining again the need "absolutely to avoid the affront to religion". In fact, Lenin felt so strongly about this issue that he demanded an additional circular, correcting the previous one. If the Secretariat could not agree with this, then he proposed to take up the matter in the Politburo. (The Central Committee subsequently published a letter in Pravda on 21 April 1921, urging that in celebrating Mayday "nothing should be done or said to offend the religious feelings of the mass of the population".)

Lenin's views on socialism and religion are quite clear cut. The views of Marx, Engels and Lenin on combating the fog of religion can now be briefly summarised. Religion is understood first and foremost as a form of oppression in class society - a means of bamboozling the masses into accepting their oppression. It exists and flourishes in specific material conditions - what Lenin referred to as "economic slavery". The emergence of capitalist decadence means, more than ever, that the proletariat and other oppressed suffer from "fear of the blind force of capital", as capitalism's economic catastrophes thrust the working masses repeatedly and abruptly into "pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation".

The forms of religion vary enormously. But all religion, while unquestionably a diversion from real human liberation, functions as a diversion precisely because it is a comfort in conditions of adversity. It appears to provide hope for a better life (albeit after death, or after some purely supernatural transformation of the material world). And this hope of liberation ('salvation') in the hereafter or the apocalyptic future even enables the illusion to develop that suffering here and now is not in vain, since suffering will be generously rewarded in Paradise, provided the believer submits to God. In the callous, cold, inhuman world of the permanent and deepening crisis of capitalist decadence, religion also provides the oppressed with a means of apparent partial release from their bondage; religion affirms that each person is indeed precious in the eyes of his or her divine creator.

To overcome religion: unity in the class struggle

For anarchists, "narrow bourgeois uplifters" and impatient middle class radicals, the hold of religion on the masses is due to the latter's ignorance. Marxists, in contrast, understand that the material roots of religion are very deep and real in modern capitalism (indeed, they extend far deeper than capitalism itself, to the very origins of class society and even to the origins of humanity itself). Religion cannot therefore be overcome merely (or even primarily) by propaganda. Communists must make anti-religious propaganda, but this must always be subordinate to practical proletarian unity in the class struggle: the anti-religious preaching "must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating its social roots of religion". This is the only materialist strategy of uprooting religion. Attempts to solve the problem by declaring a political 'war upon religion', engaging in tactless affronts to religion, or by supporting measures aimed at restricting religious observance ignore religion's real, material, roots. Such behaviour is folly, from a proletarian viewpoint, since it exacerbates religious divisions within the proletariat and pushes working people into the arms of religious fanatics.

Communists' opposition to religion does not mean that they support measures by any state against religious belief and observance, or against particular religious sects.

Communists remain ideological and political opponents of religion: there is no question of religion being a private matter in the ranks of the revolutionary organization itself, which is made up of class conscious militants who have broken with all forms of religion. This said, in their battle against popular religious prejudices, the communists must be not only materialists - believing and acting on the fundamental standpoint that it is humans who make their own history and can thus liberate themselves through their own conscious activity - but also dialectical materialists. That is, marxists must proceed on the basis of the situation as a whole, being acutely aware of all the crucial interactions between the respective political component parts. This implies linking anti-religious propaganda in a concrete way to the actually existing class struggle, instead of waging an abstract, purely ideological battle against religion. Only with the victory of the proletarian class movement can the social roots of religious prejudice in class exploitation begin to be severed. Religion cannot be “abolished” - the working masses must outgrow it, on the basis of their own experiences. Communists will therefore avoid any measures (such as reviling religious practices) which inflame religious feelings for no good purpose. The state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism, established by the dictatorship of the proletariat, must therefore foreswear all religious discrimination, as well as any material affiliation or tie with religion.

In order to show clearly which class interests religion serves today, revolutionary organisations must integrate into their propaganda the evolution of religion’s role within society. The original creeds and practises of the great religions have been transformed into caricatures, due to the religious establishment's adaptation to and absorption by class society Rosa Luxemburg framed an appeal to religious-minded workers with this in mind, accusing the churches: “Today it is you, in your lies and your teachings, who are pagans, and it is we who bring to the poor, to the exploited the tidings of fraternity and equality. It is we who are marching to the conquest of the world as he did formerly who proclaimed that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism and The Churches).

Clearly, there is much that remains useful in our movement's revolutionary heritage. Marx and Engels wrote as militants at the height of capitalism's ascendant era, while Lenin was a revolutionary pioneer of communist praxis at the dawn of capitalism's decadence. Today we are in the highest and final phase of capitalist decadence - capitalist decomposition, when the proletariat will either rediscover its own revolutionary political heritage or humanity as a whole will literally be condemned to extinction. Obviously, this means that it is simply not good enough to repeat the relevant texts of the marxist classics; it is imperative that we also identify what is new in the present era, and what this means in practice for the proletariat and its political organisations.

The struggle against religion in the decadence and decomposition of capitalism

The first point to clarify in this regard is actually something that emerged at the dawn of decadence in about 1914, but has not been stressed sufficiently by revolutionaries; its clarification is therefore something left over from the dawn of decadence. This concerns the Second International’s and the French revolution’s slogan of the complete separation between church and state. This slogan - quite appropriate and necessary at the time it was initially framed - is an unrealised bourgeois democratic demand of capitalism in its ascendant phase. It should be understood clearly that only the proletariat and its party can truly achieve this, due to the countless ties between the religious establishment and capitalism. This was already universally true by the end of the nineteenth century; it is even more evident in the era of state capitalism ushered in by capitalist decadence. It is therefore both pointless and a dangerous illusion to believe that it is possible to campaign for the demand that the capitalist state separate from the religious establishment, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks tended to do.

The second point, as mentioned in the introduction to the present article and in the preceding part, is that, since entering its phase of decomposition, capitalism is now both more irrational and barbarous than at any previous point (see ‘Decomposition: the Final Phase of Capitalist Decadence’, in International Review N°107). Decomposition is the consequence of the situation in which capitalism, having long outlived its usefulness to humanity as a whole, confronts a proletariat, the only force that can overthrow this system and replace it with another society, that is still heavily marked by long decades of counter-revolution and lacking in confidence in itself as a class. The mass workers' movements of 1968-1989 represented a serious weakening of the effects of the capitalist counter-revolution, but in the last decade or so, the period we characterise as that of capitalist decomposition, the working class has suffered a number of powerful blows against its sense of class identity, in particular through all the bourgeois campaigns about the “death of communism” and the “end of the class struggle”, and through the insidious, creeping effects of social decomposition in general.

In its final, vicious and highly irrational phase, capitalism will stop at nothing to attempt to prevent proletarians from becoming self-confident and politically conscious. Furthermore, revolutionary political organisations are not immune from the influence of decadent capitalism's irrationality. A section of the Bolsheviks were gripped by a paroxysm of 'God-building' in the wake of the defeat of the 1905 revolution and the triumph of the Stolypin reaction. More recently, a section of the Bordigists, the group publishing the paper il partito has begun dabbling in mysticism (see "Marxism and Mysticism", in International Review No. 94, and the May 1997 issue of Programme Communiste). And the ICC was compelled, in the mid-1990s, to combat a sudden enthusiasm among certain militants for mysticism and occultism.

The heightened dangers posed by capitalism's decomposition should not be underestimated. Humanity as a whole is by nature a social animal. Decomposition is a sort of social acid, eating away at the bonds of natural solidarity between humans in society, sowing distrust and paranoia in its place. To put it another way: decomposition generates a spontaneous tendency in society to regroup in cliques, clans and gangs. “Fundamentalism” of any sort, cults of all varieties, the growth of inane “New Age” groups and practices, the resurgence of criminal youth gangs, are all warped attempts to “replace” missing social solidarity, in an increasingly harsh world. Because they are not based on the latent vitality of the era's sole revolutionary class, but on individualist replications of exploitative relations, all these attempts are by their very nature doomed to produce only more alienation and distress and, in fact, to further exacerbate the effects of decomposition.

This further underlines the fact that the fight against the revival of religion, against all the forms of irrationalism which are flourishing today, is inseparable from the necessity for the working class to revive the struggle for its own real interests, because it is this struggle alone which can counter the corroding effects of a disintegrating social order. The proletariat, in the struggle to defend its material interests, has no choice but to create the premises for a genuine human community; its authentic solidarity in struggle is the antidote to the false solidarity offered by the culture of gangs and fundamentalism. By the same token, the struggle to awaken the class consciousness of the proletariat – a struggle whose avant-garde is the communist minority- is the antidote to the increasingly debased and inhuman mythologies secreted by a society in putrefaction; and in turn it indicates the path towards a future where man will have at last become fully aware of himself and his place in nature, and thus will have left all the gods behind him.

Dawson

In a previous article (InternationalReview n°108), we described the emergence of the leftfractions that fought the degeneration of the old workers'parties, in particular the German SPD that supported the wareffort of its national capital in 1914, and the Russian CP and theThird International as they were being transformed intoinstruments of the Russian state with the progressive defeat ofthe October Revolution. In this process, the task of the fractionswas to struggle to re-conquer the organisation for the fundamentalpositions of the proletarian programme, against their abandonmentby the opportunist right and the complete betrayal by theleadership controlling the majority of the organisation. Topreserve the organisation as an instrument of the class struggleand to save as many militants as possible, one of the leftfractions' main concerns was to remain in the party as long aspossible. However, the process of political degeneration wasinevitably accompanied by a profound modification in the partiesthemselves, and in the relationships between the militants and theorganisation as a whole. Inevitably, this situation posed for thefractions the problem of breaking party discipline in order tofulfil their task of preparing the new party of the proletariat.

In fact, within the workers' movement theleft has always defended the rigorous respect of theorganisation's rules and discipline. Breaking party discipline wasnot something to be taken lightly, but on the contrary demanded agreat sense of responsibility, a profound evaluation of the stakesand the future perspectives for both the proletariat and itsorganisation.

The purpose of thisarticle is to examine how the question of discipline was posed inthe history of the working class' organisations, and in particularhow it was treated by the left fractions in two great workers'parties: the 2ndand 3rdInternationals. We will see how the left fractions struggledwithin these parties to defend the revolutionary line againsttheir degeneration. Finally, we will see how the question wasposed in the left fractions of which we, and most of the otherorganisations of the proletarian political milieu, are the heirs.To do so, we must first examine more generally how the question ofdiscipline is posed within class society, and more particularlyhow it is posed for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Discipline and consciousness

The idea that every human activity needs tobe organised according to rules is banal enough, whether at thelevel of a small collective or of society as a whole. Thedifference between communism and all the previous class societiesthat have preceded it, is not that communism will be lessorganised - on the contrary, for the first time the humancommunity will be organised on a planetary scale - but that socialorganisation will no longer be imposed on an exploited class tothe profit of an exploiting class. "The government ofmen", as Marx said, "will be replaced by theadministration of things". However, as long as we live inclass society, "the government of men" is notsomething neutral. Under capitalism, discipline in the factory orthe office is imposed by the ruling class on the exploited class,and guaranteed in the last instance by the state through labourlaw backed up by armed force. The bourgeoisie would like us tobelieve that the state and its discipline stands above society,independent of classes - that everyone is equal before thediscipline of the law. Marxism attacks this mystification head-on,showing that no element of social organisation or behaviour can beconsidered independently of its social role and status withinclass society. As Lenin wrote, to use "abstract conceptsof 'democracy' and 'dictatorship', without specifying what classis in question (...) is a downright mockery of the basic theory ofsocialism (...) For in no civilised capitalist country is there'democracy in the abstract', there is only bourgeois democracy".1In the same way, it makes no sense to talk of "discipline"as such: we must identify the class nature of the discipline underconsideration. In capitalist society, freedom as such (whichappears as the opposite to discipline) is an illusion, since onthe one hand humanity lives under the reign of necessity and istherefore not free in its choices, and on the other because humanconsciousness is inevitably mystified by the false consciousnessof the ruling ideology. Freedom does not mean doing what onelikes, but reaching the most complete understanding possible ofwhat it is necessary to do. As Engels said in Anti-Dühring,"Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but thecapacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject.Therefore the freer a man's judgement is in relation to a definitequestion, the greater is the necessity with which the content ofthis judgement will be determined; while the uncertainty, foundedon ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among manydifferent and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely bythis that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very objectit should itself control".2The aim of marxist theory - historical and dialectical materialism- is precisely to make it possible for the proletariat to acquirethis "knowledge of the subject" of bourgeoissociety. Only thus will the revolutionary class be able to breakthe enemy class' discipline - its dictatorship - over society, andin doing so lay the foundations for the creation of the first freehuman society: free because for the first time, the whole ofhumanity will possess a conscious mastery both of the naturalworld and of its own social organisation.

Marxism has alwaysfought the influence of petty-bourgeois revolt infiltrating theworkers' movement, and the idea specific to anarchism that it isenough to oppose bourgeois discipline with "non-discipline",a so-called "proletarian indiscipline" so to speak.3The worker experiences bourgeois discipline as something foreignto him and to his interests, a discipline imposed from above inorder to enforce the power and interests of the ruling class.Unlike the petty-bourgeois, however, who can do nothing butrevolt, the working class is capable of understanding thediscipline imposed by capitalism as having a dual nature: on theone hand, an oppressive side, the expression of the class rule ofthe bourgeoisie which appropriates privately the fruits of theproletariat's labour; on the other hand, a potentiallyrevolutionary side, as a requirement of a collective process oflabour imposed by capital on the proletariat, itself a fundamentalprecondition for the planetary socialisation of production. It isprecisely this idea that Lenin expressed in One step forward,two steps back, dealing with the question in the only waypossible for a marxist: by treating "discipline" not asan abstract category in itself, but as an organisational vectordetermined by its class belonging: "the factory, whichseems only a bogey to some, represents that highest form ofcapitalist co-operation which has united and disciplined theproletariat, taught it to organise, and placed it at the head ofall the other sections of the toiling and exploited population.And Marxism, the ideology of the proletariat trained bycapitalism, has been and is teaching unstable intellectuals todistinguish between the factory as a means of exploitation(discipline based on fear of starvation) and the factory as ameans of organisation (discipline based on collective work unitedby the conditions of a technically highly developed form ofproduction). The discipline and organisation, which come so hardto the bourgeois intellectual, are very easily acquired by theproletariat just because of this factory "schooling".Mortal fear of this school and utter failure to understand itsimportance as an organising factor are characteristic of the waysof thinking which reflect the petty-bourgeois mode of life".Obviously, Lenin does not mean here to idealise the disciplineimposed on workers by the bourgeoisie,4but to show how the conditions of its existence have determinedthe attitude of the working class to the question of discipline,as indeed to other aspects of its self-activity. The conditions ofhis existence demonstrate to the worker that he is part of acollective productive process, and that he cannot defend hisinterests against the ruling class other than through collectiveaction. The great difference between the discipline of thebourgeoisie and of the proletariat is this: whereas the former isa discipline imposed by an exploiting class with all the power ofits state apparatus in order to maintain its own domination, thelatter is fundamentally the self-discipline of an exploitedclass in order to oppose a collective resistance to exploitationand eventually to overthrow it altogether. The proletariat thuscalls on a conscious, voluntary discipline, inspired by anunderstanding of the goals of its struggle. Where bourgeoisdiscipline is blind and oppressive, the discipline that theproletariat imposes on itself is liberating and conscious. In thissense, this discipline can never be substituted for an awarenessthroughout the proletariat of the goals of its movement and themeans to reach them.

What is true for the class as a whole is alsotrue for its revolutionary organisations. However, there aredifferences. Whereas the working class' collective discipline, itsunity of action, and its centralisation are the direct expressionsof its collective and organised nature, its being as arevolutionary class, discipline within revolutionary organisationsis founded on each member's commitment to respect theorganisation's rules, and the most developed consciousness of whatthese rules express. No revolutionary organisation can usediscipline to replace this proletarian consciousness.Revolutionary organisations cannot substitute discipline for thewidest debate within the organisation, any more than the workingclass as a whole can advance in its struggle against thebourgeoisie without developing an ever deeper and broaderconsciousness of the demands of the struggle and the path tofollow.

It was in this sensethat the GCF (Gauche Communiste de France) denounced thediscipline imposed by the Internationalist Communist Party on itsown militants, without debate, in order to force through itspolicy of participation in the Italian elections in 1946:"Socialism (...) is only possible as a conscious act ofthe working class (...) You cannot bring socialism with atruncheon. Not because the truncheon is an immoral means (...) butbecause the truncheon does not contain the element ofconsciousness (...) The only basis for concerted communist actionand organisation is the consciousness of the militants on whichthey are based. The greater and the clearer is this consciousness,the stronger the organisation and the more concerted and effectiveits action

"Lenin morethan once violently denounced the recourse to 'freely consenteddiscipline' as a truncheon of the bureaucracy. If he used the termdiscipline, he understood it - and he explained this many times -in the sense of the will to organised action, based on therevolutionary conviction of each militant ".5

It is no accident thatthis article looks back to Lenin, and to the Lenin of One stepforward, two steps back. The organisation that published thisarticle in 1947 was the same that had reacted with the greatestfirmness against those within its own ranks who had put in danger"the will to organised action" (see below).

Within the communist organisation,proletarian discipline is thus inseparable from discussion, thepitiless criticism of capitalist society, but also of its ownmistakes and those of the working class as a whole.

We will now considerhow the left fought to defend party discipline in the 2ndand 3rdInternationals.

Revisionism against party discipline inthe SPD

In the two decades that preceded World War I,the German SPD, the flower of the Second International, was thescene of an increasingly bitter struggle between the left and therevisionist, opportunist right. The latter was epitomisedtheoretically by the "revisionist" theories of EduardBernstein, and appeared in two distinct but allied forms: on theone hand a tendency of the parliamentary fractions to takeinitiatives independently of the party as a whole; on the otherthe refusal by the leaders of the trades unions to be bound by thedecisions of the party. In Social Reform or Revolution(first published in 1899), Rosa Luxemburg pointed to thedevelopment of the practical opportunism that laid the groundworkfor Bernstein's opportunist theory: "If we take intoconsideration sporadic manifestations, such as the question ofsubsidies for steamships, the opportunist currents in our movementhave existed for a long time. But it is only since the beginningof the 1890s with the suppression of the anti-socialist laws andthe re-conquest of the terrain of legality, that we have had anexplicit, unitary, opportunist current. Vollmar's 'statesocialism', the vote on the Bavarian budget, the 'agrariansocialism' of South Germany, Heine's policy of compensation,Schippel's stand on tariffs and militarism, are the high points inthe development of the opportunist practice".6Without entering into the detail of all these examples, it issignificant that Vollmar's "state socialism" includedthe vote by the Bavarian SPD of the budgets proposed by theBavarian Land (parliament), explicitly against the decisionof the majority of the party. Against the refusal of theopportunist right to respect the decisions of the majority and ofthe party congress, the left demanded the strengthening of partycentralisation and particularly of the Parteivorstand (thecentral executive), and the subordination of the parliamentaryfractions to the party as a whole. It was doubtless theexperience of this struggle that Luxemburg had in mind in replyingto Lenin on Organisational questions of Russian SocialDemocracy7in 1904: "In [the German] case, a more rigorousapplication of the idea of centralism in the constitution and astricter application of party discipline can no doubt be a usefulsafeguard against the opportunist current (?) Such a revision ofthe constitution of the German party has now become a necessity.But in this case too, the party constitution should not be seen asa kind of self-sufficient weapon against opportunism but merely asan external means through which the decisive influence of thepresent revolutionary-proletarian majority of the party can beexercised. When such a majority is lacking, the most rigorouswritten constitution cannot act in its place".

Clearly, the left stoodfor the most intransigent defence of party centralisation anddiscipline, and for the defence of the statutes.8Indeed, just as Rosa Luxemburg expresses her determination here,at the end of the 19thcentury, to defend the German party through rigorous discipline,so she constantly fought for the respect of the decisions of thecongresses of the 2ndInternational by all its constituent parties.9

1914: a coup d'Etat within theparty itself

Throughout the period that preceded the war,the left fought for a discipline faithful to revolutionaryprinciples. We can readily imagine, therefore, the terribledilemma that confronted Karl Liebknecht and the otherparliamentary deputies of the left on 4thAugust 1914, when the majority of the SPD's parliamentary fractionannounced that it would vote the war credits demanded by theKaiser's government: either break with proletarianinternationalism by voting the war credits, or vote as a minorityagainst the war and so break party discipline. What Liebknecht andhis comrades failed to understand at this critical moment, wasthat once the Social Democracy had betrayed its most basicprinciples by abandoning proletarian internationalism andsupporting the war effort of the ruling class, and had broken withthe decisions of its own congresses and of the International, itwas the Social-Democratic leadership which in reality had brokenparty discipline. The left could no longer pose the question inthe same way. By allying itself with the bourgeois state theparliamentary fraction of the SPD had carried out a veritable coupd'Etat within the party, and had seized for itself anauthority to which it had no right, but which it imposed thanks tothe armed power of the capitalist state. For Rosa Luxemburg,"Discipline towards the party as a whole, in other wordstowards its programme, takes precedence over any corps discipline,and alone can justify the latter, just as it defines the latter'snatural limit". It was the leadership, not the left,which from the outset of the war perpetrated endless violations ofparty discipline with the support of the state, "violationsof discipline which consist in specific organs of the Partybetraying on their own initiative the will of the whole, in otherwords the programme, instead of serving it".10And to make sure that the mass of militants remained unable tocontest the decision of the leadership, on the 5thAugust (ie the day after the vote for war credits), the partycongress was put off for the duration of the war. With goodreason, as the development of an opposition within the SPD was toshow.11

In the years thatfollowed, the left of the SPD, which remained faithful toproletarian internationalism, confronted a veritable bourgeoisdiscipline within the party itself. Inevitably, the activity ofthe Spartakus Group broke the party discipline as it was nowinterpreted and applied by the SPD leadership in alliance with thestate.12 Thequestion now was not how to maintain the discipline and unity ofthe proletarian organisation, but how to avoid giving theleadership disciplinary pretexts for expelling them from the partyand isolating from the militants whose resistance to the war wasbeginning to emerge, inevitably taking the expression of aresistance to the coup d'Etat of the leadership.

An example of thedifficulty the left experienced in thus determining its action isthe disagreement that appeared within the left over the payment ofdues to the SPD centre by the local sections. This was indeed adifficult question: money - the dues of its militants - is indeed"the sinew of war" for a working class organisation.However, by 1916 it was obvious that the SPD leadership was ineffect embezzling the funds of the organisation to fight, not theclass war of the working class, but the imperialist war of thebourgeoisie. Under these conditions, Spartakus called on the localmilitants to "stop paying your dues to the partyleadership, because it uses your hard-earned money for supportinga policy, for publishing texts which want to turn you into thepatient cannon-fodder of imperialism, all of which aims atprolonging the massacre".13

For a new International, aninternational discipline

From the outset of the left's struggleagainst the betrayal of 1914, the question was posed of thecreation of a new International. For some revolutionaries, such asOtto Rühle,14the utter betrayal of the SPD and its ferocious use of amechanical discipline imposed in collaboration with the state,were the definitive proof that all political parties wereinevitably condemned to become bureaucratic monsters and betraythe working class, no matter what their programme. This was notthe conclusion of the vast majority of the left, who were to leadthe fight for the construction of a new International and thevictory of the proletarian revolution begun in Petrograd inOctober 1917. For Rosa Luxemburg, as Paul Frölich explains"the workers' movement had to break with the elementswhich had gone over to imperialism; it was necessary to create anew workers' International, an International of a higher kind thanthe old one, 'with a unified understanding of theproletariat's interests and tasks, a coherent tactic, and acapacity for intervention in both peace and war'. The greatestimportance was attached to international discipline: 'TheInternational is the centre of gravity of the proletariat's classorganisation. In time of peace, the International decides thetactics to be adopted by the national sections on militarism,colonial policy, (...) etc, and the entire tactic to be adopted incase of war. The obligation to apply the decisions of theInternational takes precedence over every other obligation of theorganisation. (...) The fatherland of the workers, to whicheverything else must be subordinated, is the socialistInternational'".15

When, in June 1920, thedelegates assembled in Moscow for the Second Congress of theCommunist International, civil war was still raging in Russia andrevolutionaries world wide were locked in combat both with thebourgeoisie and with the social-traitors: the old parties whichhad betrayed the working class by supporting the war. They werealso confronted with the wavering of the "centrist"parties, which still hesitated to break off all their links withtheir old socialist methods, or indeed in the case of manyleaders, with their old friends who had stayed in the rottingSocial Democracy. Nor were the centrists prepared to breakradically with their old legalistic tactics. In such a situation,the communists and especially the left wing were determined thatthe new International should not repeat the mistakes of the old inthe matter of discipline. There would be no more autonomy of theparticularities of the national parties, which had served as amask for chauvinism in the old International,16no more toleration of the petty-bourgeois careerist whose interestlay in his personal parliamentary career. The CommunistInternational was to be a fighting organisation, the leadership ofthe proletariat in its decisive worldwide struggle for power andthe overthrow of capitalism. This determination is reflected inthe 21 Conditions for adherence to the International, adopted bythe Congress. Let us cite point 12 as an example: "Theparties belonging to the Communist International must be built onthe principle of democratic centralisation. In the present epochof bitter civil war, the communist party will not be able tofulfil its role unless it is organised in the most centralisedmanner, unless an iron discipline close to military discipline isaccepted and unless the central organ is accorded the widestpowers, exercises an undisputed authority, and benefits from theunanimous confidence of the militants".

The 21 conditions werestrengthened by the organisation's statutes, which clearlyestablished that the International should be a world wide andcentralised party. According to point 9 of the statutes: "TheExecutive Committee [the central organ of the International]of the Communist International has the right to demand thatgroups or individuals who have infringed proletarian disciplineshould be excluded from the affiliated parties; it can demand theexclusion of parties which have violated the decisions of theWorld Congress".

That this determinationwas fully shared by the left is demonstrated by the fact that the21stcondition was proposed by Amadeo Bordiga, leader of the left inthe Italian Socialist Party: "Members of the party whoreject the conditions and theses adopted by the CommunistInternational must be excluded from the party. The same is true ofdelegates to the Extraordinary Congress".

The degeneration of the party and theloss of proletarian discipline

With the ebb of the revolutionary wave of1917, came the tragic degeneration of the Communist International.The Russian working class was bled white by civil war, theKronstadt revolt had been crushed, the revolution defeated in allthe central countries of Europe (Germany, Italy, Hungary, France,Britain), and the International itself was dominated by a Russianstate already under the rule of Stalin and the GPU. The year 1925was to be the year of "bolshevisation": the reduction ofthe International to the status of a tool in the hands of Russianstate capitalism. As the counter-revolution advanced in theInternational, proletarian discipline gave way to the truncheon ofbourgeois discipline.

Inevitably, such adegeneration encountered a bitter opposition from the leftcommunists both inside Russia (the Miasnikov group, Trotsky andthe Left Opposition, the Democratic Centralism group), and withinthe International itself, especially from the left of the ItalianCP around Bordiga. Once again, as it had been during the war of1914, the left was confronted with a party discipline, which - inRussia at least - was enforced by Stalin's GPU, the prison, andthe concentration camp. But the International was not the Russianstate, and the Italian left was determined to fight to wrest theInternational from the hands of the right, and to preserve it forthe working class. What it was not prepared to do, was to conductthe struggle by throwing overboard the very principles it hadfought for at the effective founding of the International at its2ndCongress. In particular, Bordiga and the left were not prepared toabandon the discipline of a centralised party to theiradversaries. In March-April of 1925, the left wing of the Italianparty made a first attempt to work as an organised grouping byforming a "Committee of Entente": "When theCongress was announced, a Committee of Entente was formedspontaneously in order to avoid disorganised reactions byindividuals or groups, which would have led to a splintering, andto channel the action of all the comrades of the Left along acommon and responsible line, within the strict limits ofdiscipline, the respect of their rights being guaranteed to all inthe Party's constitution. The leadership [ie, of theInternational] seized on this fact and used it in its plan ofagitation to present the comrades of the Left as fractionists andsplitters, forbidding them to defend themselves and winning votesagainst them in the federal committees by pressure exercised fromabove" (Lyon Theses, 1926).17

The International'spresidium demanded the dissolution of the Entente Committee, andthe left bowed to this decision under protest: "Accused offractionism and splittism, we will sacrifice our opinions to theunity of the Party, by carrying out an order which we considerunjust and ruinous for the Party. We will thus demonstrate thatthe Italian left is perhaps the only current which considersdiscipline as something serious which cannot be bargained away. Wereaffirm our previous positions and our acts. We deny that theCommittee of Entente was a manoeuvre aimed at splitting the Partyand creating a fraction within it, and we protest again at thecampaign conducted on this basis, without even giving us the rightto defend ourselves, and by scandalously deceiving the Party.Nonetheless, since the Presidium thinks that the dissolution ofthe Committee of Entente will eliminate fractionism, and althoughwe are of a contrary opinion, we will obey. But we leave to theExecutive Committee the entire responsibility for the evolution ofthe situation within the Party, and for the reactions caused bythe way in which the leadership has administered its internallife".

When Karl Korsch,recently expelled from the KPD18,wrote to Bordiga in 1926 to propose joint action between theItalian left and the German Kommunistische Politik group, Bordigarefused. Two of the reasons he gave are worth citing here. On theone hand, he did not consider that the theoretical basis for sucha stand had yet been established: "In general, I thinkthat what must be a priority today is, more than organisation andmanoeuvring, a work of elaborating a political ideology of theinternational left, based on the eloquent experiences that theComintern has been through. As this point is far from beingattained, any international initiative seems difficult".On the other, the unity and international centralisation of theInternational was not something to be abandoned lightly: "Weshould not be in favour of splitting parties and theInternational. We should allow the experience of artificial andmechanical discipline to reach its conclusion by respecting thisdiscipline in all its procedural absurdities as long as this ispossible, without ever renouncing our political and ideologicalcritique and without ever solidarising with the dominantorientation".19

The struggle of the Italian Left, firstagainst the degeneration of the International, then to draw outthe lessons of its degeneration and of the defeat of the Russianrevolution, was critical in the creation of today's proletarianpolitical milieu. All the major proletarian currents that existtoday, including the ICC, are the direct descendants of thatstruggle, and for us there is no doubt that their defence ofproletarian discipline within the International was one of thestruggle's critical elements. The proletarian discipline of theInternational was essential in delimiting it from thesocial-traitors, in defining what behaviour was and was notacceptable within the organisations of the working class. But asBordiga clearly implies, proletarian discipline is completelyforeign to the discipline imposed on exploited classes by thecapitalist state.

The question of discipline in the LeftFraction

Once it could no longer work within theInternational, after being excluded by the Stalinist leadership,the Italian Left Fraction adopted its own organisational form(around the publication Bilan), by drawing the lessons fromits struggles for and within the International.

First amongst these wasthe insistence on discussion "without taboos", as Bilanput it, in order to understand all the lessons of the immenseexperience that had been the revolutionary wave after October1917. But the left fractions were also confronted by internalcrises, when "the will to organised action, based on therevolutionary conviction of each militant" proved wantingamongst a minority within the organisation. What is to be donewhen the very framework which makes this organised action possibleis undermined by the organisation's own militants? The first ofthese crises that we will examine here occurred in 1936, when alarge minority of the Bilan group rejected the majorityposition that the war in Spain was being fought, not on theterrain of the proletarian revolution but on the terrain of theimperialist war. The minority demanded the right to take up armsin defence of the Spanish "revolution", and despite aveto by Bilan's Executive Commission (EC) 26 members of theminority left for Barcelona where they established a new section.This new section in Barcelona refused to pay its dues, integratednew members on the basis of participation on the military front inSpain, and demanded the recognition of both the Barcelona sectionand the newly integrated militants as a pre-condition for itscontinued activity within the organisation.20

The Italian Lefttreated the question of discipline in its own ranks in accord withits conception of the organisation, and of its relationship to itsmilitants. Thus the EC "decided that the discussion shouldnot be carried on in a hurried manner so that the organisation canbenefit from the contribution of the comrades who are unable atthe moment to intervene actively in the debate, and also becausethe further evolution of the situation in Spain will allow for amore complete clarification of the fundamental differences whichhave emerged".21Given the extent of the disagreements, the EC knew that a splitwas inevitable and considered that priority should be given toprogrammatic clarification. To make this possible, it was ready topass over some of the minority's violations of the statutes, so asnot to give it a pretext for leaving the organisation and avoidingthe fundamental political questions. It even went as far as toaccept the minority's not paying its dues. When the minority ofthe fraction set up a "Co-ordinating Committee" (CC) tonegotiate with the majority and demanded the immediate recognitionof the Barcelona section (even announcing that it considered therefusal to recognise the section as equivalent to the exclusion ofthe minority), the EC initially refused to do so: "TheExecutive Commission based its decision on an elementary criterionand a principle the organisation was founded upon when it decidednot to recognise the Barcelona group. The decision was taken onthe basis of considerations which were not even discussed by theCo-ordinating Committee and which were published in our previouscommuniqué. It was decided that no member of the minoritywas to be expelled and thus the decision of the Co-ordinatingCommittee in considering the whole minority expelled if theBarcelona group was not recognised, is quite incomprehensible".Given the minority's threat to split otherwise, the EC decided torecognise the Barcelona section; however, it refused to recognisethe newly integrated militants of the section, on the grounds thatthey had joined on a completely unclear basis and had not evenagreed to the fraction's basic founding documents. Throughout,"The EC (...) based itself on the same principle: thatsplits must take place over questions of principle and not overquestions particular to a tendency and still less overorganisational questions". This determination to maintainthe political debate was to no effect. The minority refused toattend the congress of the fraction, organised in order to discussthe contending positions, refused to make its own politicaldocuments known to the EC, and made contact with the anti-fascistgroup "Giustizia e Liberta". Consequently, "Inthese circumstances, the Executive Commission is of the opinionthat the evolution of the minority is clear proof that it can nolonger be considered as a tendency of the organisation but as areflection of the Popular Front within the Fraction. Consequentlythere can be no problem of a political split in the organisation.

"Consideringmoreover that the minority is flirting with obviouscounter-revolutionary enemies of the Fraction (?) while at thesame time declaring any discussion with the Fraction to beuseless, the EC has decided to expel for political unworthinessall the comrades who are in solidarity with the CC's letter of25/11/1936, and it will allow fifteen days for the comrades of theminority to come to a collective decision".

In defence of organisational discipline

The Italian Left underwent another crisis atthe beginning of World War II, when the Fraction dissolved on thebasis of a theory defended by Vercesi, that the proletariatdisappeared as a class during wartime. However, during the warsome of its members regrouped around the Marseilles nucleus. Inparallel, a French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFGC) wasformed. In 1945, a new crisis broke out. In Italy, a new PartitoComunista Internazionalista had just been created by those membersof the Italian Left who had spent the war in Mussolini's gaols.The Italian Fraction decided to dissolve, and to rejoin the ranksof the party on an individual basis. The FFGC severely criticisedthis decision, on the grounds that the basis for the formation ofthe new party in Italy was unclear, and that the Fraction'sdissolution turned its back on all the work accomplished duringthe war by the Italian Fraction in exile. Marco, member of boththe Italian Fraction and the FFGC, refused the liquidation of theFraction. Part of the FFGC, however, adopted the position of themajority in the Italian Fraction, but instead of defending thispolitical position within the organisation, these militantspreferred to conduct a campaign of slander inside and outside theorganisation, directed essentially against Marco. Unsuccessful inpersuading these comrades to return to the framework oforganisational discipline, the FFGC adopted a resolutionsanctioning them (17/06/1945):22"The General Assembly reasserts its position of principle,namely that splits and exclusions cannot be a means for resolvinga political debate, as long as disagreements are on the grounds ofthe programmatic foundation of our principles. On the contrary,organisational measures in a political debate can only obscure theproblem, preventing the complete maturation of tendencies, whichalone will allow the movement to come to a conclusion and tostrengthen the fraction's political heritage through politicalstruggle. But it does not follow from this position of principlethat political elaboration can be conducted under no matter whatconditions. Political elaboration is only possible if elementaryorganisational rules are respected, and in a fraternal andcollective work in the interests of the class and of theorganisation (...)

"Refusing toexplain themselves either in front of all the comrades, orpublicly in our organ Internationalisme, these elementshave published a communiqué signed 'a group of militantsfrom P', in which they indulge in insulting attacks and slanders(...)

"These two elements have thus openlyand publicly broken their last ties to the fraction of the FrenchCommunist Left (...)

"The activityof Al and F has revealed both the incompatibility of theirpresence within the organisation, and a political break which putsthem outside the organisation (...) Taking note of these facts,the organisation sanctions them by suspending comrades Al and Ffor one year (...) the assembly demands that they returnimmediately the organisation's material in their care".

What the Fraction is emphasising here is notjust that the organisation has the right to expect that itsmembers' behaviour be in accord with its principles, but even morefundamentally that the development of debate, and therefore ofconsciousness, is not possible without the respect of rules commonto all.

The organisation's statutes inaccord with the being of the proletariat

In an article published in 1999,23,we developed our vision of the statutes' role in the life of arevolutionary organisation: "we have always been faithfulto Lenin's method and the lessons he has left on organisationalmatters. The political struggle to establish precise rulesregulating organisational relationships, in other words Statutes,is fundamental. The struggle to have them respected is equally so,of course. Without this, grand declarations on the Party remainmere empty words (...) Lenin's contribution is particularlyconcerned with internal debate, the duty - not merely the right -to express any disagreement within an organisational framework andto the organisation as a whole; and once debates are settled anddecisions taken by the Congress (which is the sovereign body, theorganisation's general assembly in effect), then the subordinationof both parts and individual militants to the whole. Contrary tothe widespread idea that Lenin was a dictator who sought only tostifle debate and political life within the organisation, inreality he consistently opposed the Menshevik vision of theCongress as 'a recorder, a controller, but not a creator'24(...) The revolutionary organisation's statutes are not merelyexceptional measures, safety barriers. They are the concretisationof the organisational principles proper to the proletariat'spolitical vanguards. They are the products of these principles, atone and the same time a weapon in the fight against organisationalopportunism, and the foundation on which the revolutionaryorganisation must be built. They are the expression of its unity,its centralisation, its political and organisational life, and itsclass character. They are the rule and the spirit which must guidethe militants from day to day in their relations with theorganisation and other militants, in the tasks entrusted to them,in their rights and duties, and in their daily personal life,which can be in contradiction neither with their militant activitynor with communist principles".

The especially stronginsistence in our statutes on the framework which should not justallow, but encourage the widest possible debate within theorganisation, comes in large part from the experience of the leftfractions who fought against the degeneration of the old workers'parties. However, there is one aspect in which our organisationhas lagged behind those of our predecessors: the treatment ofserious accusations directed against a militant, and especiallythe most serious of all, that of collaborating with the repressiveapparatus of the state. The organisations of the past knew frombitter and repeated experience that the bourgeois state was expertin the infiltration of agents provocateurs, and that therole of the provocateur was not merely to spy onrevolutionaries and to deliver them into the hands of therepressive state apparatus, but to sow the seeds ofself-destructive mistrust and suspicion among the revolutionariesthemselves. They also knew that such mistrust was not necessarilythe work of a provocateur, but that it could also be thefruit of the jealousies, frustrations, and resentments which arepart and parcel of life in capitalist society, and from whichrevolutionaries are not immune. Consequently, as we have shown inarticles published in our territorial press,25this question was a key element in the statutes of previousproletarian political organisations: not just the fact ofprovocation, but the accusation of provocation levelled at anymilitant, was treated with the utmost seriousness.26

oOo

The proletariat opposes the blind forces ofthe capitalist economy and the repressive power of the bourgeoisstate with the conscious and organised force of a worldrevolutionary class. The proletariat opposes the leaden disciplineimposed by capitalist society with a voluntary and consciousdiscipline, which is a vital element in its unity and its abilityto organise.

When they commit themselves to a communistorganisation, militants accept the discipline that springs fromthe recognition of what is necessary for the cause of theproletarian revolution and the liberation of humanity from themillennial yoke of class exploitation. But their commitment torespect common rules of action does not mean that communistsabandon their critical spirit towards their class or theirorganisation. On the contrary, this critical spirit for whichevery militant is responsible, is vital to the organisation's veryexistence, since without it the organisation can only become anempty shell whose revolutionary words are nothing but the mask foran opportunist practice. This is why it was the left, inparticular, which fought to the end within the degeneratingCommunist International against the use of administrativediscipline to settle political disagreements.

This struggle was not conducted in the nameof "freedom of thought", the "right to criticise"or other such anarchist and bourgeois illusions. As we have seenin the course of this article, in general it was not the left, butthe opportunist tendencies, expressions of the organisation'spenetration by bourgeois or petty bourgeois ideas, who were thefirst to break organisational discipline. In general, themilitants of the left like Lenin, Luxemburg, or Bordiga, were themost determined to respect the decisions of the organisation, ofits congresses and central organs, and to struggle for itsprinciples whether in the form of programmatic positions or rulesof functioning and behaviour.

As we have shownthrough the examples of the left fractions in the German SPD andthe Communist International, the degeneration of an organisationputs the left's militants before a terrible choice: whether or notto break organisational discipline in order to remain faithful tothe "discipline towards the party as a whole, in otherwords towards its programme", in Luxemburg's words. Theworking class has the right to expect that its left fractionsundertake such a choice with the greatest seriousness. Breakingorganisational discipline is not something to be taken lightly,for this self-discipline is at the heart of the organisation'sunity, and of the mutual confidence which must unite comrades intheir struggle for communism.

Jens 

NOTES

1."Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship",March 1919, reprinted in International Review n°100.

2.Fundamentally, Lenin is doing nothing other here than reformulating the famous words of the Communist Manifesto: "The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable".

3.The glorification of individual sabotage is an example.

4.In essence, Lenin here is simply elaborating on thefamous words of the Communist Manifesto: "Theessential conditions for the existence and for the sway of thebourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; thecondition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour restsexclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance ofindustry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replacesthe isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by therevolutionary combination, due to association. The development ofModern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the veryfoundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriatesproducts. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, areits own grave-diggers".

5Internationalisme n°25, August 1947, reprinted inInternational Review n°34

6In Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, MonthlyReview Press, p128.

7Ibid, p304.

8We will not, in this article, deal with the conflict at the 1903Congress which led to the formation of the Bolshevik and Mensheviktendencies in the RSDLP (Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party),which has been already been described in the InternationalReview. In this case too, it is clear that the it was theopportunist wing - the Mensheviks - who flouted party disciplinethe day after the Congress by transgressing the decisions adoptedby the congress itself (see Lenin, One step forward, two stepsback).

9.That said, she is clearly right to insist that the organisation'sstatutes remain no more than words on a scrap of paper, if theyare not defended by the conscious involvement of the party's ownmilitants.

10.Quoted in Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Frölich. Frölich'stestimony is first-hand, since he was one of Luxemburg's studentsin the party school and a leader of the Bremen left radical in theSPD.

11.Throughout the war, the Spartakists constantly demanded theholding of a new congress so that the dissensions could be widelydebated. The party leadership always refused. The same was true ofthe Mensheviks. After the Mensheviks' "coup d'Etat"immediately following the 1903 congress (thanks to Plekhanov'sturn-around), by which they took control of Iskra, theBolsheviks insistently demanded the holding of a new congress,which the Mensheviks refused.

12.This discipline was enforced by the imprisonment of militants ortheir despatch to death on the front line.

13.Nonetheless, at least one leader of the left wing, Leo Jogisches,was against this decision on the grounds that it would give theleadership an excuse to expel the left, and thus to isolate themfrom the rest of the militants: "Such a split in thesecircumstances would not mean the expulsion from the party of themajority and of Scheidemann's men, as we wish, but wouldnecessarily lead to the dispersal of the party's best comradesinto small circles and condemn them to complete impotence. Weconsider this tactic damaging and even destructive".

14.Like Liebknecht, Otto Rühle was an SPD deputy; whenLiebknecht voted against the second government demand for warcredits in December 1914, Rühle joined him.

15.Frölich, op.cit. The quotations are from Luxemburg's "Guidingprinciples for the tasks of the international Social Democracy",originally published with the Junius Pamphlet.

16.An example of the "particularism" confronted by theInternational was the refusal of the French Communist Party, inthe name of "national specificities" to apply the rulesof the International by refusing to admit freemasons. Once again,in its first years when it was still a living organisation of theproletariat, the most flagrant examples of indiscipline in theCommunist International came from the opportunists.

17.Quoted in Défense de la continuité du programmecommuniste, published by the Parti Communiste International,p144.

18.The German Communist Party

19.These quotes both taken from the ICC's book on The ItalianCommunist Left, 1926-45, p27.

20.This was clearly a manoeuvre by the minority, since the hastyintegration of new members would have converted the minority intoa majority of the fraction.

21.This and the quotes that follow are from Bilan n°34-36,reprinted in International Review n°7.

22Published in the FFGC's Bulletin Extérieur, June1945.

23See International Review n°97, "Have we becomeLeninists?".

24.Quoted from Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation.

25.See World Revolution n°252 and 253

26.We can cite as an example point 9 in the statutes of the League ofthe Just (the predecessor of the Communist League): "Thereis open behaviour amongst all the brothers. If anybody wants tocomplain about people or questions belonging to the League, thenhe must do so openly in the [section] meeting. Slandererswill be excluded".