From the beginning of the first series of these articles, we argued against the cliché that 'communism is a nice idea, but it could never work' by affirming, with Marx, that communism is not at all reducible to a 'nice idea', but is organically contained in the class struggle of the proletariat. Communism is not an abstract utopia dreamed up by a few well-intentioned visionaries; it is a movement given birth by the very conditions of present day society. And yet, that first series was very much a study of the 'ideas' of communists during the ascendant period of capitalism - an examination of how their conception of the future society and the way to achieve it developed during the course of the 19th century, before the communist revolution was on the immediate historical agenda.

We make no apology for this. Communism is the movement of the whole proletariat, of the working class as a historic and international social force. But the history of the proletariat is also the history of its organisations; and the clarification of the goals of the movement is the specific task of the proletariat's political minorities, its parties and fractions. Contrary to the fantasies of councilism and anarchism, there is no communist movement without communist organisations. Neither is there any conflict of interest between the two. Throughout the first series we showed how the work of clarifying the means and goals of the movement was carried out by the marxists of the Communist League and the First and Second Internationals; but this work was always done in the closest connection to the movement of the masses, by participating in, and drawing the lessons from, such epochal historical events as the revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune of 1871 in this second series we will be looking at the evolution of the communist project in the period of capitalism's decadence: that is to say, the period when communism has become more than the overall perspective of the workers' struggle - when it has become a veritable necessity since capitalist relations of production have entered into definitive and permanent conflict with the productive forces they have set in motion. Put more simply, the decadence of capitalism has faced humanity with the choice between communism or a relapse into barbarism. We will have occasion to look more deeply into the meaning of this phrase as this series progresses. For the moment we simply want to say that, no less than in the first series, the articles that will deal with capitalism's decadent period cannot pretend to provide a 'history' of all the momentous events of the 20th century that have served to elucidate the means and goals of communism. Perhaps even more so than in the first series, we will have to restrict ourselves to the way that the communists analysed and understood these events.

We only have to look at the 1917 Russian revolution to realise why this has to be: to write a new history even of the first few months of this event would be entirely beyond our means. But this should in no way diminish the importance of our study: on the contrary, we will find that nearly all the advances that the revolutionary movement of the 20th century has made in its understanding of the road to communism derive from its interaction with this irreplaceable experience of the working class. Even if the ICC's International Review has already devoted many of its pages to the lessons of the Russian revolution and the international revolutionary wave that it instigated, there is still much to be said about the way these lessons were drawn out and elaborated by the communist organisations of this era.

Marxists generally reckon that the onset of the epoch of capitalist decadence was marked by the outbreak of the first imperialist world war in 1914. Nevertheless, we ended the first series and begin the second, with the 'first' Russian revolution - with the events of 1905, which occurred during a kind of watershed between the two epochs. As we shall see, the ambiguous nature of this period led to many ambiguities in the workers' movement about the significance of these events. But what emerged most clearly, in the clearest fractions of the movement, was that 1905 in Russia marked the emergence of new forms of struggle and organisation that corresponded to the needs of the onrushing period of capitalist decline. If, as we showed in the last article of the first series, the previous decade had witnessed a strong tendency in the workers' movement to lose sight of the road to revolution - particularly through the growth of reformist and parliamentary illusions in the movement - 1905 was the lightning flash which illuminated the road for all those who wanted to see it.

Luxemburg and the mass strike debate

At first sight, the 1905 revolution in Russia was indeed a bolt from the blue. Reformist ideas had seized hold of the workers' movement because capitalism appeared to be enjoying a halcyon period in which things could only get better and better for the workers, so long as they stuck with the legal methods of trade unionism and parliamentarism. The days of revolutionary heroism, of street fighting and barricades, had seemed to be a thing of the past, and even those who professed marxist 'orthodoxy', such as Karl Kautsky, insisted that the best way for the workers to make the revolution was through winning a parliamentary majority. Suddenly, in January 1905, the bloody repression of a peaceful demonstration led by a priest and police agent, Father Gapon, ignited a massive wave of strikes throughout the Tsar's immense empire, and opened up a whole year of ferment, culminating in new mass strikes in October, which saw the formation of the St Petersburg Soviet, and the armed uprising of December.

In truth, these events had not sprung from nowhere. The wretched living and working conditions of the Russian workers, which had been the subject of their humble petition to the Tsar on that first 'Bloody Sunday', had been made even more intolerable by Russia's war with Japan in 1904 - a war which fully expressed the sharpening of global inter-imperialist tensions that was to reach its paroxysm in 1914. Furthermore, the magnificent combativity of the Russian workers was also no isolated phenomenon, either historically or geographically: the strike movement in Russia had been gathering pace since the 1890s, while the spectre of the mass strike had already raised its head in advanced Europe itself: in Belgium and Sweden in 1902, Holland in 1903, and Italy in 1904.

Even before 1905, therefore, the workers' movement had been traversed by an animated debate about the 'general strike' in the Second international, the marxists had fought against the anarchist and syndicalist mythology which had portrayed the general strike as an apocalyptic event that could be ushered in at any moment, and which could get rid of capitalism without any need for the working class to battle for political power. But as the practical experience of the class turned the debate away from such abstractions to the concrete question of the mass strike, i.e. to a real, evolving strike movement as opposed to a once and for all, universal work stoppage decreed in advance, the protagonists in the debate changed. From now on, the question of the mass strike was to be one of the main bones of contention between the reformist right and the revolutionary left within the workers' movement and the social democratic parties in particular. As with the previous round of this debate (over Bernstein's 'revisionist' theories in the late 1890s), the movement in Germany was to be at the centre of the controversy.

The reformists, and above all the trade union leaders, could only see the mass strike as a force for anarchy, one which threatened to undermine the years of patient labour which had built up the membership and funds of the trade unions, and a substantial parliamentary presence for the party. The trade union bureaucrats, specialists in negotiation with the bourgeoisie, feared that the kind of massive and spontaneous outbursts that had occurred in Russia would only end in massive repression and the loss of all the painfully acquired gains of the previous decades. To be sure, they took care not to openly denounce the movement in Russia. Instead they sought to limit its field of application. They granted that the mass strike was an understandable product of Russia's backward and despotic regime. But it was hardly necessary in a country like Germany, where trade unions and workers' parties had a recognised legal existence. If some kind of general strike became necessary in western Europe, it would only be as a limited, defensive exercise designed to safeguard existing democratic rights from a reactionary onslaught. And above all, any such operation had to be prepared in advance and tightly controlled by the existing workers' organisations, in order to curb any threat of 'anarchy'.

Officially, the leadership of the SDP distanced itself from these conservative reactions. At the 1905 Jena congress, Bebel put forward a resolution which appeared to mark a victory for the left against the reformists, since it hailed the importance of the mass strike. In fact, Bebel's resolution was a classic manifestation of centrism, since it reduced the mass strike to the purely defensive sphere. The duplicity of the leadership was proved a few months later, in February 1906, when it made a secret deal with the unions to block any effective propaganda for the mass strike in Germany.

For the left, on the other hand, the movement in Russia had a universal and historical significance, bringing a breath of fresh air to the musty atmosphere of trade unionism and 'nothing but' parliamentarism which had dominated the party for so long. The left's efforts to understand the implications of the mass strikes in Russia were crystallised above all in the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, who had already led the combat against Bernstein' s revisionism, and who had been directly involved in the 1905 events through her membership of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, then part of the Russian empire. In her justly famous pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions, she displayed a profound mastery of the marxist method, which, being armed with a historical and global theoretical framework, is able to discern the flowers of the future in the seeds of the present. Just as Marx had been able to predict the general future of world capitalism by studying its pioneering forms in Britain, or proclaim the revolutionary potential of the proletariat by looking at a movement as seemingly ineffectual as that of the Silesian weavers, so Luxemburg was able to show that the proletarian movement in 'backward' Russia in 1905 exhibited the essential characteristics of the class struggle in a historic period that was only just beginning to open up - the period of world capitalism's decline.

The opportunists entrenched in the union bureaucracy, and their more or less open supporters in the party, were swift to brand those marxists who sought to draw out the real implications of the mass strike movement in Russia as being "revolutionary romanticists", and above all as anarchists reviving the old millennial vision of the general strike. It was true that there were semi-anarchist elements in the SDP - in particular the so-called 'lokalisten' who called for a 'social general strike' - and, as Luxemburg herself wrote, the mass strikes in Russia appeared at first sight "to have become the experimental field for the heroic deeds of anarchism" (Mass Strike, part I). But in reality, Luxemburg showed, not only had the anarchists been almost completely absent from the movement: the latter's methods and aims actually constituted "the historical liquidation of anarchism ". Not merely because the Russian workers had proved, contrary to the apoliticism advocated by the anarchists, that the mass strike could be an instrument in the struggle for democratic political gains (this, after all, was nearing its end as a realisable component of the workers' movement). But first and foremost because the actual form and motion of the mass strike had dealt a decisive blow both to the anarchists and the union bureaucrats, who, for all their differences, had in common the false notion that the general strike was something that could be turned on or off at will, regardless of historic conditions and the real evolution of the class struggle. Against this, Luxemburg insisted that the mass strike was a "historical and not an artificial product”, that it is not "artificially made, not 'decided' at random, not 'propagated', but it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from actual conditions with historical inevitability. It is not therefore by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the injuriousness of the mass strike, but only by an examination of those factors and social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of the class struggle - in other words, it is not by subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but only by objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable, that the problem can be grasped or even discussed" (ibid., part II).

And when Luxemburg talks about the "present phase of the class struggle", she is not referring to a passing moment, but to a new historical epoch. With striking foresight, she argues that "the present Russian revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already over the summit, which is on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society" (ibid., part VII). In other words, the mass strike in Russia presaged the conditions that would become universal in the approaching epoch of capitalist decline. The fact that it had appeared with such sharpness in 'backward' Russia strengthened rather than weakened this thesis, since the delayed but very rapid development of capitalism in Russia had given birth to a highly concentrated proletariat confronting an omnipresent police apparatus that virtually forbade it to organise, and thus gave it no choice but to organise in and through the struggle - a reality that would be imposed on all workers in the decadent epoch, in which the state capitalist bourgeoisie cannot tolerate any permanent mass workers' organisations and systematically destroys or recuperates all previous efforts to organise on such a scale.

The period of capitalist decadence is the period of the proletarian revolution: consequently, the 1905 revolution in Russia "appears not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the west. The most backward country of all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries" (ibid.). These "ways and methods" are precisely those of the mass strike, which as Luxemburg says, is "the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution" (ibid., part IV). In sum, the movement in Russia showed workers everywhere how their revolution could become a reality.

Characteristics of the class struggle in the new epoch

What precisely was this "method of motion" of the class struggle in the new period?

First, the tendency of the struggle to break out spontaneously, without pre-planning, without prior collection of funds to sustain a long siege against the bosses. Luxemburg recalls the "trivial" issues at the Putilov works which sparked off the January strike; in his 1905, Trotsky says that the October strike wave began as a dispute over pay for punctuation marks amongst the typesetters of Moscow. Such developments are possible because the immediate causes of the mass strike are entirely secondary in comparison to what lies behind them: the profound accumulation of discontent in the proletariat faced with a capitalist regime less and less able to grant any concessions and compelled to make increasing inroads on whatever acquisitions they may have previously won.

The trade union bureaucrats, of course, could hardly imagine any large-scale workers' struggle not planned and controlled from the safety of their offices; and if spontaneous movements did flare up in front of their eyes, they could only see them as being ineffectual because disorganised. But Luxemburg replied that in the newly-emerging conditions of the class struggle, spontaneity was not the negation of organisation, but its most viable premise: "The rigid, mechanical-bureaucratic conception cannot conceive of the struggle save as the product of organisation at a certain stage of its strength. On the contrary the living, dialectical explanation makes the organisation arise as a product of the struggle. We have already seen a grandiose example of this phenomenon in Russia, where a proletariat almost wholly unorganised created a comprehensive network of organisational appendages in a year and a half of stormy revolutionary struggle" (ibid., part VI).

Contrary to many of Luxemburg' s critics, such a view is not 'spontaneist', since the organisations referred to here are the immediate and general organs of the workers, not the political party or fraction whose existence and programme, rather than being tied to the immediate movement of the class, correspond above all to its historical, depth dimension. As we shall see, Luxemburg in no way denied the necessity for the proletarian political party to intervene in the mass strike. But what this view of organisation does lucidly express is the end of a whole era in which the unitary organisations of the class could exist on a permanent basis outside phases of open combat against capital.

The explosive, spontaneous nature of the struggle in the new conditions is directly connected to the very essence of the mass strike - the tendency of struggles to extend very rapidly, to wider and wider layers of workers. Describing the spread of the January strikes, she writes "there was no predetermined plan, no organised action, because the appeals of the parties could scarcely keep pace with the spontaneous risings of the masses; the leaders had scarcely time to formulate the watchwords of the onrushing crowd of the proletariat" (ibid., part III). Since the discontent within the class is already general, it becomes eminently possible for the movement to extend through the direct action of the striking workers, calling out their comrades in other factories and sectors around demands that reflect their common grievances.

Finally, against those in the unions and the party who insisted on the "purely political mass strike", on the mass strike being no more than a defensive weapon of protest against infringements on the workers' democratic rights, Luxemburg demonstrated the living inter-action between the economic and political aspects of the mass strike:

" ... the movement as a whole does not proceed from the economic to the political struggle, nor even the reverse. Every great political mass action, after it has attained its political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes. And that applies not only to each of the great mass strikes, but also to the revolution as a whole. With the spreading, clarifying and involution of the political struggle, the economic struggle not only does not recede, but extends, organises and becomes involved in equal measure. Between the two there is the most complete reciprocal action ....

... In a word: the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and effect here continually change places; and thus the economic and the political factor in the period of the mass strike, now widely removed, completely separated or even mutually exclusive, as the theoretical plan would have them, merely form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle in Russia. And their unity is precisely the mass strike" (ibid., part IV). And here "political" does not simply mean for Luxemburg the defence of democratic freedoms, but above all the offensive struggle for power, for as she adds in the very next passage, "the mass strike is inseparable from revolution". Capitalism in decline is a system unable to offer and long-term improvements in the workers' living conditions; indeed, all it can offer is repression and impoverishment. Thus the very conditions that give rise to the mass strike also compel the workers to pose the question of revolution. And more than this: since it forms the basis for the polarisation of bourgeois society into two great camps, since it inevitably brings the workers up against the full force of the capitalist state, the mass strike cannot help but raise the necessity to overthrow the old state power:

"Today, when the working classes are being enlightened in the course of the revolutionary struggle, when they must marshal their forces and lead themselves, and when the revolution is directed as much against the old state power as against capitalist exploitation, the mass strike appears as the natural means of recruiting the widest proletarian layers for the struggle, as well as being at the same time a means of undermining and overthrowing the old state power and of stemming capitalist exploitation" (ibid., part VII).

Here Luxemburg addresses the problem posed by the opportunists in the party, who based their 'nothing but' parliamentarism on the correct observation that a modem state power could no longer be overthrown by the old tactics of barricades and street fighting alone (and, in the last article in this series, we saw how even Engels had given succor to the opportunists on this point). The opportunists believed that the result of this would be that "the class struggle would shrink to an exclusively parliamentary contest and that street fighting would simply be done away with". But, as Luxemburg goes on to argue, "history has found the solution in a deeper and finer fashion: in the advent of revolutionary mass strikes, which, of course, in no way replace brutal street fights or render them unnecessary, but which reduce them to a moment in the long period of political struggle ... " (ibid.). Thus, armed insurrection is affirmed as the culmination of the organising, educating work of the mass strike - a perspective richly confirmed by the events of February to October 1917.

In this passage, Luxemburg mentions David and Bemstein as the spokesmen for the opportunist trend in the party. But Luxemburg's insistence that the revolution would not only be a violent act of overthrow, but that it would be the crowning point of a mass movement on the specific terrain of the proletariat - the point of production and the streets - was in essence also a total rejection of the 'orthodox' conceptions defended by Kautsky, who at that stage was seen as being on the left of the party, but whose notion of revolution, as we showed in the article in this series in International Review (IR) 88, was also completely caught up in the parliamentary maze. As we shall see later on, Kautsky's real opposition to Luxemburg's revolutionary analysis of the mass strike was to become clearer after her pamphlet was written. But Luxemburg had already pointed the way out of the parliamentary maze by showing that the mass strike was the embryo of the proletarian revolution.

We have said that Luxemburg's work on the mass strike in no way eliminated the need for the proletarian party. In fact, in the epoch of revolution, a revolutionary party becomes all the more crucial, as the Bolsheviks were to show in Russia. But to the development of new conditions and new methods of the class struggle, there corresponds a new role for the revolutionary vanguard, and Luxemburg was one of the first to affirm this. The conception of the party as a mass organisation which regroups, encompasses and commands the class, which had increasingly dominated the social democracy, was historically laid to rest by the mass strike. The experience of the latter had shown that the party cannot regroup the majority of the class, nor can it take in hand the organisational details of a movement as enormous and fluid as a mass strike. Hence Luxemburg's conclusion:

"In this way we arrive at the same conclusions in Germany in relation to the peculiar tasks of direction, in relation to the role of social democracy in mass strikes, as in our analysis of events in Russia. If we now leave the pedantic scheme of demonstrative mass strikes artificially brought about by order of parties and trade unions, and turn to the living picture of a people's movement arising with elementary energy from the culmination of class antagonisms and the political situation ... it becomes obvious that the task of social democracy does not consist in the technical preparation and direction of mass strikes, but, first and foremost, in the political leadership of the whole movement" (ibid., part VI).

The depth of Luxemburg's analysis of the mass strike in Russia provided a comprehensive rebuttal of all those who sought to deny its historical and international significance. As a true revolutionary, Luxemburg had shown that that the storms from the east completely overturned not only the old conceptions of the class struggle in general, but even demanded a radical reappraisal of the role of the party itself Little wonder that she disturbed the sleep of the conservatives who dominated the union and party bureaucracies!

The Soviets, organs of proletarian power

The Bordigist idea that the revolutionary programme has been 'invariant' since 1848 is clearly refuted by the events of 1905. The methods and organisational forms of the mass strike - in particular the soviets or workers' councils - were not the result of some pre-established schema but sprang from the creative capacities of the class in movement. The soviets were not exnihilo creations, for such things do not exist in nature. They were the natural successor to previous forms of working class organisation, in particular the Paris Commune. But they also represented a higher form of organisation corresponding to the needs of the struggle in the new epoch.

Equally contradicted by the reality of 1905 is another strand of the 'invariance' thesis: that the 'red thread' of revolutionary clarity in the twentieth century runs through a single current of the workers' movement (i.e., the Italian left). As we shall see, the clarity that did emerge amongst revolutionaries concerning the events of 1905 was unmistakably a synthesis of the different contributions made by the revolutionaries of the time. Thus, while Luxemburg's insight into the dynamics of the mass strike, into the general characteristics of the class struggle in the new period, was second to none, The Mass Strike text contains a surprisingly limited understanding of the real organisational acquisitions of the movement. She had certainly uncovered a profound truth in showing that the organisations of the mass strike were the product rather than the producer of the movement, but the organ that was more than anything else the emanation of the mass strike, the Soviet, gets no more than a passing mention; when she talks about the new organisations born out of the struggle, she is referring first and foremost to the trade unions: " ... while the guardians of the German trade unions for the most part fear that the organisations will fall in pieces in a revolutionary whirlwind like rare porcelain, the Russian revolution shows us the exactly opposite picture; from the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions" (ibid., part III).

It is true that, in this twilight period, the trade unions had not yet been fully integrated into the bourgeois order, even if the bureaucratisation against which Luxemburg was polemicising was already an expression of this tendency. But the fact remains that the emergence of the soviets pointed to the historical demise of the trade union form of organisation. As a method of workers' defence, the latter was entirely bound up with the preceding epoch when it had indeed been possible for workers' struggles to be planned in advance and waged on a sector by sector basis, since the bosses had not yet unified themselves through the state, and workers' pressure on one enterprise or sector did not automatically provoke the class wide solidarity of the ruling class against their struggle. But now the conditions for "fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions" were fast disappearing, since new conditions demanded new forms of class organisation.

The revolutionary significance of the soviets was understood most clearly by the revolutionaries in Russia, and by none more clearly than Trotsky, who had played such a central role in the St Petersburg Soviet. In his book 1905, written soon after the events, Trotsky provides a classic definition of the soviet which clearly links its form to its function in the revolutionary struggle:

"What was the Soviet of Workers' Deputies? The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions, which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat, which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control - and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within twenty-four hours ... In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, such an organisation had to be based on the broadest representation. How was this to be achieved? The answer came of its own accord. Since the production process was the sole link between the proletarian masses who, in the organisational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and plants" (Chapter 8, 'The Soviet of Workers' Deputies', p 104-5, London 1971).

Here Trotsky fills in the gap left by Luxemburg by showing that it was the Soviet, not the unions, which was the organisational form appropriate to the mass strike, to the essence of the proletarian struggle in the new revolutionary period. Born spontaneously, out the creative initiative of the workers in movement, it embodied the necessary passage from spontaneity to self-organisation. The permanent existence and sectional form of the trade unions were suited only to the methods of struggle of the preceding period. The soviet form of organisation, by contrast, expressed perfectly the needs of a situation where the struggle "tends to develop no longer on a vertical level (by trade and industrial branches) but on a horizontal level (geographically), uniting all its different aspects (economic and political, local and general) ... (thus) the form of organisation which it engenders can only have the function of unifying the proletariat beyond professional sectors" ('1905 Revolution: Fundamental Lessons for the Proletariat', IR 43, autumn 1985).

As we have already seen, the political dimension of the mass strike is not restricted to the defensive level, but inevitably implies the offensive - the proletarian struggle for power. Here again, Trotsky saw more clearly than anyone that the Soviet's ultimate destiny was to be a direct organ of revolutionary power. As the mass movement became more organised and unified, it was inevitably obliged to go beyond the 'negative' tasks of paralysing the productive apparatus and assume the more 'positive' ones of ensuring the production and distribution of essential supplies, of disseminating information and propaganda, of guaranteeing a new revolutionary order - all of which uncovered the real nature of the Soviet as an organ capable of reorganising society:

"The Soviet organised the working masses, directed the political strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, and protected the population against pogroms. Similar work was done by other revolutionary organisations before the Soviet came into existence, concurrently with it, and after it. Yet this did not endow them with the influence that was concentrated in the hands of the Soviet. The secret of this influence lay in the fact that the Soviet grew as the natural organ of the proletariat in its immediate struggle for power as determined by the actual course of events. The name of 'workers' government' which the workers themselves on the one hand, and the reactionary press on the other, gave to the Soviet was an expression of the fact that the Soviet really was a workers' government in embryo" (ibid., chap 22, p 251, 'Summing Up'), This conception of the real meaning of the soviets was, as we shall see, intimately linked to Trotsky's view that it was essentially the proletarian revolution that was on the historical agenda in Russia.

Lenin, though forced to observe the initial phases of the movement from exile, also grasped the key role of the soviets. Only three years beforehand, in writing What Is To Be Done?, a book whose whole heart is to stress the indispensable role of the revolutionary party, he had warned against the way that the economist current had made a fetish out of the immediate spontaneity of the struggle. But now, in the turmoil of the mass strike, Lenin found himself having to correct those 'super-Leninists' who were turning this polemic into a rigid dogma. Distrusting the Soviet as a non-party organ that had indeed emerged spontaneously out of the struggle, these Bolsheviks delivered it with an absurd ultimatum: adopt the Bolshevik programme or dissolve. Marx had warned against this kind of attitude - 'here is the truth, down on your knees' - even before the Communist Manifesto had been written, and Lenin saw straight away that if the Bolsheviks persisted in this line they would be completely marginalised from the real movement. This was Lenin's response:

"It seems to me that Comrade Radin is wrong in raising the question ... : the Soviet of Workers' Deputies or the Party? I think that it is wrong to put the question this way and that the decision must certainly be: both the Soviet of Workers' Deputies and the Party. The only question - and a highly important one - is how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. I think it would be inadvisable for the Soviet to adhere wholly to one party ..

The Soviet of Workers' Deputies came into being through the general strike, in connection with the strike, and for its aims. Who led the strike and brought it to a victorious close? The whole proletariat, which includes non-Social Democrats ... Should this struggle be conducted only by the Social Democrats or only under the Social Democratic banner? I do not think so.. The Soviet of Workers' Deputies, as an organisation representing all occupations, should strive to include deputies from all industrial, professional and office workers, domestic servants, farm labourers, etc. .... As for the Social Democrats, we shall do our best ... to use the struggle we are waging jointly with our fellow proletarians, irrespective of their views, for the tireless, steadfast advocacy of the consistent, the only truly proletarian world outlook, marxism. To propagate it, to carry on this propaganda and agitation work, we shall by all means preserve, strengthen and expand our completely independent, consistently principled class party of the class conscious proletariat ... " ('Our Task and the Soviet of Workers' Deputies', Complete Works Vol. 10. p 19-21).

Along with Trotsky, who also stressed this distinction between the party as an organisation "within the proletariat" and the Soviet as the organisation "of the proletariat" (1905, p251), Lenin was able to see that the party did not have the task of regrouping or organising the whole proletariat, but of intervening in the class and its unitary organs to provide a clear political leadership - a view which actually tends to converge with Luxemburg's conception adumbrated earlier on. Moreover, in the light of the experience of 1905, which bore such eloquent witness to the revolutionary capacities of the working class, Lenin was to 'bend the stick back' and correct some of the exaggerations contained in What Is To be Done", in particular the notion, first developed by Kautsky, that socialist consciousness has to be 'imported' into the proletariat by the party, or rather by the socialist intellectuals. But this reaffirmation of Marx's thesis that communist consciousness necessarily emanates from the communist class, the proletariat, in no way diminished Lenin's conviction in the indispensable role of the party. Since the working class as a whole, even when it is moving in a revolutionary direction, still has to confront the enormous power of bourgeois ideology, the organisation of the most class conscious proletarians has to be present in the workers' ranks, combating all hesitations and illusions and clarifying the immediate and long term goals of the movement.

We cannot go much further into this issue here. It would take a whole series of articles to expound the Bolshevik theory of organisation, and in particular to defend it from the widespread slander, common to Mensheviks, anarchists, councilists and innumerable parasites, that Lenin's 'narrow' conception of the party was a product of Russian backwardness, a throw-back to Narodnik or Bakuninist conceptions. What we will say here is this: just as the 1905 revolution itself was not the last in a series of bourgeois revolutions, but the forerunner of the proletarian revolutions gestating in the womb of world capitalism, so the '1903', Bolshevik conception of the party was not rooted in the past. It was in fact a break with the past, with the legalistic, parliamentarian conception of the 'mass party' that had come to dominate the social democratic movement. The events of 1917 were to confirm in the most concrete manner possible that Lenin's 'party of a new type' was precisely the type of party that corresponded to the needs of the class struggle in the epoch ofthe proletarian revolution.

If there were weaknesses in Lenin's grasp of the 1905 movement, they lay essentially in his approach to the problem of perspectives. We shall develop on this shortly, but Lenin's view that the 1905 revolution was at 'root a bourgeois revolution in which the leading role had fallen to the proletariat prevented him from reaching the same degree of clarity as Trotsky concerning the historical significance of the soviets. Certainly he was able to see that they should not remain as purely defensive organs, that they should see themselves as organs of revolutionary power: "I think that politically the Soviet of Workers' Deputies should be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government. I think the Soviet should proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government of the whole of Russia" (Lenin, op cit). But in Lenin's conception of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', this government was not the dictatorship of the proletariat carrying out the socialist revolution. It was carrying out a bourgeois revolution and therefore had to incorporate all those classes and strata who were involved in the fight against Tsarism. Trotsky saw the strength of the Soviet precisely in the fact that "it did not allow its class nature to be dissolved in revolutionary democracy: it was and remained the organised expression of the class will of the proletariat' (Trotsky, op cit., p 251). Lenin on the other hand, called for the Soviet to dilute its class composition by broadening its representation to the soldiers, the peasants and the "revolutionary bourgeois intelligentsia" ('Our Tasks ... ')., and by assuming the tasks of a 'democratic' revolution. In order to understand these differences, it is necessary to look a little deeper into the question that lay behind them: the nature of the revolution in Russia.

Nature and perspectives of the coming revolution

The 1903 split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was focused on the question of organisation. But the 1905 revolution revealed that the differences on organisation were also connected to other, more general programmatic issues: in this case, above all, the nature of and perspectives for the revolution in Russia.

The Mensheviks, claiming to be the 'orthodox' interpreters of Marx on this question, argued that Russia was still awaiting its 1789. In this belated bourgeois revolution, inevitable if Russian capitalism was to break its absolutist fetters and build the material bases for socialism, the task of the proletariat and its party was to act as a force of independent opposition, supporting the bourgeoisie against Tsarism but refusing to participate in government in order to be free to criticise it from the left. In this view, the leading class of the bourgeois revolution could only be the bourgeoisie, albeit its most forward looking and liberal fractions.

The Bolsheviks, with Lenin to the fore agreed that the nature of the revolution could only be bourgeois, and rejected as anarchist the idea that it could immediately assume a socialist character. But their analysis of the way that capitalism was developing in Russia (especially its dependence on foreign capital and the Russian state bureaucracy) convinced them that the Russian bourgeoisie was too submissive to the Tsarist apparatus, too flabby and indecisive to carry through its own revolution. In addition, the historical experience of the 1848 revolutions in Europe taught that this indecisiveness would be even more marked given that any revolutionary upheaval would unleash the 'threat from below', i.e. the movement of the proletariat. In these circumstances, the Bolsheviks insisted that the bourgeoisie would betray the struggle against absolutism, which could only be taken to a successful conclusion through an armed popular uprising in which the leading role would be played by the working class. This uprising would install a 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry'; and, much to the scandal of the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks declared that they would be willing to participate in the provisional revolutionary government that would be the instrument of this 'democratic dictatorship', returning to opposition once the main acquisitions of the bourgeois revolution had been pushed through.

The third position was that of Trotsky - the 'revolution in permanence', a phrase adopted from Marx's writings about the revolutions of 1848. Trotsky agreed with the Bolsheviks that revolution still had bourgeois-democratic tasks to complete, and that the bourgeoisie would be incapable of achieving such tasks as these. But he rejected the idea that the proletariat, once embarked upon the revolutionary road, would or could impose a "self-limitation" on its struggle. The class interests of the proletariat would compel it not only to take power into its own hands, but also to 'telescope' bourgeois-democratic into proletarian tasks - to inaugurate socialist political and economic measures. But such an evolution could not be limited to the national arena alone:

"Self-limitation' by a workers' government would mean nothing other than the betrayal of the interests of the unemployed and strikers - more, of the whole proletariat - in the name of the establishment of a republic. The revolutionary authorities will be confronted with the objective problems of socialism, but the solution of these problems will, at a certain stage, be prevented by the country's economic backwardness. There is no way out from this contradiction within the framework of a national revolution.

The workers' government will from the start be faced with the task of uniting its forces with those of the socialist proletariat of Western Europe. Only in this way will its temporary revolutionary hegemony become the prologue to a socialist dictatorship. Thus permanent revolution will become, for the Russia proletariat, a matter of class self-preservation" (Trotsky, 1905, p317 'Our Differences').

The notion of the 'permanent revolution', as we have noted before in this series, is not without its own ambiguities, and these have been duly exploited by those who have forged Trotsky's copyright, the latter-day Trotskyists. But at the time it was put forward, as an attempt to understand the transition to a new period in capitalism's history, Trotsky's position had an immense advantage over the two previously mentioned theories: it approached the problem from the international, rather than the Russian context. In this Trotsky rather than the Mensheviks was really the heir of Marx, since the latter, in reflecting on the possibility of Russia 'by-passing' the capitalist stage had also insisted that this would only be possible in the context of an international socialist revolution (see IR 81. 'Past and Future Communism'). Subsequent developments had shown that Russia could not escape the ordeal of capitalism. But contrary to the schematic dogma of the Mensheviks, who ponderously argued that each country had to patiently 'build the foundations of socialism in its own national confines, the internationalist Trotsky was moving towards the view that the conditions for the realisation of socialism - capitalism's 'rotten ripeness' or decadence - emerged as a global reality long before each country could go through the full gamut of capitalist development. The events of 1905 had amply demonstrated that the highly concentrated and combative urban proletariat was already the only truly revolutionary force in Russian society; and the events of 1917 were soon to confirm that a revolutionary proletariat could only embark upon a proletarian revolution.

The Lenin of 1917, as shown in the article on the April Theses in IR 89, was himself able to jettison the luggage of the 'democratic dictatorship' even when many 'Old Bolsheviks' were clinging to it for dear life. In this respect, it is certainly no accident that in the period around 1905 Lenin himself had also veered towards the 'permanent revolution' thesis, declaring in an article written in September 1905:

"From the democratic revolution we shall at once , according to the degree of our strength, the strength of the class conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass over to the socialist revolution. We stand for permanent revolution. We shall not stop half-way" (Complete Works, Vol. 8, p236-7, 'Social democracy's attitude towards the peasant movement'. Later Stalinist translations changed the word 'permanent to 'uninterrupted' in order to protect Lenin from any Trotskyist virus, but the meaning is clear). If Lenin continued to have hesitations about Trotsky's position, this was a result of the ambiguities of the period: until the war of 1914, it was not yet clear that the system as a whole had entered its epoch of decay, thus defmitively placing the world communist revolution on the agenda of history. The war, and the gigantic movement of the proletariat that began in February 1917, removed his last doubts.

The Menshevik position also revealed its inner secrets in 1917: in an epoch of proletarian revolution, 'critical opposition' to the bourgeoisie becomes first capitulation to the bourgeoisie, then enrolment in its counter-revolutionary forces. And indeed, in 1917 even the Bolshevik position of 'democratic dictatorship' was threatening to lead the party in the same direction, until Lenin's return from exile and the victorious fight to rearm the party. But Trotsky's reflections on the 1905 revolution also played a crucial part in that fight. Without them. Lenin may not have been able to forge the theoretical weapons he needed to elaborate the April Theses and point the way to the October insurrection.

Kautsky, Pannekoek, and the State

The 1905 revolution ended in a defeat for the working class. The armed uprising of December, isolated and crushed, led neither to a proletarian dictatorship nor a democratic republic, but to a decade of Tsarist reaction which caused the temporary dispersal and disorientation of the workers movement. But this was not a defeat of world-historic proportions. By the second decade of the new century, there were clear signs of a proletarian resurgence, even in Russia. But the focus of the mass strike debate had shifted back to Germany. Indeed, it took on a new urgency and directness here, because the deteriorating economic situation had provoked massive strike movements among the German workers themselves - sometimes around economic demands as such, but also, in Prussia, around the question of suffrage reform. There was also the growing threat of war, which prompted the workers' movement to consider the mass strike as a form of action against militarism. These developments gave rise to a bitter polemic within the German party, pitting Kautsky, the Pope of marxist orthodoxy (in fact, the leader of the centrist current in the party), against the principal theoreticians of the left, fust Luxemburg, then Pannekoek.

With the social democratic right increasingly revealing its outright opposition to any mass action by the working class, Kautsky's argument was that mass strikes in the advanced countries should at best be restricted to the defensive level, that the best strategy for the working class was that of the gradual, essentially legalistic "war of attrition" with parliament and elections as the key instruments .for the transfer of power to the proletariat. But this merely proved that his self-professed "centrist" position was in reality a cover for the openly opportunist wing of the party. Replying in two articles published in Neue Zeit in 1910, 'Attrition or Struggle?' and 'Theory and Practice', Luxemburg reaffirmed the arguments that she had defended in The Mass Strike, rebutting Kautsky's view that the mass strike in Russia was a product of Russian backwardness and opposing the "attrition" strategy by showing the intimate and inevitable connection between the mass strike and the revolution.

But as our book The Dutch Left points out, there was an important weakness in Luxemburg's argument. "In reality, very often in this debate, Rosa Luxemburg remained on the terrain chosen by Kautsky and the SPD leadership. She called for mass strikes as a means to achieve universal suffrage and put forward the 'transitional' mobilising slogan of the struggle for the Republic. On this level, Kautsky was able to reply that 'to want to inaugurate an electoral struggle
through a mass strike is absurd'” (p67, French edition). And as the book goes on to show, it was the Dutch marxist Anton Pannekoek, who was living in Germany during this period, who was able to take this debate a vital step forward.

Already, in 1909, in his text on the 'Tactical Divergences in the Workers Movement', which was directed at the revisionist and anarchist deviations in the movement, Pannekoek had shown a profound grasp of the marxist method, defending positions on parliament and trade unionism which, while clearly rejecting any timeless anarchist moralising, can be seen in hindsight to contain the seeds of the principled rejection of parliamentarism and trade unionism elaborated by the German and Dutch communist left after the war. In his polemic with Kautsky, conducted in Neue Zeit in 1912 with the texts 'Mass Action and Revolution' and Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics , Pannekoek took these insights further. Among the most important contributions contained in these texts are Pannekoek's diagnosis of Kautsky s centrism,(referred to as "passive radicalism in the second text); his defence of the mass strike as the form of class struggle appropriate to the newly emerging imperialist epoch; his insistence on the capacity of the proletariat to develop new forms of unitary self-organisation in the course of the struggle1 and his view of the party as an active minority whose task was to provide political programmatic leadership to the movement rather than to organise or control it from above. But most important of all was his argument about the ultimate direction the mass strike would have to assume, which led him to reassert, against Kautsky's legalism and parliamentary fetishism, the fundamental marxist thesis on the attitude of the proletariat towards the bourgeois state in the revolutionary confrontation. In a passage quoted approvingly by Lenin in State and Revolution, Pannekoek wrote:

"The struggle of the proletariat is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie for state power, but a struggle against state power ... The content of this revolution is the destruction and dissolution of the instruments of power of the bourgeoisie. The struggle will cease only when, as a result of it, the state organisation is completely destroyed. The organisation of the majority will then have demonstrated its superiority by destroying the organisation of the ruling minority"(Collected Works, Vol. 25, p 488. The passage is from 'Mass Action and Revolution').

And Lenin, despite seeing certain defects in Pannekoek's formulation, ardently defends them as being founded on marxism, contrary to Kautsky's charge that they represent a reversion to anarchism.: "in this controversy, it is not Kautsky but Pannekoek who represents marxism, for it was Marx who taught that the proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it by a new one" (State and Revolution, Collected Works, p 489).

For us, the defects in Pannekoek's presentation lie at two levels: first, that he did not sufficiently ground his argument in the writings of Marx and Engels on the question of the state, particularly their conclusions about the Paris Commune. This made it easier for Kautsky to smear his position with the accusation of anarchism. And second, that Pannekoek remains vague about the form of the new organs of proletarian power: like Luxemburg, he had not yet grasped the historic significance of the soviet form - something he would certainly make up for in the period following the Russian revolution! But this merely provides further proof that the clarification of the communist programme is a process which integrates and synthesises the best contributions of the international proletarian movement. Luxemburg's analysis of the mass strike was 'crowned' by Trotsky's appreciation of the soviets and the proletarian revolutionary perspective he drew out of the events of 1905; Pannekoek's insights into the question of the state were taken up by Lenin in 1917, who was able to show not only that the proletarian revolution must indeed destroy the existing capitalist state, but that the specific organs for the accomplishment of this task, the "finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat' were the soviets or workers' councils. Lenin's achievement in this field, largely summarised in his book The State and Revolution, will be the axis of the next chapter in this series.

CDW

In the previous issue of this Review, we answered the polemic in Revolutionary Perspectives no.5 (publication of the Communist Workers' Organisation, CWO) entitled "Sects, Lies, and the Lost Perspectives of the ICC". We were unable, for lack of space, to deal with every question opened up by the CWO, and so limited ourselves to answering one of them: the idea that the ICC's perspective for the present historic period has completely collapsed. We pointed out that the CWO's assertions were based essentially on a profound incomprehens ion of our actual positions, and above all on their own utter lack of any analytical framework for the present period. Moreover, this lack of framework is proudly upheld by the CWO and the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) to which it is affiliated, because they consider it impossible for revolutionary organisations to identify the dominant tendency in the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat: either a course towards increasing confrontations between the two classes, or towards imperialist war. In fact, the IBRP's refusal to acknowledge both the possibility and the necessity for revolutionaries to identify the nature of the historic course, springs from the conditions in which the other organisation of the IBRP - the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt, also known as Battaglia Comunista, BC) - was formed at the end of World War II. And in no.15 of the their English-language theoretical review (Internationalist Communist), the IBRP publish a polemic titled "The political roots of the ICC's organisational malaise", where they return to the question of the origins of both ICC and PCInt. This is the main issue we will take up in this response to their polemic.

The IBRP's polemic deals with the same subject as the article in RP no.5: the causes of the organisational difficulties that the ICC has confronted recently. The great weakness of both texts, is that nowhere do they mention the analysis that the ICC itself has made of these difficulties1: for the IBRP, they can spring only from weaknesses either in our programme, or in our understanding of the present world situation. These questions can certainly be a source of problems for a communist organisation. But the whole history of the workers' movement demonstrates that questions to do with the organisation's structure and functioning are political questions in their own right, and that weaknesses in this domain have consequences still more serious - even dramatic - on the life of revolutionary groups. Need we remind the comrades of the IBRP - who after all claim to uphold the positions of Lenin - of the example of the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1903, when the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks took place precisely on the organisation question (and not at all on programmatic issues, or the analysis of the situation). In fact, when we look more closely, the IBRP's present inability to give an analysis of the nature of the historic course derives in large part from its political mistakes on the organisation question, more particularly on the relationship between class and party. We can see this again in the article published in IC. Lest the comrades of the IBRP accuse us of falsifying their positions, let us quote at length from their article:

"The ICC was formed in 1975 but its history goes back to the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) a tiny group formed during the Second World War by the same individual ("Marc '') who would found the ICC in the Seventies. The GCF was fundamentally based on the rejection of the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy by the IBRP's ancestors in the period after 1942.

The GCF argued that the Internationalist Communist Party was not an advance on the old Fraction of the Communist Left which had gone into exile in France during the Mussolini dictatorship. The GCF called on the members of the fraction not to join the new Party that was being formed by revolutionaries like Onorato Damen, released from jail with the collapse of Mussolini's regime. It argued that the counter-revolution which had faced the workers since their defeats in the 1920s still continued, and that therefore there was no possibility of creating a revolutionary party in the 1940s. After Italian fascism collapsed in 1943 and the Italian state became a battleground between the two imperialist fronts, the vast majority of the exiled Italian fraction rallied to join the Internationalist Communist Party (pClnt) with the expectation that workers' unrest would not only be limited to Northern Italy as the war drew to a close. The GCF's opposition was of no significance at the time but it was the first example of the consequences of the abstract reasoning which is one of the methodological hallmarks of the ICC today. Today the 1CC will say that no revolution came out of World War ll, ergo the GCF were right. But this ignores the fact that the PCInt was the most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian Revolution and that, despite the half a century of further capitalist domination, it continues to exist and is growing today.

The GCF, on the other hand, took their "logical" abstractions a stage further. They argued that since the counter-revolution was still dominant then proletarian revolution was not on the agenda. If this was the case then a further imperialist war must be coming! The result was that the leadership took itself off to South America and the GCF collapsed during the Korean War. The ICC have always been somewhat embarrassed by this revelation of their ancestors' powers of understanding "the course of history ". However, their response has always been to brazen it out. Instead of admitting that the PCInt got both their perspectives and their conception of organisation right all along, when the ex-GCF returned to a remarkably unscathed Europe in the mid-1960s, they sought to denigrate the PCInt as "sclerotic ", "opportunist ", and told the world that they were "Bordigist " (a charge which they could only sustain on the basis of the ignorance of the new young generation of revolutionaries. It was a charge they were subsequently forced publicly to retract). However, even after this admission was forced out of them they had not finished with their policy of denigrating possible "rivals" (to quote the ICC themselves) and now they tried to maintain that the PCInt had "worked in the partisans" (ie supported the bourgeois forces seeking to establish a democratic Italian state). This was a disgusting and cowardly slander. In fact PCInt militants had been murdered directly on the orders of Palmiro Togliatti (General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party) for attempting to undermine that Stalinist control of the working class by winning support away from the partisans".

This passage on the respective histories of the ICC and the IDRP deserves an answer in depth, notably through historical fact. However, to clarify the debate, we have to start by correcting some of these accusations, which indicate either bad faith, or an alarming ignorance on the part of the article's author.

Some corrections and precisions

First, let us take the question of the partisans which provokes such indignation amongst the comrades of the IBRP, to the point where they even accuse us of "slander" and "cowardice". We have indeed said that the PCInt "worked in the partisan movement". But this is hardly a slander - it is simply the truth. Did the PCInt send some of its cadres and militants into the partisans' ranks, yes or no? This is not something that can be hidden. Moreover, the PCInt claims this policy as its own, unless it has changed position since comrade Damen wrote in autumn 1976, in the name of the PCInt's Executive, that "the Party has nothing to be ashamed of”, and recalling "those revolutionary militants who worked to penetrate the ranks of the partisans in order to spread the principles and the tactics of the revolutionary movement, and who paid for this commitment with their lives"2. By contrast, we have never pretended that this policy consisted of "supporting the bourgeois forces seeking to establish a democratic Italian state". We have dealt with this question several times in our press3 and we will return to it in the second part of this article, but although we have been pitiless in our critique of the errors committed by the PCInt at its formation, we have never treated it in the same way as the Trotskyists, still less the Stalinists. The comrades would do better to quote the passages that make them so angry. In the meantime, we think it better that they should keep their indignation to themselves. Their insults likewise.

Another point that we should correct, concerns the GCF's analysis of the historic period at the beginning of the 1950s, which led to the departure of some of its members from Europe. The IBRP is wrong to think that the ICC is embarrassed by the question, and that it replies by "brazening it out". In the obituary article on comrade Marc (International Review no.66), we wrote: "We can find this analysis in the article on "The Evolution of Capitalism and the New Perspective ", published in Internationalisme no.45 (and reprinted in the International Review no.21). The text was drawn up by Marc in 1952, and constituted, in a sense, the GCF's political testament.

In June 1952, Marc left France for Venezuela. This departure followed a political decision by the GCF: the Korean War had convinced them that a Third World War between the Russian and American blocs was both inevitable and imminent (as the text in question says). Such a war would ravage Europe, and was likely to destroy completely the few communist groups which had survived World War II. The GCF's decision to send some of its militants to "safety" outside Europe had nothing to do with their personal security (...) but with a concern for the survival of the organisation itself However, the departure of its most experienced militant was to prove fatal for the GCF; despite their constant correspondence with Marc, the 'elements who had remained in France were unable to keep the organisation alive in a period of profound counter-revolution. For reasons which we have not space to deal with here, World War III did not happen. It is clear that this error of analysis cost the life of the GCF (and of all the mistakes Marc made during his life as a militant, it was probably this one which had the most serious consequences)".

Moreover, when we first republished the text mentioned above (in 1974, in Revolution Internationale's Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion no.8, the predecessor to the International Review), we clearly stated:

"Internationalisme was right to analyse the period following World War II as a continuation of the period of reaction and reflux in the proletarian class struggle (...) It was right, too, to declare that the end of the war did not mean the end of capitalism's decadence, that all the contradictions that had pushed capitalism to war continued, and would push the world inexorably towards new wars. But Internationalisme did not see, or did not pay enough attention to, the possible phase of "reconstruction" in the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-crisis. It was for this reason, and in this context of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR of the time, that Internationalisme thought that the resurgence of the proletariat would be possible only in and following a Third War”.

As we can see, the ICC has never tried to "brazen out" this question, nor has it been too "embarrassed" to talk about the mistakes of the GCF (even when the IBRP was not yet there to remind us). That said, the IBRP demonstrates once again that it has not understood our analysis of the historic course. The GCF's mistake lay not in an incorrect evaluation of the balance of class forces, but in an under-estimation of the respite that reconstruction would give to the capitalist economy, and which would allow it for two decades to escape the open crisis, and so to attenuate somewhat the tensions between the two blocs. These tensions remained contained within the framework of local wars (Korea, Middle East, Vietnam, etc.). If the World War did not break out at the beginning of the 50s, it was not thanks to the proletariat (which was paralysed and controlled by the left wing of capital), but because the war was not yet a necessity for capitalism.

Having made these corrections, we have to return to an "argument" which seems dear to the IBRP (since it has already been used in the polemic in RP no.5): the "tiny" size of the GCF. In reality, the reference to the GCF's "tiny" size is a reference back to "the most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian Revolution", in other words the PCInt, which at the time had several thousand members. Is this supposed to be the IBRP's proof that the reason for the PCInt's "greater success" was that its own positions were more correct than those of the GCF?

If that is the case, then the argument is thin indeed. However, leaving aside the poverty of the argument, the IBRP's approach brings up some fundamental questions, which are precisely where some of the most profound disagreements between our organisations lie. To deal with them, we need to return to the history of the Italian communist left. For the GCF was not just a "tiny" group, it was also the real political continuity with the same political current where the PCInt and the IBRP have their origins.

Some milestones in the history of the Italian Left

In our book The Italian Communist Left, the ICC has put forward a history of this current. Here, we can only sketch a few important aspects of this history.

The Italian Left emerged around Amadeo Bordiga and the Naples Federation as the "Abstentionist" Fraction within the Italian Socialist Party. The Left was responsible for founding the Italian Communist Party at the Livorno Congress of 1921, and held the leadership of the Party until 1925. At the same time as other left currents within the Communist International (such as the Dutch and German lefts), and well before Trotsky.'s Left Opposition, it fought the opportunist direction that the International was taking. In particular, unlike Trotskyism which claims complete adherence to the Cl's first four Congresses, the Italian Left rejected certain positions adopted by the 3rd and 4th Congress, especially the tactic of the "United Front". On some aspects, notably on the state capitalist nature of the USSR or the definitively bourgeois nature of the trades unions, the positions of the Dutch and German Lefts were at first much more correct than those of the Italians. However the Italian Left's contribution to the workers' movement was to prove much more fruitful thanks to its better understanding on two essential questions:

• the ebb and defeat of the revolutionary wave;

• the nature of the tasks of revolutionary organisations in such a situation.

In particular, while they were aware of the need to call into question political positions which had been contradicted by historical experience, the Italian Left moved forward with great caution, which allowed them to avoid "throwing the baby out with the bath water", unlike the Dutch Left which finally concluded that October 1917 had been a bourgeois revolution, and by rejecting the necessity of the revolutionary party. This did not prevent the Italian Left from adopting some of the positions which the German and Dutch Lefts had worked out previously. Increasing repression by the Mussolini regime, especially after the emergency laws of 1926, forced most of the militants of the Italian Communist Left into exile. It was thus abroad, mainly in France and Belgium, that the current continued an organised activity. In February 1928, in the Parisian suburb of Pantin, there was founded the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party. It tried to take part in the efforts at discussion and regroupment of various Left currents that had been excluded from a degenerating International, and whose best-known member was Trotsky. The Fraction hoped especially to publish a common discussion review with the different currents. But after being excluded from Trotsky's International Left Opposition, the Fraction determined in 1933 to publish its own review Bilan in French, at the same time as it continued to publish Prometeo in Italian.

This is not the place to look at the whole evolution of the Fraction's positions. We will limit ourselves to one, which lay at its foundations: the relationship between party and fraction.

This position had been worked out little by little during the 1920s and the beginning of the 30s, when the Fraction had to decide what should be its policy towards the degenerating Communist Parties.

We can summarise the main lines of this position as follows. The Left Fraction is formed as the proletarian party is degenerating under the influence of opportunism, in other words its penetration by bourgeois ideology. It is the responsibility of the minority, which upholds the revolutionary programme, to conduct an organised struggle for its victory within the party. Either the Fraction succeeds, its principles triumph, and the party is saved, or the party continues to degenerate and ends up passing arms and baggage into the bourgeois camp. The moment where the proletarian party passes into the bourgeois camp is not easy to determine. However, one of the most important signs of this passage is the fact that no proletarian political life any longer appears within the party. It is the responsibility of the Left Fraction to continue the fight within the party as long as there remains any hope of redressing it: this is why, during the late 1920s and early '30s, the left currents did not leave the parties of the IC, but were excluded, often by means of sordid manoeuvres. That being said, once a proletanan party has passed over to the bourgeois camp, no return is possible. The proletariat must then produce a new party, to return to the road towards revolution, and the role of the Fraction is to be a "bridge" between the old party gone over to the enemy and the future party, for which it must build a programmatic foundation, and whose skeleton it must become. The fact that once the party has passed over into the bourgeois camp, there can no longer exist any proletarian life within it means that it is both useless and dangerous for revolutionaries to undertake "entryism", which has always been one of Trotskyism's "tactics", and which the Fraction always rejected. Attempts to maintain a proletarian life within a bourgeois party, in other words one which is sterile as far as class positions are concerned, has never had any result other than to accelerate the opportunist degeneration of those organisations which have attempted it, without redressing the party in the slightest. As for any "recruitment" gained by such methods, it has always been particularly confused, and gangrened by opportunism, and has never been able to form a vanguard for the working class.

In fact, one of the fundamental differences between the Italian Fraction and Trotskyism was that when it came to regrouping revolutionary forces, the Fraction always put forward the need for the greatest clarity and programmatic rigour, although being open to discussion with all the other currents that had committed themselves to struggle against the degeneration of the Cl. The Trotskyist current, by contrast, tried to form organisations in haste, without any serious discussion or decantation of political positions beforehand, relying essentially on agreements between "personalities" and the authority of Trotsky as one of the most important leaders of the 1917 revolution, and of the early Cl.

Another question where the Fraction and Trotskyism disagreed, was the right moment for the formation of a new party. For Trotsky and his comrades, the question of founding a new party was put on the agenda as soon as the old parties had been lost for the proletariat. For the Fraction, the question was very clear:

"The transformation of the Fraction into a party is conditioned by two elements, that are closely linked4:

1) The elaboration, by the Fraction, of the new political positions which will be able to give a solid framework to the proletariat's struggle for the revolution, in its new and more advanced phase (...).

2) The overthrow of the present system of class relationships (...) with the outbreak of revolutionary movements which will allow the Fraction to regain the leadership of the struggle with a view to insurrection" (“Towards the 2-3/4 International?" in Bilan no. 1, 1933).

For revolutionaries to determine correctly their responsibilities at a given moment, it is vital for them to identify clearly the balance of class forces, and the direction in which it is moving. One of the Fraction's great merits was precisely its ability to identify the nature of the historic course during the 1930s: because the counter-revolution weighed heavily on the whole working class, the general crisis of capitalism could only lead to a new world war.

The full importance of this analysis became clear with the outbreak of the war in Spain. Whereas most of the organisations that belonged to the left of the Communist Parties saw in the Spanish events a revolutionary recovery of the world proletariat, the Fraction understood that despite the combativity and courage of the Spanish proletariat, it had been trapped by the anti-fascist ideology promoted by all the organisations with any influence within it (the anarchist CGT, the socialist UGT, as well as the Communist and Socialist parties, and the POUM, a left socialist party which took part in the bourgeois government of the Barcelona "Generalitat"), and was destined to serve as cannon-fodder in a confrontation between the "democratic' and "fascist" sections of the bourgeoisie which would be a prelude to the inevitable world war. At the time, a minority formed within the Fraction, which considered that the situation in Spain remained "objectively revolutionary". Defying all organisational discipline, and refusing the debate proposed by the majority, this minority joined up in the POUM's anti-fascist brigades5 and even wrote in the POUM's press. The Fraction was obliged to recognise that the minority had split. The latter, on their return from Spain at the end of 19366, joined Union Communiste, a left split from Trotskyism in the early 1930s, which was to rejoin the latter describing the events in Spain as "revolutionary", and calling for "critical anti-fascism".

Along with a number of communists from the Dutch Left, the Italian Fraction was thus the only organisation to maintain an intransigent class position against the imperialist war developing in Spain7. Unfortunately, at the end of 1937 Vercesi. who was the Fraction's leading figure and theoretician, began to develop a new theory that the various military confrontations of the latter half of the 1930s were not preparations for a new generalised imperialist slaughter, but "local wars" aimed at keeping the growing proletarian menace at bay by massacring workers. According to this theory, the world was thus on the eve of a new revolutionary wave, and world war was no longer a possibility, since the war economy was supposed to overcome the capitalist crisis of itself Only a minority of the Fraction - our comrade Marc among them - managed to avoid being dragged down this slippery slope, which turned out to be a sort of posthumous revenge for the minority of 1936. The majority decided to stop publishing Bilan and the replace it with October (whose name matched the "new perspective"), which was to be the organ of the International Bureau of Left Fractions (Belgian and Italian) and published in three languages. In fact, instead of "doing more" as the "new perspective" demanded, the Fraction proved unable to maintain its previous rhythm: unlike Bilan, October appeared irregularly, and in French only; many militants, confused by this calling into question of the Fractions positions, became demoralised or resigned.

The Italian Left during World War II and the formation of the GCF

When World War II broke out, the Fraction was disjointed. Its rout was less the result of repression, first by the democratic police and then by the Gestapo (several militants, including Mitchell, the leading figure of the Belgian Fraction, died in the camps), as of political disorientation and lack of preparation for a world war which had been supposed not to happen. Vercesi proclaimed that with the war, the proletariat had become "socially non-existent", that any Fraction work was therefore a waste of time, and that the Fractions should be dissolved (the decision that was taken by the international Bureau), which helped to paralyse the Fraction still further. Notwithstanding, the Marseille nucleus, made up of militants who had opposed Vercesi's revisionist ideas before the war, went on working patiently to rebuild the Fraction - a task that was made all the more difficult by repression and straitened circumstances. Sections were reestablished in Lyon, Toulon, and Paris. Contact was renewed with Belgium. By 1941, the "reconstituted" Italian Fraction was able to hold annual Conferences, to elect an Executive Commission, and publish an international Discussion Bulletin. In parallel, in 1942 the French nucleus of the Communist Left was formed on the basis of the Italian Fraction's positions, and with a view to building a French Fraction. Marc, now a member of the Italian Fraction's EC, joined the French group8. When in 1942-43 the great workers' strikes began, that were to lead to the fall of Mussolini and his replacement by the pro-Allied Admiral Badoglio (strikes which were to have an echo among Italian workers in Germany, supported by strikes of German workers), the Fraction considered, in line with the position it had always held, that "the course towards the transformation of the Fraction into the Party is open in Italy". The Conference of August 1943 decided to renew contact with Italy, and asked its militants to prepare to return as soon as possible. However, the return proved impossible, partly for material reasons and partly because Vercesi and a part of the Belgian Fraction remained hostile to the move, on the grounds that events in Italy did not call into question "the social non-existence of the proletariat". At its May 1944 Conference, the Fraction condemned Vercesi's theories. Vercesi had further to fall, however. In September 1944, he took part, in the name of the Fraction and in company with Pieri, another of its members, in the Brussels "Coalizione antifascista", alongside the Christian Democrat, "Communist", Republican, Socialist and Liberal parties. This unholy alliance published the newspaper L'Italia di Domani, in whose columns are to be found appeals for financial subscriptions to help the Allied war effort. When the Fraction became aware of these facts, its EC expelled Vercesi on 20th January 1945. This did not prevent the latter from continuing his work both in the Coalizione and as president of the Croce Rossa9.

The Fraction continued to work, in difficult conditions, to propagandise against the anti-fascist hysteria and to denounce the imperialist war. Now, it had at its side the French Nucleus, which held its first congress as the French Fraction of the Communist Left - December 1944. The two Fractions distributed leaflets and flyposted calls for fraternisation between the proletarians in uniform of the two imperialist camps. However, when they learnt at the Conference of May 1945 of the formation in Italy of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, including prestigious figures as Amadeo Bordiga and Onorato Damen, the majority of the Fraction decided that it should dissolve, and in its members enter the PCInt on an individual basis. This called into question the very basis of the Fraction's whole approach since its formation in 1928. Marc, who was a member of the Fraction's EC and had been the leading figure in its work during the war, opposed the decision. His approach was not formalist, but political: he considered that the Fraction be maintained until they had ascertained the positions of the new party which were not known in detail, and determined whether they conformed to those of the Fraction10. Rather than be an accomplice to the suicide of the Fraction, he resigned from the EC and left the Congress, after making a declaration to explain his attitude. The Fraction (despite no longer being supposed to exist) excluded him as "politically unworthy", and refused to recognise the FFGC, whose leading figure Marc was. A few months later, two members of the FFGC met Vercesi - who had declared for the formation of the PCInt - and split, to form a "FFGC no. 2", with the support of the latter. To avoid any confusion, the FFGC took the name of Gauche Communiste de France (GCF), while still claiming to represent the political continuity of the Fraction. The "FFGC no. 2" found itself "strengthened" by the entry of the members of the minority excluded from the Fraction in 1936, and of Chaze - the leading figure of Union Communiste. This did not stop the PCInt and the Belgian Fraction from recognising it as "the only representative in France of the Communist Left".

In 1946, the "tiny" GCF stopped publication of its agitational press L'Etincelle ("The Spark '), considering that the perspective of a historic recovery in class struggle which had been put forward in 1943 had proven invalid. By contrast, between 1945 and 1952 it published 46 issues of its theoretical review Internationalisme, that dealt with all the questions confronting the workers' movement at the end of World War II, and clarifying the programmatic foundations for e formation of Internacionalismo in 1964 in Venezuela, Revolution Internationale in 1968 in France, and the International Communist Current in 1975.

In the second part of this article, we will return to the formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, the inspiration for the IBRP and according to its own words “the most successful creation of the revolutionary working class since the Russian revolution”.

Fabieane

The extreme right goes onto the offensive, democracy inflicts a defeat on the working class

In International Review 83 we showed how in 1919 the working class, following the failure of the January uprising, went through a series of heavy defeats owing to the fragmentation of its struggles. The ruling class in Germany unleashed the most violent repression against the workers.

1919 was the zenith of the world revolutionary wave. While the working class m Russia remained isolated in the face of an assault organised by the democratic states, the German bourgeoisie went onto the offensive with the aim of finishing off a proletariat which had been terribly weakened by its recent defeats.

The working class forced to pay for the defeat of German imperialism

After the disaster of the war, even though the economy was in ruins, the ruling class tried to exploit the situation by piling the weight of its defeat on the shoulders of the working class. Between 1913 and 1920, agricultural and industrial production in Germany had fallen by more than 50%. On top of this, a third of the production that remained had to be delivered to the victorious powers. In many branches of the economy, production continued to collapse. Prices rose dizzily and the cost of living index went from 100 in 1913 to 1,100 in 1920. After the hardships suffered by the working class during the war, "peacetime" famine was on the agenda. Malnutrition continued to spread. The anarchy and chaos of capitalist production, impoverishment and hunger reigned over the workers everywhere.

The bourgeoisie uses the Treaty of Versailles to divide the working class

Simultaneously, the victorious powers of the West extracted a heavy price from the defeated German bourgeoisie. However there were considerable differences of interest between the victors. While the USA had an interest in Germany acting as a counter-weight to Britain, and thus opposed any attempt to tear Germany to pieces, France wanted Germany to be weakened for as long as possible on the territorial, military and economic level, and even favoured the dismemberment of the country. The Treaty of Versailles of 28th June 1919 stipulated that the German army would be reduced in stages from 400,000 on 10th April 1920, then to 200,000 on 20th July 1920. The new Republican army, the Reichswehr, was only allowed to keep 4,000 of its 24,000 officers. The Reichswehr saw these decisions as a deadly threat and opposed them by all means possible. All the bourgeois parties - from the SPD to the centre and the extreme right - were united, in the interests of the national capital, in rejecting the Treaty of Versailles. They only yielded to it under the constraint of the victorious powers. However, the world bourgeoisie profited from the Versailles Treaty in that it deepened the divisions which had already existed during the war between the workers of the victorious powers and those of the defeated powers.

Meanwhile, an important faction of the army, feeling directly threatened by the Treaty, immediately began to organise resistance against its application. This faction aimed at stirring up a new conflict with the victorious powers. This perspective demanded that the bourgeoisie very quickly impose a new and decisive defeat on the working class.

But for the moment there was no question of the army coming to power as far as the main forces of German capital were concerned. At the head of the bourgeois state, the SPD had already given proof of its considerable capacities. Since 1914, it had succeeded in muzzling the proletariat And in the winter of 1918-19, it had very efficiently organised the sabotage and repression of the revolutionary struggle. German capital did not need the army to maintain its rule. It could still rely on the dictatorship of the Weimar Republic. Police troops under the orders of the SPD had fired on a massive demonstration in front of the Reichstag on 13th January 1920, where 42 demonstrators were killed. During the strikes in the Ruhr at the end of February, the "democratic government” threatened revolutionaries with the death penalty.

This is why, when in February 1920 parts of the army put their putschist aspirations into practice, they were only supported by a few factions of capital.These were above all from the agrarian east, since they had a particular interest in reconquering the eastern regions lost during the war.

The Kapp Putsch: the extreme right goes onto the offensive ...

The preparations for this putsch were an open secret within the bourgeoisie. But initially the government did nothing about the putschists, On 13th March 1920, a marine brigade under the command of General von Luttwitz entered Berlin, surrounded the seat of the Ebert government and proclaimed its overthrow. When Ebert rallied generals von Seekt and Schleicher to his side in reply to the putsch, the army hesitated, because, as the Supreme Commander of the General Staff declared: "the Reichswehr cannot accept any fratricidal war'of Reichswehr against Reichswehr".

The government then fled, first to Dresden, then to Stuttgart. Kapp then declared that the Social Democratic government was out of office but made no arrests. Before its flight to Stuttgart, the government, supported by the trade unions, launched an appeal for a strike and once again showed the duplicity it was capable of in acting against the working class:

"Fight by all means at your disposal for the maintenance of the Republic. Forget all your differences. There is only one way to oppose the dictatorship of Wilhelm II:

• the total paralysis of the whole economy;

• all arms must be given up;

• no proletarian must cooperate with the military dictatorship;

• general strike all along the line. Proletarians unite. Down with the counter-revolution.

The Social Democratic members of the government: Ebert, Bauer, Noske The Directing Committee of the SPD"

The unions and the SPD thus intervened immediately to protect the bourgeois Republic - even if on this occasion they used pro-worker language1.

Kapp proclaimed the dissolution of the National Assembly, announced the holding of elections and threatened any striking worker with the death penalty.

The armed response of the working class

The indignation of the workers was gigantic. They understood immediately and clearly that this was a direct attack on their class. Everywhere a violent response developed. Naturally, it was not a question of defending the Scheidemann government From Wasserkante in eastern Prussia, through to central Germany, Berlin, BadWurtemburg, Bavaria and the Ruhr, in all the big towns, there were demonstrations; in all the industrial centres the workers went on strike and raided police stations in order to arm themselves; in the factories they held general assemblies to decide on the struggle to be waged. In most of the big cities putschist troops opened fire on demonstrating workers. On 13th and 14th March 1920, dozens of workers were shot down.

In the industrial centres, workers formed action committees, workers' councils and executive councils. The proletarian masses descended onto the streets. Not since November 1918 had there been such a massive mobilisation of the working class. Everywhere their anger against militarism exploded.

On the 13 March, the day the Kapp troops entered Berlin, the KDP Zentrale took a wait-and-see attitude. In its first statement of position, it was not in favour of a general strike:

“The proletariat will not lift a finger for the democratic republic ... The working class, which only yesterday was disarmed and repressed by the Eberts and Noskes ... is for the moment incapable of acting. The working class will take on the struggle against the military dictatorship in the circumstances and with the means that seem suitable to it. These circumstances are not yet present"

However, the KPD Zentrale was mistaken. The workers themselves did not want to wait, on the contrary, in the space of a few days more and more of them were joining the movement. Everywhere the slogans were: "Arm the workers! Down with the putschistsl".

Whereas in 1919, throughout Germany, the working class had struggled in a fragmented way, the putsch provoked a simultaneous mobilisation in many places. However, apart from in the Ruhr, there was hardly any contact made between the different centres of struggle. Throughout the country, there was a spontaneous response but without any real centralised organisation.

The Ruhr, the most important concentration of the working class, was the "Kappists" main target. This is why it was the centre of the workers' response. Starting with Munster, the Kappists attempted to encircle the workers of the Ruhr. The latter were the only ones to unify their struggle at the level of several towns, to give the strike a centralised leadership. Strike committees were formed everywhere.

Armed units, numbering up to 80,000 workers, were set up. This was the most important military mobilisation in the history of the workers' movement, apart from Russia. Although this resistance was not centralised on the military level, the armed workers managed to stop the advance of Kapp's troops. In town after town the putschists were defeated. The working class had not achieved such a success in 1919, during the various revolutionary uprisings. On 20 March 1920, the army was forced to retreat completely from the Ruhr. Already on 17th March, Kapp had been compelled to resign unconditionally. His putsch had hardly lasted for 100 hours. As in the events of the previous year, the main foci of the workers' resistance were Saxony, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich2. But the most powerful reaction was in the Ruhr.

Whereas in Germany as a whole the movement ebbed considerably after Kapp's resignation and the failure of the putsch, in the Ruhr this did not put an end to the movement. Many workers saw this as an opportunity to take the struggle forward.

The limits of the workers' response

Although a very broad workers' front had developed with the speed of lightening against the bloody putschists, it was obvious that the question of overthrowing the bourgeoisie was not yet on the agenda. For the majority of workers the issue was one of thwarting an armed aggression. At this point, it was not clear how to follow up the workers' initial success.

Apart from the workers of the Ruhr, those in other regions advanced hardly any demands that could have given the class movement a further dimension. As long as the workers' energy was directed against the putsch, there was a homogeneous orientation among the workers. But once the putschist troops had been defeated, the movement began to mark time and lacked a clear objective. Repelling a military attack in one region, which was the immediate issue facing the workers, does not necessarily create the conditions for overthrowing the capitalist class.

In various places, the anarcho-syndicalists tried to carry out the socialisation of production. This expressed the illusion that kicking out the extreme right was enough to open the door to socialism. A whole series of "commissions" were created by the workers with the aim of putting their demands to the bourgeois state. All this was presented as the first measures on the road to socialism, as the first steps towards dual power. In reality, these conceptions were signs of an impatience which was distracting the workers from the most urgent tasks. The illusion that it is enough to establish a favourable balance of forces in one region is a grave danger to the working class, because the question of power can only be posed, first of all, at the level of a whole country, and in reality only at an international level. This is why it is so important to combat petty bourgeois impatience and the demands for "everything, now".

While the workers mobilised themselves immediately on the military level against the putsch, the impulse and force of their movement did not come fundamentally from the factories. Without this - i.e. without the initiative from the masses exercising their pressure in the streets but also expressing themselves in general assemblies where they can discuss the situation and take decisions collectively - the movement cannot really go forward. This process demands that the workers take direct control of the extension and direction of the movement, but it also requires a development of consciousness in depth, since this alone makes it possible to unmask the enemies of the proletariat.

This is why the arming of the workers and a determined military response are not sufficient. The working class has to set in motion its principal strength: the development of its consciousness and its organisation. In this perspective, the workers' councils occupy a central place. However, the workers' councils and action committees which reappeared spontaneously in this movement were too weakly developed to serve as a rallying point and spearhead of the combat.

Moreover, from the beginning, the SPD undertook a whole series of manoeuvres to sabotage the councils. While the KPD focused its whole intervention on the need to re-elect the workers' councils, in order to reinforce the workers' initiative, the SPD managed to block these efforts.

The SPD and the unions: spearhead of the workers' defeat

In the Ruhr many representatives of the SPD sat in the action committees and the central strike committee. As in the period from November 1918 to the end of 1919, this party sabotaged the movement both from the inside and the outside, and once the workers had been decisively weakened, it brought to bear all the means of repression at its disposal.

Following Kapp's resignation on March 17, the withdrawal of the troops from the Ruhr on 20 March and the Ebert-Bauer government's return from "exile", the latter, alongside the army, was able to reorganise all the bourgeois forces.

Once again the SPD and the unions came to the aid of capital. Using the worst kind of demagogy and scarcely veiled threats, Ebert and Scheidemann immediately called for a return to work:

"Kapp and Luttwitz have been put out of business, but the sedition of the Junkers continues to threaten the German popular state. The combat against them must continue until they submit unconditionally. In this great aim, we must all the more solidly and deeply strengthen the Republican front. The general strike, if it goes on any longer, will not only threaten those who have been guilty of high treason, but also our own front. We need coal and bread to carry on the fight against the former powers. This is why we must halt the peoples' strike, but remain in a permanent state of alert".

At the same time, the SPD made a show of granting political concessions, in order to isolate the most combative and conscious elements from the rest of the movement. Thus it promised "more democracy" in the factories, in order to give the workers "a decisive influence in the elaboration of the new regime and the social and economic constitution"; it also promised the purging from the administration of all those who had sympathised with the putschists. But above all, the unions did everything to ensure that an agreement would be signed. The Bielefeld agreement promised concessions which in reality were aimed at holding back the movement so that the repression could then be organised.

At the same time the threat of "foreign intervention" was once again raised: the workers were told that spreading their struggles would result in an attack on Germany by foreign troops, especially those of the USA, and in the blocking of desperately needed food supplies from Holland.

Thus the unions and the SPD prepared the conditions and put in place all the means necessary for the repression of the working class. The same SPD whose ministers had a few days before, on 13th March, been calling for a general strike against the putschists, now took back the reins and carried out the repression. Although negotiations for a cease-fire were underway and the government appeared to be making "concessions" to the working class, the general mobilisation of the Reichswehr was already taking place. A large number of workers had the fatal illusion that the government troops sent by the "democratic" Weimar Republic would not carry out any action against the workers. This is what the Berlin-Kopenick defence committee promised when it called on the workers' militias to cease the struggle. But as soon as troops loyal to the government entered Berlin, councils of war were set up whose ferocity easily matched that of the Freikorps the year before. Anyone found in possession of a weapon was immediately executed. Thousands of workers were tortured and shot, innumerable women were raped. In the Ruhr alone it is estimated that 1000 workers were murdered. What Kapp's thugs had failed, the butchers of the democratic state succeeded admirably.

Since World War I, all bourgeois parties have been mortal enemies of the working class

Since the capitalist system entered its period of decadence, the proletariat has had to constantly relearn the fact that there are no factions of the ruling class less reactionary than any others, or less hostile to the working class. On the contrary, the forces of the left of capital, as proved by the example of the SPD, are all the more devious and dangerous in their attacks on the working class. In decadent capitalism there are no progressive factions of the bourgeoisie that the working class can support.

The proletariat paid a heavy price for its illusions in Social Democracy. In crushing the workers' response to the Kapp putsch, the SPD showed all its duplicity and proved that it was acting in the service of capital.

It began by presenting itself as the most radical representative of the workers. In doing so it succeeded in mystifying not only the workers in general, but also their political parties. Although at a general level the KPD warned the working class loudly and clearly about the SPD, denouncing the bourgeois character of its politics, at the local level it often fell victim to its tricks. Thus, in various towns, the KPD signed joint appeals for the general strike with the SPD.

For example, in Frankfurt, the SPD, the USPD and the KPD declared jointly that "We must enter into struggle now not to protect the bourgeois Republic, but to establish the power of the proletariat. Leave the factories and offices right away!".

In Wuppertal, the district leaderships of the three parties published this appeal:

"The unified struggle must be waged with the/oil owing aims:

1. The conquest of political power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, up until the consolidation of socialism by the council system.

2. The immediate socialisation of the economic enterprises sufficiently large to serve this end.

To attain these aims, the signatory parties (USPD, KPD, SPD) call (or a determined general strike on Monday 15 March".

The fact that the KPD and the USPD did not denounce the real role of the SPD, but lent their support to the illusion that you could form a united front with a party that had betrayed the working class and had its hands covered in workers' blood was to have disastrous consequences.

Once again the SPD was pulling all the strings and was preparing to repress the working class. After the defeat of the putschists, with Ebert at the head of the government, it appointed a new Commander to the Reichswehr - von Seekt, a general who had already acquired a solid reputation as a butcher of the working class. Right away, the army stirred up hatred against the workers: "although the right wing putschists have left the stage in defeat, left wing putschism is again raising its head. We will use our weapons against putsches of all kinds". Thus the workers who had fought the putschists were denounced as the real putschists. "Don't be led astray by Bolshevik and Spartacist lies. Stay united and strong. Form a front against Bolshevism which wants to destroy everything".

Under the orders of the SPD, the Reichswehr carried out a real bloodbath. It was the "democratic" army which marched against the working class, long after the "Kappists" had been put to flight!

The weaknesses of revolutionaries are fatal for the whole working class

While the working class was heroically fighting the attacks of the army and was trying to find a direction for its struggles, the revolutionaries were lagging behind the movement. The absence of a strong communist party was one of the decisive reasons for this new reverse for the proletarian revolution in Germany.

As we showed in the article in IRs 88 and 89, the KPD found itself gravely weakened by the exclusion of the opposition at the Heidelberg Congress. In March 1920, the KPD only had a few hundred militants in Berlin, the majority of its members having been excluded. On top of this, the party was traumatised by its weaknesses during the bloody week of January 1919, when it had proved unable to act in a unified way to expose the trap set by the bourgeoisie and to prevent the working class from falling into it.

This is why on the 13 March 1920, the KPD developed a false analysis of the balance of forces between the classes, thinking that it was too soon for a fightback. It was clear that the working class was facing an offensive by the bourgeoisie and could not choose the moment to struggle. But its determination to resist was extremely important. In this situation, the party was perfectly correct to put forward the following orientation:

"Immediate assemblies in all factories to elect workers' councils. Immediate meeting of councils in higher assemblies which must take charge of the direction of the struggles and the next measures to carry out. Immediate meeting of the councils in a Central Congress of councils. Within the workers' councils, the communists fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the Republic of councils" (15th March 1920).

But after the SPD regained control of the reins of government, the KPD Zentrale declared, on 21st March 1920:

"For the ultimate conquest of the proletarian masses to the cause of communism, a state of affairs in which political liberty can be used without any limits and in which bourgeois democracy does not appear as the dictatorship of capital is of the highest importance for things to go in the direction of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The KPD sees the formation of a socialist government that excludes any capitalist bourgeois party as a favourable basis for the action of the proletarian masses and the process of maturation necessary for exerting the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Towards the government it adopts an attitude of loyal opposition as long as it does not threaten the guarantees that ensure the working class its freedom of political action, and as long as it combats the bourgeois counter-revolution by all the means at its disposal and does not prevent the social and organisational strengthening of the working class".

What was the KPD hoping for in promising to be a "loyal opposition" to the SPD? Was this not the same SPD which during the war and at the beginning of the revolutionary wave had done everything it could to mystify the working class, to tie it to the state? Was this not the same SPD which had coldly organised the repression of the workers?

By adopting this attitude the KPD Zentrale left itself wide open to the manoeuvres of the SPD.

When the vanguard of the working class falls into an error of this scale, it is not surprising that the masses' illusions in the SPD should have been reinforced. The catastrophic policy of the "United Front from below" as applied in March 1920 by the KPD Zentrale would unfortunately be taken up straight away by the whole Communist International. The KPD had taken a first tragic step.

For the militants excluded from the KPD, thIS new error by the Centrale was the motive for pushing them to found the KAPD in Berlin shortly afterwards, at the beginning of April 1920.

Once again the working class in Germany had fought heroically against capital. And this despite the fact that the international wave of struggles was well in retreat. But once again it was deprived of decisive action by the party. The errors and hesitations of the revolutionaries in Germany were a very clear demonstration of the grim consequences of a lack of clarity on the part of the political organisation of the proletariat.

The. confrontation provoked by the bourgeoisie through the Kapp putsch ended in a new and grave reverse for the proletariat in Germany. Despite the formidable courage and determination with which the workers hurled themselves into the fray, they once again paid heavily for their persistent illusions.in the SPD and bourgeois democracy. Handicapped politically by the chronic weaknesses of its political organisations, abused by the underhand policies and speeches of Social Democracy, they were. defeated and finally exposed to the bullets not so much of the extreme right but of the very "democratic" Reichswehr under the orders of the SPD government.

But above all this new defeat of the proletariat in Germany was a crucial blow against the worldwide revolutionary wave, leaving Soviet Russia more and more isolated.

DV

The 12th Congress of the ICC, which was held in April 1997, marked a fundamental step in the life of our international organisation. This congress concluded a period of nearly four years of debate on the question of the way the organisation functions, four years of struggle to recover its unity and cohesion. The perspectives adopted by the congress put it thus: "The ICC has completed its convalescence and at this 12th International Congress it is able to give itself the perspective of returning to a balance between all its activities, of assuming all the tasks for which the proletariat has engendered it as part of the proletarian political milieu". (Resolution on activities from the 12th Congress).

The defence of the organisation

Since the end of 1993, while maintaining its regular activities of analysing the international situation and intervening through its press, the priority of the ICC has been the task of defending the organisation against the attacks on its organizational integrity, both from the inside, and the outside via an unprecedented offensive of political parasitism.

This combat, which has nothing to do with a sudden relapse into 'paranoia' by the ICC, contrary to the complacent insinuations of political parasitism, but also of certain groups and elements of the proletarian political milieu, has gone through several phases.

First of all there was a critical examination, done without any concessions, of all aspects of our organisational life that revealed an insufficient grasp of the marxist conception of the revolutionary organisation, and a penetration of behaviour alien to this conception. During this phase the ICC was obliged to uncover the pernicious role of 'clans' within the organisation. A vestige of the conditions in which the ICC was formed and grew up, the phase of circles and small groups, these informal groupings of militants based around friendship and other ties, instead of being subsumed into the organisation as an international, centralised unity, persisted to the point where they represented an insidious, parallel form of functioning within the organisation. In the general framework of an understanding of the necessity for a permanent struggle against the circle spirit and for the party spirit, the 11th International Congress, in 1995, highlighted the devastating role of one clan in particular, which had extended its influence into several territorial sections and the international central organ. After a long internal inquiry, the congress unmasked the main animator of this clan, the individual JJ who had carried out a systematic policy of sabotage, through all kinds of secret manoeuvres, including the formation of a network of 'initiates' into esotericism within the organisation. The delegations and participants at the 11th Congress unanimously pronounced the exclusion of this individual.

The 11th International Congress enabled us to throw light on the internal malfunctioning of the organisation. By systematically discussing all the mechanisms of this malfunctioning, by exposing the different kinds of anti-organisational behaviour, by critically re-examining the history of the ICC, but also by reappropriating the lessons of the history of the workers' movement in organisational matters, the ICC was able to conclude that it had overcome the main danger to its existence and had restored marxist principles on the organisation question.

However it was not yet time to end the debate and the fight on the organisation question. This is why the activities report for the 12th International Congress presented the organisation with a balance sheet of its "convalescence". After the 11th congress, the ICC was the target of a whole series of attacks. On the one hand, the individual JJ, immediately after the 11th Congress, went onto a new offensive, by exerting a considerable amount of pressure on his 'friends' who had remained inside the organisation and on . militants who were still undecided about the validity of the ICC's orientation. On the other hand, and in conjunction with this, "this new offensive was immediately relayed onto the outside through the redoubled attacks on the ICC by parasitism on an international scale" (ibid). The ICC thus faced a second phase of its struggle on the organisation question: it was no longer just a matter of resolving problems of internal functioning, but of "going from the fight for the defence of the organisation internally to defending it on the outside ... by responding to all the aspects of a concerted attack by the bourgeoisie aimed at the ICC and the communist left as a whole" (ibid).

The 12th Congress drew a positive balance-sheet of this phase. Contrary to the rumours and denigrations about the 'crisis' and 'haemorrhaging of militants' going on in the ICC, this policy not only made it possible to consolidate the return to a solid and collective internal functioning, and to integrate new militants on this basis, but was also a considerable factor in tightening the organisation's links with elements looking for revolutionary positions, with our contacts and sympathisers.

It might seem surprising that an international revolutionary organisation which has already been around for 20 years should have been obliged to devote so much time to the defence of the organisation. But this is only astonishing for those who believe that this question is secondary or derives mechanically from programmatic political positions. In reality, the question of organisation is not only a political question in its own right, but is the one that, more than any other, conditions the very existence of the organisation in the accomplishment of all its daily tasks. It demands from revolutionaries a permanent vigilance towards, and combat against, all aspects of the power of the bourgeoisie, whether we are talking about direct repression or indirect ideological pressure. This combat for the defence of the revolutionary organisation against the bourgeoisie has been a constant feature of the history of the workers' movement It was waged by Marx and Engels within the First International against the petty bourgeois influences conveyed by anarchism and against the intrigues of Bakuninism; by Rosa Luxemburg against the influence of the bourgeoisie on German social democracy and against reformism within the IInd International; by Lenin against the circle spirit within the Russian, Social Democratic Labour Party and for a centralised, organised, disciplined party; by the communist left against the degeneration of the Illrd International, in particular the defence of fraction work by the Italian communist left.

This is a combat the ICC itself has waged since it was formed in the 1970s, by fighting for the regroupment of revolutionaries, by defending the concept of a unified and centralised international organisation, against all the anti-organizational conceptions which held sway over the movement which arose out of the resurgence of the class struggle and the rediscovery of revolutionary positions at the time. In the 1980s, the ICC still had to struggle against academic conceptions and the influence of 'councilism'. In the period we are going through today, the whole ideology of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie in decomposition sustains an atmosphere of denigration of the very idea of communism, of revolutionary organisation and of militant commitment Through its incessant ideological campaigns the bourgeoisie continues to proclaim the 'death of communism', and is now even directly attacking the heritage of the communist left by presenting this current as an example of fascist-type 'extremism' or as a constellation of tiny fanatical sects. This is why the defence of the marxist conception of the communist organisation has to be a constant preoccupation of the groups of the communist left.

"The ICC has won a battle. It has won not without hardships, the battle against the danger of the destruction of the organisation from within. However, it has not won the war. Because our war is the class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a fight to the death which can leave no respite to the weak communist vanguard of which the ICC is the main component. In this sense, in drawing out the perspectives (or our activity, while they have to be considered in the light of what the organisation has been able to accomplish in these last two years - and more generally, since its formation - we can only measure the acquisitions of our combat and the real state of our forces in relation to what is at stake in the general struggle of the working class, and within that, in relation to the necessity to construct the world party, indispensable weapon of the revolutionary struggle" (ibid).

The proletarian political milieu

The 12th Congress thus reaffirmed the ICC's insistence that there exists a 'proletarian political milieu'. Contrary to conceptions which exist within this milieu, mainly among the 'Bordigist' heirs of the Italian communist left, the ICC does not consider itself to be the only communist organisation, still less to be 'the party'. But the ICC does defend the absolute necessity for the construction of a world party, which is indispensable to the revolutionary struggle as the most advanced expression of, and most active factor in, the proletariat's coming to consciousness. For the ICC, the long term task of building the party must have as its starting point the organisations of the present histories I period, the organisations which have survived from the left currents of the IIIrd International and the new groups which arise on class positions out of the heat of the proletarian struggle. The formation of the party will not be the spontaneous product of a class movement that will automatically line up with the 'historic party', by recognising its 'invariant programme', as in the Bordigist conception. Neither will it be the result of an unprincipled agglomeration based on mutual concessions and the opportunism of organisations who are ready to make deals about their positions. It will be the result of a conscious activity by revolutionary organisations, carried out today on the basis of the conception that the proletarian political milieu (or what the Internationalist Communist Party - Battaglia Comunista -calls the "internationalist camp") "is an expression of the life of the class, of the process through which it becomes conscious of itself (Resolution on the proletarian political milieu, the swamp and parasitism from the 12th ICC Congress). The 12th Congress thus reaffirmed that the ICC's policy of systematic confrontation with the positions of other organisations of the proletarian milieu must never lose sight of the fact that the aim is not in itself the denunciation of errors but clarification in front of the working class:

"Our ultimate goal is to move towards the political unification of our class and of the revolutionaries, a unification expressed in the construction of the party and the development of consciousness within the class. In this process, political clarification is the essential element and this has always guided the ICC's policy towards the proletarian political milieu. Even when a split in a group of the proletarian milieu becomes inevitable owing to the invasion of bourgeois currents, it is important that such a split is the fruit of a process of clarification, so that it can serve the interests of the working class and not of the bourgeoisie" (ibid).

The 12th Congress also went back over the notion of 'parasitism' which it has deepened ID the past few years. It insisted on the necessity to make a clear demarcation between the proletarian political milieu and this nebula of groups, publications and individuals which, while more or less claiming to be part of the revolutionary milieu, show by their political positions or their activity towards this milieu that their real function is to spread confusion, and in the final analysis to do the bourgeoisie's work against the proletarian political milieu.

"Parasitism is not part of the proletarian political milieu. The notion of parasitism is not an ICC innovation. It belongs to the history of the workers' movement. In no sense does parasitism express the efforts of the class to become conscious. On the contrary it constitutes an attempt to abort these efforts. In this sense its activity completes the work of the bourgeois forces whose role is to sabotage the intervention of revolutionary organisations within the class.

What animates the activity and determines the existence of parasitic groups or individuals is not the defence of the class principles of the proletariat, the clarification of political positions, but, at best, the spirit of the sect, of the 'circle of friends', the assertion of individualism and of individuality towards the proletarian political milieu. In this sense what characterises modern parasitism is not the defence of a programmatic platform but essentially a political attitude towards the revolutionary organisations" (ibid).

In this sense the 12th congress concluded that one of the priorities for our activities is "the defence of the proletarian political milieu (which includes our sympathisers and contacts) against the destructive offensive of the bourgeoisie and the activities of parasitism" (ibid).

The international situation and the perspectives for the class struggle

The 12th congress also spent a long time discussing the international situation - the acceleration of the economic crisis, the aggravation of imperialist tensions and the development of the class struggle. This discussion was particularly important given the development of chaos in all domains today, the result of the decomposition of capitalist society, and given the confusions spread by the bourgeoisie in order to hide the bankruptcy of its system. This confusion has even made it difficult for revolutionary groups to adhere to a marxist analytical framework and to draw out the perspectives for the development of the class struggle.

At the level of the economic crisis, the 12th Congress reaffirmed the necessity to base itself on the fundamental insights of marxism in order to deal with all the mystifying discourse of the bourgeoisie. We cannot limit ourselves to an empirical observation of the 'economic figures' which are being more and more falsified by the 'specialists' in bourgeois economy. We have to situate our examination of the crisis in the framework of the marxist theory of the collapse of capitalism. "Revolutionary marxists cannot predict the precise form or the rhythm of the growing collapse of the capitalist mode of production. but it is their task to proclaim and demonstrate that the system has reached an absolute impasse, to denounce all the lies and myths about the 'light at the end of the tunnel''' (Resolution on the international situation, 12th ICC Congress).

At the level of imperialist tensions, the 12th Congress took up the task of analysing the characteristics of today's chaos, of the freefor-all between the great imperialist powers that is being disguised behind the pretext of 'humanitarian' and 'peacekeeping' interventions, and which is dragging more and more regions of the planet into military barbarism. "... The tendency towards 'every man for himself predominated over the tendency towards the reconstitution of stable alliances that could prefigure future imperialist blocs, and this was to multiply and aggravate military confrontations" (ibid).

Finally, it was the perspectives for the class struggle which was the object of the most important discussion during this congress. The working class today is in a difficult situation, where it is being subjected to the full force of extremely brutal attacks on its living conditions, and this in the context of a situation of ideological disarray which it has not left behind and which the bourgeoisie tries to reinforce through its media campaigns and all sorts of manoeuvres. "For the ruling class, which is fully aware that its growing attacks on the working class. will provoke widescale reactions, it is vital to get in the first blow at a time when combativity is still at an embryonic stage and where the echoes of the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes still weigh very heavily on the workers' consciousness. The aim is to 'wet the powder' and to reinforce to the maximum its arsenal of trade unionist and democratic mystifications" (ibid).

This situation has important implications for the intervention of the organisation. It is important not to deceive ourselves when we consider the situation. The serious obstacles that the bourgeoisie has mounted against the development of the class struggle does not mean that the proletariat is in a state of defeat similar to the one it was in during the 1930s.

"The campaigns of the 30s:

- were situated in a context of a historic defeat for the proletariat, of an undisputed victory for the counter-revolution;

- had as their main object the mobilisation of the proletariat for the coming world war

- had a real trump card at their disposal - the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany - and were thus very real, massive and clearly aimed.

By contrast, today's campaigns:

- are situated in a context in which the proletariat has overcome the counter-revolution, has not been through a massive defeat which has put into question the historic course towards class confrontations;

- have as their main aim that of sabotaging a rising tide of consciousness and combativity within the working class;

- do not have a single target but are obliged to call on disparate and sometimes circumstantial themes (terrorism, the 'fascist danger', paedophile networks, corruption of the legal system, etc) , which tends to limit their impact both in time and place" (ibid).

Neither IS It a question of falling into euphoria, of the kind encouraged in response to the 'strike movement' in France in December 1995. This preventative manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie led quite a few to believe that the road to major working class mobilisations was open and to seriously underestunate the current difficulties of the working class. "Only a significant advance in the consciousness of the working class would enable the latter to push away such mystifications. And this advance could only be the result of a massive development of workers' struggles which put into question, as had begun to be the case in the mid-80s, the most important instruments of the bourgeoisie within the workers' ranks, the trade unions and trade unionism" (ibid).

In this context, the 12th Congress made one of its priorities for the activities of the organisation "intervention in the development of the class struggle ...

The perspective for our intervention will in general not be one of active, direct participation in a situation where the class struggle is on the rise and is clearly escaping the grip of the unions and affirming itself on its own terrain; of agitation aimed at pushing forward the workers' efforts to extend the struggle and take it into their own hands.

In general our intervention in the class struggle, while continuing to put forward the historical perspective of the proletariat (the defence of communism against the campaigns of the bourgeoisie) will have as its main task the patient and obstinate work of explaining and denouncing the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, of the unions and rank and file unionism, against the growing discontent and militancy of the working class. Such an intervention will as often as not have to be undertaken 'against the stream', against the tendency to fall into the traps posed by the divisive and corporatist 'radicalism' of the trade unions" ("Resolution on Activities").

In tracing the perspectives for the years ahead, this congress carried out important work of which this account has only given a brief sketch. Our readers and sympathisers will be able to find a more developed account in International Review 90, while their implications will be developed in future interventions and issues of our press.

ICC

Resolution on the International Situation

1) The widespread lies disseminated when the Stalinist regimes collapsed at the turning point of the 80s and 90s, lies about the "definite failure of marxism", are not new. Exactly one century ago, the left of the Second International, with Rosa Luxemburg at its head, had to fight against the revisionist theses which claimed that Marx was completely wrong when he announced that capitalism was doomed to failure. The decades that followed, with the first world war and then the great depression of the 30s which came after a brief period of reconstruction, gave the bourgeoisie little opportunity to hammer home that message. On the other hand, the two decades of "prosperity" after the second world war allowed a new blossoming of "theories" which "once and for all" buried marxism and its prediction of the collapse of capitalism: such theories were also common in various "radical" milieu. These songs of self-satisfaction went rather quiet with the return of the open crisis at the end of the 1960s, but the slow pace of the latter, punctuated by periods of "recovery" like the one that American and British capitalism have been going through, has enabled the propaganda of the bourgeoisie to hide from the great majority of workers the reality and scope of the impasse facing the capitalist mode of production today. This is why it is so important for revolutionaries, for marxists, to permanently denounce all the bourgeois lies about capitalism's ability to "come out of the crisis", and in particular to expose all the "arguments" used to "demonstrate" this ability.

• In the mid-70s, faced with the obviousness of the crisis, the "experts" began to look into all the possible explanations that would allow the bourgeoisie to reassure itself about the rosy prospects of Its system. Incapable of envisioning its ultimate demise, the ruling class needed, not only to mystify the exploited, but for its own use as well to explain the growing difficulties of the world economy by pointing to circumstantial causes, and so avoid confronting the real causes. One after another the following explanations had their moment of glory:

• the "oil crisis", following the Yom Kippur war of 73 (an explanation which "forgets" that the open crisis went back six years earlier, and that the oil price nses merely accentuated a deterioration which had already expressed itself in the recessions of 67 and 71);

• the excesses of the neo-Keynsian policies carried out since the end of the war, and which have led to to galloping inflation. Conclusion: we need "less state";

• the excesses of "Reaganomics" in the 80s which provoked an unprecedented rise in unemployment in the main countries.

Fundamentally, the bourgeoisie had to cling to the idea that there was a way out, that with proper management the world economy could return to the splendour of the post-war boom. It was simply a question of finding the lost secret of "prosperity".

2) For a long time, the economic performances of Japan and Germany, at a time when other countries were getting stuck in the mud, were supposed to demonstrate capitalism's ability to "overcome its crisis": "if every country was as virtuous as the two main losers of the second world war, everything would be fine" - this was the credo of many of capitalism's appointed apologists. Today, Japan and Germany have become "sick men". Having found it extremely difficult to return to the fabulous growth rates it had enjoyed in the past, Japan has recently been placed alongside Brazil and Mexico in category D in the index of countries most at risk because of the accumulation of debt by the state, by companies and by individuals (amounting to more than two and a half years of national production). As for Germany, it now has the highest rates of unemployment in the European Union and is at present unable to fulfil1 the "Maastricht criteria" indispensable for setting up the "single currency". It has finally become clear that the alleged "virtue" of these countries in the past simply hid the same head-long flight into debt which has characterised capitalism for decades. In reality, the present difficulties of the two countries which were "top of the form" in the 70s and 80s are an illustration of the impossibility of capitalism continuing indefinitely this cheating of Its own laws, which was the main basis for the reconstruction after the second world war and which has allowed it up till now to avoid a collapse similar to that of the 1930s: in short, the systematic resort to credit.

3) At the time she was denouncing the revisionists' "theories", Rosa Luxemburg was already obliged to demolish their idea that credit would allow capitalism to overcome its crises. While credit was undoubtedly a stimulant to the development of this system, from the point of view both of the circulation and the concentration of capital, it was never able to substitute itself for a real market as the soil for capitalist expansion. Borrowing for the future makes it possible to accelerate the production and sale of commodities but sooner or later it has to be repaid. And this repayment is only possible if exchange takes place on the market - something which does not flow automatically from production, as Marx systematically demonstrated against the bourgeois economists. At the end of the day, far from enabling capitalism to overcome its crises, credit merely extends their force and graviity, as Rosa Luxemburg showed by applying marxism. Today the theses of the marxist left against revisionism at the end of the last century remain fundamentally valid. No more than before can credit enlarge solvent markets. However, faced with the definitive saturation of the latter (whereas last century there was still the possibility of conquering new markets), credit has become the indispensable condition for absorbing commodities, substituting itself for the real market.

4) This reality was already illustrated in the aftermath of the second world war when the Marshall Plan, apart from its strategic function in the constitution of the American bloc, allowed the USA to create an outlet for its industries. The resulting reconstruction of the European and Japanese economies had by the 1960s made the latter rivals of the American economy, signaling the return of the open crisis of world capitalism. Since then, it has been mainly through the use of credit, of growing debt, that the world economy has managed to avoid a brutal depression like the one m the 30s. In this way the recession of 1974 was put off until the beginning of the 80s thanks to the enormous debts run up by the third world, leading to the debt cnsis of the early 80s which coincided with a new recession even more serious than the one in 74. This new world recession was in turn only overcome by the dizzying trade deficit of the USA whose mounting external debt vied with that of the third world. Parallel to this, the budget deficits of the advanced countries exploded, stimulating demand but plunging states into veritable bankruptcy (these state debts represented between 50 and 130% according to the country). Furthermore it is for this reason that open recession, which is expressed by negative. growth rates for the country's production, IS by no means the only indicator of the gravity of the crisis. In nearly all countries the annual budget deficit of the state (not counting that of local administrations) is higher than the growth of production. This means that if the budget was balanced (which would be the only way to stabilise the accumulated state debts) all these countries would be in open recession. The largest part of these debts will obviously never get repaid, and have thus been accompanied by periodic and increasingly serious financial crashes, veritable earthquakes for the world economy (1980, 1987), which are more than ever on the agenda today.

5) When we recall these facts it makes it possible to put paid to the speeches about the current "health" of the British and American economies which are contrasted with the poor performance of their competitors. In the first place, we have to insist on the relative nature of these "successes". Thus, the very notable fall in the rate of unemployment in the UK owes a great deal, according to none other than the Bank of England itself, to the statistical suppression of those unemployed who have given up looking for a job (the way of calculating the unemployment figures has changed 33 times since 1979). Having said this, these successes are to a large extent based on an improvement in the competivity of these economies on the international arena, which in turn is largely based on the weakness of their currencies: keeping the pound Stirling out of the European Monetary Snake has up till now proved to be a good move. In other words, this "success" is based on the deterioration of competing economies. This is a fact that has been partly hidden by the worldwide synchronisation of periods of recession and of "recovery" which we have experienced up till now: the relative improvement of the economy of one country does not take place thanks to the improvement of its "partners" but basically through their deterioration, since "partners" are essentially competitors. With the disappearance of the American bloc resulting from the collapse of its Russian rival at the end of the 80s, the previous coordination (eg through the G7) of their economic policies - a by no means negligible factor in slowing down the crisis - has given way to an increasingly frantic "every man for himself'. In such a situation, the world's leading power has the privilege of being able to impose its diktats in the sphere of commerce to the benefit of its own national economy. This to a considerable extent is what explains the current "success" of American capital.

This said, not only does the current performance of the Anglo-Saxon economies not point to a possible improvement for the world economy as a whole, it itself is not going to last very long. As tributaries of the world market, which cannot overcome its total saturation, these economies will inevitably come up against this saturation. Above all, no country has been able to resolve the problem of generalised debt (even if the budget deficits of the USA have been slightly reduced in the last period). The best proof of this is the fear haunting the principal economic authorities (such as the president of the US Federal Bank) that the present "growth" will lead to an "overheating" of the economy and a return of inflation. In reality, behind this fear of overheating is the recognition that today's "growth" is based on exorbitant debts which will inevitably resuit in a catastrophic swing of the pendulum. The extremely fragile basis of the current success of the American economy has been demonstrated once again by the panic on Wall Street and other stock exchanges when the Fed announced, at the end of March 97, a minimal increase in interest rates.

6) Among the lies which have been spread far and wide by the ruling class to buttress belief in the viability of its system, a special place has been given to the example of the South East Asian countries, the "dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and the "tigers" (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia) whose current growth rates (sometimes in double figures) are the envy of the western bourgeoisies. These examples are supposed to demonstrate that capitalism today can both develop the backward countries and escape the fall or stagnation of growth. In reality, the "economic miracle" of the majority of these countries (particularly South Korea and Taiwan) is by no means fortuitous: it is the consequence of the equivalent of the Marshall Plan set up during the cold war by the USA in order to contain the advance of the Russian bloc in the region (massive injection of capital amounting to as much as 15% of GNP, directly taking charge of the national economy, notably by relying on the military apparatus to make up for the quasi-absence of a national bourgeoisie and to overcome the resistance of financial sectors, etc). As such, these examples can in no way be generalised across the whole third world, the greater part of which continues to slide into a nameless catastrophe. Furthermore, the debts of most of these countries, both external and at state level, has reached considerable levels, which subjects them to the same dangers as all the other countries. Finally, while the very low cost of labour power in these countries has been highly attractive to many western enterprises, the fact that they are now becoming commercial rivals to the advanced countries exposes them to the risk that the latter will put up barriers to their exports. Though they have up till now represented an exception, like their big Japanese neighbour, these countries cannot indefinitely escape the contradictions of the world economy which have transformed other "success stories" into a nightmare, as in the case of Mexico. It is for all these reasons that, alongside the eulogies about these countries, the international experts and the financial institutions are already taking measures to limit the financial risks they represent. And the measures aimed at making the work force more "flexible", which were at the origin of the recent strikes in Korea, show that the native bourgeoisie is itself conscious that the best of the meal has already been eaten. As The Guardian wrote on 16.10.96: "The question has been which Asian tiger would be the first to fall".

7) The case of China, which some portray as the world power of the next century, is also no exception to the rule. The bourgeoisie of this country has up till now made a successful transition towards the classic forms of capitalism, unlike those of eastern Europe which with a few exceptions are in a total mess, utterly refuting all the blather about the "great prospects" for these countries following the downfall of Stalinism. This said, the country remains considerably underdeveloped, with the greater part of the economy, as in all Stalinist regimes, being smothered under the weight of the bureaucracy and military expenditure. On the authorities' own admission, the public sector is overall in deficit and hundreds of thousands of workers are owed months of wages. And even if the private sector is more dynamic, it cannot overcome the weight of the state sector and in any case remains particularly dependent on the fluctuations of the world market. Finally, the "formidable dynamism" of the Chinese economy cannot hide the fact that, even if it were to maintain its current growth rates, it envisages having 250 million unemployed by the end of the century.

8) Whichever way you look at it, so long as you can resist the siren-songs of the apologists for the capitalist mode of production and rely on the teachings of marxism, the perspective for the world economy can only be one of increasing catastrophe. The so-called "success" of certain economies at the moment (the Anglo-Saxon and South East Asian countries) in no way represents the future for capitalism as a whole. It is no more than an optical illusion which cannot hide the catastrophe for very long. By the same token, all the talk of "globalisation", which is supposed to open up an era of free, expanding trade, is just a cover for the unprecedented intensification of the trade war. In this context, conglomerations of countries like the European Union represent no more than a fortress against competition from other countries. Thus the world economy, balancing precariously on a mountain of debts which will never be repaid, will more and more be subjected to the convulsions of "every man for himself” which has always characterised capitalism but which in the period of decomposition has assumed a new quality. Revolutionary marxists cannot predict the precise forms or the rhythm of the growing collapse of the capitalist mode of production. But it is their task to proclaim and demonstrate that the system has reached an absolute impasse, to denounce all the lies and myths about the "light at the end of the tunnel".

9) Even more than in the economic sphere, the chaos that characterises the period of decomposition exerts its effects on the political relations between states. At the time when the eastern bloc collapsed, ending the system of alliances that emerged from the second world war, the ICC pointed out:

• that, even if this was not realisable in the immediate, this situation put on the agenda the formation of new blocs, one led by the USA, the other by Germany;

• that, in the immediate, it would unleash all the conflicts which the "Yalta order" had kept in a framework "acceptable" to the world's two gendarmes.

Initially, the tendency towards the constitution of a new bloc around Germany, which was in the dynamic of reunification, took some significant steps forward. But very soon the tendency towards "every man for himself” predominated over the tendency towards the reconstitution of stable alliances that could prefigure future imperialist blocs, and this was to multiply and aggravate military confrontations. The most significant example of this was Yugoslavia, whose break-up was facilitated by the antagonistic imperialist interests of the big European states, Germany, Britain and France. The conflict in Yugoslavia created a gulf between the two great allies of the European Community, Germany and France and resulted in a spectacular rapprochement between France and Britain and the end of the alliance between Britain and the US, which had been the most solid and durable of the 20th century. Since then, this tendency towards "every man for himself", towards chaos in the relations between states, with its succession of circumstantial and ephemeral alliances, has not been called into question. Quite the contrary.

10) Thus, in the recent period we have seen a number of changes in the alliances formed previously:

• significant loosening of ties between France and Britain, illustrated in particular by the latter's refusal to support France's demands, such as the reelection of Boutros-Ghali to the head of the UN or the appointment of a European to the command of the southern branch of NATO forces in Europe;

• a new rapprochement of the links between France and Germany, concretised in particular by the latter's support for these same demands by France;

• shelving of the conflicts between the US and Britain, which among other things was expressed in Britain's support for Uncle Sam on the same questions.

In fact. one of the characteristics of this evolution of alliances is linked to the fact that only the US and Germany have, and can have, a coherent long term policy: the first, one of preserving its leadership, the second, one of developing its own leadership in a part of the world. The other powers are obliged to follow a more circumstantial policy aimed largely at countering the policies of the first two. In particular, since the end of the division of the world into two blocs, the USA has been faced with a permanent challenge to its authority by its former allies.

11) The most spectacular expression of this crisis of authority for the world's gendarme has been the break in its historic alliance with Britain, on the latter's initiative, from 94 onwards. It was also concretised by the long-standing powerlessness of the USA on one of the major terrains of imperialist confrontation, ex- Yugoslavia, which lasted until .the summer of 95. More recently, in September 96, it was expressed by the almost unanimously hostile reaction towards the US cruise missile attack on Iraq, whereas the US had succeeded in obtaining the support of the same countries for Operation Desert Storm. Among other examples of this contesting of American leadership we can mention:

• the general protest against the Helms Burton Law which reinforces the embargo against Cuba, whose "great leader" was then received by the Vatican with pomp and ceremony, and for the first time ever;

• more generally, the loss of a monopoly of control over the situation in the Middle East, a crucial zone if ever there was one. This has been illustrated in particular by the return in force of France, which imposed itself as the joint supervisor in settling the conflict between Israel and Lebanon at the end of 95, and which has confirmed its success in the region with the warm welcome Saudi Arabia gave Chirac;

• the recent invitation to several European leaders (including, once again, Chirac, who launched an appeal for independence from the USA) by a number of South American states, which confirms that the US no longer has undisputed control of this region.

12) This said, the recent period has been marked, as noted a year ago by the 12th congress ofthe ICC's section in France, by a massive counter-offensive from the US. This counter-offensive has been concretised in particular by America's return in force in ex-Yugoslavia in the summer of 95 under the cover of IFOR, which took the place of UNPROFOR, the latter having for several years been the instrument for the intervention of the French-British tandem. The best proof of America's success was the signing of the Dayton accord in the US, the "peace treaty" over Bosnia. Since then, the new advance of US power has made further gains. In particular, it has managed to inflict on the country which has defied it most openly, France, a very serious reverse in its own "hunting ground" of Africa. After eliminating French influence in Rwanda, it is now France's main bastion on the continent, Zaire, which is about to slip out of its hands with the collapse of the Mobutu regime under the blows of the Kabila "rebellion" which has received massive support from Rwanda and Uganda, ie the US. This is a particularly severe punishment for France (aimed at crowning other set-backs the USA has inflicted on issues like the succession to Boutros-Ghali and the command of NATO's southern flank), and it is intended to serve as an example for all other countries tempted to imitate the latter's stance of permanent defiance.

13) It is to a large extent because it understands the risk it was running by following in the footsteps of the adventurist policies of France (which regularly pursues objectives that are beyond its real capacities), that the British bourgeoisie has recently taken a certain distance from its French consort. This rift has been greatly facilitated by the action of the USA and Germany both of whom can only look askance at the alliance contracted between Britain and France over the Yugoslav question. Thus the American bombing of Iraq in September 96 had the immense advantage of driving a wedge between French and British diplomacy, with the first supporting Saddam Hussein as best it could, and the second counting, like the US, on the downfall of his regime. Similarly, Germany has not missed any chance to undermine Angle-French solidarity by playing on points of disagreement between them, in particular that of the European Union and the single currency (there were three Franco-German summits on this question in December 96). It is thus in this framework that we can understand the new evolution of alliances in the recent period. In fact, the attitude of Germany and the US confirms what we said at the last ICC congress: "In such a situation of instability, it is easier for each power to create difficulties for its rivals, to sabotage alliances which run counter to its interests, than to develop its own solid alliances and ensure a stable control of its own spheres" (Resolution on the international situation, point 11). However, it is necessary to show that there are important differences both in the methods used and the results obtained by these two powers.

14) The result of Germany's international policy is very far from being limited to detaching France from Britain and getting it to renew its previous alliance, though these efforts have been concretised in the recent period by important military agreements, both on the ground, through the formation of a joint corps in Bosnia, and through the signing of military cooperation agreements (accord of9 December for a "common concept in the area of security and defence"). In reality we are seeing at the present time a significant advance of German imperialism, which can be seen notably through:

• the fact that within the new alliance between France and Germany, the latter finds itself in a much more favourable rapport de force than in the 1990-1994 period (France having to a large extent been forced to go back to its old love affair owing to Britain's infidelity).

• an extension of its traditional sphere of influence in eastern Europe, in particular through the development of an alliance with Poland;

• the strengthening of its influence in Turkey (whose new government led by the Islamist Erkaban is more favourable to the German alliance than the previous one), which provides a bridge into the Caucasus (where it supports the nationalist movements pitted against Russia) and into Iran, with whom Turkey has signed important agreements;

• the deployment for the first time since the second world war of combat units outside its frontiers, and this in a zone as critical as the Balkans, with the expeditionary corps in Bosnia in the framework of IFOR (which has allowed its minister of defence to declare that "Germany will play an important role in the new society”).

15) At the same time, in company with France, Germany is exerting a lot of diplomatic pressure in Russia, whose main creditor is Germany and which has not drawn any decisive advantages from its alliance with the US.

Thus Germany is clearly establishing itself as the main imperialist rival of the US. However, it must be noted that up till now it has succeeded in advancing its pawns without exposing itself to reprisals from the American mammoth, in particular by systematically avoiding defying it openly in the manner of France. The policy of the German eagle (which for the moment has managed to keep its talons hidden) is showing itself to be much more effective than that of the French cock. This is the consequence both of the limitations still imposed on it by its status as a defeated power in the second world war (even though its present policies are obviously aimed at leaving this status behind) and of its confidence as the only power which has the possibility of eventually heading a new imperialist bloc. This is also a result of the fact that up till now Germany has been able to advance its positions without the direct use of military force (even if it provided significant military aid to its Croat ally in the war against Serbia). But the historic first represented by the presence of its expeditionary corps in Bosnia has not only broken a taboo but also indicates the direction in which it will go more and more in order to maintain and develop its positions. Thus, in the longer term, Germany will be making its contribution to the bloody conflicts and massacres ravaging the world today not only by delegation (as was the case with Croatia, and to a lesser extent in the Caucasus) but in a much more direct manner.

16) As regards the international policy of the USA, the widespread use of armed force has not only been one of its methods for a long time, but is now the main instrument in the defence of its imperialist interests, as the ICC has shown since 1990, even before the Gulf war. The USA is faced with a world dominated by "every man for himself”, where its former vassals are trying to withdraw as much as possible from the tight grip of the world cop, which they had to put up with as long as the threat from the rival bloc existed. In this situation, the only decisive way the US can impose its authority is to resort to the area in which they have a crushing superiority over all other states: military force. But in doing so, the US is caught in a contradiction:

• on the one hand, if it gives up using or extending the use of its military superiority, this will only encourage the countries contesting its authority to contest even more;

• on the other hand, when it does use brute force, even, and especially when this momentarily obliges its opponents to rein in their ambitions towards independence, this only pushes the latter to seize on the least occasion to get their revenge and squirm away from America's grasp.

The assertion of its military superiority by a superpower works in a very different way depending on whether the world is divided into blocs, as before 1989, or whether there are no blocs. In the first place, the assertion of this superiority tends to reinforce the vassals' confidence in their leader, in its ability to defend them, and is thus an element of cohesion around the leader. In the second case, the display of force by the only remaining superpower has the opposite ultimate result of aggravating "every man for himself' even more as long as there is no other power that can compete with it at the same level. This is why the success of the present US counter-offensive cannot be considered to be definitive, to have overcome its crisis of leadership. Brute force, manoeuvres aimed at destabilising its rivals (as in Zaire today), with their procession of tragic consequences, will thus continue to be used by this power, serving to accentuate the bloody chaos into which capitalism is sinking.

17) This chaos has still relatively spared the Far East and South East Asia. But it is important to stress the accumulation of explosive material in this part of the world:

the intensified efforts to arm themselves by the two main powers, China and Japan;

• the latter's intention to break out of the American control inherited from the second world war;

• the more openly "contestationist" policy of China (the latter somewhat playing the role that France plays in the west, whereas Japan's diplomacy is much more similar to that of Germany's);

• the threat of political destabilisation, particularly after the death of Deng; the existence of a multitude of "disputes" between states (Taiwan and China the two Koreas, China and Vietnam, India and Pakistan, etc).

Just as it cannot escape the economic crisis, there is no way that this region can escape the imperialist convulsions that assail the world today accentuating the world-wide chaos into which capitalist society is plunging.

18) This generalised chaos, with its train of bloody conflicts, massacres famines, and more generally, the decomposition which invades all areas of society and which in the long run threatens to destroy it, is the result of the total impasse which capitalist society has reached. But at the same time, this impasse, with the permanent and increasingly brutal attacks that it provokes against the class that produces the essentials of social wealth, obliges the latter to react and thus raises the perspective of a revolutionary upsurge. Since the end of the 1960s, the world proletariat has proved that it has not been willing to submit passively to the attacks of capital, and the struggles it has waged since the first effects of the crisis have shown that it has emerged from the terrible counter-revolution which descended on it after the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. However, it has not developed its struggles in a continuous manner, but in an uneven way, with advances and retreats. Between 1968 and 1989, the class struggle went through three successive waves of combats (1968-74, 1978-81, 1983-89), in the course of which the working masses, despite defeats, hesitations, regressions, acquired a growing experience which led them in particular to more and more reject the trade union prison. However, this progressive advance of the working class towards becoming aware of the means and goals of its combat was brutally interrupted at the end of the 80s:

"This struggle, which revived with great power at the end of the 1960s, putting an end to the most terrible counter-revolution the working class has ever known, went into a major retreat with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the ideological campaigns which accompanied them, and all the events which followed (Gulf war, war in Yugoslavia). The working class suffered this reflux at the level both of its combativity and its consciousness, without this putting the historic course towards class confrontations into question, as the ICC already affirmed at the time" (Resolution on the international situation, XIth Congress of the ICC).

19) From autumn 1992, with the big workers' mobilisations in Italy, the proletariat has been back on the path of struggle. But this is a path sown with obstacles and difficulties. At the time of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the autumn of 89, when it announced that this event would result in a reflux in consciousness, the ICC made it clear that "reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on struggles in the period ahead, greatly favouring the action of the trade unions" (Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the eastern countries, IR 60). And indeed in the past period we have seen the unions make a powerful comeback, the result of a very elaborate strategy on the part of the whole bourgeoisie. The first aim of this strategy has been to take advantage of the disarray provoked in the class by the events of 89-91, in order to restore as much credit as possible to the union machines, whose image had taken such a battering in the 80s. The clearest illustration of this political offensive by the bourgeoisie was the maneouvre carried out by the different sectors of the bourgeoisie in the autumn of 95 in France. Thanks to a skillful division of labour between the right in power, which launched a whole avalanche of provocative attacks on workers' living conditions, and the trade unions, who presented themselves as the best defenders of the working class, putting forward proletarian methods of struggle such as extension across sectors and the running of the movement by general assemblies, the entire bourgeois class restored to the unions a degree of popularity they had not enjoyed for over a decade. The premeditated, systematic, and international character of this manoeuvre was revealed by the huge publicity given to the strikes at the end of 95 in all countries, whereas most of the movements in the 80s had been subject to an almost total black-out. It was further confirmed by the manoeuvre developed in Belgium during the same period, which was virtually a copy of the first one. Similarly, the reference to the strikes in France in the autumn of 95 was widely used during the manoeuvre set up in Germany in the spring of 96, which culminated with the immense march on Bonn on June 10. The latter manoeuvre was aimed at providing the unions, who were seen mainly as specialists in negotiations and deals with the bosses, with a much more militant image, so that in the future they would be better placed to control the social struggles which could not fail to arise in response to an unprecedented intensification of economic attacks on the working class. Thus the analysis that the ICC put forward at its 11th Congress was clearly confirmed: “...the present manoeuvres of the unions have also, and above all, a preventative aim: that of strengthening their hold on the workers before the latter display much more militancy, which will necessarily result from their growing anger faced with the increasingly brutal attacks demanded by the crisis" (Resolution on the international situation, point 17). And the result of these manoeuvres, which have supplemented the disarray provoked by the events of 89-91, enabled us to say at the 12th Congress of our section in France: "... in the main capitalist countries, the working class has been brought back to a situation which is comparable to that of the 1970s as far as its relation to unions and unionism is concerned: a situation where the class, in general, struggled within the unions, followed their instructions and their slogans, and in the final analysis, left things up to them. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has temporarily succeeded in wiping out from working class consciousness the lessons learned during the 80s, following the repeated experience of confrontation with the unions" (Resolution on the international situation, point 12, lR 86).

20)The political offensive of the bourgeoisie against the working class is very far from being restricted to restoring credibility to the union machinery. The ruling class uses the different manifestations of the decomposition of society (the rise of xenophobia, conflicts between bourgeois cliques, etc) in order to turn them back against the working class. We have thus seen in several European countries the use of campaigns aimed at diverting the workers or even derailing their anger and discontent onto a terrain completely alien to the proletariat:

• the use made of the xenophobic feelings exploited by the extreme right (Le Pen in France, Heider in Austria) in order to mount campaigns about the 'danger of fascism';

• in Spain, campaigns against ETA terrorism in which workers are asked to solidarise with their bosses;

• the use of in-fighting between the police and judicial apparatuses in order to mount campaigns in favour of a 'clean' state and judiciary in countries like Italy ('clean hands' operation) and particularly in Belgium (the Dutroux affair).

• The latter country has in the past period served as a kind of laboratory for a whole gamut of mystifications against the working class. This could be seen in a series of steps;

• the carbon-copy of the manoeuvre by the French bourgeoisie in the autumn of 95;

• then, the development of a manoeuvre very similar to that of the German bourgeoisie in spring 96;

• from the summer of 96, the stageing of the Dutroux affair which was opportunely 'discovered' at a very good moment (even though all the elements were already known to the judiciary long before this), in order to create, with the help of an unprecedented media barrage, a veritable psychosis among working class families, at a time when economic attacks were raining down on them: at the same time, this strategem helped to divert the workers' anger onto the interclassist terrain of fighting for a judiciary 'at the people's service', especially at the time of the 'White March' of20 October;

• via the 'Multicoloured March' of 2 February organised on the occasion of the closure of the Clabecq foundry, a new boost was given to the interclassist mystification of a 'popular justice', of an 'economy in the service of the citizens', a mystification reinforced by the promotion of a 'fighting', 'rank and file' unionism around the very media-friendly figure of D'Orazio;

• finally, a new layer of democratic lies following the announcement at the beginning of March of the closure of Renault at Vilvorde (a closure which had been condemned by the courts), pitting a 'social Europe' against the 'Europe of the capitalists'.

The immense international media coverage of all these manoeuvres once again proves that they were not just for domestic
consumption but were part of a concerted plan by the bourgeoisie in all countries. For the ruling class, which is fully aware that its growing attacks on the working class will provoke widescale reactions, it is vital to get in the first blow at a time when combativity is still at an embryonic stage and where the echoes of the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes still weigh very heavy on the workers' consciousness. The aim is to 'wet the powder' and to reinforce to the maximum its arsenal of trade unionist and democratic mystifications.

21) The undeniable disarray in which the working class presently finds itself has given the bourgeoisie a certain margin of manoeuvre as regards its internal political strategems. As the ICC already noted at the beginning of 1990: "This is why, in particular, we have to update the lCC's analysis of the 'left in opposition '. This was a necessary card for the bourgeoisie at the end of 70s and throughout the 80s due to the class' general dynamic towards increasingly determined and conscious combats, and its growing rejection of democratic, electoral, and trade union mystifications. The difficulties some countries encountered in setting it up (in France for example) in no way alter the fact that this was the lynchpin of the bourgeoisie's strategy against the working class, illustrated by the right-wing governments in the USA, Germany, and Britain. By contrast, the class' present reflux means that for a while this strategy will no longer be a priority for the bourgeoisie. This does not necessarily mean that these countries will see the left return to government: as we have said on several occasions ... this is only absolutely necessary in periods of war or revolution. By contrast, we should not be surprised if it does happen, nor should we put it down to 'accident' or to a 'specific weakness' of the bourgeoisie in these countries' (IR 61). This is why the Italian bourgeoisie was able, largely due to reasons of international policy, to call on a centre-left team in spring 96, one dominated by the old Communist Party (the PSD) and for quite some time supported on the extreme left by 'Rifondazione Comunista'. For the same reason, the probable victory of the British Labour Party in May 97 should not be seen as a source of difficulties for the bourgeoisie in this country (which in any case has taken care to put an end to the organic link between the party and the union apparatus so that the latter can oppose a Labour government if necessary). Having said this, it is important to underline the fact that the ruling class is not going to return to the themes of the 70s when the 'left alternative' with its programme of 'social' measures, even of nationalisations, was put forward in order to break the elan of the wave of struggles which had begun in 1968, by derailing discontent and militancy onto the election dead-end. If left parties (whose economic prgramme in any case is increasingly hard to distinguish from that of the right) get into government, this will essentially be 'by default', the result of difficulties experienced by the right, and not as a way of
mobilising the workers, whose illusions in the 'health of capitalism', which they might have had in the 70s, have been undermined by the crisis.

In this context, it is also necessary to mark the very sharp difference between the ideological campaigns being used today, and those used against the working class in the 1930s. There is a point shared by these two kinds of campaigns: they are all based around the theme of the 'defence of democracy'. However, the campaigns of the 30s:

• were situated in a context of a historic defeat for the proletariat, of an undisputed victory for the counter-revolution;

• had as their main object the mobilisation of the proletariat for the coming world war;

• had a real trump card at their disposal, the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany, and were thus very real, massive and clearly aimed.

By contrast, today's campaigns:

• are situated in a context in which the proletariat has overcome the counter-revolution, has not been through a massive defeat which has put into question the historic course towards class confrontations;

• have as their main aim that of sabotaging a rising tide of consciousness and combativity within the working class;

• do not have a single target but are obliged to call on disparate and sometimes circumstantial themes (terrorism, the 'fascist danger', paedophile networks, corruption of the legal system, etc), which tends to limit their impact both in time and place.

It is for these reasons that while the campaigns at the end of the 30s succeeded in mobilising the working masses behind them in a permanent way, those of today:

• either succeed in mobilising workers on a massive scale (the case of the 'White March' in Bruxelles on 20 October), but only for a limited period (this is why the Belgian bourgeoisie resorted to other manoeuvres afterwards);

• or, if they are deployed in a permanent way (the case of the anti-Front National campaigns in France), they don't manage to mobilise the workers and serve mainly as a diversion.

This said, it is important not to underestimate the danger of these kinds of campaigns to the extent that the effects of the general and growing decomposition of bourgeois society permanently provide the ruling class with new themes. Only a significant advance in the consciousness of the working class would enable the latter to push away such mystifications. And this advance could only be the result of a massive development of workers' struggles which put into question, as had begun to be the case in the mid-80s, the most important instruments of the bourgeoisie within the workers' ranks: the trade unions and trade unionism.

22) This questioning of the unions, which will be accompanied by the tendency for workers to take direct control of their struggles and of their extension through general assemblies and elected and revocable strike committees, will necessarily come about through a whole process of confrontation with the sabotage of the unions. This is a process that will inevitably develop in the future because of the growth of workers' militancy in response to the increasingly brutal attacks unleashed by capitalism. Already, the tendency for this militancy to develop means that the bourgeoisie, for fear of being outflanked, cannot launch huge manoeuvres 'a la francaise' of 95-96 aimed at restoring union credibility on a massive scale. However, the latter have still not really been unmasked even if, during the last period, they have started to make more frequent use of their 'classic' methods of action such as the division between public and private sectors (as in the demonstrations on 11 December 96 in Spain), or the advocacy of corporatism. The most spectacular example of the latter tactic was the strike launched on the announcement of the closure of the Renault factory at Vilvorder, where we saw the unions of the different countries where this company's factories are located promoting a 'Eurostrike' of Renault workers. But the fact that this rotten manoeuvre by the unions was not seen through, and even allowed the unions to increase their prestige somewhat, while at the same time propagating the mystification of a 'social Europe', proves that we are today in a kind of transition period between the one in which the unions were regaining their credibility, and one in which they will be exposed and discredited more and more. One of the characteristics of this period is the revival of the themes of 'fighting' trade unionism, in which the 'rank and file' are supposed to be able to push the union leaderships to be more radical (example of the Clabecq foundry, or the miners last March in Germany), or where there is supposed to be a 'union base' which can 'really' defend the workers' interests despite the 'sell-out of the leaders' (a notable example being the dockers' strike in the UK).

23)Thus, the working class still has a long way to go on the road towards its emancipation, a road that the bourgeoisie will try systematically to lay with all sorts of traps, as we have already seen in the last period. The breadth of the manoeuvres set up by the bourgeoisie shows just how conscious it is of the dangers posed to it by the present situation of world capitalism. Engels once wrote that the working class wages its struggle on three levels - economic, political, and ideological. The present strategy of the bourgeoisie; which is also aimed against revolutionary organisations (the campaigns on the so-called 'revisionism' of the communist left) is proof that it also is quite aware of this. It is up to revolutionaries not only to identify and denounce all the traps laid by the ruling class and its organs, notably the trade unions, but also, against all the falsifications which have been bred in the past period, to point out the real perspective of the communist revolution as the ultimate goal of the present combats of the proletariat. It is only if its communist minority fully assumes its role that the working class will be able to develop the strength and the consciousness to attain this goal. 

Some of our readers may have come across a text which has been circulating for a few weeks entitled "Prise de position sur l'evolution recente du CCI”. This text, by Raoul Victor (RV), a long-standing militant who broke with the ICC just over a year ago, is a charge-sheet against our organisation. It is prompted by the following considerations: "(...) it is impossible to remain silent in the face of the ICC's extremely serious accusations against one of its long-standing militants, and of the dangerous degeneration of one of the main organisations of the proletarian political milieu".

Given the gravity of such accusations, whose lengthy "proof” is full of lies and distortions while at the same time pretending to give a coherent theoretical and political explanation for the ICC's "degeneration", we have decided to publish this text in full, with our reply, in the form of a pamphlet. We therefore refer our readers to this pamphlet for a detailed response to what we consider a veritable declaration of war on the ICC. It is all the more important that we respond in detail and at length to such a "manifesto", inasmuch as its accusations have an appearance of legitimacy, coming as they do from an experienced militant who claims to explain what has led him to "take his distance from an organisation to whose construction he has devoted more than 30 years of his life". RV is obviously trying to lend some credibility to his thesis of the ICC's "degeneration" by suggesting that there is an analogy between Stalinism and the "persecution" that he has suffered in the organisation. In this brief notice, we simply want to make a few remarks on this text, which is a striking contribution to the present campaign by groups and elements of the parasitic milieu to denounce the ICC1, and more generally to an offensive aimed at discrediting the proletarian political milieu and distorting the heritage of the internationalist Left Communist current2.

As RV says himself, when he "broke with the ICC”, he put forward "ONE essential reason": the fact that during the period preceding this "break", the organisation considered that his positions in the debate within the organisation were dictated by an attitude that made him the "spokesman" for JJ3. On reading his text, we would say the same - in spades. JJ has, with good reason, carefully avoided trying to defend himself against the ICC's supposedly slanderous and false accusations against him, he has succeeded in delegating his ''friends'', RV foremost amongst them, to "shed light" on the "affair", and to denounce the ICC in public. JJ could have no better advocate than RV, a "founding member" of the ICC, a comrade whose reputation for honesty, probity, and militant commitment has spread far beyond the ICC. Having taken him under his influence for years, JJ knew full well that RV would move heaven and earth to formulate the "theoretical and political" reasons to whitewash him. Whether he likes it or not, our ex-comrade RV has proven with his text that he has become JJ's "parrot". His text is essentially an unconditional defence of JJ. RV serves up the "arguments" of JJ and those close to him on the justification for his anti-organisational behaviour, his passion and proselytising for esotericism, the supposed "abandonment by the ICC of one of its fundamental conceptions in favour of a "Lenintst" conception better adapted to the spirit of the sect".

To justify JJ's efforts to spread esoteric ideas, for example, RV adopts the "argument" of JJ (who has always refused to take position clearly on the incompatibility between marxism and any esoteric theory), that "marxism claims neither to have explained everything, nor to exclude all other forms of knowledge". He maintains a complete silence on the mysticism implied by such enthusiasm, which is completely foreign to marxism, not to mention the total condemnation of such "theories" by the workers' movement, especially the left, throughout its history. And once RV has brushed aside the antagonism between marxism and esoteric theory, he can reduce to mere "maladroitness" JJ's half-hidden proselytism within the organisation. He concludes that this is nothing but a "paranoid fable of the ICC”. We should nonetheless remember that during the ICC's 11th Congress, RV voted for the resolution excluding JJ, on the grounds that this element's behaviour had been "unworthy of a communist militant". RV today, under the pressure of JJ, is a turncoat who offers his approval to the behaviour that he himself condemned yesterday.

To defend JJ against the "ICC's very serious attacks against one of its long-standing militants", RV abruptly reveals, in introducing his text, the ICC's hypothesis that JJ may have been a state agent infiltrated into the organisation. We have published this hypothesis neither in the notice in our press on JJ's exclusion, nor in our external interventions on the question. Still less have we made any mention of the concrete facts which led us to such a grave hypothesis. For two years, we have urged JJ to appeal to a jury of honour made up from organisations of the proletarian political milieu, so that they could judge his case and pronounce on the accusations levelled against him; JJ himself has done his utmost to prevent any possibility that such a jury of honour might take place4 We have given our dossier on the JJ case to organisations and to certain individuals within the milieu, asking them for their opinion as to how the ICC had conducted its enquiry, and on some of its conclusions. We have offered to show the dossier to JJ himself - a proposal to which he has made no reply. RV gives not a jot for such precautions. He simply spreads out to public view the most serious aspect of the JJ dossier! Such an attitude says much about the dilapidated state of RV's "political reflection", but the lie that accompanies this attitude says still more. RV presents JJ's passion for esotericism as the basis for the ICC's "fabricating" this hypothesis. Certainly an adherence to and propaganda for Masonic ideology and behaviour do not belong in the workers' movement, and are part of the arsenal of the bourgeoisie. But this was not the only element in the case. We should also point out that within the ICC, JJ engaged in a whole series of manoeuvres, manipulations, and destructive behaviour. Above all, there is the known fact that a person in JJ's immediate entourage has worked, and may still work, for the state services that specialise in the political domain - a fact which JJ kept quiet about for 20 years. RV has nothing to say about this "detail". RV tried from the outset to throw the most disgusting suspicion on the ICC's attitude, by encouraging the rumour spread by some that "the ICC denounces state agents as soon as a disagreement appears"5. Faced with such irresponsibility, the ICC has no choice but to make the whole JJ dossier public, including its most delicate aspects. This we will do in the weeks to come, so that our readers may judge for themselves the validity of the ICC's behaviour in this affair.

RV has chosen to join the camp of those who denounce the ICC and its supposed "paranoia": "this adjective "paranoiac”, which the ICC has so methodically managed to have bestowed on it by all those who have been in contact with it and its press in recent times, and have not fallen for its diseased view of the world". Obviously, it never occurs to RV that not "all those who have been in contact" with the ICC have necessarily found that the ICC is "paranoiac". But perhaps they have "fallen for its diseased view of the world"? This theme of "paranoia", put forward by JJ, is one of the text's most developed aspects, and its recurrent theme, like a litany. A few samples: "a completely crazy conception of the organisation", "collective paranoia", "the wind of madness", "the diseased swelling of insane imaginations", "all this lunatic inquisition", etc. RV even delivers a lesson in psychiatry to puff up his "analysis" by describing very didactically all the attributes of "paranoia". As a worthy disciple of JJ, RV has perhaps become a subtle psychologist, and serves us up the lessons he has learned in the dictionary on the meaning of the words "paranoia" or "sect". At all events, he has become a wretched marxist. He makes a travesty of the facts; he sweeps aside with disdain the theoretical and political arguments of the ICC; he ignores the entire experience of the workers' movement on the organisation question, and takes his arguments from the most banal anti-Leninism; he redefines the proletarian political milieu; he revises the analysis of the present historical period, etc. We will refute RV's "theoretical arguments" in future issues of the International Review.

Where is the militant who defended in writing and in speech the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik party during the years when the ICC regrouped and formed in the 1970s at a time when so many groups still indulged one way or another in an infantile rejection of October 1917, Lenin, and the Bolshevik Party, in the name of the rejection of Stalinism? Disappeared. Where is the unshakeable militant, who declared - in his own terms - that "a crane wouldn't get him out of the organisation"? Gone away. RV has sold his soul to JJ, who has to all appearances become his mental inspiration.

ICC

The July Days of 1917 are one of the most important moments, not only in the Russian Revolution, but in the whole history of the workers' movement. In the space of three days, from July 3rd to July 5th, one of the mightiest ever confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat, despite ending in a defeat for the working class, opened the road to the seizure of power four months later in October 1917. On July 3rd, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd rose massively and spontaneously, calling for all power to be transferred to the workers' councils, the soviets. On July 4th an armed demonstration with half a million participants besieged the leadership of the soviet, calling for it to take power, but returned home peacefully in the evening, following an appeal by the Bolsheviks. On July 5th, counter-revolutionary troops took over the Russian capital, and began to hunt down the Bolsheviks and repress the most advanced workers. But by avoiding a premature struggle for power, the proletariat maintained its revolutionary forces intact. As a result, the working class was able to draw all the lessons of these events, and in particular to understand the counter-revolutionary character of bourgeois democracy and of the new left wing of capital: the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who had betrayed the cause of the workers and poor peasants and gone over to the counter-revolution. At no other moment of the Russian Revolution was the danger of a decisive defeat of the proletariat, and the decimation of the Bolshevik party, so acute as during those dramatic 72 hours. At no other moment did the profound confidence of the leading battalions of the proletariat in its class party, in the communist vanguard, prove more important.

80 years later, in face of the bourgeois lies about the "death of communism", and in particular its denigration of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism, the defence of the true lessons of the July Days and of the whole proletarian revolution is one of the main responsibilities of revolutionaries. According to the lies of the bourgeoisie, the Russian Revolution was a "popular" struggle for a bourgeois parliamentary republic, the "freest country in the world" until the Bolsheviks, "inventing" the "demagogic" slogan of "all power to the soviets" imposed through a "putsch" its "barbaric dictatorship" over the great majority of the working population. However, even the briefest objective look at the events of July 1917 will show as clear as daylight that the Bolsheviks were on the side of the working class, that it was bourgeois democracy which was on the side of barbarism, putschism, and the dictatorship of a tiny minority over the working people.

A cynical provocation by the bourgeoisie, and a trap set for the Bolsheviks

The July Days of 1917 were from the outset a provocation by the bourgeoisie, with the aim of decapitating the proletariat by crushing the revolution in Petrograd, and eliminating the Bolshevik party before the revolutionary process in Russia as a whole became ripe for the seizure of power by the workers.

The revolutionary upsurge of February 1917, leading to the replacement of the Tsar by a "bourgeois democratic" provisional government, and to the establishment of the workers' councils (soviets) as a rival, proletarian centre of power, was first and foremost the product of the struggle of the workers against the imperialist world war begun in 1914. But the provisional government, as well as the majority parties in the soviets, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs), against the will of the proletariat, committed themselves to continue the war, and to the imperialist robber programme of Russian capitalism. In this way, not only in Russia but in all countries comprising the Entente, the coalition against Germany, a new pseudo-revolutionary legitimacy had been lent to the war, to the greatest crime in human history. Between February and July 1917 several million soldiers, including the flower of the international working class, were killed or wounded to settle the question: which of the main capitalist imperialist gangsters should rule the world? Although many Russian workers initially fell for the lies of the new leaders that it was necessary to continue the war "in order to achieve a just peace without annexations once and for all", now coming as they did from the mouths of alleged "democrats" and "socialists", by June 1917 the proletariat had resumed the revolutionary struggle against the imperialist slaughter with redoubled energy. During the gigantic demonstration of June 18th in Petrograd, the internationalist slogans of the Bolsheviks won over a majority for the first time. By the beginning of July, the biggest and bloodiest Russian military offensive since the "triumph of democracy" was ending in a fiasco, the German army breaking through the front at several points. It was the most critical moment for Russian militarism since the beginning of the "Great War". But although the news of the offensive's failure had already reached the capital, fanning the revolutionary flames, it had not yet penetrated to the rest of the gigantic country. Out of this desperate situation the idea was born of provoking a premature revolt in Petrograd, crushing the workers and the Bolsheviks there, and then blaming the collapse of the military offensive on the "stab in the back" delivered from behind the front by the capital.

The objective situation was not unfavourable to such a plan. Although the main workers' sectors in Petrograd were already going over to the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and SRs still had a majority position in the soviets, and were still dominant in the provinces. Within the working class as a whole, even in Petrograd, there remained strong illusions about the capacity of the Mensheviks and SRs to serve in some way the cause of revolution. Despite the radicalisation of the soldiers, mostly peasants in uniform, a considerable number of important regiments were still loyal to the Provisional Government. The forces of counter-revolution, after a phase of disorientation and disorganisation after the "February Revolution", were now at the zenith of their reconstitution. And the bourgeoisie had a trick card up its sleeve: forged documents and testimonies claiming to prove that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were paid agents of the German Kaiser.

This plan represented above all a trap, a dilemma for the Bolshevik party. If the party put itself at the head of a premature insurrection in the capital, it would discredit itself in the eyes of the Russian proletariat, appearing as the representative of an irresponsibly adventurist policy, and to the backward sectors even as the helper of German imperialism. But if it disowned the mass movement it would dangerously isolate itself from the class, leaving the workers to their fate. The bourgeoisie hoped that however the party decided, its decision would spell its doom.

The counter-revolutionary, Black-Hundred, anti-Semitic mob funded by "Western democracy"

Were the anti-Bolshevik forces the fine democrats and defenders of the "freedom of the people" alleged by bourgeois propaganda? They were led by the Kadets ([1] [13]), the party of big industry and the great landlords; by the officers’ committee representing about 100,000 commanders preparing a military putsch; by the soviet of the counter-revolutionary Cossack troops; by the secret police; and by the anti-Semitic "Black Hundred" mob. "Those are the circles stirring up pogroms, shooting at demonstrators etc." as Lenin wrote. ([2] [14])

But the July provocation was a blow against the maturing world revolution, struck not only by the Russian, but by the world bourgeoisie in the form of the government of Russia's war allies. In this treacherous attempt at an early drowning of a still unripe revolution in blood, we can recognise the handwriting of the old democratic bourgeoisie: the French with its long and bloody tradition of such provocations (1791, 1848, 1870), and the British with its incomparable political experience and intelligence. In fact, in view of the Russian bourgeoisie's increasing difficulties in effectively combating the revolution and maintaining the war effort, Russia's Western allies had already become the main force, not only financing the Russian front, but advising and funding the counter-revolution. The Provisional Committee of the State Duma (parliament) "supplied a legal covering for the counter-revolutionary work, which was broadly financed by the banks and by the embassies of the Entente" as Trotsky recalled ([3] [15]).

"Petrograd was swarming with secret and semi-secret officer organisations enjoying lofty protection and generous support. In a confidential report made by the Menshevik, Lieber, almost a month before the July Days, it was asserted that the officer-conspirators were in touch with Buchanan. Yes, and how could the diplomats of the Entente help trying to promote the speedy establishment of a strong power in Russia?" ([4] [16]).

It was not the Bolsheviks, but the bourgeoisie which allied itself with foreign governments against the Russian proletariat.

The political provocations of the blood-thirsty bourgeoisie

At the beginning of July, three incidents arranged by the bourgeoisie were enough to trigger off a revolt in the capital

1. The Kadet party withdrew its four ministers from the Provisional government. Since the Mensheviks and SR's had until then justified their refusal of "all power to the soviets" with the need to collaborate, outside the workers' councils, with the Kadets as representatives of the "democratic bourgeoisie", this snubbing of the coalition was bound to provoke renewed demands for immediate soviet power among workers and soldiers.

"To imagine that the Kadets may not have foreseen the effect of this act of open sabotage of the Soviet would be decidedly to underestimate Miliukov. The leader of liberalism was obviously trying to drag the Compromisers into a difficult situation from which they could make a way out only with bayonets. In those days Miliukov firmly believed that the situation could only be saved with a bold blood-letting" ([5] [17]).

2. The humiliation of the Provisional Government by the Entente, aimed at obliging it to confront the revolution with arms or be dropped by its allies:

"Behind the scenes the threads of all this were in the hands of the embassies and governments of the Entente. At an inter-allied conference in London the western friends ‘forgot’ to invite the Russian ambassador (...) This mockery of the ambassador of the Provisional Government and the demonstrative exit of the Kadets from the government - both events happening on the 2nd of July - had the same purpose: to bring the Compromisers to their knees" ([6] [18]).

The Menshevik and SR parties, still in the process of joining the bourgeoisie, inexperienced in their role, full of hesitations and petty bourgeois vacillations, and still with small proletarian-internationalist oppositions within their ranks, were not initiated into the counter-revolutionary plot, but manoeuvred into the role designated to them by their senior bourgeois leaders.

3. The threat to immediately transfer combative revolutionary regiments from the capital straight to the front. In fact, the explosion of the class struggle in response to these provocations was initiated, not by the workers but the soldiers, and politically incited not by the Bolsheviks but by the anarchists.

"In general the soldiers were more impatient than the workers - both because they were directly threatened with a transfer to the front, and because it was much harder for them to understand considerations of political strategy. Moreover, each one had his own rifle; and ever since February the soldier had been inclined to over-estimate the independent power of a rifle" ([7] [19]).

The soldiers immediately undertook to win the workers for their action. At the Putilov Works, the biggest Russian workers’ concentration, they made their most decisive breakthrough.

"About ten thousand men assembled. To shouts of encouragement, the machine-gunners told how they had received an order to go to the front on the 4th of July, but they had decided ‘to go not to the German front, against the German proletariat, but against their own capitalist ministers’. Feeling ran high. ‘Come on, let’s get moving’ cried the workers" ([8] [20]).

Within hours, the proletariat of the whole city had risen, armed itself and come together around the slogan "all power to the soviets", the slogan of the masses themselves.

The Bolsheviks avoid the trap and lead the proletariat around it

On the afternoon of July 3rd, delegates from the machine-gun regiments arrived to win the support of the city conference of the Bolsheviks, and were shocked to learn that the party was speaking out against the action. The arguments given by the party - that the bourgeoisie wanted to provoke Petrograd in order to blame it for the fiasco on the front, that the moment was not ripe for armed insurrection, and that the best moment for a more immediate major action would be when the collapse on the front was known to all - show that the Bolsheviks immediately grasped the meaning and danger of the events. In fact, already since the June 18th demonstration the Bolsheviks had been publicly warning against a premature action.

Bourgeois historians have recognised the remarkable political intelligence of the party at that moment. Indeed, the Bolshevik party was imbued with the conviction that it is imperative to study the nature, strategy and tactics of the class enemy to be able to respond and intervene correctly at each moment. It was steeped in the marxist understanding that the revolutionary seizure of power is a form of art or science, where an insurrection at an inopportune point and the failure to seize power at the correct moment are both equally fatal.

But as correct as the analysis of the party was, to have stopped here would have meant falling for the trap of the bourgeoisie. The first decisive turning point during the July Days came the same night, when the Central Committee and the Petrograd Committee of the party decided to legitimise the movement and put itself at its head, but in order to assure its "peaceful and organised character". As opposed to the spontaneous and chaotic events of the previous day, the gigantic demonstrations of July 4th betrayed the "ordering hand of the party". The Bolsheviks knew that the goal the masses had set themselves, of obliging the Menshevik and SR leadership of the soviet to take power in the name of the workers’ councils, was an impossibility. The Mensheviks and SRs, presented today by the bourgeoisie as the real defenders of soviet democracy, were already integrating themselves into the counter-revolution and waiting for an opportunity to have done with the workers' councils. The dilemma of the situation, the still insufficient consciousness of the mass of the proletariat, was concretised in the famous story of an enraged worker waving his fist under the chin of one of the "revolutionary" ministers shouting "Take power, son of a bitch, when we give it to you". In reality, the ministers and soviet misleaders were playing for time until regiments loyal to the government arrived.

By now the workers were realising for themselves the difficulties of transferring all power to the soviets as long as the traitors and compromisers held the leading influence within it. Because the class had not yet found the method of transforming the soviets from within, it was trying vainly to impose its armed will upon them from without.

The second decisive turning point came with the address by Bolshevik speakers to tens of thousands of Putilov and other workers on July 4th, at the end of a day of mass demonstrations, which Zinoviev began with a joke to ease the tension, and which ended with an appeal to return home peacefully - an appeal that the workers followed. The moment of revolution had not yet arrived, but it was coming. Never was the truth of Lenin's old saying more dramatically proven: patience and humour are indispensable qualities for revolutionaries.

The Bolsheviks' ability to lead the proletariat around the trap of the bourgeoisie was not only due to their political intelligence. What was decisive was above all the profound confidence of the party in the proletariat and in marxism, allowing it to fully base itself on the force and method which represents the future of humanity, and thus avoid the impatience of the petty bourgeoisie. Decisive too was the profound confidence which the Russian proletariat had developed in its class party, allowing the party to remain with and even lead the class although all sides knew it shared neither its immediate goals nor its illusions. The bourgeoisie failed in its aim to drive a wedge between party and class, a wedge which would have meant the certain defeat of the Russian Revolution.

"It was the absolute duty of the proletarian party to remain with the masses, and to attempt to give the justified actions of these masses as much as possible a peaceful and organised character, not standing aloof, washing its hands in innocence like Pilate for the pedantic reason that the masses were not organised to the last man, and that excesses took place in its movement" ([9] [21]).

The pogroms and slanders of the counter-revolution

Early in the morning of July 5th, government troops began to arrive in the capital. The work began of hunting down the Bolsheviks, depriving them of their meagre publishing resources, disarming and terrorising workers, inciting pogroms against the Jews. The saviours of civilisation from "Bolshevik barbarism" resorted to two main provocations to mobilise troops against the workers.

1) The campaign of lies that the Bolsheviks were German agents.

"The soldiers sat gloomily in their barracks waiting. Only in the afternoon of July 4 did the authorities at last discover an effective means of influencing them. They showed (..) documents demonstrating as plain as 2+2=4 that Lenin was a German spy. That moved them. The news flew around the regiments. (...) The mood of the neutral battalions changed" ([10] [22]).

In particular a political parasite called Alexinski, a renegade Bolshevik who had once helped to form an "ultra-left" opposition against Lenin, but having failed to fulfil his ambitions had become a declared enemy of workers' parties, was an instrument in this campaign. As a result, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders were obliged to go into hiding, while Trotsky and others were arrested. "The internationalists behind bars - that is what Mr. Kerensky and Co. need" declared Lenin ([11] [23]).

The bourgeoisie has not changed. 80 years after, they are conducting a similar campaign with the same "logic" against the communist left. Then: since the Bolsheviks refuse to support the Entente, they must be on the German side! Now: since the Communist Left refused to support the "antifascist" imperialist camp in World War II, they and their successors today must have been on the German side. "Democratic" state campaigns prepare future pogroms.

Revolutionaries today, who often underestimate the significance of such campaigns against them, still have much to learn from the example of the Bolsheviks after the July days, who moved heaven and earth in defence of their reputation within the working class. Trotsky later called July 1917 "the month of the most gigantic slander in human history", but even this pales in comparison with the present day slander that Communism equals Stalinism.

Another way of attacking the reputation of revolutionaries, as old as the method of public denigration, and normally used in combination with it, is the encouragement by the state of non-proletarian and anti-proletarian elements who like to present themselves as revolutionaries.

"Provocation undoubtedly played a certain role in the events at the front as well as on the streets of Petrograd. After the February revolution the government had thrown over into the active army a large number of former gendarmes and policemen. None of them of course wanted to fight. They were more afraid of the Russian soldiers than of the Germans. In order to get their past forgotten, they would stimulate the most extreme moods of the army, incite the soldiers against the officers, come out loudly against discipline, and often openly give themselves out for Bolsheviks. Bound naturally together as accomplices, they created a kind of special Brotherhood of Cowardice and Villainy. Through them would penetrate and quickly spread through the army the most fantastic rumours, in which ultra-revolutionism was combined with Black Hundredism. In critical hours these creatures would give the first signals for panic. The press more than once referred to this demoralising work of the police and gendarmes. No less frequent references of this kind are to be found in the secret documents of the army itself. But the high command remained silent, preferring to identify the Black Hundred provocateurs with the Bolsheviks" ([12] [24]).

2. Snipers fired at troops arriving in the city, who were then told the Bolsheviks were behind the shooting.

"The deliberate madness of this shooting clearly disturbed the workers. It was clear that experienced provocateurs were greeting the soldiers with lead with a view to anti-Bolshevik inoculation. The workers were eager to explain this to the arriving troops, but they were denied access to them. For the first time since the February days the junker or officer stood between the worker and soldier" ([13] [25]).

Being forced to work in semi-illegality after the July Days, the Bolsheviks also had to fight against the democratic illusions of those within their ranks who wanted their leaders to go up for trial before a counter-revolutionary court to answer charges of being German agents. Recognising another trap being laid for the party, Lenin wrote:

"A military dictatorship is at work. It is ridiculous to even speak of a court case. What we are dealing with here is not at all a "court case", but an episode of civil war" ([14] [26]).

If the Party survived the period of repression which followed the July Days, it was not least because of its tradition of constant vigilance in the defence of the organisation against all the attempts of the state to destroy it. It should be noted for instance, that the police agent Malinovsky, who before the war managed to become the member of the central committee of the party directly responsible for the security of the organisation, would probably have been the man in charge of hiding Lenin, Zinoviev etc. after the July Days, had he not been unmasked by the vigilance of the organisation beforehand (despite the blindness of Lenin himself!). Without such vigilance, the result would most probably have been the liquidation of the most experienced party leaders. In January-February 1919, when Luxemburg. Liebknecht, Jogisches and other veterans of the young KPD were murdered by the German bourgeoisie, it seems that the authorities may have been tipped off by a "high-ranking" police agent within the party.

Balance-sheet of the July Days

The July Days revealed once again the gigantic revolutionary energy of the proletariat, its struggle against the fraud of bourgeois democracy, and the fact that the working class alone is a factor against imperialist war in the face of the decadence of capitalism. Not "democracy or dictatorship" but the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, socialism or barbarism, that is the alternative facing humanity which the July Days posed, without yet being able to answer. But what the July Days above all illustrated is the indispensable role of the proletarian class party. No wonder that the bourgeoisie is today "celebrating" the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution with renewed manoeuvres and slanders against the contemporary revolutionary milieu.

July 1917 also showed that overcoming illusions in the renegade ex-workers' parties on the left of capital is vital if the proletariat is to seize power. This was the central illusion of the class during the July Days. But this experience was in itself decisive. The July Days definitively clarified, not only for the working class and the Bolsheviks, but for the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries themselves, that the latter's organisations had irrevocably joined the counter-revolution. As Lenin wrote at the beginning of September:

"In Petrograd at the time we were not even physically in a position to take power, and had it been physically possible to take it, it would not have been possible to hold onto it politically, since Tsereteli and Co. had not yet sunk to supporting the hangmen. That's why, at the time, from the 3rd to the 5th of July in Petrograd, the slogan of taking power was wrong. At that time even the Bolsheviks still lacked the conscious determination - nor could that have been otherwise - to treat Tsereteli and Co. as counter-revolutionaries. At the time neither the soldiers nor the workers possessed the experience which the month of July gave them" ([15] [27]).

Already in mid-July Lenin had clearly drawn this lesson:

"After the 4th of July the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, hand in hand with the monarchists and Black Hundreds, engulfed the petty bourgeois Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, after having intimidated them, placing the real state power (...) in the hands of a military clique, who shot those who refused orders on the front, and struck down the Bolsheviks in Petrograd" ([16] [28]).

But the key lesson of July was the political leadership of the party. The bourgeoisie has often employed the tactic of provoking premature confrontations. Whether 1848 and 1870 in France, or 1919 and 1921 in Germany, in each case the result has been a bloody repression of the proletariat. If the Russian Revolution is the only major example where the working class has been able to avoid such a trap and bloody defeat, then this was above all because the Bolshevik class party was able to fulfil its decisive vanguard role. In steering the class away from such a defeat, the Bolsheviks saved from their perversion by opportunism the deeply revolutionary lessons of Engels' famous 1895 Introduction to Marx's Class Struggle in France, especially his warning:

"And there is only one means through which the continuous swelling of the ranks of the socialist armies in Germany can be set back for some time: a large scale confrontation with the military, a blood-letting like 1871 in Paris" ([17] [29]).

Trotsky summarised the balance sheet of the action of the party as follows:

"Had the Bolshevik Party, stubbornly clinging to a doctrinaire appraisal of the July movement as ‘untimely’ and  turned its back on the masses, the semi-insurrection would inevitably have fallen under the scattered and uncoordinated leadership of anarchists, of adventurers, of accidental expressers of the indignation of the masses, and would have expired in bloody and fruitless convulsions. On the other hand, if the party, after taking its place at the head of the machine-gunners and Putilov men, had renounced its own appraisal of the situation as a whole, and glided down the road to a decisive fight, the insurrection would indubitably have taken a bold scope. The workers and soldiers under the leadership of the Bolsheviks would have conquered the power - but only to prepare the subsequent shipwreck of the revolution. The question of power on a national scale would not have been decided, as it was in February, by a victory in Petrograd. The provinces would not have caught up to the capital. The front would not have understood or accepted the revolution. The railroads and the telegraphs would have served the Compromisers against the Bolsheviks. Kerensky and headquarters would have created a government for the front and the provinces. Petrograd would have been blockaded. Disintegration would have begun within its walls. The government would have been able to send considerable masses of soldiers against Petrograd. The insurrection would have ended, in those circumstances, with the tragedy of a Petrograd Commune. At the July forking of historic roads, the interference of the Bolshevik Party eliminated both fatally dangerous variants - both that in the likeness of the July Days of 1848, and that of the Paris Commune of 1871. Thanks to the party's taking its place boldly at the head of the movement, it was able to stop the masses at the moment when the demonstration began to turn into an armed test of strength. The blow struck at the masses and the party in July was very considerable, but it was not a decisive blow (..) It fully preserved its fighting cadres, and these cadres had learned much" ([18] [30]).

History proved Lenin right when he wrote:

"A new phase begins. The victory of the counter-revolution sparks off disappointment among the masses concerning the parties of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and clears the way for the transition of the masses to the politics of supporting the revolutionary proletariat" ([19] [31]).

 Krespel

[1] [32] So-called from the initials - KD - of their party, the Constitutional Democrats.

[2] [33] Lenin: Where is the Power and where is the Counter-Revolution?

[3] [34] Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, Page 517.

[4] [35] Trotsky: History P.551. Buchanan was a British diplomat in Petrograd.

[5] [36] Trotsky: History P. 525.

[6] [37] Trotsky: History P. 624.

[7] [38] Trotsky: History P. 520.

[8] [39] Trotsky: History P. 528.

[9] [40] Lenin: On Constitutional Illusions.

[10] [41] Trotsky: History P.561.

[11] [42] Lenin: Should the Bolshevik leaders stand trial?

[12] [43] Trotsky: History P. 585. A very similar role was played by ex-gendarmes, criminal elements and other lumpen proletarians among the "Spartacus soldiers" and "revolutionary invalids" during the German revolution, particularly during the tragic "Spartacus Week" in Berlin, January 1919, and proved even more catastrophic.

[13] [44] Trotsky: History P. 568.

[14] [45] Lenin: Should the Bolshevik leaders stand trial?

[15] [46] Lenin: Rumours about a Conspiracy.

[16] [47] Lenin: On Slogans.

[17] [48] Engels: Introduction to the 1895 edition of Class Struggles in France.

[18] [49] Trotsky: History. P. 593-94.

[19] [50] Lenin: On Constitutional Illusions.