In a recent letter, the Contra-a-Corrente bookshops of the group Combate in Portugal informed us of their decision to stop selling publications of the ICC. It's not the usual practice of the ICC to go into such details in its publications, although we don't share the contempt displayed by the 'modernists' for what they call 'a concern for political merchandise'. On the contrary, we think that the widest possible dissemination of the revolutionary press is an important contribution to clarification and thus constitutes an elementary political preoccupation. Moreover, as long as revolutionary groups remain as a small minority, it would be difficult for them to carry on publishing unless they maintain some level of sales.

But the reason why we are discussing Combatels letter here is to publicly raise the question: why has Combate decided to close its bookshops to us? In their letter, we find only a refusal, not an explanation.

On a purely practical level we can say that with the reflux in class struggle in Portugal, revolutionary publications are not selling as well as they did between 1974-5. Therefore it had seemed necessary to reduce the number of copies being sent to the bookshops (a decision taken in common between Combate and the ICC comrades who went to Portugal last summer). But it's quite another thing to ban all sales. Only a bourgeois bookshop can use as its one criterion the idea that if publications don't sell quickly enough and in sufficient quantities, they and their contents are a waste of time. But the Contra-a-Corrente bookshops in Oporto and Lisbon belong to a group which claims to be revolutionary, to be interested in making the ideas of communist tendencies more accesible to workers. Thus we think we should drop any 'practical' hypothesis as an explanation for this decision.

On a political level, the ICC has never hidden its criticisms of Combate - either verbally when we met with these comrades, or in our press. Despite all the weaknesses and confusions which we pointed out in the article on Combate in International Review no.71, we have always considered Combate as one of the only groups in Portugal which defends class positions: the denunciation of the mystifications of the Armed Forces Movement, of the trade union and left-wing apparatus of capital, and the defence of autonomous workers' struggles and of proletarian internationalism. This is why we made contact with Combate and put militants from other countries in contact with them. But the main weakness of Combate - its lack of clarity on the need to constitute an organization on the basis of a coherent political platform - has inevitably led it into a certain localism, an ambiguous support for 'self-management' experiences, a growing confusion about the orientation of revolutionary activity. Indeed we have said that if Combate continues to theorize its errors, they will be unable to:

" … put up much resistance against the terrible contradiction between their own revolutionary principles and the immense pressure of bourgeois ideology, which they have allowed to penetrate their ranks by refusing to give these principles a clear and coherent basis founded on the historic experience of the class." (International Review no.7)

Our criticisms of Combate are part of an effort to contribute to the clarification of revolutionary positions within the working class. Is Combate so 'sensitive' that these criticisms have made it close the door to the ICC? The ICC only engages in a confrontation of ideas with groups which belong to the proletarian camp, despite all the confusions they may have. We don't polemicize with Stalinism, Trotskyism, or Maoism; we simply denounce them as ideological arms of capital. And we are not surprised when bookshops directly or indirectly under the control of Stalinists or Trotskyists refuse to take our publications or - as happened with a bookshop in Boston - the Trotskyists send our magazines back to us after tearing up the articles on Vietnam. It's a waste of time asking the bourgeoisie to be 'democratic'. But has Combate also begun to use administrative measures in order to settle political accounts?

In the discussions we had with Combate, Combate reproached the ICC for being fixated on the need to create an international organization on the basis of clear, tested class positions. According to some of its members, we are a vestige of the 'old conception' of a revolutionary organization, obsessed with ourselves, sectarian, unable to “open ourselves up to the new gains of the struggle", especially in Portugal. We regret that our intransigence about political class positions and our concern for the regroupment of revolutionaries has found no echo in Combate. We also regret that Combate seems to be much more interested in groups whose main characteristic is a political fluidity and a search for 'novelties' like the 'self-management' ideas of Solidarity in Britain, or of other libertarians without a clear political definition. Maybe we must draw the conclusion that there are no worse demagogues than those claiming to be 'libertarian', until differences lead them to take repressive measures? To accuse us of being the sectarians seems to be too easy an alibi.

It should be pointed out that the Contra-a-Corrente bookshops don't only distribute revolutionary publications. One can understand that in the capitalist world today it's impossible to run a bookshop which only sells communist publications. Consequently, Contra-a-Corrente sells publications of all kinds: psychology, novels, books by Stalin and Mao, texts by Trotsky, as well as the publications of Solidarity, the Communist Workers Organization, and the ICC, in Portuguese and in other languages. Are we to understand that the working class in Portugal needs to read the sophistries of the counter-revolution written by Stalinists or Trotskyists, but that it has to be 'protected' from the ICC? That the rabble of Stalinism are given the means to disseminate their mystifications but that a revolutionary voice must be silenced? Then you would have to put a sign on the doors of the Contra-a-Corrente bookshops saying: "There is no greater enemy of the working class than the ICC and that's why you won't find its press here!"

What's at stake in this discussion is not simply the distribution of ICC material. Whatever happens, our press will get distributed in Portugal. But the kind of attitude shown by Combate is not worthy of people who are attempting to rediscover the path of revolution. It is repugnant that Combate should take such decisions without any explanation. There are too many groups today who claim to be revolutionary but who set themselves up as the judges and censors of the revolutionary movement: the CWO is a flagrant example of this with their unfortunate conviction that all those who don't agree with them are part of the counter-revolution. We have to fight against this tendency for everyone to establish their 'own' class frontiers in order to defend the interests of their little sect. Today, when the working class must have a clear political orientation if it is to act in time in the face of the crisis, when after fifty years of the barbarism of the counter-revolution there is at last an opening in history, it is lamentable that groups like Combate should remain content with confused political positions and fall so easily into taking repressive measures against other political tendencies, measures which recall the 'good old days' of Stalinism.

We thus openly ask Combate to reconsider this ban on our press and repudiate this aberrant decision.

30 November 1976

THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST CURRENT

Letter from Combate

Dear Comrades,

In a meeting a few days ago the Contra-a-Corrente bookshops (in Oporto and in Lisbon) decided that they would no longer sell RI or any other publications of your Current; in future we only want to receive two copies of RI for the archives; we will try to pay you for what we have sold as soon as possible. Until the next time. (A bientot)
F.S.

LIVRARIA CONTRA-A-CORRENTE
Oporto, 9 September 1976

The texts on the international situation and the period of transition which we are publishing in this issue of the International Review were presented to the Second Congress of Revolution Internationale, the ICC's section in France. These two themes were the main focus of interest in the work of the Congress. They were put on the agenda of the Congress not as purely theoretical questions but as a response to the real situation in which we find ourselves today. The present evolution of the crisis of capital - which is simply the continuation of the system's decay – is demonstrating more and more clearly that the only way out of the crisis is the revolution. The inexorable development of the crisis, which no one tries to deny anymore, will force the proletariat to once again take up the weapons of its historic struggle. At a time when capital has given up talking about the 'good times' ahead and is simply asking the workers everywhere to 'pull in their belts', the revolution no longer appears as a distant possibility but as a vital necessity.The content of sociaiism, the problems posed by the victory of the revolution, are going to become increasingly important preoccupations for revolutionaries, It is these problems - the analysis of the situation which leads up to the revoiution and the initial problems posed by the seizure of power - which the Congress attempted to deal with, These two aspects of the future - the situation before and after the revolution - are intimateiy connected with each other, because the present evolution of the crisis, by making the revolution a more and more concrete perspective, will oblige the proletariat to consider the content of the revolution as a reai and urgent question.

This is indicated by the fact that today a number of groups have begun to realize the importance of the problems of the transition period. Groups like the PlC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste), the CWO (Communist Workers' Organization), and the Spartakusbond have written articles on this question, which only a few years ago was practically ignored by the newly emerging revolutionary movement. Reality itseif has given rise to this need for clarification. The full reality of the crisis had to become quite obvious before eiements of the class like ICO (Informations Correspondance Ouvrieres), GLAT (Groupe de Liaison pour l'Action des Travailleurs), Alarma, or the situationists, who in 1968-9 used to make ironic comments about the 'apocalyptic prophecies' of RI, would be forced to recognlze the crisis and discuss it. Similarly it is the present evolution of the situation which is impelling various groups today to recognize and examine the problems of the revolution. "Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve." It is the real situation which demands that the proletariat becomes aware of its interests and its tasks; it is the real situation which forces revolutionaries to fulfil their responsibilities in the development of this awareness.

The development of the situation will therefore increasingly confront the workers movement with the problem of the content of the revolution. Who takes power, what form does this power take, how will it be organized, what are the first measures to be taken - all these questions will have to be raised and discussed as widely as possible. We can only begin to answer these questions by basing ourselves on the experience of the past. These questions must be approached in an extremely serious manner, and the responsibility of revolutionaries in this work is emphasized by the rupture in organic continuity with the past workers' movement, which has left the present workers' movement in a state of ignorance about the acquisitions of its own past. For several years now RI has been engaged in a discussion on the period of transition: this discussion has culminated in the passing of the resolution published in this Review, and the resolution is in turn a contribution to the discussion that is going on in the ICC and in the working class as a whole.

Concerning the texts on the international situation, the first, which deals with the world political situation, is an attempt to make a synthesis of the discussions on current events which have taken place in the ICC this year, and to highlight the various general factors which determine each particular situation. It is in this sense a methodological text which seeks to develop instruments for understanding any political situation that might arise. The second text examines the economic situation of capital at this juncture.

We can thus see that the Second Congress of RI didn't restrict itself to the specific problems of the section in France. The Congress was seen as an integral part of the work of the ICC as a whole. We published the texts which related more directly to the French section in Revolution Internationale no.32 (and the text on the situation in France also appeared in World Revolution no.9), but the following texts are of a general international interest, and we are publishing them in our international press as a contribution to the workers' movement as a whole. CN

The International Political Situation

1. For years the appointed spokesmen of the bourgeoisie tried to exorcize the demons of the crisis with their pseudo-scientific incantations. By handing out the Nobel Prize and other honours to its most cretinously complacent economists, the bourgeoisie hoped that reality would concur with its aspirations. But today the crisis of capitalism has become so blatant that even the most 'confident' and 'optimistic' sectors of the ruling class have had to admit not only its existence but also its severity. Because of this the task of revolutionaries today is not to proclaim the inevitability of the crisis, but to underline the bankruptcy of all the theories which sprang up like mushrooms after the rain during the fake 'prosperity' of the post-war reconstruction period.

2. Among the more fashionable theories of the bourgeoisie, those of the neo-Keynesian school were surely the most favoured. They promised an era of unlimited prosperity on the basis of judicious state intervention in the economy through various budgetary mechanisms. Since 1945, intervention of this kind has indeed been the rule in all countries: but the present economic crisis is shattering the illusions held by disciples of the man the bourgeoisie called: "the greatest economist of the twentieth century."

On a more general level, the present situation is exposing all those bankrupt theories which saw the state as the instrument that would save the capitalist system from its own internal contradictions. State capitalism - which these theories presented as simply the prolongation of the process of capital concentration which began in the ascendant period of capitalism, or even as a 'transcendence of the law of value' – is increasingly being revealed for what it always has been since its appearance during World War I: the essentially political expression of an economic system at the end of its tether, the desperate attempt of capitalism to retain a minimum of cohesion and to ensure not the expansion of the system but simply its survival.

The violent way in which the world crisis is now hitting those countries where state capitalism is most developed is more and more dispelling any illusions about their 'socialist' nature, or about the supposed ability of 'planning' or a 'monopoly on foreign trade' to end the anarchy of capitalism. In these countries it's becoming harder and harder to cover up unemployment by underutilizing the labour force. The authorities are now openly and officially recognizing the existence of this classical capitalist scourge. At the same time, rising prices which until recently have only affected the private sector market, are now hitting the official market in a spectacular manner. The economies of these countries which were supposed to be able to stand above the convulsions of world capital are now proving to be extremely fragile; poorly equipped to face up to the exacerbation of commercial competition. Despite the claims of their leader about 'overtaking the capitalist west' these economies have in recent years run up enormous debts with the west, which makes them more or less bankrupt today. This vast state of debt is a ringing refutation of all those theories which - sometimes in the name of 'marxism' - forgot that the general saturation of the market is not a phenomenon specific to this or that region of the world, and which saw the so-called 'socialist’ countries as a miraculous outlet for the resolution of capitalism's problems.

3. Since the end of the I960s, when it first began to become aware of its economic difficulties, the bourgeoisie has repeated over and over again that the present situation is fundamentally different from that of 1929. Terrified by the idea that it might enter another 'depression', it has tried to console itself by emphasizing all the differences between today's crisis and the crisis of the I930s. Thus the bourgeoisie has been trying to fixate on different aspects and stages of the crisis; it began by talking about a simple 'crisis in the monetary system' and then about the 'oil crisis', which was held responsible both for galloping inflation and the recession.

But in contrast to the explanations given by most 'experts' of the ruling class, it is clear that the crises of 1929 and of today do have the same underlying nature: both are part of the infernal cycle of the capitalist mode of production in its epoch of decadence, the cycle of crisis-inter-imperialist war-reconstruction-crisis, etc. They are both expressions of the fact that, after a period of reconstructing the productive apparatus destroyed by imperialist war, capitalism is unable to find outlets for its production on a saturated world market. The differences between the two crises are purely circumstantial. In 1929, the saturation of the market manifested itself through the collapse of private credit, in turn expressed through the collapse of the stock exchange. After an initial panic massive state intervention in the mechanisms of the economy permitted a temporary recovery; this took the form of armaments production and public works programmes, as in Hitler's Germany or the American New Deal. But these policies reached their own inherent limits because the reserves of the state were not inexhaustible: by 1938 the Treasuries were empty and the world economy plunged into a new depression, from which it emerged only because of the war …

In the period after World War II, state intervention was not relaxed as it had been after the first war. In particular, arms expenditure retained a crucial role in the economy. This explains the structural inflation which has existed in the system since 1945. Such inflation expresses the growing weight of unproductive expenditure necessary for the system's survival which leads to an increasingly generalized state of debt, especially on the part of the state machine when the period of reconstruction ends and the market is saturated, the only escape route open to the system is the accumulation of huge anticipatory debts which transform structural inflation into galloping inflation. Henceforth capitalism has no alternative but to oscillate between this inflation and recession as soon as the governments try to intervene. This is why 'recovery' and 'austerity' plans succeed each other at a growing pace in time with the system's catastrophic convulsions. At the present stage of the crisis, inflation and recession are more and more hitting national economies simultaneously and not one after the other.

Systematic state intervention has avoided the collapse of private credit which took place in 1929. Obfuscated by mere epiphenomena, unable to understand the fundamental laws of its own economy, the bourgeoisie does not see itself faced by a new 1929 … for the simple reason that it is already in the situation of 1938!

4. The present situation of the world economy also invalidates an idea which was defended even amongst revolutionaries, namely that the present crisis is a ‘crisis of reconstruction' - not meaning that it has no solution except a transformation of the structure of society itself, but that it is a result of a rearrangement of the existing economic structures. In this conception, state capitalist measures are often presented as a means for the system to overcome its contradictions.

At the end of the 1960s such theories could have a certain credibility; today they just look like intellectual gimmicks. The managers of the bourgeois economy would be wretched sorcerers' apprentices if they alone had plunged the world into the present state of chaos just to 'restructure' the economy.

In fact, in every sphere, the situation today is far worse than it was five years ago, which in turn was a considerable come-down from the situation ten years ago. If the conditions which began ten years ago led to the situation we were in five years ago, and if the conditions of five years ago have in turn led to the present situation, it's impossible to see how the present conditions - in which recession, debt, and inflation have never been worse - could lead to some kind of amelioration of the capitalist economy.

Nobel prize-winning economists, and those 'revolutionaries' who threw marxism on the scrap-heap because they thought they had gone beyond it, might as well resign themselves to the fact that there is no way out of the crisis and that it can only get worse.

5. Although the present crisis can only deepen inexorably, although no measure the ruling class might take can change its direction, the bourgeoisie is forced to adopt a series of policies aimed at assuring some kind of defence of the national capital amid the general panic and at slowing down the process of deterioration.

Because the crisis is the result of the conflict between the limitations of the world market and the expansion of capitalist production any defence of a national capital's interests must be based on a strengthening of its competitive abilities in relation to other national capitals; this also involves pushing its own difficulties onto others. Apart from the external measures aimed at improving its position on the international arena, each national capital must, on the internal level, put into effect policies which help to reduce the price of its commodities in relation to those of other countries; this requires cutting the costs of production. A fall in the costs of production in turn demands a maximum return on capital and a reduction of a country's over-al consumption; and this means, on the one hand an attack on the most backward sectors or production and on the middle classes as a whole and, on the other hand, an attack on the living standards of the working class.

There are thus three aspects to the policies of the bourgeoisie: deflecting difficulties onto other countries, onto the intermediate strata, and onto the working class. The common denominator of all three is the strengthening of the tendency towards state capitalism, which the bourgeoisie everywhere is trying to put into effect. The resistance against this, and the contradictions it gives rise to explain how the economic crisis is leading to a political crisis which is becoming more and more generalized today.

6. The first aspect of the response to the crisis by the bourgeoisie of each country - the attempt to deflect its problems onto other countries - comes up against the immediate and obvious problem that it is met by the same effort on the part of all the other national bourgeoisies! It can only lead to an intensification of economic rivalry between countries which inevitably has repercussions in the military sphere. But no single nation can be in opposition to all the other nations of the world, whether it be on the economic level or, still less, on the military level. This is why there are imperialist blocs, and these blocs inevitably tend to strengthen themselves as the crisis deepens.

The division of the world into these blocs does not necessarily correspond to the main economic rivalries which continue to intensify (thus Western Europe, USA, and Japan, the main economic rivals, are all in the
same imperialist bloc). But even though military conflict between the countries of one bloc can't be ruled out (eg. Israel and Jordan in 1967, Greece and Turkey in 1974), these economic tensions do not override the military 'solidarity' between the main countries of a bloc when they are confronted with the other bloc. If the intensification of economic rivalries between the countries of one bloc expresses itself in military terms, it only serves the interests of the other bloc; thus it expresses itself as a rule in the intensification of military rivalry between the blocs. In this situation, the defence of the national capital of each country tends more and more to come into conflict with the defence of the interests of the bloc as a whole. This constitutes another difficulty encountered by the bourgeoisie of each country in its attempts to put into effect the first aspect of its response to the crisis; and the only outcome can be the submission of national interests to the interests of the bloc.

7. The ability of each bourgeoisie to carry through this aspect of its policy is conditioned basically by the strength of its economy. This is expressed by the fact that the first waves of the crisis hit countries at the periphery of the system, the countries of the Third World. But as the crisis deepens, its effects begin to shake the industrial metropoles with increasing brutality; and here again it is those metropoles which have the most solid economic base that are best able to resist the crisis. Thus the 'recovery' u:t 1'175-76, which mainly benefited the USA and West Germany, was paid for by a catastrophic deterioration of the weakest European economies such as Portugal, Spain, and Italy; this increased these latter countries' dependence on the more powerful economies, above all on the USA. This economic superiority also expresses itself on the military level: not only do the weaker countries of each bloc have to subordinate themselves more and more to the most powerful country, but also the bloc which has the strongest economic base - ie. the American bloc - is advancing and strengthening itself at the expense of the other bloc. It is quite clear today, for example, that the much vaunted American 'defeat' in Vietnam was no more than a tactical withdrawal from an area which was of no great military and economic interest in order to reinforce American power in much more important areas like Southern Africa and the Middle East. The intensification of the crisis is thus silencing the chatter about 'national independence' which developed in countries like France during the reconstruction period; at the same time it is giving the lie to all the mystifications disseminated by the extreme left of capital about' national liberation' and a 'victory against American imperialism'.

8. The second aspect of the bourgeoisies' response to the crisis consists in trying to make the productive apparatus more profitable by acting against other social strata apart from the proletariat. On the one hand this involves an attack on the living standards of all the middle strata linked to non-productive sectors or small scale production; on the other hand it requires the elimination of economic sectors which are the most backward, the least concentrated, or which use the most archaic techniques. These heterogeneous social strata are essentially composed of small peasants, artisans, small capitalists and shopkeepers, whose incomes are often being reduced in a draconian way because of fiscal pressure and competition from more concentrated units of production and distribution. Quite often this has led to the ruin of these strata. Through state capitalist measures this policy can also hit the liberal professions, officers in the armed forces, certain elements in administration or the tertiary sector, as well as those factions of the ruling class which are most tied to the classical forms of individual property.

Such policies when executed by the national capital inevitably come up against resistance, sometimes extremely fervent, from all these strata. Although they are historically doomed and incapable of unifying themselves, these strata can have a considerable weight in political life. In particular, they can have an important, even decisive electoral influence in certain countries. They represent the main source of support for right-wing governments linked to 'classical' capitalism - governments which dominated most countries during the reconstruction period - or even a balancing force to governments of the left, particularly in Northern Europe. Because of this, the resistance put up by these social strata can act as a powerful obstacle in the way of state capitalist measures which governments desperately need to take. This obstacle can lead to a real paralysis in a government's ability to act which further serves to aggravate the political crisis of the ruling class.

9. The third aspect of capitalism's response to the crisis, attacking the living standards of the working class, is bound to become the most important since the proletariat is the main producer of social wealth. This policy, whose main aim is to reduce real wages and increase exploitation, manifests itself primarily through the inflation which is hitting consumer prices in goods most important to the working class ( food, etc.); through a massive increase in unemployment; through the elimination of certain 'social advantages' which are actually a part of the means of reproducing labour power and thus a part of wages; and finally through speed-ups in the pace of work which are sometimes extremely brutal.

This assault on the living standards of the working class is a reality which the capitalist class has to recognize; in fact it is the cornerstone of all its 'austerity' plans. This assault is actually much more violent than official figures dare admit, since these do not take into account the reductions in 'social advantages' (medical facilities, social security, housing, etc.), or the effects of unemployment which not only hits workers out of a job but the class as a whole since it means a general reduction in the variable capital available for the maintenance of labour power.

This situation is destroying another theory which had its hey-day in the period of reconstruction: the so-called refutation of the marxist prediction about the absolute pauperization of the proletariat. Today the consumption of the working class is being reduced and exploitation being increased, not in a relative but in an absolute manner.

10. Since around 1968-69, the capitalist attack on the working class has encountered a very lively response. This confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat determines the general direction which the current crisis is imposing on history, a direction which leads not to the imperialist war which followed the 1929 crisis but to class war. So, of the three aspects of the bourgeoisie's response to the crisis, the one which relates directly to the working class is going to become more and more important in the general political developments ahead. Especially where the proletariat is strongest, we are going to see capital making increasing use of its 'left' factions, those political forces best qualified to mystify and contain the working class, to impose on it the 'sacrifices' demanded by the economic situation. This need to call on the left will be most strongly felt in those industrialized countries whose economy makes it impossible to establish any kind of social 'consensus' or to inspire any confidence in capital's ability to overcome the crisis. In contrast to the more prosperous countries which are better able to resist the effects or the crisis and have less need for 'anti-capitalist' propaganda in their efforts to tie the workers to the defence of the national capital, the weaker countries are about to go through important changes in their political apparatus. However - and this is another contradiction which the ruling class has to deal with - these changes are being met with a determined resistance from the old governing clique; these cliques are doing everything they can to stay where they are or at least retain a position of importance, even if this works to the detriment of the national capital.

11. We can thus see how, in trying to put these three aspects of its strategy into effect, the bourgeoisie is coming up against a whole series of resistances and contradictions. Not only that, but each aspect of capital's strategy has its own internal contradictions. In some cases, there is a convergence between certain of these aspects: for example, state capitalist measures which are bound to hit the most backward sectors of capitalism also provide the left factions of capital with an opportunity to mystify the working class by presenting them as 'anti-capitalist' or 'socialist' measures. Similarly, it can be the case that a struggle against the most backward sectors of society is led by political forces who enjoy the confidence and support of the dominant imperialist bloc. This is the case in Spain today where the process of ‘democratization’ is being set in motion in liaison and agreement with the European and American bourgeoisie. Very often, however, there is a conflict between the state capitalist measures demanded by the deepening of the crisis and the increased subordination of the national capital to the interests of the bloc. Such conflicts can be the result either of a threat to the economic interests of the major power in the bloc, or of the fact that the political forces most qualified to serve the interests of the national capital defend international policies which do not conform to the interests of the bloc. For the same reason there may be a conflict between the needs of a national capital in its international policies and the nationalist mystifications which it tries to use against the proletariat.

12. As the crisis deepens, these contradictions tend to get sharper, to make the bourgeoisie's problems more inextricable. In trying to cope, the bourgeoisie does not have recourse to any long-term or even middle term plans. It proceeds blow by blow, from day to day, according to the needs of the moment. The empirical character of bourgeois politics is further accentuated by the fact that the bourgeoisie is incapable of developing a long-term view of its own historical perspectives. Certainly it has profited from past experiences and its political and academic advisers, its economists and its historians are always on hand to jog its memory and prevent it from making the same mistake twice: on the economic plane for example, it has understood the need to avoid another 1929; similarly, on the political plane, in 1945, it was able to take measures against the possibility of a post-war revolutionary wave like the one of 1917-23. However the bourgeoisie's use of its own experience never goes beyond learning how to make a few fixed responses to a situation that has already appeared before. Its own class prejudices prevent it from developing a real understanding of the laws of history; this lack of vision is further aggravated by the fact that today, the bourgeoisie is a reactionary class whose social system is in total decomposition and decadence. As the economic system gets out of control, it becomes harder and harder for the bourgeoisie to understand the complex and contradictory mechanisms which underlie the crisis.

Any understanding of the different policies which the bourgeoisie of this or that country is compelled to adopt at any given moment, any grasp of the relations of force between contending factions of the bourgeoisie, must therefore take into account the contradictory elements of the various problems which confront the ruling class, and the relative importance which these elements acquire in a given geographic, historic, economic and social context. It is particularly important to bear in mind that the bourgeoisie does not always act in its own best interests, either immediate or historical; very often the factions of the bourgeoisie most suited to deal with a situation only come to the fore after violent conflicts with their rivals.

13. It is in the under-developed countries that the bourgeoisie comes up against the most violent contradictions in its efforts to deal with the crisis. The measures taken by the ruling class are doomed to meet a total impasse at the economic level. These countries are unable to push the effects of the crisis elsewhere: on the contrary they are the main victims of this policy when it is used by the bourgeoisies of more developed countries. This economic impotence expresses itself on the political level in the form of chronic instability and brutal convulsions. Confrontation between different factions of the national capital cannot be resolved through the machinery of 'democracy', and often leads to armed conflict. These conflicts are particularly violent when they take place between the partisans of state capitalism - the need for which increases as the economy falls to pieces - and the most anachronistic factions of capital, who have a particular importance in countries with a low level of industrialization.

These confrontations between factions of national capital are usually amplified by the pressure of inter-imperialist rivalries, and in areas like Lebanon and Southern Africa today, they are entirely subordinated to the conflict between imperialisms.

For all these reasons, the under-developed countries are the main breeding ground for 'national liberation' struggles - especially when they happen to be situated in regions over which the great imperialist brigands are squabbling - and for military coups d'etat; the latter because the army is the only force in such societies which can guarantee a modicum of cohesion because it offers something which is crucial to the struggle between factions of the ruling class in these countries: physical violence. Very often the army in the under-developed regions is the most resolute agent of state capitalism in contrast to the 'democratic' factions who are tied to private interests. The predominant role of confrontations between factions of the ruling class in these countries is further underlined by the fact that the working class, despite frequent violent reactions to ferocious levels of exploitation, is relatively weak, owing to the low level of industrialization.

14. It is in the countries with the greatest economic strength that the ruling class has the strongest grip over the problems thrown up by the crisis and therefore enjoys the highest level of political stability. This is connected to the fact that in these countries the different aspects of the bourgeoisie's response to the crisis do not lead to so many contradictions. Since the economic situation is less chaotic than elsewhere, the ruling class is not forced to take such extreme measures and still has a wide margin of political manoeuvre.

In concrete terms, this is expressed by the fact that the national capital is in a position to compete with its rivals on the economic and military front. This makes it less dependent on the imperialist blocs and more able to impose its own objectives on them. The strength of these capitals is further reinforced:

-- By the fact that the anachronistic sectors of production have a small numerical, economic and political influence in these countries;

-- By the ability of these countries to use the simple mystification of 'prosperity' against the working class.

This second aspect of the power of the bourgeoisie is particularly apparent in countries like the USA and West Germany where the ruling class has been able to mount an officially acknowledged attack on the living standards of the workers (a fall in real wages and massive increases in unemployment) without any major reaction from the proletariat, even though it is amongst the most powerful in the world. Moreover in countries of this kind, the general tendency towards state capitalism which the crisis accelerates does not take the form of violent conflicts as it does in the backward countries. Instead there is a gradual fusion between private and state capital.

In these conditions, the bourgeoisie retains a fairly wide margin of manoeuvre which tends to keep confrontations between ruling factions within certain limits (eg. the similarity between the programmes of Carter and Ford in the USA), and to absorb the repercussions of these confrontations (eg.the ease with which the American bourgeoisie survived and made use of the Watergate affair). The fact that moves, towards implementing the first and third aspects of the bourgeoisie's strategy does not lead to many contradictions at the moment can, even though these two are the most important historically, lead to a temporary pre-eminence of the contradictions created by the second aspect. In this way one can explain the defeat of the Social Democrats in Sweden and the SPD's losses in Germany.

But the SPD is being kept in power thanks to the co-operation of the liberals and this expresses the German bourgeoisie's need to retain a vehicle for carrying out state capitalist measures and mystifying the working class.

15. In countries which are developed but where capitalism is relatively weak, the contradictions engendered by the different aspects of the bourgeoisie's strategy are tending to find their own balance and to interact in a way that may appear paradoxical and precarious at first sight. This phenomenon is particularly clear when we look at the role of the Communist parties in certain European countries. These parties represent the faction of the bourgeois political apparatus which is best qualified both to take the state capitalist measures demanded by the situation and to make the working class accept the necessary sacrifices. This is why their participation in government is becoming more and more urgent. However, because of their international policies and the fear that they invoke in important sectors of the ruling class, the CP's accession to government office is being held up by a determined resistance from the American bloc, which is supported by the most backward sectors of society. In recent years, the CP's have been trying to prove to the rest of the bourgeoisie that they are loyal servants of the national capital, that they are independent from the USSR, and that they have every intention of respecting the rules of democracy; an intention which their rejection of the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' clearly indicates. However, all these concessions have yet to overcome all opposition, even though the entry of the CP into government is extremely urgent in some of these countries. This again illustrates the fact that, shaken by its own internal contradictions both nationally and internationally, the bourgeoisie does not always grasp the right instrument at the right time. This is a significant, though temporary and unstable, characteristic of the situations and balance of forces which prevail today in a number of European countries, especially Portugal, Spain, Italy and France.

16. Of all the European countries, Portugal has in the last few years been the best illustration of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie. Portugal has the combined characteristics of both a 'backward' country - which explains the role played by the army - and a 'developed' country with a highly concentrated proletariat which became extremely combative around the end of 1973. These factors were at the root of the country's convulsions in 1974 and 1975. The first phase of these convulsions was a sharp move to the left, led by the established left, the left of the army and the extreme left. This expressed both the urgent necessity for state capitalist measures in a particularly catastrophic economic situation, and the need to derail and contain the working class. This phase was followed by a return to the right, which corresponded to a decline in the class struggle to an extremely strong resistance to state capitalism by sectors linked to small property, and to enormous political and economic pressure from the American bloc. The present orientation of Portuguese politics to the right (the abandoning of some aspects of agrarian reform, the return of Spinola, the liberation of PIDE - secret police agents) is an expression of a reflux in the class struggle and reinforces the demoralization of the class; at the same time the agents of these policies are poorly equipped to deal with a revival of class struggle, so the Portuguese situation is full of instability for the future.

17. Spain is one of the European countries destined to go through major convulsions in the next few years. The sharpness of the crisis, together with the senility and unpopularity of the old Franco regime, have made it extremely important that Spain should undergo a 'democratic' transformation. The death of Franco has set this process in motion. Such a change is all the more important for a bourgeoisie that has to deal with one of the most combative proletariats in the world: mere repression is becoming less and less effective as a means for containing the struggles of the Spanish working class. 'Democracy' is the only instrument Spanish capital can use to derail the combativity of the workers. And yet despite the urgency of this democratic transition, the whole process is being held up by the determined resistance of the most backward sectors of the ruling class based around the state bureaucracy, the army, and above all, the police. At the same time the Spanish bourgeoisie, like the rest of the Western bourgeoisie, is still extremely distrustful of the Spanish Communist Party, even though it is one of the staunchest advocates of 'Eurocommunism'. Alarmed by the Portuguese experience, the Spanish bourgeoisie wants to avoid a too rapid shift of power into the hands of the opposition, in case this might give too many advantages to the CP which is the main force in the opposition movement. Therefore, before any major changes take place, the bourgeoisie is trying to set up a strong centre party to defend the interests of the classical bourgeoisie and form a counter-weight to the CP.

The political crisis of the Spanish bourgeoisie is thus expressing itself in an extremely precarious balance between the vestiges of Francoism, the demands of the western bloc, and the strength of tile class struggle.

18. The situation of Italian capital is also characterized by the extreme precariousness of the political solutions it has resorted to up until now. Confronted with one of the most chaotic economic situations in Europe, the ruling political faction, the Christian Democracy, is incapable of taking the necessary measures to bring some degree of health to the economy and to strengthen the authority of the state. But although a growing element of the bourgeoisie recognizes the indispensability of the Italian Communist Party to the government, this solution is encountering fierce resistance today. In Portugal an alliance between the interests of the American bourgeoisie and those of backward sectors of the national economy opposed to further state capitalism pushed the CP from power. The same alliance is now keeping the Italian CP out of the government. At the moment the PCI is carrying out its responsibilities to Italian capital in an indirect manner. But its 'critical support' of the minority government of Andreotti can only be temporary. If it lasts too long it will bring considerable problems for capital in Italy.

This bastard solution has a dual inconvenience: it does not allow the adoption of energetic state capitalist measures, and it cannot be presented as a 'victory' for the workers in the way that direct PCI participation in government could. At the same time the unpopularity of austerity measures is to some extent directed at the PCI. In Italy as in Spain, capital is walking a tight-rope.

19. In France a long period of political stability is coming to an end. It is now following the path of other Latin countries hit by the crisis and is also on the verge of major political upheavals. The political forces which have been in power for nearly twenty years are becoming worn out, incapable of taking energetic measures to ameliorate the economic situation. As the parliamentary fracas about capital-gains tax showed, these forces are extremely dependent on the most backward sectors .of society, and they are only capable of mounting a relatively timid attack on the living standards of the working class. This is illustrated by the moderate character of the Barre plan. In these circumstances, the 'united left' is confidently putting itself forward as the most likely successor to the right after the legislative elections of 1978. The left will tend to move towards the centre of political life in France. It will also make use of the municipal elections of 1977 in order to induce an increasingly discontented working class to be patient and 'await the 'great victory' of a left government.

In the meantime, the right will have to improvise. However, although the situation in France is transitory - just as it is in Portugal, Spain and Italy - French capital has a greater structural strength and therefore a wider margin of manoeuvre and more effective means of holding its political problems at bay.

20. The precarious situation of British capital is not fundamentally different from that of other European countries we have looked at. But the point to emphasize about Britain is the paradoxical relationship between the depth of the economic crisis and the ability of the bourgeoisie to retain political control of the situation. If we bear in mind the three main aspects of the bourgeoisie's strategy, we can see that the British ruling class does not have much difficulty with the middle strata, in particular the peasantry, which is practically non-existent. At the same time British capital's main left faction, the Labour Party, enjoys the full confidence of the American bloc. Finally, the political strength of British capital is demonstrated by the way that the trade union apparatus from the TUC to the shop stewards has succeeded in maintaining control of one of the most militant proletariats in the world.

However, although the oldest bourgeoisie in the world has surprised everyone with the breadth of its resourcefulness, in the end all its 'savoir faire' will be rendered powerless by the continued decomposition of an economy which since 1967 has been one of the hardest hit by the world crisis.

21. The situation in the so-called 'socialist' countries is fundamentally no different from the situation in western Europe. The economic crisis is moving onto a political level because of the contradictions engendered by the divergences between national interests and the interests of the bloc; by the necessity to breathe some life into the productive apparatus; by the sullen but sometimes decisive resistance of sectors like the peasantry; and by the sporadic but violent reactions of the working class. In fact the fragility of these regimes, their economic weakness and their unpopularity, leave them with a much narrower margin of manoeuvre than the 'democratic' countries. In particular, the almost total statification of political life means that there are no political forces capable of channelling working class discontent into a 'democratic' dead-end a la Spain. The only political changes that can take place in these countries involve a modification of the ruling clique within the single party apparatus, and this places considerable limits on the mystifying effect of such window-dressing. Apart from the recuperation and institutionalization of organs of working class struggle, and the 'democratic' phraseology of certain forces which are doomed to remain in opposition, capital in these countries lacks any method for dealing with the working class excepting ferocious and systematic repression. The situation in Poland is a graphic illustration of all these points: Polish capital is extremely weak, and this means that its rigid political apparatus is subject to all kinds of convulsions which make it incapable of mounting an attack on the living standards of the peasantry and of an extremely combative working class.

22. China is a particularly significant example of the crisis of the 'socialist' countries. The development of its domestic and international policies confirms the analysis put forward for other countries.

To begin with, its rapprochement with the USA towards the end of the I960s has invalidated the theory that there is a 'state capitalist bloc' with a fundamental solidarity of interests against the 'private capitalist bloc'. This rapprochement also shows that it is impossible for any country, no matter how powerful, to be independent of the two great imperialist blocs which dominate the globe. The only 'national independence' is the ability to move from one bloc to another.

Secondly, the convulsions which have followed Mao’s death show the extreme instability of regimes of this kind. Once again we have seen confrontations between political forces more or less favourable to the Russian bloc or the American bloc, combined with conflicts within the state bureaucracy over various political and economic orientations. These conflicts have been settled in a violent and sometimes bloody manner by the different cliques that make up the state and the party.

Thirdly, the fact that Hua Kuo-Feng, former chief of police and now strongly supported by the army, has emerged as Head of State shows that open systematic repression is the main way of dealing with the working class in China. It also illustrates the fact that despite its particular characteristics, China does not escape the rule which gives the army a preponderant role in the internal politics of under-developed countries.

23. Although we can only understand the current political crisis of the bourgeoisie by taking into consideration all three major aspects of capital's response to the crisis, this doesn't mean that the three aspects have the same impact in the evolution of the crisis. We have already seen that certain of these aspects can, at a given moment and for largely circumstantial reasons, constitute the determining factors in a particular situation. But it is also true that on a historic level certain of these aspects will tend to play a more decisive role than others. We can thus say that the importance of problems arising from capital's attack on the middle strata will tend to give way to problems which are more directly linked to the fundamental interests of capital and which are at the heart of the historic alternative posed by the crisis: generalized class war or imperialist war. In the coming period we are going to see a growing concern with, on the one hand, the question of competition between national capitals, which will be expressed by the aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions and the internal strengthening of the blocs; and, on the other hand, with the question of the class struggle. And since it is the class struggle which will determine the survival of the system, the more the class struggle threatens the existence of capital the more it will come to the fore over the factor of inter-imperialist rivalries. History has shown, especially in 1918, that the only time the bourgeoisie is able to forget rivalry between nations is when its own life is at stake; and at such extreme times the bourgeoisie is perfectly capable of uniting against its common enemy, the proletariat.

Having outlined this general perspective, an examination of the political situation in most countries (with the exception perhaps of Spain and Poland) leads us to the conclusion that, over the past year, the factor of class struggle has to some extent given way to the other factors which determine the way the bourgeoisie runs its affairs.

Although in contrast to the 1930s the general perspective today is not imperialist war but class war, it must be said that the present situation is characterized by the large gap between the level of economic and political crisis and the level of class struggle. This gap is particularly striking when we look at a country which since 1969 has experienced a large number of social movements: Italy. The first effects of the crisis produced a powerful response from the working class, like the 'rampant May' of 1969. But today the massive assault on the working class which is the result of the country's political and economic disintegration has provoked a very limited response from the class, a response which in no way measures up to the previous levels of struggle. We are not just talking about a stagnation of class struggle, but an actual retreat by the proletariat. This applies both to the combativity of the class and to its level of consciousness, since today in Italy the trade union apparatus especially, which was previously brushed aside and denounced by an important number of workers, has regained a fairly effective control over the class.

24. Leaving aside the explanation for the present downturn in the class struggle, this phenomenon has delivered the coup de grace to all the theories which see the class struggle as the cause of the crisis. Whether they come from bourgeois economists - usually the most stupid and reactionary - or whether they hide behind a 'marxist' screen, such conceptions are today quite incapable of explaining how a reflux of class struggle can lead to such an intensification of economic crisis. The 'marxism' of the situationists, who saw May 1968 as the cause of economic difficulties which they only 'discovered' several years later, like the 'marxism' of a group like the GLAT ( Group de Liaison pour l'Action des Travailleurs) which spends its time accumulating vast stocks of statistics, is in dire need of a rest cure.

On the other hand, the present situation might appear to provide grist to the mill of those theories which hold that the crisis is the enemy of the class struggle and that the proletariat can only make its revolution against the system when it is functioning 'normally'. This idea, which bases its arguments on the way the class struggle developed after 1929, is one expression - when it's defended by revolutionaries - of the demoralization engendered by the terrible counter-revolution which has dominated one half of the twentieth century. It turns its back on the whole historical experience of the class and has always been opposed by marxists. If we look at the present situation in a static, immediatist manner, it might appear that the relative reflux of the class struggle is the result of the deepening crisis. But if we take into account all the characteristics of the proletarian movement, we can understand the real causes of this reflux and draw out the perspectives which arise from this situation. And of all the factors which determine the present situation three in particular must be borne in mind:

-- the characteristics of the historical development of revolutionary movements of the class;

-- the nature and rhythm of the current crisis;

-- the situation created by a half-century of counter-revolution.

25. For over a century revolutionaries have defended the idea that, in contrast to bourgeois revolutions which "storm quickly from success to success", proletarian revolutions "constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course … they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever …" (K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). The jagged course of the class struggle, which manifests itself both in the great historic cycles of flux and reflux and in fluctuations within these cycles, is connected to the fact that, in contrast to previous revolutionary classes, the working class has no economic base in society. Because its only source of strength is its consciousness and its capacity to organize which are constantly threatened by the pressure of bourgeois society, any mistake by the proletariat can mean not simply a standstill but a defeat which immediately plunges the class into demoralization and atomization.

This phenomenon is further accentuated as capitalism enters into its decadent epoch, when the working class no longer has any permanent organizations, such as the trade unions last century, to defend its interests as an exploited class. Today, as we emerge from the most terrible counter-revolution in the history of the working class, the jagged evolution of the class struggle is further accentuated by the profound break between the new generation of workers and the past experience of the proletariat. The working class today will have to endure a whole series of experiences over and over again before it will be able to draw the lessons of these experiences, renew the links with its own past, and integrate everything it has learnt into its future struggles.

The long road the class struggle must follow today is elongated further by the conditions in which the resurgence of class combativity is taking place: the slow development of an economic crisis of the system. Previous revolutionary movements of the proletariat all grew out of wars; this immediately forced the class to deal with the most violent convulsions that capitalist society can give rise to, and which very rapidly confronted the proletariat with political problems, above all the problems of seizing power. In the present circumstances, the development of an awareness of the total bankruptcy of the system - especially where the proletariat is most concentrated, ie in the most developed countries - is necessarily a slow process which has to follow the rhythm of the crisis itself. This allows all kinds of illusions to linger for quite some time about the possibility of the system overcoming the crisis by simply changing the bourgeois team in power and applying a few choice formulae.

26. This who l e situation has allowed capital to recoup some of the ground it lost at the beginning of the crisis when the sudden initial reaction of the proletariat came as quite a surprise to the ruling class. In particular, the left factions of capital and their trade union machinery have managed to systematically sabotage the struggles of the class: when they are in power by brandishing the threat of the return of the 'right', of the 'reactionaries or even more frequently, by presenting state capitalist measures as a way of overcoming the crisis and of defending the interests of the proletariat. The 'extreme left' has played an important part in all this with its policy of 'critical support' which serves to steer elements of the class who are beginning to break with the established left back into the electoral and trade union fold.

The idea of waiting for the victory of the left has gained ground in the working class because of the disappointment engendered by a series of defeats on the level of economic struggles. Feeling the need for some kind of 'politicization' of its struggles, but lacking sufficient experience, the class has been led onto the terrain of bourgeois politicization. This disappointment has also bred a certain fatalism in the working class; the workers will not tend to react again until the crisis has deepened in a really violent manner.

27. All these factors allow us to understand the present mood of the proletariat and the relative decline of its struggles. But because the crisis can only get worse, and because, in contrast to 1929, the working class today is an undefeated class, the conditions which for the moment have allowed the ruling class to regain control of the proletariat will tend to disappear.

As the crisis deepens and the living conditions of the proletariat get worse and worse the class will be forced to respond no matter what mystifications are obscuring its consciousness today. In places where the left and its leftist pimps are already in power this response will tend to unmask their real nature quite quickly. In places where the left is not yet in office, its accession to state power will probably allow it to keep things ticking over for a little while longer. But at the same time this will give rise to the conditions which will enable the proletariat to understand that its struggles can only lead in one direction: direct confrontation with the capitalist state.

Finally, as an accumulation of experience allows the class to draw the lessons from its struggle, the demoralization and the mystification that it is going through today will be transformed into positive factors in the development of combativity and class consciousness. At the moment, the mystifying manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie are still bearing fruit and the role of revolutionaries is to carry on denouncing them with the utmost energy, especially those mystifications promulgated by the 'extreme left'. But this very gap between the level of the crisis and the level of the class struggle means that important upsurges of the class are on the agenda, and these upsurges will tend to narrow the gap.

The relative calm in the class at a time when the crisis is getting worse and worse (particularly the period 1974-5) and seems to have stunned the class to some extent, should not be seen as an inversion of the general tendency for the class struggle to follow the ascendant course it began in the late sixties. The calm today is simply the calm before the storm. After its initial battles at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies the working class is often in an unconscious manner preparing and concentrating its forces for a second round. Revolutionaries must also prepare themselves for this second round so that it doesn't take them by surprise and so that they can fully carry out their tasks in the coming struggles.

November 1976

The Acceleration of the Economic Crisis

"It seems that this time, happily, the danger will be avoided. The recovery has taken on afresh and has become general during the first quarter of 1976; unemployment which had reached one of the highest levels since the war, has started to fall in some countries." (OECD, Economic Perspectives, June 1976)

These optimistic predictions of the OECD would be swept away just a few months later. For the first time since the recession of 1974-5 the stock exchanges in New York, London and Paris experienced their lowest trade-figures. Confirming the profound scepticism of the bourgeoisie as to the depth of the 'recovery', the Paris stock exchange experienced its 'black Thursday' on 12 October with an average 3 per cent fall in one day of all its shares. On the very same day, Spain, Portugal and Italy took the most draconian measures in their histories: interest rates were raised; wage and price freezes introduced; and a series of protectionist measures against imports brought in. Actually Paris had already preceded them on this path (though not with the same severity) with the ‘Barre Plan'. Simultaneously, in the same month, the franc, pound and lira continued their slow descent to hell. On 5 October Le Monde could laconically conclude that the "recovery was drawing to a close".

THE FINALE OF THE 'RECOVERY'

Before examining the phenomena and nature of the 'recovery' we must first of all recall the state of the world economy in 1975. According to the Bangue de Reglements Internationaux world trade for that year expanded by 33 billion dollars, an eighth of the figure for 1974; the most significant contraction in world trade since World War II.

This paralysis in trade, the expression of an over-developed productive apparatus acting on a world market saturated with unrealizable commodities, was concretized in a 10 per cent decline in the volume of international trade.

In August 1975 the decline in industrial production taken over a year was the following: the USA by 12.5%, Japan by 14%, West Germany by 12%, France by 9%, Great Britain by 6% and Italy by 12.2%. As a corollary to this, the indices for world trade in metals went from 245.8 in May 1974 to 111.5 in May 1975, (using 100 as the base in 1970). That classic expression of the insoluble contradiction between the relations of production and the productive forces, unemployment, had reached a record total of 23 million unemployed in the OECD countries by the middle of 1975.

THE PHENOMENA OF THE ‘RECOVERY’

The reason for the 'recovery' - beginning in the last quarter of 1975 - was essentially the purely conjunctural movement of stock-building that had taken place during 1975. This artificial aspect of the ‘recovery' was emphasized by the fact that "the build-up of stocks this year will undoubtedly have contributed about 1.75 per cent to the expansion of production in real terms, although this played a negligible role during the recoveries of 1969 and 1972." (OECD, Economic Perspectives)

What are the results of this 'technical operation'? According to the OECD Ministers who met last June in Paris:

"The rapid expansion experienced by the USA since mid-1975 provided a strong impetus to the recovery in other countries, notably Japan. The level of industrial production in the OECD zone is now approaching the highest achieved in the last months of 1973. The level of unemployment which had reached some 5.5 per cent of the active population towards the end of 1975 has now fallen to about 5 per cent of the active population, a fall which essentially reflects the improved situation of the USA. In Japan and in Europe part-time working has clearly receded, but the number of unemployed remains high.”

Once again these optimistic predictions would be contradicted by reality only a month later:

“The deviation already observed in May and June is now being transformed into a slowing-down and we could even see a sudden drop in economic activity. The rates of industrial growth for France and Germany are falling far more than could have been predicted some months ago; 5 per cent growth per annum is small for a growth economy which should normally be around 7 or 8 per cent. In Italy, where the recovery is most recent, the rate of growth is also falling, although it still remains quite high (18 per cent). Let’s not discuss Great Britain where the ending of the recovery followed on almost immediately after the first serious effort to get the economy moving.”

As for the two big economic giants, the USA and Japan, they too have experienced the same process of declining growth since the third quarter of 1976 - although less marked because of their economic strengths.

“In Japan the recession hit later but was devastating: the rate of growth has fallen from almost 30% in April to no more than 9% in June-July to hardly 2% in November. Only the rate of industrial growth in the USA shows a different pattern, less abrupt and more reassuring: after a pinnacle of 18% in September-October 1975 the growth rate fell to 6% in the beginning of 1976, to stabilize at 7% in June-July.” (Le Monde, 5 October 1976)

As for the fall in unemployment, presented as the great victory of the ‘recovery’, this was essentially due to the fact that the USA added 1.8 million to its labour force from the beginning of 1976.1 In Europe, on the contrary, not only has the number of unemployed remained exactly the same in France, Italy and even West Germany, but in Great Britain the number has grown to the record figure of 6.4 per cent of the active population.

It is this extremely ‘moderate’ nature of the ‘recovcry’ which explains the fall-back in the inflation of wholesale prices and raw material prices (but not retail prices which always rise): thus, as in 1975, a movement started from July-August to lower metal prices in order to counteract the falling sales in metals, particularly from Japan. The fall-back in inflation, which the economists of capital have taken to be a sign of 'recovery', actually expresses a relapse into the crisis.

MECHANISMS OF THE 'RECOVERY’

Unlike the ‘recoveries’ following the recessions of 1967-8 and 1971 the 'recovery' in the first quarter of 1976 was of a sectoral and non-generalized nature. The boost to production was far from being the result of a rise in investment in fixed capital (as had been the case with the preceding ‘recoveries’ through a policy of hyper-inflation); this ‘recovery’ was above all the result of purchases in durable goods (cars, electrical gadgets, etc) in addition to public service expenditure (social security, public works, housing etc). In fact the ‘recovery’ was quite simply a matter of 'depreciation’ costs (wear and tear of durable goods and public facilities). As the OECD asserted on the subject in France:

“Demand emanating from the public sector and private consumption were the motive force behind this recovery. Later they were replaced by foreign demand and a new restocking cycle. The extremely brisk increase in demand for household goods was stimulated by last autumn's reflationary measures and essentially meant a catching-up on the purchase of durable goods which had been deferred since 1974.”

Today, whatever Professor Duhring's descendants in the shape of the left and leftists may claim to the contrary, the idea that consumption can be a boost to production is more than ever an utter lie. This is so not only because the very survival of capital implies a more rapid growth in Sector I (production goods) than in Sector II (consumption goods), but also because growth in Sector I implies the necessary relative or absolute decline in Sector II, this being the contradiction which lies at the very heart of the capitalist system. In fact there can only ever be a rise in oonsumption when it is based on a massive and lasting growth in production which corresponds to the existence of solvent markets. And today the crises of decadent capitalism are accompanied not only by a relative decline in consumption but also by an absolute decline. Today when millions of workers are being thrown out of production and the mass of the proletariat is subject to an ever-increasing decline in its wages, both nominal and real, this analysis is proved more than ever to be correct.

This is why the apparent demand for consumer goods was really an attempt to keep ahead of the wear and tear on consumer goods necessary for the upkeep of the labour force.

Moreover, we can observe the complete inability of capitalism to maintain any level of consumption,except for a more and more restricted sector of the population, in the fact that this so-called policy of 'stimulation' of the economy has not only not stopped the decline in production for all capitalist countries, but has been accompanied by a real worsening in inflation through a policy of growing debts and budgetary deficits. Thus the increase in the volume of trade in the first quarter of 1976 has brought with it a speed-up in the current deficits of the OECD which have risen from 6 billion dollars in 1975 to some 20 billion dollars (annual rate) during the first quarter of 1976.

Faced with the growing pessimism of the bourgeoisie, governments have implemented all kinds of measures to encourage investments in production: from tax credits to subsidies for investments, to a quicker redemption of debts. Thus at the end of 1975 the French government granted fiscal reductions to companies on 10 percent of the value of orders for capital goods carried out between 1 May 1975 and 7 January 1976. When governments are in a state of semi-bankruptcy financially they make urgent appeals for foreign loans: a loan of 1 billion dollars to Italy from the OECD and also to Great Britain and Portugal where the central banks have been propping up these flagging economies. But, as The Economist recently noted: "The bankers are worried now about the fate of these loans, but they have allowed trade to continue." (our emphasis) It could not have been stated clearer: survival by credit, or the sudden death of the system!2

Through this growth in budgetary deficits and foreign debts we see the ever-increasing role of state intervention in the economy. This is the real motive force behind the 'boom' when a real boom in markets is missing, for markets have continued to stagnate and even to decrease (the share in the world market of the seven largest OECD countries further declined in 1976, the only exceptions to this tendency being West Germany and Japan). Faced with this state of affairs governments have implemented a system to encourage exports by subsidies and lessening taxes on profits. This policy has encouraged exporting countries like West Germany and Japan to significantly increase their share of exports in world trade.

THE BREVITY OF THE 'RECOVERIES'

One of the most convincing indications of the permanent character of the general crisis of the system since 1967 is that the length of the phases of 'recovery' have become shorter. The crisis of 1967-8 was followed by a two-year 'recovery'; the 'recovery' in 1971 only lasted a year and a half.
The 1976 'recovery' lasted scarcely more than six months. On the other hand the phases of recession have lengthened: one year in 1967 and 1971 and almost two years in 1974-5. Thus the phases of 'recovery' become shorter and shorter to the point that they become non-existent, while the phases of recession become longer and longer, tending to become permanent.

We can thus clearly see the futility of 'marxist' explanations (like the one in Programme Communiste, no.67) which describe cycles of growth and recession in capitalist decadence. These cycles had a real existence in the nineteenth century when recessions opened up the way to an enlarged expansion onto the world market. But they can have no real existence when capitalism is in decline.

While capitalism was still an ascendant mode of production and was still developing its modern form of industrial capital, the development of economic cycles was a manifestation of the organic growth of the system. The cycles of expansion and recession were therefore expressing in a material way the contradictory development of a system coming up against the limitations of national markets when its mode of existence was already set within a global framework. Capital was not yet limited by the completion of the conquest of the world market and experienced crises which essentially were ones
of adaptation, when the growth in production tended to be more rapid than that of the market, or when the incessant technical revolution imposed an ever more rapid transferring of capital to new branches of production. The crises therefore acted as spurs to new and greater cycles of production on the level of the world market. The reason for these periodic phases of recession and stagnation, as regular as the tides and generally short, came to lay less and less in the burden of agricultural or climatic conditions (for example the crisis of 1847) as in the temporary weakness of that universal aspect in the world-wide growth of production: capital in its money or credit form. The long phases of depression (long in relative terms) such as the one from 1873-96 found their origins in the appearance of more modern capitals (Germany and the USA) who started to compete with the old capitalist countries (Great Britain, France) and were therefore of a more local than international nature. It was then a question of different levels of development in the general period of international expansion of the system. As for the crises which burst out at the peak of these cycles, they became less and less frequent but more severe (1873) in relation to the colossal expansion of the system itself.

What were natural cycles in the life of a developing system are today nothing but convulsions, spasms of a declining system which occur with greater frequency and with shorter and shorter intervals in between. Only the mechanisms applied by the bourgeoisie since 1929 have to some extent attenuated the violent growth of these convulsions - although these mechanisms are becoming weaker and weaker like a brake will with overuse. To imagine in spite of all this that the bourgeoisie is able to launch 'recoveries' and booms at will before falling once more into a new crisis, is to believe that the bourgeoisie is able to overcome its mortal contradictions indefinitely:

"The global cycle we have observed from 1971 to 1975 has an average duration of four to five years ….. Within this hypothesis the slow recovery in the beginning must speed up towards 1977 because of the simultaneity of forces at play in the economic cycle and the interdependence of economies; this recovery would have to be as vigorous as the fall was deep and should take place towards 1978 with a new productive boom." (Programme Communiste, no. 67)

The transparency of the 'recovery' in today's crisis and the bankruptcy into which the whole of Europe is slowly sinking in the wake of the Third World countries, will soon sweep away such pseudo-dialectical mumbo-jumbo about the 'natural' cycles of capitalism in decadence.3

THE 'RECOVERY' IS UNEQUAL

Recessions in the period of reconstruction during the fifties were of a purely conjunctural origin (due to the inequality of reconstruction according to country, the weight of colonial wars etc) which is also why the recovery was general and continued on such a regular and strong path.

Since 1967, the beginning of the phase of the general crisis of capitalism, the very opposite has taken place. Recession has become the rule and recovery the exception.In general, the 'recovery' on a world scale has only affected the most powerful economies, essentially the dominant imperialisms who can throw off the effects of the crisis onto their zone of influence, like the USA and Russia who temporarily benefited from the 'recovery' by strengthening their hold over their own bloc. In reality only three countries experienced a real recovery in production and foreign trade: the USA, West Germany and above all Japan. The famous 'recovery' in fact saw the fall of the three larger capitalist powers: Italy, Great Britain and France.

At the end of the day, only the USA with its greater economic strength has been able to withstand the increasing competition posed by West Germany and Japan. It has achieved this by floating the dollar and taking a series of protectionist measures, while at the same time exerting political pressure on its allies. The weakness of Japan and West Germany, whose production depends on keeping up and even increasing exports, is clear to see; and in the USA industrial production has already declined in the third quarter of 1976 and unemployment has reappeared. Thus we can see that movements of 'recovery' that were both local and international in 1969-70 and 1972-3 have now become unequal and purely local. We can also say that as these periods of 'recovery' become purely local expressions and then increasimgly appear in only two or three nation, they also take on a negative character: the 'recovery' in production is simply a relative slowing down in the fall in production as compared to the previous period of 'recession'. At the same time the precondition for this local 'recovery' is the acceleration in the decomposition of the
weakest competing economies. And within this general decomposition, what the bourgeoisie calls 'recovery' is no more than a greater capacity to put a brake on the free fall of the economy on the part of the economically strongest countries, and no longer corresponds to a rise in industrial production and world trade. In this new mortal crisis of world capitalism there can no longer be an alternation of economic cycles as in the ascendant phase: there is only one cycle, that of the permanent crisis which leads either to war or revolution.

Let us examine in more detail some of the measures which capital has tried to take in both the national and international spheres in order to halt the rapid decomposition of the economy.

THE SOLUTIONS OF THE BOURGEOISIE:

Export More

From the East to the West it is heralded as the miracle solution. This is the solution which presents itself particularly to the weaker capitals on account of their own second-rate home market. For example, in Poland, exports were increased by 30 percent in 1975 acting as the key to the maintenance of the GNP. For all the Eastern bloc countries exports to the OECD zone have increased from 22 per cent to 30 per cent in 1975. The same thing applies to Italy and Great Britain where successive devaluations allowed them to increase the volume and value of their exports.

Despite the massive aid pumped into exporting companies by the different countries a much smaller number of countries have enjoyed the few months of 'recovery' than in 1972; Essentially these were countrles where the productivity of labour has been noticeably raised or was maintained at a former level, while the real wages of the workers have diminished. This is particularly true in the three major powers in world trade: Japan, West Germany and the USA. This can be proved by looking at the development of unit-costs of manpower in manufacturing industries:

% INCREASE IN LABOUR COSTS

Figures from the OECD Economic Perspectives, 1976

It is thanks to its greater competivity that Japanese capital has been able to improve its position to the detriment of the USA by becoming the main exporter of steel and by solidly implanting itself in Latin America and Europe in the automobile and electronic fields. To a lesser extent it has done this in the USA and West Germany as well. However, the fact that Japan's hold over such crucial capital exports is at the expense of other capitals, means that the latter can less and less be used as outlet for Japan's goods, so that overall there is in fact a decrease in markets.

The first contradiction of this 'solution' for capital can be observed in the current massive export of capital. Foreign investment has increased to a previously unknown proportion; for example, West Germany and Japan have increased theirs seven times since 1967. What people refer to as the 'multinationals' having increasing investments outside their country of origin really expresses the need of capital to reduce its costs of production by lessening the share of variable capital included in the price of a commodity. The places for investment can only be those where the average cost of labour is below the average in developed countries and where the production of commodities is necessarily a simple process. The installation of production units discharging commodities onto a world market at lower prices can only reinforce the very competition it is trying to overcome: according to the Far Eastern Review (15.10.76) the implantation of Japanese electronic factories in Singapore and South Korea brought with it an increased competition on the Japanese home market for cameras and transistor radios. The same thing has happened in the largest capitalist power, the USA. Because of the lowering costs of labour power in the USA over the last three years4 European and Japanese multinationals have already taken one quarter of American exports with investments costs at half those in 1970. (Mentioned in Neue Zurcher Zeitung. 29 June 1976.)

This pursuit of lower investment costs on the world market is accompanied by a fall in investment in the larger industrial countries.

This brings us to the second contradiction, (a corollary to the first) which increasingly affects the industrialized countries, and that is the need to continue investing productively in their own national capital in order to maintain the minimum of modernization in machinery, a prerequisite for the maintenance of competivity in export commodities. But budgetary restrictions and a massive reduction in profits for capital bring with them a growing reduction in productive investments and technical research in proportion to decreasing markets:

"The weak inclination to invest, apparent in the USA for some years, has now resulted in the phenomenon of a much more rapid ageing in machinery than in Japan or West Germany. While in West Germany in 1975 less than 50 per cent of industrial machinery was eleven years old or more, in the USA the proportion was 85 per cent; in the most important sectors such as steel, paper and cars, there is no longer any trace of innovation." (Der Spiegel, 29 March 1976)

What is already true for the USA (and even more so for Britain) can only be repeated on a larger scale in the weaker countries. Countries like Russia or Poland which, in spite of their accumulation problems, or rather because of them, attempt to modernize their productive apparatus with investments obtained through systematic overseas borrowing, can in the long run only burden their commodities with the heavy weight of these foreign debts. Without a foothold in the world market they will only accelerate their bankruptcy and also the bankruptcy of the lending countries who will be unable to recover their loans.

This is why the only possihle investments for the capitalists are those that they cynically call 'rationalizations'. Further on we will look at how these 'rationnlizations' really mean more unemployment and increasing exploitation for the working class.

Thus, what the bourgeoisie is pleased to call the 'scarcity of capital' really only expresses the growing powerlessness of capital, both East and West, to find new outlets for its commodities. To develop the productive apparatus in order to realize an ever shrinking volume of capital becomes increasingly absurd even within the framework of this system. Today only the most developed capitals are able in any way to break the fall in their investments and keep production at previous levels; and this can only be at the expense of destroying weaker capitals, which leads to a further contraction of solvent markets.

The Return of Protectionist Measures

The end of the Irecoveryl once more puts on the agenda the time-honoured recipes of the bourgeoisie in crisis. Because of the generalized bankruptcy expressed in the negative balance of payments of the Eastern countries, Third World countries and the OECD countries (apart from West Germany and Japan for the time being), each country is trying to protect its own home market from competition by restricting import commodities.

Over recent months the free circulation of products within the EEC was a reality. However, France recently decided to put a price freeze on importers' goods until 31 December in order to fight against German competition. Since last spring, Italy has put a 50 percent surcharge on imports. In order to fight against Japanese competition Great Britain started talking about imposing supplementary quotas. In general, all the anti-inflation plans adopted in Europe over the last few months will have the effect of restraining foreign trade. The EEC believes that trade within the community will decrease in value from 13 percent to 10 percent in a year.

In the Eastern bloc countries the same tendency is apparent. In Hungary, for example, the five-year plan predicted a decline in imports as much from within COMECON as from the OECD, the figures given being respectively: from 9.9% a year to 6.5% and from 8.3% to 6.5% (Courrier des Pays de l'Est, May 1976).

In the USA, that haven of 'free trade', the government decided in June to impose quotas on steel imports (specialized steel and stainless steel). This recent imposition of quotas in steel imports reveals the same tendency to return to a sort of autarky as did the numerous inquiries into Japanese dumping of televisions, cars and shoes.

Nevertheless, such extreme measures can only be taken within very well-defined limits owing to:

– the greater international division of labour and interpenetration or rather inter-dependence of the largest capitals than in the past;

– the strengthening of blocs which demands a minimum level of economic stability. The bankruptcy of a given country under the blows of too-vicious protectionist measures can only lead to the bankruptcy of other economies in a chain reaction;

– the lessons which the bourgeoisie has learnt following the 1929 crisis about the catastrophic effect of a brutal return to autarky by national capitals;

– the development of the class struggle since 1968, which imposes a certain prudence on the bourgeoisie about limiting essential consumer imports (for example, the lesson which the Polish bourgeoisie learnt from the workers' riots in 1970).

In the coming period, therefore, we can predict that we will see protectionist measures being accompanied by hagglings over export quotas and 'mutual compensations'.5 However, the gradual limitations on trade can only postpone the inevitable crash of the world economy, and ensure that it will take place on a much more extensive scale. At the same time, the massive 'aid' granted to the weaker economies by the central banks, by unleashing new waves of hyper-inflation, risks unleashing at some time or other a generalized financial bankruptcy; this is because the permanence of the crisis will produce movements of more and more uncontrollable panic within the bourgeoisie.

State Capitalism and Austerity Measures

All the measures to 'boost' the economy taken by the different national states demonstrate the growing importance of the statels role in favorizing exports and restricting imports on the home market and expresses the tendency for the whole economy to be taken over by the state apparatus, the ultimate crutch of this declining system.

The tendency towards state capitalism, which has resulted in total control of the economy in the Eastern bloc and most Third World countries (eg Peru, Algeria, China etc) also exists in all countries where capitalism is in a state of debilitation and endemic stagnatlon; and recently the tendency has considerably increased in countries where the economy is in an adverse position vis-a-vis the world market. The coming to power of the left in Europe, in order to take the nationalization measures necessary to obtain a centralized control over the economy, will appear more and more inevitable in the months to come. The repeated cropping up of 'scandals' in all the Western countries could perhaps be interpreted as signs of the increasingly intense pressures being exerted by a growing faction of the bourgeoisie on the most backward or developed sectors of capital, in order to get them to submit to the necessity for an increasingly energetic state control of the most important capitalist firms.

Where capital has traditionally been the most powerful (Japan and the USA) this tendency to state capitalism is essentially expressed by an increasingly rapid rate of capital concentration, encouraged for the most part by means of a variety of state 'aids', Just between January and April 1976 the number of fusions rose to 264, 40 percent more than during the same period in 1975. What's more, in the USA there is a growing faction of the capitalist class which has no hesitation in envisaging a planned economy as a very real possibility. In April 1976, the President of the Ways and Means Commission of the House of Representatives had to announce that:

"The expression 'planned economy' is considered in some circles to be like a red flag used against private enterprise and evokes the image of soviet commissars; it would be absurd for a government to plan the complex system of supply and demand down to the very last detail, but it would be even more absurd to claim that the government has no responsibility about having some foresight and taking intelligent measures in order to avoid dangers or even disaster." (Cited by Hiscox in 'Analysis of the Crisis in the USA', Critique of Political Economy, nos.24-25.)

But even in the state capitalist countries this tendency is accelerated by putting into operation plans (like the ones in Russia) which envisage the liquidation of the small peasant property-holder and the reorganization of land into agrico-industrial complexes. This is now a necessity after the recent succession of agricultural disasters. Thus the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued a decree on 2 June 1976 concerning the "development of specialization and agricultural concentration on the basis of inter-company co-operation and agrico-industrial integration." Such statements quite clearly point out their main preoccupations, (quoted from Courrier des Pays de l'Est, July-August 1976). In addition there has been over the last few years a particularly accelerated fusion of capital by horizontal and vertical concentrations: these measures have made the fusion of capital with the state more direct, and in 1976 have led to the development of industrial units regrouping formerly autonomous companies (their number has now reached 2300 according to Kosygin's speech at the Twenty Fifth Congress of the Russian CP).

These measures to 'rationalize' the economy in face of the crisis are accompanied by unprecedented austerity measures which tend towards 'cheapening' accumulation for a state severely paralyzed by budgetary deficits of dizzying proportions. In 1975, as a result of the 'stimulation' measures following the recession, the budgetary deficits reached unprecedented heights: 70 billion dollars for the USA; 35 billion for West Germany; 10 billion dollars for Japan, etc.

With the end of the 'recovery' the OECD warned and advised its members to reduce their budgetary deficits; according to the OECD they should be reduced from 1977 onwards. These reductions would come primarily from cuts in 'services' (social security in particular, whose costs have risen everywhere) which constitute a part of workers' wages. In New York the 'rationalization' measures in municipal services balanced the books by getting rid of 36,000 jobs, while other big cities decided on massive lay-offs, increased taxes, and a draconian reduction in social aid. Similarly, from France to Italy and Poland the governments have taken measures to freeze wages and introduce tax increases; and in Poland the government decided, as a matter of course, to levy some part of savings bank deposits in order to subsidize house-building.

GROWING PAUPERIZATION OF THE PROLETARIAT

In recent years we have seen a considerable growth in the rate of exploitation of the proletariat through a vicious increase in productivity for those workers still employed. This increase in the rate of exploitation through the extraction of relative surplus value is supplemented by absolute exploitation through enforced overtime.

The relative pauperization of the proletariat which is a permanent feature of the capitalist system, is now joined by the growth of absolute pauperization. In the past this was denied by the reformists when the cyclical crises crashed down on the vast majority of the proletariat, and today it is denied by the left of capital when the crisis has become permanent and has ended up affecting the entire class. Limited during the period of reconstruction to Third World and East European countrics, the tendency towards pauperization is now affecting the immense majority of the world proletariat through:

– the constant unemployment which now affects 20 million workers in the OECD countries and at least 20 percent of the active population in Third World countries; in East European countries where it is not officially recognized, it is often hidden by the existence of labour camps, (according to Contemporary Poland, September 1971, there were 600,000 unemployed before the 1970 events). More and more this immense mass of unemployed is being pushed towards the threshold of physical poverty as governments cut down their already paltry benefits to the unemployed. While this threshold of physical poverty varies quantitatively according to each country (depending on the historic rates of pay of the different working classes), qualitatively speaking (as the OECD inquiries into 'poverty' have demonstrated) the whole capitalist world is moving towards the poverty-line,and in some cases has already crossed over it.6

– the cutting of real wages, which is expressed both by the cutting of benefits (family allowances, social security etc) and by the decrease of buying power which is being attacked with increasing severity by galloping inflation. The official statistics from the Department of Trade reveal that the average real wage of wage-earners has fallen by more than 10 percent between 1972 and 1975, even in the USA. Judging from the official statistics from Ministries of Labour and employers, it seems that in one year from 1974-5 real wages fell on average more than 6 percent in France, Japan and Great Britain. This fall can be more or less sharp in the different countries affected by the crisis depending on how fiercely the workers resist the massive attacks of capital; in Poland, for example, the workers had just peen subjected to massive reductions in their real wages when the insurrection of 1970 forced the Polish government to become massively indebted to the USA and Russia in order to dampen the powder-keg of class struggle with a nominal 40 percent raise in wages to be spread over five years (Le Monde Diplomatique, October 1976). This to a large extent explains the bankruptcy of Polish capital, which sees today that 'to produce more' means to 'consume less'.

The living conditions of the working class were only made worse by the 'recovery', which was accompanied by wage freezes and an inflation which became more violent when 'boom' techniques were set in motion. The complete lie of a 'recovery' is exposed by this more than anything else.

The return of absolute pauperization, believed to be definitively banished from 'industrial societies', confirms the analysis Rosa Luxemburg made almost seventy years ago:

“The lowest, most reprobate and miserable layers which are rarely or never employed are not the rubbish which the bourgeoisie describes as the 'good for nothings' of 'official society'; these layers are intimately linked to the best placed upper layers of industrial workers down through all the intermediary members of
the reserve army. The existence of the lowest layers of the proletariat is determined by the same laws of capitalist production that swell or reduce its numbers; and so the proletariat forms an organic whole, a social class whose degrees of misery and oppression allow it to grasp the capitalist law of wages in its totality, and that includes farm labourers and the reserve army of unemployed with all its different strata, from the highest to the lowest.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy) (our translation)

Thus the pauperization of the class does not mean its defeat or atomization; absolute pauperization far from expressing the organic decomposition of the exploited class, as was the case in the periods of decline in the slave and feudal systems, is the organic affirmation of a whole class, an historic class forced to affirm itself through revolution, or to disappear through the war that will signify the general destruction of humanity.

PERSPECTIVES

In the report brought out after the meeting of the principal OECD members in June 1976, the world bourgeoisie imagined 'scenarios' of growth (the bourgeoisie no longer speaks of forecasts, given the growing bankruptcy of state capitalism). It considers:

– that growth until 1980 must be moderate (not more than 5 per cent per annum) in order to avoid a new wave of inflation which could make the international monetary and financial system sink into bankruptcy after too strong a 'recovery'. Thus the bourgeoisie, which once developed the productive forces in a historically progressive manner, and puffed itself up with the pride of a conquering class, today acknowledges that the condition for its survival now rests upon "containing the risks of an excessive growth in profitslt and avoiding “the risk involved in an under-estimation of the strength of expansionist forces", (OECD, June 1976);

– that “growth between 1975 and 1980 can only happen if wage rises are prevented from reaching a level which would compromise productivity and discourage investment.” Said another way, the slowing-down in decline now depends on whether the bourgeoisie can limit the class struggle. The bourgeoisie is beginning to understand that the survival of its system now lies in the hands of the proletarian class.

Nevertheless, today's crisis is still developing slowly. Unlike in 1929 the crash in the economy doesn't spread from the most powerful nations to the weakest (from the USA to Germany from 1929 to 1932) but rather from the least developed centres (Italy, Great Britain and France) to the heartlands of capitalism (USA, Japan, Russia) because of a slow process whereby the fall of the weak economies is momentarily accompanied by the relative strengthening of their strongest rivals. In view of the gradual disappearance of the phases of 'recovery' and the support world capital has given to its bankrupt partners by an increasing resort to fictitious capital, the bourgeoisie has to resist the temptations to panic which are more and more appearing in its midst (despite all the international organs which it has set up since 1945 to assure some kind of cohesion among the various national capitals). Otherwise the threat of generalized bankruptcy will present itself to a terrified bourgeoisie.

These then are the two factors - class struggle and the growing panic of the bourgeoisie - which together determine the survival of the system.

The State and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Presentation on the Period of Transition

In the ICC Platform adopted at the First Congress of the ICC in January 1976, the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the state in the period of transition remained “open”:

“The experience of the Russian Revolution has shown the complexity and seriousness of the problem of the relationship between the class and the state in the period of transition. In the coming period, the proletariat and revolutionaries cannot evade this problem, but must make every effort to resolve it." (The Platform of the ICC, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (Point 15), in International Review no.5.)

It is in the context of this effort that the Second Congress of Revolution Internationale has approached the question and tried to formulate a resolution which sums up the point reached by the discussion so far.

But the question which has been raised is of a programmatic character. Since the ICC Platform is the only programmatic basis for all sections of the Current, it goes without saying that only the general Congress of the ICC has the competence to decide about any possible changes in the Platform.

Thus by taking up a position on the resolution on the period of transition, the Second Congress of RI will not be altering the programmatic basis of RI; just like any other section of the ICC, RI does not have a distinct programmatic basis from the Current as a whole.

THE LIMITS OF THE DISCUSSION

Before going into the complex problems of the period of transition, it would be useful to distinguish three main areas of discussion:

– The general specificities which characterize the period of transition from capitalism to communism and which distinguish it from other historical periods of transition.

– The relationship between the revolutionary class and the rest of society during the period of transition; in other words the problem of what is meant by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and, consequently, what must be the relationship between the revolutionary class and the state during the transition period.

– Questions about all the concrete 'economic' measures for the transformation of social production.

Revolutionaries must try to give an answer to all those problems. However, ever since Marx and Engels first laid down the bases of 'scientific materialism', revolutionaries have been aware that they must be conscious of the tremendous limitations imposed by the very limitations of proletarian experience in this area. Otherwise they risk losing themselves in the kind of speculations which Marx dismissed contemptuously as "recipes for the dishes of the future". The extent of these limitations was underlined by Marx in 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:

" … what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present functions of the state? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state."

This same awareness was expressed by Rosa Luxemburg in 1918 in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution:

"Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which only have to be applied, the practical realization of socialism as an economic, social, and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our programme is nothing but a few signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that … (socialism) has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force against property etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways." (The Russian Revolution)

Beyond these general limitations, the resolution is bound by the objectives it sets for itself. It does not claim to make a synthesis of everything that has been clarified by revolutionaries on the period of transition. In particular the resolution does not go into the question of the economic measures for the transformation of social production. On the one hand, it includes the positions which were acquired by the workers' movement before the experience of the Russian Revolution and which have shown themselves to be genuine class frontiers; on the other hand it includes a number of positions concerning the relationshlp between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition. These positions have been derived mainly from the Russian Revolution, and although they are not in themselves class frontiers, they are lessons sufficiently developed by historical experience to be an integral part of the programmatic basis of a revolutionary organization.

These fundamental class frontiers are: the inevitability of a transition period; the primacy of the proletariat's political activity as the precondition and guarantee of the transition towards a classless society; the world-wide character of this transformation; the specificity of the power of the working class, in particular the fact that the proletariat, in contrast to other revolutionary classes in history, has no economic basis within the old society, and therefore does not fight for political domination in order to consolidate itself as an economically ruling class, but in order to put an end to all economic domination by abolishing classes themselves; the impossibility of the proletariat using the bourgeois state apparatus and the necessity for its destruction as a precondition for the establishment of proletarian political power; the inevitability of a state during the period of transition, even though this state will be profoundly different from all other states in history.

These positions already represent a categorical rejection of all the social democratic, anarchist, self-management, and modernist conceptions which have always been present in the workers' movement but which are today pillars of the counter-revolution.

On the basis of these fundamental class positions the resolution goes on to define, primarily from the experiences of the Russian Revolution, certain aspects of the relationship between the proletariat and the
state during the transition period. Thus we have an understanding of the inevitably conservative nature of the transitional state; the impossibility of the proletariat or its party identifying themselves with this state; the necessity for the working class to conceive of its relationship to this state (in which it participates as a politically ruling class) as being a relationship of force: "domination over society is thus its domination over the state"; the necessity for the existence and armed strength of the working class's own specific organizations: only the working class is organized as a class in this period and the state can have no coercive power over the proletariat's own organizations.

These positions enable us to reject the mystifications which served as a basis for "the counter-revolution which developed in Russia under the direction of a degenerating Bolshevik Party" and which are defended today by all the Stalinist and Trotskyist currents as a theoretical justification for identifying state capitalism with socialism.

The content of this resolution thus represents a real safeguard against all the erroneous conceptions which the proletariat could encounter in its coming world-wide assault on the capitalist system. However, no matter how important these positions might be for the future struggles of the class, we must understand the real limits of this acquisition today.

The historic experiences which gave rise to these positions dealing with the relationship between class and state in the transition period are still much too rare and specific for the conclusions that can be drawn from them to be considered class lines by revolutionaries today. Class lines are positions which establish a clear point of demarcation between the bourgeois camp and the proletarian camp. They cannot be drawn up by revolutionaries on the basis of insufficient historical experience or in anticipation of the future; they can only arise on the empirical basis provided by the very history of proletarian struggle, which must be sufficiently clear to supply us with lessons that are'beyond discussion'.7

It is therefore necessary to underline how very limited are the points which we can consider as definite gains on this question: the rejection of the identification of the proletariat or its party with the transitional state; the definition of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state as being one of the dictatorship of the class over the state, and never the state over the class; the defence of the autonomy of the proletariat's own organizations in relation to the state, as being the precondition for the real autonomy and strength of the proletarian dictatorship.

These points are still inevitably abstract and general. They are simply "a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that." The precise forms in which they will be put into practice inevitably remain a "new territory" which only experience will allow us to open up.

A precondition for the effectiveness of a revolutionary organization is not only understanding what it knows and can know, but also what it does not and cannot know. This can only come from its ability to show a real programmatic rigour and to grasp the fundamental lessons provided by the living struggle of the proletarian masses.

THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CLASS AND STATE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORKERS' MOVEMENT

The general lack of knowledge about the history of the workers' movement, which has been aggravated by the organic break between the revolutionaries today and the former political organizations of the class, have led some to think that the analysis presented in this resolution is somehow a 'discovery' or an 'originality' of the ICC. A brief summary of the way this question has been tackled (one might even say 'discovered') by revolutionaries since Marx and Engels will soon show how wrong this view is.

In the Communist Manifesto which did not yet make use of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", the "first step in the revolution of the working class" is defined as raising "the proletariat to the position of ruling class, (winning) the battle of democracy". This conquest refers in fact to the apparatus of the bourgeois state which the proletariat must use in order:

" ... to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state ie of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."

Even if the idea of the ultimate disappearance of the state was already affirmed in The Poverty of Philosophy; even if the idea of the inevitable existence of a state during the “first step of the revolution of the working class” is present in the Manifesto, the actual problem of the relationship between the working class and the state during the period of transition was hardly touched upon.

It was the experience of the Paris Commune which really began to allow the problem to be more fully understood through the lessons that Marx and Engels drew from it: the necessity for the proletariat to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, the setting up of a completely different apparatus which was "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word" (Engels), since it was no longer an organ for the oppression of the majority by a minority. That this apparatus was still burdened with the weight of the past was clearly underlined by Engels who defined it as a "necessary evil”:

" … an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worse sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap." ('Introduction' to The Civil War in France.)

However, despite an intuitive awareness of the necessity for the proletariat to distrust this apparatus inherited from the past (the proletariat, Engels, said "must safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment"), and probably because the extremely short and circumscribed experience of the Paris Commune did not make it possible to really pose the problem of the relationship between the proletariat, the state, and the other non-exploiting classes in society, one of the ideas which came out of the Commune was the identification of the proletarian dictatorship with the transitional state. Thus, three years after the Paris Commune, Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program:

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

This was the theoretical basis which Lenin reformulated in the concept of the 'proletarian state' in State and Revolution; and it was on this basis that the Bolsheviks and the Russian proletariat established the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1917.

This attempt at proletarian power confronted the most enormous difficulties - the overwhelming majority of peasants in Russian society, the immediate necessity to wage a pitiless civil war, the international isolation of Russia, the extreme weakness of a productive apparatus destroyed by the First World War and then the civil war. All this was to dramatically highlight the problem of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state.

The grim reality of these events was to prove that it was not enough to baptize the state as 'proletarian' for it to serve the revolutionary interests of the proletariat; that it was not enough to place the proletarian party at the head of the state (to the point where it became totally identified with it) for the state machine to follow the course on which even the most dedicated revolutionaries wanted to set it.

The state apparatus, the state bureaucracy, could not be the expression of proletarian interests alone. As an apparatus whose task was to ensure the survival of society it could only express the survival needs of the moribund Russian economy. What Marxists have said from the very beginning was powerfully vindicated: the imperatives of economic survival imposed themselves mercilessly on the policies of the state. And the economy was a long way from being influenced in any proletarian direction. Lenin had to admit this powerlessness at the Eleventh Congress of the Party, one year after the NEP had begun:

"You communists, you workers, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which undertook to administer the state, must be able to arrange it so that the state, which you have taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to … the state is in our hands: but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in this past year? No! … How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired." (From Lenin and Trotsky, Lenin's Fight Against Stalinism, ed. Russell Block, Pathfinder Press, Inc. New York, 1975, p. 75.)

The identification of the proletarian party with the state did not lead to the state being subordinated to the revolutionary interests of the proletariat, but to the subordination of the party to the Russian state. Under the pressure of the survival needs of the Russian state, which the Bolsheviks saw as the incarnation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the 'proletarian bastion' that had at all costs to be defended, the Bolshevik Party ended up subordinating the tactics of the Communist International to the interests of Russia (for example, alliances with the big European 'social-chauvinist' parties in an attempt to break the 'cordon sanitaire' which was strangling Russia); it was this pressure which led to the signing of the Rapallo Treaty with German imperialism; and it was to prevent any weakening of the power of the 'proletarian' state apparatus and in the name of this state, that the Kronstadt insurgents were crushed by the Red Army.

As for the working masses, the identification of their party with the state led to their vanguard being cut off from them precisely when they most needed it, while the idea of identifying their power with the power of the state rendered them powerless and confused in the face of the growing oppression of the state bureaucracy.8

The counter-revolution which reduced the dictatorship of the proletariat to ashes had arisen out of the very organ which for decades revolutionaries had thought could be identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The long process of drawing out the lessons of the Russian experience began right from the beginning of the revolution itself.

The first theoretical reactions came in the midst of an unavoidable confusion; they were limited to attacking partial aspects of the problem and unable to grasp the essence of the question in the tumult of a revolution whose signs of degeneration began to appear right from the start. Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the Russian Revolution in 1918, which criticized the identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party as well as warning against any limitation of working class political life by the state, contained already the germs of a critique of the identification of the proletariat with the transitional state. Rosa Luxemburg, although she still considered this transitional state as a 'proletarian' state, and although she still retained the idea of the "seizure of power by the socialist party", pointed out the only way of "lopping off the worse side" of this "evil", the state:

" … the only effective means in the hands of the proletarian revolution are: radical measures of a polical and social character, the speediest possible transformation of the social guarantees ol the life of the masses – the kindling of revolutionary idealism, which can be maintained over any length of time only through the intensely active life of the masses themselves under conditions of unlimited political freedom." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution)

In Russia and within the Bolshevik Party itself, the development of the state bureaucracy, and thus of the antagonism between the proletariat and the state power, provoked early on various reactions, such as that of Ossinky's group or later on the Workers' Group of Miasnikov. These groups, by questioning the rise of the bureacracy, were already raising, albeit in a confused manner, the question of the nature of the state and its relationship to the class.

But it is probably the polemic between Lenin and Trotsky at the Tenth Congress on the question of the unions that most sharply posed the problem of the state. Against Trotsky's idea of more and more integrating the workers' unions into the state inorder to deal with economic difficulties, Lenin defended the necessity to safeguard the autonomy of the proletariat's organization, so that the workers could defend themselves against "the nefarious abuses of the state bureaucracy". Lenin even went so far as to say that the state was not a "workers' state, but a workers' and peasants' state with numerous bureaucratic deformations". Even though these debates took place in a milieu of a generalized confusion (Lenin considered his differences with Trotsky to be questions of contingency, not principle), they were nevertheless authentic expressions of the proletariat's search for answers to the problem of the relationship between its dictatorship and the state.

The Dutch and German Left continued along the path laid down by Rosa Luxemburg concerning the development of the state bureaucracy in Russia. Having been forced to confront the problem of the degeneration of the international policies of the C.l., they were also led to elaborate a critique of what they called 'state socialism'. However, the work done by Jan Appel in collaboration with the Dutch Left on the Basic Principles of Communist Production and Distribution was mainly concerned with the economic aspects of the transition period. Concerning its political aspects they tended to reaffirm the fundamental ideas of Rosa Luxemburg.

The theoretical basis for a more profound understanding of the problem was posed above all by the work of the Italian Left in Belgium, in particular the articles by Mitchell published from no. 28 of Bilan (March-April 1936). While retaining a 'Leninist' position on the quasi-identity between party and class, Bilan was the first to clearly affirm the pernicious character of any identification between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition. At the same time Bilan stressed the importance of the class and its party remaining autonomous from the state. Taking up some of Rosa Luxemburg's ideas, Mitchell saw the vitality of the proletariat's own organs as the necessary antidote to the "worst sides" of the state:

"But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider the Soviet State as 'an evil inherited by the proletariat … whose worst sides the victorious proletariat … cannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible', but as an organism which could be completely identified with the proletarian dictatorship, ie with the Party.

The result of this important modification was that the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer to be the Party, but the state; and through the ensuing reversal of roles the latter found itself in a course of development which led not to the withering away of the state but to the reinforcement of its coercive and repressive powers. Once an instrument of the world revolution, the proletarian state was inevitably converted into a weapon of the global counter-revolution.

Although Marx, Engels, and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian Revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilized them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance." (Mitchell, Bilan)

Bilan's analysis still contained hesitations and weaknesses, in particular its analysis of the class nature of the transitional state, which it still characterized as a 'proletarian state'.

These understandable hesitations and inadequacies were transcended in the analysis of Internationalisme in 1946 (see the article 'The Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution', republished in RI's Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion, no.1, January 1973). Basing itself on an objective analysis of the economic and political nature of the period of transition, Internationalisme clearly affirmed the non-proletarian, anti-socialist character of the transitional
state:

“The state, insofar as it is reconstituted after the revolution, expresses the immaturity of the conditions for a socialist society. It is the political superstructure of an economic base which is not yet socialist. By its very nature it is opposed to and hostile to socialism. Just as the period of transition is a historically inevitable stage which the proletariat has to go through, so the state is for the proletariat an unavoidable instrument of violence which it must use against the dispossessed classes but with which it cannot identify itself ...

The Russian experience in particular has demonstrated the theoretical falsity of the idea of the workers' state, of the proletarian nature of the state, and of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilization by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state." ('Theses on the Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution', Internationalisme, no.9, April 1946.)

Internationalisme drew from the experience of the Russian Revolution the vital necessity for the proletariat to exert a strict and permanent control over the state apparatus, which at the slightest reflux would become the principal force of the counter-revolution:

"History and the Russian experience in particular have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist and which, as soon as the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a reborn capitalism." (Ibid)

Still impregnated with certain conceptions held by the Italian Left from which Internationalisme had evolved, especially on the question of the party and of the trade unions, but clearly aware that the subject of the revolution was the working class, Internationalisme defended the necessity for total political freedom for the class and its class-wide organs (which it still thought could take the form of 'unions') in relation to the state. In particular Internationalisme condemned any use of violence by the state against the class. It was also the first to develop a real understanding of the link between economic and political problems during the transition period:

"This period of transition between capitalism and socialism under the political dictatorship of the proletariat expresses itself on the economic terrain in an energetic policy which aims to diminish class exploitation, to constantly increase the proletariat's share in the national income, to alter the relationship between variable capital and constant capital in favour of the former. This policy cannot be based simply on the programmatic declaration of the party; still less is it the prerogative of the state, the organ of coercion and administration. This policy can only find a guarantee and a real expression in the class itself, through the pressure which the class exerts over society, through its opposition to and struggle against all other classes ...

Any tendency to reduce the role of the trade unions after the revolution; any pretence that the existence of a 'workers' state' means the end of freedom to engage in union activities or strikes; any advocacy of fusing the unions with the state, through the theory of handing economic administration over to the unions, which seems revolutionary but which in fact leads to an incorporation of the unions into the state machine; any position which, however revolutionary its intentions, calls for violence within the proletariat and its organizations; any attempt to stand in the way of the broadest workers' democracy and the free play of political struggle and of fractions within the unions: any such policies are anti-working class. They falsify the relationship between party and class and weaken the proletariat's position during the transition period.

The duty of communists will be to energetically denounce and fight against all these tendencies and to work for the full development and independence of the trade union movement, which is an indispensable condition for the victory of socialism." (Ibid)

It was the achievement of Internationalisme to have provided the general theoretical framework in which the question of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition could finally be posed in a solid and coherent manner.

Situated firmly within this process, the resolution presented to the Congress is to be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the principal gains of the workers' movement on this question and as an effort to continue the unending work of deepening the programmatic basis of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle.

We can see that this resolution is in no way a 'discovery' of the ICC. But we must also understand the weight of responsibility which the revolutionary organization is taking on its shoulders by attempting to assume this inheritance.

Contribution from the 2nd Congress of RI

1. Between capitalism and socialism there inevitably exists a more or less long period of transition from one to the other. It is transitional in the sense that it does not have its own stable mode of production. Its specific characteristic is the systematic and uninterrupted transformation of the relations of production. By means of political and economic measures it undermines the basis of the old system and lays the basis for new social relations, for communism.

2. Communism is a society without classes. The period of transition, which can only really develop after the victory of the revolution on a world scale, is a dynamic period which tends towards the disappearance of classes, but it still suffers from class divisions and the persistence of divergent and antagonistic interests in society.

3. In contrast to previous periods of transition in history, all of which unfolded within the old society and culminated in revolution, the period of transition from capitalism to communism can only begin after the destruction of the political domination of capitalism, and in the first instance of the capitalist state. The general political seizure of power over society by the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat, precedes, conditions, and guarantees the process of economic and social transformation.

4. In contrast to the bourgeois revolutions which took place within the framework of the region or nation, socialism can only be realized on a world scale. The extension of the revolution and of the civil war is thus the primordial act which conditions the possibilities for and the rhythm of the social-economic transformation in the country or countries where the proletariat has already taken political power.

5. A product of the division of society into classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat is distinguished from the power of previous ruling classes by the following essential characteristics:

a. Not being an economically dominant class, the working class does not exert power in order to defend any economic privileges (it does not and can never have any) but in order to destroy all privileges.

b. For this reason, unlike other ruling classes, it has no need to hide its goals, to mystify the oppressed classes by presenting its dictatorship as the reign of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

c. This dictatorship does not have the aim of perpetuating the existing state of affairs, but on the contrary of revolutionizing the social fabric so as to ensure the advent of a genuinely human society without exploitation or oppression.

6. In all class societies, in order to prevent the class antagonisms of society from exploding into permanent struggles which threaten its entire equilibrium, endangering the very existence of that society, superstructures and institutions have emerged of which the state is the highest expression, whose essential function is to maintain these struggles within an acceptable framework, to adapt themselves to and conserve the existing economic infrastructure.

7. The period of transition to socialism is as we have seen a society still divided into classes. This is the reason why there will inevitably arise in this period this superstructural organism, this unavoidable evil, the state.

But there are fundamental differences between this state and the state in other class societies:

a. In the first place, the fact that for the first time in history it is the state of the majority of exploited and non-exploiting classes against the minority (the former ruling class), and not of an exploiting minority for the oppression of the majority.

b. The fact that it is not constituted on the basis of a specialized body - of political parties - but on the basis of delegates elected by local territorial councils and revocable by them.

c. This whole state organization categorically excludes any participation in it by exploiting classes and strata, who are deprlved of all political and civil rights.

d. The fact that the remuneration of the members of this state is never more than that of the workers.

It is in this sense that marxists can justflably speak of a semi-state, an altered state, a state on the road to extinction.

8. The experience of the victorious Russian Revolution bears with it certain precise though negative, lessons concerning the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and state institutions in the transition period:

a. The function of proletarian political parties is fundamentally different from that of bourgeois political parties, above all because they are not and cannot be state organisms. While bourgeois parties can only exist by tending to become integrated into the state apparatus, the integration of workers' parties into the state after the revolution perverts them and causes them to completely lose their specific function in the class.

b. Because the function of the state is the conservation of the existing social order the state in previous class societies could not fail to be identified with the economically dominant class, to become the main expression of its general interests and of its unity, both within that class and in the face of other classes in society.

This is not at all the case ror the proletariat which does not tend to conserve the existing state of affairs but to overthrow and transform it. That is why its dictatorship cannot find its authentic and total expression in a conservative instrument par excellence, the state.

There can be no such thing as a 'socialist state'. This is a contradiction in terms. But soclalism is the historic interest of the proletariat, its own evolving essence. There is identity and identification between the two. To the extent that onc can talk of a socialist proletariat, one cannot speak of a workers' state, a proletarlan state.

We also consider that, on the basis of the Russian experience, a theoretical effort must be made concerning the necessary distinction between the state in the period of transition, which the proletariat is forced to use and over which the proletarlat must exert its dlctatorship at all times, and the proletarian dictatorship itself. Politically this identification has been tremendously harmful to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, serving as a mystifying cover for the counter-revolution in Russia, under the direction of a degenerating Bolshevik party.

c. The state in the transition period, with all its distinctive characteristics and limitations, still bears all the marks of a class-divided society. It can never be the organ which establishes and symbolizes socialism. Only the proletarian class is the seed-bearer of socialism. Its domination over society is also its domination over the state, and can only be assured by its own class dictatorship.

9. The dictatorship of the proletariat must be defined by:

a. The necessity to maintain the unity and autonomy of the working class in its own organs, the workers' councils, accompanied by the proletariat's dissolution of all organs belonging to other classes as classes.

b. The proletariat's exertion of its hegemony in society, which means a hegemonic participation within the organizations from which the state emanates, while denying the other classes any right to intervene in its own class organs.

c. The proletariat's assertion of itself as the only armed class, independently of any other organ, above all the state.

When one talks about the revolutionary opposition to the degeneration of the revolution in Russia, or of the Communist International, it is generally assumed that one is referring to the Left Opposition led by Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders. The wholly inadequate criticisms of the degeneration made after much delay by those who had played an active part in that degeneration are taken to be the be all and end all of communist opposition inside Russia or the International. The much deeper and more consistent critique elaborated by the ‘left wing communists' long before the Left Opposition came into existence in 1923 is either ignored or dismissed as the ravings of sectarian lunatics cut off from the ‘real world'. This distortion of the past is simply an expression of the long ascendancy of the counter-revolution since the years of the revolutionary struggle ended in the 1920s. It is always in the interests of the capitalist counter-revolution to hide or distort the genuinely revolutionary history of the working class and its communist minorities, because only in this way can the bourgeoisie hope to obscure the historic nature of the proletariat as the class that is destined to lead mankind into the reign of freedom.

Against this distortion of the past revolutionaries must reaffirm and re-examine the historic struggles of the proletariat; not out of an archivist's interest in history, but because the past experience of the class forms and unbreakable chain with its present and future experience, and only by understanding the past can the present and the future also be understood and outlined. We hope that this study of the communist left in Russia will help to reclaim an important chapter in the history of the communist movement from the distortions of bourgeois history, whether academic or leftist. But more important we hope that it will serve to clarify some of the lessons that emerge out of the struggles, failures and victories of the Russian left, lessons that have a vital role to play in the reconstitution of the communist movement today.

"In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia". (Rosa Luxemburg, in The Russian Revolution.)

In the wake of the counter-revolution which inundated the world after the revolutionary years of 1917-23, a myth grew up around Bolshevism, portraying it as a specific product of Russian ‘backwardness' and Asiatic barbarism. Remnants of the German and Dutch left communists, profoundly demoralised by the degeneration and death of the revolution in Russia, regressed to the semi-Menshevik position that the bourgeois development of Russia in the twenties and thirties was inevitable, because Russia had been unripe for communism; and Bolshevism was defined as an ideology of the ‘intelligentsia' who had sought only the capitalist modernisation of Russia and who had thus carried through a ‘bourgeois' or ‘state-capitalist' revolution in place of an impotent bourgeoisie, basing itself on an immature proletariat.

This whole theory was a total revision of the genuinely proletariat character of the Russian Revolution and of Bolshevism, and a repudiation by many left communists of their own participation in the heroic events that began in October 1917. But like all myths, it contained a grain of truth. While fundamentally a product of international conditions, the workers' movement also contains certain specificities arising out of particular national-historic conditions. Today, for example, it is not by accident that the re-emerging communist movement is strongest in the countries of Western Europe and far weaker, indeed almost non-existent, in the countries of the Eastern bloc. This is a product of the specific manner in which the historic events of the last fifty years have unfolded, in particular the way in which the capitalist counter-revolution has organised itself in different countries. Similarly, when we examine the revolutionary movement in Russia prior to and following the October insurrection: while its essence can only be grasped by considering it in the context of the international workers' movement, certain of its strengths and weaknesses can be linked to the particular conditions then prevailing in Russia.

In many ways, the weaknesses of the Russian revolutionary movement were simply the other side of the coin of its strengths. The ability of the Russian proletariat to move very quickly towards a revolutionary solution to its problems was largely determined by the nature of the Tsarist regime. Authoritarian, decrepit, incapable of erecting any stable ‘buffers' between itself and the proletarian menace, the Tsarist system ensured that any attempt of the proletariat to defend itself would immediately bring itself up against the repressive forces of the state. The Russian proletariat, young but highly combative and concentrated, was neither given the time nor the political space to develop a reformist mentality which could lead it to identify the defence of its immediate material interests with the survival of its ‘motherland'. It was thus far easier for the Russian proletariat to refuse all identification with the Tsarist war-effort after 1914, and to see the destruction of the Tsarist political apparatus as a precondition for its advance in 1917. Very broadly, and without trying to make too mechanical a connection between the Russian proletariat and its revolutionary minorities, these strengths of the Russian class were one of the factors which allowed the Bolsheviks to stand at the head of the world revolutionary movement both in 1914 and in 1917, with their ringing denunciation of the war and their uncompromising advocacy of the need to smash the machinery of the bourgeois state.

But as we have said, these strengths were also weaknesses: the immaturity of the Russian proletariat, its lack of organisational traditions, the suddenness with which it was propelled into a revolutionary situation, tended to leave important lacunae in the theoretical arsenal of its revolutionary minorities. It is significant, for example, that most of the pertinent critiques of the reformist practices of social democracy and trade unionism began to be elaborated precisely in those countries where these practices were most firmly established, in particular, Holland and Germany. It was here, rather than in Russia where the proletariat was still struggling for parliamentary and trade union rights, that the pernicious dangers of reformist habits were first understood by revolutionaries. For example, the work of Anton Pannekoek and the Dutch Tribune group in the years preceding World War 1 helped to prepare the ground for the radical break that the German and Dutch revolutionaries made with the old reformist tactics after the war. The same applies to Bordiga's Abstentionist Fraction in Italy. In contrast to this, the Bolsheviks never really understood that the period of reformist ‘tactics' had ended once and for all with the entry of capitalism into its death throes in 1914; or at least they never fully understood all the implications of the new epoch for revolutionary strategy. The conflicts over trade union and parliamentary tactics which rent the Communist International after 1920 resulted to a large extent from the failure of the Russian party to thoroughly grasp the needs of the new epoch; and this failure was not entirely restricted to the Bolshevik leadership: it was also reflected in the fact that the critique of unionism, parliamentarism, substitutionism and other social democratic hangovers which the Russian left communists made never achieved the same level of clarity as that of their Dutch, German and Italian counterparts.

But here again we must temper this observation with an understanding of the international context of the revolution. The theoretical weaknesses of the Bolshevik party were not absolutes, precisely because this was a genuinely proletarian party, and therefore open to all new developments and understandings that come from the proletarian struggle when it is on an ascendant path. Had the revolution of October extended itself internationally, these weaknesses could have been overcome; the social democratic deformations in Bolshevism only hardened into a fundamental obstacle to the revolutionary movement when the world revolution entered into a reflux and the proletarian bastion in Russia became cripplingly isolated. The rapid slide of the Communist International into opportunism, largely under the influence of the Russian party, was, amongst other things, the result of the Bolsheviks' attempt to balance the survival needs of the Soviet state with the international needs of the revolution, an attempt which became increasingly contradictory the more the tide of revolution receded, and which was finally abandoned with the triumph of ‘socialism in one country', which signified the death of the Communist International and crowned the victory of the counter-revolution in Russia.

If the extreme isolation of the Russian bastion was to ultimately prevent the Bolshevik party from going beyond its initial errors, it also severely hampered the theoretical development of the left communist fractions who detached themselves from the degenerating Russian party. Cut off from the discussion and debate which was still being maintained by the left fractions in Europe, subjected to a ruthless repression by an increasingly totalitarian state, the Russian left tended to restrict itself to a formal critique of the degeneration of the Russian counter-revolution, and rarely penetrated to the roots of the degeneration. The sheer novelty and rapidity of the Russian experience were to leave an entire generation of revolutionaries utterly confused as to what had happened there; not until the thirties and forties did a coherent understanding began to emerge out of the remaining communist fractions. But this understanding came above all from revolutionaries in Europe and America; the Russian left was too close, too caught up in the whole experience to elaborate an objective, global analysis of the phenomenon. We can therefore only endorse the assessment of the Russian left made by the comrades of Internationalism:

"The enduring contribution of these small groups trying to come to grips with the new situation, is not that they could have possibly understood the entire process of state capitalism at its beginnings nor that they expressed a totally coherent programme, but that they sounded the alarm and were among the first to prophetically denounce the establishment of a state capitalist regime; their legacy in the workers' movement is to have provided the political proof that the Russian proletariat did not go down to defeat in silence". (J. Allen, ‘A Contribution on the Question of State Capitalism', Internationalism n°6)

What is the communist left?

An aspect of the myth of ‘backward' or ‘bourgeois' Bolshevism is the idea that there is an impassable gulf between the Bolsheviks, who are presented as partisans of state capitalism and party dictatorship, and the left communists who are painted as the real defenders of workers' power and the communist transformation of society. This idea has a particular appeal to councilists and libertarians who want to identify only with what pleases them in the past workers' movement and reject the real experience of the class as soon as they discover its blemishes. In the real world however there is a direct and irreplaceable continuity between what Bolshevism originally was and what the left communists were in the 1920s and after.

The Bolsheviks were themselves on the extreme left of the pre-war social democratic movement, especially because of their resolute defence of organisational coherence and the need for a revolutionary party independent of all reformist and confusionist tendencies of the workers' movement.[1] Their position on the 1914-18 war (or rather the position of Lenin and his supporters in the party) was again the most radical of all the anti-war stances in the socialist movement: "turn the imperialist war into a civil war"; and their call for the revolutionary liquidation of the bourgeois state in 1917 made them the rallying point for all the intransigent revolutionary minorities in the world. The ‘left radicals' of Germany - who were to provide the main nucleus of the KAPD (German Workers' Communist Party) in 1920 - were directly inspired by the example of the Bolsheviks, especially when they began to call for the constitution of a new revolutionary party in total opposition to the social-patriots of the SPD (Social Democratic Party).[2]

Thus, up to a certain point the Bolsheviks and the Communist International, which was largely set up on their initiative, represented the pre-war ‘left'; they became the communist movement. Left communism only has a meaning as a reaction against the degeneration of this original communist vanguard, against the betrayal of what the vanguard has stood for at the beginning. Left communism thus emerged organically out of the original communist movement led by the Bolsheviks and the CI.

This becomes startlingly clear when we look at the origins of the communist left in Russia itself. All the Russian left fractions had their origins in the Bolshevik party. This is in itself proof of the proletarian character of Bolshevism. Because it was a living expression of the working class, the only class that can make a radical and continuous critique of its own practice, the Bolshevik party perpetually generated revolutionary fractions out of its own body. At every step in its degeneration voices were raised inside the party in protest, groupings were formed inside the party, or split from it, to denounce the betrayals of Bolshevism's original programme. Only when the party had been buried by its Stalinist gravediggers did these fractions no longer spring from it. The Russian left communists were all Bolsheviks; it was they who defended a continuity with the Bolshevism of the heroic years of the revolution, while those who calumniated, persecuted and exterminated them, no matter how exalted their names, were the ones who were breaking with the essence of Bolshevism.

The Communist Left during the heroic years of the revolution, 1918-21

The first months

The Bolshevik party was actually the first party of the reconstituted workers' movement to give rise to a ‘left'. This was precisely because it was the first party to lead a successful insurrection against the bourgeois state. In the conception of the workers' movement of the time, the role of the party was to organise the seizure of power and to assume governmental office in the new ‘proletarian state'. Indeed the proletarian character of the state, according to this conception, was guaranteed by the fact that it was in the hands of a proletarian party which sort to lead the working class towards socialism. The fundamentally erroneous character of this dual or treble substitution (party-state, state-class, party-class) was to be laid bare over the ensuing years of the revolution; but it was the tragic destiny of the Bolshevik party to put the theoretical errors of the entire workers' movement into practice, and thus to demonstrate through their own negative experience the absolute falsity of this conception. All the shame and betrayals associated with Bolshevism derived from the fact that the revolution was born and died in Russia, and that the Bolshevik party, by identifying itself with the state that was to become the internal agent of the counter-revolution, itself became an organiser of the revolution's decline. Had the revolution broken out and degenerated in Germany and not Russia, the names of Luxemburg and Liebknecht might today cause the same ambiguous and mixed reactions as do the names Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev. It is only because of the great adventure that the Bolsheviks undertook that revolutionaries can assert unambiguously today: the role of the party is not to take power on behalf of the class, and the interests of the class are not identical to the interests of the post-revolutionary state. But it has taken many years of painful reflection to be able to spell out these apparently simple lessons.

As soon as it became a party ‘in charge of' the Soviet state in October 1917, the Bolshevik party began to degenerate: not all at once, not in a completely unbroken downward course, and, as long as the world revolution was on the agenda, not irreversibly. But nevertheless, the general process of degeneration began immediately. Whereas formerly the party had been able to act freely as the most resolute fraction of the class, always showing the way to deepen and extend the class struggle, the Bolsheviks' assumption of state power put a growing brake on their ability to identify with and participate in the proletarian class struggle. From now on the needs of the state were to more and more take precedence over the needs of the class; and although this dichotomy was hidden at first by the very intensity of the class struggle, it was nevertheless the expression of an intrinsic and fundamental contradiction between the nature of the state and the nature of the proletariat. The needs of the state are essentially concerned with holding society together, of containing the class struggle within a framework acceptable to the maintenance of the social status quo; the needs of the proletariat, and thus of its communist vanguard, can only be the extension and deepening of its class struggle towards the overthrowing of all existing conditions. Now as long as the revolutionary movement of the class was on the ascendant both in Russia and internationally, the Soviet state could be used to guard the conquests of the revolution; it could be an instrument in the hands of the revolutionary class. But as soon as the real movement of the class disappeared, the status quo defended by the state could only be the status quo of capital. This was the general tendency, but in fact the contradictions between the proletariat and the new state began to appear immediately, because of the immaturity of the class and the Bolsheviks in their attitude to the state, and above all because the consequences of the revolution remaining isolated in Russia began to take their toll on the new proletarian bastion from the very beginning. Faced with a number of problems which could only be solved on the international arena - the organisation of a war ravaged economy, relations with huge peasant masses inside Russia, and with a hostile capitalist world outside - the Bolsheviks lacked experience to take measures which could have at least diminished the nefarious consequences of these problems; as it was the measures which they took tended to compound the problems rather than relieve them. And the overwhelming majority of the errors they made flowed from the fact that they had taken charge of the state, and thus felt justified in identifying proletarian interests with the needs of the Soviet state, and indeed subordinating the former to the latter.

Although no communist fraction in Russia at the time succeeded in making a fundamental critique of these substitutionist errors - and this was to remain a failing on the part of the entire Russian left - a revolutionary opposition to the Bolsheviks' early state early state policies crystallised only a few months after the seizure of power. This opposition took the form of the Left Communist group around Ossinski, Bukharin, Radek, Smirnov and others; organised mainly in the party's Moscow Regional Bureau and expressing itself through the factional journal Kommunist. This opposition of early 1918 was the first organised Bolshevik fraction to criticise the party's attempts to discipline the working class. But the original raison d'être of the Left Communist group was its opposition to the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty with German imperialism.

This is not the place to undertake a detailed study of the whole Brest-Litovsk issue. In brief the main debate was between Lenin and the Left Communists (led on this issue by Bukharin) who were in favour of a revolutionary war against Germany and denounced the peace treaty as a ‘betrayal' of the world revolution. Lenin defended the signing of the treaty as a way of obtaining a ‘breathing space' while reorganising the military capacities of the Soviet state. The Lefts insisted that:

"The adoption of the conditions dictated by the German imperialists would be an act going contrary to our whole policy of revolutionary socialism; it would lead to the abandonment of the proper line of international socialism, in domestic as well as foreign policy, and could lead to one of the worse kinds of opportunism." (R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, 1960, p.73)

Acknowledging the technical inability of the Soviet state to wage a conventional war against German imperialism, they advocated a strategy of tying the German army down with guerrilla tactics by flying detachments of Red partisans. The waging of the "holy war against German imperialism", they hoped, would serve as an example to the world proletariat and inspire it to join in the fight.

We do not wish to enter into a retrospective debate about the strategic possibilities open to the Soviet power in 1918. We should make it clear that both Lenin and the Left Communists recognised that the only ultimate hope of the Russian proletariat lay in the world extension of the revolution; both of their motivations and actions were placed within a framework of internationalism and both presented their arguments in full view of the Russian proletariat organised in the Soviets. We therefore consider it inadmissible to define the signing of the treaty as a ‘betrayal' of internationalism. Nor as it turned out, did it mean the collapse of the revolution in Russia or Germany, as Bukharin had feared. In any case, these strategic considerations are imponderable to some extent; one of the most important political questions deriving from the Brest-Litovsk debate is the following: is ‘revolutionary war' the principal means for extending the revolution? Does the proletariat in power in one region have the task of exporting revolution at bayonet point to the world proletariat? The comments of the Italian Left on the Brest-Litovsk question are significant in this regard:

"Of the two tendencies in the Bolshevik party who confronted each other at the time of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin's and Bukharin's, we think that it was the former who was more in line with the needs of the world revolution. The positions of the fraction led by Bukharin, according to which the function of the proletarian state was to liberate the workers of other countries through a ‘revolutionary war', are in contradiction with the very nature of the proletarian revolution and the historic role of the proletariat." (‘Parti-Etat-Internationale: L'Etat Proletarien', Bilan n°18, April-May, 1935)

In contrast to the bourgeois revolution, which could indeed be exported by military conquest, the proletarian revolution depends on the conscious struggle of the proletariat of each country against its own bourgeoisie: "The victory of a proletarian state against a capitalist state (in the territorial sense of the word) in no way means the victory of the revolution". (ibid). The Red Army's advance into Poland in 1920, which only succeeded in driving the Polish workers into the arms of their own bourgeoisie, is proof that military victories by a proletarian bastion cannot substitute for the conscious political action of the world proletariat, and therefore the extension of the revolution is first and foremost a political task. The foundation of the Communist International in 1919 was thus a far greater contribution to the world revolution than any ‘revolutionary war' could have been.

The actual signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, its ratification by the party and the Soviets, coupled with the Left's earnest desire to avoid a split within the party over the issue, ended the first stage of the Left Communists' agitation. Now that the Soviet state had acquired its ‘breathing space', many of the immediate problems facing the party were centred around the organisation of the war-torn economy within Russia. And it was on this question that the Left Communist group contributed its most valuable insights into the dangers facing the revolutionary bastion. Bukharin, the fervent partisan of revolutionary war, was less interested in formulating a critique of majority Bolshevik policy on the internal organisation of the regime; from now on many of the most pertinent criticisms of the leadership's domestic policies were to come from the pen of Ossinsky, who was to prove himself to be a much more consistent oppositional figure than Bukharin.

In the early months of 1918 the Bolshevik leadership attempted to deal with Russia's economic turmoil in a perfunctorily ‘pragmatic' manner. In a speech given to the Bolshevik Central Committee and published as The Immediate tasks of the Soviet Regime, Lenin advocated the formation of state trusts in which the existing bourgeois experts and owners were to be retained, though under the supervision of the ‘proletarian' state. The workers in turn would have to accept the Taylor system of ‘scientific management' (once denounced by Lenin himself as the enslavement of man by the machine), and one-man management in the factories: "The revolution demands... precisely in the interests of socialism that the masses unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process". All of this meant that the factory committee movement, which had spread like wildfire ever since February 1917, was to be curbed; expropriations carried out by such committees were to be discouraged, their growing authority in the factories was to be reduced to a mere ‘checking' function, and they were to be made into appendages of the trade unions, which were much more manageable institutions, already incorporated into the new state apparatus.

The leadership presented these policies as the best way for the revolutionary regime to overcome the threat of economic chaos and to rationalise the economy towards an eventual social construction, when the world revolution extended itself. Lenin frankly called this system "state-capitalism", by which he understood the proletarian state's control of the capitalist economy in the interests of the revolution. In a polemic against the Left Communists (Left-wing Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality) Lenin argued that such a system of state capitalism would be a definite advance in a backward country like Russia, where the main danger of counter-revolution was the fragmented, archaic petty bourgeois mass of the peasantry. This conception remained a tenet of creed to the Bolsheviks and blinded them to the fact that the internal counter-revolution was expressing itself first and foremost through the state, not through the peasants. The Left Communists too were worried about the possibility of the revolution degenerating into a system of "petty bourgeois economic relations" (‘Theses on the Present Situation', Kommunist, n°1, April 1918, available in English in Daniels, A Documentary History of the Revolution), and they also shared the leadership's conviction that nationalisation by the ‘proletarian' state was indeed a socialist measure, and in fact they demanded its extension to the whole economy. Clearly they could not have been fully aware of what the danger of "state capitalism" actually meant, but basing themselves on a strong class instinct, they quickly saw the dangers inherent in a system which claimed to organise the exploitation of the workers in the interests of ‘socialism'. Ossinsky's prophetic warning is now well known:

"We do not stand for the point of view of ‘construction of socialism under the direction of the trusts'. We stand for the point of view of the construction of the proletarian society by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by ukases of ‘captains of industry'...We proceed from trust for the class instinct, to the active class initiative of the proletariat. It cannot be otherwise. If the proletariat does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for socialist organisation of labour, no-one can do this for it and no-one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power; then the soviet power will be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (e.g. the peasantry), and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation must be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up - state capitalism." (‘On the Building of Socialism', Kommunist n°2, April 1918, in Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 85).

Against this threat the Left Communists advocated workers' control of industry through a system of factory committees and ‘economic councils'. They defined their role as that of a "responsible proletarian opposition" constituted within the party to prevent the party and the soviet regime "deviating" towards the "ruinous path of petty bourgeois policies" (‘Theses on the Present Situation', Kommunist no. 1, in Daniels, A Documentary History etc).

That the dangers that the Lefts were warning against were not restricted to the economic plane, but had far-reaching political ramifications, can be shown by another warning they issued against the attempt to impose labour discipline from above:

"With the policy of administering enterprises on the basis of broad participation by capitalists and semi-bureaucratic centralisation it is natural to combine a labour policy directed towards the installation amongst the workers of discipline under the banner of ‘self-discipline', towards the introduction of obligatory labour for workers (such a programme was advocated by the rightist Bolsheviks), piecework payment, lengthening of the working day, etc.

"The form of governmental administration will have to develop in the direction of bureaucratic centralisation, the deprivation of the local soviets of their independence, and in practice the rejection of the type of ‘commune state' administered from below" (ibid).

Kommunist's defence of factory committees, soviets, and working class self activity was important not because it provided a solution to the economic problems facing Russia, or still less a formula for the ‘immediate construction of communism' in Russia; the Lefts explicitly stated that "socialism cannot be put into operation in one country and a backward one at that" (L. Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 1955, p. 137). The imposition of labour discipline by the state, the incorporation of the proletariat's autonomous organs into the state apparatus, were above all blows against the political domination of the Russian working class. As the ICC has often pointed out,[3] the political power of the class is the only guarantee of the successful outcome of the revolution. And this political power can only be exercised by the mass organs of the class, by its factory committees and assemblies, its soviets, its militias. In undermining the authority of these organs the policies of the Bolshevik leadership were posing a grave threat to the revolution itself. The danger signals so perceptively observed by the Left Communists in the early months of the revolution were to become even more serious during the Civil War period. In fact this period would in many ways determine the ultimate destiny of the revolution inside Russia.

The civil war

The period of the Civil War in Russia, from 1918-20, above all attests to the immense dangers facing a proletarian outpost if it is not immediately reinforced by the armies of the world revolution. Because the revolution did not take root outside Russia, the Russian proletariat had to fight virtually alone against the attacks of the White counter-revolution and its imperialist backers. In military terms, the heroic resistance of the Russian workers was victorious, but politically the Russian proletariat emerged from the Civil War decimated, exhausted, fragmented, and more or less deprived of any real control of the Soviet state. In their fervour to win the military struggle, the Bolsheviks had accelerated the decline of working class political power by a continuous militarisation of social and economic life. The concentration of all effective power in the higher echelons of the state machine allowed the military struggle to be prosecuted in a ruthless and effective manner, but it further undermined the real bastions of the revolution: the mass unitary organs of the class. The bureaucratisation of the Soviet regime that occurred during this period was to become irreversible with the reflux of the world revolution after 1921.

With the outbreak of hostilities in 1918, there was a general closing of ranks within the Bolshevik party, as everybody recognised the need for unity in action against the external danger. The Kommunist group, whose publication had ceased to appear after being severely hounded by the party leadership, ceased to exist, and its original nucleus went in two directions in response to the Civil War.

One tendency, exemplified by Radek and Bukharin, greeted the economic measure imposed by Civil War with unabashed enthusiasm. For them, the wholesale nationalisations, suppression of trade and monetary forms, and requisitioning of the peasantry, the so-called ‘War Communism' measures, represented a real break with the previous "state capitalist" phase and constituted a major advance towards communist relations of production. Bukharin even wrote a book, The Economics of the Transition Period, explaining how economic disintegration and even forced labour were inevitable preliminary stages in the transition to communism; he was clearly trying to demonstrate ‘theoretically' that Russia under War Communism, which had been adopted simply as a series of emergency measures to deal with a desperate situation, was a society in transition to communism. Former Left Communists like Bukharin were quite prepared to abandon their previous criticisms of one-man management and labour discipline, because for them the Soviet state was no longer trying to compromise with domestic capital, but was acting resolutely as an organ of communist transformation. In his Economics of the Transition Period, Bukharin argued that the strengthening of the Soviet state, its increasing absorption of social and economic life, represented a decisive advance towards communism:

"The ‘governmentalisation' of the trade unions and in practice all mass organs of the proletariat result from the inner logic of the transformation process itself. The smallest germ cell of the labour apparatus must become a support for the general process of organisation, which is planfully led and conducted by the collective reason of the working class, which has its material embodiment in the highest, all-embracing organisation, its state power. Thus the system of state capitalism is dialectically transformed into its own opposite, into the governmental form of workers' socialism." (Bukharin, Economics of the Transition Period, quoted in A Documentary History of Communism, edited by R. Daniels, 1960, p. 180).

With such ideas Bukharin ‘dialectically' reversed the marxist understanding that the movement towards a communist society will be characterised by a progressive weakening, a "withering away" of the state machine. Bukharin was still a revolutionary when he wrote the Economics; but between his theories of a statified ‘communism' entirely contained within one nation, and the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country' there is a definite continuity.

While Bukharin made his peace with War Communism, those Lefts who had been most consistent in their advocacy of workers' democracy continued to defend this principle in the face of the growing militarisation of the regime. In 1919 the Democratic Centralism group was formed around Ossinsky, Sapranov and others. They continued to dispute the principle of one-man management in industry and continued to advocate the collective or "collegial" principle as "The strongest weapon against the growth of departmentalism and bureaucratic deadening of the soviet apparatus" (Theses on the Collegial Principle and Individual Authority). While accepting the need for the use of bourgeois specialists in industry and the army, they also stressed the need for these specialists to be put under the control of the rank and file. "No one disputes the necessity of using the spetsy - the dispute is over how to use them" (Sapranov, quoted in Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, p.109).

At the same time the Democratic Centralists, or ‘Decists' as they were known, protested against the loss of initiative by local soviets, and they suggested a series of reforms aimed at restoring them as effective organs of workers' democracy; it was policies of this sort which led critics to remark that the Decists were more interested in democracy than in centralism. Finally the Decists called for the restoration of democratic practices in the party. At the Ninth Congress of the RCP in 1920 they attacked the bureaucratisation of the party, the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a tiny minority. It is indicative of the influence that these criticisms could still have in the party that the congress ended up voting a manifesto vigorously calling for "broader criticism of the central as well as the local party institutions", and the rejection of "any kind of repression against comrades because they have different ideas". (Resolution of the Ninth Party Congress, ‘On the Next Tasks of Building the Party'.)

In general the Decists' attitude to the tasks of the Soviet regime in a period of Civil War can be summed up in Ossinsky's words to that same Congress:

"The basic slogan which we should proclaim at the present time is the unification of military work, military forms of organisation and methods of administration, with the creative initiative of the conscious workers. If, under the banner of military work, you in fact begin to implant bureaucratism, we will disperse our own forces and fail to fulfil our tasks." (Quoted in Daniels, A Documentary History of the Revolution)

Some years later the left communist Miasnikov had this to say about the Democratic Centralism group:

"This group did not have a platform of any real theoretical value. The only point which attracted the attention of all the groups and of the party was its struggle against excessive centralisation. It is only now that one can see in this struggle a still imprecise attempt of the proletariat to dislodge the bureaucracy from the positions it had just conquered in the economy. The group died a natural death, without any violence being used against it..." (L'Ouvrier Communiste, 1929, a French journal close to the KAPD.)

The Decists' criticisms were inevitably "imprecise" because they were a tendency born at a time when the Bolshevik party and the revolution were still very much alive, so that any criticisms of the party were bound to take the form of appeals for the party to be more democratic, more equitable etc... in other words, to restrict criticisms to the level of organisational practice rather than of fundamental political positions.

Many of the Democratic Centralism group were also involved in the Military Opposition, which was formed for a brief period in 1919. The requirements of the Civil War had impelled the Bolsheviks to set up a centralised fighting force, the Red Army, composed not only of workers but of recruits from the peasantry and other strata. Very quickly this army began to conform to the hierarchical pattern that was being established in the rest of the state apparatus. Election of officers was soon dispensed with as "politically pointless and technically inexpedient" (Trotsky, ‘Work, Discipline, Order', 1918, quoted in Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, p. 104); the death penalty for disobedience under fire, saluting and special forms of address to officers were restored, and differences between ranks solidified, especially with the appointment of former Tsarist officers to high command posts in the army.

The Military Opposition, whose main spokesman was Vladimir Smirnov, was formed to fight against the tendency to model the Red Army along the lines of a typical bourgeois army. They did not oppose the establishment of the Red Army as such, nor the use of military spetsy, but they were against excessive hierarchy and discipline, and wanted to ensure that the army was guided by an overall political orientation which did not depart from Bolshevik principle. The party leadership falsely accused them of wanting to disband the army in favour of a system of partisan detachments more suited to peasant warfare; as on many other occasions, the only alternative that the Bolshevik leadership could see to what they termed "proletarian state organisation" was petty bourgeois, anarchist decentralisation; in fact very often the Bolsheviks confused bourgeois forms of hierarchical centralisation with the self discipline and centralisation produced from below which is the hall mark of the proletariat. In any case the demands of the Military Opposition were rejected and the grouping soon fell apart. But the hierarchical structure of the Red Army - in conjunction with the disbanding of the factory militias - were to make it more amenable to be used as a repressive force against the proletariat from 1921 onwards.

Despite the persistence of oppositional tendencies within the party throughout the Civil War period, the need for unity against the attack of the counter-revolution tended to act as a cohesive force within the party and among all the classes and social strata who supported the Soviet regime against the Whites. The innate tensions within the regime were held down during this period, only to burst up to the surface when the hostilities ceased and the regime was faced with the task of reconstructing a ruined country. Dissension over the next step for the Soviet regime expressed itself in 1920-21 in peasant revolts, discontent in the navy, workers' strikes in Moscow and Petrograd, to culminate in the Kronstadt workers' uprising in March 1921. These antagonisms inevitably expressed themselves within the party itself, and in the traumatic years 1920-21, it fell to the Workers' Opposition group to provide the main focus for political dissent inside the Bolshevik party.

The Workers' Opposition

The tenth Party Congress in March 1921was the arena for a controversy within the Bolshevik party which had been getting sharper and sharper since the end of the Civil War: the trade union question. On the surface this was a debate about the role of trade unions under the proletarian dictatorship, but it in fact expressed far deeper problems about the whole future of the Soviet regime and its relationship to the working class. Broadly speaking there were three positions within the party: that of Trotsky, who stood for the total integration of the unions into the ‘Workers' state' where they would have the task of stimulating labour productivity; that of Lenin, who argued that the unions still had to act as defensive organs of the class, which, he pointed out, was actually a "workers' and peasants' state" which suffered from "bureaucratic deformations"; and finally the position of the Workers' Opposition group who stood for the management of production by industrial unions independent of the Soviet state. Although the entire framework of this debate was profoundly inadequate, The Workers' Opposition expressed in a confused and faltering way the proletariat's antipathy to the bureaucratic and military methods which had more and more become the trademark of the regime, and the hope of the class that things would improve now that the rigours of the Civil War were over.

The leaders of the Workers' Opposition group came mainly from the trade union apparatus, but it appears to have had considerable working class support in South Eastern parts of European Russia and in Moscow, especially among metal workers - Shliapnikov and Medvedev, two of the groups leading members, were both metal workers. But the most famous of its leaders was Alexandra Kollontai, who wrote the programmatic text The Workers' Opposition as an elaboration on the ‘Theses on the Trade Union Question' submitted by the group to the Tenth Congress. All the strengths and weaknesses of the group can be gauged from this text which begins by affirming that:

"The Workers' Opposition sprang from the depths of the industrial proletariat of Soviet Russia. It is an outgrowth not only of the unbearable conditions of life and labour in which seven million industrial workers find themselves, but it is also a product of vacillations, inconsistencies and outright deviations of our Soviet policy from the early expressed class-consistent principles of the Communist programme." (Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition, Solidarity pamphlet n°7, p. 1).

Kollontai then goes on to outline the appalling economic conditions facing the Soviet regime after the Civil War, and draws attention to the growth of a bureaucratic stratum whose origins lie outside the working class - in the intelligentsia, the peasantry, remnants of the old bourgeoisie, etc. This strata had more and more come to dominate the Soviet apparatus and even the party itself, infusing both with a careerism and a blind disregard for proletarian interests. For the Workers' Opposition the Soviet state itself was not a pure proletarian organ but a heterogeneous institution forced to balance between the different classes and strata in Russian society. They insisted that the way that the revolution remained loyal to its original goals was not by entrusting its direction to non-proletarian technocrats and the socially ambiguous organs of the state, but by relying on the self-activity and creative powers of the working masses themselves:

"This consideration, which should be very simple and clear to every practical man, is lost sight of by our party leaders: it is impossible to decree Communism. It can be created only in the process of practical research, through mistakes, perhaps, but only through the creative powers of the working class itself." (Kollontai, ibid, p. 33).

These general insights of the Workers' Opposition were very profound in many ways, but the group was unable to contribute much of lasting value beyond these generalities. The concrete proposals they put forward as a solution to the crisis the revolution was passing through were based on a series of fundamental misconceptions, all of which expressed the magnitude of the impasse the Russian proletariat faced at this juncture.

For the Workers' Opposition, the organs which expressed the pure class interests of the proletariat were none other than the trade unions, or rather the industrial unions. The task of creating communism should therefore be entrusted to the unions: "The Workers' Opposition sees in the unions the mangers and creators of the communist economy..." (Kollontai, ibid, p. 28).

Thus while the left communists of Germany, Holland and elsewhere were denouncing the trade unions as one of the main obstacles to the proletarian revolution, the left in Russia was extolling them as potential organs of communist transformation! Revolutionaries in Russia seemed to have had great difficulty grasping the fact that the trade unions could no longer have any role to plat for the proletariat in the epoch of capitalist decadence: although the appearance of factory committees and soviets in 1917 signified that the unions were dead as organs of working class struggle, none of the left groupings in Russia really understood this, either before or after the Workers' Opposition. By 1921, when the Workers' Opposition was portraying the unions as the backbone of the revolution, the real organs of revolutionary struggle - the factory committees and the workers' soviets - had already been emasculated. Indeed in the case of the factory committees, it was their integration into the unions after 1918 which effectively killed them as organs of the class. The transfer of decision making power into the hands of the unions, despite the good intentions of its advocates, would in no way have restored power to the proletariat in Russia, even if such a project had been possible, it would simply have been a transfer of power from one branch of the state to another.

The Workers' Opposition programme for the regeneration of the party was also flawed at its roots. They explained the growing opportunism of the party purely in terms of the influx of a non-proletarian membership. For them the party could be put back on a proletarian path if an ouvrièrist purge was carried out against non-worker members. If the party was overwhelmingly composed of ‘pure', rough-handed proletarians, all would be well. This ‘answer' to the degeneration of the party completely missed the point. The opportunism of the party was not a question of its personnel but was a response to the pressure and tensions of holding state power in an increasingly unfavourable situation. Given the reigns of state in a period of reflux in the revolution, anyone would became an ‘opportunist', no matter how ‘pure' his proletarian ‘pedigree'. Bordiga once remarked that ex-workers often became the worst bureaucrats. But the Workers' Opposition never challenged the notion that the party had to control the state in order to guarantee that it remained an instrument of the proletariat:

"The Central Committee of our party must become the supreme directing centre of our class policy, the organ of class thought and control over the practical policy of the Soviets, and the spiritual personification of our basic programme." (Kollontai, ibid, p.42).

The Workers' Opposition's inability to conceive of the dictatorship of the proletariat as anything else but the dictatorship of the party led them to make frantic pledges of loyalty to the party when, in the middle of the Tenth Congress, the Kronstadt revolt broke out. Prominent leaders of the Workers' Opposition even backed up these pledges by putting themselves in the front line of the assault on the Kronstadt garrison. Like all the other left fractions in Russia, they completely failed to understand the importance of the Kronstadt rising as the last mass struggle of the Russian workers for the restoration of soviet power. But assisting in the suppression of the revolt did not save the Workers' Opposition from being condemned as a "petty bourgeois anarchist deviation", as an "objectively" counter-revolutionary element at the conclusion of the Congress. The banning of "factions" in the party at the Tenth Congress dealt a stunning blow to the Workers' Opposition. Faced with the prospect of illegal, underground work, they proved unable to maintain their opposition to the regime. A few of its members fought on throughout the twenties in association with other illegal fractions; others simply capitulated to the status quo. Kollontai herself ended up as a loyal servant of the Stalinist regime. In 1922 the left communist paper, the Workers' Dreadnought referred to the "unprincipled and backboneless leaders of the so-called ‘Workers' Opposition'" (Workers' Dreadnought, July 29, 1922), and certainly there was a real lack of resolution in the group's programme. This was not a question of the courage or lack of courage of the group's members, but resulted from the extreme difficulty Russian revolutionaries faced in trying to oppose or break from a party which had been the moving spirit of the revolution. For many communists, to challenge the very premises of the party was sheer folly; outside the party was nothing but the void. This deep attachment to the party - so deep that it became a barrier against the defence of revolutionary principles - was to be even more pronounced in the Left Opposition later on.

Another reason for the weakness of the Workers' Opposition's criticisms of the regime was their almost total lack of an international perspective. While the most determined left fractions in Russia drew their strength from an understanding that the only true ally of the Russian proletariat and its revolutionary minority was the world working class, the Workers' Opposition's programme was based on a search for solutions entirely within the framework of the Russian state.

The central concern of the Workers' Opposition was this: "Who shall develop the creative powers in the sphere of economic construction?" (Kollontai, ibid, p. 4). The primordial task which she ascribed to the Russian working class was the construction of a "communist economy" in Russia. Their preoccupation with the problem of the management of production, with creating so-called ‘communist relations' of production in Russia show a complete misunderstanding of a fundamental point: communism could not be built in an isolated bastion. The main problem facing the Russian working class was the extension of the world revolution, not the "economic reconstruction" of Russia. Although the Kollontai text criticises "foreign trade with the capitalist states... [that is] carried on over the heads of the Russian as well as the foreign organised workers" (ibid, p. 10), the Workers' Opposition shared the growing tendency of the Bolshevik leadership at the time to put the domestic problems of the Russian economy above the problem of the international extension of the revolution. That the two tendencies had a different vision of this economic reconstruction is less important than the fact that they both tended to agree that Russia could turn in on itself for an indefinite period without betraying the interests of the world revolution.

This exclusively Russian perspective of the Workers' Opposition was also reflected in the group's failure to establish any firm ties with the left communist opposition outside Russia. Although Kollontai's text was smuggled out of Russia by a member of the KAPD and published both by the KAPD and the Workers' Dreadnought, Kollontai soon regretted this and tried to get the document back! The Workers' Opposition offered no real criticisms of the opportunist policies being adopted by the Communist International, endorsed the 21 Conditions, and did not seek to ally itself with the ‘foreign' oppositions within the CI, despite the obvious sympathy accorded them by the KAPD and others. In 1922 they made a last-ditch appeal to the Fourth World Congress of the CI, but restricted their protest entirely to the bureaucratisation of the regime and the lack of free expression for dissident communist groupings within Russia. In any case, they received scant echo from an International which had already expelled many of its best elements and was about to endorse the infamous United Front policy. Shortly after this appeal was made a special Bolshevik commission was set up to investigate the activities of the Workers' Opposition; it came to the conclusion that the group consisted an "illegal factional organisation", and the ensuing repression soon put an end to most of the group's activities.[4] The Workers' Opposition had the misfortune of being thrust into the political limelight at a time when the party was going through profound convulsions which would soon make legal oppositional activity. In trying to balance between the two stools of legal intra-party faction work and underground opposition to the regime the Workers' Opposition fell into the void; henceforward the torch of proletarian resistance would have to be carried on by more resolute and intransigent fighters.

[1] The Bolsheviks themselves produced extreme left tendencies in the pre-war period, notably the so-called ‘Ultamists' and ‘Recallists' who criticised the parliamentary tactics of the Bolshevik organisation after the 1905 Revolution. But since this debate took place in the twilight period between capitalism's ascent and decline, this is not the place to discuss these issues. The Communist Left is a specific product of the workers' movement in the epoch of decadence, since it originated in a critique of the ‘official' communist strategy concerning the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat in the new epoch.

[2] See ‘Lessons of the German Revolution' in the ICC's International Review n°2.

[3] See ‘The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution' and ‘The Lessons of Kronstadt' in International Review n°3.

[4] Although the Workers' Opposition effectively ceased to function after 1922, its name, like that of the Democratic Centralists, crops up over and over again in connection with illegal underground activities until the beginning of the 1930s, which implies that elements of both groups fought on till the bitter end.

Letter from Battaglia Comunista

Dear Comrades,

In the September issue of your paper (Revolution Intenationale, no. 29) we read the following passage:

“To be honest, revolutionaries (‘impotent metaphysicians’ according to the Internationalist Communist Party) aren’t all that surprised to find the Bordigists offering their services to the united front.  The ICP was carrying the baggage of anti-fascism with it when it was founded. The first to join its ranks had come out of the Italian ‘Partisans’; it was then joined by people who had been involved in the Brussels Anti-Fascist Committee, then by elements from the old minority of the Italian Left, which had been in favour of ‘real class struggle’ against Franco. In   contrast to all this, the Communist Left in France and Belgium had remained intransigently loyal to the principles of the International Communist Left. During World War II, its appeals were not addressed to ‘sincere’ or ‘proletarian’ anti-fascists, but to the world proletariat, calling upon the class to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, excluding in advance any gesture that could be     interpreted as critical support for democracy.”

This passage is from the article ‘Honnetes  Propositions d’Hymen Frontiste du PCI’, a polemic against another frontist escapade by  Programma Communista (Le Proletaire in France).

We don’t want to go into the details of a polemic which doesn’t concern us and about which we have already clearly expressed our position. What we do want is a full rectification of the grave assertions contained in the above passage, assertions which we don’t hesitate in calling entirely and completely false, though we don’t know whether they derive from lack of knowledge or from an irresponsible political attitude.

It is true that Programma Communista (the Bordigists) have put themselves outside the Partito Communista Internazionalista which in Turin “in 1943 held its first convention, which brought together those same comrades who are once again regurgitating the frontist positions (anti-fascist and trade unionist) which were long ago rejected by the revolutionary Left”. But it is also true that the PCI has continued to be the only force in Italy to defend, in a serious and consequential manner, everything that was best in the Left’s work of drawing the lessons and conclusions from the first revolutionary wave opened by the revolution in Russia and closed inside the IIIrd International. The fact that the ‘Programmists’ lay claim to this patrimony of elaboration and struggle while negating it in their political practice only concerns us because of the confusion that it can engender even amongst the most advanced sectors of the working class.

And the PCI, founded in 1943, and which went through the Turin convention, the Florence Congress in 1948, and the Milan Congress of 1952 didn’t start out with no more than an ‘anti-fascist’ baggage. The comrades who came from the Communist Left and who constituted the party were the first both in Italy and outside it to denounce the counter-revolutionary policies of the democratic bloc (including the Stalinist and Trotskyist parties) and were the first and only ones to act inside the workers’ struggles and even in the ranks of the Partisans, calling on the workers to fight against capitalism no matter what kind of regime it was hiding behind.

The comrades who RI calls ‘Resistance fighters’ were revolutionary militants who engaged in the task of penetrating the ranks of the Partisans in order to disseminate the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movement, and who paid for this work with their lives. Must we remind the comrades of RI about Acquaviva and Atti? Well, these two comrades, despicably assassinated on the order of the Stalinist leaders (the ‘democrats’ of today), were cadres of the PCI. Because of their heroic revolutionary behaviour the PCI was and is still able to put all its cards on the table.

Concerning the comrades who, during the war in Spain, decided to abandon the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left and to throw themselves into an adventure which took them outside class positions: let us remember that the events in Spain, which simply confirmed the positions of the Fraction, taught a lesson to these comrades and allowed them to return to the revolutionary Left. The Brussels Anti-Fascist Committee, in the person of Vercesi who thought he had to join the PCI when it was founded, held onto its own bastardized positions until the party, making the sacrifices that clarity demanded, rid itself of the dead leaves of Bordigism.

What we are saying here is confirmed by documents which the comrades of RI have at their disposal, but which they don’t seem to have read. The documents of the period show what the politics of the PCI were, and what kind of ‘frontism’ it stood for (the unity of the workers against the war and its fascist and democratic agents). This was very different from the frontism of organizations which the Programmists defend today.

By asking for this rectification, at a time when RI has declared itself in favour of discussion between revolutionaries and of the international initiative of our party, we hope that all revolutionaries will know how to undertake a serious critical examination of the main political problems confronting the working class today; when dealing with the errors of the past – something which is always necessary – it is precisely up to revolutionaries to document their work in the most serious manner. Communist Greetings.

Damen,

for the Executive of the Partito Communista Internazionalista.

The ICC’s Reply

We were a little surprised to receive and read your letter, which to say the least is full of righteous indignation. What exactly is at issue here? The matter has arisen over an article published in Revolution Internationale no. 29 (September), an attack on the Bordigist International Communist Party which showed up the profound opportunism of this organization, especially their more and more pronounced tendency towards frontism. Bordigism, which reconstituted itself into a party at the end of World War II, is a striking example of the degeneration of a current which came from the communist left. This degeneration can be seen in relation to all the questions which have been posed to the workers ‘ movement since the decomposition of the IIIrd International: the function of the party, and the historical context in which parties are formed; the nature and function of trade unions today; the problem of transitional demands; electoralism; national liberation; frontism. On all these questions, Bordigism has moved further and further away from communist positions and is moving closer and closer to Trotskyism. This political regression seems to be the only kind of ‘invariance’ in the evolution of Bordigism, and every genuinely revolutionary group has no alternative but to confront this tendency and wage an implacable battle against it. This is what RI was doing in the offending article.

How is it that these attacks on Bordigism have affected Battaglia Communista and impelled it to write this letter of protest? It seems that the bullet has ricocheted in an unfortunate manner. But who has been caught by the ricochet?

In the first place, a considerable part of the problem is caused by the fact that in Italy today there are at least four groups[1] who call themselves the ICP, all of them deriving from the original party, all of them claiming the same continuity, the same ‘invariance’, the same tradition and the same original platform. Each one argues that it is the only true heir of this platform. It’s certainly a pity that, out of amour propre and a concern for authenticity, these groups all hold onto the same name, because this only leads to confusion. This is something which we can only regret. It should be said at this point that, outside Italy, and especially in France, it is the Bordigist group (Programma Communista) which is known as the ICP; and, whatever Battaglia might think, this isn’t entirely illogical. Although it’s not our job to hand out certificates of legitimacy, it seems to us to be going a bit far to consider that Bordigism is a current which simply ‘ran across’ the Italian Left, as this letter would have us believe. However much it has regressed today, no-one can ignore or deny the fact that, over a period of twenty-five years, Bordigism was totally bound up with what is known as the Italian Left. This is not only true for Bordiga’s abstentionist fraction and its paper Il Soviet in the early twenties; it’s also attested by the fact that the platform presented by the Left at the Lyon Congress of 1926, which led to the Left being expelled from the Communist Party, was expressly entitled Platform of the Left (Bordigist).

In any case, no-one could have any doubts about which group our article was addressed to. There was no room for ambiguity because we took the precaution of writing ‘A Frontist ICP (Programme Communiste)’ in our subtitle. As for the passage you cite and which seems to irritate you so much, we can only say that it is not only our right but politically logical to inquire whether the degeneration of Bordigism is a question of pure chance, or whether we should look for the germs of this degeneration in the past, in the very conditions in which the party was set up. What embarrasses you is that the history of the formation of this party is also your own history. Thus you are trying to minimize the unity of responsibility, the unity which existed at the beginning of the party, by making various distinctions which, according to you, were there from the start:

“It is true that Programma Communista (the Bordigists) have put themselves outside the Partito Communista Internazionalista which in Turin ‘in 1943 held its first convention, which brought together those same comrades’ (…)

… until the party, making the sacrifices that clarity demanded, rid itself of the dead leaves of Bordigism.”

In other words: when the ICP was set up, there was us and them. What was good about the party was us, what was bad was them. Even if one was to admit that it was like this, it wouldn’t alter the fact that the ‘bad’ was there, that it was a fundamental element in the constitution of the party, and that at the time no-one raised the slightest criticism of this element. This was because, with everyone rushing together to build the party, no-one took the time to look a bit closer at the people who were taking part in this enterprise and what positions and forms of activity they defended (not to speak of engaging in a serious study of the whole context in which the party was set up). Not seeing or understanding something when it happens might be an explanation, but it can never be a justification, certainly not an a posteriori one. This is why we don’t understand why you are protesting when all we are doing is going over the facts and analyzing their significance.

Battaglia Communista asks us to make “a full rectification of the grave assertions made in the above passage, assertions which we don’t hesitate in calling entirely and completely false”. Rather than making any rectification, we feel obligated to explain what we mean and to elaborate our initial assertions, which are far from being “entirely and completely false” as Battaglia Communista claims. First of all, one thing must be clear: we have never said that the ICP formed in 1943 started out “with no more than an ‘anti-fascist’ baggage”. If that had been our position, we would have said so, and we would follow up the political implications of such a position. We would have purely and simply denounced it, as we do with the Trotskyists. This would be quite different from our attitude of confronting the positions of the party, even though this confrontation is sometimes quite violent. We don’t say that the positions of the ICP were “no more than” anti-fascist. What we do say is that elements were allowed to exist in the party, even in its leadership, who quite openly defended their frontist and anti-fascist experiences. We want to point out that, while affirming some class positions, the ICP allowed all kinds of ambiguities to subsist, whether we are taking about the elements it regrouped with or the formulations it put forward. It was as though it was closing the door while leaving the window half open. It’s no good making us say things we haven’t said; but we do defend everything that we have actually said. We fully endorse what was written in Internationalisme no. 36, July 1948:

“Just as we did after the 1948 Conference, we consider that within the ICP there are a lot of healthy revolutionary militants, and that because of this, this organization cannot be seen as being lost in advance to the proletariat.”

Internationalisme is certainly not talking about a simple anti-fascist group here, but this didn’t alter the “grave assertions” and criticisms which it made concerning the ambiguities and the errors of the ICP, criticisms which were fully vindicated by the subsequent vicissitudes of the party, by all its crises and splits.

These ambiguities and errors can be traced to the very fact that the party was set up in the first place. The party cannot be constituted at any given moment. The Gauche Communiste de France (Internationalisme) was quite right when it made a thorough critique of the formation of the ICP, basing itself on Bilan’s pertinent criticisms of the proclamation of the Trotskyist IVth International. A party set up in a period of reaction, when the working class is defeated, is bound not only to have an artificial and voluntaristic character, but also to contain all kinds of political ambiguities. As far as we know, the ICP (whether or not you alone are its continuatiors) never replied to this criticism; instead, in the excitement of constituting itself, if preferred to ignore this critique with a disdainful silence, while at the same time opening its doors to politically dubious elements.

These ambiguities can be found in the Political Platform of the ICP, published in French in 1946. It hardly needs to be said that, during the war and especially towards the end of the war, the attitudes revolutionaries had towards the war, the partisan resistance, the anti-fascist mystification and other kinds of “liberations” took on a particular importance and demanded the greatest clarity and intransigence. And yet while condemning the Resistance as a whole, the ICP Platform said:

“The effective elements of the clandestine activity which has developed against the fascist regime were and are the informal and spontaneous reaction of proletarian groupings and of a few unselfish intellectuals, as well as being the kind of activity and organization which every state and every army creates and nourishes behind enemy lines.” (ICP, Platform, p. 19, paragraph 7)

The whole of paragraph 7, which deals with the question of the Partisans, is a defence of the idea that this movement had a dual nature – one of proletarian origin, the other emanating from states and armies. And to emphasize its character as an “informal and spontaneous reaction of proletarian groupings”, the Platform even minimizes the importance of the second aspect: “These political big-shots who appeared like flies in the ointment only had a minor influence in this activity.” (Ibid)

Another passage in the same paragraph contains the same ambiguities:

“In reality the network set up by the bourgeois and pseudo-proletarian parties during the period of clandestinity did not at all have as their goal a national-democratic partisan insurrection. What they wanted to do was to create an apparatus capable of immobilizing any revolutionary movement that might arise with the collapse of the fascist and German defences.” (Ibid)

This insistence on distinguishing and showing the opposition between “a national-democratic partisan insurrection” and the attempt at “immobilizing any revolutionary movement” follows on naturally from the original distinction the Platform makes between the dual origins and characteristics of the Partisan movement. And it lead logically to a recognition of the possibility of a sincere, democratic, proletarian anti-fascist movement, in opposition to the false anti-fascism of the bourgeoisie.

This is a thinly-veiled version of the idea that there is a ‘natural’ link between the proletariat and the Partisans. And in another passage, the veil disappears completely:

“These movements (the Partisans), which don’t have a sufficient (sic!) political orientation, still express the tendency of local proletarian groups to organize themselves and to arm themselves           in order to seize and maintain control of the situation locally, and thus take power.”  (Ibid, p. 2, paragraph 18)

The Partisan movement is no longer denounced for what it is – the mobilization of the workers for imperialist war – but has become a tendency of proletarian groups to take power locally, although it unfortunately doesn’t have sufficient political orientation”.

If this sort of thing can be found in the platform, ie a founding document written with great care by the party’s most responsible members, one can easily imagine the kind of anti-fascist diatribes which appeared in the local press of the PCI, especially in the South which was isolated and cut off from the party centres in the North.[2]

It should come as no surprise that such a definition of the Partisans should lead to a defence of their struggle:

“Concerning the partisan and patriotic struggle against the Germans and the fascists, the party denounces the manoeuvres of the international and national bourgeoisie who, with their propaganda for the rebirth of official state militarism (a propaganda which can have no meaning) (sic), are aiming at the dissolution and liquidation of the voluntary organizations of this struggle. In a number of countries these organizations have already been subject to armed repression.”

We are asked to make “a full rectification of (our) grave assertions”. We are absolutely agreed and convinced that these rectifications are necessary. The only question is: who must rectify what? Is it up to us to rectify a false accusation of anti-fascism? Or is it up to Battaglia to rectify the highly ambiguous postulates and formulations of the ICP Platform?

How could the ICP seek to defend the Partisan organizations from the threat of dissolution by the state? The Partisans were the armed organizations through which the bourgeoisie mobilized the workers behind enemy lines into the imperialist war, in the name of anti-fascism and national liberation. This didn’t seem to be very clear to the ICP, who saw something else in the patriotic, anti-fascist Partisans: a spontaneous reaction of proletarian groupings”. Thus the ICP had an attitude of extreme solicitude towards the Partisans:

“With regard to these tendencies, which constitute an historic reality of the greatest importance, the party affirms that a proletarian tactic demands that the most resolute and combative elements must finally (!) arrive at the political positions and the organizational form which will enable them to at last fight in their own interests, after such a long period of giving their blood in the service of others.” (Ibid)

There can be no doubt about this. The ICP is not talking about workers who have been derailed into a capitalist organization which the proletariat has to destroy, but about a working class organization “an historical reality of the greatest importance”, which doesn’t have “a sufficient political orientation”, which must be defended against the bourgeoisie’s attempts to dissolve it. It is an organization with which one can have a dialogue; it is a fertile soil for the revolution and revolutionaries must enter its ranks in order to bring communist positions to it.

It might appear that our criticism can be answered by the assertion that the militants of the ICP didn’t enter the Partisans in order to do ‘resistance’ work but to “disseminate the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movement”. But revolutionaries don’t make oral or written propaganda by joining a counter-revolutionary organization. This kind of penetration is an ‘entry tactic’ which we don’t subscribe to and which we are happy to leave to the Trotskyists. But this doesn’t explain why the ICP was in favour of penetrating the Partisans, and not, for example, the Socialist or Communist Parties. This would be even closer to the ‘entry’ tactics of the Trotskyists. In any case, these kind of tactics have nothing in common with the revolutionary positions of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. Whether it was the decision of its leader or of the party as a whole, the ICP accepted elements who belonged to the Partisans as ‘cadres of the Party’. This is a rather strange ‘tactic’, one which we can only describe as political collaboration. Let’s not forget that the Partisans were a counter-revolutionary organization of the worst kind, created during the war in order to perpetuate the massacre of the workers. It was a military organization based (just like the SS) on voluntary membership. Because of this it did not provide any suitable context for the dissemination of revolutionary principles and tactics. This is in contrast to the army, since the workers are mobilized into the army by force.[3] The fact that this organ of war had a ‘popular’ and ‘anti-fascist’ façade in no way justified the policy of penetration, of a revolutionary party sending its cadres into its ranks. If the ICP did this, it was because it was itself confused. Consumed by activism, it committed an act of terrible irresponsibility by allowing – or worse still, sending – its militants to join this counter-revolutionary military organization in which all they could do was to get themselves murdered. There’s nothing to boast about in such errors.[4]

We don’t know the details of the circumstances in which comrades Acquaviva and Atti were murdered at the behest of the Stalinists. But their tragic end, far from vindicating your policy of participation, only strengthens us in our convictions. Many Trotskyists in France and elsewhere lost their lives in analogous circumstances; this is no way proves that the policy of participation which they followed was a revolutionary one.

After all this, there can be no doubt that the ICP had all kinds of ambiguities on the question of the anti-fascist resistance from the moment it was set up. This was to weigh heavily on the subsequent evolution of the organization. As a confirmation of what we are saying, we only have to cite Danieli’s intervention at the ICP Congress in Florence (6-9 May, 1948).[5]

“One thing must be clear for everyone: the party has suffered gravely from a facile extension of                its political influence – the result of an equally facile activism – on a purely superficial level. I must recount a personal experience which will serve as a warning against the danger of the party exerting a facile influence on certain strata of the masses, which is an automatic consequence of the equally facile theoretical formation of its cadres. In the last months of the war I was a party representative in Turin. The Federation was strong numerically; it had a lot of young, activist elements; it organized many meetings, leaflets, the newspaper, a bulletin, contacts with the factories; there were internal discussions which always had an extremist tone when differences on the question of the war in general and the Partisans in particular came up;               there were also contacts with deserters. The position on the war was clear: no participation in the war, refusal of military discipline by elements who called themselves internationalists. One might think therefore that no member of the party would have accepted the directives of the ‘Committee of National Liberation’. Now, on the morning of 25 April (the day Turin was ‘liberated’) the whole Turin Federation was in arms, insisting on participating in the crowning of       six years of massacre, and some comrades from the provinces – still under military discipline – came to Turin to take part in the whole thing. As for myself, I should have declared the organization dissolved, but I found a way of compromising and got a resolution passed, in which comrades agreed to participate in the movement as individuals. The party no longer existed; it had liquidated itself.”

This public testament of an old and responsible militant, formed by a long experience with the Italian Fraction in exile, is both eloquent and dramatic. We can see that it wasn’t the party which was penetrating the ranks of the Partisans and disseminating revolutionary tactics and principles; it was the spirit of the Partisans which penetrated the party and corrupted its militants. The party has never engaged in a critical discussion of these questions; for reasons of prestige it has taken refuge in silence on this and other questions. This is why all its initial ambiguities have survived and developed in all the groups it has given rise to.

This ambiguity on the question of the Partisans can be found in all the groups emanating from the original ICP, and not only among the Bordigists (Programma) with their support for national liberation movements in the underdeveloped countries. They can be found, for example, in the International Bulletin published in French in the early sixties as a joint effort of News and Letters, Munis, and Battaglia Communista. An article written by an Italian comrade uses the theory of the ‘special case’ to show that the Partisans in Italy were different from other resistances in other countries, and thus had to be treated in a particular manner. Traces of this ambiguous position can still be found in Battaglia Communista’s present letter, where it talks about acting “inside the workers’ struggle and even in the ranks of the Partisans”.

According to Battaglia’s letter, the comrades of the minority of the Italian Fraction went to Spain and passed “outside class positions”, in contrast to the militants of the ICP who “engaged in the task of penetrating the ranks of the Partisans in order to disseminate the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movement”.  But do the comrades of Battaglia Communista think that the militants of the minority went to Spain to defend Republican democracy against fascism? Just like those of the ICP who went into the Partisans, they went to Spain to disseminate in the ranks of the militias “the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movements”, to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism.

Why is it that what the minority did was an “adventure” and what the ICP did was an act of heroism? A simple question, and one that is not answered by the gratuitous assertion that the events in Spain “taught these comrades a lesson and allowed them to return to the revolutionary Left.” The minority excluded from the Fraction in 1936 ended up regrouping with Union Communiste, which defended the same positions, and there they remained until the dispersion of the group during the war. There was no question of these militants going back to the Communist Left until the Fraction was dissolved and its militants integrated into the ICP (at the end of 1945). It was never a question of a ‘lesson’ being learned, or of these militants rejecting their old position and condemning their participation in the anti-fascist war in Spain. It was simply that the euphoria and confusion of setting up the party ‘with Bordiga’ inspired these comrades, including a few French comrades left over from the old Union Communiste, to join the party. And this was done at the direct instigation of Vercesi, who in the meantime had become leader of the party and its representative outside Italy. The party in Italy did not ask these comrades to account for their past activities. This was not because of ignorance – old comrades of the Fraction like Danielis, Lecce, Luciano, Butta, Vercesi and others could hardly be ignorant of a minority which they themselves had expelled nine years before. It was because it was a time to forget ‘old quarrels’: the reconstitution of the party wiped the slate clean. A party which was not very clear about the effect of the Partisan movement on its own militants wasn’t likely to have a very rigorous attitude towards what the minority had been doing some years before. Thus it ‘naturally’ opened its doors to these comrades, quietly making them the nucleus of the French section of the new Party.

If we examine the explanation given in the letter about the Brussels Anti-Fascist Committee and Vercesi’s part in it, it doesn’t fare any better. The letter says that “the Brussels Anti-Fascist Committee, in the person of Vercesi who thought he had to join the Partito Communista Internazionalista when it was founded, held onto his own bastardized positions until the party, making the sacrifices that clarity demanded, rid itself of the dead leaves of Bordigism”. What an elegant way of putting it! He – Vercesi - thought he had to join!!!??? And the party – what did the party think of him? Or is the party a bridge club which anyone can join? Vercesi didn’t come out of nowhere. He was an old militant of the Italian Left in the 1920s, and the main spokesman of the Italian Left in exile. He was the guiding spirit of the Fraction and the main editor of Bilan. His militant contribution and his revolutionary merits were enormous, and his influence was considerable. This is why the struggle within the Fraction on the eve of the war and during the war against his increasingly aberrant positions was so important.

The announcement of the formation of an Italian Anti-Fascist Committee in Brussels in the last months of the war, with Vercesi, in the name of the Fraction at its head, provoked a violent response from revolutionary elements and groups in France. Elements of the Italian Fraction who were in France – with the agreement of the French Group of the Communist Left – reacted by expelling Vercesi from the Fraction, a few months before hearing about the constitution of the party in Italy and proclaiming the dissolution  of the Fraction. What makes Vercesi’s political conduct even more serious is the fact that he took with him the Italian comrades in Brussels and the majority of the Belgian Fraction. A few months later Vercesi went to Italy where he was given a leading role in the new party and the task of representing it abroad. The party must have known about all these events because not only had a number of the comrades from the recently dissolved Fraction just arrived in Italy, but even more because the French Group of the Communist Left raised the question publicly in its review Internationalisme and addressed a number of letters and open letters to the ICP and the other fractions of the Communist Left, criticizing and condemning all these activities. But apart from the Belgian Fraction, there was no reply. The ICP shut itself up in silence, and its only response was to recognize as its sole expression in France the Fraction recently set up by Vercesi around the old minority, thus keeping away from Internationalisme and its embarrassing questions. We had to wait until 1948 for the party to break its silence, passing a brief and laconic resolution against the Brussels Anti-Fascist Committee without mentioning by name the man who remained one of its leaders: Vercesi. This policy of silence is one of holding onto ambiguities. And it took another five years for the party to make “the sacrifices that clarity demanded, (and) rid itself of the dead leaves of Bordigism”.

We don’t want to write a history of the ICP here. If we have dwelt at length on the Platform and the question of the Partisans, it’s because this was the crucial question at the time. We didn’t spend a long time discussing the question of the integration of the minority of the Fraction who had fought in Spain, or the issue of the Brussels Anti-Fascist Committee, even though the political implications of these questions are of the greatest importance. This is because what we were interested in doing was not making ad hoc condemnations, but simply corroborating what we said originally about the ICP: that the very basis on which it was set up contained all kinds of ambiguities which meant that the party was a political regression in relation to the positions of the Fraction before the war, the positions of Bilan. While remaining within the proletarian camp in a general sense, the ICP failed to break away from the erroneous positions of the Communist International, for the example on the union question and the question of participating in electoral campaigns. The subsequent evolution of the ICP and its dislocation into a number of groups are proof of its failure. The contribution of the Italian Left is considerable, and its theoretical and political work is part of the heritage of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. But, as with the German and Dutch Left, the traditional Italian left exhausted itself a long time ago. This is simply an expression of the break in organic continuity in the revolutionary movement. The terrible length and depth of the counter-revolution physically destroyed all that was left of the Communist International. The Fraction wanted to be a bridge between yesterday’s party and the party of the future. But this hope was not realized. The ICP attempted to be the pole of a new revolutionary movement. But the period, plus its own insufficiencies and ambiguities, didn’t allow this either. It failed and today looks more like a survival of the past than a new point of departure.[6]

With the re-emergence of the historic crisis of the capitalist system, and the resurgence of workers’ struggles all over the world, new revolutionary groups are bound to arise, expressing the necessity and possibility of the regroupment of revolutionaries. It’s time to stop claiming a vague and dubious organic continuity, it’s time to stop giving it artificial respiration. What we have to do is apply ourselves seriously to the task of regroupment, to create a pole of revolutionary regroupment. That is the task of the hour.

But if such a regroupment is to fulfill its real function, it must be based on precise political criteria, on a clear and coherent orientation, which springs from the experiences of the workers’ movement and its theoretical principles. This is something that has to be sought after as methodically and as seriously as possible. We must, as Danielis said, guard against a facile attitude, such as convening conferences on the vague basis of denouncing this or that about-turn of the ‘Communist’ parties in Europe. This would be chasing after numbers at the expense of examining the political criteria for a solid revolutionary regroupment. Here again, the experience of the formation of the ICP has an important lesson for us.

Because it is firmly committed to the necessity of contact and regroupment in the revolutionary movement, the ICC will encourage and actively participate in any initiative in this direction. This is why we have responded positively to Battaglia’s suggestion for an international conference of revolutionary groups, even though we have criticized its lack of political criteria which has allowed invitations to be sent to the modernist Trotskyists of Union Ouvriere and Maoist-Trotskyists like Combat Communiste, who have no place in a conference of communists.

We have been asked to make a “rectification”. This is what we have done – a bit long perhaps, but clear enough we hope. Precisely because we are more than ever convinced of the necessity for discussion between groups who defend communist positions, we think that this discussion can only be fruitful when it aims at the highest degree of clarity about political positions, both in the present and in the past. Until we next hear from you.

Communist Greetings,

The International Communist Current

30.11.76