For five years the class struggle has continued to develop world wide. Against the simultaneous and ever deeper attacks with which it is confronted the working class is reacting, demonstrating its militancy and asserting its class struggle in both the so-called developed and under-developed countries.
During 2007, workers' struggles have erupted in many countries.
Egypt. In December 2006 and spring 2007, the 27,000 workers of the Ghazl Al Mahallah factory, some hundred kilometres from Cairo were at the heart of a great wave of struggle. They returned to the fight, in the midst of a powerful wave of struggle, on 23rd September. The government had failed to keep its promise of paying 150 days pay to all the workers, which had put an end to the previous strike. One striker, arrested by the police, declared: "We were promised 150 days pay, we just want to have our rights respected: we are determined to go on to the end". The workers drew up a list of their demands: a £150 Egyptian bonus (this is worth less than 20 euros, while monthly wages vary between £E200 and £E250); no confidence to the union committee and the company's CEO; bonuses to be included in the basic wage without being tied to factory output; increase in food bonuses; a housing bonus; a minimum wage indexed on prices; provision of transport for workers obliged to live a long way from the factory; and an improvement in medical services. The workers of other textile factories, like those of Kafr Al Dawar who had already in December 2006 declared that "We are all in the same boat and embarked on the same journey", once again demonstrated their solidarity and went on strike at the end of September. In the Cairo flour-mills, the workers went on sit-down strike and sent a message of solidarity to support the demands of the textile workers. In the factories of Tanta Linseed and Oil, the workers followed the example of Mahalla by publishing a similar list of demands. These struggles also declared a powerful rejection of the official unions, seen as the faithful bloodhounds of the government and the bosses: "The representative of the official state-controlled union who had come to ask his colleagues to put an end to the strike, is in hospital after being beaten up by angry workers. 'The union only obeys orders, we want to elect our own representatives', explained the workers" (quoted in Libération, 1/10/2007). The government has been forced to offer the workers 120 days bonuses and to promise to sanction the management. But the workers have shown that they no longer trust mere promises; little by little they have gained confidence in their own collective strength and their determination to fight until their demands are satisfied remains intact.
Dubaï. In this Persian Gulf emirate, hundreds of thousands of construction workers, for the most part Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Chinese, are building luxurious hotels and palaces for a hundred euros a month, parked like cattle in sordid lodgings. Struggles had already broken out their in spring 2006, but in October 2007 4,000 of them braved the threat of repression, of losing their jobs and wages, and being expelled from Dubaï for life and took to the street bringing 400,000 other building workers out with them for two days.
Algeria. Faced with growing discontent, the autonomous civil service unions called a national strike of state empployees, especially the teachers, for the 12th and 15th January 2008, against the collapse of purchasing power and the new wage scales for teachers. But the strike also drew in other sectors, including health workers. The town of Tizi Ouzou was completely paralysed and the teachers' strike was especially solid in the towns of Oran, Constantine, Annaba, Bechar, Adrar and Saïda.
Venezuela. In May 2007 the oil workers had already mobilised against lay-offs in a state enterprise. In September they mobilised again during the labour contract negotiations to demand higher wages. May also saw a mobilisation by students against the regime, demanding improvements in living conditions for the poorest of the population and workers. The students organised in general assemblies open to all, with elected strike committees. Each time, the repression meted out by the government of Chavez, "apostle of the Bolivarian revolution", left some dead and hundreds wounded.
Peru. In April, an open-ended strike began in a Chinese company and soon spread to coalmines nationwide, for the first time in 20 years. The Sider Peru company at Chimbote was totally paralysed despite attempts by the unions to isolate and sabotage the strike. The miners' wives demonstrated alongside them, joined by a large part of the local population including peasants and unemployed. Near Lima, the miners of Casapalca sequestrated the mine managers who had threatened them with lay-offs if they left their work. Students from Lima, joined by a part of the population, came to bring food and support for the strikers. In June, a large proportion of the country's 325,000 teachers were mobilised, equally supported by much of the population, despite the best efforts of the unions. Each time, the government reacted with arrests, threats of redundancies, the use of contract workers to replace striking miners, and by organising vast media campaigns to slander the striking teachers.
Turkey. Faced with the loss of wage and job security as a result of privatisation and the transfer of 10,000 jobs to subcontractors, 26,000 workers of Türk Telecom struck for 44 days at the end of the year - the biggest strike in Turkey since the 1991 miners' strike. In the midst of a military campaign against the Kurds on the Iraqi frontier, some "leaders" were arrested and accused of sabotage, even of high treason towards the national interest, and threatened with sanctions and redundancy. In the end, they kept their jobs and a 10% wage rise was negotiated.
Greece. A general strike on 12th December 2007 against the reform of the "special" pension schemes (the retirement age has already risen to 65 for men and 60 for women) involved 700,000 workers (32% of the working population), and brought together state and private employees from the banks, schools, courts, civil service, post office, electricity and telephone industries, hospitals and public transport (metro, trams, ports and airports). More than 100,000 demonstrated in Athens and Thessalonika and in other major towns.
Finland. The bourgeoisie has already gone a long way to dismantling social protection in Finland, where 70,000 health workers (mostly nurses) went on strike for a month in October to demand a rise in wages of at least 24%; wages are so low (between 400 and 600 euros a month) that many are obliged to find work in neighbouring Sweden. 12,800 nurses threatened to resign collectively if the negotiations between the government and the Tehy union failed to give them satisfaction - the government having only proposed a 12% rise. In some hospitals whole wards are still threatened with closure.
Bulgaria. After a one day symbolic strike on the first day of term, teachers came out on an open-ended strike at the end of September to demand pay increases: 100% for secondary school teachers (who earn on average 174 euros per month) and a 5% increase in the national education budget. The strike has ended for the moment following a government promise to review teachers' wages in 2008.
Hungary. Rail workers came out on strike to protest at the closure of unprofitable lines and against the government's reforms of pensions and the health service. On 17th December, the railwaymen also brought out another 32,000 workers from various industries (teachers, health workers, bus drivers, Budapest airport workers). In the end, despite the fact that the Parliament had just voted through the reform, the unions were able to use the mobilisation across industries to stifle the railwaymen's struggle, and called for a return to work the following day.
Russia. Braving the law which makes all strikes of more than 24 hours illegal, the convictions of strikers systematically handed down by the courts, constant police violence, and the use of gangsters against the most militant workers, since last spring a wave of strikes has swept through the country for the first time in ten years, from Western Siberia to the Caucasus. Numerous branches of industry have been affected: building sites in Chechnya, a sawmill in Novgorod; a hospital in the region of Tchita, building maintenance workers in Saratov, fast-food workers in Irkutsk, the General Motors factory at Togliattigrad and a major engineering factory in Carelia. The movement culminated in November with a three-day strike by dockers at Tuapse on the Black Sea, followed by the dockers at three St Petersburg companies between 13th and 17th November. Postal workers went on strike on 26th October as did power company workers during the same month. Train drivers on the railways threatened to strike for the first time since 1988. The complete blackout maintained by the media concerning this wave of strikes provoked by massive inflation and price rises of 50-70% for basic foodstuffs was broken above all by the strike of the Ford workers at Vsevolojsk in the region of St Petersburg on 20th November. The Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia which openly works hand in glove with the government and is hostile to strikes of any description, proved unable to play the slightest role in controlling the workers' movement. On the other hand, the management of the major companies, with the help of the Western ruling class, exploited to the hilt the workers' illusions in the "free" or "class-struggle" unionism, encouraging the emergence of new union structures, such as the Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers, created at the initiative of the Ford union committee and grouping independent unions from several major companies such as Avto-VAZ-General Motors in Togliattigrad and Renault-Autoframos in Moscow. It is these new "independent unions" which - by isolating the workers in "their" factory and limiting other workers' expressions of solidarity to messages of sympathy and financial help, led the workers to bitterest defeat. Exhausted and pennyless after a month on strike, they were forced to return to work after winning nothing and on management's terms: a vague promise of negotiations after the return to work.
Italy. On 23rd November, the rank-and-file unions (Confederazione Unitaria di Base - CUB, Cobas, and various inter-branch "class struggle" unions) launched a one-day general strike followed by two million workers against the agreement signed on 23rd July last between the government and the three main union federations (CGIL/CISL/UIL) legalising attacks on job security, and a drastic reduction in pensions and health spending. Some 400,000 people marched in 25 demonstrations around the country, the biggest being in Rome and Milan. All branches were affected, but especially in transport (railways, airports shut down), engineering (the strike was 90% solid at Fiat's Pomigliano plant), and the hospitals. Large numbers of those on strike were young people on short-term contracts (of which there are more than 6 million) and non-unionised workers. Anger at declining purchasing power played an important part in the size of this mobilisation.
Britain. For the first time in more than a decade, postal workers, especially in Liverpool and South London, came out spontaneously in series of strikes against falling real wages and threatened job losses; the Communication Workers' Union (CWU) responded by isolating the workers by restricting their activity to picketing the striking sorting offices. At the same time, the CWU was signing an agreement with management to increase flexibility in jobs and wages.
Germany. The railworkers' "rolling strike" for higher wages lasted 10 months controlled by the train drivers' union GDL (Gewerkschaft Deutscher Lokführer). The unions played a major role in dividing the workers, some unions keeping to the legal framework, while others appeared more radical in the readiness to break the law. The media organised a huge campaign to slander the "selfish" strikers, who in fact received a good deal of sympathy from "customers" who are largely other workers increasingly ready to identify with those in struggle against the same "social injustice" that they feel themselves. The number of railwaymen has halved in the last 20 years, while working conditions have deteriorated and wages have been blocked for the last 15 years to the railwaymen are now some of the worst paid workers in Germany (monthly wages of only 1500 euros on average). Under the pressure of the railwaymen a new three-day strike in November was authorised by the courts in parallel with the rail strike in France, which had wide popular support in Germany. This led, in January, to a wage increase of 11% (much less than the 31% demanded and already in part eroded); in an attempt to let off steam, the 20,000 train drivers' working week was reduced from 41 to 40... starting in February 2009.
At the end of 2008 the Finnish mobile phone company Nokia announced the closure of its Bochum plant, laying off 2300 workers and putting another 1700 jobs at risk amongst the subcontractors in the town. The day after the announcement, on 16th January the workers refused to return to work and car workers from the nearby Opel factory, from Mercedes, steelworkers from Hoechst's Dortmund plant, engineers from Herne, and miners from the region all gathered at the Nokia factory gates to bring support and solidarity to their comrades. The German proletariat at the heart of Europe, by systematically drawing on its experience of solidarity and militant struggle, is once again becoming a beacon for the international class struggle. Remember that in 2004 the workers of Daimler-Benz in Bremen had already come out on strike spontaneously against the management's attempts to blackmail them into competing with their comrades at Daimler-Benz' Stuttgart factory threatened with redundancies. A few months later it was the turn of the same Opel workers in Bochum to strike spontaneously against the same kind of management pressure. That is why today the German ruling class has tried to avoid the same expressions of solidarity and mobilisation across branches of industry by focusing attention on this umpteenth case of delocalisation (the Nokia factory is being moved to Cluj in Romania) and orchestrating a huge media campaign (in a united front of government, local and regional deputies, the church and the unions) to accuse the Finnish company of betraying the government after spending all the subsidies it had received to keep the Bochum factory open.
Increasingly, the struggle against redundancies and job losses are being joined by demands for wage rises and against declining buying power, while the working class as a whole is the target of incessant attacks by the ruling class (retirement age raised to 67, redundancy plans, the Agenda 2010 cuts in benefits...). In 2007, the number of strike days lost was the highest since 1993 just after reunification (70% of these were due to the strikes in spring against the contracting out of 50,000 jobs in the telecommunications industry).
France. The potential for the future has been demonstrated above all by the strikes of rail and tram drivers in France during October and November, one year after the struggles in 2006 which forced the government to withdraw the new law (CPE) aimed reducing job security for young people, and where the student youth played a major role. The transport strikes followed on a 5-day strike by Air France cabin crews against the deterioration of their working conditions, indicative of a general rise in militancy and social discontent.
Far from hanging on to a "privileged" pension scheme, the railwaymen demanded a return to retirement after 37½ years of contributions for all. The young workers of the SNCF in particular demonstrated a clear determination to spread the strike and break with the corporatism dividing different categories of railworkers (drivers, mechanics, train crew) which had weighed so heavily on the struggles of 1986-7 and 1995, revealing a strong feeling of solidarity within the working class as a whole.
At the same time, the student movement against the reform of the universities (known as the "Loi Pécresse"), aimed at dividing the universities into a few élite institutions for the bourgeois and "dustbin" universities ending in short-term work contracts for the rest, was a prolongation of the 2006 movement in that its platform of demands included not only the withdrawal of the Loi Pécresse but the rejection of all the government's attacks. Real ties of solidarity were created between students and railworkers and tram drivers, expressed in however limited a form at the strongest moments of the struggle in presence in each others' general assemblies, joint action, and meals taken together.
These struggles confront everywhere the sabotage and division encouraged by the trades unions which are more and more revealing their true function in the service of the bourgeois state, as they are forced to the fore in the attacks on the working class. In the rail and tram workers' struggles of October and November 2007 in France, the unions' collusion with the government was evident. And every union played its part in dividing and isolating the struggles.[1]
United States. The United Auto Workers' union sabotaged the strike at General Motors in September, then at Chrysler in October, negotiating with management the transfer of medical and social coverage to the union in return for the "preservation" of jobs and a four-year pay freeze. This is a real swindle, since in keeping the same number of jobs the management plans to replace permanent full-time workers with temporary workers with lower wages, who will still be obliged to join the union.
This attitude of the union, accepting worse treatment for future hires, is a long way from the determination shown by the New York subway workers in 2005, who struck at great cost to themselves against a proposed deal that would have penalised future generations while leaving today's workers relatively untouched, and who explicitly declared their solidarity not only for their fellow workers but for workers as yet unborn.
Increasingly, the bourgeoisie is obliged to adopt counter-measures faced with the discredit of the union apparatus. This is why we are seeing the appearance, depending on the country, of rank-and-file unions, or more "radical" unions, or unions claiming to be "free and independent" in order to control the struggles, to hold back the workers' ability to take control of the struggle themselves and above all to prevent any process of reflection, discussion, and rise in consciousness taking place among the workers themselves.
The development of these struggles also confronts a vast hate campaign orchestrated by the ruling class, and an increase in repressive measures. In France, not only was a great campaign organised to play "customers" off against the striking transport workers, to divide the workers amongst themselves and break the impulse towards solidarity, there is a growing attempt to "criminalise" the strikers. On 21st November, at the end of the strike, a whole campaign was mounted around acts of sabotage of rail tracks and overhead catenaries in order to make the workers appear as "irresponsible" or even "terrorists". The same "criminalisation" was directed against the students picketing the universities described as "Khmer rouges" or "delinquants". The same students were the object of violent repression by the police when they cleared the pickets and "unblocked" the occupied universities. Dozens of students were hurt or arrested and summarily sentenced to long prison terms.
These recent struggles entirely confirm the characteristics which we highlighted in the resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC's 17th Congress in May 2007:[2]
Today, the process of development in the class struggle is also marked by the development of discussion within the working class, by a need for collective reflection, the politicisation of searching elements which can be seen in the appearance or reactivation of proletarian groups and discussion circles confronted with important events (the outbreak of imperialist conflicts) or after strikes. Throughout the world, there exists a tendency to move towards internastionalist positions. We find a characteristic example in Turkey, where the comrades of the EKS group defend an internationalist position against the war in Iraq and Turkey's intervention there, defending the class positions of the Communist Left there.[3]
Revolutionary minorities have also appeared in less developed countries such as the Philippines and Peru, or in highly industrialised countries where the tradition of the workers' movement is less developed such as Korea and Japan. In this context, the ICC has assumed its responsibilities as can be seen in our recent interventions where we have taken part in, encouraged, or organised public meetings in places as different as Peru, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Japan or South Korea.
"It is the responsibility of revolutionary organisations, and the ICC in particular, to be an active part in the process of reflection that is already going on within the class, not only by intervening actively in the struggles when they start to develop but also in stimulating the development of the groups and elements who are seeking to join the struggle". Within these minorities, the growing echo of the propaganda and positions of the Communist Left will be an essential factor in the politicisation of the working class towards the overthrow of capitalism.
W (19th January 2008)
[1] For more information on the unions' sabotage, see the articles published in our French press during November and December 2007 some of which are available in English in World Revolution n°310 (https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/index [1]).
[2] See International Review n°130, 3rd quarter 2007.
[3] See their leaflet published in World Revolution n°309 and on our web site: https://en.internationalism.org/wr/309/eks-leaflet [2]
The previous article in this series[1] showed how the CNT contributed decisively to setting up the trap of the Spanish Republic and how, at the Madrid Conference (June 1931), the union leaders of the CNT did all they could to complete this marriage between the union and the bourgeois state.
Two factors prevented this marriage at the time:
Anarchism took the lead in this resistance, when the majority regrouped to form an organisation, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federacion Anarquista Iberica - FAI) in 1927. The aim of this article is to assess this attempt to preserve the CNT for the proletariat.
The FAI was born out of the struggle against the growing influence of the union wing in the CNT. Although it was officially formed in 1927 in Valencia, it originated in a Committee for anarchist links which called a clandestine Congress in Barcelona in 1925. This Congress was to take position on three points:
So the anarchist Congress placed itself on the same basis as the unionists that it claimed to combat: it adopted the "tactical" aim of replacing the dictatorship with a liberal regime and making an alliance with the Republican opposition forces. Olaya quotes a declaration by Garcia Oliver[4] during a meeting held at the Paris trade union centre ("Bourse de travail") "that a change of regime is imminent in Spain and that it must be given every support regardless of ideology".
This position of Garcia Oliver was formally rejected by the Marseilles Congress of 1926, which concluded that it was necessary to "break off relations with the political parties and prepare to overthrow the dictatorship in collaboration with the CNT." That is, the "tactical" aim to participate in the "fight against the dictatorship" still stood but at the same time it declared that it would have no relationship with the political parties. On the other hand, contact between its militants and the Republican parties continued even after the formation of the FAI[5].
After the Republic was declared, a long editorial in Tierra y libertad[6] (Earth and Freedom) of 19th April 1931 entitled "The Position of Anarchism on the Republic" welcomed "warmly the creation of the Republic", explicitly welcomed "the new leaders" and formulated a series of demands which, according to Olaya, "coincide with the electoral promises made by many of them." This was the very least they could do as these demands included the suppression of aristocratic titles, a limitation on dividends paid to the share holders of large companies, the closure of convents, monasteries and Jesuit communities! No more nor less than a 100% bourgeois programme to be put into effect... by the much vilified political action!
Far from breaking with the direction of the CNT majority which gave priority to the struggle for a bourgeois regime in Republican form, the anarchist FAI jumped into it feet first! However it maintained the illusion that it could break out of this framework by encouraging the radicalisation of the masses. In doing so it reproduced the classic ambiguity of anarchism in relation to the Republic, an ambiguity that it had already displayed in 1873 with the First Spanish Republic (1873-1874)[7].
On 8th June 1931 a Peninsula[8] anarchist plenum was held at which the "comrades" of the peninsula committee were sanctioned for having contacts with "politicians". The Plenum declared it necessary to "direct activities towards revolution and anarchism in the knowledge that democracy is the last refuge of capitalism"[9].
How are we to understand this radical about-turn? Two months previously democracy was welcomed, now it is denounced. In fact it is the very basis of anarchism that obliges it to do one thing and then its opposite. This basis affirms that individuals tend naturally towards liberty and reject any kind of authority. On the basis of such abstract and general principles it is possible to justify the total rejection of any kind of authority or of the state - which makes it possible to understand that democracy is the last refuge of capitalism - while at the same time supporting an authority that "has more respect for individual liberty" or which is "less authoritarian" than the former one, as the Republic pretended to be.
Moreover these "principles" lead to a complete personalisation of political activity. The members of the former peninsula committee were forced to resign because they had had contact with political elements. However no attempt was made to examine the reasons which led them to support what was now rejected; no attempt was made to understand why the central organ, the peninsula committee, pursued a policy that was contrary to the principles of the organisation. The committee members were changed on the principle that "if the creature is dead so is its poison". Such personalisation meant that the struggle against the union sector was not carried out by means of debate and clarification but rather by means of campaigns against those militants who had a different point of view, through attempts to "win over" local or regional committees, administrative measures of expulsion, etc. For most of the CNT militants the fight against the "union" sector is not seen as a struggle for clarity but rather as a war between pressure groups, in which insults, suspicion and prohibitions predominated. Events reached a surprising level of violence. Olaya says that there reigned "within the CNT a civil war atmosphere". On 25th October 1932 "a group of those who had split attacked two CNT militants at their workplace who were opposed to the split. They killed one and seriously wounded the other".
"During the regional union plenum organised at Sabadell during the repression, there was a resounding confrontation between the two tendencies. The reformist 'Trentists' were little by little relieved of their organisational responsibilities. Pestaña and Arin, who signed the Manifesto of the 30, were stripped of their functions on the national committee. The unions linked to the local Sabadell federation withdrew from the regional Congress as a protest against the so-called dictatorship of the FAI. The unions in question, who counted more than 20,000 members, were later expelled by the regional committee. All this led to the organisational split that was at the origin of the 'Oppositional Unions'"[10]. The division was very serious in Catalonia and in the region of Valencia (where there were more members in the oppositional unions than in the official CNT) but there were also serious repercussions in Huelva, in the Asturias and in Galicia.
Although - as we will see later - the CNT was to follow the anarchist orientation, the union sector which made up a large part of the CNT was to function autonomously under the name of the Oppositional Unions up until the definitive regroupment of 1936 (see the next article). The Oppositional Unions acted on the basis of a more or less open collaboration with the UGT (the socialist union) on the principle of unity between unions.
In the period 1931-32 the FAI managed to convince the CNT to take up a revolutionary orientation. Behind this 180° about-face lay a real radicalisation of the workers, day labourers and peasants, who were suffering greatly from the increase in poverty and brutal repression under the Republic. This about-face took place within a situation of total confusion, on the one hand because of the split and the way it came about[11] and on the other because it was not based on any serious reflection, going from a policy of support for the Republic to a vague "struggle for the revolution" without answering collectively some basic questions: what kind of revolution are we fighting for? are the historic conditions ripe internationally? why did both unionists and the FAI support the formation of the Republic? These questions remained unanswered, the CNT's orientation was simply reversed from a right wing "critical" support for the Republic to a left wing position for the "insurrectional struggle for the revolution". The eternal principles of anarchism made it possible to endorse one or the other.
The period 1932-1934 has been called the "insurrectional period" by Gomez Casas. The most significant episodes were the attempts at a general strike in 1932, January 1933 and December of the same year. These movements were highly combative, there was an ardent desire to escape from an intolerable situation of poverty and oppression but they remained totally dispersed, each sector of workers confronting the capitalist state in isolation. Of course the army was sent systematically to crush the struggles. The Republic's response was always the same; massacres, massive detentions, incarceration, torture, penal servitude and deportation. The principle victims were naturally the militants of the CNT.
These movements often arose at the initiative of the workers themselves and were labelled by the bourgeoisie an "insurrectional plot perpetrated by the anarchists"[12]. One example is what happened to the strike in Alto Llobregat[13] in January 1932. On the 17th the workers of the Berga textile industry went on strike to protest against the failure to apply an agreement won six months beforehand. The next day other workers and miners in the area (Balsareny, Suria, Sallent, Figols...) struck in solidarity with their comrades. The workers managed to disarm the Somatenes (the auxiliary civil guard of the state forces in Catalonia). By the 22nd January the strike was solid throughout the whole zone. The CNT flag was hoisted above local government headquarters in some places. The Civil Guard shut itself in its barracks so the government sent reinforcements from the Civil Guard stationed at Lerida and Saragossa as well as army units to crush the struggle.
In order to justify the barbarous repression the government launched a campaign to create confusion. It claimed that the strike at Alto Llobrega was the work of the CNT-FAI[14] "it portrayed the confederates [confederates, ie members of the CNT] as infiltrated criminals and spread the repression to Catalonia, the Levant and Andalusia. Hundreds of prisoners were crammed into the holds of ships that were to take them into deportation"[15]. Fransisco Ascaso, one of the leaders of the FAI, was among the detainees. To complete the confusion one the leaders of the organisation, Federica Montseny, attributed the movement to the initiative of the FAI in an article that was to become famous.
The movement made demands and was solid, it was an expression of the workers themselves and as such it was very different from the insurrectional movements created by anarchist groups. However, although it was motivated by solidarity, in particular with the numerous detainees who were victims of the Republican repression, and also by a clear revolutionary will, these movements involved a minority, they were very localised and were foreign to the real dynamic of the workers' struggle and also very dispersed.
The most important insurrectional action began in January 1933 and spread throughout Catalonia and many districts of Valencia and Andalusia. Peirats shows that this movement originated in the continual provocations of the autonomous government in Catalonia, controlled by the "radicals" of the republican Esquerra. These señoritos (gentlemen of good family) had flirted with the CNT in the 20s and had made an agreement more or less secretly with the unionist leaders to support the autonomous government and "turn the CNT into a domestic union like the UGT in Madrid" (Federica Montseny). They were very disappointed when the Trentists were excluded and, with even more fury than their Spanish brothers, tried to "crush the CNT by systematically closing its unions, suppressing its press, a regime of governmental prisons and a terrorist policy of the police and escamots[16]. The Casals de Esquerra[17] were turned into clandestine prisons where the confederated workers were kidnapped, beaten and tortured"[18].
The improvisation and chaos which characterised the organisation of this movement rapidly transformed it into a rout that the Catalonian and state forces together finished off by means of an incredible and immense repression. The climax was the massacre of Casas Viejas perpetrated under the direct order of the Prime Minister Azaña, who gave the direct and famous command:"Leave no wounded or prisoners, shoot at the stomach!"
"The revolutionary movement of 8th January 1933 was organised by the Defence Corps, shock troops formed by the action groups of the CNT and the FAI. These badly armed groups hoped that a few committed groups would be able to infect the people who would then follow them. The general strike in the railways depended on the national federation of this sector which, unfortunately was in a minority relative to the national railway union of the UGT and the strike failed to get off the ground (...). The barracks did not throw open their doors to revolutionary magic. The people remained indifferent or approached the movement with great reservations"[19].
Peirats describes the five phases of these insurrectional actions:
This testimony is terribly eloquent. The most combative forces of the Spanish proletariat were mobilised for ridiculous battles that were condemned to be routed. The heroism and the great moral worth[20] of the combatants was brought to nothing by an ideology - anarchism - which produced the very opposite result from that which it was trying to attain. The conscious and collective action of the majority of the workers was substituted by the unreflecting action of a minority; the revolution was not the result of the workers' action but that of a minority who decreed it.
While the FAI was throwing its militants into imaginary battles, the real struggles of the proletariat passed completely unnoticed. In The Spanish Labyrinth Gerald Brenan notes that "the cause of almost all of the CNT strikes was the question of solidarity, that is the strikes broke out around the demand to free the prisoners or against unfair sackings. These strikes were not led by the FAI, they were real and spontaneous demonstrations of the unions"[21].
This disastrous conception of "the revolution"[22] was described in the famous Manifesto of the Thirty written by Pestaña and his friends: "History shows us that revolutions have always been made by daring minorities who have incited the people against the dominant forces. Is it enough for the minorities to want and call for it in order to bring about the destruction of the regime in power and its defensive forces in such a situation? That remains to be seen. Such minorities, joined one fine day by certain aggressive elements or taking advantage of the element of surprise, confront the public forces and provoke a violent event that may lead to the revolution (...) They entrust the victory of the revolution to the capacities of certain individuals and to the hypothetical intervention of the masses who support them when they take to the streets. There is no point in planning anything in advance, or in counting on anything or thinking about anything except flooding into the streets in order to vanquish a colossus: the state (...). Everything is left to chance; all hope is in the unexpected, in faith in the miracles of the Holy Revolution".
In the words of Peirats himself, thousands upon thousands of workers were no more than "clusters of tortured flesh scattered throughout the Spanish gaols". The brutality of the repression carried out by the Socialist-Republican alliance did not however stop them from winning the general election of November 1933: "The workers' movement, which had shown some signs of recovery, was hit hard and retreated after the anarchist adventure. On the other hand, the reaction recovered from its fearful hesitation and went onto the offensive with great energy. The anarchists had not managed to draw the masses behind them but their defeat was that of the masses. The government and the reaction understood perfectly; they affirmed themselves and organised themselves openly"[23].
The change in the political situation was also linked to the development in the international situation and, in particular to the perspective of the Second World War, towards which capitalism was inexorably headed. There were two preconditions for war; to crush beforehand those sectors of the proletariat who still had some reserves of combativeness and to enroll the whole of the world proletariat within anti-fascist ideology. Against the fascist offensive, that is the offensive of the imperialist camp composed of Germany and Italy, it was necessary to marshal the workers behind the defence of democracy, that is the opposite camp formed around Great Britain and France. It was the latter camp that the USSR[24] and the United States would later join.
Engaging the proletariat in the defence of democracy and anti-fascism, meant dragging its struggle off its class terrain and towards aims that were foreign to it and that were merely in the service of one of the imperialist camps. With this aim in view, Social-Democracy (abetted by Stalinism from 1934 onwards) used a combination of legal and pacifist means as well as "violent" policies to drag the proletariat towards insurrectional struggles condemned to bitter defeat and followed by barbaric repression.
This international perspective accounts for the dramatic about-face of the PSOE in Spain following its defeat in the elections of 1933. Largo Caballero, who had been no less than Councillor of State to the dictator Primo de Rivera and who had participated in the Republican government from 1931 to 1933[25] as Labour Minister, suddenly became a revolutionary maximalist[26] and adopted the insurrectional policy defended up to then by the FAI.
This cynical manoeuvre mirrored that of the Austrian Social-Democrats, who managed to mobilise the workers of that country for a suicidal insurrection against the pro-fascist Chancellor Dollfuss which ended in a terrible defeat. Largo Caballero undertook to defeat a particularly combative sector of the Spanish proletariat, that of the Asturias. The coming to power of the most pro-fascist section of the current Spanish right - that led by Gil Robles whose slogan was "All power to the leader" - incited the miners of the Asturias to rise up in October 1934. The Socialists had promised them a vast general strike throughout the whole of Spain but they were careful to avoid any solidarity movement in Madrid or in the areas were they were influential.
The workers of Asturia were caught in a trap, from which they could only escape by means of the solidarity of their class brothers in other regions. This could be based not on a struggle against the new right-wing government but rather against the Republican state which it served. The spontaneous attempts to strike which occurred in several places in Spain were blocked and were refused recognition not only by the Socialists but also by the CNT and the FAI: "In fact the FAI and consequently the CNT too, were against the general strike and when their militants participated in the struggle on their own initiative and, as usual, with great heroism they called on them to stop doing so in Barcelona and made no attempt to extend the strike to other regions where they were the predominant force"[27].
In Catalonia the autonomous Esquerra Republicana government took advantage of the situation to organise its own "insurrection", whose aim was to declare "the Catalan state within the Federal Spanish Republic". In order to carry out this grandiose "revolutionary action", they first banned the CNT publication, closed down its centres and arrested its better known militants, one of whom was Durruti. The "strike" was imposed by force of arms by the autonomist police force. The radio of the Catalonian "revolutionary" government did not fail to denounce the "anarchist provocateurs who have sold themselves to the reaction". This terrible confusion reached a magnificent high-point the next day: the Catalonian government surrendered shamefully as soon as it was confronted by two regiments that had remained faithful to Madrid. The reaction of the CNT was pitiful. It declared in a Manifesto: "the movement that broke out this morning must be transformed into popular heroism through proletarian action, without accepting the protection of the public forces, which shame those who authorised it and who lay claim to it. The CNT has been the victim of bloody repression for a long time and can no longer be confined within the limited space that its oppressors have left it. We demand the right to intervene in this struggle and we will take it. We are the best guarantee against fascism and those who claim otherwise are promoting fascism by preventing us from acting"[28].
Certain points can be drawn out of the CNT's manifesto very clearly:
This manifesto marks a very serious development in its political orientation. Against the whole tradition of the CNT and against the will of many anarchist militants, it abandoned the terrain of workers' solidarity to embrace the terrain of anti-fascism and "critical" support for Catalan nationalism.
It was quite logical for the CNT, as a union, to go onto this anti-worker terrain. Within the framework of the repression and marginalisation for which the Republican state was responsible, it needed desperately a "liberal" regime that would enable it to play a role as a "recognised spokesman". But the FAI was the mouthpiece of anarchism and the propagandist of the struggle "against any form of state" that denounced "any alliance" with political parties; as such
it is harder to see why it supported this orientation.
A deeper analysis makes it possible to understand this paradox. The FAI had made the CNT, a union, into an organisation for the "mobilisation of the masses" which obliged it increasingly to make concessions. It was no longer the logic of anarchist principles that directed the FAI's action; it was more and more the "realities" of unionism, determined by the imperious need to be integrated into the state.
Moreover anarchist principles are not seen as the expression of the aspirations, the general demands and historic interests of a social class, the proletariat. So they are not rooted in the terrain marked out by its historic struggle. On the contrary, they claim to be much "freer". Their terrain is timeless and unhistorical, basing itself on the freedom of the individual in general. The logic of this kind of reasoning is implacable: the interest of the free individual may be the rejection of any kind of authority, of any state and any centralisation or it may be the tactical acceptance of the "lesser evil". So against the fascist danger, that denies all rights simply and strictly, it is preferable to have a democratic regime that formally recognises certain individual rights.
Gomez Casas stresses in his book that "the mentality of the radical part of anarcho-syndicalism saw the process as revolutionary gymnastics by means of which the optimum conditions for social revolution would be obtained" (ibid). This vision considers it essential to maintain the masses in a state of mobilisation, whatever its aim. The "anti-fascist" terrain evidently seemed propitious in order to "radicalise the masses" and conduct them towards the "social revolution", as the "left-wing" socialists of the period advocated. In fact, the anti-fascist vision of Largo Caballero and that of the FAI seemed to converge but their intentions were radically different. Largo Caballero was trying to bleed the Spanish proletariat dry by means of his calls to "insurrection" whereas the majority of the FAI militants sincerely believed in the possibility of the social revolution. On the question of the Republic Largo Caballero declared in 1934 (in complete contradiction with what he had said in 1931): "The working class wants the democratic Republic [not] for its intrinsic virtues, not as an ideal of government but because within its framework the class struggle, that has been stifled by despotic regimes, can obtain its immediate and middle term aims. If this is not so, why should the workers want the Republic and democracy?"[29]. For his part, Durruti said: "We are not interested in the Republic but we accept it as a departure point for a process of social democratisation, on condition of course that this Republic really does guarantee those principles that make freedom and social justice more than empty words. If the Republic disdains the aspirations of the workers, then the slight interest that they have in it will be reduced to nil because this institution would not answer the hopes awoken on 14th April"[30].
How could the 20th century state with its bureaucracy, its army, its system of repression and totalitarian manipulation, be "a departure point for a process of social democratisation"? How in anyone's wildest dreams could it be the guarantor of "freedom and social justice"? The very idea is as absurd as it is illusory...
This contradiction had a long history. When General Sanjurjo rose up against the Republic on 10th August 1932, provoking the mobilisation of the Seville workers under the leadership of the CNT, the latter already saw the struggle as being on an openly anti-fascist terrain. In a manifesto it stated: "Workers! Peasants! Soldiers! A factious and criminal assault of the most shady and reactionary section of the army, of the autocratic and military caste which is bogging Spain down in the most terrible horrors of the dark period of the dictatorship (...) has surprised us all, obscuring our history and our consciousness, burying our national sovereignty in the most deadly of choices"[31].
The proletariat had to block the assassin's hand of General Sanjurjo but its struggle could only follow its class interests, whose perspective represents the interests of the whole of humanity. It was therefore necessary for them to combat both fascism and also its Republican rival. The CNT's manifesto places the emphasis on... national sovereignty! It calls for a choice between dictatorship and the Republic. The Republic that had already assassinated more than one thousand workers and peasants through its repression! The Republic that had filled the prisons and gaols with militant workers, essentially those belonging to the CNT!
The assessment to be made is very clear and we will make it by leaving the last word to our predecessors of the Italian Communist Left: "We will now look at the action of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) which now controls the CNT. After the fall of Azaña it demanded an unconditional amnesty, also valid for the generals of the military pronunciamientos, the friends of General Sanjurjo. It abandoned the CNT workers who had put a stop to the latter's manoeuvres in Seville by telling them not to do anything. In October 1934 it adopted the same position when it wrote that it was a question of a power struggle between Marxists and fascists, which was of no interest to the proletariat and that the latter must wait before intervening until the two had destroyed each other"[32].
The attempt of the FAI to rescue the CNT for the working class was a failure. It was not the FAI that corrected the CNT, it was rather the CNT that that dragged the FAI into the state capitalist trap. This was apparent in 1936 when well-known members of the FAI collaborated in the government in the name of the CNT.
"In February 1936 all the forces within the proletariat shared the same goal: the need to attain victory for the popular front in order to get rid of the right-wing and obtain an amnesty. From social-democracy to the centrist parties[33], to the CNT and the POUM, not forgetting the parties of the Republican left, everyone was agreed to divert the explosion of class conflicts onto the parliamentary arena"[34]
In the next article in the series we will analyse the situation in 1936 and examine the definitive union between the CNT and the bourgeois state.
RR - C.Mir 10-12-07
[1] See International Review n°131, "The CNT's contribution to the constitution of the Spanish Republic (1921-1931)"
[2] The anarchist author of the book History of the Spanish workers' movement (2 volumes in Spanish). The quotations translated here are extracts from the second volume.
[3] It is to be noted that Macia was a Catalan nationalist army officer.
[4] Juan Garcia Oliver (1901-1980) was a founder member of the FAI and one of its best-known leaders. In 1936 he was made a minister of the Republic within the government of the socialist Largo Caballero (we will go into this in a future article).
[5] Olaya reveals that in 1928, "the Republicans for their part entered into contact with Arturo Parera, José Robusté, Elizalde and Hernandez, members of the FAI and the Catalan regional committee of the CNT".
[6] A Spanish anarchist newspaper which appeared for the first time in 1888. In 1923 it was suppressed by Primo de Rivera's dictatorship. In 1930 it reappeared as an organ of the FAI.
[7] In his pamphlet, The Bakhuninists at work, Engels shows how the leaders of the Spanish section of the IWA "had been preaching the gospel of unqualified abstention too long to be able suddenly to reverse their line; and so they invented that deplorable way out - that of having the International abstain as a body, but allowing its members as individuals to vote as they liked. The result of this declaration of political bankruptcy was that the workers, as always in such cases, voted for those who made the most radical speeches, that is, for the Intransigents, and considering themselves therefore more or less responsible for subsequent steps taken by their deputies, became involved in them".
[8] ie, the Iberian peninsula
[9] Olaya, ibid.
[10] Gómez Casas, the anarchist author of a History of Spanish Anarcho-syndicalism. We have reproduced extracts from this book in previous articles in this series.
[11] This attempt to adopt a "correct" orientation by means of campaigns of intimidation and bureaucratic manoeuvres gave rise to tragi-comic situations due to the desire of each committee to be "more insurrectional" than the next one. Olaya describes the chaos created by the national committee in October 1932, "when to prove that it was not influenced by the Pestaña tendency, asked the unions in its Circular n°31 if they would agree to ratify or rectify the decisions of the August plenum on the revolutionary general strike". The Levant Committee (Valencia) replied that it was ready for action. This firm reply stopped the national committee in its tracks; it backed down and revoked the order. This angered the Levant Committee, which demanded that a date be fixed to "go out onto the streets" A plenum was therefore convoked and, after a series of zigzags, it was decided that the "general strike" would take place in January 1933 (we will come back to this later).
[12] The Republic's insistent campaigns about the "FAI menace" only served to nourish the myth believed by some FAI militants that they had fomented this or that revolutionary action. Olaya wrote of the declaration of the general strike in Seville which was decided in July 1931 and cancelled two days later: "in reality it was no more than bragging, at the time the FAI was no more than a ghost used by the bourgeoisie to frighten old ladies".
[13] Industrial and mining district in the province of Barcelona.
[14] In fact, although CNT militants certainly played a very active role in the movement, the attitude of the CNT as an organisation was fairly tepid and contradictory. On 21st January "the departmental Plenum called by Emilio Mira, the secretary of the regional committee of the CNT, was held and it decided to send another delegate. Although some delegates were in favour of expressing solidarity with the strikers, the majority abstained on the pretext that they did not have a mandate from their organic base" (Olaya, ibid). This decision was re-examined the next day but was revoked once more on the 24th when a manifesto was adopted calling for an end to the strike.
[15] Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, ibid.
[16] The escamots were "Catalonian action groups that expressed xenophobia against anything that was not Catalonian" (Peirats, ibid).
[17] The centres of the escamots.
[18] Peirats, ibid.
[19] Peirats, ibid.
[20] The honesty and uprightness of many FAI militants was proverbial. Buenaventura Durruti, for example never touched the funds entrusted to him even when he had nothing to eat.
[21] Ruedo Ibérico publishers, 1977 Madrid. Brenan is not an author who has links with the workers' movement but he examines the historic period 1931-39 with great honesty, which often enables him to make correct observations.
[22] By denouncing in a caractural way the absurdity of the "insurrectional method" of its opponents in the FAI, those who wrote the Manifesto - who belonged to the unionist wing of the CNT - did not aim to clarify consciousness but rather to reinforce their reformist and capitulatory band wagon.
[23] Munis, Jalones de derrota promesas de Victoria. Munis was a Spanish revolutionary (1911-1988) who broke with Trotskyism in 1948 and approached the positions of the Communist Left. He was a founder member of the group Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (FOR). For an analysis of his work see the International Review n°58. Chapter V of our book 1936:Franco y la Republica masacran al proletariado goes into a critique of his positions on the so-called Spanish revolution in 1936.
[24] We can recall here that there was formerly a secret pact allying the USSR and Hitler from 1939-41.
[25] See International Review n°131, the fourth article in the series.
[26] The Young Socialists venerated him as the "Spanish Lenin".
[27] Bilan, organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, "In the absence of a class party", no 14, Dec 1934-Jan 35. This analysis is corroborated by a passage in the book History of the FAI by Juan Gomez Casas: "J.M. Molina states that although the CNT and the FAI were by no means involved in the strike (he was talking about the one in the Asturias in 1934), the committees of these two organisations were in permanent session. He said that 'all these meetings accorded with our own inhibition but without committing one of the most serious and incomprehensible errors in the history of the CNT'. Molina is referring to the position taken by some of the organisms of the CNT for a return to work and the instructions to this effect given to the radio by Patricio Navarro, a member of the regional committee (in Barcelona, the regional Committee that met in plenary session, headed by Ascaso, was obliged to resign)".
[28] Quoted by Peirats, ibid.
[29] Quoted by Bolloten, an author sympathetic to anarchism, in his very interesting work the Spanish Civil War: revolution and counter-revolution.[30] Juan Gomez Casas, History of the FAI, ibid.
[31] Quoted by Peirats, ibid.
[32] Bilan, n°34, "In the absence of a class party", ibid.
[33] This is the rather ambiguous term by which the Italian Left of the period described Stalinism.
[34] Bilan n°36, Oct-Nov 1936, "The Lesson of the Events in Spain".
In 2007 the ICC held its 17th International Congress. For the first time since 1979, the Congress was able to welcome delegates of other internationalist groups coming literally from the four corners of the earth (from Brazil to Korea). As we have pointed out in the article on the work of the Congress,[1] this was no innovation on our part: the ICC did nothing other than adopt the same approach that had led to its own creation in 1975, and which it had itself inherited - as we will see - from the Communist Left and particularly from the French Communist Left (Gauche Communiste de France, GCF). Whence the interest of the article which we are publishing below, and which is the report originally published in Internationalisme n°23, of a conference of internationalists held in May 1947, just 60 years before our own 17th Congress.[2]
The 1947 conference was called by the Dutch Communistenbond "Spartacus", a "council communist" group which had survived the 1939-45 war despite ferocious repression, especially following its participation in the workers' struggles under the occupation.[3] The conference itself was held at a dark moment for those rare revolutionaries who had remained true to the principles of proletarian internationalism and refused to fight for the defence of bourgeois democracy and Stalin's "socialist fatherland". In 1943 a wave of strikes in Northern Italy had revived hopes that the Second World War II would end in the same way as the First, with a workers' uprising which this time would not only bring the war to an end, but open the way to a new proletarian revolution which would sweep away capitalism and its train of horror for ever. But the ruling class had drawn the lessons of 1917 and World War II ended with the proletariat systematically crushed before it even had the chance to rise: the Italian workers' districts bloodily put down by the German occupiers; the Warsaw rising destroyed by the German army under the benevolent gaze of its soviet adversary;[4] the massive aerial bombardment of the German working class districts by US and British aviation; these are only a few examples. The GCF realised that in this period, the road to revolution was no longer open in the short term: as they wrote in reply to the Communistenbond in preparation for the conference:
"It was in some sense natural that the monstrosity of the war should open eyes and cause new revolutionary militants to appear. As a result in 1945 there began to appear here and there small groups which, notwithstanding their inevitable confusion and political immaturity, nonetheless were sincere in their efforts to rebuild the proletariat's revolutionary movement.
"Unlike the First, the Second World War did not end in a wave of revolutionary class struggle. Quite the contrary. After a few feeble attempts, the proletariat suffered a disastrous defeat which opened a worldwide reactionary course. In such conditions, the weak groups which emerged at the end of the war risked being swept away or broken. We have already seen this process begin, some groups weakening while others have disappeared altogether, such as the 'Communist revolutionaries' in France".[5]
The GCF had no illusions as to the conference's potential: "In a period such as ours' of reaction and retreat, there can be no question of forming new parties or a new International - as the Trotskyists & Co. are doing - for the bluff of such artificial constructions has never achieved anything other than to leave the workers even more confused than before".[6] This did not mean that the GCF thought the conference a waste of time, on the contrary they considered it vital for the very survival of the internationalist groups: "No group has exclusive possession of 'the absolute and eternal truth' and no group alone will be able to resist the pressure of today's terrible historic course. The groups' very existence and their ideological development are directly dependent on the links that they will be able to establish and the exchange of views, the confrontation of ideas, the debate that they are able to establish and develop internationally.
"This task seems to us of primary importance for militants at the present time, and this is why we have pronounced ourselves in favour and are determined to do everything we can to encourage any effort to make contact and to develop meetings and wider correspondence".[7]
If for no other reason, this conference was important in that it was the first international meeting of revolutionaries after six terrible years of war, repression and isolation. But in the end, the historical context - the "period of reaction and retreat" - got the better of the initiative of 1947. The results of the conference were meagre in the extreme. In October 1947 the GCF wrote to the Communistenbond to ask them to organise a new conference with a preparatory discussion bulletin, only one issue of which was ever published; the second conference never took place. In the years that followed most of the participating groups disappeared, including the GCF which was reduced to a few isolated comrades who maintained their ties as best they could through correspondence.[8]
Today the historical context is very different. After years of counterrevolution, the wave of struggles that followed May 1968 in France marked the revolutionary class' return to the historical stage. These struggles were unable to rise to the level demanded by the extent of capitalism's attacks during the 1980s, and came to an abrupt halt with the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. The 1990s were a very difficult period of discouragement and confusion for both the working class and its revolutionary minorities. But with the new millennium, things began to move again: on the one hand, the last few years have seen a development of workers' struggles increasingly on the basis of the fundamental question of solidarity. At the same time, the presence of the groups invited to the ICC's Congress bears witness to the growing development of a truly world wide political reflection among the small minorities which uphold an internationalist vision and which are trying to develop contacts amongst each other.
In this situation, the experience of 1947 is alive and up to date. Like a seed that has remained hidden in the winter soil, it bears a potential for today's internationalists. In this short introduction, we want to highlight the main lessons which we think should be drawn from the conference and from the GCF's participation in it.
Ever since 1914 and the betrayal of the socialist parties and the unions, even more since the 1930s when the communist parties went the same way, followed by the Trotskyist groups in the 1940s, there has been a proliferation of groups and parties which claim to be working class, but whose reason for existence is in reality nothing other than to support the domination of the capitalist class and its state. This is why the GCF wrote in 1947: "It is not a matter of discussions in general, but of meetings which will make it possible for revolutionary proletarian groups to discuss together. This necessarily implies a discrimination on the basis of political ideological criteria. To avoid any ambiguity and to avoid as much as possible remaining vague on the matter, it is absolutely necessary to make these criteria as clear as possible".[9] The GCF identified four key criteria:
Following the conference, the criteria proposed by the GCF in its letter of October 1947 are reduced to two:
As we can see, these criteria are focused on the two questions of war and revolution: in our opinion they remain wholly valid today.[10] What has changed, however, is the historical context in which they are posed. For the generations who are coming to political activity today, World War II and the Russian revolution are far-off events known only from history books. They remain critical for the revolutionary future of the working class and determining for a profound commitment to the revolutionary cause. But for today's generation, in the immediate the question of revolution is posed through the necessary denunciation of wars throughout the world: Iraq, the Israeli-Arab conflict, Chechnya, nuclear tests in North Korea, etc.; in the immediate, the question of revolution is posed more through the denunciation of fraudulent imitations of the Chavez variety than directly in relation to the Russian revolution of 1917.
In the same way, there is no danger today of fascism being used to enrol the mass of the working class for imperialist war, even though some countries (notably those of the ex-Eastern bloc) still suffer from the presence of fascist gangs which terrorise the population and pose a real problem for revolutionaries. As a result anti-fascism cannot in present conditions be a major means of controlling the proletariat ideologically, as it was during the 1939-45 war when it was used to draw workers in behind the defence of the democratic state, even if it can still be used to distract the workers from the defence of their own class interests.
An important discussion, both before and during the conference itself, was the attitude to adopt towards anarchism. For the GCF it was clear that "like the Trotskyists or any other movement which has participated (or participates) in imperialist war under the pretext of defending a country (Russia) or defending one form of bourgeois rule against another (defence of the Republic and democracy against fascism), the anarchist movement had no place in a conference of revolutionary groups". The exclusion of anarchist groups was thus determined not by the fact that they were anarchist, but by their attitude towards imperialist war. The distinction is an important one and is illustrated by the fact that the conference was in fact presided by an anarchist (as we can read in a "correction" to the report published in Internationalisme n°24).
The heterogeneity of the anarchist current is such that today the question can no longer be posed in such simple terms. Under the same denomination of "anarchist" we can find groups which differ from the Trotskyists on the sole question of the "party" while at the same time supporting the whole range of Trotskyist demands (right down to the demand for a Palestinian state!), and truly internationalist groups with which communists can perfectly well not only discuss but undertake a common activity on the basis of internationalism.[11] In our opinion, there can be no question today of rejecting discussion with groups or individuals simply because they describe themselves as "anarchists".
In conclusion, we want to emphasise three other significant aspects of the conference:
ICC, 6th January 2008
(Note: in the text below, the footnotes at the end of the text are from the original, the notes included immediately after the article were added to clarify certain historical points)
On 25th and 26th May an International Conference took place to develop contacts between revolutionary groups. It was not just for security reasons that this Conference was not announced with great fanfare, as are the Stalinist and Socialist meetings. The participants at the Conference were very much aware that the proletariat is living through a terrible period of reaction and that they themselves are very isolated, as is inevitable in a period of social reaction. Nor are they given to the spectacular bluffs that are so much to the taste - to the very bad taste - of all the Trotskyist groups.
This Conference did not try to set itself immediate concrete aims which it would have been impossible to realise in the present situation. Nor did it try to set up some artificial structure in the guise of an International or to make inflammatory proclamations to the proletariat. Its sole aim was to make initial contact between dispersed revolutionary groups, to allow a confrontation of their respective ideas on the present situation and on the perspectives for the proletariat's struggle for its emancipation.
By calling this Conference, the Communistenbund "Spartacus" of Holland (better known as the Council Communists) [i] have broken the harmful isolation in which most revolutionary groups find themselves and have made it possible to clarify a certain number of questions.
The following groups were represented at the Conference and participated in the debates:
Moreover there were comrades belonging to various revolutionary groupings who participated in the debates of the Conference either in person present or through written interventions.
We draw attention to a long letter from the "Socialist Party of Great Britain", addressed to the Conference, in which it explains at length its specific political positions.
The FFGC[15] also sent a short letter in which it wished the Conference "good work" but said that it was unable to participate for lack of time, and because of urgent work.[ii]
The following agenda was adopted as a framework for discussion at the Conference.
This first Conference was not well enough prepared, had too little time, and the agenda proved to be much too ambitious to be completed. Only the first three points of the agenda were taken up adequately. Each point gave rise to interesting debates.
Obviously it would be presumptuous to expect this exchange of views to reach a unanimous position and the participants at the Conference never had such pretensions. However we can say that the debates, which were passionate at times, revealed a greater agreement than we might have expected.
On the first point of the agenda concerning the general analysis of the present period of capitalism, the majority of the interventions rejected Burnham's theories concerning the immediate possibility of revolution and the need to lead it, they also rejected the idea that capitalist society is able to continue by means of an eventual development of production. The present period was characterised culturally and politically as that of state capitalism.
The question of whether organisational forms like the unions and activity such as participation in electoral campaigns can still be used by the proletariat in the present period gave rise to a lively and very interesting debate. It is to be regretted that the tendencies who still advocate these forms of class struggle and who do not realise that these outworn and outdated forms can only be anti-proletarian today - the PCI of Italy specifically - were not present at the Conference to defend their position. The Belgian Fraction and the autonomous Federation of Turin were there but the conviction of these groups in these positions, that they defended until recently, is now so shaken and unsure that they preferred not to speak on these points.
Therefore the debate did not take up whether it is possible to use unionism and electoral participation as forms of proletarian struggle, it discussed exclusively around the question of the historical reasons, the explanation of why it is impossible to use these forms of struggle in the present period. On the question of the unions the debate broadened out; the discussion was not specifically on the organisational form as such, which is only a secondary aspect. It investigated rather the goals that determine the struggle for corporatist and partial economic demands in the present conditions of decadent capitalism, in which they cannot be realised and can still less serve as a platform to mobilise the class.
The question of Workers' Councils or Committees as a new form of unitary organisation of the workers, reveals its full significance and becomes meaningful when linked tightly and inseparably with the goals presented to the proletariat today. This goal is not economic reform within the framework of the capitalist system but social transformation against the capitalist system.
The third point - tasks and organisation of the revolutionary vanguard - raised the problems of whether or not it is necessary to form a political class party, of what the role of such a party would be in the struggle for the emancipation of the class and of the relationship between the class and such a party, but unfortunately could not be deepened to the extent we would have wished.
A brief discussion was only able to allow the different tendencies to give a general outline of their positions on this point. However everyone felt that this was a decisive question both in order to make it possible to close the gap between the various revolutionary groups, as well as for the future and the success of the proletariat in its struggle for the destruction of capitalist society and the creation of socialism. This question, which we consider fundamental, was barely touched on and requires further discussion in order to deepen it and elaborate the issues more precisely. However it is important to note that at this Conference, although there were divergences on the importance of the role of an organisation of conscious revolutionary militants, it did emerge that the Council Communists, as well as the others present, do not deny the need for such an organisation to exist - whether it is called Party or not - if socialism is to triumph in the end. This is a point held in common, whose importance cannot be over-estimated.
There was not enough time at the Conference to take up the other points on the agenda. A short but very important discussion took place towards the end about the character and function of the anarchist movement. It was during the discussion about the groups to be invited to the next conferences that we were able to bring out the social-patriotic role of the anarchist movement during the 1939-45 war, in spite of its hollow revolutionary phraseology. We also pointed out that its participation in the partisan struggle for "national and democratic liberation" in France, in Italy and even today in Spain is a logical continuation of its participation in the bourgeois "republican and anti-fascist" government and in the imperialist war in Spain in 1936-38.
Our position that the anarchist movement, as well as the Trotskyists and any other tendency that participated in the imperialist war in the name of the defence of a nation state (the defence of Russia) or of one form of bourgeois domination against another (the defence of the Republic or of democracy against fascism) has no place in a conference of revolutionary groups, was supported by the majority of the participants. Only the representative of the "Prolétaire" advocated the invitation of certain non-official tendencies within anarchism or Trotskyism.
As we have already said, the conference ended without having got through the whole agenda, without having taken any practical decisions and without having voted any resolutions. It could not have been otherwise. This was not so much to avoid the religious ceremonial, as some comrades called it, at the end of every Conference which consists of an obligatory final vote on resolutions that do not mean much. In our view it was rather because the discussions were not sufficiently developed to make a vote possible on any resolution or to justify it.
The sceptical or those of ill-will may think: "So the Conference was no more than a meeting taking up the same old discussions and is of no further interest". Nothing could be further from the truth. We think, on the contrary, that the conference was indeed of interest and that its importance will emerge in the future in terms of the relationship between the various revolutionary groups. We must bear in mind that for the last 20 years these groups have lived in isolation, cloistered and closed in on themselves. This has inevitably produced in all of the tendencies a spirit of the chapel or sect; so many years of isolation means that each group has developed its own way of thinking, of reasoning and of expressing itself, which often makes it incomprehensible to the other groups. Half the time this is the reason why there are so many misunderstandings and such incomprehension between groups. There is above all a need to open oneself up to the ideas and arguments of others and to submit one's own ideas to the criticism of others. This is an essential condition for the existence of living revolutionary thought and it is this that makes this kind of conference so very interesting.
The first step, the least dramatic but the most difficult, has been made. All the participants at the conference, including the Belgian Fraction which agreed to participate only after a great deal of hesitation and a lot of scepticism, expressed their satisfaction and were pleased with the fraternal atmosphere and the seriousness of the discussion. Everyone said that they wanted to convoke another Conference soon, one that would be broader and better prepared, and that they wanted to continue the work of clarification and mutual confrontation.
This is a positive outcome which raises the hope that, by continuing along this path, revolutionary militants and groups will be able to go beyond the present phase of dispersal and so manage to work more effectively for the emancipation of their class. This is the class that has the mission to save the whole of humanity from the terrible and bloody destruction that is in the making and towards which decadent capitalism is dragging us.
Marco
Notes
[i] In the newspaper Libertaire of 29th May there is an article full of fantasy about this conference. The author, who signs himself AP and who passes for the Libertaire's expert on the history of the workers' movement, really does take too many liberties with history. He presents this Conference - which he did not attend and about which he knows absolutely nothing - as a Conference of Council Communists. In fact the latter, who indeed called the Conference, participated with the same status as all the other tendencies.
AP is not content to take liberties with past history, he also feels authorised to write in the past tense about history that is to come. Just like those journalists who recounted in advance and in detail Goering's execution, little dreaming that he might have the bad taste to commit suicide at the last moment, the Libertaire's historian, AP announces the participation of anarchist groups in the conference, although there were none.
It is true that the Libertaire was invited to attend but it refused and was right to do so in our opinion. The anarchist movement is now a current that is completely alien to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. This is shown by the participation of the anarchists in the Republican government and in the imperialist war in Spain in 1936-38, the continuation of their policy of class collaboration with any Spanish bourgeois political formation abroad under the pretext of struggling against fascism and Franco, their ideological and physical participation in the "resistance" against "foreign" occupation. The anarchist movement therefore had no place at this conference and it was a mistake to invite it.
[ii] The "urgent work" of the FFGC expresses eloquently how it feels about having contact with other revolutionary groups. What exactly is the problem of the FFGC; "lack of time" or lack of interest and understanding of the importance of contact and discussion between revolutionary groups? Or could it be that it is too embarrassed to confront its positions with those of other groups because of its lack of political orientation (both for and against participation in elections; for and against working in the unions; for and against participation in anti-fascist committees, etc...).
[1] See International Review n°130
[2] The other texts quoted in this introduction are published in full in our pamphlet La Gauche communiste de France (available in French only).
[3] See our book The Dutch and German communist left, notably the penultimate chapter. The Communistenbond Spartacus originated in the "Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front" which participated energetically in the Dutch workers' struggle of 1941 against the persecution of Jews by the Nazi occupying forces, and distributed leaflets calling for fraternisation inside German army barracks during the war.
[4] It was Churchill's decision to "let the Italians stew in their own juice". Stalin stopped the Red Army's advance for several months on the other side of the Vistula river from Warsaw, until the German repression was complete.
[5] Published in Internationalisme n°23, emphasis in the original. The "Communistes révolutionnaires" originated in the RKD, a group of Austrian Trotskyist refugees in France. They were the only delegates to the 1938 Périgny congress to oppose the formation of the 4th International, which they considered "adventurist".
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] This is not the place to write the post-war history of the Communistenbond Spartacus (see the last chapter of our book on The Dutch and German communist left). We will limit ourselves to a few major milestones: soon after the 1947 conference, the Communistenbond adopted a much more clearly "councilist" orientation, along the same lines as the old GIC (Groepen van internationale communisten) on the organisational level. In 1964 the group split to form the "Spartacusbond" and the group around the review Daad en Gedachte ("Deed and thought") inspired notably by Cajo Brendel. The Spartacusbond took an activist turn after 1968 and disappeared in 1980. Daad en Gedachte followed the logic of its councilist positions to their conclusion and disappeared in 1998 for lack of contributors to the review.
[9] Ibid.
[10] We adopted the same approach in 1976 when the Battaglia Comunista group launched an appeal for a conference of groups of the Communist Left, but without proposing any criteria for participation. We replied positively to the appeal, while at the same time insisting "For this initiative to be successful, for it to be a real step towards the rapprochement of revolutionaries, it is vital to clearly establish the fundamental political criteria which must serve as a basis and framework, so that discussion and confrontation of ideas are fruitful and constructive..." (see International Review n°40, "The constitution of the IBRP, an opportunist bluff").
[11] The ICC, for example, has engaged several times in discussions and even in common activity with the Moscow-based KRAS-AIT.
[12] See for example the article on our web site on the struggles in the MEPZA in the Philippines.
[13] See in particular our articles on the 17th Congress of the ICC and on the culture of debate in International Review n°130 and n°131.
[14] A "Correction" published in Internationalisme n°24 points out the presence of the "Autonomous section of Turin" of the PCI (ie. the "Partito Comunista Internazionalista" not the Stalinist CP). The section wrote in particular to correct the impression given in the report of certain of its positions: the Section "has declared itself autonomous precisely because of its disagreements on the electoral question and on the key issue of the unity of revolutionary forces".
[15] The so-called "French fraction of the Communist left" had broken with the GCF on an unclear political basis which had much more to do with personal animosities and resentments. See our pamphlet for more details.
In 1915, as the hideous reality of the European war became ever more apparent, Rosa Luxemburg wrote "The crisis of social democracy", a text better known as the "Junius pamphlet" from the pseudonym under which Luxemburg published it. The pamphlet was written in prison and was distributed illegally by the Internationale group which had been formed immediately after the outbreak of the war. It was a savage indictment of the positions adopted by the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The day hostilities began, on 4 August 1914, the SPD had abandoned its internationalist principles and rallied to the "Fatherland in danger", calling for the suspension of the class struggle and for participation in the war. This was a shattering blow to the international socialist movement, because the SPD had been the pride and joy of the whole Second International; instead of acting as a beacon of international working class solidarity, its capitulation to the war effort was seized on as a justification for similar acts of betrayal in other countries. The result was the ignominious collapse of the International.
The SPD had been formed as a marxist party in the 1870s, symbolising the growing influence of the current of "scientific socialism" within the workers' movement. In appearance, the SPD of 1914 retained its commitment to the letter of marxism even as it trampled on its spirit. Had not Marx, in his day, consistently warned against the threat posed by Tsarist absolutism, the main bulwark of reaction throughout Europe? Had not the First International been formed at a rally to support the struggle for Polish independence from the Tsarist yoke? Had not Engels, even while warning of the danger of war in Europe, still expressed the view that German socialists would have to adopt a "revolutionary defencist" position in the event of a Franco-Russian aggression against Germany? And now the SPD was calling for national unity at all costs in the face of the main danger facing Germany - the might of Tsarist despotism, whose victory, it said, would undo all the political and economic gains won by the working class through years of patient and tenacious struggle. It thus presented itself as the legitimate heir of Marx and Engels and their resolute defence of all that was progressive in European civilisation.
But in the words of Lenin, another revolutionary who had no hesitation in denouncing the shameful treason of the "Social-Chauvinists": "Whoever refers to Marx's attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Marx's statement that ‘the workers have no fatherland', a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution, shamelessly distorts Marx and substitutes the bourgeois for the socialist point of view".[1] Luxemburg argued along exactly the same lines. The war was not the same kind of war that had been seen in Europe in the middle part of the previous century. Such wars had been short, limited in space and limited in their goals, and mainly fought between professional armies; and, what's more, for the greater part of the century since 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic wars, the continent of Europe had experienced an unprecedented era of peace, economic expansion, and steadily rising living standards. Furthermore, such wars, far from ruining their antagonists, had more often served to accelerate the overall process of capitalist expansion, by clearing away feudal obstacles to national unification and enabling new nation states to establish themselves as a framework suited to the development of capitalism (the French revolutionary wars and the wars fought around the issue of Italian unity being clear cases in point).
Such wars - national wars which could still play a progressive function for capital itself - were a thing of the past. In its murderous destructiveness - 10 million men perished on the battlegrounds of Europe, almost all of them in the confines of a bloody and futile stalemate, while millions of civilians also perished, largely as a result of the misery and famine imposed by the war; in its global implications as a war between world-spanning empires, and hence with its virtually unlimited goals of conquest and of utter defeat of the enemy; in its character as a "total" war which mobilised not only millions of conscripted proletarians at the fronts, but also the sweat and sacrifice of millions more workers in the industries at the rear, this was a war of a new type, dumbfounding all the predictions of the ruling class that "it would all be over by Christmas". The monstrous carnage of the war was of course greatly intensified by the vastly developed technological means at the disposal of the antagonists, and the fact that the latter had already far outpaced the tactics and strategies evolved in the traditional schools of war further increased the rate of slaughter. But the barbarity of the war expressed something far deeper than the simple technical development of the bourgeois system. It was an expression of a mode of production that had entered a fundamental and historical crisis, revealing the obsolescent nature of capitalist social relations and posing the human species with the stark alternative: socialist revolution or a relapse into barbarism. Hence one of the most oft-quoted passages from the Junius pamphlet:
"Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism'. What does ‘regression into barbarism' mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes".
This epochal change had rendered obsolete Marx's arguments in favour of support for national independence (which, in any case, he had already declared to be a dead letter in the advanced countries of Europe after the Paris Commune). There could no longer be a question of looking for the most progressive national cause in this conflict, because national struggles had themselves lost all progressive function, had become mere instruments of imperialist conquest and of capitalism's career towards catastrophe:
"The national program could play a historic role only so long as it represented the ideological expression of a growing bourgeoisie, lusting for power, until it had fastened its class rule, in some way or other, upon the great nations of central Europe and had created within them the necessary tools and conditions of its growth. Since then, imperialism has buried the old bourgeois democratic program completely by substituting expansionist activity irrespective of national relationships for the original program of the bourgeoisie in all nations. The national phase, to be sure, has been preserved, but its real content, its function, has been perverted into its very opposite. Today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialistic desires, a battle cry for imperialistic rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialistic wars".
Not only had the "national tactic" changed - everything else had also been profoundly altered by the war. There was no going back to the previous era in which social democracy had patiently and systematically struggled to establish itself, and the proletariat as a whole, as an organised force within bourgeois society:
"One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us. Not that the basic law of capitalist development, the life-and-death war between capital and labour, will experience any amelioration. But now, in the midst of the war, the masks are falling and the old familiar visages smirk at us. The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat - these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers' movement seem a pleasant idyll".
These tasks were enormous because they demanded more than a stubborn defensive struggle against exploitation - they called for an offensive, revolutionary struggle to do away with exploitation once and for all, to "establish in the social life of man a conscious thought, a definite plan, the free will of mankind". Rosa's. insistence on the opening of a radically new epoch in the struggle of the working class was soon to become the commonly-agreed guideline of the international revolutionary movement which reconstituted itself from the ruins of social democracy and which, in 1919, founded the world party of the proletarian revolution - the Communist International. At its First Congress in Moscow, the CI famously proclaimed in its platform: "A new epoch is born! The epoch of the break-up of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat". And it likewise agreed with Rosa that if the proletarian revolution - which at that point was reaching its zenith throughout the globe, following the October insurrection in Russia and the revolutionary tide that was sweeping through Germany, Hungary and many other countries - was not able to overthrow capitalism, humanity would be plunged into another war, indeed into an epoch of unending war that would put the whole future of human culture into question.
Nearly 100 years later, capitalism is still here and, according to the official propaganda, it is the only possible form of social organisation. What has become of Luxemburg's dilemma between socialism and barbarism? Again, sticking to the ideological mainstream, socialism has been tried and found wanting in the 20th century. The bright hopes raised by the Russian revolution on 1917 have been dashed on the rocks of Stalinism and buried alongside the latter's corpse when the eastern bloc collapsed at the end of the 1980s. Not only has socialism turned out to be at best a utopia and at worse a nightmare; even the struggle of the working class, which the marxists said was its essential foundation, has disappeared in the amorphous fog of a "new" form of capitalism sustained not by an exploited producer class but by an infinite mass of consumers and an economy which is often more virtual than material.
Or so we are told. No doubt Luxemburg, if she could return from the dead, would be somewhat surprised to find that capitalist civilisation still rules the planet; in another article we will look more closely at the ways in which the system has managed to keep itself alive despite all the difficulties it has endured this past century. But if we abandon the distorting spectacles of the dominant ideology and look with a minimum of seriousness at the course that century has taken, we will see that the prognosis offered by Luxemburg, together with the majority of revolutionary socialists at the time, has been validated. This epoch - in the absence of the victory of the proletarian revolution - has already been the most barbaric in human history and brings with it the threat of an even deeper descent into barbarism, whose ultimate consequence could be not only the "collapse of civilisation" but the extinction of human life on the planet.
In 1915, only a minority of socialists stood clearly against the war. Trotsky joked that the internationalists who gathered that year at Zimmerwald could all fit into one taxi. But Zimmerwald itself was a sign of something stirring in the ranks of the international working class. By 1916 disaffection with the war, both at the battlefronts and at the rear, was becoming increasingly overt, as exemplified by strikes in Germany and Britain and the workers' demonstrations in Germany that greeted the release from jail of Luxemburg's comrade Karl Liebknecht, whose name had become synonymous with the slogan "the main enemy is at home". In February 1917 revolution broke out in Russia, bringing an end to the reign of the Tsars; but far from being a Russian 1789, a new if belated bourgeois revolution, February merely paved the way to October: the seizure of power by the working class organised in soviets, and proclaiming that this insurrection was merely the first blow struck for the world revolution that would not only end the war but end capitalism itself.
The Russian revolution, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks insisted over and over again, would stand or fall with the world revolution. And at first, its call to arms seemed to have been answered: mutiny in the French army in 1917; revolution in Germany in 1918, sending the bourgeois governments of the world scurrying to conclude a hasty peace lest the spectre of Bolshevism spread any further; soviet republics in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919; general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg, tanks to answer workers' unrest on the Clyde in the same year; occupation of the factories in Italy in 1920. This was a striking confirmation of the CI's notion that the new era was the era of wars and revolutions. Capitalism, by dragging humanity into the path of the military juggernaut, was also calling forth the necessity for the proletarian revolution.
But the consciousness reached by the most dynamic and far-sighted elements of the working class, the communists, rarely coincides with the levels reached within the class as a whole. The majority of the working class did not yet understand that there was no going back to the old era of peaceful and piecemeal reforms, They wanted above all an end to the war and although they had to force this demand on the bourgeoisie, the latter was able to profit from the idea that it would be possible to go back to the status quo ante bellum, albeit with a number of changes presented as gains by the workers: in Britain, "homes fit for heroes", votes for women, and Clause Four in the Labour programme, promising the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. In Germany, where revolution had already assumed material form, the promises were more radical, using terms like socialisation and workers' councils alongside the abdication of the Kaiser and the granting of a republic based on universal suffrage.
Almost universally, it was the social democrats, the German "labour party", those tried and trusted specialists of the struggle for reforms, who sold these illusions to the workers, illusions that enabled them to declare that they were on the side of the revolution even while calling on proto-fascist gangs to massacre the truly revolutionary workers of Berlin and Munich, along with Liebknecht and Luxemburg themselves; and at the same time, they supported the economic strangulation and military offensive against the Soviet power in Russia with the specious justification that the Bolsheviks had forced the hand of history by leading a revolution in a backward country where the working class was only a minority, thus offending the sacred principles of democracy.
In short, through a mixture of guile and brutal repression, the revolutionary wave was beaten back in a series of separate defeats. Cut off from the oxygen of world revolution, the revolution in Russia began to suffocate and devour itself, a process symbolised by the disaster of Kronstadt, where discontented workers and sailors demanding new soviet elections were crushed by the Bolshevik government. The "victor" thrown up by this process of internal degeneration was Stalin, and its first victim was the Bolshevik party itself, finally and irrevocably transformed into an instrument of a new state bourgeoisie which had abandoned all pretence of internationalism in favour of the fraudulent notion of "socialism in one country".
Capitalism thus survived the scare of the revolutionary wave, despite aftershocks like the general strike in Britain in 1926 and the Shanghai workers' uprising in 1927. It proclaimed its firm intention to go back to normal. During the war, the principles of profit and loss had been temporarily (and partially) suspended as virtually all production was geared towards the war effort, and the central state machine took direct control over whole sectors of the economy. In a report to the Third Congress of the Communist International, Trotsky noted how the war had introduced a new mode of functioning for the capitalist system, based essentially on state manipulation of the economy and the generation of vast mountains of debt, of fictitious capital:
"Capitalism as an economic system is, you know, full of contradictions. During the war years these contradictions have reached monstrous proportions. To obtain the resources required for war, the state resorted primarily to two measures: first, issuance of paper money; second, flotation of loans. Thus an ever-increasing amount of the so-called ‘valuable paper' (securities) entered into circulation, as the means whereby the state pumped real material values out of the country in order to destroy them in the war. The greater the sums expended by the state, i.e., the more real values it destroyed, the larger the amount of pseudo-wealth, of fictitious values accumulated in the country. State-loan paper has piled up mountain-high. Superficially it might seem that a country had grown extremely rich, but in reality the ground was being cut under the economic foundation, shaking it apart, bringing it to the verge of collapse. State debts have climbed to approximately 1,000 billion gold marks, which adds up to 62 percent of the present national wealth of the belligerent countries. Before the war, the world total of paper and credit money approximated 28 billion gold marks, today the amount is between 220 and 280 billion, i.e., ten times as much. And this, of course, does not include Russia, for we are discussing only the capitalist world. All this applies primarily, if not exclusively, to European countries, mainly continental Europe and particularly Central Europe. On the whole, as Europe kept growing poorer and poorer - as she has to this very day - she became and is still becoming encased in ever-thicker layers of paper values, or what is known as fictitious capital. This fictitious capital-paper currency, treasury notes, war bonds, bank notes, and so on - represent either mementos of deceased capital or expectations of capital yet to come. But at the present time they are in no way commensurate to genuine existing capital. However, they function as capital and as money and this tends to give an incredibly distorted picture of society and modern economy as a whole. The poorer this economy becomes, all the richer is the image reflected by this mirror of fictitious capital. At the same time, the creation of this fictitious capital signifies, as we shall see, that the classes share in different ways in the distribution of the gradually constricting national income and wealth. National income, too, has become constricted, but not to the same extent as the national wealth. The explanation for this is quite simple: The candle of capitalist economy was being burned at both ends".
Such methods were a sign that capitalism could only operate through flouting its own laws. The new methods were described as "war socialism", but in fact they were a means for preserving the capitalist system in an era when it had become obsolete, and were thus a desperate rampart against socialism, against the rise of a higher mode of social production. But while "war socialism" was seen as essential for winning the war, it was effectively dismantled afterwards.
The post war period confirmed another fundamentally new characteristic of the imperialist war. Whereas the wars of the 19th century had usually "made sense" economically, resulting in an important surge of development for the winning side, the gigantic material costs of the world war led to the decline and in some cases even the economic ruin of both victors and vanquished. A fitful period of reconstruction began in war-ravaged Europe in the early 20s, but the economies of the Old World remained sluggish: the spectacular rates of growth that had been achieved by the first capitalist countries in the period before the war were not seen again. Unemployment became a permanent fixture in countries like Britain, while Germany's economy, bled white by vicious reparations, broke all previous records for inflation, and was kept afloat almost entirely by credit.
The main exception was America, which had flourished during the war by acting as what Trotsky in the same report termed Europe's quartermaster. It now definitively emerged as the world's most powerful economy and flourished precisely because its rivals had been laid low by the gigantic cost of the war, the post-war social turmoil, and the effective disappearance of the Russian market. For America above all this was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties: the images of the Flapper and the Model T mass produced in Henry Ford's factories reflected the reality of dizzying rates of growth. Having reached the end of its internal expansion, and greatly benefiting from the stagnation of the old European powers, American capital and commodities now began to invade the globe, sweeping both into Europe and into the underdeveloped and often still pre-capitalist regions. From being a net debtor in the 19th century, the US became the world's leading creditor - it was mainly American loans which kept Germany afloat during the 1920s. Although US agriculture was to a great extent left behind by the boom, there was a discernable rise in the consuming power of the urban and proletarian population. All this was apparently the proof that you could go back to the world of laisser-faire capitalism which had brought such extraordinary expansion in the 19th century. The re-assuring philosophy of Calvin Coolidge had triumphed. Thus the president addressed Congress in December 1928:
"No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquillity and contentment, harmonious relations between management and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the good will which comes from mutual understanding, and the knowledge that the problems which a short time ago appeared so ominous are yielding to the touch of manifest friendship. The great wealth created by our enterprise and industry, and saved by our economy, has had the widest distribution among our own people, and has gone out in a steady stream to serve the charity and the business of the world. The requirements of existence have passed beyond the standard of necessity into the region of luxury. Enlarging production is consumed by an increasing demand at home, and an expanding commerce abroad. The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism".
Famous last words! In 1929 came the crash. The feverish growth of the US economy came up against the inherent limits of the market, and many of those who had believed in unlimited growth, in capitalism creating its own markets forever, and had invested their savings on the basis of this mythology, were now jumping from high buildings. Furthermore, this was not a crisis the like of which had punctuated the 19th century, crises so regular during the first half of that century that it was possible to talk about a "decennial cycle". In those days, after a brief period of slump, new markets were found across the world, and a new and even more vigorous phase of growth set in; furthermore in the period from the 1870s to 1914, characterised by an accelerated imperialist thrust to conquer the remaining non-capitalist regions, the crises that struck the centres of the system were far less violent than they had been in capitalism's youth, despite the talk of a "Long Depression" between the 70s and the 90s, which to some extent reflected the beginning of the end of Britain's world economic supremacy .
But in any case there was no comparison whatever between the commercial problems of the 19th century and the world slump that set in during the 1930s. It was on a qualitatively different level: something fundamental in the conditions of capitalist accumulation had changed. The depression was world wide - from its nub in the USA it then hit Germany, which had become almost totally dependent on the US, and the rest of Europe. The crisis was equally devastating in the colonial or semi-dependent regions, which had been largely compelled by their major imperialist "owners" to produce primary products needed in the metropoles. The sudden plunge in world prices spelt ruin for the majority of these regions.
A measure of the scale of this crisis can be seen in the fact that while world production had declined by around 10% as a result of the First World War, it fell by no less than 36.2% as a result of the Crash.[2] In the US, which had greatly benefited from the war, the fall in industrial production was as much as 53.8%. Estimates for the resulting unemployment figures vary but Sternberg's source puts it at 40 million in the main capitalist countries. The fall in world trade was equally catastrophic, dropping to as much as a third of its pre-1929 levels. But the most important difference of all between the slump of the 1930s and the crises of the 19th century was that there was no longer any "automatic" process leading to a new cycle of growth and expansion towards what remained of the non-capitalist areas of the globe. The bourgeoisie soon realised that the "hidden hand" of the market would not be picking up the economy from the floor in the near future. It thus had to jettison the naïve liberalism of Coolidge and his successor Hoover and recognise that from now on the state had to intervene despotically in the economy to preserve the capitalist system. This recognition was theorised above all by Keynes, who understood that the state had to prop up failing industries and generate an artificial market to make up for the inability of the system to develop new ones: this was the meaning of the massive "public works" undertaken in Roosevelt's New Deal, the support given to the new CIO trade unions in order to facilitate the boosting of consumer demand, and so on. In France the new policies took the form of the Popular Front. In Germany and Italy, they appeared as fascism and in Russia as Stalinism. The underlying meaning was the same. The new epoch of capitalism was the epoch of state capitalism.
But state capitalism does not exist in each country in isolation from the rest. On the contrary, it is determined to a large extent by the necessity to centralise and defend the national economy as a whole against other competing nations. In the 30s, this had an economic side - protectionism was seen as a means of defending your own industries and markets from the encroachments of other country's industries and markets; but it had a much more significant military side because economic competition was aggravating a slide towards another world war. State capitalism is in essence a war economy. Fascism, which boasted loudly about the benefits of war, was the most overt expressions of this tendency. Under the Hitler regime, German capital responded to its dire economic situation by embarking on a frenzied course of rearmament. This had the "benefit" of rapidly reabsorbing unemployment, but this was not the aim of the war economy in itself; rather it was to prepare for a new violent division of markets. Similarly, the Stalinist regime in Russia, with its ruthless subordination of proletarian living standards to the development of heavy industry, was also geared towards making Russia a world military power to be reckoned with, and as with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan (which had already embarked on a campaign of armed conquest through its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the rest of China in 1937), the "success" of these regimes in resisting the effect of the slump was directly linked to their willingness to subordinate all production to the needs of war. But the development of a war economy was also the real secret of the massive programme of public works in the countries of the New Deal and Popular Front, even when these countries were much slower to directly re-adapt their factories towards the massive production of weapons and war-materiel.
Victor Serge once described the period of the 30s as "midnight in the century". No less than the 1914-18 war, the economic crisis of 1929 had confirmed the senility of the capitalist mode of production. Here, on a scale far greater than anything seen in the 19th century, we had that "epidemic which in all previous epochs would have seemed absurd - the epidemic of overproduction".[3] Millions went hungry and were thrown into enforced idleness in the most industrialised nations of the world not because the factories and fields could not produce enough, but because they were producing "too much" for the market to absorb. It was a new confirmation of the necessity for the socialist revolution.
But the proletariat's first attempt at carrying out the verdict of history had been definitively defeated by the late 20s and everywhere the counter-revolution was triumphant. It plunged the most terrifying depths precisely in those countries where the revolution had risen the highest. In Russia it took the form of the labour camps and mass executions; the deportation of entire populations, the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants; Stakhanovite super-exploitation in the factories. At the level of culture it took the form of the repudiation of all the social and artistic experimentation of the revolution's early years and the return to the most philistine bourgeois habits and officially imposed Socialist Realist "taste".
In Germany and Italy the proletariat had been closer to revolution than in any other western European countries, and the consequence of their defeat was the imposition of a brutal police regime. Fascism was a vast bureaucracy of informers, the savage persecution of dissidents and social and ethnic minorities, most classically of the Jews in Germany. The Nazi regime trampled on hundreds of years of culture and wallowed in occultist and pseudo-scientific theories about the civilising mission of the Aryan race, burning books containing un-German ideas and exalting the virtues of blood, soil and conquest. Trotsky saw the destruction of culture in Nazi Germany as a particularly eloquent proof of the decadence of bourgeois culture:
"Fascism has opened up the depth of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing up from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the psychology of National Socialism" ("What is National Socialism?", 1933).
But precisely because fascism was a concentrated expression of the decline of capitalism as a system, it was a pure mystification to think that it could be fought without fighting capitalism as a whole, as the various brands of "anti-fascism" argued. This was demonstrated very clearly in Spain in 1936: the workers of Barcelona responded to the initial coup d'Etat led by the rightist general Franco with their own methods of class struggle - general strike, fraternisation with the troops, arming of the workers - and paralysed the fascist offensive in the space of days. The moment they handed their struggle over to the democratic bourgeoisie incarnated in the Popular Front, they were lost, dragged into an inter-imperialist contest which proved to be the general rehearsal for an even greater massacre. As the Italian left soberly concluded, the war in Spain was a terrible confirmation of its prognosis that the world proletariat had been defeated; and since the proletariat was the only obstacle to capitalism's drive to war, the course was now open to a new world war.
Picasso's painting of Guernica is rightly celebrated as a ground-breaking depiction of the horrors of modern war. The indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population of this Spanish town by German planes supporting Franco's armies still had the power to shock because it was a relatively new phenomenon. Aerial bombing of civilian targets during the First World War had been minimal and largely ineffective. The vast majority of those killed during that war were soldiers on the battlefronts. The second world war showed that capitalism in decline was increasing in its capacity for barbarism because this time the majority of those killed were civilians: "The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II, irrespective of political alignment, was roughly 72 million people. The civilian toll was around 47 million, including about 20 million due to war related famine and disease. The military toll was about 25 million, including about 5 million prisoners of war".[4] The most terrifying and concentrated expression of this horror was the industrialised murder of millions of Jews and other minorities by the Nazi regime, shot in batch after batch in the ghettos and forests of eastern Europe, starved and worked to death as slave labourers, gassed in hundreds of thousands at Auschwitz, Belsen or Treblinka. But the civilian death tolls from the bombing of the cities by both sides were proof that this Holocaust, this systematic murder of the innocent, was a generalised feature of this war. Indeed at this level the democracies certainly outdid the fascist powers, as the "carpet bombing" and "firebombing" of German and Japanese cities made the German Blitz seem amateurish in comparison. The symbolic culminating point in this new method of mass slaughter was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in terms of civilian deaths, the "conventional" bombing of cities like Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden were even more deadly.
The dropping of the atomic bomb by the US opened up a new era in two ways. First, it confirmed that capitalism had become a system of permanent war. Because if the atomic bomb signalled the final collapse of the Axis powers, it also opened up a new war front. The real target of Hiroshima was not Japan, already on its knees and suing for peace terms, but the USSR. It was a warning to the latter to moderate its imperialist ambitions in the Far East and Europe. Indeed, "the US joint chiefs of staff produced a plan to atom-bomb the twenty chief Soviet cities within ten weeks of the end of the war".[5] In other words the use of the atomic bomb ended the Second World War only to draw the battle lines for the third. And it also brought a new and frightful significance to Luxemburg's warning about the "inevitable consequences" of the period of unlimited wars. The atomic bomb demonstrated that the capitalist system now had the capacity to end human life on earth.
The years 1914-1945 - which Hobsbawm describes as "the Age of Catastrophe" - thus provide clear confirmation of the diagnosis that capitalism had become a decadent social system, just like ancient Rome or feudalism before it. The revolutionaries who had survived the persecution and demoralisation of the 30s and 40s, and who had stood up for internationalist principles against both imperialist camps before and during the war, were few in number; but for most of them this was a given. Two world wars and the immediate threat of a third, and a world economic crisis of unprecedented scale had seemed to confirm it once and for all.
In the ensuing decades, however, doubts began to creep in. Certainly the survival of capitalism meant that mankind now lived under the permanent threat of annihilation. Throughout the next 40 years, even if the two new imperialist blocs did not pull mankind into another world war, they remained in a state of unending conflict and hostility, fighting a series of proxy wars in the Far East, Middle East and Africa; and, on several occasions, especially during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, they brought the planet close to the brink of catastrophe. It has been officially estimated that up to 20 million people were killed during these wars and some estimates put it much higher.
These wars ravaged the underdeveloped parts of the world, and throughout the post war period these regions faced dire problems of poverty and malnutrition. However, in the main capitalist countries, there was a spectacular boom, which in retrospect bourgeois experts have named the "thirty glorious years". Growth rates matching or even surpassing those seen during the 19th century, steady rises in wages, the institution of welfare and health services under the benevolent guidance of the state.... By the 1960s in Britain, the working class was being told by British PM Harold Macmillan that "you've never had it so good", and among the sociologists, new theories flourished about capitalism transmuting into a "consumer society" which had "embourgeoisified" the working class with a never ending conveyor belt of televisions, washing machines, cars and package holidays. For many, including some in the revolutionary movement, this period invalidated the notion that capitalism had entered its decadent phase and proved its capacity for almost unlimited growth. "Radical" theorists like Marcuse began to look elsewhere than the working class for a subject of revolutionary change - to the peasants of the third world or the rebellious students of the capitalist centres.
We will return to a closer examination of the real bases for the post-war boom, in particular, looking at the means that capitalism in decline has adopted to stave off the immediate consequences of its contradictions. However, those who declared that capitalism had finally abolished these contradictions were to be revealed as superficial empiricists by the end of the 1960s, when the first symptoms of a new economic crisis appeared in the main western countries. By the mid 70s, the illness was explicit: inflation began to ravage the main economies, prompting a flight away from the Keynesian methods of using the state power to directly shore up the economy that had worked so well during the previous decades. The 80s were thus the decade of Thatcherism and Reaganism - which basically meant letting the crisis find its real level and allowing the sicker industries to go to the wall. Inflation was cured by recession. Since then we have been through a series of mini-booms and mini-recessions, and ideologically Thatcherism lives on in the project of neo-liberalism and privatisations, but behind all the rhetoric about a return to Victorian economic values of free enterprise, the role of the capitalist state remains as crucial as ever, manipulating economic growth through all kinds of financial manoeuvres, all which are predicated on a growing mountain of debt, symbolised above all by the fact that the USA, whose rise to global ascendancy was marked by the transition from being a debtor to a creditor nation, now staggers under a debt of over $36 trillion.[6] "This mountain of debts which are accumulating not only in Japan but also in the other developed countries constitutes a real powder keg that could have major destabilising effects in the long term. Thus, a rough estimate of the world debt for the entirety of economic agencies (states, companies, households and banks) oscillates between 200% and 300% of world production. Concretely, that signifies two things. On the one hand, that the system has advanced the monetary equivalent of two to three times the value of world production in order to mitigate its crisis of overproduction; and on the other hand, that it would be necessary to work two to three years for nothing to repay this debt. While such massive debt can still be borne by the more developed economies, it is by contrast about to strangle the "emerging" countries one by one. This phenomenal debt on a world level is historically without precedent and shows what a dead-end the capitalist system has reached - but also reveals its capacity to manipulate the law of value in order to ensure its survival."[7]
And while the bourgeoisie asks us to place our confidence in all kinds of snake-oil remedies such as the information economy and various "technological revolutions", the dependence of the entire world economy on debt is building up underground pressures that are bound to have volcanic consequences in the future. Occasionally we get a glimpse: the sudden stalling of the eastern Tigers and Dragons in 97 was perhaps the most significant. Again, we are at this moment told that the spectacular growth rates being experienced in India and China are the way of the future. But in the next breath they can hardly conceal their fears that all this will end badly. China's growth, after all, is based on cheap imports to the west, and the west's capacity to consume them is based on massive debt.... so what happens when the debts are called in? And underneath the debt-fuelled growth of the last two or more decades the fragility of the whole enterprise is revealed by some of its more evidently negative features: the virtual deindustrialisation of whole swaths of the western economy, creating a multitude of unproductive, and very often precarious jobs, increasingly linked to the most parasitic areas of the economy; the growing poverty gap, not only between the central capitalist countries and the world's poorest regions, but also within the most advanced economies; the evident inability to really absorb mass, permanent unemployment, whose real scale is hidden by a very large box of tricks (training schemes that lead nowhere, constant reclassifying of the meaning of unemployment, etc).
Thus on the economic level capitalism has by no means overcome its tendency towards catastrophe. The same remains true at the imperialist level. When the eastern bloc suddenly collapsed at the end of the 80s, dramatically ending four decades of "Cold War", the US president George Bush Senior famously announced the beginning of a New World Order of peace and prosperity. But because decadent capitalism is permanent war, imperialist conflicts can change their line-up but they do not go away. We saw that in 1945 and we have seen it since 1991. Instead of the relatively "disciplined" conflict between the two blocs, we have a much more chaotic war of each against all, with the sole remaining super-power, the US, more and more resorting to military action to try to impose its declining authority. And yet each display of its undoubted military superiority has only succeeded in accelerating opposition to its hegemony. We saw this after the first Gulf war in 91: although it temporarily compelled its former allies Germany and France to support its crusade against Saddam, within a couple of years it became evident that the old discipline of the western bloc had disappeared forever: in the Balkans wars first Germany (through its support for Croatia and Slovenia) then France (through its continued support for Serbia while the US switched its support to Bosnia) found themselves effectively fighting a proxy war against the US. Even America's "lieutenant", the UK, was also on the opposite side on this occasion, backing Serbia until it was able to forestall the US bombing offensive no longer. The recent "war against terror" - prepared by the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11 2001 by a suicide commando that had very likely been manipulated by the US state, another striking expression of the barbarism of today - has further exacerbated these divergences, with France, Germany and Russia forming a coalition of the unwilling to oppose the US invasion in Iraq. And the consequences of the 2003 invasion have been even more disastrous. Far from consolidating US control over the Middle East and thus securing the USA "Full Spectrum Dominance" as dreamed about by the Neo-Conservatives in and around the Bush administration, the invasion has plunged the entire region into chaos, with instability growing in Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile the imperialist equilibrium has been further undermined by the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear powers, possibly soon to be joined by Iran, which in any case has vastly increased its imperialist ambitions following the downfall of its great rival Iraq; by the increasingly hostile stance assumed by Putin's Russia towards the west; by the growing weight of Chinese imperialism in world affairs; by the proliferation of "failed states" and "rogue states" in the Middle East, the Far East and Africa; by the spread of Islamic terrorism on a world scale, sometimes at the service of this or that imperialist power, but often acting as an unpredictable power in its own right... The world is thus not a less dangerous place since the end of the Cold War, but a more dangerous one.
And if throughout the 20th century we have been increasingly aware of the dangers posed to human civilisation by economic crisis and imperialist war, it is only in the last few decades that we have really become conscious of a third dimension of the disaster that capitalism has in store for mankind: the ecological crisis. This mode of production, spurred on by increasingly feverish competition for every last market opportunity, must continue to spread into every corner of the globe, to plunder the resources of the entire planet at whatever cost. But this frenzied "growth" is more and more and more revealed as a cancer on the body of the planet Earth. In the last two decades, the scale of this threat has gradually seeped into public awareness, because even if what we are seeing now is the culmination of a much longer process, the problem is beginning to move onto a much higher level. The pollution of the air, the rivers and the seas by industrial and transport emissions, the destruction of the rainforests and numerous other wild habitats, the extinction or threatened extinction of countless animal species, are reaching alarming levels, and are now coming together around the problem of climate change, which threatens to inundate human civilisation in a succession of floods, droughts, famines and plagues. And climate change itself could set off a self-expanding spiral of disaster, as recognised by, among others, the distinguished physicist Stephen Hawking. In an ABC News interview in August 2006, Hawking explained, "The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of methane, trapped as hydrates on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so further global warming. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can."
The threats of economic, military and ecological collapse are not separate either - they are intimately linked. Above all, it is evident that capitalist nations facing economic ruin and severe ecological pressures will not peacefully suffer their own disintegration, but will be pushed towards military solutions at the expense of other nations.
More than ever, the alternative between socialism or barbarism stands before us. And just as the first world war, in Luxemburg's words, was already barbarism, the danger facing humanity, and in particular its only source of salvation, the proletariat, is that it will be engulfed in the growing barbarism spreading across the planet before it can react and develop its own solution.
The ecological crisis poses this danger very clearly: the proletarian class struggle can hardly influence it until the working class has seized power and is in a position to reorganise production and consumption on a world scale. And yet the longer the revolution is delayed the greater the danger that the destruction of the environment will undermine the material basis for the communist transformation. But the same can be said for the social effects of the current phase of decadence. In the cities there is a growing tendency for the working class to lose its class identity, for a generation of young proletarians to fall victim to the mentality of the gang, to irrational ideologies and nihilistic despair. The consequence is again that it could become too late for the proletariat to reconstitute itself as a revolutionary social force.
And yet the proletariat must never forget its real potential. The bourgeoisie has certainly always been aware of it. In the period leading up to the First World War, the ruling class anxiously awaited the response of social democracy, knowing that it would have been impossible to dragoon the workers into the war without its active support. This ideological defeat denounced by Rosa was the precondition for unleashing the war; and the proletarian recovery after 1916 was what brought the war to an end. Inversely, it was the defeat and demoralisation after the retreat of the revolutionary wave which opened the course towards the Second World War, even though it took a long period of repression and ideological intoxication before the working class could be mobilised for this second round of slaughter. And the bourgeoisie was well aware of the need to take preventative action to snuff out the danger of a repetition of 1917 at the end of the war. This "class consciousness" was above all displayed by that "Greatest Ever Briton", Winston Churchill, who had learned well from his role of helping to smother threat of Bolshevism in 1917-20. Following the mass strikes of the workers of Northern Italy in 1943, it was Churchill who formulated the policy of letting the Italians "stew in their own juice", delaying the Allied advance from the south to allow the Nazis to crush the Italian workers; it was also Churchill who understood best the sinister meaning of the terror bombing of Germany in the last phase of the war: it was aimed at strangling any possibility of revolution in the place where the bourgeoisie feared it the most.
The world-wide defeat and counter-revolution lasted for four decades. But it did not mean the final end of the class struggle as some had begun to argue. With the reappearance of the crisis at the end of the 60s, a new generation of proletarians struggling for their own demands made its inconvenient appearance: the "events" of May 68 in France, officially remembered as a "student uprising", were only able to bring the French state to edge of the abyss because the revolt in the universities had been accompanied by the biggest general strike in history. Over the next few years, Italy, Argentina, Poland, Spain, Britain and many other countries saw further massive movements of the working class, frequently leaving the official representatives of "Labour", the unions and parties of the left, trailing in their wake. The "wildcat" strike became the norm as against the "disciplined" union mobilisation, and workers began to develop new forms of struggle to escape the numbing grip of the trade unions: general assemblies, elected strike committees, massive delegations to other workplaces. In the gigantic strikes of 1980 in Poland, the workers used such forms to coordinate their struggle across the level of an entire country.
The struggles of the period 1968-1989 very often ended in defeat as far as their immediate demands are concerned. But there is no question that if they had not taken place, the bourgeoisie would have had a free hand to impose a far greater attack on the living standards of the working class, above all in the advanced centres of the system. And above all, the refusal of the proletariat to pay for the effects of the capitalist crisis also meant that it would not be willing to march tamely off to another war, even though the re-emergence of the crisis also led to a noticeable sharpening of tensions between the two great imperialist blocs from the 1970s onwards, and particularly in the 1980s. Imperialist war is implicit in the economic crisis of the system, even if it represents not a "solution" to the crisis but an even greater plunge into ruin. But to go to war, the bourgeoisie must have a pliant, ideologically loyal proletariat, and this it did not have. Perhaps this was demonstrated most plainly in the eastern bloc: the Russian bourgeoisie, most pushed towards a military solution by economic collapse and growing military encirclement, came to realise that it could not rely on its own proletariat to serve as cannon fodder in war against the West, especially after the mass strikes in Poland in 1980. It was this impasse which led to the implosion of the Eastern bloc in 89-91.
The proletariat, however, was unable to develop its own, and genuine solution to the contradictions of the system: the perspective of a new society. Certainly May 68 raised this question on a massive scale and gave rise to a new generation of revolutionaries, but these remained in a tiny minority. As the impact of the economic crisis became more and more overt, the vast majority of the workers' struggles of the 70s and 80s remained on the defensive, economic level, and decades of disillusionment with the "traditional" parties of the left had implanted within the ranks of the working class a deep suspicion towards any kind of politics.
We thus reached a kind of stalemate in the battle between the classes: the bourgeoisie had no future to offer mankind, and the proletariat had not rediscovered its own future. But the crisis of the system does not stand still and the result of the stalemate is a growing decomposition of society at all levels. At the imperialist level, this resulted in the disintegration of the two imperialist blocs, and so the perspective of world war came off the historical agenda for an indefinite period. But as we have seen, this now exposed the proletariat and humanity to a new danger, a kind of creeping barbarism which in many ways is even more pernicious.
Humanity is indeed at the crossroads. The years and decades ahead of us could be the most crucial in its entire history, because they will determine whether human society is going to be plunged into an unprecedented regression or even total extinction, or whether it will take a leap onto a new level of organisation, where mankind is at last in control of its own social powers, and is able to create a world in harmony with its needs.
It is our conviction as communists that it is not too late for the latter alternative - that the working class, despite all the material and ideological blows it has suffered in the last few decades, is still capable of resisting, and is still the only force that stands in the way of a final descent into the abyss. Indeed since 2003, there has been a discernable development of workers' struggles all over the world; and at the same time we are witnessing the emergence of a whole new generation of groups and elements who are questioning the essential bases of the present social system and who are seriously looking at the prospects for a fundamental social change. In other words, we are seeing signs of a real maturation of class-consciousness.
Faced with a world in chaos, there is no shortage of false explanations for the present crisis. Religious fundamentalism, whether of the Muslim or Christian variety, as well as a whole host of occultist and conspiratorial explanations of history, are flourishing today precisely because the signs of an apocalyptic end to the present world civilisation are increasingly hard to deny. But these regressions to mythology serve only to reinforce passivity and despair, because they invariably subordinate man's capacity for self-activity to the fateful decrees of powers reigning over man. The most characteristic expression of these cults is therefore the Islamic suicide bomber whose actions are the epitome of despair, or the American evangelists glorying in war and ecological destruction as so many harbingers of a coming Rapture. And while "common-sense" bourgeois rationalism laughs at the absurdities of the fanatics, it includes in its mockery all those who, for the most rational and scientific reasons, are becoming increasingly convinced that the present social system cannot and will not go on forever. Against the ranting of the religious cults, and the blank denials of facile bourgeois optimism, it is more than ever vital to develop a coherent and consistent understanding of what Rosa called the "dilemma of world history". And, like Rosa, we are convinced that such an understanding can only be grounded in the revolutionary theory of the proletariat - in marxism, and the materialist conception of history. It is to this general theoretical framework that we now turn [18] .
Gerrard
[1] "Socialism and War", chapter 1, 1915.
[2] This figure excludes the USSR. Figures from Sternberg, Capitalism and Socialism on Trial, 1951, p 277-281
[3] Communist Manifesto.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties [19]
[5] Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p 233, citing Walker, The Cold War, 1993, p 26-7.
[6] Sum estimated for the third trimester of 2003 by the council of governors of the Federal Reserve and other government agencies. According to the same course, the debt has risen by 23 times since 1970 when it stood at 1.630 thousand billion dollars.
[7] "The reality of ‘economic prosperity' laid bare by the crisis", International Review n°114.
The following article was originally published in the November-December 1936 edition of Bilan (n°37), the theoretical journal of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. It is the fourth article in the series "Problems of the Period of Transition" by the Belgian comrade who signed his contributions "Mitchell". The previous three have been published in the last three issues of the International Review.
The article takes as its starting point the proletarian revolution in Russia - not as a rigid schema applicable to all future revolutionary experiences, but as a living laboratory of the class war, requiring critical assessment and analysis in order to provide reliable lessons for the future. Like most of the best marxist works, it presents itself as a polemical debate with other interpretations of this experience, judged to be inadequate, dangerous or frankly counter-revolutionary. In the last category it places the Stalinist ("centrist", to use the somewhat misleading term still used by the Italian left at the time) argument that socialism was being constructed in the confines of the USSR. The article does not dwell long on refuting this claim - it is sufficient to show that the theory of "socialism in one country" is incompatible with the most fundamental principles of internationalism, and that the practice of "building socialism" in the USSR required the most ferocious exploitation of the proletariat. More significant is the article's criticisms of the views put forward by the Trotskyist opposition, which shared with the Stalinists the idea that the "workers' state" in the USSR could prove its superiority to the established capitalist regimes by engaging in economic competition with them - indeed Mitchell points out that Stalin's post-1928 programme of rapid industrialisation had actually been plagiarised from the policies of the Left Opposition.
For Mitchell and the Italian left, the proletarian revolution can only begin a real economic transformation in the direction of communism once it has conquered political power on a world scale. It was therefore an error to judge the success or failure of the revolution in Russia on the basis of the economic policies it undertook; at best, the victorious proletariat in one country could only conduct a holding operation at the economic level, focusing all its energies on the political extension of the revolution to other countries. The article is highly critical of any notion that the measures put through under the heading of "war communism" represented a real advance towards communist social relations. For Mitchell, the virtual disappearance of money and the forced requisitioning of grain in the years 1918-20 were no more than contingent necessities forced on the proletarian power by the harsh reality of the civil war, and were accompanied by a dangerous bureaucratic distortion of the soviet state. In Mitchell's view, it would be far more accurate to look at the "New Economic Policy" of 1921, despite its various flaws, as a more "normal" model of a transitional economic regime in one country.
The polemical element of the text also extends to other currents in the revolutionary movement. The article takes up the debate with Rosa Luxemburg, who had criticised the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks in 1917 ("land to the tiller"), but who in Mitchell's view had underestimated the political necessity of the Bolsheviks' recognition of the seizure of land by the small peasants as a way of strengthening support for the dictatorship of the proletariat. It also returns to the discussion with the Dutch internationalists of the GIK which we commented on in the last issue of the International Review. In this text Mitchell argues that the Dutch comrades' exclusive focus on the problem of workers' management of production led them to conclude falsely that the principle of centralism was the main cause of the revolution's degeneration, while at the same time entirely evading the problem of the transitional state, which in the marxist outlook is an inevitability as long as classes have not been abolished.
In the concluding part of the article, dealing with the problem of the "proletarian state", Mitchell shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the Italian Left's framework of analysis. Mitchell reiterates the principal conclusion the Italian Left drew from the Russian experience in this regard, which to us remains one of its most important contributions to marxist theory: the understanding that while the transitional state is an unavoidable "scourge" that the working class will have to utilise, for this very reason the proletariat cannot identify itself with this state, but will have to maintain a permanent vigilance to ensure that it does not turn against it, as had been the case in Russia.
On the other hand, the article also reveals some of the inconsistencies in the positions of the Italian left of the time. Their keen awareness of the necessity for the communist party led them to defend the notion of the "dictatorship of the party", a view that ran counter to their insistence on the need for the party and other proletarian organs to remain independent of the transitional state. And Mitchell also insists that the existing soviet state in Russia still had a proletarian character, despite its counter-revolutionary orientation, because it had eliminated the private ownership of the means of production. In the same sense, he does not consider the new bureaucracy to be a new bourgeoisie. This position, in some ways close to the analysis developed by Trotsky, did not however lead to the same political conclusions: unlike the Trotskyist current, the Italian left always placed the international interests of the working class above all other considerations and rejected any defence of the USSR, which they already saw as being integrated into the sordid game of world imperialism. Furthermore, we can already see in Mitchell's article elements that would eventually make it possible for the Italian left to arrive at a more consistent characterisation of the Stalinist regime. Thus, in a previous section of the article, Mitchell warns that "collectivisation" or nationalisation was by no means a socialist measure in itself, even quoting Engels's prescient passage about state capitalism. It would take some years and some searching debates for these inconsistencies to be ironed out by the Italian left, partly through discussion with other revolutionary currents such as the German/Dutch left. Nevertheless, the article provides further proof of the depth and rigour of the Italian left's approach to the development of the communist programme.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 must without doubt be regarded as a proletarian revolution because it destroyed a capitalist state from top to bottom and replaced bourgeois domination with the first fully achieved proletarian dictatorship (the Paris Commune having merely created the premises for such a dictatorship).[1] It is on this basis that it has to be analysed by marxists, as a progressive experience (despite its later counter-revolutionary evolution), as a step along the way that leads to the emancipation of the proletariat and the whole of humanity.
From the considerable mass of material accumulated by this gigantic event it is not yet possible, given the state of our research, to put forward definite orientations for future proletarian revolutions. But a confrontation with certain theoretical notions, with certain marxist deductions from historical reality, will make it possible to arrive at the fundamental conclusion that the complex problems posed by the attempt to construct a classless society must be intimately linked to a series of principles founded on the universality of bourgeois society and its laws, and on the predominance of the international class struggle.
Moreover, the first proletarian revolution did not, contrary to expectations, break out in the richest countries, the most materially and culturally developed ones, countries "ripe" for socialism, but in a backward semi-feudal area of capitalism. From which we derive the second conclusion - although it's not an absolute - that the best conditions for revolution came together in a situation where a material deficiency corresponded to a lesser capacity of the ruling class to cope with social conflicts. In other words, political factors prevailed over material factors. Such an affirmation, far from being in contradiction with Marx's thesis about the conditions needed for the advent of a new society, merely underlines the profound significance we accorded to this factor in the first chapter of this study.
The third conclusion, the corollary of the first, is that the essentially international problem of the building of socialism - the preface to communism - cannot be resolved in the framework of one proletarian state, but only on the basis of the political defeat of the world bourgeoisie, at least in the vital centres of its rule, the most advanced countries.
While it is undeniable that a national proletariat can only undertake certain economic tasks after installing its own rule, the construction of socialism can only get going after the destruction of the most powerful capitalist states, even though the victory of a "poor" proletariat can take on a huge significance if it is integrated into the process of development of the world revolution. In other words, the tasks of a victorious proletariat with regard to its own economy are subordinated to the necessities of the international class struggle.
It is noteworthy that while all genuine marxists have rejected the theory of "socialism in one country", most of the criticisms of the Russian revolution have focused essentially on the modalities of the construction of socialism, looking at economic and cultural criteria rather than political ones, and forgetting to go to the logical conclusions imposed by the impossibility of any kind of national socialism.
This is a key question because the first practical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat has to dissipate the fog, which still surrounds the notion of socialism. And an essential lesson of the Russian revolution is surely - and this in the most exacerbated form, given that we are talking about a backward economy - the historic necessity for a proletarian state, temporarily isolated, to put very strict limits on its programme of economic construction.
The rejection of "socialism in one country" can only mean that it cannot be a question of the proletarian state orienting the economy towards a productive development that will encompass all areas of manufacture, that will respond to the most varying needs and build up an integrated economy, so that, juxtaposed to other similar economies, this will make up world socialism. At the most it is a question - and this only after the victory of the world revolution - of developing the branches of each national economy which have a specific function and can be integrated as such into the future communist society (it is true that capitalism has realised this in a very imperfect way through the international division of labour). With the less favourable perspective of a slow-down in the revolutionary movement (the situation of Russia in 1920-21), it is a question of adapting the processes of the proletarian economy to the rhythm of the world-wide class struggle, but only in the sense of strengthening the class rule of the proletariat as a reference point for the new revolutionary upsurge of the international proletariat.
Trotsky in particular has often lost sight of this fundamental line, even though he has sometimes made it clear that for him the proletarian objective is not the realisation of integral socialism, but only the preparation of the elements of a world socialist economy as a means of politically strengthening the proletarian dictatorship.
In fact, in his analyses of the development of the Soviet economy, while beginning from the correct premise that this economy is dependent on the capitalist world market, Trotsky often approaches the question as if it was a "match" at the economic level between the proletarian state and world capitalism.
While it is true that socialism can only affirm its superiority as a system of production if it produces more and better than capitalism, such a historical verification can only be established after a long process that has taken place in the world economy, after a bitter struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and not as the result of a clash between a proletarian economy and the capitalist economy, since it is certain that on the basis of economic competitiveness, the proletarian state would inevitably be obliged to resort to capitalist methods of the exploitation of labour which would prevent any transformation of the social content of production. Fundamentally, the superiority of socialism cannot reside in its capacity to produce more "cheaply" - although this is certainly the consequence of an unlimited expansion of labour productivity - but has to express itself through the disappearance of the capitalist contradiction between production and consumption.
Trotsky, it seems to us, has definitely supplied centrism with theoretical weapons by starting off from such criteria as "the economic race with world capital"; "the allure of development as a decisive factor", "the comparison between rates of development", "the criterion of the pre-war level", etc, all of which bear a strong resemblance to the centrist slogan about "catching up with the capitalist countries". This is why the monstrous industrialisation which has been founded on the misery of the Russian workers, while being the direct product of centrist policies, is also the "natural" child of the Russian "Trotskyist" Opposition. What's more this position of Trotsky is the result of the perspectives he traced for the evolution of capitalism after the retreat of the international revolutionary struggle. Thus his whole analysis of the Soviet economy as it evolved after the NEP is, by his own admission, deliberately abstracted from the international political factor: "it is necessary to find practical solutions for the immediate period, by taking into account, as much as possible, all the factors in their momentary conjunction. But when it comes to perspectives of development for a whole epoch, it is absolutely necessary to separate the ‘salient' factors, that is to say, the political factors above all" (Towards capitalism or towards socialism?). Such an arbitrary method of analysis naturally leads one to examining the problems of the management of the Soviet economy "in themselves" rather than in function of the evolution of the world balance of class forces.
The question that Lenin posed after the NEP: "which one will win?" is thus transposed from the political terrain - where he had placed it - to the strictly economic terrain. The emphasis was put on the necessity to bring prices in line with those on the world market through reducing the sales price (and thus, in practice, essentially through reducing the paid part of labour, i.e. wages). Which amounts to saying that the proletarian state should not limit itself to putting up with a certain exploitation of labour power as an unavoidable evil, but on the contrary should adopt policies that sanction an even higher level of exploitation by making this the determining element of the economic process, which would thus acquire a capitalist content. In the end, the question goes back to the idea of a kind of national socialism from the moment you envisage the prospect of "outdoing" capitalist production on the world market with the products of the socialist economy (i.e. the USSR), when you see it as a battle between "socialism" and "capitalism". With such a point of view, it is evident that the world bourgeoisie can rest assured about the future of its system of production.
Here we want to open a parenthesis in order to try to establish the real theoretical and historical significance of those two crucial phases of the Russian revolution: "war communism" and the NEP, the first corresponding to the extreme social tension of the civil war, the second to the end of the armed struggle and to a situation of reflux in the world revolution.
This examination seems all the more necessary in that, regardless of their contingent aspects, these two social phenomena could well reappear in other proletarian revolutions with an intensity and a rhythm in line with the level of capitalist development of the countries in question. It is therefore necessary to determine their exact location in the period of transition.
It is certain that "war communism" in its Russian version would not be characteristic of a "normal" proletarian administration. It was not the product of a pre-established programme, but a political necessity imposed by the irresistible pressure of the armed class struggle. Theory had to temporarily give way to the necessity to crush the bourgeoisie politically; this is why economics had to be subordinated to politics, but this took place at the price of the collapse of production and trade. Thus in reality the policies of "war communism" more and more entered into conflict with the theoretical premises developed by the Bolsheviks in their programme for the revolution - not because this programme was shown to be mistaken, but because its very moderate character, the fruit of "economic reason" (workers' control, nationalisation of the banks, state capitalism) encouraged the bourgeoisie to take up armed resistance. The workers responded with massive and accelerated expropriations which the decrees on nationalisation merely codified. Lenin issued a cry of alarm about this economic "radicalism", predicting that the proletariat could not win at this level. In effect, in the spring of 1921, the Bolsheviks had to recognise not that the workers had been beaten but that they had failed in their involuntary attempt to create socialism by force of arms. "War communism" had essentially been a coercive mobilisation of the economic apparatus aimed at avoiding famine in the proletariat and feeding the combatants. It was essentially a "communism" of equal consumption which had no real socialist substance. The method of requisitioning agricultural surpluses could only cause a considerable drop in production; the levelling of wages resulted in a collapse in labour productivity; and the authoritarian and bureaucratic centralism imposed by the circumstances was a real deformation of rational centralism. As for the stifling of exchange (which was accompanied by a flourishing of the black market) and the practical disappearance of money (payment in kind and free services), this was a product of the civil war and the collapse of any real economic life. They were not the measures of a proletarian administration which has taken the historic conditions into account. In sum, the Russian proletariat paid for the crushing of its class enemy through an economic impoverishment which a victorious revolution in the highly developed countries would have attenuated considerably by enabling it to "leap over" certain phases of development, even if it would not have profoundly altered the meaning of "war communism".
Marxists have never denied that the civil war - whether it precedes, accompanies, or follows the seizure of power by the proletariat - will contribute to a temporary lowering of the economic level, because they now know just how much this level can fall during an imperialist war. Thus in the backward countries, the rapid political dispossession of an organically weak bourgeoisie was and will be followed by a long struggle aimed at disorganising the new power if this bourgeoisie still has the ability to draw strength from broad social layers (in Russia, it was the vast peasantry, uncultured and lacking in political experience, which provided this source). At the same time, in the developed capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie is politically and materially powerful, the proletarian victory will very probably follow rather than precede a more or less long phase of bitter, violent and materially disastrous civil war. On the other hand the phase of "war communism" after the revolution could well be short-lived in such countries.
The NEP, considered from an absolute standpoint, and especially as it was placed in brutal opposition to "war communism", undoubtedly appeared as a serious backward step towards capitalism through the return to the "free" market, to "free" small production, to money.
But this "retreat" was established on real bases if we examine the actual economic conditions behind it. In other words, the NEP (independent of its accentuated features and specifically Russian elements) should be seen as a re-establishment of the "normal" conditions for the evolution of a transitional economy. For Russia, it was a return to the initial programme of the Bolsheviks, even though the NEP, coming after the juggernaut of the civil war, had to go well beyond it.
In sum, the NEP, separated from its contingent elements, is the form of economic administration which any other proletarian revolution will have to resort to.
Such is the conclusion imposed on those who don't make the possibilities of proletarian administration depend on the prior abolition of all capitalist categories and forms (an idea which derives from idealism, not marxism) and who, on the contrary, recognise that this administration will have to deal with the inevitable, but temporary survival of certain expressions of bourgeois servitude.
It is true that in Russia the pursuit of an economic policy adapted to the historic conditions for the transition from capitalism to communism was carried out in the heaviest and most threatening social climate, resulting from a phase of downturn in the international revolution and an internal degree of distress expressed by famine and the total exhaustion of the workers and peasants. This is why its particular historic traits tended to hide the general significance of the Russian NEP.
Under the pressure of events, the NEP represented the sine qua non for maintaining the proletarian dictatorship which it was effectively safeguarding. For this reason it was not the result of a capitulation by the proletariat: it did not involve any political compromise with the bourgeoisie but was merely an economic retreat aimed at re-establishing the original starting point for a progressive evolution of the economy. In reality, the class war, by displacing itself from the terrain of the armed struggle to the terrain of economic struggle, by taking on other forms, less brutal, more insidious, but equally redoubtable, was not at all destined to attenuate, on the contrary.
For the proletariat, the essential thing is to constantly strengthen itself in liaison with the fluctuation of the international struggle. In its general acceptance of the transitional phase, the NEP generated agents of the capitalist enemy - no more and no less than the transitional economy itself - to the extent that it was not maintained on a firm class line. It is always the political activity of the proletariat which remains decisive. Only on this basis can we analyse the evolution of the Soviet state. We will come back to this.
In the historic limits assigned to the economic programme of a proletarian revolution, its fundamental points can be summarised as follows: a) the collectivisation of the means of production and exchange already "socialised" by capitalism; b) the monopolisation of foreign trade by the proletarian state, a decisively important economic weapon; c) a plan for production and for the distribution of the productive forces based on the structural characteristics of the economy and the specific function it is called on to assume in the worldwide socialist division of labour, but which can also strengthen the material position of the proletariat at the economic and social level; d) a plan for liaison with the world capitalist market, based on the monopoly of foreign trade and aimed at obtaining the means of production and objects of consumption which it lacks, and which must be subordinated to the fundamental plan for production, with both directives being able to resist the pressures of the world market and prevent it from integrating the proletarian economy into itself.
It is evident that while the progress and realisation of such a programme depends, to a certain extent, on the degree of the development of the productive forces and the cultural level of the mass of workers, the essential question remains the political strength of the proletariat, the solidity of its power, the balance of forces at the national and international level, even if there can never be any disassociation between the material, cultural and political factors, which are closely interpenetrated. But, we repeat, when it comes for example to the mode of appropriation of social wealth, while collectivisation is a juridical measure as necessary for the installation of socialism as was the abolition of feudal property for the installation of capitalism, it does not automatically result in the transformation of production. Engels has already put us on guard against the tendency to see collective property as a social panacea, when he showed that within capitalist society "the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution" (Anti-Duhring). And Engels adds that the solution lies in the grasping the nature and function of the social forces acting on the productive forces, in order to then subordinate them to the will of all and transform the means of production from "despotic masters to docile servants".
It is obvious that the political power of the proletariat alone can determine this collective will and ensure that the social character of property is transformed, that it loses its class character.
The juridical effects of collectivisations can be singularly limited by a backward economic structure and this makes the political factor even more decisive.
In Russia there was an enormous mass of elements capable of engendering a new capitalist accumulation and a dangerous class differentiation. The proletariat could only have prevented this through a highly energetic class policy, the only one that could have kept hold of the state for the proletarian struggle.
It is undeniable that with the agrarian problem, the problem of small industry constitutes a key issue for the proletarian dictatorship, a heavy legacy left by capitalism to the proletariat, and one which can't be eliminated by decree. We can even affirm that the central problem posed to the proletarian revolution in all capitalist countries (except perhaps for Britain) is the implacable struggle against the small producers of commodities and the small peasants, a struggle made even harder by the fact that it cannot be a question of expropriating these social layers through violence. The expropriation of private production is only economically realisable in relation to the enterprises which are already "socialised" and not to the individual enterprises which the proletariat is still not capable of running at a lower cost and making more productive, and which it can only control through the means of the market; this is a necessary point of transition between individual and collective labour. Furthermore, it is impossible to envisage the structure of the proletarian economy in an abstract manner, as a juxtaposition of pure types of production, based on opposing social relations, "socialist", capitalist or pre-capitalist, and which evolve solely on the basis of competition. This is the thesis of centrism which it got from Bukharin, and which holds that everything that is collectivised ipso facto becomes socialist, so that the petty bourgeois and peasant sectors will inevitably be led into the fold of "socialism". But in reality, each sphere of production more or less bears the imprint of its capitalist origins and there is not a juxtaposition but an interpenetration of contradictory elements, combating each other under the pressure of the class struggle, developing in a very bitter manner, even if in a less brutal form than during the period of open civil war. In this battle, the proletariat, basing itself on collectivised industry, must have the aim of subjecting to its control, to the point of annihilating them completely, all the social and economic forces of capitalism, which have already been overcome politically. But it cannot commit the deadly error of believing that, because it has nationalised the land and the basic means of production, it has erected an impassable barrier to the activity of bourgeois agencies: the whole process, both political and economic, continues in a dialectical manner and the proletariat can only direct it towards the classless society on condition of reinforcing itself internally and externally.
The agrarian question is certainly one of the essential elements of the complex problem of the relationship between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie posed after the revolution. Rosa Luxemburg showed very rightly that "even in the West, under the most favourable conditions, once we have come to power, we too will break many a tooth on this hard nut before we are out of the worst of the thousands of complicated difficulties of this gigantic task!".
It is thus not a question of settling this question, even in its basic lines, and we will limit ourselves to posing the fundamental elements: the complete nationalisation of the land and the fusion of agriculture and industry.
The first is a perfectly realisable juridical act that can be accomplished immediately after the seizure of power, parallel with the collectivisation of the large-scale means of production, whereas the second can only be the product of a process throughout the economy, a result of the worldwide socialist organisation. These are not therefore two simultaneous acts, but can only be staggered in time, with the first conditioning the second, eventually resulting in the socialisation of agriculture. In itself the nationalisation of the land or the abolition of private property in land is not a specifically socialist measure. In fact it is essentially bourgeois, the final act of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
Together with the equal enjoyment of the land, it constitutes the most extreme, revolutionary stage of this revolution, but while being, to use Lenin's expression, "the most perfect foundation from the standpoint of the development of capitalism, it is at the same time the agrarian regime which is the most supple basis for the passage to socialism". The weakness of the criticisms Rosa Luxemburg made of the agrarian programme of the Bolsheviks (The Russian Revolution) concerns precisely these points: in the first place, she didn't underline that "the immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants", while having absolutely nothing in common with a socialist society - we agree with this entirely - nevertheless represented an inevitable and transitional stage between capitalism and socialism, above all in Russia, although she does admit that this was "the shortest, simplest, most clean-cut formula to achieve two diverse things: to break down large land-ownership, and immediately to bind the peasants to the revolutionary government. As a political measure to fortify the proletarian socialist government, it was an excellent tactical move", which given the situation was obviously the most fundamental issue. In the second place, she did not make it clear that the slogan "land to the peasants", taken by the Bolsheviks from the programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries, had been applied on the basis of the integral suppression of private property in land and not, as Luxemburg declares, on the basis of the passage from large landed property to a multitude of small individual peasant properties. It is not correct to say (we only have to look at the decrees on nationalisation) that the division of the land was extended to the large technically developed exploitations, since they actually formed the structure of the "sovkozes", although it has to be admitted that these were not a major element of the agrarian economy as a whole.
Let us say in passing that Luxemburg, in drawing out her own agrarian programme, says nothing about the integral expropriation of the land, which was clearly seen as a link to further measures. She only foresees the nationalisation of large and medium-sized property.
Finally, in the third place, Luxemburg confines herself to showing the negative side of the division of the land (an inevitable evil), to denouncing the fact that it would not do away with "but would increase social and economic inequality among the peasantry and aggravate class oppositions", when it was precisely the development of the class struggle in the countryside which allowed the proletarian power to consolidate itself by drawing towards it the rural proletarians and semi-proletarian peasants, and which formed the social premise for extending the influence of the proletariat and ensuring its victory in the countryside. Rosa Luxemburg undoubtedly underestimated this political aspect of the agrarian problem and the fundamental role that has to be played by the proletariat based on its political domination and the possession of large-scale industry.
It would be pointless to ignore the fact the Russian proletariat faced an extremely complex situation. Because of the extreme dispersion of the small peasants, the effects of nationalisation were very limited. We should not forget that the collectivisation of the soil does not necessarily lead to that of the means of production attached to it. In Russia this was true of only 8% of the latter, while the remaining 92% remained in the private possession of the peasants; by contrast, in industry, collectivisation reached 89% of the productive forces, including 97% of the railways and 99% of heavy industry (the situation in 1925).
Although agricultural tools only represent about a third of the total amount of equipment, they constituted a favourable basis for the development of capitalist relations, given the enormous mass of the peasants. And it is obvious that, from the economic point of view, the central method for containing and reabsorbing this development could only be the organisation of large-scale industrialised agriculture. But this was subordinated to the general problem of industrialisation and consequently to the problem of aid from the proletariat of the advanced countries. In order to avoid getting stuck in the dilemma: perish or provide tools and consumer goods to the small peasants, the proletariat - while trying as much as possible to maintain a balance between agricultural and industrial production - had to devote the major part of its efforts towards the class struggle, both in the country and in the towns, always with the perspective of linking this to the international revolutionary struggle. Allying itself with the small peasants in order to struggle against the peasant capitalists, while at the same time trying to eliminate small-scale production, the precondition for creating a collective production: such was the apparently paradoxical task imposed on the proletariat vis-à-vis the villages.
For Lenin, this alliance alone would be able to safeguard the proletariat until other sections of the proletariat rose up. It did not imply a capitulation to the peasantry but was the only condition for overcoming the petty bourgeois hesitations of the peasants, who oscillated between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat because of their economic and social situation and their inability to develop an independent policy, and thus for pulling them into the process of collective labour. "Annihilating" the small producers did not mean crushing them violently, but, as Lenin said in 1918, "helping them to move towards an ‘ideal' capitalism, since equal enjoyment of the soil is capitalism taken to its highest ideal as far as the small producer is concerned; at the same time, they have to feel for themselves the defects of this system and thus realise the need to go over to collective cultivation". It was not surprising that during the three terrible years of civil war, the experimental method had not brought a "socialist" consciousness to the Russian peasants. If they supported the proletariat to defend their land against the Whites, this was at the cost of their economic impoverishment and vital requisitions by the proletarian state.
And the NEP, while re-establishing a more normal field of experience, also restored "freedom and capitalism", but this worked above all in favour of the peasant capitalists, a huge ransom which made Lenin say that with the tax in kind, "the kulaks can push in places where they could not push before". Under the leadership of centrism, which was incapable of resisting this pressure from a renascent bourgeoisie on the economic apparatus, the state organs and the party, the middle peasants were encouraged to enrich themselves and to break with the poor peasants and the proletariat, with the results that we now see. A perfectly logical coincidence: 10 years after the proletarian insurrection, the shift in the balance of forces towards the bourgeois elements corresponded to the introduction of the 5 Year Plans, whose realisation depended on an unprecedented level of exploitation of the proletariat.
The Russian revolution tried to resolve the complex problem of the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry. It failed not because a proletarian revolution could not succeed in a situation where only a bourgeois revolution was on the agenda, as the likes of Otto Bauer or Kautsky claimed, but because the Bolsheviks did not arm themselves with the principles of administration founded on historical experience, which would have ensured them economic and political victory.
But because it brought out the importance of the agrarian question, the Russian revolution contributed to the historic acquisitions of the world proletariat. We should add that the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on this question can no longer be maintained in their entirety, and that in particular the slogan "land to the peasants" must be re-examined and limited in its significance.
And, inspired by the works of Marx on the Paris Commune, further developed by Lenin, marxists have succeeded in making a clear demarcation between centralism as a necessary and progressive form of social evolution and the oppressive centralism crystallised in the bourgeois state. While basing themselves on the first, they fight for the destruction of the second. It is on this indestructibly materialist position that they scientifically refuted anarchist ideology. And yet the Russian revolution breathed new life into this celebrated controversy, which seemed to have been dead and buried.
There have been many critiques which see the origins of the counter-revolutionary evolution of the USSR in the fact that economic and social centralism was not abolished and replaced by a system of "self-determination" by the working masses. This amounts to demanding that the social consciousness of the Russian proletariat should have jumped over the transitional stage; at the same time, there is a call for the immediate suppression of value, of the market, of wage differentials and other vestiges of capitalism. In other words, there is a confusion between two notions of centralism, which are absolutely opposed to one another, and a return, whether deliberate or not, to the typically anarchist opposition to "authoritarianism" as a way of navigating the transition period. It is an abstraction to oppose the principle of autonomy to the principle of authority; as Engels remarked in 1873, these are two very relative terms linked to historical evolution and the process of production.
On the basis of an evolution which goes from primitive communism to imperialist capitalism and which "returns" to civilised communism, the organic forms of capitalist "cartelism" and "trustification" push away the forms of primitive social autonomy, laying the basis for the "administration of things", which is actually an "anarchic" form of organisation even if it is prepared by a system where authority persists, but "kept to strict limits as long as the conditions of production make it inevitable" (Engels). The essential thing is not to try to leap over stages in a utopian manner, or to believe that you can change the nature of centralism and the principle of authority by changing the name. The Dutch internationalists, for example, have not escaped an analysis based on anticipating social reality and the theoretical convenience such an analysis provides (cf their work cited earlier).
Their critique of centralism in the Russian experience is made all the "easier" by the fact that it relates uniquely to the phase of "war communism" which engendered a bureaucratic dictatorship over the economy, whereas we know that, later on, the NEP favoured a wide economic "decentralisation". It is argued that the Bolsheviks "wanted" to suppress the market (we know that this wasn't at all the case) by replacing it with the Supreme Council of the Economy, and thus they bear responsibility for transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship over the proletariat. Thus for the Dutch comrades, because, as a result of the necessities of the civil war, the Russian proletariat had to impose an extremely centralised and simplified economic and political apparatus, they lost control of the dictatorship, even though, at the same time, they were politically exterminating the enemy class. Unfortunately the Dutch comrades don't spend any time on this political aspect of the question, which for us is fundamental.
At the same time, by repudiating the dialectical analysis and leaping over the problem of centralism, they have ended up changing the meaning of words, since what they are looking at is not the transitional period, which is the only one of interest to marxists from the point of view of solving practical problems, but the higher sage of communism. It is then easy to talk about "a general social accounting based on an economic centre to which all the currents of economic life flow, but which has no right of directing production or deciding on the distribution of the social product". And they add that "in the association of free and equal producers, the control of economic life does not emanate from personalities or offices but results from the public registration of the real course of economic life. This means that production is controlled by reproduction". In other words, "economic life is controlled by itself through average social labour time".
With such formulations, the solutions to the problems of proletarian management cannot advance at all, since the burning question posed to the proletariat is not to work out the mechanisms that regulate communist society, but to find the way that leads towards it.
The Dutch comrades have, it's true, proposed an immediate solution: no economic or political centralism, which can only take on an oppressive form, but the transfer of management to enterprise organisms which would coordinate production through a "general economic law" (?). For them, the abolition of exploitation (and thus of classes) does not take place through a long historic process involving the ceaseless growth of participation by the masses in social administration, but in the collectivisation of the means of production, provided that this involves the right of the enterprise councils to dispose of the means of production and the social product. But apart from the fact this is a formulation which contains its own contradiction - since it boils down to opposing integral collectivisation (property of all, and of no one in particular) with a kind of restricted, dispersed collectivisation between social groups (the shareholders' society is also a partial form of collectivisation) - it simply tends to substitute a juridical solution (the right to dispose of the enterprises) for another juridical solution, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. But as we have already seen, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is simply the initial condition for the social transformation (even though full collectivisation is not immediately realisable), and the class struggle will continue as before the revolution, but on political bases which will allow the proletariat to impose the decisive direction.
The analysis of the Dutch internationalists undoubtedly moves away from marxism because it never puts forward the fundamental reality that the proletariat is forced to put up with the "scourge" of the state until classes have disappeared, that is, until the disappearance of world capitalism. But to underline such a historic necessity is to admit that state functions are still temporarily mixed up with centralisation, even though this takes place after the destruction of the capitalist apparatus of oppression and is not necessarily opposed to the development of the cultural level of the working masses and their capacity to take charge. Instead of looking for the solution to this development in the real context of historical and political conditions, the Dutch internationalists have tried to find it in a formula for appropriation which is both utopian and retrograde and which is as not clearly distinct from "bourgeois right" as they imagine. What's more, if one admits that the proletariat as a whole is in no way prepared "culturally" to solve "by itself" the complex problems of social administration (and this reality applies as much to the most advanced proletariat as to the least cultured), what then is the exact use of the "right to dispose" of the factories and production?
The Russian workers did effectively have the factories in their hands and they were not able to run them. Does this mean that they shouldn't have expropriated the capitalists and taken power? Should they have "waited" to be schooled by western capitalism and acquire the culture of the English or German workers? While it is true that the latter are a hundred times more qualified to confront the gigantic tasks of proletarian administration than were the Russian worker in 1917, it is also true that they were not able, in the pestilential ambiance of capitalism and bourgeois ideology, to develop an "integral" social awareness which would have permitted them to solve "by themselves" all the problems posed, something which can only fully appear in a higher phase of communism. Historically, it is the party which concentrates this social awareness and it can only do this on the basis of experience; in other words, it does not bring fully worked out solutions but elaborates them in the fire of the social struggle, after (above all, after) as well as before the revolution. And in this colossal task, far from opposing itself to the proletariat, the party is a part of it, since without the active and growing collaboration of the masses, it will become the prey of enemy forces. "Administration by all" is the touchstone of any proletarian revolution. But history poses a precise alternative: either we make the socialist revolution "with men as they are today and who cannot do without subordination, without control by foremen, without accounting" (Lenin, State and Revolution) or there will be no revolution.
In the chapter dealing with the transitional state, we already recalled that the state owes its existence to the division of society into classes. In primitive communism, there was no state. In the higher form of communism, there will also be no state. The state will disappear with the subject that gave rise to it: class exploitation. But as long as the state exists, it conserves its specific traits and cannot change its fundamental nature. It cannot cease to be a state, that is to say, an oppressive, coercive, corrupting organism. What changes in the course of history is its function. Instead of being the instrument of the slave masters, it became that of the feudal lords, then of the bourgeoisie. It is the perfect instrument for conserving the privileges of a ruling class. This isn't threatened by its own state, but by new privileges developing in society with the rise of a new exploiting class .The political revolution which followed was the juridical consequence of a transformation of the economic structure that had already got underway, the triumph of a new form of exploitation over the old one. This is why the new revolutionary class, on the basis of the material conditions which it had founded and consolidated inside the old system, could without shame or distrust base itself on the state, which it only had to adapt and perfect in order to organise and develop its own mode of production. This is all the more true for the bourgeois class which is the first in history to rule on a world scale and whose state is the most concentrated form of all the means of oppression built up in the course of history. There is no opposition but an intimate, indestructible link between the bourgeoisie and its state; and this solidarity does not stop at national frontiers. It goes beyond them because it has its roots in the international capitalist system.
By contrast, with the foundation of the proletarian state, the historical relationship between the ruling class and the state is modified. It is true that the proletarian state, built on the ruins of the bourgeois state, is still the instrument for the domination of the proletariat. However, this domination is not aimed at the preservation of social privileges whose material bases were laid down inside bourgeois society, but at the destruction of all privileges. The new state expresses a new relation of domination, that of the majority over the minority, and a new juridical relationship (collective appropriation). On the other hand, because it remains under the influence of the climate of capitalist society (because there can be no simultaneity in the revolution), it is still the representative of "bourgeois right". This still lives on, not only in the social and economic processes, but also in the heads of millions of proletarians. It is here that the duality of the transitional state is revealed: on the one hand, as a weapon directed against the expropriated class, it reveals its "strong" side; on the other hand, as an organism called upon not to consolidate a new system of exploitation, but to abolish all exploitation, it exposes its "weak" side because by nature and by definition it tends to become the pole of attraction for capitalist privileges. This is why, while there can be no antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state, such an antagonism does indeed arise between the proletariat and the transitional state.
This historic problem has its negative expression in the fact that the transitional state can quite easily be led to play a counter-revolutionary role in the international class struggle, even when it maintains a proletarian character if the social classes upon which it was built have not been modified. The proletariat can only stand against the development of this latent contradiction through the class politics of its party and the vigilant existence of its mass organisations (trade unions, soviets, etc), through which it has to exert an indispensable control over the activity of the state and to defend its specific interests. These organisms can only disappear along with the necessity which gave rise to them, i.e. the class struggle. Such a conception is inspired entirely by the teachings of marxism, since the notion of the proletarian "antidote" within the transitional state was defended by Marx and Engels as well as by Lenin, as we have already pointed out.
The active presence of proletarian organisms is the condition for keeping the proletarian state in the service of the workers and for preventing it from turning against them. To deny the contradictory dualism of the proletarian state is to falsify the historic significance of the period of transition.
Certain comrades consider, by contrast, that during this period there has to be an identification between the workers' organisations and the state. (cf comrade Hennault's "Nature and Evolution of the Russian State, Bilan p.1121). The Dutch internationalists go even further when they say that since "labour time is the measure of the distribution of the social product and the whole of distribution remains outside any ‘politics', the trade unions have no function in communism and the struggle for the amelioration of living conditions will have come to an end" (p 115 of their work).
Centrism also starts off from the conception that since the soviet state is a workers' state, any demands raised by the workers become an act of hostility towards "their" state, therefore justifying the total subordination of the trade unions and the factory committees to the state mechanism.
If we now say, on the basis of the previous considerations, that the soviet state has conserved its proletarian character, even if it is being directed against the proletariat, is this just a subtle distinction which has nothing in common with reality, and which we ourselves repudiate because we reject the defence of the USSR? No! And we think that this thesis has to be maintained above all because it is justified from the point of view of the theory of historical materialism; secondly, because the conclusions we have to draw about the evolution of the Russian revolution are not vitiated in their premises by the fact that we reject the identity between the proletariat and the state and say that there should be no confusion between the character of the state and its function.
If the soviet state is no longer a proletarian state, what is it? Those who deny this have not succeeded in showing that it is a capitalist state. But do they fare any better by talking about a bureaucratic state and discovering that the Russian state is a ruling class original in history and linked to a new mode of production and exploitation? In fact, such an explanation turns its back on marxist materialism.
Although the bureaucracy has been an indispensable instrument in the functioning of any social system, there is no trace in history of a social layer that transformed itself into an exploiting class on its own account. There are however many examples of all-powerful bureaucracies within a society, but they were never confounded with the classes acting on production, except as individuals. In Capital, Marx, examining the colonisation of India, shows that the bureaucracy appeared there in the shape of the East India Company; that the latter had economic links with circulation - not with production - whereas it really did exert political power, but on behalf of the metropolitan capitalism.
Marxism has supplied a scientific definition of class. If we hold to it, we have to affirm that the Russian bureaucracy is not a class, still less a ruling class, given that there are no particular rights over production outside of the private ownership of the means of production, and that in Russia collectivisation still exists in its basics. It is also true that the Russian bureaucracy consumes a large portion of social labour. But this is true of any form of social parasitism and this should not be confused with a class exploitation.
While it is undeniable that in Russia the social relations express a colossal exploitation of the workers, this does not derive from the exercise of any right of property, group or individual, but from a whole economic and political process, of which the bureaucracy is not the cause, but only an expression, and in our view a secondary one, since this evolution is above all the product of the policies of centrism which has shown itself incapable of containing the impetus of the forces of the enemy both within Russia and on the international level. It's here that the originality of the social context in Russia lies - in an unprecedented historical situation: the existence of a proletarian state within a capitalist world.
The exploitation of the proletariat grows in proportion to the pressure of non-proletarian classes on the state apparatus, then on the party apparatus, and consequently on the politics of the party.
There is no need to explain this exploitation through the existence of a bureaucratic class living from the surplus labour pillaged from the workers, but through the influence of the enemy on the party which had integrated itself into the state machine rather than continuing its political and educational role among the masses. Trotsky (in The Third International after Lenin) underlined the class character of the pressures that were more and more being exerted on the party, and the growing links between these pressures - from the bourgeois intellectuals, the petty bourgeoisie, the kulaks - and the state bureaucracy; pressure as well from the world bourgeoisie, acting through all these forces. This is why the roots of the bureaucracy and the germs of political degeneration are to be sought in the social phenomenon of the interpenetration of the party and the state as well as in an unfavourable international situation, and not in "war communism", which took the political power of the proletariat to its highest level, nor in the NEP, which was the expression of a compromise and of a more normal regime for a proletarian economy. Souvarine, in his text "Apercu sur le bolshevisme", reversed the real relationship between the party and the state by arguing that the party was exerting a machine-like grip over the whole state apparatus. He quite correctly characterised the Russian revolution as a "metamorphosis in the regime that took place unbeknownst to its beneficiaries, without any premeditated intent or preconceived plan, through the triple effect of the general lack of culture, the apathy of the exhausted masses and the efforts of the Bolsheviks to overcome the chaos" (p245).
But if revolutionaries are to avoid falling into a kind of fatalism, diametrically opposed to marxism, derived from the idea of the "immaturity" of the material conditions and the cultural incapacities of the masses, if they are to reject the conclusion that the Russian revolution was not a proletarian revolution (when the historical and objective conditions for the proletarian revolution existed then and exist now on a world scale, which is the only valid basis for posing the question from the marxist point of view), then they have to focus their attention on the central issue: the political factor, i.e., the party, the indispensable instrument for the proletariat at the level of historic necessity. They would also have to conclude that in a revolution the only possible form of authority for the party is the dictatorial form. The terms of the problem cannot be rewritten by positing a kind of irreducible opposition between the proletariat and the dictatorship of the party, because that would mean turning one's back on the proletarian revolution itself. We repeat: the dictatorship of the party is an inevitable expression of the transitional period, whether in a country that has been highly developed by capitalism or in the most backward of colonies. The fundamental task for marxists is precisely, on the basis of the gigantic experience of the Russian revolution, to examine the political bases on which this dictatorship can be maintained in the interests of the proletariat, i.e. how the proletarian revolution can and must flow into the world revolution.
Unfortunately, the "fatalists" have never tried to deal with this problem. If little progress has been made towards a solution to this question, the difficulties lie as much in the painful isolation of the weak revolutionary nuclei today as in the enormous complexity of the problem. The essential question posed here is the relationship between the party and the class struggle, and within this context, the question of the party's mode of organisation and internal life.
The comrades of Bilan are right to attach so much importance in their research to two activities of the party, which they see as fundamental to the preparation of the revolution (as the history of the Bolshevik party has shown): the fractional struggle inside the party and the struggle within the mass organisations. The question is to know whether these forms of activity must disappear or transform themselves radically after the revolution, in a situation where the class struggle does not attenuate in the least, but develops in other forms. What is evident is that no organisational method or formula can prevent the class struggle from having its repercussions within the party, through the growth of tendencies or fractions.
The "unity at any price" of the Russian Trotskyist opposition, like the "monolithism" of centrism, fly in the face of historical reality. By contrast the recognition of fractions seems to us to be much more dialectical. But this simple affirmation does not in itself resolve the problem; it simply poses it or rather puts it in its proper context. The comrades of Bilan are certainly agreed that a few lapidary phrases don't constitute a solution. What remains to be examined is how the struggle of fractions and the opposition between programmes that goes with it can be reconciled with homogeneous leadership and revolutionary discipline. In the same way we have to look at how the liberty of fractions inside the union organisations can coincide with the single party of the proletariat. It's no exaggeration to say that the outcome of the future proletarian revolution depends on the answers to these questions.
(To be continued)
Mitchell
[1]. The scepticism declared today by certain internationalist communists can in no way undermine our conviction about this. Comrade Hennaut in Bilan n°34 (p1124) coldly proclaims that "the Bolshevik revolution was made by the proletariat but it was not a proletarian revolution". Such an assertion is quite stupefying when you consider that this "non-proletarian" revolution succeeded in forming the most formidable proletarian weapon that has ever threatened the world bourgeoisie - the Communist International.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/index
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/309/eks-leaflet
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/433/dubai
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/nokia
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/ghazl-al-mahallah
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/casas-viejas
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/alto-llobregat
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/271/revolutionary-syndicalism
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1936-spain
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/buenaventura-durrutti
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/largo-caballero
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/garcia-oliver
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/federica-montseny
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/french-communist-left
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/marc-chirik
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/134/what-method-to-understand-decadence
[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-i
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/779/decadence-capitalism
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/lenin
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/calvin-coolidge
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/stephen-hawking
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/rosa-luxemburg
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/mitchell