In the previous articles in this series[1] we have shown how the FAI tried to stop the definitive integration of the CNT into the structures of capitalism. This effort failed. The FAI's insurrectional policy (1932-33) which tried to correct the CNT's serious opportunist deviations, as well as those of the FAI itself, which were expressed through their active support for the creation of the Republic in 1931[2]. led to a terrible haemorrhaging of the forces of the Spanish proletariat, by squandering them in dispersed and desperate struggles.

In 1934 however there was a fundamental change: the PSOE made a spectacular about face and, led by Largo Caballero, along with its companion union , the UGT, raised the flag of the "revolutionary struggle" pushing the workers of Asturias into the dreadful trap of the October insurrection. The Republican state used a new orgy of death, torture and prison deportations, which matched the savage repression meted out in previous years, to liquidate this movement.

This change should not be seen through the prism of events in Spain. It needs to be clearly placed in the evolution of the world situation. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the massacres of workers became more widespread. In Austria the Social Democrats -the left hand of Austrian capital- pushed the workers into a premature insurrection; a defeat that allowed the right hand - the supporters of Nazism- to perpetuate a pitiless massacre. 1934 was also the year in which the USSR signed accords with France integrating it with full honours into imperialist "high society" something that was formally recognised by its admission into the League of Nations (the predecessor of the UN). In this year the Communist Party also made a radical change: the "extremist" policy of the "Third Period", a crude parody of "class against class", was replaced overnight by the "moderate" policy of helping the Socialists to form the inter-classist Popular Fronts that subordinated the proletariat to the "democratic" bourgeois fractions in order to achieve the "ultimate" aim of "stopping the rise of fascism".

Workers Alliances, tool of the anti-fascist front

This international atmosphere provided a context within which the CNT, as well as the FAI, was driven towards full integration into the capitalist state by its adoption of anti-fascism along with the other "democratic" forces.

Anti-fascist ideology was turned into a whirlwind that smashed the last reserves of proletarian consciousness and sucked up proletarian organisations whilst leaving those who managed to maintain a class position in terrible isolation. This ideology in the conditions of the period - the defeat of the proletariat, development of strong regimes as a way of installing State capitalism - best served the "democratic" bourgeoisie preparations for the march towards the generalised war the broke out out in 1939; for which the Spanish struggle from 1936 was the prelude.

We are not going to analyse this ideology here,[3] rather we are going to investigate how its adoption effected the CNT and FAI and sucked them into betraying the proletariat in 1936. The way was opened by the Workers Alliances. These Alliances were presented as the means for advancing workers unity through agreements and cartels between different organisations.[4] The lure of "workers' unity" led to the trap of "anti-fascist" unity which lined up the proletariat behind the defence of bourgeois democracy in order, supposedly, "to stop the rise" of rampant fascism. The Madrid Workers' Alliance (1934) openly proclaimed: "first and foremost, the struggle against fascism in all its forms and the preparation of the working class for the implantation of federal socialist peace in Spain, is the most pressing need".[5]

The opposition unions of the CNT[6] tried to present themselves as unions pure and simple, leaving behind "the anarchist nonsense" as they said, by actively participating in the Workers Alliances, hand in hand with the Stalinist PC, the organisations of the Left Opposition, and from 1934, the UGT-PSOE. Within the CNT and FAI on the other hand there were strong hesitations which undoubtedly expressed a proletarian instinct.

These hesitations however were progressively dissipated due to widespread poisonous atmosphere generated by anti-fascism, as well as by the spade work carried out by wide sections of the CNT itself and the Socialist Party's efforts at seduction.

The CNT's Asturian Region was at the forefront of the struggle to defeat this resistance. The October 1934 Asturian insurrection was prepared before hand by a pact between the regional CNT and UGT-PSOE.[7] The PSOE hardly took part in the arming of the strikers and marginalised the CNT, the Asturian region nevertheless stubbornly preserved the Workers Alliance. At the decisive Zaragoza Congress,[8] this region's delegate recalled that: "a comrade wrote an article in "CNT"[9] recognising the necessity for the Alliance with the Socialists in order to carry out the revolution. A month later another plenum was held and this called for sanctions to be applied in relation to the article. At the time we said we were in favour of the criteria used in this article. And we affirm our point of view about the advisability of drawing the socialists from power in order to make them take the revolutionary road. We sent them communications against the anti-socialist position taken by the National committee in a manifesto".[10]

For his part Largo Caballero[11] in a speech in Madrid put out feelers towards the CNT and FAI "[I say] to those workers nuclei that we were wrong to struggle against them. Their purpose, like ours, is a regime of social equality. They accuse us of nurturing the idea that the state is above the working class. We do not think they have really studied our ideas. We want the disappearance of the state as a means of oppression. We want to turn it into a merely administrative entity" (quoted in Olaya, op cit. Page 866).

As we can see this seduction was pretty crude. He appears to be talking about the "disappearance of the State" but what was being said in reality is that the state can be reduced to a "merely administrative entity". An illusion also used by democrats, who tell us that the democratic state is not "a means of oppression" but rather an "administration". According to this myth only dictatorial states are "organs of oppression".

This flattery, despite coming from such an unattractive individual as Largo Caballero[12] increasingly bedazzled the CNT and FAI. In 1934 a Plenum was held on fascism which according to the report began by clearly denouncing the PSOE and the UGT but ended up leaving the door open to an understanding with them: " This is not to say, of course, that if these organisations (the UGT and PSOE) were pushed by circumstances to carry out an insurrectional action we would be passive by-standers, nothing of the sort (...) at such a moment we would be able to give the anti-fascist movement the stamp of our principles, our libertarian principles".[13]

Anarchism -along with marxism- has always defended the principle that all states, whether democratic or totalitarian, are authoritarian organs of oppression. This principle was spectacularly thrown into the dustbin with the idea of the possibility of "stamping" the anti-fascist movement with the same principle, a movement whose very foundation is to choose, to defend, the democratic form of state, that is, the most devious and cynical variant of this authoritarian organ of oppression!

This progressive abandoning of principles caused by trying to combine antagonistic positions spread increasing confusion, undermined convictions and with increasing force opened the workers' movement up to "anti-fascist unity". The opposition unions added to this from 1935 by beginning a campaign aimed at drawing closer to the CNT through the idea of re-unification based upon anti-fascist unity with the UGT.

This pressure became increasingly powerful. Peirats shows that "the Asturian drama had been nurturing the Alliancists programme within the CNT. Alliancism began to be propagated in Catalyuna one of the confederal regions most addicted to abstentionism".[14] The PSOE and Largo Caballero turned up their siren songs, Peirats records how "for the first time in many years Spanish Socialism publicly invoked the name of the CNT and brotherhood in the proletarian revolution" (idem). Reticence about any policy of alliance remained, however the position of agreement with the UGT was increasingly becoming the majority one within the CNT. It was seen as a means of avoiding the "principle of apoliticism". The UGT thus became the Trojan Horse for enrolling the CNT in an anti-fascist alliance with all the "democratic" fractions of capital. The CNT's and FAI's leaders were able to save face because they maintained the "principle" of refusing all pacts with the political parties. Anti-fascism did not enter by the front door of political agreements -so loudly rejected- but sneaked in through the back door of union unity.

The February 1936 elections

These elections, which are presented as being "decisive" in the struggle against fascism, ended up by eradicating all the resistance that remained in the CNT and FAI.

On the 9th January the secretary of the CNT's Catalunya regional Committee sent a circular to the unions calling a regional Conference in the Meridiana cinema, Barcelona, on the 25th "in order to discuss two concrete questions: 1st What should the CNT's position be on the question of the alliance with institutions that have a workerist complexion, without joining them" and 2nd What concrete and definitive attitude must the CNT adopt faced with the elections" (Peirats,op cit. page 106). Peirats says that, the majority of delegates , "saw the CNT's criteria of the anti-electoral position more as a question of tactics than as a principle" and that "The discussion revealed a state of ideological vacillation" (idem).

The positions favourable to abandoning the CNT's abstentionist tradition became increasingly stronger. Miguel Abós from the Zaragoza region declared in a meeting that "to fall into the torpor created by an abstentionist campaign would be the same as fermenting the Rights victory. And we all know the bitter experience of two years of persecution carried out by the Right. If the Right wins, I assure you that the furious repression unleashed in Asturias will be spread throughout Spain" (quoted in The Zaragoza Congress, a book previously cited about the Congress, page 171).

These interventions systematically distorted reality. The barbaric repression carried out by the capitalist left between 1931-33 was forgotten and only the Rights repression of 34 remembered. The repressive nature of the capitalist state whatever fraction was governing was carefully veiled over, avoiding the minimum of analysis, whilst the monopoly of repression was exclusively attributed to the fascist branch of capital. The CNT swept away by anti-fascism, which poses an analysis as irrational and aberrant as that of fascism, clearly decided to support the bourgeois state by voting for the Popular Front whose programme Solidaridad Obrera had denounced as a "a profoundly conservative document" that clashes with the "revolution spirit that oozes from the Spanish skin".[15] This crucial step was expressed in the Manifesto issued by the National Committee 2 days before the election where we can read:

"We, who do not defend the Republic, but who give no quarter in the struggle against fascism, will contribute all the forces that we dispose of to defeating the historical executioners of the Spanish proletariat (...). The uprising [of the military] is subordinated to the outcome of the elections. The theoretical and preventative plan will be able to be put into practice if the left wins the elections. Furthermore, without a doubt we can say that, faced with the armed insurrection of the legions of tyranny, there will be an unstinting agreement with the anti-fascist forces, energetically working for the defensive action of the masses to be directed towards a true social revolution, under the auspices of Libertarian Communism".[16]

The declaration had enormous repercussions since it was made at a very opportune moment, only two days before the election: it clearly influenced the vote of many workers. The CNT's complicity in the enormous electoral swindle perpetuated against the Spanish proletariat allowed the triumph of the Popular Front, and at the same time, meant its unconditional adherence to the anti-fascist movement.

The FAI clearly shared the CNT's attitude, Gómez Cases in his history of the FAI (page 179 English Edition) says that: "The position ‘On the Elections' also merits some comments. The F.A.I. reaffirmed its traditional anti-parliamentary and anti-electoral position in its relation at the F.A.I. national plenum. However, its campaign was very different from that of 1933 and there was practically no abstention from voting. Referring to the coincidence that C.N.T. and F.A.I. militants would take no risk with an anti-electoral strategy, Santillan himself told us that "the initiative for this change came from the F.A.I. Peninsular Committee, which was in a secure underground and could have for the riskiest offensive action".

If in 1931 the juggling act of the the syndicalist section of the CNT., aimed at securing participation in the elections met strong opposition (form other sectors and the FAI), now the whole CNT -supposedly freed from the syndicalist sector that had gone along with the Opposition unions- and the FAI without much fuss went much further in their support for the Popular Front. A new government that did all it could to delay the amnesty for more than 30000 political prisoners (many of them militants of the CNT[17]), continued the repression of striking workers with the same ferocity as the previous right-wing government and, stopped the re-employment of those workers who had been thrown out of work.[18] The government that the CNT had supported as supposedly leading the struggle against the advance of fascism retained all of the generals with ambitions to carry out a coup -amongst them the astute Franco - who later became the great dictator.

The CNT and FAI stabbed the proletariat in the back. We said in the last article of this series that the CNT had prepared to consummate its marriage with the bourgeois state at its 1931 Madrid Congress but that his had been delayed. They consummated it now! Proof of this, and one which the leaders of the CNT and FAI were very aware of- was given by Buenaventura Durruti on the 6th March -less than a month after the February electoral massacre concerning the new government's repression of the strikes by transport and water workers in Barcelona. In this Durruti -seen as one of the most radical militants of the CNT- launched the typically complicit reproaches often made by the syndicalists and opposition parties: "We say to the men of the Left that we were the ones who brought about your triumph and that we are the ones carrying out two conflicts that ought to be solved immediately". In order to leave no doubt he recalled the services rendered to the new government: "The CNT, the Anarchists, following the recent electoral victory, are in the street -the gentlemen of the Esquerra know it- in order to stop the functionaries who do not want to accept the popular will. Whilst they occupy the ministries and positions of command, the CNT has to be in the street in order to stop the victory of a regime that we all repudiate".[19]

These comments were quoted by the Puerto de Sagunto delegation which was one of the few at the Zaragoza Congress to dare to show any critical reflection "After listening to these words, How can anyone still doubt the torturous, preposterous and calloborationist conduct of, if not all, a large part of the Confederal Organisation? Durruti's words appear to show that the Cataluyna Organsation in a matter of days has been turned into the honorary guard of the Catalan Esquerra".

The Zaragoza Congress: the triumph of syndicalism

Held in May 1936 this congress has been presented as the triumph of the most extreme revolutionary positions because of the adoption of the famous Resolution on libertarian communism.

We will analyse this resolution more fully in another article but here we are going to look at the development of the congress, analysing the atmosphere that dominated it and considering the resolutions and results. From this point of view, the congress marked the unarguable victory of syndicalism and the sealing of the CNT's integration into bourgeois politics through anti-fascism (which we have dealt with above). The proletarian tendencies and positions that tried to express themselves were decisively silenced and weakened by phraseology about unity around the "social revolution" and the "implanting of libertarian communism", syndicalism, anti-fascism and unity with the UGT.

One of the few delegations that expressed the minimum of lucidity at the congress was that from Puerto de Sagunto, which we have already quoted, who warned - with hardly any backing from other delegations- that "The organisation, between October to now, has radically changed, the anarchist sap that runs through its arteries, if it has not totally disappeared has been greatly reduced. If there is not a healthy reaction, the CNT will take giant steps towards the most castrated and annoying reformism. Today the CNT is not the same as that of 1932 and 1933, neither in revolutionary essence or vitality. The morbid agents of this policy have made their mark on the organisation. It has been obsessed about gaining increasing numbers of members without stopping to examine the problems that many of these individuals have caused. Ideological development has been completely forgotten and all that matters is numerical growth, despite the first being more essential the second".[20]

The CNT of Zaragoza had nothing to do with that of 1932-33 (which had already been weakened as a proletarian organisation, as we demonstrated in a previous article in this series) but, above all, it had nothing in common with the CNT of 1910-23 when it was a living organism, dedicated to the everyday struggles and reflection of the working class, along with the struggle for an authentic proletarian revolution. Now it was simply a union totally polarised by anti-fascism.

At the Congress the delegation of the CNT's railway union could tranquilly say without meeting the least opposition that "as railway workers we will solve our problems just as other workers have done, through asking for improvements, but we should never take this for the beginning of a revolutionary movement" (Minutes page 152).

This declaration was made in relation to the balance sheet of the insurrectional movements of December 1933 (which had been deprived of the strengthening that a railway strike could have given it because the union called it off at the last moment), demonstrates that syndicalism: imprisons each section of workers in "their problem" trapping them in the structures of capitalist production and thus undermining class solidarity and unity. The union slogan " that each sector deals with its own problems first" represents the "workerist" way of entangling workers in solidarity with capital and thus breaking all class solidarity as a class.

The Gijón delegation flagrantly denied the most elemental solidarity with the exiled CNT victims of the repression of the 1934 Asturias insurrection (see page 132 of the minutes, op cit). The National Committee made no comment upon this serious lack of solidarity, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years before. Clearly embarrassed by this the Fabril de Barcelona delegation tried to silence this question through a diplomatic proposition:

"We have sufficiently strong reasons for closing this debate in a completely satifactory way. The Asturian region has drawn a line under this incident since the ex-exiles are present at this congress as delegates. Moreover if there is a letter of the National Committee where support and aid are not advised there is another later one that goes back on this position.[21] The delegates who pose this problem want us to recognise them as comrades and to give them our entire confidence. The congress satisfies this request and the question is resolved."

This abandoning of the most elemental workers' solidarity expressed such a really incredible attitude that the Segunto delegation denounced it : "We protest about the paragraph refering to the management of the National Committee about the government and we say that the Vagos and Maleantes law[22] should not be applied to the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. However what we have to ask for is the abrogation of this law. It is not right to think that something that is bad for us is good enough for others" (Minutes page 106).

At the congress one could hear an intervention praising, advising, recommending that "in relation to strikes there has not been the necessary prudence that would have saved energies in order to channel them towards other struggles. This defect could be corrected by directing the workers to make demands of the bourgeoisie that have gone through the Sections and the Industrial Relations Committees in order to allow the situation to be studied and thus avoiding the disorderly calling of strikes" (Minutes, page 196, Hospitalet delegation). That is to say, the demand that had been the spearhead of the syndicalists struggle in 1919-23: the regulation of strikes through the "peer organs". This is the same idea of the mixed panels with which the Republican/Socialist government of 1931-33 had tried to straight jacket strikes and the CNT itself.

These were the typical expressions of the union mentality which tries to control and dominate workers' struggles through sabotaging them from within. When workers seek to defend their demands, the unions talk pessimistically about "unfavourable conditions" and craftily insists upon "not wasting energies". However, when the unions call for struggles this is done in order to dampen down workers combativity or to lead them to bitter defeat, and accompanied by exaggerated optimism about the possibility of success and reproach workers for their "meanness" if they do not join in.

One of the most of the most flagrant expressions of this trade union mentality was the resolution adopted by the congress on unemployment. It made more or less correct points about the causes of unemployment and correctly insisted that "the proletariats suffering will only be ended by the social revolution" (page 217). However, this remained a hollow phrase negated by the "minimum programme" that proposed "36 hour week", "the abolition of piece-work", "obligatory retirement at 60 for men and 40 for women of 70% of wages" (idem). Leaving to one side the stinginess of these proposals the problem is the thinking behind the minimum programme, is based on the illusion that there can be a dynamic towards regulated improvements within capitalism. Syndicalism could not escape from this illusion since this was the essence of its activity: to work within the relations of capitalist production in order to improve workers' conditions, something that was possible in the ascendant period of capitalism but impossible in its decadent epoch.

There was an even worse resolution however and one which did not give rise to any criticism at the Congress. In its preamble it tranquilly affirmed that:

"England has tried unemployment benefits but this was an absolute failure, since parallel with the poverty of the obliging masses with outrageous subsides, it lead to the economic ruin of the country since it had to parasitically maintain millions without work on sums which, though not fabulous, represented a significantly importance investment of the country's economic reserves on philanthropic works".[23]

The same congress that dedicated part of its work to defining the "social revolution" and "libertarian communism" also took up a preoccupation for safeguarding the national economy, which classified as parasitic the payment of unemployment benefits and lamented the waste of the nation's resources on " philanthropic works"!

How could an organisation that called itself "worker" call unemployment benefits "parasitic"? Could it not understand the basic ABC that unemployment benefits had already been paid for by many hours of work by them or their brothers and sisters still in work and in no way represents philanthropy? These laments have more to do with the politics of the Right and the bosses than unionists or the politics of the Left who distinguish themselves precisely from the Right by being more guarded and not usually saying what they think or expressing it in a deceitful way.

However this does not mean we are at all surprised that a union which was rhetorically preparing to "carry out the social revolution" adopts such things. Unions have no other playing field than the national economy and its aim -even more than that of its associate adversaries, the bosses- is the defence of the whole of its interests. Trade unionism only proposes to gain improvements within the relations of capitalist production. In the historic period of capitalism's expansion this allowed it to be a weapon of the class struggle. In the global context of strong contradictions workers conditions could be improved and the prosperity of the economy could develop in parallel. However, in the period of decadence this is no long possible: in a society marked by permanent crisis, moves towards war and war itself, the salvation of the national economy demands as its unavoidable condition the sacrifice of workers and a more or less permanent increase in their exploitation.

In 1931, the split of the unionist tendency organised in the Opposition Unions, lead the anarchists to believe that the danger of syndicalism had disappeared. They appeared to think: kill the dog put an end to rabies. But reality was very different: the blood that coursed through the CNT's veins was syndicalist and the syndicalist mentality far from being weakened was increasing reinforced. The activism of the 1932-33 insurrectional period was as dangerous mirage. From 1934 the reality was that: syndicalism and anti-fascism -mutually reinforcing each other- were inexorably imposed definitively trapping the CNT -and with it the FAI- in the cogs of the bourgeois state. The delegation of Various Officies of Igualada bitterly recognised this: "many of those who see themselves as staunch defenders of the CNT's positions have unconsciously and inadvertently turned us into mere sponsors of an increasingly bourgeois republican government" (Minutes page 71).

The Zaragoza congress dedicated a good part of its sessions to re-uniting with the opposition unions. Despite the exchange of numerous mutual recriminations which were accompanied by the rhetorical change of "welcomes" and "hand shakes" the terrain that lead to this re-unification was that of syndicalism and anti-fascism. The Anarchists sector - in order to deceive themselves and others - highlighted the proclamations about the "social revolution" and adopted with hardly any discussion the famous resolution on libertarian communism . This repeated the same manoeuvre that they had criticised the Syndicalists for in 1919 and afterwards in 1931: wrapping up syndicalist politics and collaboration with capital in the attractive wrapping paper of the "rejection of politics" and "revolution".

The two parts were re-united on the terrain of capitalism. Therefore the delegate of the Valencia Opposition could challenge the report on reunification without meetings hardly any objections..

In way of conclusion

The spectacular events that took place from July 1936 in which the CNT was the main protagonist: demobilising and sabotaging the workers' struggles in Barcelona and other parts of Spain in response to the Fascist uprising, its unconditional support for the Catalan Generalitat and participation, at first indirectly and then openly in this government; the sending of ministers to the Republican government are well known.[24]

These facts clearly show the CNT's treason. But they are not a storm that suddenly appeared from a blue sky. Throughout this series we have tried to show why this terrible and tragic situation of the loss for the proletariat of an organisation born from its own efforts took place. It is not a question of destroying a great myth or revealing a grand lie but of examining with a global and historical method the processes that led to this betrayal. The series on revolutionary syndicalism and within that the series of articles on the CNT,[25] has tried to provide the materials for opening up a discussion that will allow us to draw lessons to arm ourselves with faced with the struggles to come. Confronted with the tragedy of the CNT we can -as the philosopher said- neither laugh or cry but only understand.

RR and C. Mir 12.3.08

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[1] See the 5th article of this series in International Review n°132: "Anarchism fails to prevent the CNT's integration into the bourgeois state (1931-32) [1]".

[2] See the 4th article of this series in International Review n°131: "The CNT's contribution to the constitution of the Spanish Republic (1921-31) [2]".

[3] We have published different texts that can be consulted, some of these were written by the few revolutionary groups which resisted the "anti-fascist" tide during that period.

[4] It is necessary to underline that workers unity cannot be achieve through the agreement of political and union organisations. The experience of the 1905 Russian Revolution showed that workers unity is achieved in a direct way, through massive struggle and has its organisational source in the general assembles and when the revolutionary situation unfolds through the formation of workers' councils.

[5] From Olaya's Historia del movimiento obrero español (1900-1936), Vol 2 page 877. The references for these books are found in the second article on the CNT.

[6] A split that last from 1931 to 1936 lead by openly syndicalist elements in the CNT. See the fifth article in our series.

[7] This pact was hidden from the National Committee before it was put in place.

[8] Held in May 1936. See more above.

[9] The second newspaper besides the legendary Solidaridad Obrera.

[10] Page 163 of The Zaragoza Conferderal Congress, ZYX Edition, 1978.

[11] For many years he was the main leader of both the PSOE and the UGT.

[12] He had been Minister of Labour in the 1931-33 Republian-Socialist government, responsible for innumerable workers deaths and before that had been a state advisor to the dictator Primo de Rivera.

[13] Olaya op cit page 887.

[14] From The CNT in the Spanish revolution, vol 1 page 106. See bibliographical references in the first part of this series

[15] The articles appeared on the 17-1-1936 and 2-4-1936.

[16] Cited by Peirats op cit page 113.

[17] We should remember that this amnesty for the syndicalist prisoners was one of the most repeated motives given by the CNT and the FAI for its vigorous support for the Popular Front.

[18] We would add to this that the Agrarian Reform , a timed and stingy law , was not what was promised and between February and July the "Popular" government practically maintained a state of emergency and brutal press censorship which effected the CNT above all.

[19] Cited in the minutes of the Zaragoza Congress of the CNT, page 171.

[20] Minutes of the Zaragoza Congress, op cit, page 117.

[21] This according to the minutes of the congress caused uncertainty and confusion. During the debate, the National Committee affirmed "all we said was that we could not advise class solidarity".

[22] This odious and repugnant law which gave the government enormous repressive powers was adopted by the "very democratic" "workers'" Spanish Republic.

[23] Minutes page 215, op cit.

[24] We have analysed this in our book: Franco y La República masacran a los trabajadores.

[25] The first began with International Review n°118 whilst the second commenced in n°128.

Times are hard for the world economy! Not only has it still to get over last year’s sub-prime crisis in the US housing market, the overall situation of the capitalist economy has never seemed so dangerous since the late 1960s: despite all the efforts of the ruling class to fend it off, the crisis is back with a vengeance. The US housing crisis has been transformed into an international financial crisis, with alarms going off everywhere as American and European banking and financial institutions appear to be threatened with insolvency.[1] Those financial institutions that were in danger of bankruptcy have only survived thanks to state intervention, and there is a real fear that many financial institutions which up to now had been considered safe, may find themselves in danger of bankruptcy and so creating the conditions for a major financial crash. The crisis of confidence gripping the international banking system has aroused serious concern among many fractions of the world ruling class that there is a real danger of the whole system seizing up, making it impossible for companies and households to get the credits (even at higher prices) on which the economy’s activity depends. There is a risk that a full-blown financial crash be combined with a whole series of other “economic disasters” which are by no means accidents, but which on the contrary are expressions of a violent return of an economic crisis which the bourgeoisie has been trying to stave off by every means possible:

A forecast slowdown in economic activity, or even a recession in the case of some countries, such as the United States. The bourgeoisie managed to overcome successive crises since the 1970s thanks to an ever-growing mountain of debt, which brought ever more meager results. Will it be possible to hold off recession once again without new and greater injections of debt, with all the risks that implies for the stability of the world’s banking and credit mechanisms.

The decline in share values, punctuated by the occasional abrupt fall, has shaken confidence in the foundations of the whole system of speculation. The successes of stock exchange speculation, which made it possible to hide much of the difficulties of the world economy in particular by contributing in large part to the rise in company profitability since the mid-1980s, also created the myth that equity values could only go on rising no matter what ups and downs affected the economy.

The weight of military spending is an increasingly intolerable burden on the economy, as we can see clearly in the case of the USA. And yet this weight cannot be reduced at will. It is the consequence of the growing weight of militarism in social life, where each nation is increasingly pushed into military adventures at the same time as it is confronted with ever more insurmountable economic difficulties.

The return of inflation doubly haunts the bourgeoisie. On the one hand it threatens to reduce trade as a result of more and more unpredictable fluctuations in prices. At the same time, it is easier for workers to spread the struggle to other branches of industry when the fight concerns the defense of wages eaten away by inflation than when it concerns the threat of redundancy for example. Yet the only means for holding back inflation – reduction in credit and state spending – would only make the recession worse if they were put into operation.

Consequently, the present situation is not just a worse remake of all the crises since the 1960s, it concentrates them all in one explosive bundle which has given the economic disaster a whole new quality, much more likely to lead to a calling into question of the whole system. Another sign of the times is that whereas up to now it is America that has played the part of locomotive to draw the world economy out of recession, the only direction that the USA seems likely to draw the world today, is over the cliff and into recession.

The deepening economic crisis in the United States

When it comes to the economic situation in the U.S., George Bush is the most optimistic man in America—he may be the only optimist in America.[2] February 28th, even though he acknowledged the risk of an economic slowdown, the President declared, “I don’t think we’re headed for a recession… I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place for us… to grow and continue growing, more robustly that we’re growing now. So we’re still for a strong dollar.” Two weeks later, on March 14th, the President reaffirmed his optimistic outlook before a meeting of economists in New York City where he expressed confidence in the “resilient” American economy. He did this on the very day that the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase were forced to collaborate on an emergency bailout plan for Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank, after it suffered a run on the bank reminiscent of the Great Depression; that crude oil prices hit a record high $111 per gallon, despite the fact that supply far exceeds demand; that the government announced that mortgage foreclosures rose 60 percent in February; and that the dollar hit a record low against the Euro. Bush’s denial of reality notwithstanding, it is clear that the appearance of prosperity that accompanied the housing boom and real estate economic bubble of the last few years has given way to a full-blown economic catastrophe in the world’s most powerful economy, thus putting the economic crisis in the forefront of the international situation.

The housing crisis is symptomatic of a chronic crisis of the system.

Ever since the first signs that the housing boom was coming to an end at the beginning of 2007, bourgeois economists began debating the odds of a recession in the US economy. Just three months ago, at the beginning of 2008, the predictions ranged considerably, stretching from the ‘pessimists’ who thought that a recession had already started in December, to the ‘optimists’ who were still expecting a miracle that would avoid it. In the middle, hedging their bets, were the uncommitted experts saying that the economy “could literally go either way.”

Things have gone so bad so fast in the last two months that, except for Bush, there is no more room for optimism or ‘centrism.’ The consensus is now that the good times have come to an end. In other words the American economy is now in recession or, at best, in the edge of one.

However this bourgeois recognition of American capitalism’s troubles has little value for understanding the real state of the system. The bourgeoisie’s official definition of an economic recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The National Bureau of Economic Research uses different, slightly more useful criteria, defining recession as a significant, protracted decline in activity that cuts across the economy, affecting measures like income, employment, retail sales and industrial production. On the basis of these definitions, the bourgeoisie can’t identify a recession until it has been underway for a while, often until the worst of it is already past. Thus according to some estimates one will have to wait until late this year to know if there is a recession, or, the date of its beginning.

In this sense the recession predictions that fill the pages of economic sections of newspapers and magazines are very misleading. In the last instance they only contribute to hiding the catastrophic state of American capitalism that can only get worse in the months to come regardless of when the economy officially enters in recession.

What is important to emphasize is that the present slump is far from reflecting a supposedly “healthy” American economy that is simply going through a troubled phase in an otherwise normal business cycle of expansion and bust. What we are witnessing are the convulsions of a system in a chronic state of crisis that can only buy ephemeral moments of “health” by toxic remedies that only aggravate the next catastrophic collapse.

This has been the history of American capitalism - and global capitalism- since the end of the sixties with the return of the open economic crisis. For the last four decades through official expansions and busts, the overall economy has only kept a semblance of functionality thanks to systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies that the government is obliged to apply to fight the affects of the crisis. However the situation has not remained static. During these decades of crisis and state intervention to manage it, the economy has accumulated so many contradictions that today there is a real threat of an economic catastrophe, the likes of which we have not seen in the history of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie bought its way out of the burst of the technology/internet bubble in 2000/01 by creating a new bubble based, this time, on real estate. Despite the fact that companies in key industries in the manufacturing sector– the auto and air line industries for instance— continue going bankrupt, the real estate boom for the last five years gave the semblance of an expanding economy. Now the boom has transformed itself into the present bust that has shaken the whole edifice of the capitalist system and which will still have future repercussions that no one can yet predict.

According to the latest data about the real estate crisis, activity related to private housing is in total disarray. New home construction has already fallen by around 40 percent since its peak in 2006; sales have fallen even faster, dragging prices down with it. Home prices have dropped by 13 percent nation-wide since the peak in 2006 with predictions that they will fall by another 15 to 20 percent before hitting bottom. The real estate boom has left a huge inventory of vacant unsold homes— about 2.1 million, or about 2.6 percent of the nation’s housing supply. And the glut is bound to increase as the wave of foreclosures continues to broaden, hitting even borrowers with supposedly good credit. Last year’s foreclosures were mostly limited to the so-called sub-prime mortgages—loans given to people with essentially no means to repay. Nearly one-fourth of such loans were in default by last November. Although default rates on loans given to people with relatively good credit are much lower, they are also rising. In November, 6.6 percent of these loans were either delinquent, in foreclosure, or had been repossessed. In a sign of worse things to come, this spike in foreclosures is happening even before many mortgages have reset to higher interest rates. The declining real estate values that have accompanied the crisis means that many people hold mortgages that exceed the current value of their homes, which means that they couldn’t even recoup their losses if they sold their homes. This creates a situation in which in is more financially sensible to walk away from their mortgage obligations and declare bankruptcy.

The bursting of the real estate bubble is wreaking havoc in the financial sector. So far the crisis in real estate has generated over 170 billion dollars in losses at the world’s largest financial institutions. Billions of dollars in stock market value have been wiped out, rocking Wall Street. Among the big names that lost at least a third of their value in 2007 were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Moody’s, and Citigroup.[3] MBIA, a company that specializes in guaranteeing the financial health of others, lost nearly three-quarters of its value! Several of yesterday’s high-flying mortgage related companies have gone bankrupt.

And this is only the beginning. As foreclosures accelerate in the coming months banks will be counting new losses and the credit crunch already in place will tighten up even more, impacting further other sectors of the economy.

From the housing crisis to the credit crunch

Moreover, the financial crisis related to the mortgages is only the tip of the iceberg. The same reckless lending practices that were dominant in the mortgage market were also the norm in the credit card and auto loan industries, where problems are also increasing. And here lies the essence of today capitalist “health”. Its little dirty secret is the perversion of the mechanism of credit as a way to buy its way out of a lack of solvent markets to sell its commodities. Lending is no longer a promise of repayment with a profit backed up by some material reality (i.e., collateral) that can stimulate capitalist development. It has essentially become a way of keeping the economy artificially afloat and preventing the collapse of the system under the weight of its historic crisis. Already in the 1980’s the financial crisis that followed the bust of the Latin American economies that were weighed down by huge debts that they had no means to repay had demonstrated the limits of credit as a remedy to deal with the crisis. The same lesson could have been learned in 1997 and 1998 at the time of the collapse of the Asian tigers and dragons, and Russia’s default on its debt. In fact the housing bubble itself was a reaction to and an effort at overcoming the burst tech/internet bubble. One can justly pose the question, what is the next bubble going to be?

Yet there is another aspect of the present financial crisis. This is the rampant speculation that accompanied the real estate bubble. What we are talking about is not small time speculation by an individual investor buying a house and quickly flipping it to make a quick buck from the fast appreciation of the value of the property. This is peanuts. What really counts is the big time speculation that all the major financial institutions engaged in through the securitization and selling of mortgage-debt on the stock market. The exact mechanisms of these schemes are not completely but from what is known they look very much like the age old ponzi schemes. In any case, what this monstrous level of speculation shows is the degree to which the economy has become a “casino economy” where capital is not invested in the real economy, but instead it is used to gamble.

The crisis reveals the bluff of liberalism and the crisis of state capitalism

The American bourgeoisie likes to present itself as the ideological champion of free market capitalism. This is nothing but ideological posturing. An economy left to function according to the laws of the market has no place in today’s capitalism, dominated by omnipresent state intervention. This is the sense of the “debate” within the bourgeoisie on how to manage the present economic mess. In essence there is nothing new being put forward. The same old monetary and fiscal policies are applied in hope to stimulate the economy.

For the moment what is being done to alleviate the current crisis is more of the same— the application of the same old policies of easy money and cheap credit to prop up the economy. The American bourgeoisie’s response to the credit crunch is yet more credit! The Federal Reserve has cut its interest rate benchmark 5 times since September and seems posed to do so once more at its next scheduled meeting in March. In a clear recognition that this medicine is not working the Fed has steadily increased its intervention in the financial markets offering cheap money – $200 billion in March, on top of another multibillion package offered last December— to the financial institutions that are short on cash.

For their part the White House and Congress moved quickly as well in passing a so-called ‘economic stimulus package”, in essence approving rebates for families and tax breaks for businesses and passing legislation geared towards easing the mortgage defaults epidemic and reviving the battered housing market. However given the extent of the housing and financial crisis there is even growing consideration of proposals for a massive bailout by the State of the whole housing debacle, the price tag of which would make the huge $124.6 billions bailout by the State of the Saving and Loans industry in 1990 look insignificant.

What these efforts by the State to manage the crisis will amount to remains to be seen. What is evident is that more than ever the bourgeoisie has less margin of maneuver for its economic policies. After decades of managing the crisis, the American bourgeoisie presides over a very sick economy. The monstrous public and private national debt, the federal budget deficit, the fragile financial system, and the huge trade deficit, all these make more difficult for the bourgeoisie to deal with the collapse of its system. In fact so far the traditional government medicine to jolt the economy has failed to produce any positive results. On the contrary it seems to be aggravating the illness that it is intended to cure. Despite the Fed’s moves to easy the credit crunch, stabilize the financial sector and revive the mortgage market, credit is in short supply and expensive, the Wall Street rollercoaster ride continues unabated with wild swings and an overall downward tendency, and rising mortgages rates are not helping to alleviate the housing slump. Furthermore the Fed’s policy of cheap money is contributing to the downward plunge of the dollar, which every week is hitting new lows against the Euro and other currencies and driving up prices of key commodities like oil. This rising price of energy, food and other commodities at the same time of a sharply slowed down economic activity are fueling fears among the “experts” about the prospect of a period of “stagflation” for the American economy. Today rising inflation is already squeezing consumption of people trying to survive on fixed incomes and obliging the working class and other sectors of the population to tighten their belts.

Attacks on the US working class

The March 7 announcement by the U.S. Labor Department that 63 000 jobs were lost nationwide during the month of February sent jitters around the bourgeois world. Surely not because of concerns for the lot of laid-off workers but because this sharp decline in employment confirmed the economists’ worst nightmares of a worsening crisis. It was the second consecutive decline in employment and the third straight drop for the private sector. However in a kind of sick joke at the expense of unemployed workers, the overall unemployment rate declined from 4.9 to 4.8 percent. How is this possible? The reason is nothing but a clever statistical trick used by the bourgeoisie to underreport the number of unemployed. For the U.S. government, you are only unemployed if you are out of job, have actively looked for one in the last month and are ready to work at the moment of the survey. Thus the official unemployment rate significantly understates the jobs crisis. It ignores millions of “discouraged” American workers who have lost their jobs and have given up on the possibility of finding a new one and haven’t applied for a new job in the previous 30 days at the time of the survey, or who want to join the workforce but are too discouraged to try because the job situation remains so bleak or simply are not willing to work for half the wage rate that they had in their recent lost job, or millions of underemployed workers who want to work fulltime but are forced to work part-time because there are no fulltime jobs available. If these workers were included the unemployment statistics, the rate would be significantly higher. To further underreport unemployment, since 1983, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s statistical sleight of hand, U.S.-based military personnel have bee considered part of the domestic workforce (previously unemployment was calculated based on the civilian workforce only). This maneuver adds nearly two million man and women “employed” by the U.S. military to the denominator used to calculate the unemployment rate, artificially lowering the rate.

The present economic slump is bringing an avalanche of lay-offs across all sectors of the economy, but one has to say that the now defunct housing boom was not a paradise for the working class. Income, pensions, health care, working conditions, all continued to deteriorate while the housing market was booming. This fact has led even some bourgeois economists to point out that this was a ‘jobless’ and ‘wageless’ recovery. But even this recognition falls short of presenting the whole picture. The reality is that for the working class, working and living conditions have continued to deteriorate for the last four decades of open economic crisis, expansions and busts not withstanding. As this crisis worsens during the present economic slump there is nothing in store for the working class but more misery as the bourgeoisie tries to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties.

The dire conditions facing the American economy portends a bleak economic picture on the global level. The world’s biggest, most powerful economy will surely bring its trading partners down with it. There is no economic engine that can compensate for the American plunge and keep the global economy afloat. The credit crunch will undermine world trade, the collapse of the dollar will slash exports to the U.S. aggravating the economic situation in country after country, and the attacks on the proletariat’s standard of living will increase everywhere. If there is one bright spot, it is that all of this will accelerate the return of the proletariat to reclaiming the class struggle against capitalism, as it is forced to defend itself against the ravages of the capitalist crisis.

The perspective of the acceleration of the capitalist crisis brings with it the promise of a development of the class struggle: in it, the proletariat will have to go beyond the steps forward it has already made since the historic recovery of the struggle at the end of the 1960s.

ES/JG March 14, 2008

In spring 2005, the ICC launched an internal debate focused on the underlying causes of the economic boom that followed World War II;[1] this period remains an outstanding exception within the history of capitalism's decadence, achieving spectacular and then historically unprecedented overall growth rates for the world economy.[2]      

Elements of this debate had already been posed within our organisation, in particular concerning the economic role played by the two world wars and by the war economy in general, centred essentially on the key question of whether the destruction caused by war was in some way responsible for the post-war booms after 1918 and 1945. Indeed, this had led to the appearance of certain contradictions between various ICC texts on the question. As the debate got under way, it quickly became clear that if - as some argued - the destruction caused by war could not be said to open new markets (since the reconstruction that followed the wars took place entirely within the sphere of the existing capitalist economy), then this in turn opened a much broader problem: what other coherent explanation could account for the post-war boom that followed 1945? Although the debate is still ongoing, and the different positions continue to represent, up to a point, "work in progress", we consider nonetheless that their outlines are sufficiently clear for us to present them to comrades outside the organisation with a view to encouraging debate among all those interested in the positions of the Communist Left.

One might imagine that events prior to and since the post-war boom had sufficiently demonstrated its exceptional nature, for a debate on the subject to be of purely academic interest. We consider it critical nonetheless, since these questions go to the core of the marxist understanding of the historically limited character of the capitalist mode of production, the system's entry into decadence and the insoluble nature of the present crisis. In other words, they concern one of the main objective foundations of the proletariat's revolutionary perspective.

The context of the debate: certain contradictions in our analyses

The debate on the economic implications of war in capitalism's decadence is not new to the ICC, and had indeed already been posed in the workers' movement, notably by the Communist Left. Our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism[3] explicitly developed the idea that the destruction provoked by the wars in the phase of decadence, and in particular the world wars, could constitute an outlet for capitalist production, by creating a market based on post-war reconstruction:

"...the external outlets have contracted rapidly. Because of this, capitalism has had to resort to the palliatives of destruction and arms production to try to compensate for rapid losses in ‘living space'." (Section 5: "The turning-point of the 1914-18 war")

 "Through massive destruction with an eye to reconstruction, capitalism has discovered a way out, dangerous and temporary but effective, for its new problems of finding outlets.

During the first war, the amount of destruction was not ‘sufficient' (...) In 1929, world capitalism again ran into a crisis situation. As if the lesson had been well-learned the amount of destruction accomplished in World War II was far more intense and extensive (...) a war which for the first time had the conscious aim of systematically destroying the existing industrial potential. The ‘prosperity' of Europe and Japan after the war seemed already foreseen by the end of the war, (Marshall Plan, etc...)" (Section 6: "The cycle of war-reconstruction").

A similar idea is present in other texts of the organisation (notably in the International Review) as well as among our predecessors in the Italian Left: in an article published in 1934 by Bilan we read, for example, that "The slaughter that followed formed an enormous outlet for capitalist production, opening up a ‘magnificent' perspective (...) While war is the great outlet for capitalist production, in ‘peacetime' it is militarism (i.e. all the activities involved in the preparation for war that realises the surplus value of the fundamental areas of production controlled by finance capital" (Bilan n°11, 1934, ‘Crises and cycles in the economy of capitalism in agony' republished in International Review n°103).

Other ICC texts, written both before and after The Decadence of Capitalism was published, developed a very different analysis of the role of war in the period of decadence, harking back to the report on the international situation at the July 1945 conference of the Gauche Communiste de France, for whom war "was an indispensable means for capitalism, opening up the possibilities of ulterior dev­elopment, in the epoch when these possibilities existed and could only be opened up through violent methods. In the same way, the downfall of the capitalist world, which has historically exhausted all the possibilities for development, finds in modern war, imperialist war, the expression of this downfall which, without open­ing up any possibility for an ulterior develop­ment, can only hurl the productive forces into an abyss and pile ruins upon ruins at an ever-increasing pace".

The report on the course of history adopted at the ICC's 3rd Congress[4] refers explicitly to this passage from the GCF's text, as does the article ‘War, militarism and imperialist blocs in the decadence of capitalism', published in 1988,[5] which emphasises that "what characterises all these wars, like the two world wars, is that unlike those of the previous century, at no time have they permitted any progress in the development of the productive forces, having had no other result than massive destructions which have bled dry the countries in which they have taken place (not to mention the horrible massacres they have provoked)".

The framework of the debate

These questions are important because they give a theoretical foundation and coherence to the general political framework of a revolutionary organisation. They are nonetheless different from those class lines which separate the proletariat from the bourgeoisie and its hangers-on (internationalism, anti-working class nature of the trade unions, impossibility of taking part in parliamentary elections, etc.). The different analyses that have evolved during the debate are thus all entirely compatible with principles contained in the ICC's own platform.[6]

The critique of certain ideas contained in The Decadence of Capitalism has moreover been undertaken with the same method and general analytical framework that the ICC has used both when the pamphlet was written and since:[7]

1. The ICC stands by the Communist International's recognition that World War I had opened a new "epoch of wars and revolutions", based on the fact that capitalism could no longer escape from the insurmountable contradictions assailing its system. The workers' movement had to understand the expressions and political consequences of this change in period.
2. When we analyse the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production over a whole period, we must begin by studying, not the different sectors of capitalism (nations, enterprises, etc), but the world capitalist entity taken as a whole; it is the latter which provides the key to understanding each one of its parts. This was the method Marx used in studying the reproduction of capital, when he made it clear that "To rid the general analysis of purely incidental elements, it is necessary to treat the commercial world as a single nation" (Capital Volume One).
3. "Contrary to what the idolaters of capital claim, capitalist production does not create automatically and at will the markets necessary for its growth. Capitalism developed in a non-capitalist world, and it was in this world that it found the outlets for its development. But by generalising its relations of production across the whole planet and by unifying the world market, capitalism reached a point where the outlets which allowed it to grow so powerfully in the nineteenth century became saturated. Moreover, the growing difficulty encountered by capital in finding a market for the realisation of surplus value accentuates the fall in the rate of profit, which results from the constant widening of the ratio between the value of the means of production and the value of the labour power which sets them in motion. From being a mere tendency, the fall in the rate of profit has become more and more concrete; this has become an added fetter on the process of capitalist accumulation and thus on the operation of the entire system" (ICC Platform).
4. It fell to Rosa Luxemburg, on the basis of a critical appraisal of Marx's work, to develop the thesis that the enrichment of capitalism as a whole depended on the exchange of commodities with pre-capitalist economies ("foreign markets"), i.e. economies that practiced commodity exchange but had not yet adopted the capitalist mode of production: "In real life the actual conditions for the accumulation of the aggregate capital are quite different from those prevailing for individual capitals and for simple reproduction. The problem amounts to this: If an increasing part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists but employed in the expansion of production, what, then, are the forms of social reproduction? What is left of the social product after deductions for the replacement of the constant capital cannot, ex hypothesi, be absorbed by the consumption of the workers and capitalists-this being the main aspect of the problem-nor can the workers and capitalists themselves realise the aggregate product. They can always only realise the variable capital, that part of the constant capital which will be used up, and the part of the surplus value which will be consumed, but in this way they merely ensure that production can be renewed on its previous scale. The workers and capitalists themselves cannot possibly realise that part of the surplus value-which is to be capitalised. Therefore, the realisation of the surplus value for the purposes of accumulation is an impossible task for a society which consists solely of workers and capitalists".Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, ‘The Reproduction of Capital and its Social Setting'). The ICC has essentially adopted this position, which does not mean that there cannot exist within our organisation other positions which criticise Luxemburg's economic analysis, as we will see in particular with one of the positions in the present debate. Her analyses met with opposition in her own day, not only from the reformist currents which considered that capitalism was not doomed to provoke growing catastrophes, but also from revolutionary currents, in particular Lenin and Pannekoek, who considered that capitalism was a historically obsolete mode of production although their explanations were different from Luxemburg's.
5. The phenomenon of imperialism derived precisely from the need for the developed countries to have access to pre-capitalist markets: "imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment". (Accumulation of Capital: ‘Protective Tariffs and Accumulation')
6. The historically limited nature of these extra-capitalist outlets constitutes the economic basis of the decadence of capitalism. The First World War was the expression of such a contradiction. Once the world had been divided up between the great powers, those who were left the worst off in terms of colonial possessions had no choice but to try to re-divide the world by military force. Capitalism's entry into its period of decline signified that the contradictions which beset the system were now insurmountable.
7. State capitalism is the way the bourgeoisie, in the period of decadence, uses various palliatives to hold back the descent into the crisis, to attenuate its most brutal expressions, in order to avoid a repetition of what happened in 1929.
8. In the period of decadence, credit constitutes an essential means through which the bourgeoisie tries to make up for the lack of extra-capitalist markets. The accumulation of an increasingly uncontrollable global debt, the growing insolvency of the different capitalist sectors and the threat of a profound destabilisation of the world economy are both a consequence and a demonstration of the limits on credit.
9. A typical expression of the decadence of capitalism, at the economic level, is the development of unproductive expenditure. This expresses the fact that the development of the productive forces is increasingly held back by the insurmountable contradictions of the system: military expenditure (arms, military operations) to face up to the world wide exacerbation of imperialist tensions; the expenses poured into maintaining and equipping the forces of repression, whose role in the last instance is to deal with the class struggle; advertising, a weapon of the commercial struggle to sell on a glutted market, etc. From the economic point of view, such expenses express a pure loss for capital.

The positions emerging from the debate

Within the ICC, there exists a position which, though compatible with our political platform, is in disagreement with numerous aspects of Rosa Luxemburg's contribution on the economic foundations of the crisis of capitalism.[8] For this position, the foundations of the crisis are to be found in another contradiction highlighted by Marx: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. While rejecting conceptions (held notably by the Bordigists and councilists) which imagine that capitalism can automatically and eternally generate the expansion of its own market as long as the rate of profit is sufficiently high, it emphasises that the basic contradiction of capitalism is not located in the limits of the market as such (i.e. the form in which the crisis manifest itself) but in the barriers to the expansion of production.

The essentials of the debate around this position have been substantially taken up in polemics with other organisations (even if there are differences in the positions involved) with regard to the saturation of the market and the falling rate of profit.[9]

The other positions expressed in this debate, and which are introduced below, are all based on the analyses of Rosa Luxemburg, and consider the lack of sufficient extra-capitalist markets to play a central role in the crisis and decadence of capitalism.

 The critique developed within the organisation of certain contradictions contained within the Decadence pamphlet (notably that post-war reconstruction could in itself make continued accumulation possible by in some way compensating for the lack of markets outside the capitalist system) did not therefore abandon the text's underlying analytical framework. Quite the contrary, it should be considered as a development in the continuity of that framework.

The first of the positions presented here (under the title ‘War economy and state capitalism') though critical of certain aspects of our pamphlet (arguing that it lacks rigour in certain areas and makes no reference to the Marshall Plan in explaining the reconstruction properly so called), still basically adheres to the idea that the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s is determined by the global context of imperialist relations and the establishment of a permanent war economy in the wake of the Second World War.

The two other positions presented here are much more critical of the Decadence pamphlet's analysis of the post-war boom. The first of these (under the title ‘Extra-capitalist markets and debt') re-evaluates and accords a greater significance to these two factors, which have already been analysed by the ICC previously.[10] These two factors are considered sufficient to explain the prosperity of the post-war boom.

The second (under the heading ‘Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism'), starts from the same premise as our pamphlet on decadence - the relative saturation of the markets in 1914 with regard to the needs of accumulation on a world scale - and develops the idea that the system responded to this after 1945 by installing a variant of state capitalism based on a three-fold (Keynesian) repartition of the enormous gains in productivity (Fordism) between profits, state revenues and real wages.   

The following sections of this article provide a brief overview of these three positions.[11] In future we will publish more developed expressions of the different positions, or of others that may appear in the debate.

War economy and state capitalism

The point of departure for this position was already made explicit by the Gauche Communiste de France in 1945. The GCF considered that by 1914 the extra-capitalist markets which had supplied capitalism with its necessary field of expansion during its ascendant period were no longer able to play this role: "This historic period is that of the decadence of the capitalist system. What does this mean? The bourgeoisie, which before the first imperialist war lived and could only live through a growing extension of its production, arrived at a point in its history where it could no longer realise this extension (...) Today apart from unusable remote countries, from the derisory ruins of the non-capitalist world, insufficient for absorbing world production, it finds itself master of the world; there are no longer any extra-capitalist markets in front of it, able to serve as new markets for its system. Thus its apogee was also the point at which its decadence began".[12]

Economic history since 1914 is the history of the efforts of the capitalist class, in different countries and at different moments, to overcome this fundamental problem: how to continue to accumulate the surplus value produced by the capitalist economy in a world that has already been divided up by the great imperialist powers and whose market is incapable of absorbing the whole of this surplus value? And since the imperialist powers can no longer expand except at the expense of their rivals, as soon as one war ends they have to prepare for the next one. The war economy has become the permanent way of life of capitalist society; "War production does not aim to solve an economic problem. At its origin is the necessity for the capitalist state to defend itself against the dispossessed classes and to maintain their exploitation by force, and by force to ensure its economic positions and enlarge them at the expense of other imperialist states (...) war production has thus become the crux of industrial production and the principal economic field of society".[13]

The period of post-war reconstruction is a particular moment in this history.

Three economic characteristics of the world in 1945 need to be underlined here:

• firstly, there was the enormous economic and military preponderance of the USA, something more or less without precedent in the history of capitalism. The USA alone represented half of world production and held nearly 80% of world gold reserves. It was the only belligerent country whose productive apparatus came out of the war intact: its gross national product had doubled between 1940 and 1945. It had absorbed all the capital accumulated by the British Empire over years of colonial expansion, plus a good part of the French Empire's as well;
• secondly, there was a keen awareness among the ruling classes of the Western world that it was vital to raise working class living standards if they were to avoid social upheavals that could be used by the Stalinists and thus by the rival Russian bloc. The war economy thus integrated a new aspect, which our predecessors in the GCF were not really aware of at the time: the various social allocations (health, unemployment  benefit, pensions, etc) which the bourgeoisie - and above all the bourgeoisie of the Western bloc - put in place at the beginning of the reconstruction period in the 1940s;
• thirdly, state capitalism which, before the Second World War, had expressed a tendency towards autarchy on the part of the different national economies, was now locked into a structure of imperialist blocs which determined the economic relations between states (the Bretton Woods system for the American bloc, COMECON for the Russian bloc).

During the Reconstruction, state capitalism evolved in a qualitative manner: the part played by the state in the national economy became preponderant.[14] Even today, after 30 years of so-called ‘liberalism', state expenditure continues to represent between 30 and 60% of the GNP of the industrialised countries.

This new weight of the state represented a transformation of quantity into quality. The state was no longer just the ‘Executive Committee' of the ruling class; it was also the biggest employer and the biggest market. In the USA, for example, the Pentagon became the main employer in the country (between three and four million people, both civilian and military). As such, it plays a critical role in the economy and makes it possible to exploit existing markets to the hilt.

The setting up of the Bretton Woods framework also made it possible to establish credit systems that were more sophisticated and less fragile than in the past: consumer credit developed and the economic institutions set up by the American bloc (IMF, World Bank, GATT) made it possible to avoid financial and banking crises.

The enormous economic preponderance of the USA enabled the American bourgeoisie to spend without limit in order to ensure its military domination in the face of the Russian bloc: it sustained two bloody and costly wars (in Korea and Vietnam); Marshall-type plans and foreign investment financed the reconstruction of the ruined economies of Europe and Asia (notably in Korea and Japan). But this enormous effort - determined not by the ‘classic' functioning of capitalism but by the imperialist confrontation which characterises the decadence of the system - ended up by ruining the American economy. In 1958 the American balance of payments was already in deficit and in 1970 the USA only held 16% of world gold reserves. The Bretton Woods system was taking in water on all sides, and the world plunged into a crisis from which it has not emerged to this day.    

Extra-capitalist markets and debt

Far from developing the productive forces in a manner comparable to capitalism's ascendancy, the period of the post-war boom was characterised by an enormous waste of surplus value which was a sign that there are barriers to the development of the productive forces, expressing the decadence of the system.

The reconstruction that took place after the First World War opened a phase of prosperity which lasted only a few years, during which, as before the outbreak of the conflict, sales to extra-capitalist markets constituted the necessary outlet for capitalist accumulation. Even though the world had been divided up between the great industrial powers, it was still far from being dominated by capitalist relations of production. Nevertheless, the capacity of absorption of these extra-capitalist markets had become insufficient in relation to the mass of commodities produced by the industrialised countries, so that the recovery rapidly broke down on the reefs of overproduction with the crisis of 1929.

Very different was the period opened up by the reconstruction after the Second World War, surpassing the best economic indicators of the ascendant period. For more than two decades, a sustained growth was founded on the most important gains in productivity in the history of capitalism, due in particular to the perfecting of assembly lines (Fordism) and the automation of production, which were generalised as widely as possible.

But it is not enough to produce commodities; you also have to find outlets on the market for them. The sale of the commodities produced by capitalism serves to cover the renewing of worn-out means of production and of labour power (workers' wages). It thus ensures the simple reproduction of capital (i.e. without augmenting the means of production or consumption), but it must also finance unproductive expenses, which go from arms expenditure to the upkeep of the capitalists, and also include numerous other costs which we will come back to. Finally, if there is a positive balance, it can be devoted to the accumulation of capital.

Within the sales annually achieved by capitalism, the part which can be devoted to the accumulation of capital, and which thus participates in its real enrichment, is necessarily limited because it is the balance left over after all the obligatory expenses. Historically, it represents only a small percentage of the wealth produced annually[15] and corresponds essentially to the sales realised through trade with extra-capitalist markets (internal or external).[16] This is effectively the only way that allows capitalism to develop (apart from the pillage, whether legal or not, of the non-capitalist economies), i.e. not to find itself in a position where "capitalists are exchanging among themselves and consuming their own production", which, as Marx said "does not at all permit the valorisation of capital": "How could there otherwise be a shortage of demand for the very commodities which the mass of the people lack, and how would it be possible for this demand to be sought abroad, in foreign markets, to pay the labourers at home the average amount of necessities of life? This is possible only because in this specific capitalist interrelation the surplus-product assumes a form in which its owner cannot offer it for consumption, unless it first reconverts itself into capital for him. If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it."[17]

With capitalism's entry into decadence, the extra-capitalist markets tend to be more and more insufficient, but they did not simply disappear and their viability depended, as in ascendancy, on the progress of industry: the extra-capitalist markets are less and less able to absorb the growing quantities of commodities produced by capitalism. The result is overproduction, and along with it, the destruction of a part of production, unless capitalism is able to use credit as a palliative to this situation. But the more the extra-capitalist markets become rare, the less the palliative of credit can be repaid.

Thus the solvent outlet for growth in the post-war years was constituted by a combination of the exploitation of those extra-capitalist markets which still existed and the use of debt, given that the former were not able to absorb the whole of the supply. There is no other way (except once again the pillage of extra-capitalist wealth) for capitalism to expand, in this period as in any other. As a result, the post-war boom already made its own small contribution to the formation of the current mass of debt which will never be repaid and which constitute a real Sword of Damocles hanging over capitalism's head.

Another characteristic of the post-war years is the weight of unproductive expenses in the economy. They make up an important part of state expenses which, from the end of the 1940s on and in most of the industrialised countries, increased considerably. This was a consequence of the historical tendency towards state capitalism, notably the weight of militarism in the economy which stayed at a high level after the world war, and also of Keynesian policies aimed at artificially boosting demand. If a commodity or a service is unproductive, it means that its use value is no longer integrated into the process of production[18] by taking part in the simple or enlarged reproduction of capital. We also have to consider as unproductive those expenses that relate to demand within capitalism but not necessary for simple or enlarged reproduction. This was the case in particular with the wage increases at rates sometimes approaching those of the increases in productivity which some categories of workers ‘benefited' from in certain countries, through the application of the same Keynesian doctrines. The paying out of a wage that is more than what is strictly necessary for the reproduction of labour power is, just as with the miserable payments given to the unemployed or the state's unproductive expenses, essentially a waste of capital which cannot contribute to the valorisation of global capital. In other words, the capital involved in unproductive expenses, whatever they are, is sterilised.

The creation by Keynesianism of an internal market capable of providing an immediate solution to finding outlets for massive industrial production gave the illusion of a lasting return to the prosperity of the ascendant phase of capitalism. But since this market was totally disconnected from the needs for the valorisation of capital, its corollary was the sterilisation of a significant portion of capital. Maintaining it was achieved through a conjunction of highly exceptional factors which could not last: the sustained growth in the productivity of labour which, while financing unproductive expenditure, was sufficient to create a surplus for the continuation of accumulation; the existence of solvent markets - whether extra-capitalist or the result of debt - made it possible to realise this surplus.

A growth in the productivity of labour comparable to that of the Thirty Glorious Years has not been achieved since. However, even if that were to happen, the total exhaustion of extra-capitalist markets, the fact that we are reaching the limits of the possibility of re-launching the economy through new increases in world debt, which is already gigantic, show the impossibility of such a  period of prosperity repeating itself. 

Contrary to the analysis contained in The Decadence of Capitalism, the reconstruction market is not a factor that can explain post-war prosperity. At the end of the Second World War, the restoration of the productive apparatus did not constitute in itself an extra-capitalist market nor did it create new value. It was to a large extent the result of a transfer of wealth already accumulated in the USA towards the countries in need of reconstruction, since the financing of the operation was done through the Marshal Plan, made up essentially of gifts from the US Treasury. Nor can the reconstruction market be invoked to explain the short phase of prosperity that followed the First World War. This is why the schema ‘War-reconstruction/prosperity', although it corresponds empirically to the reality of capitalism in decadence, does not amount to an economic law in which there exists a reconstruction market capable of enriching capitalism.

Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism

The analysis we make of the driving forces behind the post-war boom originates in a series of objective observations, the principal ones being the following:

World production per inhabitant during the ascendant phase of capitalism[19] and industrial growth rates continued to increase, reaching their high point on the eve of the First World War. At this moment the markets which had supplied capitalism with its field of expansion reached saturation point relative to the needs of accumulation on an international scale. This was the beginning of the phase of decadence which has included two world wars, the greatest crisis of overproduction of all time (1929-33), and a massive brake on the growth of the productive forces (both industrial production and world production per inhabitant was almost halved between 1913 and 1945: declining respectively by 2.8% and 0.9% per year).

This in no way prevented capitalism from going through a formidable phase of growth following World War II: world production per inhabitant trebled, whereas industrial production more than doubled (respectively 2.9% and 5.2% a year). Not only were these rates much higher than they had been during the ascendant period, but real wages grew more than four times more rapidly (they multiplied by four whereas they had hardly doubled during a period twice as long, 1853 to 1913)!

How could such a ‘miracle' come about? 

• neither through a residual extra-capitalist demand since it was already insufficient in1914 and had further diminished after that;[20]
• nor through state debts or budget deficits since they fell very sharply during the post-war period;[21]
• nor through credit which only grew significantly after the return of the crisis;[22]
• nor through the war economy since it is unproductive: the most militarised countries perform the worst and vice versa;
• nor through the Marshall Plan whose impact was limited in extent and in duration;[23]
• nor through the destruction of war since the destruction that followed World War I had not engendered any prosperity;[24]
• nor through the growing weight of the state in the economy, since although it more than doubled in the period between the wars it didn't have this effect:[25] in 1960 its level (19%) was lower than in 1937 (21%) and also it includes a large number of unproductive expenses.

The ‘miracle' and its explanation lie elsewhere, all the more so because: (a) the economies were exhausted at the end of the war (b) the buying power of all the economic actors was at its lowest (c) the latter were all heavily in debt (d) the enormous power acquired by the US was based on an unproductive world economy and there were major difficulties in reconverting it and (e) the miracle nevertheless took place despite the sterilisation of growing masses of surplus value in unproductive expenditure!

In reality, this mystery is not really one if we combine Marx's analyses of the implications of the gains in productivity[26] and the contribution of the communist left on the development of state capitalism in decadence. This period was characterised by:

a) Gains in productivity never seen in the whole history of capitalism, gains which were founded on the generalisation and maintenance of assembly line production (Fordism).

b) Very considerable rises in real wages, full employment and the setting up of an indirect wage made up of various social allocations. Furthermore it was the countries where these raises were the highest that performed the best, and vice versa.

c) The taking in charge of whole portions of the economy by the state and a very high degree of intervention by the latter in capital/labour relations.[27]

d) All these Keynesian policies were to a certain extent organised at the international level through the OECD, the GATT, the IMF, the World Bank, etc.

e) Finally, unlike other periods, the post-war boom was characterised by growth centred on the developed economies (i.e. with relatively little exchange between the countries of the OECD and the rest of the world) and without any significant relocation of production to low-wage economies despite the very high rises in real wages and full employment. In effect, globalisation and relocations are phenomena which only appear from the 1980s and above all the 90s.

Thus, by guaranteeing in a coercive and proportional manner the three part repartition of the gains in productivity between profits, taxes and wages, Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism was able to ensure the completion of the cycle of accumulation between a geared-down supply of goods and services at falling costs (Fordism) and a growing solvent demand, since it was indexed on these same gains in productivity (Keynesianism) The markets thus being guaranteed, the return of the crisis appeared in a new fall in the rate of profit which, following the exhaustion of the Fordist gains in productivity, fell by half between the end of the 1960s and 1982.[28] This drastic drop in the profitability of capital led to a dismantling of the post war policies in favour of a deregulated state capitalism at the beginning of the 1980s. While this turn-around allowed for a spectacular re-establishment of the rate of profit, as a result of the compression of wages, the resulting fall in solvent demand ensured that the rate of accumulation and of growth were at a low water mark.[29] From then on, in a hitherto structural weakness in productivity gains, capitalism has been forced to put pressure on wages and conditions of work in order to guarantee a rise in profits, but in so doing, it further reduced its solvent markets. These are at the root of:

a) endemic overcapacity and overproduction,

b) the increasingly frenetic use of debt to palliate the reduced demand,

c) relocations in the search for cheaper labour power,

d) globalisation to export to the maximum,

e) constant financial instability resulting from the speculative investment of capital which no longer has outlets for expansion.

Today the rate of growth has fallen to its level between the wars, and a re-make of the post-war years is now impossible. Capitalism is doomed to sink into growing barbarism.

Not being able to present them as such, the roots and implications of this analysis will be developed later, since they require a review of certain of our analyses in order to arrive at a wider and more coherent understanding of the functioning and limits of the capitalist mode of production.[30]

A debate open to the internationalist movement

Like our predecessors in Bilan or the Gauche Communiste de France, we do not claim to be the holders of "an absolute and eternal truth"[31] and are well aware that the debates that arise inside our organisation can only benefit from critical and constructive contributions from outside it. This is the reason that all contributions addressed to us are welcome and will be taken into account in our collective reflection.

ICC

 

 

---

 

[1] This period is often referred to in France as "Les Trente Glorieuses" (the "30 Glorious Years"); the expression was coined (and was the title of a book) by Jean Fourastié, an economist who worked under Jean Monnet on the French government's planning commission set up in 1945.

[2] Between 1950 and 1973, world GNP per inhabitant increased at an annual rate of around 3%, whereas between 1870 and 1913 the increase was 1.3% (Angus Maddison, L'économie mondiale, OECD, 201, p.284)

[3] Published in 1981 as a collection of articles from our press.

[4] Third Congress of the ICC, International Review n°18, 1979

[5] International Review n°52

[6] Despite the fact that its militants varied in their theoretical explanation of the situation which had led to the outbreak of World War I, the Communist International had no difficulty in recognising both that World War I had created an entirely new situation, and that this had profound political implications for the class struggle. See the article on ‘The theory of decadence [12]' in International Review n°123.

[7] Notably through the publication in the International Review of the series ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism' in particular the article in n°56, as well as the presentation to the resolution on the international situation from the 8th Congress of the ICC with regard to the weight of debt (published in International Review n°59, 1989).

[8] This minority position has existed for a long time inside our organisation - comrades who defend it now already did so when they joined the ICC - and it has not prevented those who hold it from participating in all our activity, both intervention and theoretical-political elaboration. This vindicates the ICC's decision not to make the analysis of the economic crisis (saturation of markets or the falling rate of profit) a condition for joining the organisation.

[9] See in particular the article ‘Reply to the CWO on war in the phase of capitalist decadence' published in International Review n°127 and 128. Nevertheless, as we will see later, in the present debate there exists a certain convergence between this position and the one termed ‘Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism' which is presented below. These two positions recognise the existence of the internal market within capitalist relations of production as a factor in the prosperity of the period of the ‘Thirty Glorious Years' and analyse the end of this period as being the product of the contradiction which engenders the fall in the rate of profit.

[10] The idea of a more thorough exploitation of extra-capitalist markets was already presented in The Decadence of Capitalism. It is taken up and underlined in the 6th article in the series ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism' in International Review n°56, where the factor of debt is also put forward; the notion of a ‘reconstruction market' on the other hand is not considered in these articles.

[11] There have been different nuances within each of the three positions which we cannot present in this article for lack of space. As the debate evolves they may appear in future contributions.

[12] Internationalisme n°1, January 1945, ‘Theses on the international situation'.

[13] Internationalisme, ‘Report on the international situation', July 1945.

[14] For the US alone, the expenses of the Federal state, which represented only 3% of GNP in 1930, went up to about 20% of GNP during the 50s and 60s.

[15] As an example, during the period 1870-1913, sales to extra-capitalist markets represented an average annual percentage of 2.3% of world production (a figure calculated in relation to the evolution of global production between these two dates. Source: OECD [13]). Given that this is an average figure, it is obviously less than the reality of the years which saw the strongest growth, as was the case before the First World War.

[16] On this point, it's not so important whether the final destination of the sales is productive or not, as in the case of arms.

[17] Capital Vol III, 15, ‘Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law, Excess Capital and Excess Population'

[18] To illustrate this fact, it is enough to consider the difference in final use between, on the hand, a weapon, an advert, a course in trade union training and, on the other hand, a tool, food, school or university courses, medical care, etc.

[19] From 0.53% a year between 1820 and 1870 to 1.3% between 1870 and 1913 (Angus Maddison, L'économie mondiale, OECD 284).

Annual growth rate of world industrial production
1786-1820	2,5 %
1820-1840	2,9 %
1840-1870	3,3 %
1870-1894	3,3 %
1894-1913	4,7 %
W.W. Rostow, The World Economy p662

 

 

[20] Very important in the birth of capitalism, the internal buying power of these outlets in the developed countries only represented between 5 and 20% in 1914, and had become marginal by 1945: between 2% and 12% (Peter Flora, State, Economy and Society in Western Europe 1815-1975, A Data handbook, Vol II, Campus, 1987) As for access to the third world, it was amputated by two thirds by the withdrawal from the world market of China, the eastern bloc, India and various other underdeveloped countries. As for trade with the remaining third, it fell by half between 1952 and 1972 (P Bairoch, Le Tiers-Monde dans l'impasse; 391-392)!

[21] The figures are published in International Review n°114.

[22] The figures are published in International Review n°121.

[23] The Marshall Plan had a very weak impact on the American economy: "After the Second World War...the percentage of American exports in relation to the whole of production fell by a no means insignificant degree. The Marshall Plan in itself did not bring about any considerable changes" (Fritz Sternberg, Le conflit du siècle  p.577). The author concluded that it was the internal market that was decisive in the recovery.

[24] The facts and the argument are developed in our article in International Review n°128. We will return to this since, in conformity with Marx, the devalorisation and destruction of capital does make it possible to regenerate the cycle of accumulation and to open new markets. However, a detailed study has led us to conclude that this factor was relatively weak in impact, limited in time and to Europe and Japan.

[25] The total part played by public expenditure in the GNP of the OECD countries went from 9% to 21% between 1913 and 1937 (cf International Review n°114).

[26] In effect, productivity is simply another expression of the law of value - since it represents the inverse of labour time - and it is at the basis of the extraction of relative surplus value so characteristic of this period.

[27] The part played by public expenses in the countries of the OECD more than doubled between 1960 and 1980: from 19% to 45% (International Review n°114).

[28] Graphs in International Review n°115, 121 and 128

[29] Graphs and figures in International Review n°121 as well as in our analysis of the growth in East Asia [14].

[30] The reader can nonetheless find a number of factual elements, as well as certain theoretical developments in our various articles in International Review n°114, 115, 121, 127, 128, and in our analysis of the growth of east Asia, all available on the website.

[31] "No group is in exclusive possession of an absolute and eternal truth" as the GCF put it. See our article ‘Sixty years ago: a conference of internationalist revolutionaries [15]' in International Review n°132.

In January 1969, at the inauguration of his first Presidency of the United States, Richard Nixon declared: “We have learnt finally to manage a modern economy in a way to assure its continued growth”. With hindsight one can see to what degree such optimism has been cruelly refuted by reality: from the beginning of his second term, hardly four years later, the United States would have their worst recession since the Second World War, which would be followed by other increasingly serious recessions. But it must be said that in the domain of unfounded optimism, Nixon had been preceded by another head of state far more experienced that him: General de Gaulle, President of the French republic since 1958 and leader of the ‘Free French’ during the Second World War. The great man in his wishes to the nation had declared: “l greet the year 1968 with serenity”. One didn’t have to wait four years for this optimism to be swept away; four months sufficed for the serenity of the General to give way to the greatest disarray. It is true that de Gaulle had to face not only a particularly violent and massive student revolt but also and above all, the biggest strike in the history of the international working class movement. Needless to say that 1968 was not a ‘serene’ year for France: it was even, and remains to this day the stormiest since the Second World War. But it was not only France which saw important shocks during this year, far from it. Two authors that one cannot suspect of ‘franco-centrism’ the Briton David Caute and the American Mark Kurlansky are clear on this subject: “1968 was the most turbulent year since the end of the Second World War. The series of uprisings affected America and Western Europe, and included Czechoslovakia; it put the post-war world order in question”[1]

“No year has yet resembled 1968 and there will probably never be another like it. In a time when nations and cultures were still separated and very distinct (…) a spirit of rebellion caught fire spontaneously in the four corners of the globe. There had been other years of revolution: 1848, for example, but contrary to 1968, the events were restricted to Europe...”[2]

Forty years after this ‘warm year’, when certain countries have devoted massive editorial and televisual attention to this subject, it is up to revolutionaries to return to the principal events of this year, not to make a detailed or exhaustive account[3] but to draw out the real significance of them. In particular it is up to them to judge a very common idea today that also appears on page 4 of the jacket of Kurlansky’s book: “Whether historians or politicos, specialists in human sciences agree that there was a world before and a world after 1968.”

Let us say immediately that we entirely share this judgment but certainly not for the same reasons that are generally invoked: ‘sexual liberation’, ‘women’s liberation’, rejection of the ‘authoritarian’ family, the ‘democratisation’ of certain institutions (like the University), new artistic forms, etc. In this sense, this article proposes to show what for the ICC really changed in the year 1968.

Besides a series of serious enough facts (such as for example the Tet offensive of the Vietcong in February which, if it was finally repulsed by the American army, showed that the latter would never win the Vietnam war or even the intervention of Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia in August) what marked 1968 as Caute and Kurlansky underline, is this ‘spirit of rebellion that caught fire spontaneously in the four corners of the globe’. And in this questioning of the dominant order, it is important to distinguish two components of unequal scale and also of unequal importance. On the one hand, the student revolt hit nearly all the countries of the Western Bloc and even affected in a certain way the countries of the Eastern Bloc. On the other hand, the massive struggle of the working class which in this year, fundamentally only touched a single country, France.

In this first article, we are going to only tackle the first of these components not because they are the most important, far from it, but because it preceded, for the most part, the second which revealed a historic significance going far beyond that of the student revolts.

The student movement in the world…

It was in the biggest world power, the United States, that from 1964 witnessed the most massive and significant movements of this period. More precisely, it was in Berkeley University, North California that student protest took on a massive character for the first time. The demands that initially mobilised the students came from the ‘free speech movement’ in favour of free political expression (notably against the Vietnam War and racial segregation) in the surrounds of the university. Faced with the recruiters of the American army who were doing a good business, the student radicals wanted to be able to make propaganda against the war in Vietnam and also against racial segregation (it was a year after the ‘civil rights march’ of 28th August 1963 to Washington where Martin Luther King had made his famous speech ‘I have a dream’). At first the bourgeoisie reacted with extreme repression, notably by sending police against the ‘sit-in’, a peaceful occupation of the premises, making 800 arrests. Finally, at the beginning of 1965, the university authorities authorised political activities in the university which went on to become one of the principal centres of student protest in the United States. At the same time, it was with the slogan of “cleaning up the disorder at Berkeley” that Ronald Reagan was, against all expectations, elected Governor of California at the end of 1965. The movement developed massively and radicalised in the years following, around protest about racial segregation, for the defence of women’s rights and above all against the war in Vietnam. At the same time as young Americans, above all students, fled abroad in numbers in order to avoid being sent to Vietnam, the majority of universities in the country were affected by anti-war movements. At the same time, there were also outbursts in the black ghettos of the major towns (the proportion of young blacks among soldiers being sent to Vietnam was much higher than the national average). These protest movements were often repressed with ferocity; thus, at the end of 1967, 952 students were sentenced to heavy prison terms for refusing to leave for the front and 8th February 1968, three students were killed in South Carolina during a demonstration for civil rights.

The movements achieved their greatest scale in 1968. In March the black students of the Howard University in Washington occupied the premises for 4 days.

From April 23 to April 30, 1968, Columbia University in New York was occupied in protest against the contribution of its departments to the activities of the Pentagon and in solidarity with the inhabitants of the neighbouring black ghetto of Harlem. One of the elements which radicalised the discontent was also the assassination of Martin Luther King, the 4th April, which were followed by numerous and violent riots in the black ghettoes of the country. The occupation of Columbia was one of the peaks of student protest in the United States which set off new confrontations. In May, 12 universities went on strike to protest against racism and the war in Vietnam. California flared up during the summer with violent confrontations between students and the police at the University of Berkeley for two nights, which led the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to a state of emergency and curfew. This new wave of confrontations would see its violent moments between the 22 and 30 August in Chicago, with real riots at the Democratic Party Convention.

The revolts of American students spread during the same period to numerous other countries. On the American continent itself it was Brazil and Mexico where the students were the most mobilised.

In Brazil, anti-government and anti-American demonstrations punctuated the year 1967. 28th March 1968 the police intervened in a student meeting and killed one of them, Luis Edson, and several were seriously injured, one dying some days later. The funeral of Luis Edson, the 29th March, led to an important demonstration. From the University of Rio de Janeiro, which went on unlimited strike, the movement spread to the university of Sao-Paulo, where barricades were erected. New demonstrations took place in the whole country on 30th and 31st March. On 4th April, 600 people were arrested in Rio. Despite the series of repressions and arrests the demonstrations were almost daily until October.

Some months after Mexico was affected. At the end of July the student revolt broke out in Mexico and the police replied with tanks. The police chief of the ‘federal district’ of Mexico justified the repression in the following way: it was a question of blocking ‘a subversive movement’ which ‘tends to create an ambiance of hostility toward our government and our country on the eve of the 19th Olympic Games’. The repression continued and intensified. 18th September the city university was occupied by the police. 21st September 736 people were arrested during new confrontations in the capital. 30th September the University of Veracruz was occupied. 2nd October, finally, the government (using paramilitary forces without uniforms) fired on a demonstration of 10000 students on the Place of Three-Cultures in Mexico. This event remembered as the ‘massacre of Tlatelolco’ ended up in at least 200 deaths, 500 seriously wounded and 2000 arrests. President Diaz Ordaz thus saw to it that the Olympic Games could take place in ‘calm’ from 12th October. However, after the respite of the Games, the students took up the movement again for several months.

The American continent was not alone in being touched by this wave of student revolts. In fact all continents were affected.

In Asia, Japan was the stage of particularly spectacular movements. Violent demonstrations against the United States and the war in Vietnam led mainly by the Zengakuren (National Union of Autonomous Committees of Japanese Students) took place from 1963 and continued throughout the 60s. At the end of spring 1968 the student protest covered the schools and universities. A slogan was launched ‘turn the Kanda (the university quarter of Tokyo) into the Latin Quarter’. In October the movement, reinforced by the workers, reached its peak. On 9th October, in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, violent clashes between police and students ended in 80 wounded and 188 arrests. The anti-riot law was actively restored and 800,000 people took to the streets to protest this decision. In reaction to the intervention of the police in the University of Tokyo to end its occupation, 6000 students went on strike on 25th October. The University of Tokyo, the last bastion still in the hands of the movement, fell in mid-January 1969.

In Africa, two countries, Senegal and Tunisia were in the forefront.

In Senegal, the students denounced the right wing orientation of government and the neo-colonial influence of France and demanded the restructuring of the University. 29th May 1968 the general strike of students and workers was severely repressed by Léopold Sédar Senghor, member of the ‘Socialist International’ with the help of the army. The repression caused one death and 20 wounded at the University of Dakar. On the 12th June a demonstration of students and pupils in the suburbs of Dakar claimed another victim.

In Tunisia, the movement began in 1967. On the 5th June in Tunis during a demonstration against the United States and Great Britain, accused of supporting Israel against the Arab countries, American Cultural Centre was trashed and the British Embassy was attacked. A student Mohamed Ben Jennet was arrested and condemned to 20 years in prison. On the 17th November the students demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. From the 15th to the 19th March they went on strike and demonstrated to obtain the release of Ben Jennet. The movement was repressed by a series of arrests.

..in Europe…

But it was in Europe that the student movement saw the most important and spectacular developments.

In Great Britain things kicked off in October 1966 in the very respectable ‘London School of Economics’ (LSE) one of the Meccas of bourgeois economic thought, where the students protested against the new director because of his links with the racist regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa. The LSE continued to be affected by protests, for example in March 1967 there was a five-day sit-in against disciplinary action that led to an experimental ‘free university’ copying American examples. In December 1967 there were sit-ins at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Holborn College of Law and Commerce, both demanding student representations in the institution’s decision-making process. In May and June 1968 there were occupations at Essex, Hornsey College of Art, Hull, Bristol and Keele leading to further protests in Croydon, Birmingham, Liverpool, Guildford, and the Royal College of Arts. The most spectacular demonstrations (which involved a whole range of different people and different causes) were a series around the Vietnam War: in March and October 67, in March 68 and in the most massive and celebrated demonstration in October 1968, all of which involved violent clashes with the police with hundreds of injuries and arrests outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, London.

In Belgium, from the month of April 1968, the students took to the streets several times to proclaim their opposition to the war in Vietnam and demanded that the functioning of the university system be recast. On the 22nd May they occupied the Free University of Brussels, declaring it ‘open to the population’. They vacated the building at the end of June, after the decision of the University Council to take account of some of their demands.

In Italy from 1967 the students increased their occupations of universities and clashes with the police became regular. The University of Rome was occupied in February 1968. The police evacuated the building and the students repaired to the faculty of architecture in the Villa Borghese. Violent confrontations, known as the ‘Battle of Valle Giulia’, occurred with the forces of order, who charged the students. At the same time there were spontaneous movements of anger and revolt in the industries where unionism was weak (Marzotto factory in Venetia), which led the unions to decree a day of general strike in industry which was massively followed. Finally the elections of May brought an end to this movement which had begun to decline after the spring.

Franco’s Spain saw a wave of workers strikes and university occupations from 1966. The movement reached its peak in 1967 and continued throughout 1968. Students and workers showed their solidarity, as on the 27 January 1967 when 100,000 workers demonstrated in reaction to the brutal repression of a day of demonstration in Madrid, which pushed the students, holed up in the economic sciences building to fight the police for 6 hours. The authorities repressed the protestors with every means: the press was controlled; the militants of the movements and clandestine unions were arrested. On the 28th January 1968 the government installed a ‘university police’ in each university. That didn’t prevent the student agitation from resurging against the Francoist regime and also against the war in Vietnam which constrained the authorities to shut ‘sine die’ the University of Madrid in March.

Of all the countries of Europe it was in Germany that the student movement was the most powerful.

An ‘extra-parliamentary’ opposition was formed here at the end of 1966, notably in reaction to the participation of Social Democracy in government, basing itself in particular on the more and more numerous student assemblies held in the universities and animated by discussions on the means and goals of the protest. Following the example of the United States numerous university discussion groups emerged; a ‘critical university’ was formed as a pole of opposition to the ‘established’ bourgeoisie universities. An old tradition of debate of discussions in general public assemblies was revived. Even if many students were attracted by spectacular actions, the interest for theory, for the history of the workers movement resurfaced and with this interest the courage to envisage the overthrow of capitalism. Many elements expressed the hope for the emergence of a new society. From this moment, on the world level, the movement of protest in Germany was considered as the most active in the theoretical discussions, the most profound in these discussions and the most political.

Alongside this reflection numerous demonstrations took place. The war in Vietnam was obviously the main motive for the latter in a country where the government gave its full support to American military power but also which had been particularly marked by the Second World War. On the 17th and 18th February an international congress against the Vietnam war was held in Berlin followed by a demonstration of some 12000 people. But these demonstrations, starting in 1965 also denounced the development of the police character of the state, particularly through the plans for exceptional laws for the state to impose martial law in the country and intensify repression. The SPD, which had joined the CDU in 1966 in a ‘grand coalition’ government, remained faithful to its policy of 1918-19 when it led the bloody crushing of the German proletariat. On the 2nd June 1967 a demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin was repressed with the greatest brutality by the ‘democratic’ German state which maintained the best relations in the world with this bloody dictator. A student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead in the back by a uniformed policeman (who would be acquitted). After this assassination repulsive campaigns of slander against the protest movements intensified, particularly against their leaders. The mass circulation tabloid Bild-Zeitung demanded ‘Stop the terror of the young reds now’. During a pro-American demonstration organised by the Berlin Senate on 21st February the participants proclaimed ‘Enemy of the people number one – Rudi Dutschke’ the main spokesman of the protest movement. A passer by, resembling ‘Rudi the Red’ was grabbed by the demonstrators who threatened to kill him. A week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, this campaign of hate reached its peak with the attempted assassination of Dutschke on the 11th April by an excitable youth, Josef Bachmann, notoriously influenced by the hysterical campaigns unleashed by the press of Axel Springer, owner of Bild-Zeitung.[4] Riots followed that took this sinister individual and his press group as their main target. For several weeks before attention was turned toward France, the student movement in Germany strengthened its role as a reference point for the movements which touched most of the countries of Europe.

…and in France

The major episode of the student revolt in France began on the 22 March 1968 at the University of Nanterre, in western suburb of Paris. In itself, what happened that day was nothing exceptional: protesting against the arrest of a student of the extreme left from Nanterre suspected of being involved in an attack against the American Express offices in Paris during violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War, 300 of his comrades held a meeting in an amphitheatre and 142 of them decided to occupy a room of the University Council in the administrative building overnight. It wasn’t the first time that the students of Nanterre had demonstrated their discontent. Thus, just a year before at this university, we’d already seen a fight between students and police over the free movement of students in the university residence - allowed to the girls, but forbidden to the boys. On March 16 1967, an association of 500 residents, the ARCUN, decreed the abolition of the domestic rule that, amongst other things, treated the students, even the older ones (older than 21 at this time), as minors. Following which, on March 21 1967, on the demand of the administration, the police had surrounded the girls’ residence with the plan of arresting 150 boys who were found there and who were barricaded in on the top floor of the building. But, the following morning, the police themselves had been encircled by several thousand students and had finally received the order to leave without touching the student barricades. But these incidents, as well as other demonstrations of student anger, notably against the ‘Fouchet Plan’ for university reform in the autumn of 1967, were short-lived. March 22 1968 was something else entirely. A few weeks later, a succession of events led not only to the strongest student mobilisation since the war, but above all the biggest strike in the history of the international workers’ movement: more than 9 million workers on strike for almost a month.

For communists, contrary to the majority of speeches that were already being dished out, it wasn’t the student agitation, as massive and ‘radical’ as it was, which constituted the major fact of the ‘events of 68’ in France. It was rather the workers’ strike which, by far, occupied this place and which took on a considerable historical significance. We are going to treat this question in the columns of our press in other articles. Here, we want to limit ourselves to examining the students’ struggles of this time and to drawing out their significance.

From March 22 to May 13 1968

Before leaving, the 142 occupants of the Council room decided, so as to maintain and develop the agitation, to constitute the March 22 Movement (M22). It was an informal movement, composed at the beginning of Trotskyists of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire (LCR) and some anarchists (including Daniel Cohn-Bendit), joined at the end of April by the Maoists of the Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Leniniste (UJCML), and which brought together over some weeks, more than 1,200 participants. The walls of the university were covered with posters and graffiti: “Professors, you are old and so is your culture”, “Let us live”, “Take your dreams for reality”. The M22 announced a day of ‘university criticism’ for March 29, following similar action from German students. The dean decided to close the university until April 1 but the agitation restarted when the university reopened. In front of 1000 students, Cohn-Bendit declared: “We refuse to be the future cadres of capitalist exploitation”. The majority of teachers reacted in a conservative fashion: on April 22, 18 of them, including those of the “left”, demanded “measures and means so that the agitators can be unmasked and sanctioned”. The dean adopted a whole series of repressive measures, notably giving free rein to the police in the passages and paths of the campus, while the press was unleashed against the “madness”, the “small groups” and the “anarchists”. The French Communist Party fell into line: April 26, Pierre Juqin, a member of the Central Committee, held a meeting in Nanterre: “The agitators are preventing the sons of workers from passing their exams”. He couldn’t finish and had to flee. In Humanity of March 3, Georges Marchais, number 2 in the Communist Party, said in his turn: “These false revolutionaries must be energetically unmasked because objectively they serve the interests of Gaullist power and the great capitalist monopolies”.

On the campus at Nanterre, scuffles became more and more frequent between the students of the extreme-left and fascist groups of the Occident group, coming from Paris to ‘beat up the Bolshies’. Faced with this situation the dean decided on May 2 to again close the university, which was ringed by the police. The students of Nanterre decided that the following day they would hold a meeting in the courtyard of the Sorbonne in order to protest against the closure of their university and the disciplinary proceedings against 8 members of the M22, including Cohn-Bendit.

There were only 300 at the meeting: the majority of students were actively preparing for their end of year exams. However, the government, which wanted to finish with the agitation, decided to strike a blow and occupy the Latin Quarter and encircle the Sorbonne with police. The police entered the university, something which hadn’t happened for centuries. The students, who had fallen back into the Sorbonne, obtained assurance that they would be able to leave without hindrance but, while the girls were able to go freely, the boys were systematically led into the prison vans, from which they escaped. Rapidly, hundreds of students assembled on the square of the Sorbonne and insulted the police. Tear gas began to rain down: the area was taken but the students, more and more numerous now, began to harass the groups of police and their wagons. The confrontations continued for four hours during the evening: 72 police were wounded and 400 demonstrators arrested. The following days, police completely surrounded the approaches to the Sorbonne while four students were sent to prison. This policy of firmness, far from stopping the agitation, gave it a massive character. From Monday May 6, confrontations with the forces of the police deployed around the Sorbonne alternated with more and more sustained demonstrations called for by the M22, the UNEF and the SNESUP (union of head teachers) and regrouped up to 45,000 participants to the cries of “Sorbonne to the students”, “cops out of the Latin Quarter” and above all “free our comrades”. The students were joined by a growing number of schoolchildren, teachers, workers and unemployed. The processions quickly crossed over the Seine and covered the Champs-Elysees, close to the Presidential Palace. The Internationale reverberated under the Arc de Triomphe where one usually heard La Marseillaise or the Last Post. The demonstrators also prevailed in some towns of the provinces. The government wanted to give a token of good will by reopening the university of Nanterre on May 10. That evening, tens of thousands of demonstrators were to be found in the Latin Quarter in front of the police surrounding the Sorbonne. At 2100 hours, some demonstrators began to build barricades (there were about sixty of them). At midnight, a delegation of 3 teachers and 3 students (including Cohn-Bendit) was received by the rector of the Academie de Paris but, while agreeing to reopen the Sorbonne, he could make no promises about freeing the students arrested on May 3. At two in the morning, the CRS led the assault on the barricades after spraying copious amounts of tear gas. The confrontations were extremely violent provoking hundreds of wounded on both sides. More than 500 demonstrators were arrested. In the Latin Quarter, numerous inhabitants demonstrated their sympathies by welcoming demonstrators into their homes and throwing water onto the street in order to protect them from the tear gas and offensive grenades. All these events, and notably the witnesses to the brutality of the forces of repression, were being followed on the radio, minute by minute, by hundreds of thousands of people. At six in the morning, ‘order reigned’ in a Latin Quarter that seemed to have been swept by a tornado.

On Saturday May 11, indignation was immense in Paris and the whole of France. Processions formed spontaneously throughout the country, regrouping not only students but also hundreds of thousands of demonstrators of all origins, notably many young workers or parents of students. Everywhere universities were occupied; in the streets and squares, people discussed and condemned the attitude of the forces of repression.

Faced with this situation, the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, announced in the evening that from Monday May 13 the police would be withdrawn from the Latin Quarter, that the Sorbonne would be reopened and the imprisoned students would be freed.

The same day, all the centres of the trade unions, including the CGT (which up until then had only denounced the ‘leftist’ students), and even some police unions, called for a strike and demonstrations for May 13, so as to protest against the repression and against the policy of the government.

On May 13, every town in the country saw the most important demonstrations since World War II. The working class was massively present at the side of the students. One of the most used slogans was: “Ten years, that’s enough!” with reference to the date of May 13 1958 which had seen the return of De Gaulle to power. At the end of the demonstrations, practically all the universities were occupied, not only by the students but also by many young workers. Everywhere, anyone could speak. Discussions were not limited to questions about universities and repression. They began to confront all the social problems: conditions of work, exploitation, the future of society.

On May 14 discussions continued in many firms. After the immense demonstrations the day before, with the enthusiasm and feelings of strength that emanated from them, it was difficult to carry on as if nothing had happened. In Nantes, the workers of Sud-Aviation, carried along by the youngest workers, a spontaneous strike broke out and they decided to occupy the factory. The working class began to take up the reins.

The significance of the student revolts in the 60s

What characterised all these movements, above all, was obviously the rejection of the war in Vietnam. But while the Stalinist parties, allied to the regimes of Hanoi and Moscow should logically have been found at their head, at least in the countries where they had a significant influence, as was the case in the anti-war movements during the Korean War at the beginning of the 1950s, this wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary these parties had practically no influence and were often in complete opposition to these movements.[5] It was one of the characteristics of the student movements at the end of the 1960s which revealed their profound significance.

It is this significance that we are going to try and draw out now. And to do it, it is clearly necessary to recall what were the principal themes of the student mobilisation of this period.

The themes of the student revolts in the 60s in the United States

If the opposition to the war undertaken by the United States in Vietnam was the most widespread and activating theme in all the western countries, it’s certainly not by chance, evidently, that it’s first of all in the United States that student revolt developed. American youth was confronted in a direct and immediate fashion by the question of war since it was it that was sent abroad to defend the ‘free world’. Tens of thousands of young Americans paid with their lives for the policies of their government, hundreds of thousands amongst them returned from Vietnam with wounds and handicaps, millions were marked for life because of the horror that they lived through. Outside of the horror that they found themselves in, and which is characteristic of all warfare, many among them were confronted with the question: what are we doing in Vietnam? Official speeches said that they were there to defend ‘democracy’, the ‘free world’ and ‘civilisation’. But the reality that they lived through contradicted these speeches in a flagrant fashion: the regime that they were charged with protecting, the one in Saigon, had nothing either ‘democratic’ nor civilised about it: it was a dictatorial and particularly corrupt military regime. On the ground, American soldiers had difficulty understanding that they were defending ‘civilisation’ when they were asked to act as barbarians, terrorising and massacring poor, unarmed peasants, women, children and the old included. But it wasn’t just the soldiers there who felt revolted by the horrors of the war; it was also the case for a growing part of American youth. Not only were young men in fear of having to go to war and young women afraid of losing their companions; everyone became more and more informed by the returning ‘veterans’ or simply through the television channels of the barbarity that the war represented.[6] The crying contradiction between government speeches on the ‘defence of democracy’ and its actions in Vietnam fed a revolt against the authorities and the traditional values of the American bourgeoisie.[7]This revolt fed, in the first instance, the hippy movement, a pacifist and non-violent movement which raised the slogans ‘Flower Power’ and ‘Make Love Not War’. It’s probably not by chance if the first student movement of any scale took place at Berkeley University, in the suburbs of San Francisco which was the hippy Mecca. The themes, and above all the means, of this mobilisation still had some points in common with this movement: use of the non-violent ‘sit-in’ in order to claim ‘Free Speech’ for political propaganda within the University, notably for ‘civil rights’ for blacks and to denounce the presence of the army on the campus and its efforts to enlist students. However, as in many other countries subsequently, and notably in France, 1968, the repression that was unleashed at Berkeley (800 arrests) constituted an important factor in the ‘radicalisation’ of the movement. From 1967, with the foundation of the Youth International Party by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who moved away from non-violence, the movement of revolt was given a ‘revolutionary’ perspective against capitalism. The new ‘heroes’ of the movement were no longer Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, but figures such as Che Guevara (who Rubin had met in 1964 in Havana). The ideology of this movement was more confused. It bore anarchist ingredients (the cult of liberty, notably sexual liberty, as well as the copious consumption of drugs) but also stalinist ingredients (Cuba and Albania were considered as exemplary). The means of action borrowed greatly from the anarchists, such as derision and provocation. Thus one of the first actions of the Hoffman-Rubin axis was to throw phoney banknotes around in the New York stock exchange, provoking a rush to grab them. Similarly, at the Democratic Convention of summer 68, it presented a pig, Pigasus, as candidate for President of the United States[8] at the same time as preparing for a violent confrontation with the police.

To sum up the principal characteristics of the movement of revolt that agitated the United States during the 1960s, you could say that it presented itself as a protest against the war in Vietnam, against racial discrimination, against inequality between the sexes and against the traditional values of America.

The majority of its protagonists showed themselves to be the rebellious children of the bourgeoisie; this movement had no proletarian class character. It wasn’t by chance that one of its ‘theoreticians’, the professor of philosophy Herbert Marcuse, considered that the working class had been ‘integrated’ and that the forces of revolution against capitalism were to be found among other sectors such as the black victims of discrimination, the peasants of the Third World or rebellious intellectuals.

In the majority of other western countries, the movements that agitated the student world during the 60s showed a strong resemblance to those of the United States: rejection of American intervention in Vietnam, revolt against authority in general and in the universities in particular, against traditional morals, notably sexual morals. That is one of the reasons why the Stalinist parties, symbols of authoritarianism, had no echo within these revolts whereas they were party to the denunciation of American intervention in Vietnam against the forces armed by the Soviet bloc and called themselves ‘anti-capitalist’. It is true that the image of the USSR had been greatly tarnished by the repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the portrait of Brezhnev wasn’t a ‘pin-up’. The rebels of the 1960s preferred to display in their rooms posters of Ho Chi Minh (another old apparatchik, but more presentable and ‘heroic’) and more still the romantic visage of Che Guevara (another Stalinist party member, but more ‘exotic’) or Angela Davis (also a member of the US Stalinist party, but who had the double advantage of being both black and a woman, a ‘good looker’ like Che Guevara).

This form, both anti-Vietnam War and ‘libertarian’, was especially prevalent in Germany. The main spokesman of the movement, Rudi Dutschke, came from the GDR, under Soviet tutelage where, as a very young person, he was opposed to the repression of the Hungarian Uprising. His ideological references were the ‘Young Marx’ of the Frankfurt School (of which Marcuse was a part), and also the Situationist International (which included the group Subversive Aktion, which the SI’s Berlin section was based on in 1962).[9]

In fact in the course of discussions which developed after 1965 in the German universities, the search for a ‘real anti-authoritarian marxism’ had a great success, which explains the numerous texts of the councilist movement that were republished at this time.

Class nature of the 60s student movements

The French student slogans (see box), like the majority of others put forward in other countries, clearly indicate that the student movement of the 60s had no proletarian class nature, even if in several places (as in Italy and evidently in France) there was a will to establish a bridge with the struggles of the working class. This approach also manifested a certain condescension towards the workers, mixed with a fascination with these mythic beings, the blue collar proletarians, heroes of readers who had half digested some of the classics of marxism.

Fundamentally, the student movement of the 1960s was of a petty-bourgeois nature, one of its clearest aspects being the will to ‘change life immediately’.

The ‘revolutionary’ radicalism of the avant-garde of this movement, including the cult of violence promoted by certain of its sectors, was also another illustration of its petty-bourgeois nature.[10] In fact, the ‘revolutionary’ preoccupations of the students of 1968 were incontestably sincere but were strongly marked by Third Worldism (Guevarism and Maoism), or else anti-fascism. It had a romantic vision of the revolution without the least idea of the real development of the movement of the working class that would lead it. In France, for the students who believed themselves ‘revolutionaries’, the movement of May 68 was already The Revolution, and the barricades that went up day after day were presented as the inheritors of those of 1848 and of the Commune of 1871.

One of the components of the student movement of the 60s was the ‘conflict between generations’, the very important cleavage between the new generation and those of its parents, which was the subject of all kinds of criticisms. In particular, given that this generation had worked hard to get out of its situation of poverty, even famine, resulting from the Second World War, it was reproached for only concerning itself with its material well being. From this came the success of fantasies about the ‘consumer society’ and slogans such as “Never work!” Descended from a generation that had submitted to the full force of the counter-revolution, the youth of the 1960s reproached its parents for its conformism and its submission to the demands of capitalism. Reciprocally, many parents didn’t understand and were loath to accept that their children despised the sacrifices that they had made in order to give them a better life than their own.

However, there existed a real economic element in the student revolt of the 60s. At this time, there was no real threat of unemployment or of problems of finding a job as is the case today. The principal concern that then affected student youth was that it would not be able to acquire the same social status as that of previous university graduates. In fact, the generation of 1968 was the first to be confronted, in a somewhat brutal manner, with the phenomenon of proletarianisation of the middle strata abundantly studied by sociologists at the time. This phenomenon had begun some years earlier, even before the open crisis had manifested itself, following a palpable increase in the number of university students. This increase came from the needs of the economy but also from the will of parents to provide their children with an economic situation superior to their own, and the possibility of doing so. It was, among other things, this ‘massification’ of the student population which provoked a growing malaise with the authoritarian structures and practices inherited from a time when the universities were mainly frequented by the elite.

However, if the student movement that began in 1964 developed in a period of ‘prosperity’ for capitalism, it was no longer the same from 1967 where the economic situation began to seriously degrade, strengthening the malaise of student youth. This is one of the reasons that allows us to understand why the movement of 1968 reached its heights. It is what allows us to explain why, in May 1968, the movement of the working class took the reins.

That is what we will look at in the next article.

Fabienne, April 2008.

Asian Growth: an expression of the crisis and decadence of capitalism

Up to now capitalism has shown a conspicuous inability to develop the countries where two-thirds of humanity live. Now, with the incredible economic growth in India and China - and throughout East Asia generally - we hear it shouted from the roof tops that from henceforth it will be able to develop more than half the world and that it would be able to go even further if only all the constraints imposed on it were to be eliminated. If wages and working conditions were to be levelled down to those obtaining in China, it is claimed, then growth in the West would also rise to 10% a year.

This raises theoretical and ideological questions of great importance: does the development in East Asia represent a renewal of capitalism or is it no more than a stray occurrence in its on-going crisis? To answer this question we will consider the phenomenon throughout the whole of the sub-continent, though we will examine China more closely as it is the most publicised and the most representative example.

Some questions for revolutionary theory posed by development in the Asian sub-continent

1) In 25 years of economic crisis and ‘globalisation'[1] (1980-2005), Europe has increased its GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by a factor of just 1.7, the United States by 2.2 and the world by 2.5. India, on the other hand, has managed to increase it four-fold, developing Asia six-fold and China ten-fold. This means that the latter has developed 4 times more rapidly than the international average and it has done so during a period of crisis. Therefore, over the last two decades, growth in the Asian sub-continent has cushioned the continual fall in the growth rate of international GDP per head of population. This has been uninterrupted since the end of the 1960s: 3.7% (1960-69); 2.1% (1970-79); 1.3% (1980-89); 1.1% (1990-1999) and 0.9% for 2000-2004)[2]. The first question to ask therefore is: will this region of the world escape the crisis that is undermining the rest of the world economy?

2) It took the United States fifty years to double its per capita income between 1865 and the First World War (1914): China has managed to do so in half the time and in the midst of the decadent period and the capitalist crisis. Although 84% of the Middle Empire was rural in 1952, the number of workers in China's industrial sector is now 170 million, that is, 40% greater than in all of the countries of the OECD (123 million). This country is becoming the workshop of the world and employment in the tertiary sector is increasing at a very rapid rate. The transformation of the employment structure is one of the fastest ever to have taken place in the history of capitalism.[3] China has already become the fourth largest economy in the world if its GDP is calculated using the exchange rate of the dollar and it is in second place if the calculation is made in terms of parity in buying power[4]. These facts must obviously lead us to ask if this country is experiencing a genuine primitive accumulation and an industrial revolution, such as occurred in the developing countries during the XVIII and XIX centuries. To put it another way: is it possible for new capitalist countries to emerge during the period of capitalist decadence? Moreover, is it possible for a country to catch up with the others, as was the case during the ascendant period? If China's present rate of growth were to continue, in less than two decades, it would become one of the largest world powers. This is what the United States and Germany did in the XIX century, when they managed to catch up with and overtake England and France, in spite of the fact that they had begun to develop later.

3) The development of China's GDP is also the most dramatic in the entire history of capitalism. It has had an average annual increase of between 8 and 10% over the last 25 years of world-wide crisis. China's growth even exceeds the records attained during the period of prosperity following the war, when Japan grew at a rate of 8.2% per annum between 1950 and 73 and South Korea by 7.6% per annum between 1962 and 1990. What's more, at present this rhythm is much faster and more stable than that of its neighbours who were industrialised earlier (South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong). So is China experiencing its own equivalent of the post-1945 economic boom?

4) Moreover, China is not content to simply produce and export basic goods or to re-export goods produced in its workshops for low wages. It is tending more and more to produce and export goods that have a high level of added value, such as electronics and transport equipment. Does this mean that we are about to see a technological development in China similar to that in the NIC (Newly Industrialised Countries: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore)? Will China, like them, be able to reduce its dependence on exports and start to develop its internal market? In other words, are India and China no more than shooting stars that will eventually burn out or will they become new major players on the world stage?

5) The rapid formation of an enormous bastion of the international working class in the Asian sub-continent, although young and inexperienced, raises numerous questions about the development of the class struggle in this part of the world and about its influence on the balance of forces between classes at an international level. The increase in the number of class conflicts and the emergence of political minorities are clear signs of this[5]. On the other hand, the low wages and very precarious working conditions in East Asia are used by the bourgeoisie in the developed countries to blackmail (by threatening to re-locate) and to depress wages and working conditions.

These questions can only be answered and the real sources, contradictions and limitations of growth in Asia be assessed, if they are considered within the general context of the evolution of capitalism at an historic and international level. This means that the present development in East Asia must be placed within the framework of the decadent period of capitalism that began in 1914 (Part 1) and in terms of the dynamic of the crisis that re-emerged internationally at the end of the 1960s (Part 2). This alone will enable us to draw out the essential elements relating to Asian growth (Part 3) and these are the analytical axes that will be developed in this article[6].

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[1] Read our article "Behind the ‘globalisation' of the economy: the aggravation of the capitalist crisis" in n°86 of this Review.

[2] Sources: World Bank: World Development Indicators 2003 (version on line) and International Economic Perspectives 2004.

[3] Table 1: Different branches' share of produced value and employment (%)

	Primary (agriculture)	Secondary (industry)	Tertiary (services)
	Value	Employment	Value	Employment	Value	Employment
1952	51	84	21	7	29	9
1978	28	71	48	17	24	12
2001	15	50	51	22	34	28
Source : China Statistical Yearbook, 2002.

 

[4] This calculation method is more reliable in as far as it is based on a comparison of the price of a basketful of goods and standard services in the various countries, rather than just on the value of the respective currencies in terms of the exchange of goods on the world market.

[5] We refer the reader to our Report on the Conference in Korea, at which there met together a number of groups and elements whose basis is proletarian internationalism and the Communist Left (International Review n°129) and to the internet site of a new internationalist political group which has appeared in the Philippines and which sees its political affiliation as being with the groups of the Communist Left (see our internet site).

[6] Our 17th International Congress (see International Review n°130) devoted a significant part of its work to the economic crisis of capitalism; dealing specifically with the present growth in certain ‘emerging' countries such as India and China, as this seems to contradict the analysis made by our organisation, and by Marxists in general, about the definitive bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. It made the decision to publish articles deepening this question in its press, especially the International Review. The present text is a concretisation of this orientation and we think that it makes a valuable contribution to understanding growth in China within the framework of the decadence of capitalism. However the discussions that are taking place at present within our organisation, about the mechanisms that enabled capitalism to experience a spectacular level of growth after the Second World War, are taking up the question of how to understand the present dynamism in the economies of certain ‘emerging' countries, China in particular. This article raises a point of disagreement in that it defends the idea that the wage mass could constitute a soluble outlet for capitalist production, as long as it is not ‘compressed' to a minimum. This is expressed in the following formulation concerning the present ‘globalisation' which "is deformed in that it lowers the wage mass and restrains the basis of accumulation internationally". This is not the opinion presently held by the majority in the central organ of the ICC. The majority holds, for reasons that we cannot go into here, that if capitalism is led to ‘benefit' the working class with a buying power greater than that which is strictly necessary for it to reproduce its labour power, the increased consumption of the workers does not in any way benefit accumulation in a lasting way.

It is 90 years since the proletarian revolution reached its tragic culmination point with the struggles of 1918 and 1919 in Germany. After the heroic seizure of power by the Russian proletariat in October 1917, the central battlefield of the world revolution shifted to Germany. There, the decisive struggle was waged and lost. The world bourgeoisie has always wanted to sink these events into historical oblivion. To the extent that it cannot deny that struggles took place, it pretends that they only aimed at "peace" and "democracy" - at the blissful conditions presently reigning in capitalist Germany. The goal of the series of articles we are beginning here is to show that the revolutionary movement in Germany brought the bourgeoisie in the central country of European capitalism close to the brink of the loss of its class rule. Despite its defeat, the revolution in Germany, like that in Russia, is an encouragement to us today. It reminds us that it is not only necessary but possible to topple the rule of world capitalism.

This series will be divided into 5 parts. This first part will be devoted to how the revolutionary proletariat rallied to its principle of proletarian internationalism in the face of World War I. Part two will deal with the revolutionary struggles of 1918. Part three will be devoted to the drama around the formation of a revolutionary leadership, concretised in the founding congress of the German Communist Party at the end of 1918. Part four will examine the defeat of 1919. The last part will deal with the historical significance of the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the heritage of these revolutionaries for us today.

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I. Defeat and disarray

The international revolutionary wave which began in opposition to World War I, took place only a few years after the greatest political defeat which the workers' movement had ever suffered: the collapse of the Socialist International in August 1914. Understanding why this war could take place, and the reasons for the failure of the International, is thus essential in order to comprehend the nature and the course of the revolutions in Russia, and in particular in Germany.

The road to war

Since the beginning of the 20th century, world war was in the air. The great imperialist powers had been hectically preparing it. The workers' movement had been predicting it, and warning against it. But at first its outbreak was delayed - by two factors. One of them was the insufficient military preparation of the main protagonists. Germany, for instance, was completing the construction of a war fleet capable of competing with Great Britain, the ruler of the ocean waves. It had to convert the island of Heligoland into a high sea naval base and finish off the canal it was constructing between the North Sea and the Baltic etc. As the first decade of the century drew to a close, these preparations neared their conclusion. This gave the second factor of delay all the more prominence: the fear of the working class. The existence of this fear was no mere speculative hypothesis of the workers' movement. It was expressed openly by the main representatives of the bourgeoisie. Von Bülow, a leading political figure of the German state, declared that it was mainly the fear of Social Democracy which was making the ruling class postpone the war. Paul Rohrbach, the infamous propagandist of the openly imperialist, pro-war circles in Berlin, wrote: "Unless an elementary catastrophe takes place, the only thing which can compel Germany to keep the peace is the hunger of those without bread." General von Bernhardi, a prominent military theoretician of the time, warned, in his book On Contemporary War, that modern warfare is an audacious risk on account of its need to mobilise and discipline millions of people. Such insights were based not on theoretical considerations alone, but on the practical experience of the first imperialist war of the 20th century between major powers. This war - between Russia and Japan - had given birth to the revolutionary movement of 1905 in Russia.

Such considerations nourished hopes within the workers' movement that the ruling class would not dare go to war. These hopes helped to cover over the divergences within the Socialist International at the very moment when the need for proletarian clarification required their open debate. The fact that none of the different currents within the international socialist movement "wanted" war created an illusion of strength and unity. However, reformism and opportunism were not opposed to imperialist war on principle, but simply feared the loss of their legal and financial status in the event of its outbreak. The "marxist centre" around Kautsky, for its part, dreaded war mainly because it would destroy the illusion of unity within the workers' movement which it was out to defend at all costs.

What spoke in favour of the capacity of the working class to prevent the outbreak of world war was above all the intensity of the class struggle in Russia. There, the workers had not taken long to recover from the defeat of the 1905 movement. On the eve of World War I, a new wave of mass strikes was gathering momentum in the Tsarist Empire. To a certain extent, the situation of the working class there resembled that of China today - a minority of the total population, but highly concentrated in modern factories financed by international capital, brutally exploited in a backward country lacking the political control mechanisms of bourgeois parliamentary liberalism. With an important difference, the Russian proletariat had been brought up in the socialist traditions of internationalism, whereas the Chinese workers today are still suffering from the nightmare of the nationalist-stalinist counter-revolution.

All of this made Russia a threat to capitalist stability.

But Russia was not typical of the international balance of class forces. The heart of capitalism, and of imperialist tensions, was located in western and central Europe. The key to the world situation was to be found, not in Russia, but in Germany. This was the country which was most challenging the world order of the old colonial powers. And it was the country with the strongest, most concentrated working class with the most developed socialist education. The political role of the German working class was illustrated by the fact that there the main trade unions had been founded by the socialist party, whereas in Great Britain - the other leading capitalist nation in Europe - socialism appeared to be a mere appendage of the trade union movement. In Germany, the day-to-day workers' struggles were traditionally placed in the light of the great socialist final goal.

At the end of the 19th century there began however the process of the de-politicisation of the socialist unions in Germany, their "emancipation" from the socialist party. The trade unions openly contested the existence of a unity between movement and final goal. The party theoretician Eduard Bernstein only generalised this endeavour with his famous formulation: "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing". This putting in question of the leading role of Social Democracy in the workers' movement, of the primacy of the goal over the movement, brought the socialist party, the SPD, into conflict with its own trade unions. After the mass strikes in 1905 in Russia, this conflict intensified. But it ended with a victory of the trade unions over the party. Under the influence of the "centre" around Kautsky - which wanted to maintain the "unity" of the workers' movement at all costs - the party decided that the question of the mass strike was to be the affair of the trade unions.[1] But the mass strike contained the whole question of the coming proletarian revolution! In this way, the German and the international working class was politically disarmed on the eve of World War I.

The declaration of their non-political character was the preparation of the trade union movement for its integration into the capitalist state. This gave the ruling class the mass organisation it needed to mobilise the workers for war. This mobilisation in the heartlands of capitalism would in turn be enough to demoralise and disorient the workers in Russia - for whom Germany was the main point of reference - and thus break the momentum of mass struggles there.

The Russian proletariat which engaged in mass movements from 1911 on, already had recent experiences of economic crises, of wars and of revolutionary struggles behind it. Not so in western and central Europe. There world war broke out at the end of a long phase of economic development, of real improvements in working class conditions, of rising wages and falling unemployment, of reformist illusions. A phase during which major wars could be restricted to the peripheries of world capitalism. The first great world economic crisis of declining capitalism did not break out until 15 years later - in 1929. The phase of the decadence of capitalism began, not with an economic crisis, as the workers' movement had traditionally expected, but with the crisis of world war. With the defeat and isolation of the left wing of the workers' movement on the question of the mass strike, there was no longer any reason for the bourgeoisie to postpone its headlong rush into imperialist war. On the contrary: any delay could now be fatal to its plans. Waiting could now only mean: waiting for the economic crisis, for the class struggle, for the revolutionary consciousness of its gravedigger to develop!

The collapse of the International

Thus, the path to world war was opened. Its outbreak led to the explosion of the Socialist International. On the eve of the war, Social Democracy organised mass protest demonstrations and meetings throughout Europe. The SPD leadership in Germany sent Friedrich Ebert (a future murderer of the German revolution) to Zürich in Switzerland with the party funds, to prevent their confiscation, and the ever vacillating Hugo Haase to Brussels to organise the international resistance to war. But it was one thing to oppose the war before it had broken out. Quite another to take a position against it once it had become a reality. And here, the vows of proletarian solidarity solemnly taken at the international congress at Stuttgart 1907 and renewed in 1912 in Basle turned out, to a large extent, to have been lip service. Even some of the left wing proponents of apparently radical immediate actions against the war - Mussolini in Italy, Hervé in France - now went over to the camp of chauvinism.

Everyone was surprised by the extent of the fiasco of the International. It is well known that Lenin at first believed the German party press declarations in favour of war to be police forgeries aimed at destabilising the socialist movement abroad. The bourgeoisie itself seems to have been surprised by the extent to which Social Democracy betrayed its principles. It had been banking mainly on the trade unions to mobilise the workers, and had reached secret agreements with its leadership on the eve of war. In some countries, important parts of Social Democracy actually did oppose the war. This shows that the political opening of the path to war did not automatically mean that the political organisations of the class would betray. All the more striking was the failure of Social Democracy in the leading belligerent countries. In Germany, in some cases even those most resolutely opposed to war initially failed to raise their voices. In the Reichstag Fraction in parliament, where 14 members were against voting for the war credits, 78 in favour, even Karl Liebknecht at first submitted to the traditional fraction discipline.

How to explain this?

To this end we must of course first of all situate events in their objective context. Here, the change in the fundamental conditions of the class struggle though the entry into a new epoch of wars and revolutions, of the historic decline of capitalism is decisive. Through this context we can fully comprehend that the passing over of the trade unions into the camp of the bourgeoisie was historically inevitable. Since these organs, expressions of a particular, immature stage of the class struggle, were never revolutionary by nature, in a period in which the effective defence of the immediate interests of any part of the proletariat implied a logic towards revolution, they could no longer serve their class of origin, and could only survive by joining the enemy camp.

But what explains so completely the role of the trade unions already proves to be incomplete when we examine the case of the Social Democratic parties. It is true that with World War I these parties lost their old centre of gravity around the mobilisation for elections. It is also true that the change of conditions removed the basis for mass political parties of the working class in general. In the face of war as well as revolutions, a proletarian party has to be able to swim against the tide, and even in opposition to the dominant mood in the class as a whole. But the main task of a working class political organisation - the defence of its programme, and in particular of proletarian internationalism - does not change with the new epoch. On the contrary, it becomes even more important. So although it was an historical necessity that the socialist parties entered into crisis with the world war, and even that whole currents infested by reformism and opportunism would betray and join the bourgeoisie, this still does not fully explain what Rosa Luxemburg called "the crisis of Social Democracy".

It is also true that such a fundamental historical change necessarily provokes a programmatic crisis, old and tested tactics and even principles suddenly becoming out of date, such as the participation in parliamentary elections, the support for national movements or for bourgeois revolutions. But here we should keep in mind that many revolutionaries of the day, although they did not yet understand these new programmatic and tactical implications, nevertheless were able to remain true to proletarian internationalism.

Any attempt to explain what happened on the basis of the objective conditions alone will end up seeing everything which happens in history as having been inevitable from the onset. This point of view puts in question the possibility of learning from history, since we in turn are also the product of our own "objective conditions". No marxist in their right mind would deny the importance of these objective conditions. But if we examine the explanation which the revolutionaries of the day themselves gave for the catastrophe of socialism in 1914, we find that they underlined above all the importance of the subjective factors.

One of the main reasons for the downfall of the socialist movement lay in its illusory feeling of invincibility, its mistaken conviction of the certainty of its own future victory. The Second International based this conviction on three essentials of the development of capitalism which had already been identified by Marx. These were: the concentration of capital and productive power on one hand and of the dispossessed proletariat on the other; the elimination of the intermediary social layers which blur the main class contradiction; and the increasing anarchy of the capitalist mode of production, in particular in the form of economic crisis, driving the gravediggers of capitalism to put the system in question. These insights were perfectly valid in themselves. Since these three preconditions for socialism are the product of objective contradictions which unfold independently of the will of any social class, and in the long term inevitably impose themselves, they nevertheless gave rise to two very problematic conclusions. Firstly that the victory of socialism is inevitable. Secondly that its victory can only be prevented if the revolution breaks out prematurely, if the workers' movement gives in to provocations.

These conclusions were all the more dangerous for being profoundly - but only partly - true. Capitalism does inevitably produce the material preconditions for the revolution and for socialism. And the danger of being provoked by the ruling class into premature confrontations is very real. We will see the whole tragic importance of this latter question in the third and the fourth part of this article series.

But the problem with this schema of the socialist future is that it left no place for the new phenomenon of imperialist wars between modern capitalist powers. The whole question of world war did not fit into this schema. We have already seen that the workers' movement recognised the inevitability of the ripening of a war long before it actually broke out. But for Social Democracy as a whole, this recognition did not at all lead to the conclusion that the victory of socialism was no longer inevitable. These two portions of the analysis of reality remained separated from each other in a way which can appear almost schizophrenic. Such an incoherence, although it can be fatal, is not unusual. Many of the great crises and disorientations in the history of the workers' movement resulted from this problem of being locked in the schemas of the past, of consciousness lagging behind the evolution of reality. We can cite the example of the support for the provisional government and the continuation of the war by the Bolshevik Party after the February 1917 Revolution in Russia. The party had fallen victim to the schema of a bourgeois revolution bequeathed from 1905, and which revealed its inadequacy in the new context of world war. It took Lenin's April Theses and weeks of intensive discussion to find a way out of this crisis.

Friedrich Engels, shortly before his death in 1895, was the first to begin to draw the necessary conclusions from the perspective of a generalised war in Europe. He declared that it would pose the historic alternative between socialism and barbarism. Here, the inevitability of the victory of socialism is openly put in question. But not even Engels could immediately draw all the conclusions from this insight. He thus failed to recognise that the appearance of the oppositional current of "Die Jungen" ("the Youngsters") in the SPD was - for all its weaknesses - a genuine expression of justified discontent with a framework of activities (mainly oriented towards parliamentarism) which had become largely insufficient. Engels, in the face of the last crisis of the German party before his death, threw in his weight with those who defended the maintenance of the party status quo in the name of patience and the need to avoid provocations.

It was Rosa Luxemburg who, in her polemic against Bernstein at the turn of the century, was to draw the decisive conclusion from Engels' vision of "socialism or barbarism": Although patience remains one of the prime virtues of the workers' movement, and premature confrontations have to be avoided, the main danger, historically, is no longer that the revolution comes too early, but that it may come too late. This viewpoint puts the whole emphasis on the active preparation of the revolution, on the central importance of the subjective factor.

This blow against the fatalism which was beginning to dominate the Second International, this restoration of revolutionary marxism, was to become one of the hallmarks of the whole revolutionary left opposition before and during World War I.[2]

As Rosa Luxemburg was to write in her Crisis of Social Democracy: "Scientific socialism has taught us to recognise the objective laws of historical development. Man does not make history of his own volition, but he makes history nevertheless. The proletariat is dependent in its actions upon the degree of ripeness to which social evolution has advanced. But again, social evolution is not a thing apart from the proletariat; it is in the same measure its driving force and its cause as well as its product and its effect."

Precisely because it has discovered objective laws of history, for the first time ever a social force - the class conscious proletariat - can apply its will in a deliberate manner. It can not only make history, but consciously influence its course.

"Socialism is the first popular movement in the world that has set itself a goal and has established in the social life of man a conscious thought, a definitive plan, the free will of mankind. For this reason Friedrich Engels calls the final victory of the socialist proletariat a stride by mankind from the animal kingdom into the kingdom of liberty. This step, too, is bound by unalterable historical laws to the thousands of rungs of the ladder of the past with its torturous sluggish growth. But it will never be accomplished if the burning spark of the conscious will of the masses does not spring from the material conditions that have been built up by past development."

The proletariat must "learn to take hold of the rudder of society to become, instead of the powerless victim of society, its conscious guide."[3]

For marxism the recognition of the importance of objective historical laws and economic contradictions - denied or ignored by anarchism - and of the subjective elements belong together.[4]

They are inseparably linked and influence each other reciprocally. We can see this in relation to the most important factors in the gradual undermining of the proletarian life of the International. One of these was the undermining of solidarity within the workers' movement. This was of course greatly favoured by the economic expansion which preceded 1914, and the reformist illusions this engendered. But it also resulted from the capacity of the class enemy to learn from its experience. Bismarck introduced social insurance schemes (along with his Anti-Socialist Laws) in order to replace solidarity between workers by their individual dependence on what later became the "welfare state". And when Bismarck's attempt to defeat the workers' movement by outlawing it had failed, the imperialist bourgeoisie which replaced his government at the end of the 19th century reversed tactics. Realising that workers' solidarity often thrives under conditions of repression, it withdrew the Antisocialist Laws, instead repeatedly inviting Social Democracy to "constructively participate" in "political life" (i.e. the running of the state), accusing it of a "sectarian" renouncing of the "sole practical means" of gaining real improvements for the workers.

Lenin showed the link between the objective and subjective levels in relation to another decisive factor in the putrefication of the main socialist parties. This was the degradation of the struggle for the liberation of humanity to an empty everyday routine. Identifying three currents within Social Democracy, he highlighted the second current - "the so-called centre, consisting of people who vacillate between the social chauvinists and the internationalists of action" and characterised them as follows. "The centre - these are people of routine, eaten up by rotten legality, corrupted by the atmosphere of parliamentarism etc, functionaries used to a cosy job and quiet work. Considered historically and economically, they represent no particular layer, they are but a transitional expression between the period of the workers' movement from 1871 to 1914 which is behind us (..) to a new period, which has objectively become necessary since the first imperialist world war, which has inaugurated the era of socialist revolutions."[5]

For marxists at the time, the "crisis of social democracy" was not something taking place outside of their own field of activity. They felt personally responsible for what had happened. For them, the failure of the workers' movement of the day was also their own failure. As Rosa Luxemburg put it "We have the victims of the war on our conscience".

What was remarkable about the collapse of the Socialist International is that it was not in the first instance the product either of programmatic inadequacy or of a wrong analysis of the world situation.

"The international proletariat suffers, not from a dearth of postulates, programmes and slogans, but from a lack of deeds, of effective resistance, of the power to attack imperialism at the decisive moment."[6]

For Kautsky, the failure to uphold internationalism had proven the impossibility of doing so. His conclusion: the International is essentially a peace time instrument, which must be set aside in times of war. For Rosa Luxemburg, as for Lenin, the fiasco of August 1914 was above all the result of the erosion of the ethics of proletarian international solidarity within its leadership.

"Then came the awful, the incredible fourth of August 1914. Did it have to come? An event of such importance cannot be a mere accident. It must have its deep, significant, objective causes. But perhaps these causes may be found in the errors of the leader of the proletariat, the social democracy itself, in the fact that our readiness to fight has flagged, that our courage and our convictions have forsaken us." (our emphasis)

II: The turning of the tide

The collapse of the Socialist International was an event of world historic importance, and a cruel political defeat. But it did not constitute a decisive i.e. irreversible defeat of a whole generation. A first indication of this: the most politicised layers of the proletariat remained loyal to proletarian internationalism. Richard Müller, leader of the group of the revolutionäre Obleute, the factory delegates in the metal industry, recalled: "To the extent that these broad popular masses, already before the war, had been educated, under the influence of the socialist and trade union press, to definite opinions about the state and society, it turned out that they, although at first not openly, directly rejected the war propaganda and the war."[7] This in strong contrast to the situation in the 1930s, after the victory of Stalinism in Russia and Fascism in Germany, when the most advanced workers got drawn onto the political terrain of nationalism and the defence of the (imperialist) "anti-fascist" or "socialist" fatherland.

The completeness of the initial mobilisation for war was thus not the proof of a profound defeat, but of a temporary overpowering of the masses. This mobilisation was accompanied by scenes of mass hysteria. But these expressions must not be confused with an active engagement of the population such as was once witnessed during the national wars of the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the Netherlands or France. The intense public agitation of 1914 had its roots first of all in the mass character of modern bourgeois society, and in the unprecedented means of propaganda and manipulation at the disposal of the capitalist state. In this sense, the hysteria of 1914 was not quite new. In Germany it had already been witnessed at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. But it was given a new quality through the evolution in the nature of modern warfare.

The madness of imperialist war

It seems that the workers' movement underestimated the power of the gigantic political, economic, social and psychological earthquakes produced by the world war. Events of such a colossal scale and violence, beyond the control of any human force, are bound to stir up extreme emotions. Some anthropologists believe that war awakens an instinct of defence of one's own "preserve", something which human beings have in common with other species. This may or may not be the case. What is certain is that modern war stirs up age old fears which slumber in our collective historical memory, passed on over generations by culture and tradition, consciously and unconsciously: the fear of death, starvation, rape, expulsion, exclusion, deprivation, enslavement. The fact that modern generalised imperialist warfare is no longer more or less restricted to military professionals, but involves whole societies, and introduces weaponry of an unprecedentedly destructive power, cannot but augment the panic and instability it produces. To this must be added the profound moral implications. In world war, not only a particular caste of soldiers, but millions of working people drafted into the army are called upon to kill each other. The rest of society, behind the front, is supposed to work towards the same end. In such a situation, the basic morality which makes any human society possible no longer applies. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Every people which sets out to commit organised murder is transformed into a horde of barbarians."[8]

All of this produced, at the moment the war broke out, a veritable mass psychosis, and a generalised pogrom atmosphere. Rosa Luxemburg recounts how the populations of whole cities were transformed into a crazed mob. The germs of all the barbarism of the twentieth century, Auschwitz and Hiroshima included, were already contained in this war.

How should the workers' party have reacted to the outbreak of war? By proclaiming the mass strike? By calling on the soldiers to desert? Nonsense, replied Rosa Luxemburg. The first task of revolutionaries here is to resist what Wilhelm Liebknecht, referring to the experience of the war of 1870, once described as a hurricane of human passions. "Such outbreaks of the ‘popular soul' are astounding, stunning, crushing in their elemental fury. One feels powerless, as before a higher power. It is a real force majeure. There is no tangible opponent. It is like an epidemic, in the people, in the air, everywhere. (...) So it was no small thing at that time to swim against the current."

In 1870 Social Democracy swam against the current. Rosa Luxemburg's comment: "They stuck to their posts, and for forty years social democracy lived upon the moral strength with which it had opposed a world of enemies."[9]

And here she comes to the point, the crux of her whole argumentation. "The same thing would have happened now. At first we would perhaps have accomplished nothing but to save the honour of the proletariat, and thousands of proletarians who are dying in the trenches in mental darkness would not have died in spiritual confusion, but with the one certainty that that which has been everything in their lives, the international, liberating social democracy is more than the fragment of a dream. The voice of our party would have acted as a wet blanket upon the chauvinistic intoxication of the masses. It would have preserved the intelligent proletariat from delirium, would have made it more difficult for imperialism to poison and to stupefy the minds of the people. The crusade against the social democracy would have awakened the masses in an incredibly short time. And as the war went on (...) every live, honest, progressive and humane element in the masses would have rallied to the standard of the social democracy."

The conquest of this "unparalleled moral prestige" is the first task of revolutionaries in face of war.

Impossible for the likes of Kautsky to understand these concerns with the last thoughts of the proletarians in uniform before their death. For him, to provoke the anger of the mob and the repression of the state, once the war had actually broken out, would be nothing but an empty gesture. The French socialist Jaures once declared: The International represents all the moral strength in the world. Now, many of its former leaders no longer knew that internationalism is no empty gesture, but the life and death question of world socialism.

The turning point and the role of revolutionaries

The failure of the socialist party led to a truly dramatic situation. Its first result was to make possible the apparently indefinite perpetuation of the war. The military strategy of the German bourgeoisie was entirely based on avoiding a two front war, on achieving a rapid victory over France in order to then throw all its forces eastwards to make Russia surrender. Its strategy against the working class had the same basis: taking it by surprise and clinching victory before it had time to regain its orientation.

By September 1914 (the First Battle of the Marne) the overrunning of France, and with it the whole strategy of rapid victory, had completely failed. Not only the German, but the world bourgeoisie was now trapped in a dilemma which it could neither back out of nor leave behind it. There ensued unprecedented massacres of millions of soldiers, completely insane even from the capitalist point of view. The proletariat itself was trapped, without any immediate perspective of ending the war through its own initiative. The danger which thus arose was that of the destruction of the most essential material and cultural precondition for socialism: the proletariat itself.

Revolutionaries relate to their class as a part relates to the whole. Minorities of the class can never replace the self activity and creativity of the masses. But there are moments in history at which the intervention of revolutionaries can have a decisive influence. Such moments arise in a process towards revolution, when the masses are struggling for victory. Here it is decisive to help the class find the right path, sidestep the traps of its enemy, avoid being too early or too late for its rendezvous with history. But they also arise at moments of defeat, when it is vital to draw the right lessons. But here we must differentiate. In face of a crushing defeat, this work is decisive only in the long term, in passing on these lessons to future generations. In the case of the defeat of 1914, the decisive impact revolutionaries could have was as immediate as during the revolution itself. This is not only because the defeat suffered was not definitive, but also due to the conditions of world war, which, by making the class struggle literally a life or death question, gave rise to an extraordinary acceleration of politicisation.

In face of the hardships of war, it was inevitable that the economic class struggle would develop and immediately take on an openly political character. But revolutionaries could not content themselves with waiting for this to happen. The disorientation of the class, as we have seen, was above all the result of the default of its political leadership. It was thus the responsibility of all that remained revolutionary within the workers' movement to itself initiate the turning of the tide. Even before the strikes on the "home front", long before the revolts of the soldiers in the trenches, revolutionaries had to go out and affirm the principle of international proletarian solidarity.

They began this work in parliament, by denouncing the war and voting against the war credits. This was the last time when this tribune would be used to revolutionary ends. But this was accompanied, from the beginning, by illegal revolutionary propaganda and agitation, and participation in the first demonstrations for bread. But the paramount task of revolutionaries was still to organise themselves to clarify their standpoint, and in above all to re-establish contact with revolutionaries abroad, to prepare the foundation of a new International. But by May Day 1916, the Spartakusbund, the nucleus of the future Communist Party, for the first time felt strong enough to take to the streets openly and massively. It was the day on which traditionally the workers' movement celebrated its international solidarity. The Spartakusbund called demonstrations in Dresden, Jena, Hanau, Brunswick and above all in Berlin. There 10,000 assembled at Potsdamer Platz to hear Karl Liebknecht denounce the imperialist war. A street battle broke out in a vain attempt to prevent him being arrested.

The May Day protest at Potsdamer Platz deprived the internationalist opposition of its best known leader. Other arrests followed. Liebknecht was accused of irresponsibility and even of wanting to place his own person in the limelight. In reality, his May Day action had been decided collectively by the Spartakusbund leadership. It is true that marxism criticises empty gestures like acts of terrorism or adventurism. It counts on the collective action of the masses. But the gesture of Liebknecht was more than an act of individual heroism. It embodied the hopes and aspirations of millions of proletarians in face of the insanity of bourgeois society. As Rosa Luxemburg was later to write:

"Let us not forget this, however. The history of the world is not made without grandeur of spirit, without lofty morals, without noble gestures."[10]

This grandeur of spirit swiftly spread from the Spartakusbund to the metal workers. June 27th 1916, Berlin, the eve of the trial against Karl Liebknecht, arrested for public agitation against the war. A meeting of factory delegates was scheduled to take place after the illegal protest demonstration called by the Spartakusbund. On the agenda: solidarity with Liebknecht. Against the resistance of Georg Ledebour, the only representative of the opposition group within the Socialist Party (SPD) present, action was proposed for the following day. There was no discussion. Everyone stood up and left in silence.

The next morning at 9 o'clock the turners switched off the machines in the big armaments plants in the German capital. 55,000 workers from Löwe, AEG, Borsig, Schwarzkopf downed tools and assembled outside their factory gates. Despite the military censorship, the news spread like a fire across the empire: the armaments workers out in solidarity with Liebknecht! As it turned out, not only in Berlin, but also in Brunswick, on the shipyards in Bremen etc. Even in Russia there followed acts of solidarity.

The bourgeoisie sent thousands of strikers to the front. The trade unions started a witch hunt in the factories in search of the "ring leaders". But hardly any of them were arrested, so great was the solidarity of the workers. Internationalist proletarian solidarity against imperialist war: this was the beginning of the world revolution, the first political mass strike in the history of Germany.

But even more rapidly, the flame lit on the Potsdamer Platz had spread to revolutionary youth. Inspired by the example of their political leaders, this youth, even before the experienced metal workers, instigated the first major strike against the war. In Magdeburg, and above all in Brunswick, which was a bastion of Spartakus, the illegal May Day protests of 1916 escalated into an open strike movement against the government decision to pay part of the wages of the apprentices and young workers onto a compulsory savings account which could be used to finance the war effort. The adult workers came out in support. On May 5th the military authorities had to withdraw this attack in order to prevent a further extension of the movement.

After the battle of Jutland in 1916, the first and only major confrontation between the British and the German navy throughout the war, a small group of revolutionary sailors planned to take over the battleship Hyäne and take it to Denmark as a "demonstration to the whole world" against the war.[11] Although these plans were denounced and foiled, they announced the first open revolts in the war fleet which followed at the beginning of August 1917. They began around questions concerning the treatment and conditions of the crew. But soon, the sailors delivered an ultimatum to the government: either you end the war or we go on strike. The state responded with a wave of repression. Two of the revolutionary leaders, Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch, were executed.

But already in mid-April 1917 a wave of mass strikes had taken place in Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Halle, Brunswick, Hanover, Dresden and other cities. Although the trade unions and the SPD leadership, which no longer dared to openly oppose the movement, tried to restrict it to economic issues, the workers in Leipzig had formulated a series of political demands - calling in particular for the ending of the war - which were taken up in other cities.

Thus, the ingredients of a profound revolutionary movement were present by the beginning of 1918. The April 1917 strike wave was the first mass intervention of hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the country, defending their material interests on a class terrain and directly opposing the imperialist war. At the same time, this movement was inspired by the beginning of the Russian Revolution in February 1917, openly declaring its solidarity with it. Proletarian internationalism had seized the hearts of the working class.

On the other hand, with the movement against the war, the proletariat had begun to again produce its own revolutionary leadership. By this we mean not only the political groups such as the Spartakusbund or the Bremen Left who went on to form the KPD at the end of 1918. We also mean the emergence of highly politicised layers and centres of the life and struggle of the class, linked to the revolutionaries and sympathising with their positions. One of these centres was to be found in the industrial cities, in particular in the metal sector, crystallising in the phenomenon of the Obleute, the factory delegates. "Within the industrial working class there was a small nucleus of proletarians, who not only rejected the war as such, but were also willing to prevent its outbreak by all means; and when it broke out, they considered it their duty to end it by all means. They were few in number. But they were all the more determined and active people. They constituted the counterpoint to those who went to the front in order to die for their ideals. The struggle against the war in the factories and offices was not as covered in fame as the struggle on the front, but it brought with it the same dangers. Those who took up and waged this struggle were motivated by the highest ideals of humanity."[12]

Another of these centres was to be found among the new generation of workers, the apprentices and young workers with no other perspective than to be sent to die in the trenches. The nucleus of this fermentation was located in the socialist youth organisations, which, already before the war, had been characterised by the revolt against the "routine" which had begun to characterise the older generation.

Within the armed forces, where the revolt against the war took much longer to develop than on the "home front" a political advanced post was also established. As in Russia, this political centre of resistance arose among the sailors, who had a direct connection to the workers and the political organisations in their ports of call, and whose job and conditions in every way resembled those of the factory workers from whom they generally originated. Moreover, many of them were recruited from the "civilian" merchant fleets, young men who had travelled all over the world and for whom international fraternity was not a phrase, but a way of life.

Moreover, the emergence and multiplication of these concentrations of political life was marked by an intense theoretical activity. All the eye witness accounts from this period stress the extraordinarily high theoretical level of the debates at the different illegal meetings and conferences. This theoretical life found expression in Rosa Luxemburg's Crisis of Social Democracy, Lenin's writings against the war, the articles of the review Arbeiterpolitik in Bremen, but also in scores of leaflets and declarations circulated in strict illegality, and which belong to the most profound and courageous products of human culture which the 20th century has brought forth.

The stage was being set for the revolutionary storm against one of the strongest and most important bastions of world capitalism.

Steinklopfer

 

Part Two of this series will deal with the revolutionary struggles of 1918. They begin with the mass strikes of January 1918, and the first attempt to form workers' councils in Germany, and culminate in the revolutionary events of November 9 which brought World War I to an end.

 

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[1] Decision of the Mannheim Party Congress of 1906.

[2] In his memoirs from the proletarian youth movement, Willi Münzenberg, who was in Zürich during the war, recalled Lenin's point of view. "Lenin explained to us the mistake of Kautsky and his theoretical school of falsified marxism, which expects everything from the historical development of economic relations and almost nothing from the subjective factors of acceleration of the revolution. As opposed to this, Lenin stressed the significance of the individual and masses in the historic process. He placed in the foreground the marxist thesis that human beings, in the framework of the given economic relations, make their own history. This stressing of the personal value of individual human beings and groups in the social struggles made the greatest impression on us and spurred us to the greatest imaginable efforts." Münzenberg, Die Dritte Front ("The Third Front") p. 230.

[3] ibid p. 268, 269. We have slightly corrected the English translation.

[4] While correctly defending, against Bernstein, the reality of the tendency towards the disappearance of the intermediary layers, and towards crisis and pauperisation of the proletariat, the Left however failed to recognise the extent to which capitalism, in the years before World War I, had temporarily been able to attenuate these tendencies. This lack of clarity expressed itself for instance in Lenin's theory of the "workers aristocracy" according to which only a privileged minority, and not broad sectors of the class had gained substantial wage increases over longer periods. This led to underestimating the importance of the material basis for the reformist illusions which helped the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat for war.

[5] Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution.

[6] Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy ("Junius Pamphlet") January 1916. Taken from Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press 1970. p. 324

[7] Richard Müller, Vom Kaiserreich Zur Republik p.32. ("From the Empire to the Republic", part one of Müller's trilogy on the history of the German Revolution).

[8] ibid. p. 326.

[9] ibid p. 317, 318

[10] Rosa Luxemburg, Against Capital Punishment. November 1918, ibid p. 398.

[11] Dieter Nelles, Proletarische Demokratie und internationale Bruderschaft - Das abenteuerliche Leben des Hermann Knüfken. p. 1 (Nelles: Proletarian Democracy and International Fraternity - The Adventurous Life of Hermann Knüfken).

[12] Müller, ibid p. 33