As we showed in other articles of our press, towards the mid-1960s there developed an international movement of protest against the Vietnam War and against the first signs of a worsening economic situation. In many countries it carried the germs for putting into question the existing order. The movement in Germany started quite early, and it was going to have a major international impact.
Opposition outside of bourgeois parliament
While more and more demonstrations were organised from the mid-1960s on, above all against the war in Vietnam, the protests took on a new dimension when on December 1st 1966 a grand coalition government made up of CDU/CSU and SPD was formed in Bonn, and barely one week later on December 10th Rudi Dutschke called for the formation of an "Extra-Parliamentary Opposition" (APO). As the biggest ‘left' party joined the government, this resulted in a lot of disappointment and a turn away from the SPD. While the SPD was busily campaigning for participation in elections, protests were more and more taking to the streets. At the beginning of this movement there were considerable illusions about bourgeois democracy in general and about Social Democracy in particular. The idea was that since the SPD had joined the government there was no longer a major force of opposition in parliament, so this opposition would have to be organised from the streets. With the increasingly obvious role of Social Democracy as a force which supported the system from within the Grand Coalition, the "extra-parliamentary opposition" was more directed against recuperation through bourgeois democracy, against participation in parliamentary elections and in favour of direct action. This orientation was an important element in the slow process of the ending of social peace.
A new generation resists
The ruling class saw itself compelled to put the SPD into government as a reaction to the reappearance of the economic crisis after the boom that followed World War Two. After the long-lasting economic miracle, economic growth suddenly fell sharply in 1965. Even if the drop in growth still began from a high level, and the growth rates at the time would be seen as dream figures today, something of historical importance had happened. The economic miracle of the post-WW2 period was over. There was a first wave of job cuts and perks such as payment above the negotiated wages were cancelled. Even though all these measures appear extremely ‘soft' in comparison to today's austerity cuts, they were a real shock for the working class. The nightmare of the crisis had reappeared. But even though the crisis had reappeared all of a sudden, the working class did not yet react with a big wave of strikes. However, between 1965 and 67 some 300,000 workers participated in different struggles. A wave of protests in the whole of the country began with a wildcat strike in December 1966 in the Faber and Schleicher plant at Offenbach, which made printing machines. The workers demanded the dismissal of a foreman who was reproached for using "bullying" methods. In addition conflicts over working time erupted at the ILO works in Pinneberg close to Hamburg in September 1967. Almost all of these struggles turned into wildcat strikes. They contributed significantly to the change of mood, in particular amongst young workers, especially amongst trainees (at the time there was no big youth unemployment; most young people gained some working experience). While previously for years the ideology of ‘social partnership' and the image of a benevolent paternalist state had been widespread, now the first cracks in the ‘social peace' appeared. With hindsight these small strikes were only heralds of a bigger rupture which was to occur in Germany in 1969.
Yet with these hesitant, not very spectacular actions the working class in Germany had sent an important message, which also gave an impulse to the protest movement of the students. Even though the workers in Germany did not take a leading position internationally through their defensive struggles, they became part of the movement at an early stage.
But it was not so much the immediate severity of the first austerity cuts which sparked off the movement. The stirrings of a new generation could also be felt. After the deprivations of the economic crisis in the 1930s and the years of hunger during and after the war, after the brutal exhaustion of the workforce during the post-war reconstruction period with its long working hours and very low wages, a higher level of consumption had begun to develop, but at the same time these new sweat shop conditions had a horrifying effect, in particular on younger workers. A general, still unclear feeling cropped up: "we can't believe that this was it. We need something else than just consumer goods. We do not want to become as exhausted, worn-down, and burnt-out as our parents". Very slowly, a new, undefeated generation of workers appeared which had not lived through the war and which was not willing to accept the capitalist treadmill without any resistance. The search for an alternative, which was still undefined and unclear, had begun.
Behind the protest movement - the search for a new society
The formation of an ‘extra-parliamentary opposition' at the end of 1966 was only one step in a bigger stirring amongst the young generation, in particular the students. From 1965 on, even before the economic crisis broke out, more and more general assemblies were held in universities, where heated debates were held over ways and means of protest.
Following the example of the USA, in many universities discussion groups were set up as a counter pole to the ‘established' bourgeois universities; a ‘critical university' was formed. In these forums there were not only members of the SDS (Socialist Students League of Germany), who decided on all kinds of spectacular anti-authoritarian forms of protests. During that first phase of the movement an old tradition of debate, of discussion in public general assemblies partially revived. Even though many felt attracted by the urge for spectacular actions, the interest in theory, in the history of revolutionary movements re-surfaced, and with it the courage to think about overcoming capitalism. Many people expressed the hope for another society. Rudi Dutschke summarised this in June 1967 in the following manner: "the development of the productive forces has reached such a point of evolution that the abolition of hunger, war and domination has become a material possibility. Everything depends on the conscious will of the people to make history, which they have always made, but now this must become a matter of conscious control". A number of political texts of the workers' movement, in particular of council communism, were reprinted. The interest in workers' councils grew enormously. On an international scale the protest movement in Germany was considered to be one of the most active in matters of theory, the most keen on discussions, the most political.
At the same time a large part of the protesters, such as Rudi Dutschke, initially criticised Stalinism on a theoretical or at least on an emotional level. Dutschke saw Stalinism as a doctrinaire deformation of genuine Marxism which had turned into a new ‘bureaucratic' ideology of domination. He demanded a thorough-going revolution and a struggle for the renewal of socialism in the eastern bloc.
State repression creates indignation
In order to protest against the visit of the Shah of Persia in West Berlin thousands of demonstrators gathered on the streets on June 2nd 1967. The German bourgeois democratic government, which unconditionally supported the bloody dictatorial regime of the Shah, was fiercely determined to keep the demonstrations under control by police violence (using truncheons and squads to snatch demonstrators). During the violent demonstrations the student Benno Ohnesorg was murdered by a shot in the back by a plainclothes policeman (afterwards he was acquitted). This murder of a student provoked a tremendous indignation amongst the politicised youth and gave the protest movement additional dynamic. Following this state repression, discussions at a congress, which was held one week after Benno's death on June 9th 1967 on the topic "University and Democracy", revealed a growing gap between state and society. At the same time another component of the protest moved more and more into the foreground.
The movement against the war
Following the same dynamic as in the USA, demonstrations and congresses against the Vietnam war had started in 1965 and 1966. On 17/18th February 1968 an International Congress against the War in Vietnam was held in West Berlin, followed by a demonstration with some 12,000 participants. The escalation of war in the Middle East around the Six Day War in June 1967 and above all the Vietnam war brought the images of war back home. Barely 20 years after the end of WW2 the new generation, most of whom often had not experienced WW2, or only as small children, were then being confronted with a war, which unmasked the whole barbarism of the system (permanent bombardment above all of the civilian population, use of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange, massacre at My Lai: more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than during the entire second world war). The new generation was no longer willing to sacrifice its life in a new world war - therefore all over the world, above all in the USA and in Germany, more and more people demonstrated against the war in Vietnam.
However, the contradictory and confused character of the movement can be seen through a very wide spread basic idea of the time which was voiced by Dutschke in a clear manner. He and many others in the SDS believed that the US war in Vietnam, the emergency laws in Germany and Stalinists bureaucrats in the Eastern Bloc, despite of all the differences, had one thing in common - they were all elements in a world wide chain of authoritarian rule over powerless citizens. The conditions for overcoming capitalism in the rich industrial countries and the 3rd world, according to them, were different. The revolution would not be made by the working class in Europe and the USA but by the impoverished and oppressed people of the ‘periphery' of the world market. This is why so many politicised people felt attracted by the ‘anti-imperialist' theories, which praised national liberation struggles as a new revolutionary force, although in reality they were nothing but imperialist conflicts - often in the form of proxy wars in which the peasants were sacrificed on the altar of imperialism.
Even though many young people were fascinated by the so-called national liberation struggles in the 3rd world and supported the Vietcong, Russia or China in demonstrations against the war, which means they did not defend a fundamentally internationalist position, it became nevertheless tangible that the basic unease about war was increasing and that above all the new generation could not be mobilised for a new confrontation between the two blocs. The fact that the ruling class in the front line state of Germany was facing increasing difficulties to mobilise young people for a global imperialist slaughter was particularly significant.
The spiral of violence sets in
Already from 1965 there were many demonstrations against the planned emergency laws which gave the state many rights to step up militarisation and repression. The SPD, which had joined the coalition with the CDU in 1966, remained faithful to the policies it first practised in 1918/1919[1] . After the assassination of Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967 smear campaigns against the protesters, in particular against their leaders were intensified. The German mass tabloid Bild-Zeitung demanded: "Stop the terror of the young Reds now". At a pro-America demonstration organised by the Berlin Senate on February 21st 1968, participants carried slogans saying "Enemy n° 1 of the people: Rudi Dutschke". During that demonstration a person watching the demo was mistakenly taken for Rudi Dutschke; participants of the demonstration threatened to beat him up and kill him. One week after the assassination of Martin Luther King in the USA the smear campaign in Germany finally reached a peak with the assassination attempt against Rudi Dutschke on April 11th, the Thursday before Easter. Between April 11-18th, there were riots mainly directed against the printing czar Springer (the demonstrators shouted "Bild-Zeitung participated in the assassination"). Two people got killed, hundreds were injured. A spiral of violence set in. In Berlin the first Molotov-cocktails were thrown: a police agent put them at the disposal of demonstrators who were ready to commit violence. In Frankfurt the first big department store was set on fire.
Despite a march on Bonn on May 11th 1968 with more than 60,000 participants, the coalition government of the CDU-SPD hastened to adopt the emergency laws.
Whereas in France in May 68 the student demos were pushed into the background by the workers' strikes and the working class returned to the stage of history, the protests in Germany were already at a crossroads in May 68.
A wave of workers' strikes only erupted over a year later in September 1969 - not least because most of the proletarian protesters in 1968 lacked a point of reference.
While some of the protesters turned towards violent actions and others, above all student activists, flung themselves into the construction of leftist organisations with the goal of ‘better reaching the workers in the factories', many proletarian protesters rejected these options and started to withdraw.
We shall continue the 2nd part of this article [1] with the events after 1968. Weltrevolution, May 2008.
[1] How successfully the German bourgeoisie in 1918-1919 already used smear campaigns in the media and provocations in in order to present the radicals as violent terrorists and isolate them can be seen in the book by Uwe Soukup, How Benno Ohnesorg Died.
We are publishing below a series of four articles translated from the Turkish by the comrades of Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol, all dealing with the recent strike at Türk Telekom. Readers will remember that we have already published an article on this subject (the second in this series), entitled "Victory at Türk Telekom" which covered the end of the 44-day strike by 26,000 workers, which ended with a 10% wage increase. We are now able to publish the complete series of the articles published on the subject by EKS: the first was written at the beginning of the strike and analysed briefly the forces in the conflict, while the second covered the end of the strike which it considered as a victory for the workers.
The two articles that followed were published as part of a debate within EKS as to the real nature of the end of the strike: comrade Temel argues that whatever the appearances the strike was in reality a defeat, while comrade Devrim's reply returns to the original analysis of the strike and to comrade Temel's criticisms to conclude that whatever its weaknesses, the strike was on the contrary a victory in both economic and in political terms.
We think that the debate expressed in these articles is an important one for the working class as a whole. Not only do they raise general questions about what constitutes a victory for the workers and what does not, but they do so in a general context which should draw the attention of workers and communists all around the world. For most workers in the world's big industrial centres, imperialist war is an ever-present backdrop to our lives - a permanent reminder of the enormous lie of the "peace and prosperity" that we were promised after the collapse of the Eastern bloc - but it is not an immediate issue in our daily lives. For Turkish workers however, the question of war and the attitude to adopt towards war is an immediate, burning issue: the Turkish ruling class has been conducting a more or less permanent war against its own Kurdish population since the 1980s and the military operation authorised at the end of 2007 is by no means the first time that the Turkish army has conducted incursions into Northern Iraq (Kurdistan). Moreover, unlike the US or British armies fighting in Iraq the Turkish army is made up in large part of conscripts and the horror and brutality of war is a daily trauma for the workers whose sons, brothers, fathers and husbands are fighting and dying in this bloody but little reported conflict (see the report from EKS on the invasion of Iraq [4], published on our website). The attitude of the Turkish workers in struggle is thus of the greatest importance for workers and communists internationally, and we want here to comment on some of the arguments put forward in the different articles, with a view to contributing to the debate.
Temel begins by asking "...if the necessary environment for a strike to occur in Telekom was ready", and it is certainly true that revolutionaries need to have some assessment of the balance of class forces (are the workers in a more or less favorable position against the bosses for example?) when agitating in the struggle. However, the criteria for judging the strength of the strike are certainly open to question:
These questions are common to most strikes in industrialised countries today. But the most important issue in our view is the reaction of the Telekom workers to the war. Here it is necessary first of all to avoid a false debate: the Telekom workers did not strike directly against the war, nor in our view would this have been possible without a far greater degree of militancy and class consciousness than exists in the present period. We need only consider what it means for masses of workers to strike consciously against the bourgeois state's military operations: in effect, it means that the working class is calling into question the power and the right to rule of the bourgeoisie, and this can only happen in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation precisely because it poses the issue of power. In the situation in Turkey today the real question is whether workers are ready to renounce the struggle in defence of their own interests in the interests of the bourgeois war machine. We agree entirely with the reply to Temel when it says that "If there had been a spontaneous return to work in order to maintain the Telecom system in times of war, it would have been an absolute disaster. This didn't happen. In fact workers stayed on strike despite being told the media, and various members of the political class that they were acting against the national interest. This is to be applauded". That workers' should continue to defend their interests despite the war frenzy of the bourgeois media is not enough to prevent war in itself - the Turkish army invaded Kurdistan despite it - but it puts a brake on the generalised outbreak of imperialist war. It is the indispensable foundation for the development of a deeper consciousness within the class of the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeois nation and their own.
Finally, we want to express our wholehearted appreciation of and agreement with the spirit in which this debate has been and is being conducted by the comrades of EKS: "discussions of the real issues that face workers in a struggle can only add to the development of the communist organisations", and we would add, more broadly, to the development of the consciousness and self-awareness of the proletariat as a whole.
ICC
The current strike of 26.000 telecommunication workers at Türk Telecom demonstrates clearly what the real political issues are in Turkey for the working class today. While the Government tries to raise interest in the referendum, and its continual wars in the South East, the working class has posed the question very clearly. For us the real issue in Turkey today is workers' salaries.
The representatives of the bourgeoisie are very clear on this point. If anybody has missed it, Paul Doany, CEO of Türk Telekom spells it out ‘No employee can expect an increase above inflation'. What they mean by this is that they would like every employee to receive an increase below inflation, and this means that every employee receives a pay cut.
The real issue today is whether workers organised together can try to stop the continual attacks on living conditions that have taken place over the last ten years. For the communists, and for all workers this is the most important issue today.
Of course everyone expects that the capitalist papers will attack the workers. There will continue to be stories in the press like the one about the sad death of Aysel Tosun[1]. One of the things that we do find strange though is how political commentators can get so upset about one death when enthusiastically supporting the preparations for war in the South East.
What many will not be expecting is the language coming from ‘their' union leaders. Ali Akçan, President of Haber-İs[2] was quick to join the owners in condemnation of workers' acts of sabotage "This is slander. Our union has nothing to do with any of these incidents. Let them find those responsible, and we will punish them together". The strike is but a few days old, and already the unions are offering to act alongside the police in attacking militant workers. For us the issue is clear, we support the struggles of the working class to defend its living conditions, and if that means cutting a few telephone cables that means cutting a few telephone cables. Those who run to join the management in condemning workers are showing whose side they are on.
The question is whether we should find ourselves surprised by the position of ‘our' leaders. After all of the militant talk last year, the only action for coming from KESK[3] was one day of ‘not working'. The unions see their role as one of promoting social peace, and submission to the bosses. At the end of the THY[4] strike Salih Kılıç said that "I am honored to put my signature under this contract". Oğuz Satıcı, chairman of Turkish Exporters Assembly expressed the position of the capitalists perfectly "Wisdom and conscious won, Turkey got the best". We say that after a decade of defeat it is time for workers in this country to stop putting Turkey first, and to start to put their own living conditions first. When the bosses say that "Turkey got the best", they mean that the Turkish bourgeoisie got the best. And that means that the workers got screwed. Anyone who is ‘honoured' to sign the documents confirming this is a class enemy.
If workers can't trust their ‘own' trade unions who can they trust? The answer is similar to that old nationalist proverb. The only friend of the worker is another worker. Workers at Telecom must form committees to control their own strike, and not leave it in the hands of the unions, who will be ‘honoured' to sell them to the bosses. Many workers across Turkey want to struggle. The willingness of THY, and Public employees to fight was shown earlier this year. Today Telekom workers stand proudly at the head of the Turkish working class. It is up not only to them but also to all workers to make sure that they don't stand alone. We say to support Telekom strikers, all workers must fight against wage cuts in real terms at their own workplaces.
Devrim
[1] A woman who allegedly died because of the strike
[2] The Main Telecommunication Workers Union
[3] The Leftist Public Workers Union
[4] Turksih Airlines
The following article from the comrades of Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol [9], which gives an account of an important strike at Türk Telecom was originally published on our site in December 2007; we are publishing it now in the context of the debate within EKS over the strike's significance. Over and above the importance of the strike itself and the lessons to be learned from it, the EKS comrades very rightly emphasise the strike's importance within the context of the current atmosphere of rampant war-mongering nationalism, and the clear class line separating the patriotism of the Haber-İş union president and the workers' determination to defend their own living conditions. National defence and the workers' interests are not compatible!
The massive strike by over 26,000 Türk Telekom workers is over. After 44 days the strikers went back to work. At 1,100,000 working days lost it makes it the biggest strike in Turkish history after the 1991 miners strike. It is time to draw up a balance sheet of the events.
The first and most important lesson to be learned from this is that workers can protect their living conditions by struggling. Türk Telekom's original offer of 4% was well below the forecasted end of year inflation figure of 7.7%. In effect Türk Telekom was offering a pay cut to its workers.
The settlement of 10% for this year, and 6.5% plus inflation next year is certainly a massive victory. Following shortly after THY workers winning a 10% increase by only threatening to strike, it gives a clear message to all workers in Turkey today. The only way to protect salaries against inflation is by unity, and collective action.
It shows a clear way forward for all other workers and especially public employees who have been offered an insulting 2%+2% by the government. All pay rises that are less than inflation are pay cuts. In many ways the public sector is the most important sector in Turkey. Many working class families have at least one member who works for the state. A victory in that sector would be a victory for every worker in the country.
The second lesson concerns those who have been accused of committing acts of sabotage. It is positive that all employees who were dismissed in the strike have been reinstated. However, those workers who are facing charges of sabotage can only return to their jobs if they are found innocent of the charges. Unlike the management, the bosses media, and the unions we refuse to condemn workers fighting to defend their living conditions. It is important that these workers are not forgotten. How to react if workers are convicted of sabotage, and dismissed is a key question that all Telekom workers need to discuss.
The next lesson concerns the allegations of treachery. Haber-İş President, Ali Akcan was quick to claim that striking workers were not ‘traitors', and claimed that if the country needed it in case of war, the strikers would ‘do their duty'. To us it is very obvious that the working class in this country have put the interests of the nation before their own interests for far too long. The working class has paid for the states war in the South East not only through years of inflation, and austerity, but also through its children's blood. It is time to put our interests as workers first.
The final lesson concerns the entire working class. The Telekom workers struggled alone. Even while there were picket lines at workplaces the clerks in the PTT were still working. Yet the issue that the Telekom workers were struggling for, the defence of salaries from inflation concerns the entire working class. The unions lock workers into their different sectors. If Telekom workers alone won 10% what could they have won if they had linked up with PTT workers? What could they have won if they had linked up with public sector workers? What is needed is for workers to avoid being isolated in their own sectors, and to make links with other sectors. If strikers had gone directly to PTT workers, and appealed to them to join the strike, the victory could have been both greater, and quicker.
Inflation is not going to go away, the central bank has again revised its inflation forecasts. Not only will public sector workers have to struggle to defend their salaries against pay cuts, but Telekom workers will have to struggle again in the near or medium future to defend the victory won in this strike. And struggling together is the best way to do this.
EKS
When the Turkish bosses woke up on 28th of November, they realized that things weren't going as they were used to. The lines of Istanbul Stock exchange were cut off due to an accident on a building site, and as there was a strike at that point at Turkish Telekom they weren't able to send a technical observer to the building firm and thus the stock exchanges first session couldn't open. This caused Ali Bahçucav, the chairman of the foundation of stock investors, a representative of fictious capital, to raise a very hard yet a very meaningful voice. According to Bahçuvan, either the Telekom administration had to "solve the problem, or Telekom had to be nationalized again". If the Oger Group[1] wasn't even capable of dealing with problems as such today, what were they going to do when there were "serious problems" in the area of "defense" tomorrow? Thus, the other factions of the bourgeoisie started pushing Telekom capital because of the key importance of Telekom. As a result, the "unsolvable" disagreements and the "impossible" trade-union demands were settled in a meeting where "there were no winners or losers" (as the trade-union leader said) of course with the "mediation" and rupture of the Minister of Communication. After the long negotiations, Telekom managers had presented their complaints to the minister who in turn gave the trade-union bureaucrats a slap on the head. And then what? Hurriyet[2] reports in 30 November that:
"After the agreement reached at the negotiations, Communications Minister Binali Yildirim, Turk-Is (Turkish-Work) Chairman Salih Kilic, Turkish News-Work Union Chairan Ali Akcan and chairman of the Turkish Telekom Managerial and Adminstrative Committee Paul Donay ate dinner at Beykoz Trautters and Tripes Saloon."
We always need to remember that whenever the press, trade-unions, or bureaucrats of capital are in trouble, they try to reduce the matters to numbers and percentages by bringing out complicated statistics which they hope the workers won't understand. The problem started like this in the process of the Telekom strike. During the seventh round of the negotiations, the trade union and the Oger group had agreed on around twenty issues and had not agreed on about ninety issues. According to the union, the flexibility of work, subcontracts, the differences between the wages of unionized and non-unionized workers were the main problems. The trade-union portrayed those problems to the working class as an "attack" of international, foreign capital. However when examined it is easy to see that the problem is much more simple. Turk-Is[3] had always been shaped as a union by the divisions within the ruling class, that is the block in power and the mainstream bourgeois opposition. If the change in power in Turk-Is is observed, the fact that the majority of the confederation went to a pro-AKP direction while the minority has moved close to the nationalist opposition would verify this. Just before this change in power in at the general conference of the trade-union confederation, the "opposition" made up of Haber-Is[4], Petrol-Is and some other trade unions started blaming the pro-AKP trade-union for ‘submission'. Of course the bargaining behind the curtain could be interpreted as the negotiation of to what extent the nationalist trade-union bureaucrats will be liquified.
Thus it is not surprising that the pro-AKP wing took the administration right before the Telekom strike. In reality all the trade-unions in opposition (Haber-Is, Petrol-Is, Gida-Is[5]) are either organized in privatized workplaces, or workplaces that are in the process of privatization. In places where both cases are absent, those trade unions are trying to organize in sectors that have been developing recently, such as Novamed. In the first case, the trade-unions are facing the danger of losing the representative position they have with the state. As seen at Telekom, the bosses in privatized workplaces are giving the workers who quit the trade-unions certain privileges and thus are liquidizing traditional state unionism. In the second case, we can see the efforts of trade-unions connected to Turk-Is to organize, and this partially conflicts with the government policy of cheap labor in free trade zones.
Thus when certain trade-unions within Turk-Is are confronted with the possibility of being liquidized by the state, they respond by bothering and threatening the state with strikes. It could be helpful to examine the history of Turk-Is in order to understand this tendency within it.
As soon as it was founded as a trade-union confederation, Turk-Is became a product of the political struggle between the DP (Democratic Party)[6] and the CHP (Republican People's Party) and their conquest to establish their rule over the working class. In this sense, the bourgeois faction that had the majority in parliament always ended up in power within Turk-Is. In this sense Turk-Is assumed the role of the most solid Trojan horse of the dominant bourgeois ideology within the working class. What is more is that Turk-Is was created specifically for this purpose and this purpose only! Inspired to the AFL-CIO in America, Turk-Is was directly formed, funded and shaped by American imperialism. Even the "anti-imperialist" nationalists who are in the nationalist wing of Turk-Is today had said this in the past, although now obviously the situation is different (!)
All those facts show that Turk-Is was formed in order to manipulate the workers movement arising in 1950's in Turkey after the long counter revolution starting at the end of 1920's. The bi-polar imperialist struggle under the name of Cold War after the end of the Second World War required satellite countries to be shaped in a statist manner. While this was done in the name of "socialism" in Russia and it's satellites, in states directed by the US it was done under the name of "democracy". This transformation after the 1950's that pushed the Turkish state into wearing a "democratic and western" mask against the USSR was reflected in the trade-unions and in the mid fifties the heating tensions made an organ such as Turk-Is necessary for the interests of the state and of the bourgeoisie. In order to replace the previous ideological understanding which was almost a fascist corporatist ideological understanding which stated that the state represented all classes, and even that classes didn't exist in Turkey with a Western model which included the "the freedom of expression and organization", laws regarding trade unions and strikes were started to be regulated. However ironically in this period while the trade-union rights rapidly expanded, the right to strike was tightened and the structure of ‘referee' rules was changed in order to increase the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the workers.
All those changes gave birth to Turk-Is and the trade-unions that are a part of it, the trade-union confederation was born as the main weapon of the new "democratic" and anti-communist Turkey within the American imperialist block. Afterwards, Turk-Is became a loyal guard dog against the Stalinist left and trade-unions close to it in the imperialist struggle and has been the main weapon of absorbing workers struggles. Although certainly not the only examples, the 1980 coup d'etat is an important example in its striking nature. During the coup, Turk-Is supported the junta effectively, and the chairman of the union was even rewarded with being made the Minister of Work in the temporary government formed by the army! This situation changed with the "normalization" at the end of the eighties with the reappearance of the of disagreements within the different factions of the bourgeoisie. Afterwards Turk-Is started losing it's privileged position rapidly. Just like the ungrateful masters who take the guard dog home when they are scared but then kick it out of the house when they are not scared anymore, the Turkish state left Turk-Is way behind in it's calculations. Because after all, the working class had been suppressed bloodily, and with the worldwide weakening of the so called "socialist" Stalinist political tendencies and of Russian imperialism and the fact that bloody practices was added to this made the marginalization complete.
Thus Turk-Is both had to find a way to keep the working class silent in line with the interests of the state, and also try to get back its place and reestablish it's significance within the state and legitimacy among the bourgeoisie. In this direction it started to conduct a "democratic" opposition which tried to show its strength to the state by threatening to take certain actions and tried to put the workers off in the meanwhile. The tactics of Turk-Is in the Telekom strike can be traced back to this. Of course those tactics became ineffective with the workers offensive at the end of the eighties and Turk-Is fell massively in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, but this matter exceeds the limits of this articles subject. The basic point which we want to emphasize is that in cases where it is pushed away from significance, Turk-Is occasionally threatening a certain faction of the bourgeoisie with fake shows that end up in a way that it is at the expanse of workers exhaustion is a very old tactic.
Of course, we can't reach a healthy conclusion if we only judge a strike from the perspective of the bourgeoisie and its tools within the working class. Nevertheless, the Telekom strike was important not just for Telekom workers but for the entire class. This strike both strengthened the illusions of trade unions supporting workers and also imprisoned workers class needs in one sector and prevented them from spreading their struggle to the rest of the class. In reality, the question that needs to be asked is the following: when does a strike win? One has to ask if the necessary environment for a strike to occur in Telekom was ready. It is clear that even in Telekom, workers were put against each other by the union and the bosses. When the unionized workers accused workers who were outside of the union or had left the union before of selfishness, they were clearly under the impact of the trade-unions and an environment of discussion wasn't present before the strike to enable those two different "sides" to act in solidarity with each other. As a result, the trade union pointed out the workers who left it for a sound reason such as getting more wages as a target to their own class brothers and sisters.
What is more, the trade union increased the dose of chauvinism and nationalist demagogy against every attack of the bourgeois media and thus succeeded in fooling the workers again. By portraying the sale of Telekom to a foreign group as an act of "treason to the fatherland", the trade-union put nationalization in front of the interests of workers. Hence accepting at the negotiations the same 10% which was offered by the bosses before the strike was justified in the name of the fatherland. When the boss of the Haber-Is trade union shamelessly declared that "the strike was economically a defeat but politically a victory" when he was speaking in the Middle Eastern Technical University, it was this situation he had in reality admitted, and he ran away quickly following the critical questions of a few students.
And this is the situation for the workers. A strike that lasted more than a month... and which brought no improvement in living standards and only served to deepen the division within the class. When the AKP government announced a 10% wage rise at the end of the year, the situation went to it's peak and this time the trade-unions in opposition hypocritically accuse the confederation chairmanship of "being sell-outs"...
Just like the fact that communist revolutionaries need to take lessons from the victories of the working class, they need to take lessons from the defeats and have to defend them in other areas of class struggle. In order to do this, it is necessary for communists to be clear on every mistake they make and to use criticism as a weapon in every situation. Discussion is one of the most important tools for communists, just like it is for the working class in general. We need to accept that the Telekom strike did not end up in a victory in any way. The basic internal reasons for this are the following;
All this doesn't mean that we won't support strikes like this to the end. It just shows that we need to internalize that the first task of communists in strikes manipulated by trade-unions for their political goals, is to propagate an active solidarity among other workers with workers who are in the struggle in order to break trade-unionist bonds for them to obtain their interests. Only in this way can the workers start to see how empty the illusions regarding the trade unions are and where real victory lies in. For us communists, this lesson is one we need to protect and determinedly defend. In this sense, there is no doubt that the discussion created by the Telekom strike among the EKS will have a positive result.
Temel[1] Owners of the Turk Telekom company.
[2] "Liberty", a mainstream bourgeois newspaper
[3] Turk-Is, literally Turkish-Work, is the main trade union confederation in Turkey.
[4] Haber-Is, literally News-Work union is the telecommunication workers union in Turk-Is confederation and the union which was involved with the strike.
[5] Petrol-Is and Gida-Is, literally Petrol-Work and Nourishment-Work are petroleum and nourishment workers unions in Turk-Is.
[6] The old "Democratic Party" was in power in the fiftees after they beat the Republican People's Party in the elections. They were booted out of power with a coup, which resulted in the main leader of the party and prime minister Adnan Menderes being executed. The party was banned afterwards. All mainstream center-right and parliamentary Islamic right-wing parties have historical links with this party.
This article is a contribution to the debate within the EKS on the Telekom strike. It replies to the article, "Telekom: Bir Grevin Otopsisi", published in last month's Gece Notları, which in turn was a reply to a previous article "Türk Telekom'da Zafer [9] ".
In last month's ‘Gece Notları', Temel wrote that the strike at Türk Telekom ‘did not end up in a victory in any way'. This in itself was a response to the front page headline of February's which proclaimed ‘Victory at Turk Telekom' . Gece Notları said at the time that the strike was a victory, and maintains that position today. However, we are open to discussion on this issue, and would welcome contributions from readers on the subject.
Temel characterises the strike as a failure first, but not primarily on an economic basis. He claims that 10% was offered by the bosses before the strike, and was accepted at the end of it. This, however, is not exactly the case. The management's offer before the strike was 4%. The final settlement was 10% for this year, and 6.5% plus inflation next year. These are very different figures.
What Temel is referring to is reports in the press that indicated that Türk Telekom was willing to settle at 10%. This could be true, but it doesn't obscure the fact that what was on offer was 4%. Businesses like Türk Telekom make economic plans. They budget for what they think is possible. That does not mean that they would not have liked the settlement to be lower than it was. Of course the bosses always want the workers to get as small wage rises as possible. If they could have got away with four they would have been very happy. They couldn't, and in our opinion the strike is the reason that they couldn't.
Of course nobody knows exactly what went on in the negotiations between Paul Doney, and Salih Kiliç, but from what was published our perspective bears out.
Temel then goes on to talk about three ‘basic internal' reasons why he feels the strike was a failure. The first is that the ‘strike deepened the divisions within the working class', and created mistrust between unionised and non-unionised workers. As Temel says these are divisions created by the ruling class. However absurd it may seem, it is not uncommon in this country to have workers in a company working where others are striking. The most important way for workers to develop a struggle is to generalise it to include other workers. We can be reasonably sure that the unions have little or no interest in doing that, and the Telekom strike bears that out.
However, breaking down those barriers between different groups of workers is not in any way easy. The way that it can be done is by directly appealing to other workers for solidarity action. Of course there are many who will tell us that we have to make the union leaders act. We have seen recently what their ‘action' means, a sort of token two hour strike where very few even took strike action. If workers are to take these kind of actions. They need to take the initiative for themselves.
This is much easier said than done. Workers are tied to the unions not only organisationally, but also ideologically. The communist left always advocates open mass meetings for workers of all unions and none where workers can discuss how to control their own struggles. This in itself though counts for very little though if the meeting decides to do exactly what the union bosses say.
Capitalism creates divisions between workers for its own purposes. The unions play a role in maintaining this. In this strike workers failed to break out of sectionalism and spread their strike to other workers. But, did we really expect anything different? Of course we didn't.
Most strikes are isolated in their own sectors. That doesn't mean that it is the strike that deepens the divisions between striking, and non-striking workers. It means that the working class is not strong enough to overcome those divisions.
The second point in his list is that the Telekom strike forced workers to national interests in front of their own class interests. I think that this is a strange reading of the situation. In the mass hysteria about Martyrs, and Iraq that was the background to the strike, the Telekom workers didn't stand out in any way. Personally, I remember school children as being amongst the most vocal in the defence of national interests. The Telekom workers were no more, nor no less nationalistic than the vast majority of the working class in this country. Yes, nationalistic comments were made by Telekom workers, but they were made by the majority of workers at the time.
If there had been a spontaneous return to work in order to maintain the Telecom system in times of war, it would have been an absolute disaster. This didn't happen. In fact workers stayed on strike despite being told the media, and various members of the political class that they were acting against the national interest. This is to be applauded.
Yes, workers proclaimed their patriotism. Yes, workers have been agitated against foreign capital. Is this any different from other sectors of workers in Turkey? Are there sectors of workers who are rejecting both Turkish, and foreign bosses and proclaiming internationalism? Unfortunately not.
The strike did not dissolve in a wave of national feeling. That would have been a huge defeat. What happened wasn't.
Temel's third point is that the strike wasn't sufficiently well prepared. Of course it wasn't, but then this is usually the case in strikes. In addition in this point he argued that it has dissipated the willingness to struggle within the working class, and strengthened trade unionist illusions. This is something that is difficult to prove.
As for the preparation though, the working class is not politically strong enough to prepare for strikes effectively. Most militant sectors of the working class are dominated by ‘trade unionist illusions'. In our opinion, the only thing that will break the mass of workers from the unions is by coming into conflict with them during struggles. Isolated militants, or even isolated small groups of militants may be won over in advance, but in the present situation at the start of every struggle the majority of the most workers will have illusions in the unions. How then are we supposed to prepare the strike in advance. The only ones who are capable of preparing a strike in advance are the unions. And here we are in agreement with Temel that the unions do not act in the interests of the working class.
The working class is not currently strong enough to assert its own interests clearly. It can, through struggle, break away from the ideology of foreign classes and begin to act for itself. It is not strong enough to do that yet, and therefore can not prepare itself sufficiently for strikes.
As for the suggestion that this strike has led to the will of the working class to struggle being potentially wasted, we will see what happens.
If there is a large movement against pensions reform, it will support our contention that the Telekom strike has increased the will of the class to struggle. Illusions in the trade unions are strong at the moment. We don't expect them to break over night, and we don't expect them to break without struggle. If it encourages workers to struggle, then ultimately it leads them into conflict with the trade unions. This remains to be seen.
With Temel's final paragraph though we are in absolute agreement. We support all workers strikes in defence of class interests. We need to be aware of how the trade unions will manipulate strikes. We need to argue for solidarity between different sectors of workers. And discussions of the real issues that face workers in a struggle can only add to the development of the communist organisations. This in a real practical sense it was unites us, and we look forward to continuing this discussion, and discussions that develop from other workers struggles such as the current pensions dispute.
Devrim
In the first part of this article, we looked at the criticisms which Rosa Luxemburg made of the early policies of the Bolshevik party after the October revolution, emphasising that Luxemburg always made these criticisms from a standpoint of unflinching support for the Russian revolution. In this second part, we look at some of the debates that arose inside the Bolshevik party, which was faced with a totally unprecedented historical situation: the establishment of a proletarian power at the level of an entire country. These debates expressed the fact that, far from being the monolith portrayed both in ‘anti-Bolshevik' and Stalinist mythology, the Bolshevik party in 1918 was still very much a living organism of the proletariat.
Almost simultaneously with Luxemburg's criticisms, the first important disagreements arose within the Bolshevik party about the direction of the revolution. This debate - provoked in the first instance by the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but subsequently moving on to the forms and methods of proletarian power - was carried out in a completely open manner within the party. It certainly gave rise to sharp polemics between its protagonists, but there was no question of minority positions being silenced. Indeed, for a while, the "minority" position on the signing of the treaty looked as if it might become a majority. At this stage, the groupings who defended different positions took the form of tendencies rather than clearly defined fractions resisting a course of degeneration. In other words, they had come together on a temporary basis to express particular orientations within a party that, despite the implications of its entanglement with the state, was still very much the living, breathing vanguard organism of the class.
Nevertheless, there are those who have argued that the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was already the beginning of the end, if not the end, for the Bolsheviks as a proletarian party, already marking their effective abandonment of the world revolution (see the book by Guy Sabatier, Brest-Litovsk, coup d'arrêt à la révolution, Spartacus editions, Paris) And to some extent the tendency within the party that most vociferously opposed the treaty - the Left Communist group around Bukharin, Piatakov, Ossinski and others - feared that a fundamental principle was being breached when the representatives of the Soviet power signed a highly disadvantageous "peace" agreement with a rapacious German imperialism rather than committing itself to a "revolutionary war" against it. Their views were not dissimilar to those of Rosa Luxemburg, although her main concern was that the signing of the treaty would retard the outbreak of the revolution in Germany and the West.
In any case, a simple comparison between the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918 and the Rapallo treaty four years later shows the essential difference between a principled retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, and a real marketing of principles which paved the way towards Soviet Russia being integrated into the world concert of capitalist nations. In the first case, the treaty was debated openly in the party and the Soviets; there was no attempt to hide the draconian terms imposed by Germany; and the whole framework of the debate was determined by the interests of the world revolution, rather than the "national" interests of Russia. Rapallo, by contrast, was signed in secret, and its terms even involved the Soviet state supplying the German army with the very weapons that would be used to defend capitalist order against the German workers in 1923.
The essential debate around Brest-Litovsk was a strategic one: did the Soviet power, master of a country that had already been exhausted by four years of imperialist slaughter, have the economic and military means at its disposal to launch an immediate "revolutionary war" against Germany, even the kind of partisan warfare that Bukharin and other Left Communists seemed to favour? And secondly, would the signing of the treaty seriously delay the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, whether through the "capitulationist" message it sent out to the world proletariat, or more concretely through providing German imperialism with a life line in the East? On both counts, it seems to us, as it did to Bilan in the 1930s, that Lenin was correct to argue that what the Soviet power needed above all was a breathing space in which to regroup its forces - not to develop as a "national" power but so that it could make a better contribution to the world revolution than by going down in heroic defeat (as it did, for example, by helping to found the Third International in 1919). And it could even be said that this retreat, far from delaying the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, helped to hasten it: freed from the war on the Eastern front, German imperialism then attempted to launch a new offensive in the west, and this in turn provoked the mutinies in the navy and army that sparked off the German revolution in November 1918.
If there is a principle to be drawn from the signing of the treaty, it is the one drawn by Bilan: "The positions of the fraction led by Bukharin, according to which the function of the proletarian state was to liberate the workers of other countries through a ‘revolutionary war', are in contradiction with the very nature of the proletarian revolution and the historic role of the proletariat". In contrast to the bourgeois revolution, which could indeed be exported by military means, the proletarian revolution depends on the conscious struggle of the proletariat of each country against its own bourgeoisie: "The victory of a proletarian state against a capitalist state (in the territorial sense of the word) in no way means a victory of the world revolution" (‘Parti-Etat-Internationale: L'Etat prolétarien', Bilan no.18, April-May 1935). This position had already been confirmed in 1920, with the debacle around the attempt to export revolution to Poland on the bayonets of the Red Army.
The position of the Left Communists on Brest-Litovsk - especially in the "death rather than dishonour" way that Bukharin defended it - was not therefore their strong point, even if it is the position that they are best remembered for. With the conclusion of "peace" with Germany, and the suppression of the first wave of bourgeois resistance and sabotage that arose in the immediate aftermath of the October insurrection, the focus of the debate shifted. The breathing space having been won, the priority was to determine how the Soviet power should set about consolidating itself until the world revolution had moved on to its next stage.
In April 918, Lenin made a speech to the Bolshevik central committee that was subsequently published as The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Power. In this text he argues that the primary task facing the revolution - assuming, as he and many others did, that the worst moments of the civil war were behind rather than in front of the new power - was the task of "administration", of rebuilding a shattered economy, of imposing labour discipline and raising productivity, of ensuring strict accounting and control in the process of production and distribution, of eliminating corruption and waste, and, perhaps above all, of struggling against the ubiquitous petty bourgeois mentality that he saw as the ransom paid to the huge weight of the peasantry and of semi-mediaeval survivals.
The most controversial parts of this text concern the methods that Lenin advocated to achieve these aims. He did not hesitate to make use of what he himself termed bourgeois methods, including: the use of bourgeois technical specialists (which he described as a "step backwards" from the principles of the Commune, since in order to "win them over" to the Soviet power they had to be bribed with wages much higher than that of the average worker); the recourse to piecework; the adoption of the "Taylor system" which Lenin saw as "a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc" (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 27, p 259). Most controversial of all, Lenin, reacted against a certain degree of "anarchy" at the level of the workplace especially where the factory committee movement was strong and was disputing control of the plants with the old or the new management. He therefore called for "One man management", insisting that "unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry" (p269). This latter passage is often quoted by anarchists and councilists who are keen to show that Lenin was the precursor of Stalin. But it must be read in the proper context: Lenin's advocacy of "individual dictatorship" in management did not at all preclude the extensive development of democratic discussions and decision-making about overall policy at mass meetings; and the stronger the class consciousness of the workers, the more this subordination to the "manager" during the actual work process would be "something like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra".(ibid)
Nevertheless, the whole orientation of this speech alarmed the Left Communists, particularly as it was accompanied by a push to curb the power of the factory committees at shop-floor level and to incorporate them into the more pliant trade union apparatus.
The Left Communist group, which was extremely influential both in the Petrograd and Moscow regions, had established its own journal, Kommunist. Here it published two principal polemics with the approach contained in Lenin's speech: the group's "Theses on the Current Situation" (published by Critique, Glasgow, as a pamphlet in 1977), and Ossinski's article "On the construction of socialism".
The first document shows that this group was by no means animated by a spirit of "petty bourgeois childishness" as Lenin was to claim. The approach is profoundly serious, beginning by trying to analyse the balance of forces between the classes in the aftermath of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Certainly, this reveals the weak side of the group's analyses: it both clings to the view that the treaty has dealt a serious blow to the prospects of revolution, while at the same time predicting that "during spring and summer the collapse of the imperialist system must begin" - a piece of fortune-telling that Lenin rightly lambasts in his reply to this document. This contradictory stance is a direct product of the false assumptions the Lefts had made during the debate over the treaty.
The strong side of the document is its critique of the use of bourgeois methods by the new Soviet power. Here it must be said that the text is not rigidly doctrinaire: it accepts that bourgeois technical specialists will have to be used by the proletarian dictatorship, and does not rule out the possibility of establishing trade relations with capitalist powers, although it does warn against the danger of "diplomatic manoeuvering on the part of the Russian state among the imperialist powers", including political and military alliances. And it also warned that such policies on the international level would inevitably be accompanied by concessions to both international and "native" capital within Russia itself. These dangers were to become particularly concrete with the retreat of the revolutionary wave after 1921. But the most immediately relevant aspect of the Lefts' criticisms concerned the danger of abandoning the principles of the commune state in the Soviets, in the army, and in the factories:
"A policy of directing enterprises on the principle of wide participation of capitalists and semi-bureaucratic centralisation naturally goes with a labour policy directed at the establishment among the workers of discipline disguised as ‘self-discipline', the introduction of labour responsibility for the workers (a project of this nature has been put forward by the right Bolsheviks(, piecework, lengthening of the working day, etc).
The form of state control of enterprises must develop in the direction of bureaucratic centralisation, of rule by various commissars, of deprivation of independence from local Soviets and of rejection in practise of the type of ‘Commune state' ruled from below...
In the field of military policy there must appear, and can in fact be noted already, a deviation towards the re-establishment of nationwide (including the bourgeoisie) military service...With the setting up of army cadres for whose training and leadership officers are necessary, the task of creating a proletarian officer corps through broad and planned organisation of appropriate schools and courses is being lost from sight. In this way in practise the old officer corps and command structures of the Czarist generals is being reconstituted" (‘Theses...').
Here the Left Communists were discerning worrying trends that were beginning to appear within the new Soviet regime, and which were to be rapidly accelerated in the ensuing period of War Communism. They were particularly concerned that if the party identified itself with these trends, it would eventually be forced to confront the workers as a hostile force: "The introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist leadership in production cannot essentially increase the productivity of labour, but it will lower the class autonomy, activity and degree of organisation of the proletariat. It threatens the enslavement of the working class, and arouses the dissatisfaction both of the backward sections and of the vanguard of the proletariat. To carry this system through with the sharp class hatred prevailing in the working class against the ‘capitalists and saboteurs', the communist party would have to draw its support from the petty bourgeoisie against the workers and therefore put an end to itself as the party of the proletariat" (ibid).
The final outcome of such an involution, for the Lefts, was the degeneration of the proletarian power into a system of state capitalism:
"In place of a transition from partial nationalisation to general socialisation of big industry, agreements with ‘captains of industry' must lead to the formation of large trusts led by them and embracing the basic branches of industry, which may with external help take the form of state enterprises. Such a system of organisation of production gives a base for evolution in the direction of state capitalism and is a transitional stage towards it" (ibid).
At the end of the Theses, the Left Communists put forward their own proposals for keeping the revolution on the right path: continuation of the offensive against the bourgeois political counter-revolution and capitalist property; strict control over bourgeois industrial and military specialists; support for the struggle of the poor peasants in the countryside; and, most importantly, for the workers, "Not the introduction of piece-work and the lengthening of the working day, which in circumstances of rising unemployment are senseless, but the introduction by local economic councils and trade unions of standards of manufacture and shortening of the working day with an increase in the number of shifts and broad organisation of productive social labour.
The granting of broad independence to local Soviets and not the checking of their activities by commissars sent by the central power. Soviet power and the party of the proletariat must seek support in the class autonomy of the broad masses, to the development of which all efforts must be directed". Finally, the Lefts defined their own role: "They define their attitude to the Soviet power as a position of universal support for that power in the event of necessity - by means of participation in it...This participation is possible only on the basis of a definite political programme, which would prevent the deviation of the Soviet power and the party majority onto the fateful path of petty bourgeois politics. In the event of such a deviation, the left wing of the party will have to take the position of an active and responsible proletarian opposition".
A number of important theoretical weaknesses can be discerned in these passages. One is a tendency to confuse the total nationalisation of the economy by the Soviet state as being identical with a real process of socialisation - ie as already part of the construction of a socialist society. In his reply to the Theses, ‘Left wing childishness and the petty bourgeois mentality' (May 1918, CW, vol 27), Lenin pounces on this confusion. To the statement in the Theses that "the systematic use of the remaining means of production is conceivable only if a most determined policy of socialisation is pursued", Lenin replies: "One may or may not be determined on the question of nationalisation or confiscation, but the whole point is that even the greatest possible ‘determination' in the world is not enough to pass from nationalisation and confiscation to socialisation. The misfortune of our ‘Lefts' is that by their naïve, childish combination of words they reveal their utter failure to understand the crux of the question, the crux of the ‘present situation'...Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by ‘determination' alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability" (p333-4). Here Lenin is able to show that there is a difference in quality between mere expropriation of the bourgeoisie (especially when this takes the form of statification) and the real construction of new social relations. The Lefts' weakness on this point was to lead many of them into confusing the almost complete statification of property and even distribution that took place during the War Communism period with authentic communism: as we have shown, Bukharin in particular developed this confusion into an elaborate theory in his Economics of the Transformation Period (see International Review no.96). Lenin, by contrast, is much more realistic about the possibility of the besieged, depleted Russian Soviet power taking real steps towards socialism in the absence of the world revolution.
This weakness also prevents the Lefts from seeing with full clarity where the main danger of counter-revolution comes from. For them, "state capitalism" is identified as a central danger, it is true, but this is seen rather as an expression of an even greater danger: that the party will end up deviating towards "petty bourgeois politics", that it will line up with the interests of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat. This was a partial reflection of reality: the post-insurrectionary status quo was indeed one in which the victorious proletariat found itself confronting not only the fury of the old ruling classes, but also the dead weight of the vast peasant masses who had their own reasons for resisting the further advance of the revolutionary process. But the weight of these social strata made itself felt on the proletariat above all through the organism of the state, which in the interests of preserving the social status quo was tending to become an autonomous power in its own right. Like most of the revolutionaries of their day, the Lefts identified "state capitalism" with a system of state control that ran the economy in the interests either of the big bourgeoisie, or the petty bourgeoisie; they couldn't yet envisage the rise of a state capitalism which had effectively crushed these classes and still operated on an entirely capitalist basis.
As we have seen, Lenin's reply to the Lefts, ‘Left wing Childishness', hits the group on its weak points: their confusions about the implications of Brest-Litovsk, their tendency to confound nationalisation with socialisation. But Lenin in turn fell into a profound error when he began to laud state capitalism as a necessary step forward for backward Russia, indeed as the foundation stone of socialism. Lenin had already outlined this view in a speech delivered to the executive committee of the Soviets at the end of April. Here he took issue with the best intuition of the Left Communists - the danger of an evolution towards state capitalism - and went off in entirely the wrong direction:
"When I read these references to such enemies in the newspaper of the Left Communists, I ask: what has happened to these people that fragments of book-learning can make them forget reality? Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory, How is it that they cannot see that it is the petty proprietor, small capital, that is our enemy? How can they regard state capitalism as the chief enemy? They ought not to forget that in the transition from capitalism to socialism our chief enemy is the petty bourgeoisie, its habits and customs, its economic position...
What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism was established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book-learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.
I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would be easy, would be within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralised, calculated, controlled and socialised, and that is exactly what we lack; we are threatened by the element of petty bourgeois slovenliness, which more than anything else has been developed by the whole history of Russia and her economy... " (Works, 27, p293-4).
There is in this discourse a strong element of revolutionary honesty, of warning against any utopian schemes for rapidly building socialism in a Russia which has hardly dragged itself out of the Middle Ages, and which does not yet enjoy the direct assistance of the world proletariat. But there is also a serious mistake, which has been verified by the whole history of the 20th century. State capitalism is not an organic step towards socialism. In fact it represents capitalism's last form of defence against the collapse of its system and the emergence of communism. The communist revolution is the dialectical negation of state capitalism. Lenin's arguments, on the other hand, betray the vestiges of the old social democratic idea that capitalism was evolving peacefully towards socialism. Certainly Lenin rejected the idea that the transition to socialism could begin without the political destruction of the capitalist state, but what he forgets is that the new society can only emerge through a constant and conscious struggle by the proletariat to supplant the blind laws of capital and create new social relations founded on production for use. The "centralisation" of the capitalist economic structure by the state - even a Soviet state - does not do away with the laws of capital, with the domination of dead labour over living labour. This is why the Lefts were correct to say, as in Ossinski's oft-quoted remarks, that "If the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour, no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the Soviet power; but the Soviet power will then be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (eg the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up - state capitalism" ("On the construction of socialism", Kommunist 2, April 1918). In short, living labour can only impose its interests over those of dead labour through its own efforts, through its very struggle to take direct control over both the state and the means of production and distribution. Lenin was wrong to see this as a proof of the petty bourgeois, anarchist approach of the Lefts. The Lefts unlike the anarchists, were not opposed to centralisation. Although they were in favour of the initiative of local factory committees and Soviets, they were for the centralisation of these bodies in higher economic and political councils. What they saw, however, was that there was no choice between two ways of building the new society - the way of proletarian centralisation and the way of bureaucratic centralisation. The latter could only lead in a different direction altogether, and would inevitably culminate in a confrontation between the working class and a power which, even though born out of the revolution, had increasingly estranged itself from it.
This was a general truth, applicable to all phases of the revolutionary process. But the criticisms of the Left Communists also had a more immediate relevance. As we wrote in our study of the Russian communist left in International Review no.8.
"Kommunist's defence of factory committees, Soviets and working class self-activity was important not because it provided a solution to the economic problems facing Russia, still less a formula for the ‘immediate construction of communism' in Russia; the Lefts explicitly stated that ‘socialism cannot be put into operation in one country and a backward one at that' (cited by L Schapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, 1955, p137). The imposition of labour discipline by the state, the incorporation of the proletariat's autonomous organs into the sate apparatus, were above all blows against the political domination of the Russian working class. As the ICC has often pointed out, the political power of the class is the only real guarantee of the successful outcome of the revolution. And this political power can only be exercised by the mass organs of the class - by its factory committees and assemblies, its Soviets, its militias. In undermining the authority of these organs, the policies of the Bolshevik leadership were posing a grave threat to the revolution itself. The danger signals so perceptively observed by the Left Communists in the early months of the revolution were to become even more serious during the ensuing Civil War period".
***
In the immediate aftermath of the October insurrection, when the Soviet government was being formed, Lenin had a momentary hesitation before accepting his post as chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars. His political intuition told him that this would put a brake on is capacity to act in the vanguard of the vanguard - to be on the left of the revolutionary party, as he had been so clearly between April and October 1917. The position that Lenin adopted against the Lefts in 1918, though still firmly within the parameters of a living proletarian party, already reflected the pressures of state power on the Bolsheviks; interests of state, of the national economy, of the defence of the status quo, had already begun to conflict with the interests of the workers. In this sense there is a certain continuity between Lenin's false arguments against the Lefts in 1918, and his polemic against the international communist left after 1920, which he also accused of infantilism and anarchism. But in 1918 the world revolution was still in the ascendant, and had it extended beyond Russia, it would have been far easier to correct its early mistakes. CDW
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/08/08/germany-1968-part2
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/may-68-germany
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/504/may-68
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2008/05/turkey-iraq
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/turkey
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/enternasyonalist-komunist-sol
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/turk-telekom-strike
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/forum
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/16/state-capitalism