History of US foreign policy since World War II

The world has come a long way since the collapse of the bipolar division of the world that characterized the 45-year period of the Cold War. The era of peace, prosperity and democracy that the world bourgeoisie promised with the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 has of course never materialized. Indeed the decomposition of capitalist society, which was a consequence of the stalemate in class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie after two decades of open economic crisis and triggered the collapse of Stalinism, has relentlessly spiraled deeper and deeper into chaos, violence, death and destruction, as humanity is brought closer and closer to a future of barbarism. At the time of the writing of this article, President George W. Bush has just announced that the United States was ready to invade Iraq, with or without international support, even in the face of a failure to get a Security Council sanction for its military action. The breach between Washington and the capitals of major European countries, and even China, on the question of this imminent war is palpable. It is particularly appropriate at this conjuncture to examine the roots of American imperialist policy since the end of World War II, so as to better understand the current situation.

The dominant position of American imperialism at the end of World War II

As the second imperialist world war drew to a close in 1945, the global imperialist terrain had been vastly altered. “Before World War II there were six great powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States. By the end of the war, the United States stood alone, easily the most powerful nation in the world, its power greatly increased by its mobilization and war effort, its rivals defeated, and its allies exhausted” (D.S. Painter, Encyclopedia of US Foreign Policy, p.273). The imperialist war “destroyed the old balance of power, leaving Germany and Japan crushed and impotent and reducing Great Britain and France to second or even third-rate powers” (George C. Herring, Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p. 112).

During the war the US, with over 12 million men under arms, had doubled its Gross National Product, and by the end of the war it accounted for “half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and almost all of its financial reserves. The United States held the lead in a wide range of technologies essential to modern warfare and economic prosperity. Possession of extensive domestic oil supplies and control over access to the vast oil reserves of Latin America and the Middle East contributed to the US position of global dominance” (Painter, op. cit). America possessed the world’s most powerful military. Its Navy dominated the seas, its air forces the skies, its army occupied Japan, and part of Germany, and it enjoyed a global monopoly on atomic weapons, which it had shown at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that it would not shrink from using to advance its imperialist interests. American strength was favoured by advantages accruing from America’s relative geographic isolation. Distant from the epicentre of both world wars, the American homeland had suffered none of the massive destruction of the means of production that the European nations had experienced, and its civilian population had been spared the terror of air raids, bombardments, deportations, and concentration camps that led to the death of millions of non-combatants in Europe (more than 20 million civilians in Russia alone).

Russia, devastated by the war, suffered perhaps 27 million military and civilian deaths, and a massive destruction of its manufacturing capacity, its agriculture and mining resources, and its transport infrastructure. It had an economy only one-fourth the size of the US. However, it benefited greatly from the total destruction of Germany and Japan, both of whom had historically checked Russian expansion in the west and east respectively. Great Britain was completely drained by six years of war mobilization. It had lost a quarter of its pre-war wealth, was deeply in debt, and “was in danger of slipping from the ranks of the great powers” (ibid). France, defeated easily early in the war, damaged by German occupation, and divided by collaboration with Germany occupation forces “no longer counted as a great power” (ibid).

Even before the end of the war the American bourgeoisie was already preparing for the formation of a military bloc for the anticipated future confrontation with Stalinist Russia. For example, some bourgeois commentators (Painter, Herring) have argued that the civil war in Greece in 1944 was a precursor of the future US-Russian confrontation. This preoccupation with a future confrontation with Russian imperialism could be seen in the bickering and delays over the Allied invasion of Europe to relieve pressure on Russia by opening a second front in the west. Originally Roosevelt promised an invasion in 1942, or early 1943, but it didn’t come until June 1944. The Russians complained that the Allies were “deliberately holding back assistance to weaken the Soviet Union, thus allowing themselves to dictate the terms of the peace” (Herring, op cit, p. 112). The same preoccupation also explains the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945, even as that country sent out feelers for a negotiated surrender, which was designed a) to win the war before Russian imperialism could enter the war in the East, and stake a claim for territory and influence in the region, and b) to give a warning to the Russians as to the true scale of American military might as the post war era began to dawn.

However, if the US anticipated confrontation with Moscow in the post-war era, it would be wrong to imply that they understood completely, or accurately, the precise contours of that competition, or Moscow’s imperialist designs. Roosevelt in particular seemed to cling to outdated, 19th century conceptions of imperialist spheres of influence, and hoped for Russian cooperation in building a new world order in the post war period, with Moscow in a subordinate role (Painter, op. cit., p.277). In this sense, Roosevelt apparently believed that granting Stalin a buffer zone in Eastern Europe to provide safeguard against its historic German adversary would satisfy Russia’s imperialist appetites. However, even at Yalta where much of this framework was laid out there were disputes over British and American participation in the determination of the future of the Eastern European nations, including especially Poland.

In the 18 months after the end of the war, President Truman confronted a more alarming picture of Russian expansionism. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had already been reabsorbed by Russia by the end of the war; puppet regimes had been established in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria and in the part of Germany controlled by Russian forces. In 1946, Russia delayed its withdrawal from Iran, supported dissident forces there, and tried to extract oil concessions. Pressure was put on Turkey to grant increased Russian access to the Black Sea and Stalinist guerrillas resumed their civil war in Greece after disputed elections. And at the United Nations, Moscow rejected an American plan on the control of atomic weapons, which would have granted the US the right to maintain its nuclear monopoly, thus signaling its own plans to join the nuclear arms race.

In February, 1946, George Keenan, a young State Department expert stationed in Moscow, drafted his famous “long telegram” which presented a view of Russia as an “intractable” foe, bent on an expansionist policy to spread its power and influence, which became the basis of American Cold War policy. The alarm sounded by Keenan seemed to be confirmed by Moscow’s growing influence throughout the world. Stalinist parties in France, Italy, Greece and Vietnam seemed posed to take power. European nations faced immense pressure to de-colonise their pre-war empires, particularly the Near East and Asia. The Truman administration embraced a strategy of containment to block any further spread of Russian power.

The containment of “communism”

In the initial aftermath of the war, the primary strategic goal of American imperialism was the defence of Europe, to prevent any nations beyond those already ceded to Russian imperialism at Yalta from falling to Stalinism. The doctrine was called “containment,” and it was designed to resist the further spread of Russia imperialism’s tentacles in Europe and the Near East. This doctrine emerged as a counter measure to Russian imperialism’s post war offensive. Beginning in 1945/46, Russian imperialism aggressively staked imperialist claims in two theatres of traditional Russian interests in Eastern Europe, and the Near East that had alarmed Washington. In Poland, Moscow disregarded Yalta’s guarantee of “free” elections and imposed a puppet regime, the civil war in Greece was rekindled, pressures were brought to bear on Turkey, and Moscow refused to withdraw its troops from northern Iran. At the same time, Germany and Western Europe remained a shambles, with efforts to begin reconstruction and to negotiate to formally settle the war at a standstill due to big power bickering, while the Stalinist parties enjoyed tremendous influence in the devastated countries of Western Europe, especially France and Italy. Defeated Germany was another focal point for confrontation: Russian imperialism demanded reparations and guarantees that a reconstructed Germany would never again pose a threat.

In order to contain the spread of Russian “communism” the Truman administration responded in 1946 by supporting the Iranian regime against Russia, assuming previous British responsibilities in the eastern Mediterranean by providing massive military aid to Turkey and Greece in early 1947, and by initiating the Marshall Plan in June 1947 to begin the reconstruction of Western Europe. While it is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about the nature and mechanisms involved in the economic revitalization of Western Europe, it is important to understand that economic assistance was a critical factor in combating Russian influence. Economic assistance was supplemented by a policy of fostering pro-Western (i.e. pro-Washington) institutions and organizations, creating anti-Communist trade unions and political organizations, with AFL[1] operatives working hand in glove with the CIA to make Western Europe safe for American capitalism. The Force Ouvrière trade union in France and the left-wing New Statesman review in Britain are two prominent examples of American gold being showered upon non-communists in post war Europe. “US assistance allowed moderate governments to devote massive resources to reconstruction and to expand their countries’ exports without imposing politically unacceptable and socially divisive austerity programs that would have been necessary without US aid. US assistance also helped counteract what US leaders saw as a dangerous drift away from free enterprise and toward collectivism. By favoring some policies and opposing others the United States not only influenced how European and Japanese elites defined their own interests but also altered the internal balance of power among the decision-making groups. Thus US aid policies facilitated the ascendancy of centrist parties, such as the Christian Democrats in West Germany and Italy and the more conservative Liberal Democratic Party in Japan” (Painter, op cit, p. 278)

The economic revitalization of Western Europe was followed quickly by the foundation of the NATO alliance, which in turn prompted the formation of the Warsaw Pact, and hence set the strategic confrontation that would prevail in Europe until the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s. Despite the fact that both military pacts were supposed to be mutual security alliances, each was in fact totally dominated by the bloc leader.

The creation of a bipolar world order

Despite the confrontations described above, the creation of the bipolar imperialist world order that characterized the Cold War did not emerge instantaneously with the end of World War II. While the US was clearly the dominant leader, France, Great Britain, and other European powers still had illusions of independence and power. While American policy makers talked privately of creating a new empire under their control, in public they maintained the fiction of mutual co-operation and partnership with Western Europe. For example, four power summits, with the heads of state of the US, Russia, Britain and France in attendance continued throughout the 1950s, eventually shriveling into nothingness as American imperialism consolidated its dominance. From the 1960s until the end of the Cold War, the summits were limited just to the US and Russia, with the European “partners” often totally excluded even from consultation in advance of the meetings.

After the war Great Britain was the world’s third greatest power – a distant third at that – but in the early days of the Cold War, there was a tendency to substantially overestimate British capabilities. There was still a remnant of US imperialist rivalry with Britain, and even perhaps a tendency to want to use Russia to counter balance the British, while at the same time a belief that Britain could be counted upon to hold the line in Europe against Russian expansionism. In this sense responsibility for blocking Russia in Greece was handed over to the British as the predominant European power in the eastern Mediterranean. However, this led to a rude awakening in 1947, when the British had to call the US to come to the rescue. Thus it took some time for the US to see more clearly the precise role they would have to play in Europe, and for the bipolar division of the world to occur.

Despite their enormous military and economic importance, the European countries were dragged kicking and screaming into submission to the will of their imperialist master. Pressure was put on reluctant European powers to give up their colonies in Africa and Asia, in part to strip them of the vestiges of their past imperialist glories, in part to counter Russian inroads in Africa and Asia, and in part to give American imperialism more opportunity to exert influence in the former colonies. This of course did not stop the Europeans from trying to convince the Americans to pursue mutually agreeable policy orientations, as for example when the British tried to get the Americans to support their policy towards Egypt’s Nasser in 1956. French and British imperialism, acting in concert with the Israelis, attempted the last overt act of independent imperialist initiative by playing their own card in the Suez Crisis of 1956, but the US showed the British that they would not allow themselves to be used. Britain was given a lesson that it could not presume to negotiate from a position of American strength, and incurred a swift disciplinary intervention by the US. France, however, stubbornly tried to maintain the illusion of its independence of American domination by withdrawing its forces from NATO command in 1966, and insisting that any NATO offices be removed from French territory by 1967.

The unity and continuity in American imperialist policy during the Cold War

Isolationism as a serious political current within the American ruling class was completely neutralized by the events at Pearl Harbor in 1941, which were used by Roosevelt to force isolationists, as well as pro-German elements within the American bourgeoisie, to abandon their positions. Since World War II isolationist viewpoints within the bourgeoisie have essentially been confined to elements of the fringe right and are not a serious factor in foreign policy formulation. The Cold War against Russian imperialism was clearly a unified policy of the bourgeoisie. Whatever divergences that appeared to surface were largely window dressing for the democratic charade, with the exception of the divergences over the Vietnam War after 1968, which will be discussed in the next article in this series. The Cold War began under Truman, the Democrat who came to power with the death of Roosevelt in 1945. It was Truman who dropped the atomic bomb, undertook efforts to block Russian imperialism in Europe and the Near East, introduced the Marshall Plan, initiated the Berlin airlift, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and committed American troops to war in Korea.

In the 1952 election campaign, conservative Republicans, it is true, criticized Truman’s policy of containment, as a concession to “communism,” a form of appeasement that tacitly or explicitly accepted Russian domination of countries already under their influence or control and only opposed the spread of Russian imperialism to new countries. Instead these conservative elements called for “rollback,” an active policy of pushing back Russian imperialism towards its own borders. But despite the fact that the Republican Eisenhower came to power in 1952, and ruled through the height of the 1950s Cold War in Europe, there was in fact no attempt at rollback ever undertaken by American imperialism. US strategy remained one of containment. Thus in 1956, during the Hungarian uprising, American imperialism made no intervention, except propagandistic, implicitly acknowledging Russia’s prerogative to suppress rebellion in its own sphere of influence. On the other hand, under Eisenhower, US imperialism clearly continued the strategy of containment, moving into the breach in Indochina, following the defeat of French imperialism in the region, by undermining the Geneva Accords, to block eventual unification of Vietnam by bolstering the regime in the South, by maintaining the division of Korea and turning South Korea into a showplace for western capitalism in the Far East, and by moving to oppose Fidel Castro’s regime and its overtures towards Moscow. The continuity of this policy can be seen in that it was the conservative Republican Eisenhower administration that planned the Bay of Pigs invasion, but it was the liberal Democrat Kennedy, whose administration carried it out.

It was the liberal Democrat Johnson, who first began to develop the notion of détente – he called it “building bridges” and “peaceful engagement” – in 1966, but it was the conservative Nixon, a Republican, with Henry Kissinger at his side, who presided over the flowering of détente in the early 1970s. And it was the Democrat Carter, not Reagan, who began the process of dismantling détente and reviving the Cold War. Carter made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy, which while it forced certain changes in the antiquated military dictatorships that dominated Latin America, also alienated Moscow and revived anti-Russian propaganda. In 1977, NATO adopted three Carter proposals: 1) détente with Moscow had to be based on a position of strength (based on the Harmel Report adopted in 1967); 2) a commitment to standardization of military equipment within NATO and further integration of NATO forces on the operational level; 3) revival of the arms race, through what came to be known as the Long-Term Defense Program (LTDP), which started with a call for beefing up conventional weaponry in NATO countries. In response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Carter switched to fully-fledged Cold Warrior stance, essentially ending détente, refusing to submit the Salt II treaty to the Senate for ratification, and organising the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. In December 1979, under Carter’s leadership, NATO adopted a “dual track” rearmament strategy – negotiating with Moscow to cut or eliminate Russia’s intermediate range nuclear SS20 missiles aimed at Western Europe by 1983, but at the same time preparing to deploy equivalent US missiles (464 cruise missiles in the UK, Holland, Belgium and Italy and 108 Pershings in West Germany) in the event that agreement with Moscow were not reached. In this sense, Reagan’s support to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, acceleration of the arms race, and deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe 1983-84, which triggered so much protest in Europe, was in complete continuity with American policy initiatives undertaken on Carter’s watch rather than a divergence from it. The strategic goal of preventing the rise of a rival power in Asia or Europe that might challenge the US was developed at the end of the first Bush administration, continued through the Clinton administration, and is now at the heart of Bush the younger’s policy. Even the much ballyhooed war against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda unleashed by the Bush administration after 9/11 is a continuation of a policy begun under the Clinton administration, even if it is elevated to a higher level of open combat, designed primarily to establish and solidify the American presence in Central Asia. Likewise, the necessity for US imperialism to be prepared to take unilateral action militarily was developed in the Clinton administration, and taken up by the current Bush regime. The overarching continuity in American imperialist policy is a reflection of the central characteristic of state capitalist policy-making in decadent capitalism, where the permanent bureaucracy, not the legislature, is the locus of political power. This is of course not to deny that sometimes that are significant policy divergences within the bourgeoisie in the US that stand in sharp contrast to the overall unity. The two most glaring examples were Vietnam and the China policy in the late 1990s that led to the impeachment of Clinton, both of which will be discussed below.

The Korean War: containment in action in the Far East

While East-West tensions in Western Europe, especially in Germany and Berlin, and in the Near East had preoccupied American imperialist policy makers in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, events in the Far East soon rang alarm bells. With a US military government in place in Japan, and a friendly nationalist regime in China, which would also serve as a permanent member of the Security Council, the US had anticipated a dominant role in the Far East. The fall of the nationalist regime in 1949 raised the spectre of Russian expansionism in the Far East. Even though Moscow had done plenty to alienate Mao’s leadership during the war years, and had a working relationship with the nationalists, Washington feared a rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow as a real challenge to US interests in the region. The blockage of a Russian led attempt to win UN recognition for Red China in the UN, led Moscow to walk out of the Security Council, boycotting that body for seven months, until August 1950.

Moscow’s Security Council boycott would have a profound impact in June 1950, when North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Truman immediately ordered American forces in the battle to defend the pro-western regime in South Korea, a full week prior to a Security Council vote authorizing military action under US leadership, demonstrating that American imperialism’s predisposition to take unilateral action is not a recent invention. Not only did American troops enter battle in Korea before the UN authorization, but even after it became a UN-endorsed operation, and 16 other nations sent forces to participate in the “police action,” the American commander reported directly to Washington, not to the UN. Had Moscow been present in the Security Council it could have exercised a veto to bloc UN military intervention, prompting an earlier version of the same drama we have witnessed in the past few months as to what degree American imperialism would go it alone to defend its imperialist interests.

Some bourgeois analysts suggest that the Russian boycott was in fact motivated by a desire to avoid the possibility of an early acceptance of Mao’s regime by the UN in a new vote and instead to use the time to cement relations between Moscow and Beijing. Zbigniew Brzezinski even suggested that it was “a calculated move deliberately designed to stimulate American-Chinese hostility…the predominant US inclination prior to the Korean War was to seek some sort of an accommodation with the new government on the Chinese mainland. In any case, the opportunity to stimulate a head-on clash between America and China must have been welcomed by Stalin, and deservedly so. The ensuing 20 ears of American-Chinese hostility were certainly a net gain for the Soviet Union” (“How the Cold War Was Played,” Foreign Affairs, 1972, p.186-187).

Cuban Missile Crisis and the brink of nuclear war

Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the US-supported dictator Battista in 1959 posed a serious dilemma within the bipolar Cold War confrontation and brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The character of Castro’s revolution was at first unclear. Draped in an ideology of democratic populism, with a certain romanticisation of the guerrilla thrown into the sauce, Castro was not a member of the Stalinist party, and his links to it were quite strained. However, his nationalisations of American-owned properties in the initial moments after taking power, quickly alienated Washington. American animosity only operated to push Castro into the arms of Moscow for foreign aid and military assistance. The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, originally planned under Eisenhower and executed by Kennedy, demonstrated American commitment to the overthrow of the Russian-backed regime. For the US, the existence of a regime in its own backyard, linked to Moscow was intolerable. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated in 1823, the US had maintained a position that the Americas were off-limits to European imperialisms. To have its Cold War adversary establish a beachhead just ninety miles from American territory in Florida was absolutely unacceptable to Washington.

By the fall of 1962, Castro and the Russians expected an imminent American invasion, and in fact under Robert Kennedy’s instigation, in November 1961, Washington had begun Operation Mongoose, which planned for a military operation against Cuba in mid-October 1962, conducted under the umbrella of a US-inspired decision of the Organisation of American States to exclude Cuba from membership and to prohibit arms sales to Castro. “On 1 October, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered military preparations for a blockade, an air strike, an invasion, with ‘maximum readiness’ for the last two actions to be achieved by 20 October” (B.J. Bernstein, Encyclopedia of US Foreign Relations, p.388). At the same time the US had installed 15 Jupiter missiles in Turkey, near Russia’s southern border, aimed at targets in Russia, which Moscow found unacceptable.

Moscow sought to counter both threats through one measure: the deployment of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States in Cuba. The Kennedy administration miscalculated Moscow’s intentions, and considered that the deployment of the missiles was an offensive, not defensive, measure, and demanded the immediate dismantling and withdrawal of the missiles already deployed, and that any other missiles en-route to Cuba be returned to Russia. Because a naval blockade of Cuban waters would have been an act of war under international law, the Kennedy administration announced a “quarantine” of Cuban waters, and prepared to stop Russian vessels suspected of carrying missiles on the high seas, in international waters. The whole crisis occurred on the eve of the midterm Congressional elections in November 1962, in which Kennedy apparently feared a rightwing Republican triumph if he appeared weak in confrontation with Khrushchev, though it is difficult to believe, as some historians claim, that Kennedy was motivated more by domestic political considerations than foreign policy and defense strategies. After all because of their proximity to the US, the Russian missiles in Cuba increased Moscow’s capacity to hit the continental US with nuclear warheads by 50%, constituting a major alteration in the balance of terror of the Cold War. In this context the administration pushed hard and brought the world to the brink of direct nuclear confrontation, especially when the Russians successfully shot down a U2 spy-plane in the middle of the crisis. triggering demands from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an immediate attack on Cuba. At one point, Robert Kennedy “suggested looking for a pretext – ‘sink the Maine or something’ and go to war with the Soviets.[2] Better then, than later, he concluded” (Bernstein, p. 390). Finally a behind the scenes deal was reached with Khrushchev when the Americans offered to secretly remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey in return for the withdrawal of the Russian missiles from Cuba. Because the American concession was kept secret Kennedy was able to claim a complete victory in forcing Khrushchev to back down. The huge propaganda coup for the US may have severely undermined Khrushchev’s authority within the Russian ruling circles and contributed to his removal shortly thereafter. The members of the Kennedy inner circle maintained the fiction for nearly two decades, lying in their various memoirs. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the facts surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis and the secret agreement that ended it were revealed (Bernstein, op cit.). Sobered by coming so close to the brink of nuclear war, Moscow and Washington agreed to establish a “hotline” means of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, reached agreement on a nuclear test ban treaty, and focused more on confrontation through proxies for the rest of the Cold War.

Proxy wars during the Cold War

Throughout the Cold War Russian and American imperialism never confronted each other directly in armed combat, but rather through a series of proxy wars, which were confined to the peripheral countries, never involving the metropoles of world capitalism, never posing a danger of spiralling out of control into a world war or a nuclear conflagration, with the exception of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Most often these peripheral conflicts involved proxies representing both sides, usually a client government backed by American imperialism, and a national liberation movement backed by Moscow. Less frequently the conflicts involved either Russia or the US fighting a proxy for the other, as when the US fought in Korea, or Vietnam, or when the Russians fought the US-backed and supplied Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. In general the insurgents were supported by the weaker bloc (i.e., the so-called wars for national liberation supported by Stalinism throughout the Cold War). Notable exceptions, were Angola and Afghanistan where the rebels were supported by the US. In general advances achieved in this deadly imperialist chess game by Russian proxies, brought a larger and more devastating response from US proxies, for example the Middle East wars where Israel pushed back Russian supported Arab offensives repeatedly and overwhelmingly. Despite the numerous liberation struggles it backed throughout four decades, Russian imperialism was seldom successful in establishing a lasting beachhead outside its existing sphere of influence. Various states in the third world would play the two blocs off against each other, flirt with Moscow, accepting its military supplies, but never completely or permanently integrating into its orbit. Nowhere was the inability of Russian imperialism to spread permanently its influence more glaring than in Latin America, where it was never able to expand its influence beyond Cuba. In fact unable to spread Stalinism to Latin America Cuba was forced to repay its aid from Russia by sending shock troops to Angola in the service of Moscow.

(to be continued)

J. Grevin

 

 

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1. With the massive US offensive against Iraq, we enter a new stage in capitalism’s descent into military barbarism, which is set to aggravate all the other areas of open hostilities or simmering tensions around the globe. Even apart from the awful devastation which is being heaped on the hapless population of Iraq, the war can only have the effect of stoking up imperialist tensions and military chaos everywhere else. The preparations for the war have already given rise to the first open split between America, on the one hand, and the only other power which could pose as the candidate to lead a new anti-American bloc – Germany. The divisions between the great powers over Iraq have sounded the death knell of NATO, while at the same time revealing that Europe, far from being such a bloc already, is riven with profound divergences on the key issues of international relations. It has prompted another pole of the ‘axis of evil’, North Korea, to play its own hand in the crisis, with the danger that this will in the medium term extend the theatre of war to the far east. Meanwhile the third pole of the axis – Iran – is also playing the nuclear card. In Africa, France’s pretensions to being a ‘pacifist’ power are exposed by the increasing involvement of its troops in the bloody war in the Ivory Coast. The aftermath of war in Iraq, far from creating a new Middle Eastern ‘West Germany’ as some of the more facile bourgeois commentators have predicted, can only serve to create a huge zone of instability which will have immediate consequence of aggravating the Israel/ Palestine conflict and generating new terrorist attacks around the globe. The war against terrorism is spreading terror all over the planet - not only through the massacres it perpetrates on its immediate victims in the front lines of imperialist rivalry, but more widely in the shape of growing popular anxiety about what the future holds in store for the whole of mankind.

2. It is no accident that the racking up of military tensions ‘coincides’ with a new plunge into the world economic crisis. This has been manifested not only in the overt collapse of weaker (but still economically significant) economies like Argentina, but above all in the return of open recession to the US economy, whose debt-fuelled growth in the 1990s  - portrayed as the triumph of the ‘new economy’ - was the great white hope of the entire world economic system, in particular the countries of Europe. These glorious years are now definitively at an end as the US economy is wracked by explicitly rising unemployment, a fall in industrial production, a decline in consumer spending, stock market instability, corporate scandals and bankruptcies, and the return of the Federal budget deficit.

 A measure of the seriousness of the current economic situation is given by the state of the British economy, which of all the major European countries was presented as being best placed to weather the global storms emanating from the US. In fact almost immediately after Chancellor Brown declared that “Britain remains better placed than in the past to cope with the world economic downturn”, official figures were released showing that British manufacturing –in hi-tech as well as more traditional industries –was at its lowest point since the 1991 recession, and that 10,000 jobs are disappearing every month in this sector

 Coupled with the sacrifices demanded by the spiralling increase in military budgets, the slide into open recession is already generating a whole new round of attacks on working class living standards (redundancies, ‘modernisation’, cuts in benefits, especially pensions, etc).

3. The situation facing the working class is thus one of unprecedented gravity. For over a decade, the working class has been experiencing the most prolonged retreat in its struggles since the end of the counter-revolutionary period in the late 60s. Confronted with the twin assaults of war and economic crisis, the working class has experienced considerable difficulties in developing its own struggles, even on the most basic level of economic self-defence. On the political level its difficulties are even more pronounced, as its general consciousness of the huge historical responsibility weighing on its shoulders has suffered blow after blow in the last decade and more. And yet the very forces whose first task is to combat the political weaknesses in the proletariat - the forces of the communist left -are in a more dangerous state of disarray than at any time since the re-emergence of revolutionary forces at the end of the 60s. The immense pressures of a decomposing capitalist order have tended to reinforce the long-standing opportunist and sectarian weaknesses in the proletarian political milieu, resulting in severe theoretical and political regressions which tend to underestimate the seriousness of the situation faced by the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities, and indeed to obscure any real understanding of the nature and dynamic of the entire historical epoch.

The crisis of US leadership  

4. Faced with the collapse of the rival Russian bloc at the end of the 80s, and with the rapid unravelling of its own western bloc, US imperialism formulated a strategic plan which has, in the ensuing decade, revealed itself more and more openly. Confirmed as the only remaining superpower, the USA would do everything in its power to ensure that no new superpower – in reality, no new imperialist bloc – could arise to challenge its ‘New World Order’. The principal methods of this strategy were demonstrated forcefully by the first Gulf war of 1991:

• a massive display of US military superiority, using Saddam’s regime as a whipping boy
• the press-ganging of the other powers into a coalition that would give an air of legitimacy to the US operation, as well as providing a considerable portion of the enormous funds required. Germany in particular – the only real candidate to the leadership of a new anti-American bloc – was to pay the most. 

5. If the Gulf war’s primary aim was to issue an effective warning to all who would challenge US hegemony, it must be judged a failure. Within a year, Germany had provoked the war in the Balkans, with the aim of extending its influence to a key strategic crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. It would take the best part of the decade before the US – through the war in Kosovo – could impose its authority in this region, having been opposed not only by Germany (which gave underhand support to Croatia) but also by France and its supposedly loyal ally Britain, who secretly backed Serbia. The chaos in the Balkans was a clear expression of the contradictions faced by the US: the more it sought to discipline its former allies, the more it provoked resistance and hostility, and the less able it was to recruit them for military operations which they knew were ultimately aimed against them. Thus the phenomenon of the US being increasingly obliged to ‘go it alone’ in its adventures, relying less and less on ‘legal’ international structures such as the UN and NATO, which have more and more functioned as obstacles to the US’s plans.

6. After September 11 2001 – almost certainly carried out with the complicity of the US state – the USA’s global strategy shifted onto a higher level. The ‘war against terrorism’ was immediately announced as a permanent and planet-wide military offensive. Faced with an increasing challenge from its principal imperialist rivals (expressed in rows over the Kyoto agreement, the European military force, manoeuvres over the policing of Kosovo, etc), the USA opted for a policy of much more massive and direct military intervention, with the strategic goal of the encirclement of Europe and Russia by gaining control of Central Asia and the Middle East. In the Far East, by including North Korea in the ‘axis of evil’, and by renewing its interest in the ‘struggle against terrorism’ in Indonesia following the Bali bombing, US imperialism has also declared its intention to intervene directly in the backyard of China and Japan.

7. The aims of this intervention are by no means limited to the question of oil considered uniquely as a source of capitalist profits. Control of the Middle East and central Asia for geo-strategic reasons was a matter of intense inter-imperialist rivalry long before oil became a vital element in the capitalist economy. And while there is a clear necessity to control the huge oil producing capacities of the Middle East and the Caucasus, US military action there is not carried out on behalf of the oil companies: the oil companies are only allowed to get their pay off provided they fit in with the overall strategic plan, which includes the ability to shut off oil supplies to America’s potential enemies and thus throttle any military challenge before it begins. Germany and Japan in particular are far more dependent on Middle East oil than the USA.

8. The USA’s audacious project of building a ring of steel around its main imperialist rivals thus provides the real explanation for the war in Afghanistan, the planned assault on Iraq, and the declared intention to deal with Iran. However, the upping of the stakes by the US has called forth a commensurate response from its main challengers. The resistance to US plans has been led by France, which threatened to use its veto on the UN Security Council; but even more significant is the open challenge issued by Germany, which hitherto has tended to work in the shadows, allowing France to play the role of declared opponent of US ambitions. Today however, Germany perceives the US adventure in Iraq as a real menace to its interests in an area which has been central to its imperialist ambitions since before the first world war. It has thus issued a far more open challenge to the US than ever before; furthermore, its resolute ‘anti-war’ stance has emboldened France, which until quite close to the outbreak of war was still hinting that it might change tack and take part in the military action. With the outbreak of the war, these powers are adopting a fairly low profile, but historically a real milestone has been marked. This crisis has pointed to the demise not only of NATO (whose irrelevance was shown over its inability to agree on the ‘defence’ of Turkey just before the war) but also of the UN. The American bourgeoisie is increasingly regarding this institution as an instrument of its principal rivals, and is openly saying that it will not play any role in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq. The abandonment of such institutions of ‘international law’ represents a significant step in the development of chaos in international relations.

9. The resistance to US plans by an alliance between France, Germany, Russia and China shows that, faced with the massive superiority of the US, its main rivals have no choice but to band together against it. This confirms that the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs remains a real factor in the current situation. But it would be a mistake to confuse a tendency with an accomplished fact, above all because in the period of capitalist decomposition, the movement towards the formation of new blocs is being constantly obstructed by the counter-tendency for each country to defend its own immediate national interests above all else - by the tendency towards every man for himself; The powerful divisions between the European countries over the war in Iraq has demonstrated that “Europe” is very far from forming a coherent bloc, as some elements of the revolutionary movement have tended to argue. Furthermore, such arguments are based on a confusion between economic alliances and real imperialist blocs, which are above all military formations oriented towards world war. And here two other important factors come into play: first, the undeniable military dominance of the US, which still makes it impossible for any openly warlike challenge to be mounted against the US by its great power rivals; and secondly, the undefeated nature of the proletariat, which means that it is not yet possible to create the social and ideological conditions for new war blocs.Thus the war against Iraq, however much it has brought imperialist rivalries between the great powers into the open, still takes the same basic form as the other major wars of this phase: a “deflected” war whose real target is hidden by the selection of a “scapegoat” constituted by a third or forth rate power, and in which the major powers take care to fight using only professional armies;

10. The crisis of US leadership has placed British imperialism in an increasingly contradictory position. With the end of the special relationship, the defence of Britain’s interests requires it to play a ‘mediating’ role between America and the main European powers, and between the latter powers themselves. Although presented as the poodle of the US, the Blair government has itself played a significant role in bringing about the current crisis, by insisting that America could not go it alone over Iraq, but needed to take the UN route. Britain too has been the scene of some of the biggest ‘peace’ marches, with large fractions of the ruling class – not only its leftist appendages – organising the demonstrations; The strong ”anti-war” sentiments of parts of the British bourgeoisie express a real dilemma for the British ruling class, as the growing schism between America and the other great powers is making its “centrist” role increasingly uncomfortable. In particular, Britains arguments that the UN should play a central role in the post-Saddam settlement, and that this must be accompanied by significant concession to the Palestinians, are being politely ignored by the US. Although as yet there is no clear alternative, within the British bourgeoisie, to the Blair line in international relations, there is a growing unease with being too closely associated with US adventurism. The quagmire now developing in Iraq can only strengthen this unease.

11. Although the US continues to demonstrate its crushing military superiority to all the other major powers, the increasingly open character of its imperialist ambitions is tending to weaken its political authority. In both world wars and in the conflict with the Russian bloc, the US was able to pose as the principal rampart of democracy and the rights of nations, the defender of the free world against totalitarianism and military aggression. But since the collapse of the Russian bloc the US has been obliged to itself play the role of aggressor; and while in the immediate aftermath of September 11 the US was still able to some extent to present its action in Afghanistan as an act of legitimate self-defence, the justifications for the current war in Iraq have shown themselves to be completely threadbare, while its rivals have come forward as the best defenders of democratic values in the face of US bullying.

The first weeks of the military action have served mainly to create further difficulties for US political authority. Initially presented as  a war that would be both quick and clean, it appears that the war plan drawn up by the current administration seriously underestimated the degree to which the invasion would provoke sentiments of national defence among the Iraqi population. Although the omnipresence of Saddams special units has certainly played a role in stiffening the resistance of the regular army through their habitual methods of coercion and terror, there has been a much more general reaction of hostility to the American invasion, even if this is not accompanied by any great enthusiasm for Saddams regime. Even the Shiite organisations, who were being counted on to lead an “uprising” against Saddam, have declared that the first duty of all Iraqis is to resist the invader. The prolongation of the war can only serve to aggravate the misery of the population, whether through hunger and thirst or the intensification of the bombing; and the indications are that all this will tend to increase popular hostility towards the US.

Moreover, the war is already exacerbating the divisions in Iraqi society, in particular between those who have allied themselves with the USA (as in the Kurdish regions) and those who have fought against the invasion. These divisions can only serve to create disorder and instability in post-Saddam Iraq, further undermining the USA claim that it will be the bearer of peace and prosperity in the region. On the contrary, the war is already stoking up tensions throughout the region, as demonstrated by Turkeys incursion into northern Iraq,  the anti-American position adopted by Syria, and the renewal of sabre-rattling between India and Pakistan.     

Thus, far from resolving the crisis of American leadership, the current war can only take it new levels

Decadence and decomposition

12. The plunge into militarism is the expression par excellence of the impasse facing the capitalist mode of production - of its decadence as a mode of production. As with the two world wars, and the cold war between 45 and 89, the wars of the period inaugurated since 89 are the most crying manifestation of the fact that capitalist relations of production have become an obstacle to human progress. Not only does this terrifying record of  destruction (and production of the means of destruction) represent a staggering waste of human labour power in a period when the productive forces are objectively capable of liberating man from all forms of economic drudgery and scarcity, it is the product of and active factor in a dynamic that threatens the very survival of humanity. This dynamic has aggravated throughout the period of decadence: we only have to compare the levels of death and destruction brought about by the first and second world wars, as well as the global extent of each conflict, to understand this. In addition, while the third world war between the Russian and American blocs – a war that would almost certainly have led to the extinction of humanity – never took place, the proxy wars fought between them over four decades in themselves caused as many deaths as the two world wars combined. These are not merely mathematical or technological facts; they testify to a qualitative deepening of capitalism’s tendency towards self-destruction.

13. It is evident to any observer of the international scene that 1989 marked the beginning of a radical new phase in the life of capitalism. In 1990, Bush senior promised a new World Order of peace and prosperity. And for the intellectual apologists of the ruling class, the end of the ‘Communist experiment’ meant a new upsurge of capitalism, now at last a truly ‘global’ system, and armed with wondrous new technologies that would make its economic crises a thing of the past. Neither would capitalism be troubled by the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, because in the ‘new economy’ the working class and its struggles had ceased to exist. So evident was the dawning of the new age of globalisation, that even its most publicised opponents – the ‘global anti-capitalist movement shared practically all of the basic assumptions of its apologists. For marxism, however, the collapse of the Stalinist bloc was the collapse of a part of an already global capitalist system; and the period ushered in by this seismic event did not represent any flowering or rejuvenation of capitalism; but on the contrary, it could only be understood as the terminal phase of  capitalist decadence - the phase we refer to as decomposition, the ‘flowering’ only of all the accumulated contradictions of an already senile social order.  

14. The return of the open economic crisis in the late 1960s had in effect already opened a final chapter in the classical cycle of capitalist decadence - crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis. Henceforward it would be virtually impossible for capitalism to reconstruct after a third world war, which would probably mean the annihilation of humanity or at best a regression of incalculable proportions. The historic choice now facing humanity was not merely revolution or war, but revolution or the destruction of humanity.

15. 1968 saw the historic revival of proletarian struggles in response to the emergence of the crisis, opening up a course towards massive class confrontations. Without defeating this resurgent proletariat, the ruling class would not be able to lead society towards war, which, even if it would certainly signify the self-destruction of capitalism, remained the ‘logical’ outcome of the system’s fundamental contradictions. This new period of workers’ struggles was manifested in three international waves (68-74, 78-81, 83-89); but the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, with its attendant campaigns about the fall of communism and the end of the class struggle,  brought an important break with the whole of this period. The working class had not suffered a major historic defeat and the threat of a third world war, which had already been held at bay by the revival of the class struggle, was put even lower down history’s agenda by new objective barriers to the reconstitution of imperialist blocs, in particular the strength of the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’ in the new period. Nevertheless,  the working class, whose struggles in the period 69-89 had prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its ‘solution’ to the economic crisis, now more and more faced the consequences of its own failure to raise its struggles to a higher political level and offer an alternative for humanity. The period of decomposition, the result of this ‘stalemate’ between the two major classes, does not bring any positive fruits to the exploited class. Although the combativity of the class has not been wiped out in this period, and a process of subterranean maturation of consciousness could still be detected, especially in the form of ‘searching elements’, small politicised minorities, the class struggle overall went into a retreat which is still with us today. The working class in this period has been faced not just with its own political shortcomings but with the danger of losing its class identity under the weight of a disintegrating social system.

16. This danger is not fundamentally the result of the reorganizations of production and the division of labour necessitated by the economic crisis (eg the shift from secondary to tertiary industries in many of the advanced countries, computerisation, etc); it results first and foremost from the most ubiquitous tendencies of decomposition – the accelerated atomisation of social relations, gangsterisation, and most important of all, the systematic attack on the memory of historical experience and the proletariat’s own perspective that has been mounted by the bourgeoisie in the wake of the ‘collapse of communism’. Capitalism cannot indeed function without a working class, but the working class can lose, in time, any real awareness of its existence as a class. This process is daily reinforced by decomposition at a spontaneous and objective level; but it does not prevent the ruling class from consciously using all the manifestations of decomposition to further atomise the class. The recent rise of the extreme right, capitalising on popular fears of being overwhelmed by flood of desperate refugees from the countries most hit by crisis and war, is an example of this, as is the use of  fears about terrorism to strengthen the repressive arsenal of the state.

17. Although capitalism’s decomposition results from this historic ‘stand-off’ between the classes, this situation cannot be a static one. The economic crisis, which is at the root both of the drive towards war and of the proletariat’s response, continues to deepen; but in contrast to the 68-89 period, when the outcome of these class contradictions could only be world war or world revolution, the new period opens up a third alternative: the destruction of humanity not through an apocalyptic war, but through the gradual advance of decomposition, which could over a period of time undermine the proletariat’s capacity to respond as a class, and could equally make the planet uninhabitable through a spiral of regional wars and ecological catastrophes. To wage a world war, the bourgeoisie would first have to directly confront and defeat the major battalions of the working class, and then mobilise them to march with enthusiasm behind the banners and ideology of new imperialist blocs; in the new scenario, the working class could be defeated in a less overt and direct manner, simply by failing to respond to the crisis of the system and allowing itself to be dragged further and further into the cesspool of decay. In short, a much more dangerous and difficult perspective confronts the class and its revolutionary minorities.

18. The necessity for marxists to understand there has been a major shift in the scenario confronting humanity is underlined by the growing threat that the mere continuation of capitalist production poses to the natural environment.  More and more scientists are expressing alarm over the possibilities of ‘positive feedback’ in the process of global warming – for example, in the case of the Amazon, where the combined effects of logging and other encroachments as well as rising temperatures are dramatically accelerating the rate of destruction. If the destruction goes on unabated, this would release into the atmosphere further massive amounts of carbon dioxide, thus greatly increasing the overall rate of warming. In addition to this, the intensification of ecological dangers can only have massive destabilizing effects on the structure of society, the economy, and on inter-imperialist relations. In this domain, the working class can do little to halt the slide until it has won political power on a world scale, and yet the longer its revolution is delayed, the more the proletariat faces the danger of being overwhelmed, and the very bases for a social reconstruction undermined.  

19. Despite its mounting dangers, the majority of the groups of the communist left do not accept the concept of capitalist decomposition, even if they can see its outward manifestations in the growing chaos at the international and social level. In fact, far from having a clear view of the perspective confronting the working class, the new and unprecedented period of decomposition has created a real theoretical disarray. The Bordigist groups have never had a firm theory of decadence, even if they recognize the drive towards imperialist war in this epoch, and are still capable of responding to it on an internationalist terrain. Neither have they been able to take on board the concept of the historic course elaborated by the Italian Fraction during the 1930s – the notion that imperialist world war requires the prior defeat and active mobilization of the proletariat. They thus lack the two basic theoretical building blocks of the concept of decomposition. The IBRP, while accepting the notion of decadence, has also rejected the Italian left’s concept of the historic course. Moreover, recent pronouncements by this current show that their grasp on the concept of decadence itself is slipping.  A polemic with the ICC’s conception of decomposition reveals quite plainly the incoherence of the positions they are now tending to adopt:

“The tendency towards decomposition, which the ICC’s apocalyptic vision detects everywhere, would indeed imply capitalist society were on the brink of breakdown if it were true. However, this is not the case and if the ICC were to examine the phenomena of contemporary society more dialectically this would be apparent. While on the one hand, old structures are collapsing, new ones are arising. Germany, for example, could not be reunited without the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the collapse of the Russian bloc. The countries of Comecon could not join the EU without the dissolution of Comecon etc. The process of collapse is at the same time one of reconstruction, decomposition is part of the process of recomposition. While the ICC does recognize that there is a tendency towards re-composition, they regard it as insignificant in the face of the predominant tendency towards decomposition and chaos.  …..The ICC has failed to demonstrate how this tendency springs from the capitalist infrastructure. The difficulty it faces in doing this, springs from the fact that it is the tendency towards recomposition which springs from the forces of the capitalist infrastructure. In particular the continuing economic crisis, derived from reduced profitability of capital, is forcing weaker capitals into trading blocs, and these trading blocs are the skeletons on which future imperialist blocs are being built” (Revolutionary Perspectives no°27).

Faced with this hypothesis, it is necessary to make the following points:

• Marxism has always insisted that the onset of the epoch of capitalism’s decline poses the historical alternative between socialism or barbarism. Before waxing ironic about the “apocalyptic” visions of the ICC, the comrades of the IBRP need to consider whether they are underestimating the gravity of the world situation, and the destructive dynamic imposed on capital by its historic impasse.
  The question is not the timing of an immediate and final collapse; the tendency towards collapse is inherent in the entire decadent period, where the old framework for economic growth is absent, and the literal breakdown of the system is only held off by the necessary responses of the ruling class  - state control of the economy and the flight towards war, which itself threatens collapse on an even more devastating level than the simple clogging up of the economic machine. Furthermore, the phase of decomposition signifies a real acceleration of this downward momentum. This is perhaps most evident at the level of imperialist relations where international competition is at its most ruthless and anarchic; at the economic level the ruling class is more able to mitigate the danger of untrammelled competition between national capitals (cf the US bourgeoisie’s recognition of the need to shore up its main economic rival, Japan);
• in the decadent period there is no ‘dialectical’ harmony between recomposition and decomposition. Decomposition is only the final phase of a tendency towards chaos and catastrophe that was already identified in the first congress of the Third International.  In the decadent epoch, the war of each against all – not the invention of Hobbes, but a fundamental reality of a society based on generalized commodity production – is by no means done away with by the formation of huge ‘state capitalist trusts’ and imperialist blocs; as Bukharin already noted in 1915, these formations merely pushed the basic anarchy of capital onto a higher and more destructive level. This is the tendency that flows from the ‘capitalist infrastructure’ when it can no longer grow in accordance with its own laws. On the other hand there is in this epoch no spontaneous tendency towards recomposition. If by this the comrades mean reconstruction, this is at the cost of the tremendous physical destruction of imperialist war, and in any case is no longer a real possibility for capitalism today. On the other hand if they think that ‘recomposition’ expresses a natural and peaceful evolution of ‘modern’ capitalism this would seem to show the influence of ‘autonomist’ theories which reject the catastrophist vision that lies at the heart of marxism; by the same token, the partial acceptance of the ideology of globalisation, microchip revolution etc all point to a real concession to current bourgeois campaigns about a new ascendancy of capitalism;
• finally, if recomposition means that new imperialist blocs are already being formed, this is based on a mistaken identification between trading alliances and imperialist blocs, which are fundamentally military in character. The Iraq crisis has shown in particular that ‘Europe’ is totally divided over its relations with the US. The factors which prevent the formation of new blocs remain as valid as ever: profound divisions among potential members of a German bloc; the massive military superiority of the US; lack of ideological bases for new bloc, itself a further expression of non-defeated nature of the proletariat.

The irrationality of war in the period of decadence

20. The period of decomposition shows more clearly than ever the irrationality of war in decadence – the tendency for its destructive dynamic to become autonomous and increasingly at variance with the logic of profit. This is fully in character with the basic conditions of accumulation in the decadent period. The incapacity of capital to expand into new “outlying fields of production” more and more inhibits the ‘natural’ functioning of the laws of the market, which, left to themselves, would result in a catastrophic economic blockage. The wars of decadence, unlike the wars of ascendancy, do not make economic sense. Contrary to the view that war is ‘good’ for the health of the economy, war today both expresses and aggravates its incurable sickness. Furthermore, the irrationality of war in terms of capital’s own laws has intensified during the period of decadence. Thus, the first world war was aimed at a clearly discernible ‘economic’ goal – in essence, at grabbing the colonial markets of rival powers. To some extent this element was also present in World War II, although it had already been shown that there was no mechanical link between economic rivalry and military confrontation: thus in the early 20s the Third International was mistaken in its view that the next world imperialist conflict would be between the USA and Britain.

What created the impression that World War II had a rational function for capitalism was the long reconstruction period that followed it, leading many revolutionaries to conclude that capital’s main motive for war was to destroy capital and reconstruct it afterwards. In reality, war was not the result of a conscious aim for post-war reconstruction but was imposed on the capitalist powers by the ruthless logic of imperialist competition, demanding the total destruction of the enemy for predominantly strategic reasons.

This does not alter the fact that the drive to war is fundamentally a result of capitalism’s economic impasse. But the connection between crisis and war is not a purely mechanical one. The economic difficulties of capitalism at the time of the first world war were still only embryonic; the second world war broke out after the initial shock of the depression had begun to be absorbed. Rather the exacerbation of the economic crisis creates the general conditions for the exacerbation of military rivalries; but the history of decadence shows that purely economic rivalries and objectives have become increasingly subordinated to strategic ones. This is turn expresses the profound dead-end that capitalism has reached. After the second world war, the global conflict between the American and Russian bloc was almost entirely dominated by strategic concerns, since at no point could Russia pose as a serious economic rival to the US. And henceforward it was clear that world war would not solve capitalism’s economic problems, since this time it would lead to the final self-destruction of the entire system.  

Furthermore the manner in which the period of the blocs came to an end also demonstrates the ruinous economic costs of militarism:  the weaker Russian bloc collapsed because it was incapable of bearing the economic costs of the arms race (and was equally incapable of mobilising its proletariat for a war to break the strategic and economic stranglehold achieved by the stronger US bloc). And despite all the  predictions about how the ‘fall of Communism’ would create a bright new future for capitalist enterprise, the economic crisis has continued its ravages ever since, in the west as well as the former eastern bloc countries. 

Today, the USA’s ‘war on terrorism’ also involves the defence of the USA’s immediate economic interests at home and round the world, and US belligerence can only be increased by the rapid exhaustion of options for its economy. But it is fundamentally dictated by the USA’s strategic need to maintain and strengthen its ‘global leadership’. The immense cost of the major international operations mounted in the first Gulf war 91, Serbia 99, Afghanistan 2001 and the Gulf in 2003 refute the facile arguments about these being wars fought on behalf of the multinational oil companies or for the juicy contracts coming out of post-war reconstruction. The reconstruction in Iraq after the war will also be motivated by a political and ideological need: it will be an indispensable if not sufficient condition for an American domination of this country. Of course individual capitals can always make a buck out of war but the overall economic balance sheet is negative. The war on terrorism will bring no real reconstruction, no important new markets for the expansion of the US or any other economy.

War is the ruin of capital – both a product of its decline and a factor in its acceleration. The development of a bloated war economy does not offer a solution to the crisis of capitalism, as certain elements of the Italian Fraction thought in the 1930s. The war economy does not exist for itself but because capitalism in decadence is obliged to go through war after war after war, and to increasingly subsume the entire economy to the needs of war. This creates a tremendous drain on the economy because arms expenditure is fundamentally sterile. In this sense the collapse of the Russian bloc gives us a glimpse into the future of capital, since its inability to sustain an ever-accelerating arms race was one of the key factors in its demise. And although this was a result deliberately pursued by the US bloc, today the USA itself is moving towards a comparable situation, even if it is at a slower pace. The present war in the Gulf, and more generally the whole ‘war against terror’ is linked to a vast increase of arms spending designed to totally eclipse the arms budgets of the rest of the world combined. But the damage that this insane project will inflict on the US economy is incalculable.

21. The deeply irrational nature of war in the decadent period is also demonstrated by its ideological justifications, a reality already revealed by the rise of Nazism in the period leading up to the second world war. Thus, in Africa, country after country has submitted to ‘civil’ wars in which marauding gangs maim and kill with almost no semblance of ideological purpose, destroying the already frail infrastructure with no prospect of any post-war renaissance. The resort to terrorism by an increasing number of states, and in particular the growth of Islamic terrorism with its fantasies of suicide and death, are further expressions of a society in full putrefaction, caught up in a deadly spiral of destruction for its own sake. According to the comrades of the CWO, Al Qaida “represents an attempt to erect an independent Middle East imperialism based on Islam and the territories of the Ummayad Empire of the 8th century. It is not simply a movement expressing decomposition and chaos” (RP 27). In fact, such a reactionary and unrealistic goal is no more rational than Bin Laden’s other secret hope: that his actions will take us a step nearer to the final Day of Judgement.  Islamic terrorism is a pure culture of decomposition.

In contrast to this, the justification for war by the great democratic powers still generally presents itself in the garb of humanitarianism, democracy, and other progressive and rational goals. In fact, leaving aside the immense gulf between the justifications offered by imperialist states, and the real sordid motives and actions that lie behind them, the irrationality of the USA’s grand enterprise is also beginning to emerge through the ideological fog: a new Imperium in which one power rules without contest, forever. History, and the history of capitalism above all, has already shown the vanity of such dreams. But this has not prevented the development of a new and profoundly backward-looking ideology to justify the whole project: the concept of a new and humane colonialism, which is being taken seriously by a number of American and British ideologues today.

The class struggle

22. It is vital to understand the distinction between the historic weight of the class and its immediate influence on the situation. In the immediate, the class cannot prevent the current wars and may be in serious retreat, but this is not the same as a historic defeat. The fact that the bourgeoisie is not able to mobilize the class for direct inter-imperialist conflict between the great powers, but has to ‘deflect’ the conflict onto second and third rate states, using not conscript but professional armies, is an expression of this historic weight of the class.

 Even in the context of these ‘deflected’ wars, as the stakes involved are increased, the bourgeoisie is compelled to take preventive action against the working class. The organization of pacifist campaigns on an unprecedented scale (both in terms of the size of the demonstrations and their international coordination) testifies to the ruling class’s unease about the mounting hostility to its war drive both among the population in general and within the working class in particular. For the moment, the main thrust of the pacifist campaigns has been to emphasise their cross-class, democratic nature, their appeal to the UN and the pacifist intentions of America’s rivals. But already within the speeches being spat out from the rostrums of these protests there is a strong strain of workerist demagogy, talk about mobilizing the power of the trade union movement, of taking illegal strike action when the war breaks out, even the recuperation of classic internationalist slogans such as ‘the main enemy is at home’. Behind this rhetoric is an understanding by the bourgeoisie that the drive to war cannot avoid confronting the resistance of its main victim, the working class, even if actual class opposition to the war is currently restricted to isolated responses by workers or the activity of a small internationalist minority.

23. All this is evidence that the historic course has not been reversed even if, in decomposition, the conditions under which it unfolds have altered significantly. What has changed with decomposition is the possible nature of a historic defeat, which may not come through frontal clash between the major classes so much as a slow ebbing away of the proletariat’s ability to constitute itself as a class, in which case the point of no return will be harder to discern, coming as it would be before any final catastrophic end. This is the deadly danger faced by the class today. But we are convinced that this point has not yet been reached and that the proletariat still retains the capacity to rediscover its historic mission. To take into account the real potentialities within the proletariat, and to assume the responsibility it imposes on revolutionaries , it is all the more important not to begin from an immediatist analysis of situations.

24. Without a clear historical framework for understanding the present situation of the class, it is all too easy to fall into an immediatist attitude which can swing from moods of euphoria to the bleakest pessimism. In the recent period the main trend in the proletarian milieu has been to get carried away by false hopes about massive class movements: thus a number of groups saw the December 2002 riots in Argentina as the beginnings of a movement towards proletarian insurrection when the movement was not even posed on a basic class terrain in the first place; similarly, the firefighters’ strike in Britain has been interpreted as a focus for massive class resistance against the war drive. Or else, in the absence of open social movements, there has been a tendency to look to rank and file unionist bodies as the basis for preparing the class revival of the future. 

25. In the context of the present historic course, the perspective for the class struggle remains the  revival of massive struggles in response to the deepening economic crisis. These struggles will follow the dynamic of the mass strike, which is characteristic of the real class movement in the epoch of decadence: they are not organised in advance by a pre-existing body. It is through the tendency towards massive struggles that the class will regain its class identity, which is an indispensable precondition for the ultimate politicization of the struggle. But we should bear in mind that such movements will inevitably be preceded by a series of skirmishes which will remain under union control, and even when they assume a more massive character they will not appear straightaway in a ‘pure form’, ie openly outside of and against the unions, and organized and centralized by autonomous assemblies and strike committees. Indeed it will be more important than ever for the revolutionary minorities and advanced workers’ groups to defend the perspective of the formation of such organisms within the movements that arise.

26. There have been many such skirmishes through the 90s and they express the counter-tendency to the overall retreat. But their lack of any clear political dimension has been seized upon by the bourgeoisie to further increase the disarray in the class. A particularly important card in the 90s has been the coming to power of left governments, able to give a huge impulse to the bourgeoisie’s arsenal of democratic and reformist ideology; alongside this the unions have organized a number of pre-emptive actions to corral the growing discontent in the class. The most spectacular of these were the strikes in December 1995 in France, which even had the appearance of going beyond the unions and unifying at the base, the better to prevent this happening in substance.  Since then union campaigns have been more low key, in line with the disorientation in the class, but a return to more confrontational responses can be discerned today in examples such as the public sector strikes called or threatened in Britain, France, Spain, Germany and elsewhere.

27. Marxism has always insisted that it is insufficient to look at the class struggle only in terms of what the proletariat itself is doing; since the bourgeoisie also wages a class struggle against the proletariat and its coming to consciousness, it has always been a key element of Marxist activity to examine the strategies and tactics used by the ruling class to forestall its mortal enemy. An important part of this is the analysis of which government teams the bourgeoisie tends to put together in response to different moments in the evolution of the class struggle and of the general crisis of society.

28. As the ICC noted in the first phase of its existence, the initial response of the ruling class to the historical resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s was to place its left teams in power, or to divert workers’ struggles by offering left governments as a false perspective for the movement. We then saw, at the end of the 70s, in response to the second international wave of struggles, the adoption of a new strategy, in which the right was brought back to government and the left went into opposition in order to sabotage the workers’ resistance from the inside. While never automatically applied in all countries, these strategies could nonetheless be discerned in the most important capitalist countries.

After the collapse of the eastern bloc, however, given the retreat in working class consciousness, there was no longer the same need to maintain this line-up, and in a number of countries center left governments, typified by the Blair regime in Britain, were favoured as the best ruling team, both with regard to the management of the economic crisis and the need to present capitalism’s flight into militarism as a new form of humanitarianism.     

The recent rise of right wing parties to government office does not however mean that the ruling class is returning to a concerted strategy of the left in opposition The advent of right governments in a number of central capitalist countries is more the expression of the lack of coherence within the national bourgeoisies and between national bourgeoisies which is one of the consequences of decomposition. It would take a significant advance in the class struggle for the bourgeoisie to overcome these divisions and impose a more unified response – to return to the strategy of the left in opposition to deal with a serious revival of the class movement, and, as its ultimate card, the placing of an ‘extreme left’ in power in the event of a directly revolutionary threat by the working class.  

29. Even if the main development of workers’ struggles will not be in direct response to war, revolutionaries should be attentive to the class responses that do arise, bearing in mind that the question of war will more and more become a factor in the development of a political consciousness about the real stakes of the class struggle, particularly as the swelling of the war economy will increasingly bring with it the demand for sacrifices in working class living standards.  This growing connection between crisis and war will express itself first in the formation of minorities aiming to make an internationalist response to war, but it will also tend to inform the more general movement as the class recovers its confidence and no longer sees the wars being organised by the ruling class as proof only of its own powerlessness.  (pacifism)

30. The new generation of ‘searching elements’, the minority moving towards class positions, will have a role of unprecedented importance in the future struggles of the class, which will be faced much more quickly and profoundly than the struggles of 68-89 with their political implications. These elements, who already express a slow but significant development of consciousness in depth, will be called upon to assist in the massive extension of consciousness throughout the class. This process reaches its highest point in the formation of the world communist party. But this can only become a reality if the existing groups of the communist left live up to their historical responsibilities. Today in particular this means facing up to the dangers that lie in front of them. For just as a surrender to the logic of decomposition can only deprive the class of its capacity to provide an answer to the crisis facing human society, so the revolutionary minority itself risks being ground down and destroyed by the putrid ambience which surrounds it, and which penetrates its ranks in the forms of parasitism, opportunism, sectarianism, and theoretical confusion. Revolutionaries today can have confidence in the intact capacities of their class, and by the same token in the capacity of the revolutionary milieu to respond to the demands that history is placing upon its shoulders. They know that they must retain a long term vision of their work and avoid all immediatist pitfalls. But at the same time they must understand that we do not have all the time in the world, and that serious errors made today already constitute an obstacle to the future formation of the class party.   

International ICC leaflet

War has always been a test for the working class and its revolutionary minorities.

The workers are the first to suffer the consequences of a war, whether through loss of life or through increased exploitation. At the same time, the proletariat is the only force in society capable of putting an end to its barbarity by overthrowing the capitalism which lies at its root.

This new Gulf war and the serious aggravation of imperialist tensions of which it is an expression are a reminder that the survival of this historically condemned system constitutes a mortal danger for humanity, knowing as it does no other way out of its economic crisis than a headlong flight into militarism and war.

Denouncing bourgeois mystification

The working class is today unable to respond to this situation through revolutionary struggle. It is nonetheless necessary that this new eruption of barbarism should serve to develop its consciousness. Unable to hide the imperialist nature of this conflict behind the pretext of humanitarianism or the defence of international law, the bourgeoisie is doing all it can to prevent it becoming a positive factor in the development of class consciousness. To this end, every country is putting to good use a whole arsenal of ideological and media brainwashing.

Whatever the opposing imperialist interests of the bourgeoisie’s different national fractions, their propaganda has at least two common themes: first, it is not capitalism as a whole that is responsible for the barbarity of war, but this or that state, this or that regime; second, war is not an inevitable expression of capitalism, because there exist ways of ensuring peaceful relations between states.

War, like revolution, is a moment of truth for revolutionary organisations. It forces them to take position clearly for the bourgeois or the proletarian camp.

Determined intervention in the working class

Revolutionary organisations are alone capable of defending a clear class viewpoint against this war and the deluge of pacifist propaganda that accompanied it: it was their responsibility to mobilise for a determined intervention in their class. It was their responsibility to denounce, loud and clear, this war’s imperialist nature – in common with all the wars since the beginning of the 20th century – to defend proletarian internationalism, to oppose the interests of every fraction of the bourgeoisie with those of the working class, to reject any support whatever for national unity, to put forward the only possible perspective for the proletariat: the development of the class struggle world-wide, until the revolution.

As far as the ICC is concerned, we mobilised our forces in order to assume this responsibility to the best of our ability.

We intervened with our press in the pacifist demonstrations that proliferated across the world during January, and the level of our sales is testimony at least to our determination to convince as to the validity of our positions. In some countries, our sections brought out supplements to the press, or distributed calls to extraordinary public meetings. In some towns, this made it possible to open discussion with new elements who had never heard of the ICC before.

The day after the first bombs fell we began the mass distribution (relative to our modest strength) of a leaflet directed towards the working class in the fourteen countries where we have an organised presence, in some fifty towns on every continent other than Africa. In India, the distribution of the leaflet in two industrial centres meant its translation into Hindi and Bengali. Many sympathisers joined our distribution, widening its extent still further. The leaflet was also distributed more selectively in some of the pacifist demonstrations. It has been translated into Russia for distribution in that country, where the ICC is not yet present. On the first day of the bombing, the leaflet was published on the ICC’s web site in English and French. It will shortly be made available in other languages, including those of some countries where the ICC has no presence: Portuguese, Farsi, and Korean.

Call on the revolutionary milieu to live up to its responsibility

Other organisations of the Communist Left have also intervened with leaflets, notably in the pacifist demonstrations. They have set themselves apart from all the hotchpotch of leftist groups by their intransigent internationalism against the war, making no concession to any bourgeois camp.

In accord with our conception of the existence of a revolutionary milieu made up precisely by these organisations, and in accord also with our practice since the foundation of our organisation, the ICC called on these groups to undertake a common intervention against the war. We suggested two forms for such an intervention: “to draw up and distribute a common document denouncing the imperialist war and the bourgeois campaigns which accompany it”, or “to hold joint public meetings, where each group could put forward, as well as the common positions which unite us, the specific analyses which distinguish it from the others”.

We are publishing below the full text of our appeal, as well as a preliminary analysis of the replies we have received – all of them negative. This situation demonstrates that the revolutionary milieu as a whole has failed to live up to its responsibility against the war, and even more seriously in the perspective of the necessary regroupment of revolutionaries in preparation for the formation of the future class party of the international proletariat.

For a joint intervention against the war

We are publishing below two letters that we sent to the organisations of the Communist left to propose a common intervention against the war. Having received no reply to our first letter, we decided to send a second containing new, more modest, proposals which we thought they would find more readily acceptable. The organisations to which we sent our appeal were the following:

- The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP)

- Partito Comunista Internazionale (Il Comunista, Le Prolétaire)

- Partito Comunista Internazionale (Il Partito Comunista)

- Partito Comunista Internazionale (Il Programma Comunista).

Only the IBRP and the PCI (Le Prolétaire) have deigned to reply, which says much as to the self-satisfaction of the other two organisations.

Our letter of 11th February

Comrades,

The world is heading for a new war with all its tragic consequences: the massacre of the Iraqi civilian population and proletarians in uniform, intensified exploitation of the workers of the “democratic” countries who will bear the brunt of the enormous increase in military spending by their governments. In fact, this new Gulf War, whose objectives are far more ambitious than those of the war in 1991, is likely to out do the latter in terms of the massacres and suffering that it will provoke and in terms of the increased instability that it will create throughout the region of the Middle East, which is already particularly affected by imperialist conflict.

As always on the eve of war, today we are witness to an enormous campaign of lies in order to make the exploited accept the new crimes that capitalism is preparing to commit. On one hand, the coming war is being justified as “a necessity to prevent a bloody dictator threatening world security with his weapons of mass destruction”. On the other, we are told that “war is not inevitable and we must rely on the action of the United Nations”. Communists know very well what such speeches are worth: the main possessors of weapons of mass destruction are precisely those countries which today claim to guarantee the planet’s security, and their leaders have never hesitated to use them when they considered it useful to defend their imperialist interests. As for the states which today are calling for “peace”, we know very well that this is the better to defend their own imperialist interests which are threatened by the ambitions of the United States and that tomorrow they will not hesitate in their turn to unleash massacres if their interests demand it. Communists also learnt that there is nothing to hope from this “den of thieves”, to apply Lenin’s term for the League of Nations to its successor, the United Nations.

At the same time as the campaign is organised by the governments and their hired media, we are also witnessing the development of unprecedented pacifist campaigns, particularly under the impetus of the anti-globalisation movements. These are both far noisier and far more massive than those in 1990-91 during the first Gulf war or those of 1999 during the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia.

War has always been a central question for the proletariat and the organisations which defend its class interests and its historic perspective of the overthrow of capitalism. Most currents which took a clear and truly internationalist position on the war at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, were also those who would stand at the vanguard of the revolution of October 1917, of the revolutionary wave which followed it, and the foundation of the Communist International. History has also shown that during this period the proletariat is the only force in society which can really oppose imperialist war, not by lining up behind the pacifist and democratic delusions of the petty bourgeoisie, but by undertaking the combat on its own class terrain against capitalism as a whole and against the lies of pacifism. In this sense, history has also taught us that the denunciation by Communists of the imperialist slaughter and of all expressions of chauvinism must necessarily be accompanied by the denunciation of pacifism.

During the first imperialist slaughter it was the left of the Second International (and particularly the Bolsheviks) who defended most clearly a truly internationalist position. And it fell to the Communist Left of the CI (especially the Italian Left) to represent the internationalist position against the betrayal by the parties of the CI in the Second World War.

Faced with the coming war and all the campaigns of lies unleashed today, it is clear that only the organisations which spring from the historical current of the Communist Left are really capable of defending a truly internationalist position:

a) The imperialist war is not the result of a “bad” or “criminal” policy of this or that government, or of this or that sector of the ruling class; capitalism as a whole is responsible for imperialist war.

b) In this sense, the position of the proletariat and communists against imperialist war can in no way line-up, even “critically” behind one or other of the warring camps; concretely, denouncing the American offensive against Iraq in no way means offering the slightest support to this country or its bourgeoisie.

c) The only position in conformity with the interests of the proletariat is the struggle against capitalism as a whole, and therefore against all the sectors of the world bourgeoisie with a perspective not of a “peaceful capitalism” but overthrowing the capitalist system and setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat.

d) Pacifism is at best a petty bourgeois illusion which tends to turn the proletariat away from its strict class terrain; more often, it is nothing but a ploy cynically used by the bourgeoisie in order to drag the proletariat into the imperialist war in defence of the “pacifist” and “democratic” sectors of the ruling class. In this sense, the defence of the internationalist proletarian position is inseparable from the unsparing denunciation of pacifism.

The existing groups of the Communist Left all share these fundamental positions, whatever the divergences that may exist amongst them. The ICC is well aware of these divergences and has never tried to hide them. On the contrary, it has always tried in its press to point out these disagreements with the other groups and combat the analyses that we consider incorrect. This being said, and in line with the attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1915 at Zimmerwald and of the Italian Fraction during the 1930s, the ICC considers that real Communists today have the responsibility of presenting as widely as possible to the class as a whole, in the face of imperialist war and the bourgeoisie’s campaigns, the fundamental positions of internationalism. From our point of view, this presupposes that the groups of the Communist Left do not restrict themselves to their own intervention, but that they join together in order to express in common their common position. For the ICC a common intervention of the different groups of the Communist Left would have a political impact within the class which would go well beyond the sum of their respective forces which, as we all know, are only too weak at the present time. This is why the ICC is proposing to the following groups to meet in order to discuss what means could permit the Communist Left to speak with one voice in defence of proletarian internationalism, without hindering or calling into question the specific intervention of any group. Concretely, the ICC makes the following proposals to the groups cited at the end of the document:

- To draw up and distribute a common document denouncing the imperialist war and the bourgeois campaigns which accompany it.

- To hold joint public meetings, where each group could put forward, as well as the common positions which unite us, the specific analyses which distinguish it from the others.

- The ICC is of course open to any other initiative which could give the widest possible audience to internationalist positions.

In March 1999, the ICC had already sent a similar appeal to the same organisations. Unfortunately, none of them replied favourably and this is why our organisation considered it useless to renew such an appeal at the time of the war in Afghanistan at the end of 2001. If we are renewing our appeal today, it is because we think that all the groups of the Communist Left are aware of the extreme gravity of the present situation and the exceptional size of the deceitful pacifist campaigns, and therefore want to do everything they can to give the widest possible audience to the internationalist position.

We ask you to transmit your response as soon as possible by addressing it to the postbox given at the top of the page. So that it may reach us as quickly as possible we suggest that you address a copy to the postbox of the territorial sections which are closest to your own organisation or to any militants of the ICC that you may meet.

With our communist greetings.

Our letter of 24th March

Comrades,

(…) Clearly, you consider that the adoption by the different groups of the Communist Left of a common document denouncing the imperialist war and the pacifist campaigns is liable to create confusion and to hide the differences between our organisations. As you know, this is not our opinion. However, our purpose in this letter is not to change your minds on the subject, but to put forward the following proposal: the joint organisation of public meetings where each of the organisations of the Communist Left present in the meeting would be responsible for its own presentation, and for the development of its own arguments in the discussion. It seems to us that a meeting organised in this way would meet your concerns that there should be no confusion between our respective positions. At the same time, it would give the greatest possible impact (modest though this would be) to the presence of an internationalist, proletarian, and revolutionary position – which only the groups of the Communist Left are capable of defending – against the different bourgeois positions put forward today (whether they advocate support for this or that camp in the name of “democracy” or “anti-imperialism”, or whether they claim to call for “peace”, the “respect of international law”, or other such nonsense). This kind of meeting would also allow the greatest possible number of elements who are interested in the ideas and the internationalist positions of the Communist Left to meet and discuss both together and with the organisations who defend these positions. They would at the same time be able to measure as clearly as possible the extent of the disagreement amongst these organisations.

Let us be absolutely clear: our purpose is not to allow the ICC to widen its audience by speaking to elements who usually come to your organisation’s public meetings. As an earnest of our good faith, we make the following proposal: should you agree, the ICC’s public meetings planned for the months to come, which will of course be devoted to the war and the proletariat’s attitude to the war, could be converted to the kind of meeting we propose. This poses less difficulty in towns or countries where both our organisations have a presence. However, our proposal also includes other towns and countries: to be concrete, we would be glad to take part in Cologne or Zurich in a joint meeting with militants of the Communist Left from Britain, France or Italy, or in New York with IBRP comrades from Montreal or Michigan (we could ourselves also send militants to Montreal, for example, should you consider this appropriate). Needless to say, we will be glad to lodge the militants of your organisation who come to take part in these meetings, and to translate their presentation and interventions should this be necessary.

Should this proposal meet with your agreement, we ask you to let us know as quickly as possible (for example to the e-mail shown below) so that we can make the necessary arrangements. At all events, even should you reject our proposal (something we would of course regret), your organisation and its militants are cordially invited to take part in our public meetings to defend your positions.

We look forward to your reply.

Communist and internationalist greetings

IBRP reply, 28th March[1]

Dear comrades,

We have received via our comrades your “appeal” for united action against the war. We find ourselves obliged to reject it, for reasons you should be aware of and which we will summarise here.

It is almost thirty years since the First International Conference of the Communist Left, and our disagreements with the ICC have not only failed to diminish, they have on the contrary increased. The ICC has undergone the splits of which we are all aware. This means – and this should be obvious to anyone who considers the essential in this phenomenon – that we cannot consider the ICC as a valid partner in defining any kind of valid action.

It is impossible to “bring together” those who consider that an immense danger threatens the working class – a class which, having undergone extremely violent attacks on its wages, jobs, and working conditions, today runs the risk of being chained to the juggernaut of war – and those who, like the ICC, think that war did not break out between the blocs because an undefeated working class prevented it. What would we have to say together? It is obvious that, faced with the enormity of the problem, the general principles put forward in the Appeal are not enough.

Moreover, united action – against the war or on any other problem – can only be envisaged between well-defined and unequivocally identified political partners who share political positions that they both consider essential. We have already seen that our positions are antithetical on this point that we consider essential. Independently of any hypothetical convergence in the future, it is essential that the hypothetical organised unity of action between different political tendencies should be preceded by a convergence of all the components into which these tendencies are divided. In other words, there is no point in united action between parts of the different political currents while other parts remain outside with a critical and antagonistic attitude.

Well, you the ICC are part of a political tendency which is henceforth divided into several groups all of which claim to defend the orthodoxy of the ICC at the beginning, just like the Bordigist groups to which you have also addressed your Appeal.

Everything that you write in your “Appeal” with respect to the need to close revolutionary ranks in the face of war, should be valid above all within your own tendency, just as it should be within the Bordigist tendencies.

Frankly, it would be more serious if an Appeal like this were addressed to the IFICC and the EFICC, just as it would be more serious for Programme Communiste or Il Comunista-Le Prolétaire to launch a similar appeal to the numerous Bordigist groups in the world. Why would this be more serious? Because it would be a real attempt to reverse a tendency which would be ridiculous were it not so dramatic, of increasing divisions just as the contradictions of capitalism and the problems posed to the working class increase also.

But today it is obvious that this dramatic-ridiculous tendency is now a characteristic of both these currents.

This is no accident, and brings us back to the other essential question. The ICC’s political positions, its theory, its method, and its conception of organisation are obviously defective (just as were those of Programme Communiste from the outset), since these are the basis for splits every time that the problems of capitalism or class relationships are exacerbated.

If – sixty years after the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party and 58 years after the end of World War II – two of the three tendencies in the inter-war Communist Left have fallen to pieces, then there must be a reason.

We insist: the question is not one of a failure to grow or an inability to lay roots within the working class – these are both determined by the working class’ extreme difficulty in extricating itself from its historic defeat by the Stalinist counter-revolution. On the contrary, we are posing the problem of these two tendencies’ fragmentation into a constellation of groups, all laying claim to original orthodoxy. The reason – as we have said several times before – lies in the weakness of the orthodoxy, its inability to understand and explain capitalism’s dynamic and to elaborate the resulting necessary political orientations. To conclude, it seems to us that the aim of reconstituting the Italian Left in a unitary political framework is henceforth unattainable, given that two of its components manifest a notorious inability to explain events in terms that are coherent with reality, and consequently can only fragment more and more.

Obviously, this does not mean that we are closed in on ourselves. Just as we were able to take the appropriate initiative to break the ice in the far-off 1970s by starting a new dynamic in the debate within the proletarian political camp, so today we will attempt to take initiatives capable of going beyond the old political framework – which is now blocked – and to renovate the revolutionary and internationalist tradition in a new process of taking root in the class.

PCI – Le Prolétaire reply of 29th March[2]

Comrades

We have received your letter of 24th March, which also contained your previous letter of 11th February. We have already answered orally to the proposal contained in the latter during a readers’ meeting, and we will return to the subject in the columns of Le Prolétaire. Even if you seem to have given up the idea of a joint text, your new proposal springs from the same political frontism, and we can therefore only give it the same negative response.

With our communist salutations.

Is joint action possible? Our response

This is not the first time that the ICC has launched an appeal to the groups of the proletarian political milieu for a joint intervention in the face of an accelerating world situation. As our letter says, we launched just such a call in March 1999, against the military barbarism unleashed in Kosovo. The articles that we wrote in response to the refusals we received at the time[3] essentially remain perfectly adapted to the present situation. We nonetheless consider it necessary to take position briefly on the negative replies that we have once again received, to make the point that they spring from a political approach which we consider damaging to the interests of the proletariat. We will return to the subject in greater depth in a forthcoming issue. The PCI – Le Prolétaire has said that it will do the same in its own press.

We will thus limit ourselves here to answering the arguments given by the two groups for rejecting both of our proposals: the distribution of a document against the war, on the basis of our common internationalist positions, and the organisation of meetings aimed both at a joint denunciation of the war, and the confrontation of the disagreements between our organisations.

The PCI and its lowest common denominator

The very brief letter from the PCI considers that our Appeal comes down to “frontism”. This reply is in line with that given orally at the PCI’s readers’ meeting at Aix-en-Provence on 1st March, where we were also told that the ICC’s vision was to seek a “lowest common denominator” between the organisations. Moreover, these very sketchy arguments are coherent with those put forward – more fully though not more convincingly – in a polemic against us published in Le Prolétaire n°465. This will allow us to look briefly at the PCI’s organisational conceptions.

Let us say from the outset, that this article represents a step forward on the attitude of the PCI in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, we had got used to confronting an organisation which already considered itself to be the “compact and powerful party”, sole guide of the proletarian revolution, whose sole programme could only be the “invariant” one of… 1848. Today, the PCI tells us: “Far from thinking ourselves ‘alone in the world’, we defend the need for intransigent programmatic criticism and political struggle against positions we consider false and against the organisations that defend them”.

Le Prolétaire seems to think that we want to attract elements in order to form the party on the basis of a lowest common denominator. They oppose to this a method which considers that all other organisations and their positions are to be fought equally, in other words they make no distinction between organisations which hold to an internationalist position and Trotskyist or Stalinist organisations which have long since abandoned the terrain of the working class through their more or less explicit support for one or other camp in imperialist war. Such a method leads inevitably to the idea that they are the only organisation to defend the programme of the working class, and in consequence therefore the only basis for the construction of the party – and so to act in the final instance as if they were alone in the world to defend class positions.

The PCI also observes that the present situation has nothing to do with that of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and so considers our reference to the principles of Zimmerwald to be inapplicable because based on an improper comparison. They are either unable – or unwilling – to understand what we are saying.

You hardly need to be a marxist to see that the situation today is not identical to that of 1917, nor even to that of 1915 – the year of the Zimmerwald conference. Nonetheless, both periods have this significant trait in common: the stage of history is dominated by imperialist war, and for the working class’ advanced elements, this means that one question takes precedence over all others – internationalism against this war. It is these elements’ responsibility to make their voices heard against the flood tide of bourgeois ideology and propaganda. To talk of “frontism” and a “lowest common denominator” not only does nothing to clarify the disagreements among the internationalists, it is a factor of confusion inasmuch as it places the real divergence, the class frontier that separates the internationalists from the whole bourgeoisie, from far right to extreme left, at the same level as the disagreements among the internationalists.

The accusation of “frontism” is in fact based on a profound error as to the nature of frontism, as our predecessors of the Communist Left understood and denounced it. This term referred to the tactics adopted by the Third International as it tried – but with an incorrect and opportunist method – to break the isolation of the Russian revolution. Later, as it degenerated, the Communist International became more and more a mere instrument of the Russian state’s foreign policy, and used the frontist tactic as an instrument of this policy. Frontism – for example the CI’s “workers’ united front at the base” – was thus an attempt to create a unity in action between the parties of the International which had remained faithful to proletarian internationalism, and the social-democratic parties in particular which had supported the war effort of the bourgeois state in 1914. In other words, frontism tried to create a united front between two enemy classes, between the organisations of the proletariat and those which had passed irretrievably into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The PCI hides behind differences in historic period and the rejection of frontism in order to avoid the real questions and the responsibilities which are incumbent on internationalists today. When we appeal to the spirit of Lenin at Zimmerwald, it is at the level of principles. Whatever the PCI may think, we agree with them on the need for programmatic criticism and political struggle. We also combat ideas that we consider false, although since we understand the different nature of bourgeois and proletarian organisations, we combat the latter’s positions rather than their organisations.

“The one party which tomorrow will guide the proletariat in the revolution and the dictatorship cannot be born from the merger of heterogeneous organisations and therefore programmes, but from the clear victory of one programme over the others (…) it must have a programme which is also unique and unequivocal, the authentic communist programme which synthesises all the lessons from the battles of the past.”.[4]

We too think that the proletariat will be unable to make the revolution if it is unable to give birth to a world-wide communist party based on a single programme,[5] which synthesises the lessons of the past. But the problem is, how is this party going to appear? We do not believe that it will spring forth all ready at the revolutionary moment, like Athena from the head of Zeus: it must be prepared in advance, starting now. It was precisely this lack of preparation which was so cruelly lacking at the foundation of the Third International. Two things are necessary for this preparation: firstly, to draw a clear line between internationalist positions and all the leftist garbage which always comes down to defending this or that fraction of the bourgeoisie in imperialist war; and secondly, to allow the disagreements which exist within this internationalist camp to confront each other in the fire of open debate. To put the formation of the world party at the same level as the defense of internationalism against imperialist war today, is nothing short of idealist since it ignores what is urgently necessary in the present situation in the name of a historical perspective which can only come to fruition on the basis of a massive development of the class struggle and a prior work of clarification and decantation in the revolutionary minorities.

As for Le Prolétaire’s rejection of “organisational mergers”, it shows that this organisation has forgotten its history: do we need to remind the comrades that the call for the formation of the Third International was not addressed solely to Bolsheviks, nor even solely to Social Democrats who had remained faithful to internationalism like the Spartakus group of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. It was also addressed to anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish CNT, to revolutionary syndicalists like Rosmer and Monatte in France or like the American IWW, to industrial unionists from the British shop stewards movement, and to De Leonists like John Maclean’s Scottish SLP. Only a few months before the October revolution, the Bolshevik party itself integrated Trotsky’s inter-rayon organisation, which included one-time Menshevik internationalists. Obviously, this was not an “ecumenical” merger, but the regroupment of proletarian organisations which had remained faithful to internationalism during the war around the conceptions of the Bolsheviks whose validity had been demonstrated both by the evolution of historical events and above all by the action of the working class. This historical experience shows that the PCI is wrong to say that a merger of organisations is equivalent to a merger of programmes.

Today, raising high the internationalist banner and creating an area of debate within the internationalist camp would allow elements searching for revolutionary clarity to foil the democratic, pacifist, and leftist bourgeoisie’s deceitful propaganda, and to temper themselves in political struggle. The PCI says that it wants to combat the ICC, its programme, its analyses, its politics, and “to conduct an uncompromising political struggle against all the confusionists” (including the ICC). Very well, we take up the challenge. The problem is, that for such a combat to take place (we mean of course a political combat within the proletarian camp), the opposing forces must be able to meet within a framework - and we can only regret that the PCI prefers to “combat” from the comfort of its doctoral armchair rather than confronting the rigours and the realities of open debate, on the pretext that this would be “an ecumenical democratic union”.[6] Their refusal of our proposal is not a “combat”. On the contrary, it means refusing the real and necessary combat in favour of an ideal and unreal one.

The response of the IBRP

The IBRP has given four reasons for its refusal which we can summarise as follows:

1. Because the ICC thinks that it is the working class which prevents the outbreak of world imperialist war, it cannot be considered as “a valid partner”.

2. The communist left is broken up into three tendencies (i.e. the Bordigists, the IBRP, and the ICC) of which two (the Bordigists and the ICC) are split up into different groups all of which lay claim to an original “orthodoxy”. For the IBRP, it is impossible to envisage any kind of common action between these “tendencies” until the latter have themselves reunified their different components (the ICC’s old “external fraction” and present “internal fraction” are, according to the IBRP, part of “our tendency”): “it is essential that any hypothetical organised unity of action amongst different political tendencies should see the convergence of all the components within which such tendencies are divided”. In this sense, “it would be more serious if an appeal like this were addressed precisely to the IFICC and the ex-EFICC”.

3. The fact that the ICC has undergone splits is supposedly the result of its theoretical weaknesses, hence “its inability to understand and explain the dynamic of capitalism and to elaborate the necessary political orientation switch result from this”. As a result (and given that the IBRP lumps us with the Bordigist groups), the IBRP finds itself today the only healthy survivor of the Italian left.

4. As a result of all this, only the IBRP is today able to “to take initiatives capable of going beyond the old political framework - which is now blocked - and to renovate the revolutionary and internationalist tradition in a new process of taking root in the class”.

How not to do “serious” work

Before dealing with the fundamental questions, we have to clear the ground of these “fractions” which – according to the IBRP – should be the first objects of our concern. As far as the one-time “external fraction” of the ICC is concerned, we think it would be more “serious” of the IBRP to pay some attention to the positions of this group (known today under the name of Internationalist Perspective): if they did so, they would realise that IP has completely abandoned the very foundation of the ICC’s positions – the analysis of the decadence of capitalism – no longer claims to defend our platform, and no longer calls itself a “fraction” of the ICC. But whether or not this group is politically part of our “tendency”, as the IBRP put it, is beside the point. The reasons that we have not addressed our appeal to this group have nothing to do with its political analyses, and the IBRP knows this very well. This group was founded on the basis of a parasitic approach, of denigrating and slandering the ICC, and it is on the basis of this political judgement[7] that the ICC does not consider it as part of the communist left. As for the group which claims today to be a “internal fraction” of the ICC, the situation is still worse. If the IBRP has read the IFICC’s bulletin n°14 and our territorial press (see our article “The police-like methods of the ‘IFICC’” in World Revolution n°262), then they know that revolutionary organisations can undertake no kind of common work with elements who behave like police informers to the benefit of the repressive forces of the bourgeois state. Unless the IBRP thinks that there is nothing wrong with this kind of behaviour!

What are the conditions for common work?

Let us turn now to a kind of argument which deserves a fuller reply: the idea that our political positions are too widely separated for us to be able to work together. We have already pointed out that this attitude is one million miles from that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the Zimmerwald conference, where the latter signed a common manifesto with other internationalist forces, despite the fact that the divisions among the participants at Zimmerwald was certainly greater than the divisions between the internationalist groups of today. To give only one example: the Social-Revolutionaries, who were not even Marxists and who for the most part ended up adopting a counter-revolutionary position in 1917, took part in the Zimmerwald conference.

It is hard to see why our analysis of the balance of class forces at a global level should be a discriminatory criterion preventing any common intervention against the war and, within this framework, an open debate on this question and others. We have already explained the basis of our position on the historic course, frequently and at length, in the pages of this Review. The method underpinning our analysis is the same as it was at the time of the international conferences of the Communist Left, initiated by Battaglia Comunista and supported by the ICC at the end of the 1970s. Our position is thus hardly a discovery for the IBRP. Indeed, at the time of the conferences, BC itself referred explicitly to Zimmerwald and Kienthal: “it is impossible to arrive either at class positions, or at the creation of a world party of the revolution, still less at a revolutionary strategy, without first resolving the need to set in motion a permanent international centre of liaison and information, which will be the anticipation and the synthesis of what will be the future International, just as Zimmerwald, and above all Kienthal, were prefigurations of the IIIrd International” (BC’s “Letter of Appeal” to the First Conference in 1976).

What has changed since then to justify a lesser unity amongst internationalists and the refusal of our proposal, which does not even have the ambition of setting up a “centre of liaison”?

The IBRP should really take a broader view of the present situation and put into perspective the importance it gives to what it considers to be our “incorrect analysis of the balance of class forces”. Because if there is one thing which has changed, and changed several times, since the period of the conferences it is the IBRP’s analysis of the balance of class forces and other factors which prevented the outbreak of a new world war before 1989. They have proposed all kinds of explanations on this subject: at one point, they imagined that the war had not broken out because the imperialist blocs were insufficiently consolidated – when in fact never in history had two blocs been so set in concrete as the American and Russian blocs. At another point, the bourgeoisie was supposed to have been too terrified by the idea of nuclear holocaust to unleash a war. And finally, the IBRP’s latest discovery, which it maintained until the disintegration of the Russian bloc under the blows of the economic crisis, was the idea that the Third World War had not broken out because... of the insufficient depth of the economic crisis!

It is worth recalling that two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ICC asserted that the new period which was opening would be marked by the disintegration of the blocs. Two months later, we wrote that this situation would lead to a growing chaos, fed above all by the opposition of the third and second order imperialist powers to the attempts by the United States to maintain and strengthen its role as gendarme of the world (see n°60 and 61 of the International Review). The IBRP on the contrary, after talking for a while about a possible new expansion of the world economy thanks to the “reconstruction” of the Eastern Bloc countries,[8] began to defend the idea of a new bloc based on the European Union and rivalling the United States. Today it is obvious that the “reconstruction” of the countries of the old Eastern Bloc is long gone, while the outbreak of the new war in Iraq has shown that the European Union has never been so divided, so incapable of united action at the level of a common foreign policy, so far away from forming even the semblance of an imperialist bloc. This divergence between the economic level (the expansion and unification of Europe at the economic level with the creation of the Euro and the entry of new member countries) and the imperialist level (the total and obvious impotence of Europe in this domain) only emphasises this fundamental aspect of capitalism’s dynamic in its period of decadence, which the IBRP still refuses to recognise: imperialist conflicts are not the direct fruit of economic competition, but the consequence of an economic blockage at a far more global level of capitalist society. Whatever the disagreements between our organisations, we have a right to ask on what the IBRP bases its judgement that only itself, unlike the ICC, is capable of understanding “the dynamic of capitalism”.

Things are no clearer when we come to the analysis of the class struggle. The IBRP considers that the ICC overestimates the strength of the proletariat and disagrees with our analysis of the course of history. And yet it is the IBRP which has a regrettable tendency to get carried away by its enthusiasm of the moment every time that it thinks it can see something which looks like an “anti-capitalist” movement. Without going into details, let us simply recall how Battaglia Comunista greeted the movements in Romania in an article entitled “Ceaucescu is dead, but capitalism still lives”: “Romania is the first country in the industrialised regions where the world economic crisis has given birth to a real and authentic popular insurrection whose result has been the overthrow of the government (...) in Romania, all the objective conditions and almost all the subjective conditions were gathered for transforming the insurrection into a real and authentic social revolution”. During the events in Argentina in 2002, the IBRP was still mistaking inter-classist revolt against corrupt governments for proletarian and classist insurrection: “[the proletariat] descended spontaneously into the street, drawing behind it the youth, the students, and large sections of the petty bourgeoisie pauperised and proletarianised like itself. Together they vented their anger against the sanctuaries of capitalism: banks, offices, and above all the supermarkets and other shops which were overrun like the bread ovens in the Middle Ages (...) the revolt did not die down, spreading throughout the country and assuming increasingly classist characteristics. The seat of government, the symbolic monument of exploitation and financial greed, was taken by assault”.[9]

The ICC by contrast, despite our “idealist overestimation” of the strength of the proletariat, has constantly warned both that the overall historical situation endangers the proletariat’s ability to put forward its own perspective, especially since 1989, and against immediatist and short-term enthusiasm for anything that looks like a revolt. While the IBRP was working itself up over the situation in Romania, we wrote: “Faced with these attacks, the proletariat [in Eastern Europe] will fight, and will try to resist (...) But the question is: what will be the context in which the strikes occur? There can be no ambiguity as to the reply: one of extreme confusion due to the Eastern working-class’ political weakness and inexperience, which will make the workers especially vulnerable to the mystifications of democracy and trade unions, and the poison of nationalism (...) We cannot exclude the possibility that large fractions of the working-class will let themselves be enrolled and massacred for interests that are totally foreign to them, in the struggles between nationalist gangs, or between ‘ democratic ‘ and Stalinist cliques” (we cannot help thinking of Grozny, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan...). As for the situation in the West, we wrote: “At first, the opening of the ‘Iron Curtain’ which divided the world proletariat in two will not permit the workers in the West to help their class brothers in the East profit from their experience (...) on the contrary, in the immediate and for some time to come, it will be the strong democratic illusions of the workers in the East that will spill over into the West...”.[10] One can hardly say that these perspectives have been refuted since.

We do not intend here to enter into a debate on this question – it would require a good deal more development on our part[11] – still less to claim that the IBRP is systematically mistaken, and that the ICC has a monopoly in its ability to analyse the situation: we simply want to demonstrate that the IBRP’s caricature of a hopelessly “idealist” ICC (“idealist” because its incorrect analyses are not based on the strictly economic materialism favoured by the IBRP) and an IBRP which alone is capable of “understanding and explaining the dynamic of capitalism” simply has no basis in reality. The comrades of the IBRP think that the ICC is idealist. So be it. For our part, we think that the IBRP too often gets stuck in the most banal vulgar materialism. But compared to what unites the internationalists against imperialist war, compared to the responsibility that they could assume and the impact that a common intervention could have, this frankly is secondary, and should in no way hinder them from debating, deepening, and clarifying the theoretical disagreements that separate them. Quite the contrary. We are convinced that “the synthesis of all the lessons from the battles of the past” will be vital for the proletariat to settle, and not just in theory, the validity of the theses of its political organisations. We are equally convinced that to achieve this it is necessary to mark out the internationalist camp and to make possible theoretical confrontation within that camp. Le Prolétaire refuses this confrontation for reasons of principle, however secondary these may be today. The IBRP refuses it for reasons of conjuncture and analysis. Is this “serious”?

Are splits a criterion for discrimination?

The third reason that the IBRP gives for refusing any collaboration with us is the fact that we have undergone splits: “two of the three tendencies in the inter-war Communist Left have fallen to pieces”. The IBRP hardly has an objective vision of what it calls the break-up of the “ICC tendency”, not only as far as the totally irresponsible political and militant approach of the parasitic groupings which gravitate in the ICC’s orbit is concerned, but also as regards the importance of an organised political presence on an international scale. By contrast, it is clearly true that there is a fragmentation among the organisations which can legitimately claim to have inherited the legacy of the Italian left. And as far as the attitude to be adopted towards the situation is concerned, Battaglia Comunista has carried out a 180° turn compared to their own attitude before the first conference of the groups of the Communist Left: “The Conference should also indicate how and when to open a debate on problems (...) which today divide the international Communist Left, if we want the Conference to have a positive conclusion, and be a step towards a broader objective, towards the formation of an international front of groups of the Communist Left which will be as homogeneous as possible, so that we can finally leave the political and ideological tower of Babel and avoid a dismemberment of the existing groups”[12] (2nd Letter from BC, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference). Battaglia also considered at the time that “the gravity of the situation (...) demands the taking up of precise and responsible positions, based on a unified vision of the various currents of the international communist left” (BC’s 1st Letter). This 180° turn took place during the conferences themselves: Battaglia refused to take any position, even to take position on the divergences existing between our organisations.[13] The IBRP refuses again today. And yet the situation is far from being any less serious.

Moreover, the IBRP should explain why the fact of undergoing splits represents a disqualification for any common work amongst groups of the communist left. Without wanting to make any improper comparisons, it is worth noting that at the time of the Second International one in particular of all the member parties had a reputation for its “internal struggles”, its “conflicts of ideas” (often opaque to militants from other countries), its splits, for an extreme vehemence in its debates on the part of some of its fractions, and for endless internal debates around its statutes. It was widely held that “those Russians are incorrigible”, and that Lenin – too much the “authoritarian” and “disciplinarian” – was largely responsible for the fragmentation of the RSDLP in 1903. Things were different in the German party, which appeared to advance sure-footedly from one success to another thanks to the wisdom of its leaders, first amongst whom was none other than the “Pope of Marxism”, Karl Kautsky. We know what became of them...

What initiatives are demanded by the situation?

The IBRP thinks that it is the only organisation of the communist left capable of “taking initiatives” and “going beyond the old political framework - which is now blocked”.

We cannot develop our disagreement with the IBRP in depth here. At all events, given that it was Battaglia Comunista who took the responsibility of excluding the ICC from the international conferences, and then bringing them to an end, given that it is the IBRP which systematically refuses today any common effort by the internationalist proletarian milieu, we can only say that they have an extraordinary gall to declare today that “the old framework is blocked”.

As far as we are concerned, and despite the disappearance of the formal and internationally organised framework of the conferences, our attitude has remained unchanged:

- seeking to work in common, on the basis of internationalist positions, with the groups of the Communist Left (our call to common action during the wars in the Gulf in 1991, in Kosovo in 1999, a common public meeting with the Communist Workers Organisation on the occasion of the anniversary of October in 1997, etc);

- the defence of the proletarian milieu (in as far as our very modest means allow us to do so) against outside attack and against the infiltration of bourgeois ideology (let us mention only our defence of the PCI’s pamphlet Auschwitz and the Great Alibi against the attacks of the bourgeois press, and denunciation of the Arab nationalists of the late El Oumami who broke up the PCI and stole its funds, the publicity that we have given to the exclusion from our ranks of elements that we judge dangerous for the workers movement, our rejection of the attempts by the Los Angeles Workers Voice group (which until recently represented the IBRP in the USA) to make itself look respectable by copying and debasing elements of our platform).

By contrast the history of the IBRP since 1980 is sown with a whole series of attempts to discover “a new process of taking root in the class”. The vast majority of these attempts have ended in failure. A non-exhaustive list includes:

- the so-called “Fourth Conference” of the Communist left where the forces “seriously selected” by the IBRP were in fact limited to the Iranian crypto-Stalinists of the UCM;

- during the 1980s, the IBRP found a new recipe for “taking root”: the “Communist factory groups” which were to remain nothing but fantasies;

- the IBRP has been seized with enthusiasm for the grandiose possibilities of forming mass parties in the countries on the periphery of capitalism; nothing came from that other than the ephemeral and “uprooted” Lal Pataka;

- with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the IBRP went fishing in the old Stalinist parties of the Eastern bloc. Nothing came of that either.[14]

The IBRP should not be offended at our reminding them of this list of disappointed illusions. It gives us no pleasure, quite the contrary. But we think that the extreme weakness of communist forces in the world today is yet another reason to close our ranks in action and in the fraternal confrontation of our divergences, rather than setting ourselves up as the sole heirs of the Communist Left.

We will be there

Once again, we are forced to note the lamentable inability of the groups of the Communist Left to create together the internationalist pole of reference which the proletariat and its advanced or searching elements urgently need as the planet plunges further and further into the military chaos of rotting capitalism.

This will not make us abandon our convictions, and the day when the other organisations of the Communist Left understand the necessity for common action we will answer: present!

Jens, 7/04/2003

 

 

 

It is sixty years since the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto; and by a strange irony of history, exactly one hundred years before, in 1843, Karl Marx had published his On the Jewish Question, a text which marked a significant step by Marx from radical democracy towards communism. We will come back to this text in another article; here it suffices to say that, while Marx supported the abolition of all feudal constraints on the participation of Jews in civil society, he also pointed out the inherent limitations of any merely ‘political’ emancipation which was founded on the atomised citizen, and showed that real freedom could only take place on the social level, with the creation of a unified community which had overcome commodity relations, the underlying source of man’s fragmentation into competing units.

In 1843, then, ascendant capitalism posed the immediate question of ending all forms of feudal discrimination against the Jews, which had included their restriction to the boundaries of the ghetto. In 1943, the pitiful remnant of Warsaw’s Jews rose not only against the restoration of the ghetto, but against their physical extermination - a tragic reflection of capitalism’s passage from ascendancy to decay.

In 2003, as this decay reaches its most advanced phase, it seems that capitalism has still not solved the Jewish question; the imperialist conflicts in the Middle East and the resurgence of radical Islam have given new life to old anti-Semitic mythologies, while Zionism, which posed as the liberator of the Jews, has not only placed millions of them in a new death trap, but has itself become a force for racial oppression, now directed at the Arab population of Israel and Palestine.

Again, we will return to these issues in other articles. But for now we want to look at a recent artistic treatment of the Holocaust which has been widely praised: Polanksi’s The Pianist, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, the best film award at the BAFTA ceremonies in London, and several Hollywood Oscars.

A capitalist holocaust

Polanski was himself a refugee from the Krakow ghetto, and this film is clearly a statement of considerable personal significance. The Pianist is a remarkably faithful rendition of a memoir of the Warsaw ghetto by one of its survivors, the classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, written immediately after the war and recently republished by Victor Gollanz in 1999 and as a paperback by Phoenix in 2002. Despite a few small pieces of embroidery, the screenplay keeps very close to Szpilman’s simple, unsentimental presentation of the horrific events he lived through, sometimes down to the last detail. It tells the story of a cultured Jewish family who elect to stay in Warsaw at the beginning of the war, and are therefore subjected to the gradual but inexorable forced-march towards the gas chambers. Beginning with smaller humiliations, such as the decree on the wearing of the Star of David, this descent passes through a stage of concentrating the entire Jewish population of the city into a newly-reconstituted ghetto, where a majority are subject to atrocious conditions of work and health, to a lingering death by starvation. However, the flourishing of a class of profiteers, and the formation of a Jewish police force and a Jewish Council entirely subservient to the occupying army demonstrate that even in the ghetto, class divisions still existed among the Jews themselves. The film, like the book, shows how during this phase, seemingly random acts of almost unbelievable cruelty by the SS[1] and other organs of Nazi rule have a ‘rationality’– that of inculcating terror and destroying the will to resist. At the same time the ‘softer’ side of Nazi propaganda encourages all kinds of false hopes and also serves to prevent any thought of resistance. This is illustrated sharply when the final process of deportation begins and thousands are being herded into the cattle trucks that are to take them to the death camps: as they wait for the trains to arrive, they still debate whether they are going to be exterminated or used for labour; it is said that such discussions took place at the very doors of the gas chambers.

There is no doubt that the Holocaust was one of the most terrible events in the whole of human history. And yet an entire ideology, aimed above all at defending the second imperialist world war as a ‘just’ war, has grown up around the supposed uniqueness of the Shoa: in the face of such unmatched evil, it must surely be necessary to support the lesser evil of democracy. It is even claimed by left-wing apologists of the war that because it introduced slave labour and harked back to pre-capitalist, pagan mythologies, Nazism was itself some kind of regression from capitalism, and that therefore capitalism was progressive in relation to it. But what is clear from this whole period was that the Nazi holocaust against the Jews was by no means unique. Not only did the Nazis murder millions of ‘untermenschen’, Slavs, gypsies, etc, as well as political opponents of all shades from bourgeois to proletarian; their holocaust took place alongside the Stalinist holocaust which was no less devastating, and the democratic holocaust which took forms such as the terror bombing of German cities, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the deliberate starvation of the German population after the war. Nor was slave labour unique to Nazism; Stalinism in particular made tremendous use of it in the building of its war machine. Certainly all this was an expression of capitalism’s extreme degeneracy, especially in a phase when it had defeated the working class and has a free hand to unleash its inmost drives towards self-destruction. But there was still a capitalist logic behind it all, as is demonstrated in the pamphlet Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, published by the International Communist Party.

Having uncovered the most basic material reason behind Nazism’s ‘choosing’ of the Jews – the necessity to sacrifice one part of the ruined petty bourgeoisie in order to mobilise the ‘Aryan’ section of it behind capital and the war – this pamphlet’s description of the economics of the Holocaust closely mirrors the events of the Warsaw ghetto:

“In ‘normal’ times , and when it’s a question of small numbers, capitalism can allow those it has ejected from the process of production to just die on their own. But it was impossible to do this in the midst of war and for millions of people: such a ‘disorder’ would have paralysed everything. Capital had to organise their death.

“Furthermore it didn’t kill them right away. To begin with, it withdrew them from circulation, it regrouped them, concentrated them. And it put them to work while undernourishing them, ie it superexploited them to death. Killing man through labour is an old method of capital. Marx wrote in 1844: ‘to be waged with success, the industrial struggle demands numerous armies which can be concentrated in one point and copiously decimated’….These people had to subsidise the cost of their lives, as long as they were alive, and of their death afterwards. And they had to produce surplus value as long as they were capable of it. Because capitalism cannot execute the men it has condemned, if it doesn’t make any profit from putting them to death”

The Warsaw rising and the indifferenceof the great democracies

Early on in the film – it is September 1939 - we see the Szpilman family listening to the radio announcement that Britain and France have declared war on Germany. They celebrate as though their delivery is at hand. As the film progresses, and the total and utter abandonment of the Jews, of Warsaw, and indeed of Poland becomes all too evident, the hopes placed in the democratic powers prove totally unfounded.

By April 1943, the ghetto population has been reduced from nearly half a million to 30,000, many of them young people who had been selected for hard labour. By now it was long past the time when there could be any real doubts about the Nazi ‘solution’ to the Jewish problem. The film shows Szpilman’s contacts with certain figures from the underground; one, Jehuda Zyskind, is described in the book as an “idealistic socialist” who often nearly convinced Szpilman of the possibility of a better world (the book reveals that Zyskind and his entire family were shot in their own home after being discovered sorting underground literature around a table). Szpilman is an artist rather than a deeply political character; he is shown smuggling guns in sacks of potatoes but he escapes from the ghetto before the uprising. Neither he nor the film go into great detail about the political currents active in the ghetto. It seems that they were made up mainly of former proletarian organisations who were now essentially on the terrain of radical nationalism in one form or another– the extreme left wing of Zionism and social democracy, Bundists, and the official Communist Party. It was these groups who organised the links with the Polish ‘national’ resistance and managed to smuggle weapons into the ghetto, preparing the final rising in April 1943 under the umbrella of the Jewish Fighting Organisation. Despite the paltry number of arms and ammunition at their disposal, the rebels managed to hold the German army at bay for a month. This was only possible because a large proportion of the famished population joined the revolt in one capacity or another. In this sense the rising had a popular character and cannot be reduced to the bourgeois forces who organised it, but neither was it an action of a proletarian character, and it was wholly unable to call into question the society capable of generating this kind of oppression and horror. Indeed it was quite consciously a revolt without perspective, the overriding motive of the rebels being to die well, rather than go like sheep to the death camps. Similar risings took place in Vilna and other cities, and even in the camps themselves there were acts of sabotage and armed breakouts. Such revolts without hope are the classic product of an evolution where the proletariat has lost the capacity to act on its own terrain. The whole tragedy was repeated on a wider scale the following year, in the general Warsaw rebellion which resulted in the final destruction of the city, just as the ghetto had been razed to the ground in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt.

In both cases, the duplicity of the forces of democracy and of the ‘Socialist Fatherland’, who claimed that they were only fighting a war for the liberation of the oppressed from Nazi rule, can be plainly demonstrated.

In his book While six million died (Secker and Warburg, London, 1968), Arthur Morse cites one of the last proclamations of the ghetto rebels: “Only the power of the Allied nations can offer immediate and active help now. On behalf of the millions of Jews burned and murdered and buried alive. On behalf of those fighting back and all of us condemned to die we call upon the whole world…Our closest allies must at last understand the degree of responsibility which arises from such apathy in face of an unparalleled crime committed by the Nazis against a whole nation, the tragic epilogue of which is now being enacted. The heroic rising, without precedent in history, of the doomed sons of the ghetto should at last awaken the world to deeds commensurate with the gravity of the hour” (p 58). This passage illustrates very clearly both the rebels’ understanding that they were doomed and their illusions in the good intentions of the Allied powers.

What were the Allies actually doing about the Nazis’ crimes as the Warsaw ghetto burned? At that very moment – 19 April 1943 - Britain and America had organised in Bermuda a conference on the refugee problem. As Morse shows in his book, the democratic powers had been directly informed of Hitler’s memorandum of August 1942 which formalised the plan to exterminate the whole of European Jewry. And yet their representatives came to the Bermuda conference with a mandate that could only ensure that nothing would be done about it:

“The State Department drew up a memorandum for the guidance of the delegates to the Bermuda conference. The Americans were instructed not to limit the discussion to Jewish refugees, not to raise questions of religious faith or race in appealing to public support or promising US funds; not to make commitments regarding shipping space for refugees; not to expect naval escorts or safe-conducts for refugees; not to delay the wartime shipping programme by suggesting that homeward-bound, empty transports pick up refugees en route; not to bring refugees across the ocean if any space for their settlement was available in Europe; not to pledge funds, since this was the prerogative of Congress and the President; not to expect any change in the US immigration laws; not to ignore the needs of the war effort or of the American civilian population for food and money; and not to establish new agencies for the relief of refugees, since the Intergovernmental Committee already existed for that purpose” (p 52).

“The British delegate, Richard Kidston Law, added some don’ts to the long list brought by his American friends. The British would not consider a direct appeal to the Germans, would not exchange prisoners for refugees or lift the blockade of Europe for the shipment of relief supplies. Mr Law added the danger of ‘dumping’ large numbers of refugees on the allies, some of whom might be Axis sympathisers masquerading as oppressed persons” (p 55).

At the end of the conference the ‘continuation’ of its activity was passed on to an Intergovernmental Committee (a precursor of the UN) which was already well known for…doing nothing.

Neither was this an isolated expression of bureaucratic inertia. Morse narrates other episodes such as the Swedish offer to take in 20,000 Jewish children from Europe, an offer which was passed from office to office in Britain and America and finally buried. And the Auschwitz pamphlet recounts the even more striking tale of Joel Brandt, the leader of a Hungarian Jewish organisation, who entered into negotiation with Adolf Eichmann over the release of a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks. But as the PCI’s pamphlet puts it, “Not only the Jews but the SS as well were taken in by the humanitarian propaganda of the Allies! The Allies didn’t want this 1 million Jews. Not for 10,000 lorries, not for 5,000, not even for nothing!” Similar offers from Romania and Bulgaria were also rejected. In Roosevelt’s words “transporting so many people would disorganise the war effort”.

This brief survey of the utter cynicism of the Allies would not be complete without mentioning the way the Red Army, which had called for the Poles to rise up against the Nazis, deliberately held its forces on the outskirts of Warsaw during the uprising of August 1944 and allowed the Nazis to massacre the insurgents. The reasons for this are explained in our article ‘The massacres and crimes of the great democracies’ in International Review 66: “Confronted with an uprising on such a scale, Stalin had decided to let Warsaw stew in its own juice, the aim being to swallow up Poland without encountering any serious resistance from the Polish population. If the Warsaw uprising had been successful, nationalism would have been considerably strengthened and would have thrown a major obstacle in the way of Russian imperialism. At the same time, Stalin was playing the role of anti-proletarian gendarme, faced with the potential threat of the working class in Warsaw”. And lest anyone think that such ruthlessness was peculiar to the evil dictator Stalin, the article points out that this tactic of ‘letting them stew in their own juice’ was first adopted by Churchill in response to the massive workers’ strikes in northern Italy in the same year: once again the Allies allowed the Nazi butchers to do their dirty work for them. Written in 1991, the article further shows that the very same tactic was used by the ‘West’ in the aftermath of the Gulf war with regard to the Kurdish and Shi’a risings against Saddam.

The survival of human solidarity

Szpilman’s survival through this nightmare was wholly remarkable, based largely on a combination of extraordinary luck and other peoples’ respect for his musicianship. He was involuntarily pulled away from the cattle trucks by a sympathetic Jewish policeman, while his parents, brother and two sisters were thrust inside and went to their doom. After being smuggled out of the ghetto he was sheltered by Polish musicians with connections to the resistance. In the end however he was totally alone and owed his life to a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who fed him while he hid in an attic in the very headquarters of the by now disintegrating German occupying force. The book contains an appendix made up of extracts from Hosenfeld’s diary. We learn that he was an idealistic Catholic disgusted by the Nazi regime and that he saved a number of other Jews and victims of the terror.

There were many such small acts of bravery and humanity during the war. The Poles, for example, had a dreadful reputation for anti-Semitism, not least because Jewish fighters escaping the ghetto were even killed by partisans of the nationalist Polish resistance. But the book also points out that Poles saved more Jews than any other nationality.

These were individual acts, not expressions of a collective proletarian movement such as the strike against the anti-Jewish measures and against deportations which began in the shipyards of Amsterdam in February 1941 (cf our book The Dutch and German Communist Left, pp 316-319) But still they give us a glimpse that even amidst the most terrible orgies of nationalist hatred, there is a human solidarity which can rise above it.

At the end of the film, after the defeat of the German army, one of Szpilman’s musician friends is seen walking past a group of German prisoners of war. He goes up to the fence to shout abuse at them; but he is taken aback when one of them runs up to him and asks him if he knows Szpilman, and appeals for help. It is Hosenfeld; but the musician is ushered away by the guards before he can learn Hosenfeld’s name and details. Ashamed of his initial attitude, the musician tells Szpilman - now restored to his job as a pianist for Warsaw radio - what has happened. Szpilman spent years trying to trace his former saviour, without success, although he did befriend members of his family. And we learn that Hosenfeld perished in a Russian labour camp in the early 50s - a last reminder that barbarism was not restricted to the losing imperialism.

The Holocaust, no doubt, will continue to be exploited by the bourgeoisie to reinforce the myth of democracy and to justify war. And in the present situation, while the best artistic expressions can provide important insights into historical or social truths, they are rarely armoured with a clear proletarian standpoint that resist all efforts at recuperation. As a result the bourgeoisie will try to use honest attempts to portray such events to serve its own dishonest ends. Certainly we are witnessing today the sickening attempt to present the new imperialist offensive in the Gulf as a battle to save us all from the atrocities being prepared by the ‘new Hitler’, Saddam Hussain. But the current preparations for war are revealing with increasing clarity that it is capital as a whole which is preparing a new holocaust for humanity, and that it is the great democratic powers who are leading the charge towards the abyss. Such a holocaust would certainly dwarf anything that could have been unleashed in the 1940s, since it would almost certainly involve the destruction of humanity. But in contrast to the 1940s, the world proletariat has not been pulverised and prevented from acting on its own class terrain, which is why it is not too late to prevent capitalism from imposing its ‘final solution’ and to replace this rotting system with a genuinely human society.

Amos

 

It is always with the greatest caution that revolutionaries have raised the question of the period of transition. The number, the complex­ity, and above all, the newness of the problems the proletariat must solve prevent any elabora­tion of detailed plans of the future society; any attempt to do so risks being turned into a strait-jacket which will stifle the revo­lutionary activity of the class. Marx, for example, always refused to give "recipes for the dishes of the future". Rosa Luxemburg insisted on the fact that with respect to the transi­tional society we only have "sign posts and those of an essentially negative character".

If the different revolutionary experiences of the class (the Paris Commune, 1905, 1917-20), and also the experience of the counter-revolution clarify a certain number of problems that the period of transition will pose, it is essentially regarding the general framework of these problems and not the detailed manner of solving them. It is this framework that we will attempt to bring out in this text.

THE NATURE OF PERIODS OF TRANSITION

Human history is made up of different stable societies linked to a given mode of production and therefore to stable social relations. These societies are based on the dominant economic laws inherent in them. They are made up of fixed social classes and are based on appropri­ate superstructures. The basic stable societies in written history have been: slave society, Asiatic history, feudal society and capitalist society.

What distinguishes periods of transition from periods when society is stable is the decompo­sition of the old social structures and the formation of new structures. Both are linked to a development of the productive forces and are accompanied by the appearance and develop­ment of new classes as well as the development of ideas and institutions corresponding to these classes.

The period of transition is not a distinct mode of production, but a link between two modes of production--the old and the new. It is the period during which the germs of the new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, until they supplant the old mode of production and constitute a new, dominant mode of production.

Between two stable societies (and this will be true for the period between capitalism and communism as it has been in the past), the period of transition is an absolute necessity. This is due to the fact that the sapping of the basis of the existence of the old society does not automatically imply the maturation and ripening of the conditions of the new. In other words, the decline of the old society does not automatically mean the maturation of the new, but is only the condition for it to take place.

Decadence and the period of transition are two very distinct phenomena. Every period of transition presupposes the decomposition of the old society whose mode and relations of production have attained the extreme limit of their possible development. However, every period of decadence does not necessarily signify a period of transition, in as much as the period of transition represents a step towards a new mode of production. Similarly ancient Greece did not enjoy the historical conditions necessary for a transcendence of slavery; neither did ancient Egypt.

Decadence means the exhaustion of the old social mode of production; transition means the surging up of the new forces and conditions which will permit a resolution and transcen­dence of the old contradictions.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COMMUNIST SOCIETY AND OTHER SOCIETIES

To delineate the nature of the period of transi­tion linking capitalism and communism and to point out what distinguishes this period from all preceding periods, one fundamental idea must be kept in mind. Every period of transition stems from the nature of the new society which is arising. Therefore, the fundamental differ­ences which distinguish communist society from all other societies must be made clear:

a) All earlier societies (with the exception of primitive communism which belongs to pre­history) have been societies divided into classes.

Communism is a classless society.

b) All other societies have been based on property and the exploitation of man by man.

Communism knows no type of individual or collective property; it is the unified and harmonious human community.

c) The other societies in history have had as their basis an insufficiency in the deve­lopment of the productive forces with respect to man's needs. They are societies of scarcity. It is for that reason that they have been dominated by blind economic, social and natural forces. Humanity has been alienated from nature and as a result from the social forces it has itself engendered.

Communism is the full development of the pro­ductive forces, an abundance of production capable of satisfying human needs. It is the liberation of humanity from the domina­tion of nature and of the economy. It is the conscious mastery by humanity of its condi­tions of life. It is the world of freedom and no longer the world of necessity which has characterised man's past history.

d) All past societies brought with them anarchronistic vestiges of past economic systems, social relations, ideas and pre­judices. This is due to the fact that all these societies were based on private prop­erty and the exploitation of the labour of others. It is for this reason that a new class society can and must necessarily be born and develop within the old. It is for the same reason that the new class society, once it is triumphant, can continue with, and accommodate, vestiges of the old defeated society, of the old dominant classes. The new class society can even associate elements of the old dominant class in power. Thus slave or feudal rela­tions could still exist within capitalism and for a long time the bourgeoisie could share power with the nobility.

The situation in a communist society is completely different. Communism retains no economic or social remnants of old society. While such remnants still exist one cannot speak of communist society: what place could there be in such a society for small producers or slave relations, for example? This is what makes the period of transition between capi­talism and communism so long. Just as the Hebrew people had to wait forty years in the desert in order to free themselves from the mentality forged by slavery, so humanity will need several generations to free itself from the vestiges of the old world.

e) All previous societies, just as they have been based on a division into classes, have also necessarily been based on regional, geographic, or national-political divisions. This is due primarily to the laws of unequal development which dictate that the evolution of society--while everywhere following a similar orientation--occurs in a relatively independent and separated fashion in differ­ent sectors with gaps of time which can last several centuries. Thus, unequal development is itself due to the feeble development of the productive forces: there exists a direct relation between the degree of development and the scale on which this development occurs. Only the productive forces developed by capitalism at its zenith, for the first time in history, permit a real inter­dependence between the different parts of the world.

The establishment of communist society imme­diately has the entire world as its arena. Communism in order to be established requires the same evolution at the same time in all countries. It is completely universal or it is nothing.

f) Based on private property, exploitation, the division into classes and into different geographical zones, production in previous societies necessarily tended towards the production of commodities with all that followed in the way of competition and anarchy in distribution and consumption solely regulated by the law of value, through the market and money.

Communism knows neither exchange nor the law of value. Its production is socialised in the fullest-sense of the term. It is univer­sally planned according to the needs of the members of society and for their satisfaction. Such production knows only use values whose direct and socialised distribution excludes exchange, the market and money.

g) Divided into antagonistic classes, all previous societies could only exist and survive through the constitution of a special organ--appearing as if above society--in order to maintain the class struggle within a framework beneficial to the conservation and the interests of the dominant class: the state.

Communism knows none of these divisions and has no need of the state. Moreover, it could not tolerate within it an organism for the government of man. In communism there is only room for the administration of things.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PERIODS OF TRANSITION

The period of transition towards communism is constantly tainted by the society from which it emerges (the pre-history of humanity) yet also affected by the society towards which it tends (the completely new history of human society). This is what will distinguish it from all earlier periods of transition.

a. Previous Periods of Transition

Periods of transition until now have in common the fact that they unfolded within the old society. The definitive proclamation of the new society--which is sanctioned by the leap that a revolution constitutes--comes at the end of the transitional process itself. This situation is the result of two essential causes:

1. Past societies all have the same social, economic basis--the division into classes and exploitation, which reduces the period of transition to a simple change or transfer of privileges but not to the suppression of privileges.

2. All these societies, and this forms the basis of the preceding characteristic, blindly submit to the imperatives of laws based on the low development of the pro­ductive forces (the reign of necessity). The period of transition between two such societies is thus characterised by a blind economic development.

b. The Period of Transition towards Communism

It is because communism constitutes a total break with all exploitation and all division into classes that the transition towards this society requires a radical break with the old society and can only unfold outside of the old society.

Communism is not a mode of production subject to the blind economic laws opposed to mankind, but is based on a conscious organisation of production which permits an abundance of the productive forces which the old capitalist society cannot attain by itself.

c. What Distinguishes the Period of Transition towards Communism?

1. The period of transition can only begin outside of capitalism. The maturation of the conditions of socialism requires as a pre­requisite the destruction of the political, economic and social domination of capitalism in society.

2. The period of transition to communism can only be begun on a world scale.

3. Unlike other periods of transition, in the period of transition to communism the essential institutions of capitalism-state police, army, diplomatic corps--cannot be utilised by the proletariat. They must be completely destroyed.

4. As a result, the opening of the period of transition is essentially characterised by the political defeat of capitalism and by the triumph of the political domination of the proletariat.

"In order to convert social production into a large and harmonious system of co-operative work there must be general social change, changes in the general conditions of society which can only be realised by means of the organised power of society--the state power--taken from the hands of the capitalists and the landowners and transferred to the hands of the producers themselves" (Marx, Instructions on Co-operatives to the Delegates of the General Council at the First Congress of the First International at Geneva).

"The conquest of political power has become the first task of the working class" (Marx, Inaugural Address to the First International).

d. The Problems of the Period of Transition

The world generalisation of the revolution is the first condition for the opening of the period of transition. The question of economic and social measures necessary to particularly protect isolated socialisations in one country, one region, one factory or among one group of people is subordinated to the world generalisa­tion of the revolution. Even after a first triumph of the proletariat, capitalism continues its resistance in the form of a civil war. In this period everything must be subordinated to the destruction of the power of capitalism. This is the first objective which conditions any later evolution.

One class and one class alone is interested in communism: the proletariat. Other productive and exploited classes can be drawn into the struggle that the proletariat wages against capitalism, but they can never as classes become the protagonists and bearers of communism. Because of this, it is necessary to emphasise one essential task: the necessity for the proletariat not to confuse itself with, or in dissolve itself into, other classes. In the period of transition the proletariat, as the only revolutionary class invested with the task of creating the new classless society, can only assure the completion of this task by affirming itself as an autonomous and politically dominant class in society. The proletariat alone has a communist programme that it attempts to carry out and, as such, it must retain in its own hands all political and armed force: it has the monopoly of arms. In order to accomplish its tasks the proletariat creates organised structures: the workers' councils based on factories, and the revolutionary party.

The dictatorship of the proletariat can be summarised in the following terms:

- the programme (the proletariat knows where it is going);

- its general organisation as a class;

- armed force.

 

The relations between the proletariat and the other classes in society are as follows:

1. Vis-à-vis the capitalist class and the old rulers of capitalist society (MPs, Congressmen, high functionaries, the army and the Church): total suppression of all civil rights and exclusion from political life.

2. As regards the peasantry and artisans, that is, independent and non-exploiting producers who constitute the major part of society, the pro­letariat cannot eliminate them totally from poli­tical life, nor at the outset, from economic life. The proletariat will necessarily be led to find a modus vivendi with these classes while at the same time pursuing a policy aimed at the dissolution and integration of these classes into the working class.

3. If the working class must take account of these other classes in economic and administra­tive life; it must not provide them with the possibility of any autonomous organisations (press, parties, etc.). These numerous classes and strata are integrated into a system of administration based on territorial soviets. They will be integrated into society as citizens, not as a class.

4. With regard to those social strata which in present day capitalism occupy a distinct place in economic life. such as the liberal professions, technicians, functionaries, intellectuals (what is called the 'new middle class'), the attitude of the proletariat will be based on the following criteria:

- these classes are not homogeneous. Their highest strata are fundamentally integra­ted into the capitalist function and mentality, while their lowest strata have the same function and interests as the working class.

- the proletariat must act, therefore, in such a way as to accentuate this already existing separation.

The transitional society is still a society divided into classes and so there will neces­sarily arise within it that institution peculiar to all societies divided into classes: the STATE. With all the limitations and precaution­ary measures with which we will surround this institution (functionaries will be elected and revocable, their consumption will be equal to that of a worker, a unification will exist between the legislative and executive functions, etc.), and which make this state into a 'semi-state', we must never lose sight of the state’s historic anti-socialist, and therefore anti-proletarian and essentially conservative, nature. The state remains the guardian of the status quo.

We recognise the inevitability of this institution which the proletariat will have to utilise as a necessary evil in order to break the resistance of the waning capital­ist class and preserve a united administrative, and political framework in this period when society is still rent by antagonistic interests.

But we categorically reject the idea of making this state the standard-bearer of communism. By its own nature ("bourgeois nature in its essence"--Marx), it is essentially an organ for the conservation of the status quo and a restraint on communism. Thus, the state can neither be identified with communism nor with the proletariat which is the bearer of commu­nism. The proletariat is by definition the most dynamic class in history since it carries out the suppression of all classes including. itself. This is why, while utilising the state, the proletariat expresses its dictator­ship riot through the state, but over the state. This is also why the proletariat can under no circumstances allow this institution (the state) to intervene by violence within the class, nor to be the arbiter of the dis­cussions and activities of the class organs - the ­councils and the revolutionary party.

On the economic plane, the period of transition consists of an economic policy (and no longer a political economy) of the proletariat with a view to accelerating the process of universal socialisation of production and distribution. But the realisation of this programme of integral communism at all levels, while being the goal affirmed and followed by the working class, will still be subject to immediate, conjunctural and contingent conditions in the period of transi­tion which only pure utopian voluntarism would ignore. The proletariat will immediately attempt to advance as far as possible towards its goal while recognising the inevitable concessions it will be obliged to tolerate. Two dangers threaten such a policy:

- the idealisation of this policy, presenting it as communist when it is nothing of the sort

- the denial of the necessity of such a policy in the name of idealistic voluntarism.

 

SOME MEASURES OF THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

Without pretending to establish a blueprint for these measures we can, at least, try to give a general idea:

1. Immediate socialisation of the great capit­alist concentrations and of the principal centres of productive activity.

2 . Planning of production and distribution--the criteria of production must be the maximum satisfaction of needs and no longer of accumula­tion.

3. Massive reduction of the working day.

4. Substantial rise in the standard of living.

5. The attempt to abolish remuneration based on wages and on its money form.

6. Socialisation of consumption and of the satisfaction of needs (transportation, leisure, meals, etc).

7. The relationship between the collectivised sectors and sectors of production which are still individual--particularly in the country­side--must tend towards an organised collective exchange through co-operatives, thus suppressing the market and individual exchange.

M.C.

Revolution Internationale/France

Printed in The International Review, no.1,

(April 1975)

 

Re-printed in ICC pamphlet The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (1981)