1. The crisis of capitalism is inexorably deepening. In 1975-6 there was an apparent recovery after the very sharp aggravation of 1974; 1977 has seen the return of all the basic problems. Although a few countries have managed to maintain a reasonable trade balance -- like Germany and Japan -- they have been unable to avoid either a stagna­tion of production or a rise in unemploy­ment. Other countries, like the US, have dealt with the fall in production better and have put a temporary stop to the rise in unemployment, but at the same time they have suffered a catastrophic trade deficit and the decline of their currency. And these factors only apply to the most developed and powerful countries, which are better equipped to face up to the crisis. The sit­uation of the other countries is desperate: inflation at more than 20 per cent, more and more serious unemployment, insurmount­able foreign debts. We can thus see the to­tal failure of all the economic policies applied by the bourgeoisie, whether neo-­Keynesian or monetarist, inspired by Harvard or the ‘Chicago school'. All they can do is try to console themselves by handing out Nobel prizes to the economists who are the most wrong about everything. The crowning moment of this was when France awarded an economist for his professional failures by making him head of the government. In rea­lity, the only perspective the bourgeoisie can put forward in the face of the crisis is a new imperialist war.

2. The ‘optimistic' sectors of the bourgeoi­sie are obviously trying to exclude the pos­sibility of such a perspective, or to lay the responsibility on the ‘evil warmonger­ing forces'. According to the pacifist viewpoint, an entente between the belliger­ents and even between imperialist blocs is possible and is something which should be striven for. In fact such a viewpoint is a typical expression of petty bourgeois humanism. The greatest objection that can be raised against it is not that it turns its back on reality but that it serves to maintain extremely dangerous illusions in the working class about:

-- the possibility of reforming and harmoni­zing capitalism;

-- the non-necessity of destroying it in order to put an end to the catastrophes it engenders.

Moreover, the idea that there can be a ‘peaceful' capitalism as against a ‘warlike' capitalism is an excellent basis for a war-mobilization of the ‘peaceful' countries against the ‘warlike' ones. At the moment the bourgeoisie is undertaking a major offen­sive on this very basis. This is particul­arly true in the Middle East, where the negotiations between Israel and Egypt are in no way a ‘victory for peace' as the Pope would have it, but simply a strengthening of the American position in preparation for future confrontations with the other bloc. More generally, all the noise about ‘Euro­pean security', ‘the rights of man' and Carter's ‘peace crusades' are simply ideo­logical preparations for such confrontations, as are all Russia's declarations about the need to support ‘socialism', ‘national independence' and ‘anti-imperialism'.

3. A ‘modern' revision of the pacifist con­ception is the one which considers that a generalized confrontation between the imper­ialist powers is no longer possible because of the development of armaments, in particu­lar of thermonuclear weapons which for the first time in history ‘favor the offensive to the detriment of the defensive', so that using them would lead to the destruction of all the bourgeoisies. What has to be said against such a conception is that:

-- it's not new: it was already used about poison gas and air warfare, so that on the eve of 1914 and 1939 ‘the end of wars' was being confidently predicted;

-- it presupposes a ‘rationality' in capita­lism and the ruling class which they don't possess;

-- it is based on the idea that wars are the result of the will of governments and not the necessary product of the contradic­tions of the system;

-- it leads to the possibility of a third alternative beyond war or revolution.

Besides the fact that this idea can serve to demobilize the working class by obscuring the dangers which face humanity in the absence of a proletarian response, it also adds grist to the mill of the whole bour­geois mystification which says "if you want peace, prepare for war!".

4. In fact the experience of over half a century has shown that the only obstacle to the bourgeois solution to the crisis -- imperialist war -- is the class struggle of the proletariat. Although war, because of the sacrifice it imposes on the exploited classes and the traumatic effects it has on the entire social organism, has given rise to revolution, it would be wrong to conclude that there is a parallel or simultaneous movement towards these two alternatives. On the contrary, the one is opposed to the other. It was because the working class was mobilized behind a warlike Social Demo­cracy, and thus ideologically defeated, that the bourgeoisie was able to go to war in 1914. Similarly, the victory of fascism and its alter-ego, the popular fronts, was the necessary precondition for war in 1939. On the other hand, it was class struggle and revolution which put an end to the war in 1917 in Russia and 1918 in Germany. At all times, the dominance of one or the other tendency is the exact reflection of the bal­ance of forces between the two main classes in society: bourgeoisie and proletariat. This is why the perspective for the present crisis is determined by the nature of this balance of forces. The capacity of capita­lism to impose its own solution to the cri­sis is inversely proportional to the capa­city of the working class to resist this and respond to the crisis on its own terrain.

The balance of forces between social classes

5. The present level of class struggle is characterized by a very clear gap between the depth of the economic crisis and the class's response to it. This gap is not an absolute which can be measured in an ideal schema such as: x amount of crisis equals y level of class struggle. It can only be understood in relative terms, by comparing the present level of class struggle with the struggles at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when the crisis was much less violent than it is today.

Such a comparison can be made both in the quantitative sense -- by looking at the num­ber of struggles, and the qualitative -- by looking at the ability of the class to break out of the containment of the unions and reject capitalist mystifications. It is necessary to consider both these levels because there is no mechanical link between combativity and class consciousness, but at the same time the number of struggles is something which represents a certain level of consciousness, or which can favor the development of consciousness.

On the ‘quantitative' level, the comparison shows that for several years and particular­ly in 1977 there has been a marked diminu­tion in the number of strikes and in the number of workers involved. This could be shown by referring to a number of countries but it is particularly significant in France between 1968 and today and Italy between 1969 and today.

On the ‘qualitative' level, the comparison between the ‘rampant May' in Italy, which saw an explicit rejection of the unions by a large number of workers, and the present situation in Italy, where the unions control the workers to the point where they can drag them out on demonstrations against ‘extremists' -- such a comparison speaks for itself. A similar, though more recent evo­lution, has taken place in Spain. After a period of intense struggle in which the class developed forms of struggle like the assemblies which often went beyond the unofficial unions, and which showed tendencies towards generalization on the level of cit­ies and regions, there has been a much calm­er period in which the signing of an auster­ity pact has not provoked any major reac­tions, and in which the only major mobiliza­tions have taken place around mystifying themes like national autonomy. This has even happened in regions which had hitherto only been slightly affected by this virus.

6. At the moment the only countries which are going through major struggles are those in the peripheral zones of capitalism, under­developed or half-developed countries in Latin America (Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia), the Middle East and North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria). These struggles confirm the fact that, contrary to the theories which claim that these countries have to go through a phase of capitalist development so that a working class can emerge, these countries already have a proletariat capable of fight­ing for its own class interests -- in some cases to the point where the class has partially held back the threat of war on the local level. But the very fact that we have to look for important class struggles in the very places where the class is the least concentrated is a striking illustration of the fact that globally speaking, the class struggle is in reflux at the present time.

7. When it comes to explaining this gap bet­ween the level of the crisis and the level of the class struggle, certain currents like the FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario), have a ready interpretation. For them, the crisis, insecurity, unemployment, weigh down on the combativity and consciousness of the working class, paralyzing it more and more and throwing it into the arms of the politi­cal forces of the bourgeoisie. In this con­ception there can only be a revolution against the system when it is functioning ‘normally', outside periods of crisis. This analysis can be refuted by pointing out that:

-- the crisis is not an ‘anomaly' in the func­tioning of capitalism; on the contrary, it is the truest and most significant expres­sion of its normal functioning; this was already the case in the ascendant phase and is all the more true in the epoch of deca­dence;

-- if you say that the working class only revolts when ‘things are going well' you are rejecting the historic vision of socia­lism as an objective necessity; either you go back to Bernstein and deny that there is any relationship between the collapse of the system and the revolutionary struggle, or you have to look for other factors that can provoke the struggle, such as a consciousness which is the fruit of education, or a ‘moral' revolt;

-- the whole history of the workers' move­ment teaches us that revolutions only come after crises (1848) or wars (1871, 1905, 1917) which are acute expressions of the crisis of society.

It is true that in certain historical cir­cumstances, the crisis has served to aggra­vate the demoralization and ideological sub­jection of the class (as in the 1930s) but this was at a time when the class was already defeated; the difficulties it encountered made things worse rather than radicalizing its struggle. It may also be true that cer­tain manifestations of the crisis, like unemployment, can momentarily disorientate the workers, but here again history teaches us that unemployment is also one of the most powerful stimuli to the class becoming aware of the bankruptcy of the system and revolting against it.

In the final analysis, not only is this con­ception false and incapable of dealing with historical reality; it also leads to the demoralization of the class, to the extent that it leads logically to the idea that:

-- the class must patiently wait for the system to get out of the crisis before it can struggle successfully;

-- during this time it must moderate its struggles, which can only end in defeat.

With this conception you are led (and what is worse, you end up saying this to the class) to renounce the revolution at the very moment when it's possible. You thus give up any revolutionary perspective.

8. In order to account for periods of reflux in the proletarian struggle, and thus for a gap between the crisis and the class struggle, marxism has already pointed to the uneven, jagged course of the class movement, which is different from that of the bourgeoisie. This is explained by the fact that the proletariat is the first revolut­ionary class in history which has no econo­mic power in the old society, no base upon which to found its future political rule. Its only strength is its organization and its consciousness, which are developed through struggle and are constantly threatened by the vicissitudes of the struggle and the enormous pressure exerted by bourgeois soc­iety as a whole. These characteristics explain the convulsive and explosive nature of proletarian struggle, whereas the develop­ment of the crisis has a much more even and progressive course.

The class struggle had the same characteris­tics last century but they are even more true in the period of decadence when the class has lost its mass organs, parties and trade unions. And this phenomenon was further amplified by the counter-revolution which followed the 1917-23 revolutionary wave and which led to the near total disappear­ance of the political organizations of the class and the loss of a whole arsenal of experience formerly passed down from one generation to the next.

These general and historic causes of the jagged course of the struggle must be supplemented by the particular conditions of the proletarian revival at the end of the 1960s if we are to understand the present characteristics of the class struggle.

The beginnings of the movement in 1968-72 were marked by a very powerful proletarian offen­sive which was a great surprise when one considers that the crisis was only just mak­ing itself felt, but which can be explained by:

-- the lack of preparation on the part of the bourgeoisie, which after decades of social calm had begun to believe that the revolt of the working class was a mere fairy tale;

-- the impetuosity of new generations of wor­kers who were entering into struggle with­out having been crushed like the previous generation.

We then saw a ‘coming to consciousness' and a counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie; this was helped by:

-- the slow development of the crisis; the deepening of the crisis did not immediately support or nourish the first wave of strug­gles, so that governments were able to con­vince workers that the ‘end of the tunnel' was in sight;

-- the youth and inexperience of the workers who participated in this wave of struggles and whose demands were vulnerable to fluctu­ations and the mystifications of the bour­geoisie.

For all these reasons, the sharp aggravation of the crisis in 1974, which expressed it­self essentially in the growth of unemploy­ment, did not immediately provoke a response from the class. On the contrary, to the extent that it hit the class when the prev­ious wave was on the decline, it tended to momentarily engender a greater disarray and apathy.

9. The counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie began to reveal itself clearly straight after the first movements of the class; its spearhead was the left factions of capital, those who have the greatest credibility among the workers. It consisted in putting forward a ‘left' or ‘democratic' alternative, the aim of which was to channel workers' dis­content into the struggle against ‘reaction', the ‘monopolies', ‘corruption' or ‘fascism'. Thus in a number of countries, especially those in which the class had been particu­larly combative, we saw the erecting of a mystification which attempted to prove:

-- that it doesn't pay to struggle;

-- that there must be a ‘change' if we are going to deal with the crisis.

This ‘change' took different forms in dif­ferent countries:

-- in Britain, the Labor Party came to power after the big strikes of 1972-3;

-- in Italy, there was the ‘historic compro­mise', destined to ‘moralize' political life when the PCI enters the government;

-- in Spain, the ‘democratic break' with the Francoist regime;

-- in Portugal, first ‘democracy', then ‘popular power';

-- in France, the Programme Commun and the Union of the Left which is going to put an end to twenty years of the ‘policies of big capital'.

In this work of mobilizing the working class behind capitalist objectives and thus of breaking the struggles of the class, the official left (communist and socialist part­ies) has been served faithfully by the lef­tist currents, who came along to provide a ‘radical' apology for the policies of the left (especially in Italy and Spain), when they themselves were not directly doing the same job.

10. After the first stage in the mobiliza­tion of the working class behind illusory objectives, the offensive of the bourgeoisie went on to a second stage which provoked demoralization and apathy among the workers

-- either because the illusory objective was obtained, or because there was a failure to attain it.

In the first case, the bourgeoisie pushed on with its mystifications by discouraging any struggle which might threaten to ‘com­promise' or ‘sabotage' the objective that had at last been attained:

-- in Spain, the workers must not ‘play the fascists' game', they must not do anything which might weaken this ‘young democracy' and bring back the hated old regime;

-- in Britain, the workers must not create problems for the Labor government, since this might allow the Tories back in and this would be ‘much worse'.

In the second case, the apathy of the class results from the failure of the objective put forward; the workers feel this as a def­eat, and this leads at first to disenchant­ment and demoralization. This demoraliza­tion is all the more intense because, con­trary to defeats encountered during real proletarian struggles, which serve as an apprenticeship in forging the unity and consciousness of the class, defeats on an alien class terrain (the real defeat being to have been led there in the first place) lead above all to a feeling of disarray and powerlessness, not to a determination to take up the struggle again. The clearest examples of this are probably Portugal and France. In Portugal the 25 November 1975 shattered the hopes of ‘popular power' which had been derailing workers' struggles for over a year; in France the split in the Union of the Left has put an end to five years of the Programme Commun, which from one election to the next has succeeded in almost totally anaesthetizing the combati­vity of the workers.

11. The fact that the class is plunged into apathy and disarray due to the failure to attain objectives for which it was mobilized, doesn't mean that the whole scenario had been planned by the different forces of the bourgeoisie in a deliberate and machiavell­ian way. In fact, although it leaves the proletariat in a demoralized state for a while, the failure of the bourgeoisie to attain its objectives runs the risk of lea­ding to ‘uncontrolled' workers' upsurges, since without reaching these objectives it becomes difficult to keep the class contained within capitalist institutions, especi­ally in the unions. And the bourgeoisie has no interest in such upsurges taking place because they are valuable experiences for the proletarian struggle. In fact, this failure to gain objectives which succeeds in demobilizing the class struggle is basi­cally the result of conflicts between diff­erent sectors of the ruling class, whether they arise over problems of internal poli­cies (vis-a-vis the middle strata, the pace towards state capitalism etc) or of foreign policy (more or less integration into the dominating bloc).

In Portugal, the elimination of the Carvalho faction, following that of the Goncalves faction, was the result both of resistance to the state capitalist measures advocated by these factions, and of the need to remain loyal to the US bloc, the Socialist Party being the most dynamic and effective expres­sion of this need.

In France, the origins of the SP/CP split reside in important differences over state capitalist measures (role of nationalizat­ions etc) and, even more, over foreign policy (degree of integration into the US bloc).

But in both cases, these aspects of bour­geois policy have been uppermost to the ex­tent that the class struggle is not in the forefront of the bourgeoisie's preoccupa­tions. Paradoxically, it is the success of ‘popular power' and the Programme Commun as methods of derailing the class struggle which have made them dispensable as government policies.

For the moment then, whether or not the per­spectives put forward have been realized, the counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie has borne fruit everywhere, almost totally silencing the class's response to the deep­ening crisis; this has left the bourgeoisie free to get on with its own policies of strengthening the state and developing the war economy.

The strengthening of the state

12. The strengthening of the capitalist state has been a continual process since the system entered its decadent phase. It operates in all spheres -- economic, politi­cal, social -- through the growing absorption of civil society into the Leviathan state. This process accelerates during periods of open crisis such as wars and the economic disintegration which follows reconstruction periods, as is happening now. But the most striking thing in recent months is the strengthening of the state's role as guard­ian of the social order, as the gendarme of the class struggle. This is how we must interpret the police and ideological appara­tus set up by the German government and its European partners after the Baader affair. We seem here to be dealing with a paradox:

-- on the one hand we are saying that the strengthening of the state has been made possible by the weakening of the class struggle;

-- on the other hand we say that the state is strengthening itself in order to face up to the class struggle.

Should we conclude that the state streng­thens itself at the same time as the class struggle? Or that its strength is inversely proportional to the class struggle?

In order to answer these questions we have to consider all the means which make up the strength of the state as the guardian of social order (ie excluding its economic role). These means are:

-- repressive

-- juridical

-- political

-- ideological

It is clear that these means can't be sepa­rated arbitrarily -- they interpenetrate each other and make up the super-structural tissue of society. But we have to look at their specificity if we are to understand how they are used by the class enemy. In fact, as the class struggle develops, the ‘technical' means of state power tend to get stronger:

-- better armed and more numerous forces of repression;

-- police measures;

-- juridical arsenal.

But at the same time, political and ideo­logical means tend to weaken:

-- to be seen in the political crisis of the bourgeoisie (‘the rulers can't go on ruling in the old way');

-- the working class breaks ideologically from the grip of the bourgeoisie (‘those at the bottom don't want to go on living in the old way').

The insurrection is the culminating point in this process when the state loses its grip on all these methods of control and can only confront the class struggle with its repressive forces -- which are them­selves partially paralyzed by the ideological decomposition in their ranks.

When we examine the strength of the state, we have to distinguish these formal aspects, which go in the same direction as the class struggle, from its real strength, which proceeds in the opposite direction.

13. The recent events around the Baader affair show a strengthening of the state on all levels, not only formal but real.

With regard to the technical means of repres­sion, these have been spectacularly streng­thened in recent months: special intervention squads of the German state, systematization of control at the frontier, massive police searches, close co-operation between differ­ent police forces, proposal for a ‘European judiciary area', etc.

On the political level, the German bourgeoi­sie has set an example to its European henchmen by setting up a ‘crisis general staff' grouping together rival political forces who have been able to overcome their differences in the face of ‘danger'.

But it is on the ideological level that the capitalist offensive has been most important. Taking advantage of a favorable balance of forces, the bourgeoisie has organized a whole campaign around terrorism aimed at:

-- justifying the police and judicial mea­sures;

-- getting public opinion used to seeing more and more state violence against the violence of the ‘terrorists';

-- replacing the old mystification ‘democracy vs fascism', which is a bit faded, with a new one, ‘democracy vs terrorism'.

14. In this offensive aimed at strengthening the police and ideological grip of the state, the bourgeoisie has made full use of the pretext supplied by the desperate behavior of elements of the decomposing petty bour­geoisie, vestiges of the student movement of the mid-sixties. But this does not mean that the cause of the strengthening of the state is the activity of a handful of terror­ists, or even that this wouldn't have taken place anyway without the terrorists. In fact the bourgeoisie is deploying its arsenal today essentially as a preventive measure against the working class, not against the gnat-like figures of the terrorists. And it is not by chance that it is the German bourgeoisie, particularly its Social Demo­cratic party, which stands at the head of the offensive:

-- Germany, both from the economic and geo­graphical point of view, occupies a key pos­ition in the evolution of the class struggle in the future;

-- until recently relatively spared by the crisis, Germany has now entered into econo­mic convulsions, particularly in the form of unemployment;

-- the SPD has an incomparable experience in repressing the working class; it played the role of ‘bloodhound' against the workers' insurrections after World War I and provoked the assassinations of the ‘terrorists' Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

The essential lessons of the Baader affair are:

-- even before the working class, with the exception of a small minority, has under­stood the inevitability of violent class conflicts with the bourgeoisie, the latter has already set up a whole arsenal to deal with them;

-- the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe are a vital weapon in this arsenal despite, or rather because of their ‘huma­nist' and ‘socialist' language;

-- contrary to what happened in the ascendant epoch, ‘democratic' language today only serves to conceal a systematic state terror which only uses ‘democratic guarantees' when it is convenient;

-- in its deadly struggle against the work­ing class, capital is prepared to use any means whatsoever, even the most terrifying;

-- the period in which the ‘right to asylum' had any meaning is over; henceforward all capitalist nations, including the most ‘liberal', will make up an immense ‘planet without visa' for elements of the class driven out of their country.

The strengthening of the war economy

15. The war economy is not a new phenomenon: it has imposed itself on capitalism since the system entered its decadent phase, marked by the cycle of crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis, etc. War is the culminating point in the crisis of society, and thus it's most significant expression, since it shows that capitalism can no longer survive except through successive rounds of self-destruc­tion. Because of this, the whole of social life, especially its economic infrastruc­ture, is dominated by war -- either the effects of one war or the preparation for the next. Thus the phenomenon of the war economy appeared in a generalized way in 1914, when we saw the mobilization of all the resources of the nation towards the production of arms, under the aegis of the state. After 1918, however, there was a certain reflux in this phenomenon: this was connected, on the one hand, to the social convulsions of the period, which pushed inter-imperialist rivalries into second place; and on the other hand, to the illusions of the bourgeoisie which believed in its own propaganda about a return to the ‘good old days'. But the phenomenon appea­red with even greater intensity than before during the 1930s, following the new round of acute crisis. It took on different poli­tical forms (fascism, Nazism, the New Deal, Popular Front, Plan de Man) but they were all orientated towards preparations for imperialist war and were all accompanied by the state exerting a more and more totalit­arian grip on the whole of social life. The phenomenon obviously reached its peak during World War II, but afterwards, in contrast to what happened after World War I, it did not take a significant step backwards. Even before the Axis was crushed, fierce inter-imperialist rivalries appeared within the victor's camp, culminating in the ‘cold war'. Ever since, the production of armaments on a massive scale has continued.

16. The permanent existence of a war econo­my should not be interpreted as a ‘solution' to the contradictions of capital, a radical change in the goals of production. This remains the production of surplus value and, contrary to certain tendencies, some of them in the workers' movement, for whom the war economy is an economic policy in itself, capable of leading the system out of crises and into a new era of growth and prosperity free of the danger of imperialist war, this kind of economy has no meaning outside of the direct preparation for war. It doesn't allow the system to avoid any of its economic impasses. It is true that arms production (and unproductive expendi­ture in general) have at certain moments in history allowed for a renewal of economic activity (for example, the policies of Hitler and Roosevelt); but this was only possible because of:

-- a considerable increase in the exploita­tion of the working class;

-- massive state debts; the state had to re­imburse the debts it had accrued, and a new war was one method (among others) of doing this, by making the conquered states pay.

In this sense, not only is the war economy no solution for the crisis or a way of avoiding war: it aggravates the economic situation and further strengthens the nec­essity of war. Thus, the fact that the war economy has continued since 1945 leaves capitalism today a narrower margin of maneuver than it had in 1929 in dealing with the crisis. In 1929, the relatively light burden of the war economy and the financial reserves of the states after the period of reconstruction made it possible for a temp­orary recovery to take place. Today on the other hand, after thirty years in which the war economy (not to mention wars themselves) has continued to play an immense role, such a policy can't have the same beneficial results, even though the war economy did make it possible to prolong the reconstruc­tion period to 1965; today all states are already deeply in debt. In particular, the fact that inflation has continued in an endemic manner since World War II as the result of these unproductive expenditures, and has taken on a violent form since the re-emergence of the open crisis, is a stri­king confirmation that the crisis of capi­talism today is expressing itself as a cri­sis of the war economy.

17. But the fact that the war economy has itself become a factor aggravating the cri­sis won't stop each state reinforcing it more and more; this is particularly true on the level of the bloc. Since the crisis of capitalism can only lead to war, each bloc has to prepare itself for war at all levels; in particular it has to subordinate the economy to the needs of arms production, which demands:

-- a greater and more totalitarian control of the productive apparatus by the state;

-- massive reduction in the consumption of all classes and social categories;

-- massive increase in the exploitation of the class which produces the bulk of social wealth-- the proletariat.

Here the present reflux in the class struggle has allowed capital to mount a new offen­sive against the proletariat's living stan­dards; this corresponds to the attempt of each national capital to improve its posi­tion on the world market but also to a new strengthening of the war economy and thus an acceleration of the course towards war.

Towards imperialist war or class war?

18. The present balance of forces in favor of the bourgeoisie and the resulting accel­eration of the course towards war could lead to the idea that this course has become domi­nant and that there are no major obstacles to the ruling class unleashing another round of imperialist carnage. In other words, the proletariat is already defeated and unable to prevent the free play of capital's forces. In such an analysis we are already on the eve of 1914 or 1939. Is this in fact the case? Is the proletariat today subordinated to capital to the same degree that it was in 1914 and 1939?

In 1914, despite the influence of Social Democracy on the workers, its electoral successes, the power of its unions -- things which were the pride of its leaders and many of its members -- and in fact because of all this, the working class was defeated, not physically, but ideologically. Opportunism had already done its work: the belief in a gradual movement towards socialism, and in a constant improvement of workers' living standards, the abandonment of any perspec­tive of a violent confrontation with the capitalist state, adherence to the ideals of bourgeois democracy, to the idea of a con­vergence of interest between the workers and their own bourgeoisie (for example, in colonial policy), etc. Despite the resistance of the left, this degeneration affec­ted the whole of Social Democracy, which had become an agent for containing the working class in the interests of capital, by obstructing its struggles, leading them into an impasse, and finally by spearhead­ing the chauvinist war hysteria. And des­pite local examples of workers' combativity like in Russia in 1913, despite the fact that certain socialist parties remained on a class terrain (as in Serbia etc), in an overall sense the working class was defeated, particularly in the most important countries` like Germany, France, Britain and Belgium, where the different expressions of opportun­ism (Bernstein's revisionism and Kautsky's ‘orthodox' reformism, Millerand's ‘minist­erialism', and the pacifist humanism of Jaures, trade unionism, Vandervelde's reformism) had completely demobilized the class and tied it hand and foot to the bourgeoisie. In the final analysis, and contrary to appearance, it wasn't the out­break of war in August 1914 which led to the collapse of the IInd International, but the opportunist degeneration of the workers' movement which made it possible for war to break out; this simply brought to light and completed a process which had been underway for a long time.

In 1939, when World War II broke out, the working class was in a much deeper state of distress than it had been in 1914. It was both ideologically and physically beaten. Following the great post-war revolutionary wave, the bourgeoisie waged a massive counter attack which lasted two decades and which consisted of three stages:

-- exhaustion of the revolutionary wave through a series of defeats in different countries, defeat of the Communist Left and its expulsion from the degenerating CI, construction of ‘socialism in one country' (ie state capitalism) in the USSR;

-- liquidation of social convulsions in the decisive centre of world events -- Germany -- through the physical crushing of the prole­tariat and the establishment of the Hitler regime; simultaneous with the definitive death of the CI and the bankruptcy of Trotsky's Left Opposition, which ended up in manoeuvrism and adventurism;

-- total derailment of the workers' movement in the ‘democratic' countries under the guise of ‘defending democracy' and ‘anti-fascism';

-- a new envelope for national defense. At the same time the complete integration of the CPs into the political apparatus of their national capitals and of the USSR into an imperialist bloc; liquidation of many revolutionary and left communist groups who were caught up in the cogs of capital, through the ideology of anti-fascism (parti­cularly during the war in Spain) and the ‘defense of the USSR', or who simply disappeared.

On the eve of the war, the working class was either completely subordinated to Sta­linist and Hitlerite terror, or derailed by anti-fascism; the rare communist groups who attempted to express a real political life were in a state of total isolation, a few unimportant islands in quantitative terms; Much less than in 1914 could there be any resistance to the unleashing of a second round of imperialist butchery.

19. Today many illusions still exist in the working class, especially electoral ones; there is still a certain trust in the ‘wor­kers' parties' (CPs, SPs); but this doesn't mean that the class has already been defeat­ed, either physically or ideologically.

Certainly, it has gone through physical de­feats as in Chile in 1973, but only in the peripheral zones of capitalism. On the ideological level, the present influence of the left parties can't be compared to the influence of social democracy in 1914 nor to that of the left in the 1930s; they have been working for capitalism for too long, they've participated too much in capitalist governments to be able to maintain the same illusions and enthusiasms among the workers. Moreover, the ‘anti-fascist' ideology has been largely used up already and its present-day variants like ‘anti-terrorism', despite their success right now, don't have the same potential. The Baader-Meinhof gang isn't going to provoke the same fear as Hitler's SS. War ideology, the need to deal with the ‘hereditary enemy' isn't deeply implan­ted today; it is extremely difficult to mobilize the young generation of workers behind such a cause (for example, the decom­position of US forces in Vietnam in the early seventies).

Globally, the conditions for beginning a new imperialist war are much less favorable to the bourgeoisie than in 1939 or even in 1914. And even if they were comparable to the conditions of 1914, we can still say that this wouldn't be enough for the bour­geoisie -- which is capable of drawing les­sons from history -- to unleash a war which might lead to another 1917. The long prep­arations for World War II, the systematic crushing of the class before it was unlea­shed, shows that after the experience of 1917, which made the bourgeoisie concerned for its very survival, the bourgeoisie would henceforward only begin a generalized war when it was absolutely certain that there was no chance of a working class reaction.

Today the bourgeoisie could only be sure of this after physically and ideologically crushing the proletariat. The perspective therefore remains not imperialist war but class war as the ICC has been arguing since the first class confrontations at the end of the 1960s.

20. So despite the present reflux, the historic perspective still points to a confron­tation between the classes; we must there­fore be ready for a new upsurge of proleta­rian struggle. And although it is impossible to predict the exact moment this upsurge will take place, we can still define some of its conditions and characteristics. The major precondition for a revival of class struggle is the class abandoning a good part of its illusions in the ‘solutions' put forward by the left of capital. This process already seems to be underway: either because the left, in power is getting more and more dis­credited, or because the failure of the perspectives put forward by the left is leading to a certain disenchantment with them. As we have seen, the loss of illusions does not necessarily allow the workers to regain their combativity straight away; in general, it causes a certain apathy. It is also not out of the question that the lost illusions will be replaced by new ones, especially by the more ‘left' factions of the bourgeoisie. This is why it would be imprudent to predict an immediate, general upsurge of struggles. However, these new illusions or the demoral­ization of the class won't be able to stand up to the inexorable advance of the crisis, to the aggravation of the proletariat's suf­fering, and to the growing discontent of the class that this will provoke. In particular, the persistent and massive extension of unem­ployment will give the lie to all the babblings about the ‘new' and ‘effective' ways of solving the crisis. Sooner or later, it is this economic pressure itself which will once again force the workers to struggle. And though it's difficult to establish what level of crisis will produce a new cycle of class struggle, it is possible to say that the next cycle -- and this is one of the criteria which will make it possible to recognize it and avoid confusing it with mere outbursts with no future -- will have to go beyond the last cycle, especially in the following two spheres: the autonomy of the struggle and the recognition of their international character. These are important because the way the bourgeoisie has kept things under control up till now is through the unions and the mystification of ‘defend­ing the national economy'. The next upsurge will therefore have to be characterized by:

-- a much clearer break from the unions than in the past, and the corollary to this: the tendency towards a higher level of self-organization (sovereign general assemblies, elected and revocable strike committees, co­ordination of these organs between the enter­prises of a whole town or region etc)

-- a greater awareness of the international character of the struggle, which could express itself in practice through movements of international solidarity, the sending of delegations of workers in struggle (not union delegations) from one country to another ...

To sum up, the situation today is like the eve of a battle which could go on for quite a time, which could be interrupted by violent but short-lived outbursts, and during which a whole subterranean process of maturation is going on -- the accumulation of a whole series of tensions and stresses which will inevitably explode into new, formidable class battles. These battles will probably not constitute the decisive revolutionary confrontation (and we will have to go through further bourgeois counter-attacks and new periods of temporary reflux); but compared to them the struggles in the late sixties and early seventies will seem like mere skirmishes.

ICC January 1978

This text is not an attempt to deal with all the problems of the Marxist theory of crisis. It is aimed simply at providing a framework to the debate now opening up in the inter­national revolutionary movement; it does not claim to be an ‘objective' view of the debate, to the extent that it is committed to a particular interpretation of the origins of capitalist decadence, but it will hopefully be able to lay down certain guide­lines which will allow the discussion to proceed in a constructive manner.

The context of the debate

In a general sense, the renewal of discussion about the crisis of capitalism is a response to the material reality which has been with us since the end of the 1960s: the irrefut­able descent of the world capitalist system into a condition of chronic economic crisis. The warning signs of the mid-sixties, which took the form of a dislocation of the inter­national monetary system, have been superseded by the symptoms of acute distress affecting the very heart of capitalist prod­uction: unemployment, inflation, falling rates of profit, slow-down in output and trade. Not one country in the world -- including the so-called ‘socialist' regimes -- has escaped the deadly effects of this crisis.

During the 1950s and 1960s, many elements in the tiny revolutionary movement which managed to maintain a precarious existence through those long years of class quiet and economic growth were dazzled by the apparent ‘success' of the capitalist economy in the post-war period. Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationist International and others took this phase of relative prosperity at face value and declared that capitalism had resolved its economic contradictions, so that the preconditions for a revolutionary upheaval could no longer be sought in the objective limitations of the system, but purely and simply in the subjective ‘refusal' of the exploited class. The very premises of Marxism were called into question, and those groups who went on insisting that the capitalist system could not and would not escape a new round of open economic crisis were brusquely dismissed as ‘relics' of the outmoded communist left, vainly clinging to a fossilized Marxist orthodoxy.

Nevertheless a few small currents, descend­ants of the communist left, such as Internationalisme in France in the 1940s and 1950s, Mattick in the USA, Internacionalismo in Venezuela in the 1960s, doggedly stuck to their guns. They saw that the post-war boom was exactly that -- a product of the cycle of crisis, war, and reconstruction which charact­erizes capitalism in its epoch of decay. They identified the tremors of the mid-sixties as the first shocks of a new economic earth­quake, and they understood that the resurg­ence of workers' struggles after 1968 was not the simple expression of ‘order-takers' refusing to take any more orders, but the first response of the proletariat to the economic crisis and the deterioration of its living standards. A few years after 1968 it became impossible to deny that there was indeed a new world-wide economic crisis. The debates that took place after that were not, therefore, about whether or not there was a crisis, but about what this new crisis meant: was it, as some maintained, a purely temporary disequilibrium, a product of the need for a ‘restructuration' of the prod­uctive apparatus, of oil price rises, or of workers' wage demands -- or was it, as the direct precursors of the ICC argued, an expression of the irreversible, historic decline of capitalism, a new outbreak of capital's death agony which could only lead to world war or world revolution?

The inexorable deepening of the crisis, the recognition by the bourgeoisie itself that this is no mere temporary fluctuation, but something deeper and more disturbing, has settled this debate for the most advanced elements in the revolutionary movement. A process of decantation has taken place in which currents that attempted to deny that today's crisis is an expression of the decadence of capitalism have fallen by the wayside. For example, groups like the GLAT (Groupe de Liason pour L'Action des Travailleurs) in France, which has drifted into the most refined form of academicism, though not before quietly abandoning the idea that the crisis is caused by the class struggle.

Today the debate is no longer about whether the crisis is a sign of the decadence of capitalism. It is about the economic found­ations of decadence itself; and in this sense is already an expression of a whole process of clarification that has been going on over the last few years. The very fact that the debate is being approached at this level is the product of real progress in the revolutionary movement.

The importance of the debate

The understanding that capitalism is a decadent social system is absolutely crucial to any revolutionary practice today. The impossibility of reforms and of national liberation, the integration of the unions into the state, the meaning of state capit­alism, the perspective facing the working class today -- none of these fundamental points can be understood without locating them in the context of the historic period in which we are living. But while no coherent revolutionary group can do without the concept of decadence, the immediate importance of the debate about the economic foundations of decadence is less clear. We will try to deal with this question during the course of this text, but for the moment we want to deal with some of the mistakes that can be made here. Broadly speaking, it is possible to fall into three errors:

a. Denying the relevance of the question as being ‘academic' or ‘abstract'. One example of this can be seen in the old Workers' Voice group in Liverpool, which regrouped with Revolutionary Perspectives to form the Communist Workers' Organization (CWO) in 1975 and split away again a year later. One of the weaknesses of this group -- though not the most important in itself -- was its lack of concern with or understanding of the problem of decadence, beyond a vague affirm­ation that capitalism was in decline. This laid the group open to dangerous confusions; while still in the CWO, various elements in Liverpool began to develop a completely un-­materialist, moralistic view of the class struggle, while others quickly succumbed to illusions about the significance of local sectional strikes. In general, such attitudes of contempt for theory go hand in hand with an activist approach to political work.

b. Exaggerating the importance of the debate. At present this is a danger facing many groups in the communist movement, so we will deal with it at somewhat greater length. An example of this error is tile CWO, who not only considers that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is the only explanation for capitalist decadence, but also relate all the alleged political errors of other groups to the fact that they explain decad­ence in a different way. For example, they consider that the activism of Pour Une Intervention Communiste(PIC) is a direct result of its ‘Luxemburgist' analysis (see ‘Text for the meeting of CWO and PIC' in Revolutionary Perspectives, no. 8), while as for the ICC, a whole host of its polit­ical shortcomings -- from its analysis of and relationship to the left to its errors on the transition period -- are the result of its defense of Luxemburg's theory of the crisis. Since political conclusions are seen to directly flow not merely from the concept of decadence, but the economic explanations for it, the CWO has developed the position that it is virtually impossible to regroup with organizations that analyze decadence in a different way. At the same time, an enormous emphasis is given in the work of the CWO to writing about ‘economics' to the detriment of other areas of concern for revolutionaries.

A similar tendency can be found in certain discussion circles emerging in different parts of the world, particularly in Scand­inavia. For many of these comrades, regular political activity and organization is impossible until one has a total grasp of the entire scope of Marx's critique of political economy. Since this is impossible, political activity is postponed indefinitely in favor of Capital study sessions or keep­ing up with the latest productions of the academic ‘Marxism' which is nourished by the universities of Scandinavia, Germany and elsewhere.

The perspective held by the comrades who over-emphasize the significance of economic analysis is based on a faulty understanding of what Marxism actually is. Marxism is not a new system of ‘economics' but a critique of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of the working class. In the last analysis, it is this class viewpoint which makes it possible to have a clear grasp of the economic processes of capital­ism -- and not the other way round. To think that either political clarity and a proletarian class viewpoint can be derived from an abstract and contemplative study of ‘economics', or that it is possible to separate the Marxist critique of political economy from a partisan world view, is to abandon the fundamental premise of Marxism that being precedes consciousness and that collective class interests determine one's view of economy and society. It is to fall into an idealist caricature of Marxism as a pure ‘science' or academic discipline which exists in an area of abstraction far removed from the sordid, vulgar world of politics and the class struggle.

Just as Marx's critique of bourgeois polit­ical economy uncovered the fact that bourg­eois economic theories were, in the end, an apologia for the class interests of the bourgeoisie, so Marx's critique was ail expression of the class interests of the proletariat. The understanding of capital's imminent tendency towards collapse which appears in Capital and other works is an elaboration of the practical consciousness which flows from the historic being of the proletariat as the last exploited class in history, the bearer of a higher, classless mode of production. Only from the stand­point of this class can the transitory nat­ure of capitalism, and communism as the resolution of capital's contradictions, be grasped. Hence the proletariat preceded and produced Marx; and the general insights of the Communist Manifesto, with its ‘vulgar' political positions and polemics, preceded and laid the ground for the more developed reflections of Capital. And Capital itself, "this economic shit" as Marx called it, was seen as only the first part of a magnum opus which would deal with every aspect of social and political life under capitalism. Those who think that you must first understand every dot and comma of Capital before being able to understand or actively defend proletarian class positions are turning Marx­ism and history on their heads.

In Marx, there is no distinction between ‘political' and ‘economic' analyses, the one is a partisan, practical approach to the world, the other an ‘objective', ‘scien­tific' approach which can be applied by anyone -- leftist guru or academic pro­fessor -- who is clever enough to read thr­ough the volumes of Capital. This was the conception Kautsky and other theoreticians of the IInd International had of Marxism -- a neutral science developed by bourgeois intellectuals and brought to the proletariat ‘from outside'. For Marx, however, communist theory is an expression of the proletarian movement itself:

"Just as the economists are the scient­ific representatives of the bourgeoisie, so the socialist and communist are the theorists of the proletariat." (Poverty of Philosophy)

Capital, like all Marx's work, is the militant, polemical product of a communist, a fighter in the proletarian movement. It can be understood only as a weapon in the arsenal of working class struggle, a con­tribution to the self-clarification and self-emancipation of the class. How could Marx, who criticized radical bourgeois philosophy, like all philosophy, for merely interpreting the world, produce any other kind of work?

For Marx, the study of political economy was necessary to give a firmer basis, a more coherent framework to the political persp­ectives which derived from the struggles and experience of the working class. It was never seen as an alternative to political activity (indeed Marx was constantly break­ing off his studies to help organize the International), or as the unique fountain­head of revolutionary positions; it could not take the place of that which gave it its real substance: the historic consciousness of the proletariat.

Just as political clarity is based prim­arily on an ability to assimilate the con­tent of working class experience, so polit­ical confusions mainly express an inability to do so, or the actual intrusion of bour­geois ideology. Thus, the confusions of a Bernstein about the possibility of capit­alism surmounting its crises were not simply the result of Bernstein's inability to understand how the law of value worked; it reflected the growing ideological subordin­ation of Social Democracy to the interests of capital. And the revolutionary critique of reformism developed by Luxemburg and others was not based on the fact that the revolutionaries were ‘better at economics' than the reformists, but on their ability to maintain a proletarian class perspective against the encroachments of capitalist ideology.

c. Closely linked to the second error is the idea that the debate on economics either has been or will be finally resolved. This again implies that the economic processes of capitalism can all be understood prov­iding one is intelligent or scientific enough or devotes enough time to them. In fact, beyond certain fundamental ideas, particularly those which flow directly from the nature and experience of the proletariat, such as the reality of exploitation, the inevitability of crisis, the concrete sig­nificance of decadence, many of the ‘econ­omic' problems of Marxism can never be decisively settled, precisely because they do not all stand and fall by the actual experience of the class in struggle. This applies to the question about the driving force behind the decay of capitalism: the future experience of the class will not be enough to determine whether decadence began as a result primarily of the falling rate of profit, or the saturation of the market. This contrasts with other ‘unsettled' quest­ions of today, like the exact nature of the state in the period of transition, which will indeed be resolved in the coming rev­olutionary wave.

This should be enough to confirm that the debate on the actual ‘causes' of decadence cannot be declared closed, but it is also important to point out that Marx himself never elaborated a completed theory about the historic crisis of capitalism, and in fact it would be ahistorical to expect him to have done so, since he could not have grasped all the phenomena of a decaying capitalism in a period when it was still expanding across the globe. Marx put for­ward some general indications, some vital insights, but above all a methodology for approaching the problem. Revolutionaries today must take up this method, but -- precisely because Marxism is not a fixed doctrine but a dynamic analysis of a changing reality -- they cannot do so by laying false claims to an ‘orthodox Marxism' which has long spoken the last word on all aspects of revolutionary theory. In the end, such an attitude can only lead to a distortion of what Marx himself actually said. The CWO, for example, in their attempt to show that an analysis of decadence based on the falling rate of profit is the only Marxist one, have fallen into the trap of branding virtually any concern with the problem of overproduction of'commodities, of the mark­et, as having nothing to do with Marx, and of being a variety of underconsumptionism and other confusions put about by the likes of Sismondi and Malthus. But, as we shall see, the problem of overproduction is central to Marx's theory of crisis. If the debate on decadence is to be a fruitful one, it must abjure sectarian claims to orthodoxy and seek, first of all, to define the general framework in which a Marxist approach to the discussion can be undertaken.

The two crisis theories

There are not 1001 theories of crisis in the Marxist tradition. The decline of capitalism is not the product of capitalist greed, or the ‘triumph of socialism on one sixth of the planet', or of the exhaustion of natural resources. There are basically two explanations for the historic crisis of capitalism in this century, because Marx pointed to two basic contradictions in the process of capitalist accumulation: two contradictions which lay at the root of the cyclical crises of growth capitalism went through in the nineteenth century, and which would, at a given moment, impel the historic decline of capitalism, plunge it into a death crisis which would put the communist revolution on the agenda. These two contradictions are the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, given the inevitab­ility of an ever higher organic composition of capital and the problem of overproduct­ion, capital's innate disease of producing more than its market can absorb. Though he developed a framework in which these two phenomena were intimately linked, Marx never completed his examination of capital­ism, so that, in different writings, more or less emphasis is given to one or the other as the underlying cause of the crisis. In Capital Volume III, Part 3, the falling rate of profit is presented as a fundament­al barrier to accumulation, though the problem of the market is also dealt with here (see below); in his polemic against Ricardo in Theories of Surplus Value Volume II, the overproduction of commodities is seen as "the basic phenomenon in crises" (p.528). It is the unfinished character of this crucial area of Marx's thought -- some­thing, as we have said, determined not merely by Marx's personal inability to finish Capital, but by the limitations of the historic period in which he was living -- which has led to controversy with­in the workers' movement about the economic foundations of capitalism's decline.

The period following the death of Marx and Engels was characterized by relative econ­omic stability in the capitalist metropoles, and the headlong rush of the imperialist powers to annex the remaining unconquered parts of the globe. The question of the specific origins of capitalist crises tended to be pushed into the background by the heated debates between the revolutionaries and the reformists in the IInd International, the latter denying that capitalism had any fundamental barriers to its expansion, the former beginning to understand imperialism as a symptom of the termination of its ascendant phase. At that time, the ‘orthodox' Marxist theory of crisis, as defended by Kautsky and others, tended to concentrate on the problem of the market, but this was not systematized or related to the actual decadence of capital until Rosa Luxemburg published The Accumulation of Capital in 1913. This text remains the most coherent exposition of the thesis that capitalist decadence is, first and foremost, brought on by its inability to continually expand the market. Luxemburg argued that since the entire surplus value of total social capital cannot, by its very nature, be realized within the social relations of capital, capitalism's growth was dependent on its continual conquest of pre-capitalist mark­ets; the relative exhaustion of these markets towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centur­ies, hurl the entire world capitalist syst­em into a new epoch of barbarism and imperialist wars.

World War I brought home the reality of this new epoch, and the understanding that capitalism had entered a new stage, "the epoch of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist world system" (Invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International, January 1919), was an axiom of the whole revolutionary movement of that time; but the CI did not adopt a unanimous position on the specific causes of capital­ism's disintegration. The main theorists of the CI, like Lenin and Bukharin, crit­icized Luxemburg and placed more emphasis on the falling rate of profit, but Lenin in particular was also influenced by the vagaries of Hilferding's theory of conc­entration, which is a kind of blind alley of Marxist thought, and the CI never elab­orated a complete theory of decadence. On the contrary, the CI's analysis of the new epoch was flawed by its inability to see that the entire world capitalist system was decadent, so that there could be no room for bourgeois revolutions or national lib­eration in the colonial regions.

The most coherent revolutionary minorities of that period, and in the period of defeat which followed, the left communists of Germany and Italy, tended to be partisans of Luxemburg's theory of crisis. This tradition links the KAPD, Bilan, Internationalisme, and the ICC today. At the same time, during the 1930s, Paul Mattick of the American Council Communists took up Henryk Grossman's criticisms of Luxemburg and his contention that capitalism's permanent crisis emerges when the organic composition of capital reaches such a magnitude that there is less and less surplus value to fuel the process of accumulation. This basic idea -- though further elaborated on a number of points -- is today defended by revolutionary groups like the CWO, Battaglia Comunista and some of the groups emerging in Scandinavia (though elements in the ICC also hold similar views). It can thus be seen that the debate going on today has real historic roots that go all the way back to Marx.

Marx, the market and the rate of profit

Two basic questions are posed by the debate on the economic foundations of decadence: are the ‘two theories' mutually exclusive; and do they lead to different political conclusions? We will look at the second question later on, but for the moment we have to examine a particular aspect of the first question: the denial by holders of the Mattick theory that Luxemburg's analysis has anything to do with Marx. If this is true, then to talk of a debate between the two positions is somewhat of an exaggeration.

In the last few years, the ‘rate of profit' theory has been taken up by a number of newly emerging revolutionaries, and one reason for this is that, at first sight, explanations based on the falling rate of profit seem to be more in line with what Marx put forward in Capital. Surely Marx was concerned with locating the crisis in ‘production' not ‘circulation'? Isn't it the bourgeoisie who are concerned with the ‘market problem'? Many of the comrades who pose these questions also take up the old war-cry of the ‘epigones' who attacked Luxemburg in 1913: Luxemburg's whole theory is based on a ‘misunderstanding' of Marx's scheme of expanded reproduction in Volume II of Capital. The problem of realization of surplus value posed by Rosa is a non-problem. A particularly virulent variety of this is in the text in Revolutionary Perspectives, no.6, where with their customary sectarian­ism the CWO accuse Luxemburg of totally abandoning Marxism.

The ICC will be answering this text at greater length soon, but for the moment we simply want to show why we consider Luxem­burg's theory to be fully in line with Marx's thought, and why an explanation of decadence based solely on the falling rate of profit obscures some crucial aspects of Marx's analysis. We can best enter this discussion through a quote from the text in RP, no.6, p.11. According to the CWO,

"Marx did not say that there would not be crises caused by temporary disprop­ortionalities between departments... but he did show that the central con­tradiction of the capitalist mode of production, its historical contradict­ion, could not be found in the process of circulation."

This statement entirely misses the point about what Marx had to say about crises. The idea that crises of overproduction are caused by ‘disproportionality' between departments -- that they are not rooted in the underlying social relations of capital but are merely temporary and contingent disruptions between supply and demand -- is precisely the thesis of Say and Ricardo which Marx attacks in Theories of Surplus Value Volume II. According to these bour­geois theorists, capitalist production perpetually creates its own market, so that general overproduction is impossible. In Marx's words:

"The conception...adopted by Ricardo from the tedious Say...that overprod­uction is not possible or at least that no general glut of the market is poss­ible, is based on the proposition that products are exchanged against products, or as Mill puts it, on the ‘meta­physical equilibrium of sellers and buyers', and this led to the conclusion that demand is determined only by prod­uction, or also that demand and supply are identical." (Theories, Volume II, p.493)

Or, as Marx puts it later, the Ricardians explain:

"...overproduction in one field by underproduction in another field... (which) means merely that if product­ion were proportionate, there would be no overproduction." (ibid, p. 532)

Marx denounces this as "a fantasy" and ins­ists that "the theory of the impossibility of general overproduction is essentially apologetic in tendency" (p.527). For Marx, overproduction is not merely a temporary interruption in an otherwise smooth process of accumulation. Such a harmony between supply and demand is, perhaps, theoretically possible in a society of simple commodity production, but not in a society based on the class relations of capitalism, on the production of surplus value. In fact:

"Overproduction is specifically cond­itioned by the general law of the prod­uction of capital: to produce by the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labor with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay; and this is carried out through the continuous expansion of reproduction and accumulation, and therefore const­ant reconversion of revenue into cap­ital, while, on the other hand, the mass of producers remain tied to the average level of needs, and must remain tied to it according to the nature of capitalist production." (ibid pps.534-5)

Marx elaborates further on the inherent limits of the capitalist market when he points out that:

"The mere relationship of wage-laborer and capitalist implies:

1. That the majority of producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production, and the raw material;

2. that the majority of producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus-value or surplus-product. They must always be overproducers, producers over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs." (ibid p.520)

Because of this ‘internal' limitation in the capitalist market, the ‘external market' must be continually expanded if capitalism is to avoid overproduction:

"... the mere admission that the market must expand with production is, on the other hand, an admission of the poss­ibility of overproduction, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal mark­et is limited as compared with a mark­et that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited as each moment of time, (though) in itself capable of expansion. The admission that the market must expand if there is to be no overproduction is therefore an admission that there can be over­production. For it is then possible -- since market and production are two independent factors -- that the expan­sion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended rapidly enough for production, or that new markets -- new extensions of the market -- may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly.

Ricardo is therefore consistent in denying the necessity of an expansion of the market simultaneously with the expansion and growth of capital." (ibid. pps.524-5)

Marx returns to this point in the section dealing with the falling rate of profit in Capital Volume III:

"The creation of this surplus-value is the object of the direct process of production, and this process has no other limits than those mentioned above. As soon as the available quant­ity of surplus-value has been material­ized in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But this production of surplus-value completes but the first act of the capitalist process of production -- the direct production process. Capital has absorbed so and so much unpaid labor. With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions. Now comes the second act of the process. The entire mass of commodities, ie the total pro­duct including the portion which repl­aces constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the laborer has indeed been exploited, but his exploitation is not realized as such for the capitalist...The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realizing it, are not ident­ical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. The first are only limited by the product­ive power of society, the latter by the proportional relation of the various production branches and the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absol­ute productive power, or the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduces the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits. It is furthermore res­tricted by the tendency to accumulate, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus value on an extended scale. This is law for capitalist production, imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, by the depreciation of existing capit­al always bound up with them, by the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and expand its scale merely as a means of self-preservation and under penalty of ruin. The market must, therefore, be contin­ually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable. This internal contrad­iction seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying fields of production. But the more productive­ness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of cons­umption rest. It is no contradiction at all on this self-contradictory basis that there should be an excess of capi­tal simultaneously with a growing sur­plus of population. For while a comb­ination of these two would, indeed, increase the mass of produced surplus value, it would at the same time inte­nsify the contradiction between the conditions under which this surplus value is produced and those under which it is realized." (Capital, Volume III, pps. 244-5, our emphasis)

Now, as Luxemburg explains in Accumulation when Marx talks about "expanding the outlying fields of production", or "foreign trade", he means expansion into and trade with non-capitalist areas, since, simply for the sake of his abstract model of accumul­ation, Marx treats the entire capitalist world as one nation, composed exclusively of workers and capitalists. Contrary to the assumptions of the CWO, who can't see how surplus value can be realized by such trade (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.6, pps.15-­16), Marx clearly recognized the possibility of such trade:

"Within its process of circulation, in which industrial capital functions either as money or as commodities, the circuit of industrial capital, whether as money capital or as commodity capital, crosses the commodity circ­ulation of the most diverse modes of social production. No matter whether commodities are the output of product­ion based on slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots), of communes (Dutch East Indies), of state enter­prises (such as existed in former ep­ochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom) or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc -- as commodities and money they come face-to-face with the money and commodities in which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as much into its circuit as into that of the surplus value borne in the commod­ity capital, provided the surplus value is spent as revenue; hence they enter into both branches of circulat­ion of commodity capital. The char­acter of the process from which they originate is immaterial." (Capital, Volume II, p.113)

Marx not only accepts the possibility of such trade; he also glimpses its necessity, since the process of trading with, destroy­ing, and absorbing pre-capitalist markets is none other than the way capitalism "continually expanded its market" during the ascendant phase.

"As soon as act M-MP is completed, the commodities (MP) cease to be such and become one of the modes of existence of industrial capital in its function­al form of P, productive capital. Thereby however their origin is oblit­erated. They exist henceforth only as forms of existence of industrial capital, are embodied in it. However it still remains true that to replace them they must be reproduced and to this extent the capitalist mode of production is conditional on modes of production lying outside its own stage of development. But it is the tenden­cy of the capitalist mode of production to transform all production as much as possible into commodity production. The mainspring by which this is accom­plished is precisely the involvement of all production into the capitalist circulation process. And developed commodity production is capitalist commodity production. The intervent­ion of industrial capital promotes this transformation everywhere, but with it also the transformation of all direct producers into wage laborers." (ibid. first emphasis ours).

Indeed, Marx had already shown in the Communist Manifesto how the very extension of the world capitalist market, while res­olving its crises in the short term, only deepened the problem of overproduction in the long term:

"The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."

It can thus be seen that the problem of realization which Luxemburg analyzed in Accumulation was not a ‘non-problem', a misreading of Marx; on the contrary Luxem­burg's thesis is in essential continuity with a central theme in Marx's theory of crisis: viz, that capitalist production has inherent limitations to its own market and must therefore continually expand into new markets if it is to avoid a general crisis of overproduction. Luxemburg showed that the model of expanded reproduction in Vol­ume II of Capital is in contradiction to this understanding to the extent that it assumes the possibility of accumulation creating its own market. But Luxemburg also points out that this model is valid as a theoretical abstraction used to illustrate certain aspects of the process of circulat­ion. It was not intended to be seen as a model for real historical accumulation, or as an explanation of crises, and certainly not to ‘solve' the problem of overproduction. Nevertheless, Marx does appear to get caught in certain inconsistencies in the use he makes of this diagram, and Luxem­burg points these out. But the main point is that both Marx and Luxemburg were aware of the difference between abstract models and the real process of accumulation. No­thing could be further from the spirit of Marx than Otto Bauer's sterile attempt to prove ‘mathematically' that accumulation can proceed without any inherent barriers in the realm of the market, and that Rosa was mistaken because she hadn't done her sums properly. When it comes to misunderstanding Marx's diagram of expanded repro­duction, it is those who take it literally and ‘liquidate' the problem of realization who are departing from Marx's underlying concern, not Luxemburg. There is no getting away from the fact that, to take the diag­ram literally means that capitalism can indefinitely create its own market, some­thing Marx specifically denied.

This lands many of Luxemburg's critics in a contradictory position. Mattick for examp­le sees further into the problem of realiz­ation than the CWO. In his Crises and Theories of Crises (French edition, p.97), he points out that:

"...in the capitalist system there can be no proportionality between the div­erse sectors of production, nor a per­fect concord between production and consumption."

But, in the end, Mattick denies this insight, by arguing that capitalism does not have a fundamental problem of realization, because accumulation creates its own market:

"Commodity production creates its own market in so far as it is able to con­vert surplus value into new capital. The market demand is a demand for con­sumption goods and capital goods. Accumulation can only be the accumul­ation of capital goods, for what is consumed is not accumulated but simply gone. It is the growth of capital in its physical form which allows for the realization of surplus value outside the capital-labor exchange relations. So long as there exists an adequate and continuous demand for capital goods, there is no reason why commodities entering the market should not be sold." (Marx and Keynes, p.76)

Mattick is clearly wishing away the problem here. "In so far as it is able to convert surplus value into new capital..."; "so long as there exists an adequate and cont­inuous demand...". The question where this continuous demand is to come from is not answered, and Mattick is caught on the "merry go round" of "production for prod­uction's sake" which Rosa points out in Accumulation (p. 335). Luxemburg's critics often cite Marx saying that capitalist production is production for its own sake, but this passage has to be taken in context. Marx did not mean that capitalist production could solve its problems by investing in a huge pile-up of capital goods without any concern for society's capacity to consume the goods they will turn out:

"Besides, we have seen in Volume II, Part III that a continuous circulation takes place between constant capital and constant capital (even without considering any accelerated accumulat­ion), which is in so far independent of individual consumption, but which is nevertheless definitely limited by it, because the production of constant capital never takes place for its own sake, but solely because more of this capital is needed in those spheres of production whose products pass into individual consumption." (Capital, Volume III, p, 359 of Chicago translat­ion)

According to Mattick, there is no problem of an unrealizable fraction of surplus value, since ‘investment' in further accum­ulation of constant capital absorbs every­thing in the fullness of time. The crisis results only from an over-accumulation of constant in relation to variable capital, ie from the falling rate of profit. But as Rosa already pointed out in Accumulation:

"From the capitalist's point of view, the consumption of the workers is a consequence of accumulation, it is never its object or condition...And in any case, the workers can only consume that part of the product which corres­ponds to the variable capital, not a jot more. Who then realizes the perm­anently increasing surplus value? The diagram answers: the capitalists them­selves and they alone. And what do they do with this increasing surplus value? The diagram replies: they use it for an ever greater expansion of their production. These capitalists are thus fanatical supporters of an expansion of production for production's sake...the upshot of all this is not accumulation of capital but an increa­sing production of producer goods to no purpose whatsoever." (Accumulation of Capital, p.335)

This "purpose" of producing more producer goods must be a continuous expansion of the market for all the products of capital. Otherwise, by arguing that ‘investment' for its own sake solves the market problem, one is turning to the false solutions criticized by Marx in Capital:

"If it is finally said that the capit­alists have only to exchange and cons­ume their commodities amongst themsel­ves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of...In short, all these object­ions to the phenomena of overproduct­ion...amount to the contention that the barriers of capitalist production are not barriers of production generally, and therefore not barriers of this specific, capitalist mode of product­ion." (Volume III, p.257)

Those who say that accumulation of constant capital solves the problem of accumulation are merely repeating the idea that the cap­italists can simply exchange their products among themselves, even though they do it for the ‘future' as it were, and not for immediate consumption. Sooner or later the constant capital they invest in must be able to find a real market for the goods it turns out, or the cycle of accumulation will break down. Because there is no way of avoiding this problem, we would argue that Luxemburg's insistence that the entire sur­plus value cannot be realized within the social relations of capitalist society is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Marx's rejection of the idea that capital­ist production creates its own market; that it is the only alternative to the Ricardian theory that overproduction crises are simp­ly accidental disruptions of a basically harmonious cycle of reproduction. The part­isans of Matticki's ‘rate of profit' theory are with Marx when they emphasize the imp­ortance of the falling rate of profit as a factor in the capitalist crisis, but they are with Say and Ricardo when they deny that the problem of realization is fundamental to the capitalist process of accumulation.

Two theories or one?

From what we have argued above, it is plain that there can be no Marxist analysis of the crisis which ignores the problem of the mar­ket as a fundamental factor in the capital­ist crisis. Even the argument, put forward by Mattick and others, that the overproduct­ion of commodities is a real problem, but only as a secondary effect of the falling rate of profit, avoids the real question posed by Marx and Luxemburg: the market for capitalist production being limited by the very wage labor-capital relationship. Both the falling rate of profit and the problem of the market are primary contradictions in capitalism. At the same time the two contra­dictions are closely linked, and mutually determine each other in a number of ways. The question is, what is the best framework for understanding how these two phenomena interact with one another?

We would argue that Mattick's analysis can­not provide such a framework to the extent that it denies the problem of the market; whereas Luxemburg's theory does not reject the falling rate of profit. It is true that in Accumulation she puts forward a model -- a purely abstract one, it should be noted -- which allows for the falling rate of profit to be "cancelled out" (p.338), and that in the Anticritique she says "there is still some time to pass before capitalism collap­ses because of the falling rate of profit, roughly until the sun burns out". These could be said to be expressions of Luxem­burg's underestimation of the problem, but there is nothing in her basic approach which rejects it; and indeed the Accumulation gives several examples of how the fall in the rate of profit interacts with the prob­lem of realization (see below).

The reason why Luxemburg emphasized the mar­kets problem as lying at the roots of decadence is not hard to find. As Marx pointed out, as a factor in capitalist crises the falling rate of profit is an overall tend­ency which expresses itself over long periods and has a number of counteracting influences; whereas the problem of realization is some­thing which can clog up the process of accum­ulation in a more immediate and direct way. This applies both to the conjunctural crises of the last century and the historic crisis of capitalism, since the absorption of the pre-capitalist milieu which had provided the soil for the continual extension of the mar­ket was a barrier which capital came up against well before its organic composition had swelled to such proportions that profitable production could no longer be maintained. But, as the Platform of the ICC points out:

"...the growing difficulty encountered by capital in finding a market for the realization of surplus value accentuates the fall in the rate of profit...from being a mere tendency, the fall in the rate of profit has become more and more concrete; this has become an added fet­ter on the process of capital accumul­ation and thus on the operation of the entire system."

The saturation of the market both aggravates the falling rate of profit (for example, increased competition over a shrinking mar­ket forces capitalists to renew plant before all its value has been used up), and removes one of its most important counteracting inf­luences: compensating for a fall in the rate of profit by increasing its mass, that is by expanding the volume of commodities prod­uced. This can only be a compensation as long as the expansion of the market can keep pace with this increased mass of comm­odities. When it can no longer do so, this compensation only makes matters worse, agg­ravating both the fall in the rate of prof­it and the problem of realization. A great deal of work and study needs to be done in this area, but while Luxemburg certainly did not solve all the problems here, the framework she elaborated does allow for the role of the falling rate of profit to be grasped more completely.

But perhaps the problem goes deeper? Per­haps, in the end, there is a basic contrad­iction in Marx's own thought? At first sight it would appear that the idea that the crisis results from too much unrealiz­able surplus value cannot be reconciled with the idea that the crisis is caused by a dearth of surplus value.

Although Marx never finally resolved this problem, there are elements in his work which enable us to see that the two contra­dictions are indeed parts of a dialectical whole. To begin with:

"Capital consists of commodities, and therefore overproduction of capital implies overproduction of commodities. Hence the peculiar phenomenon of econ­omists who deny overproduction of commodities, admitting overproduction of capital." (Capital volume III, p.256)

Once this has been grasped, it can be seen that the two contradictions necessarily act together in capitalist crises: on the one hand the overproduction of capital calls forth a decline in the profit rate because it involves an increase in the ratio between constant and variable capital; on the other hand this huge mass of constant capital produces a plethora of commodities which more and more exceeds the consuming power of this relatively diminishing variable capital (ie the working class). Goaded on by competition over a restricted market, capital and its capacity to spew out commod­ities grows huge and swollen, while the masses become poorer and poorer in relation to it; less and less profit is embodied in each commodity, less and less commodities can be sold. The rate of profit and the capacity for realization sink together, and the one aggravates the other. The seeming contradiction between having ‘too much' and ‘too little' surplus value disappears when it becomes clear that we are talking about capital as a whole, and that we are talking in relative, not absolute terms. For cap­ital as a whole, there is never an absolute saturation of markets, nor does the rate of profit sink to an absolute zero which dries up all available surplus value. In fact, as Luxemburg pointed out, at a certain mom­ent in the concentration of capital, the ‘excess' and ‘dearth' of surplus value can be the same thing viewed from a different standpoint:

"If capitalization of surplus value is the real motive force and aim of prod­uction, it must yet proceed within the limits given by the renewal of constant and variable capital (and also of the consumed part of the surplus value). Further, with the international devel­opment of capitalism the capitalizat­ion of surplus value becomes ever more urgent and precarious, and the substr­atum of constant and variable capital becomes an ever-growing mass -- both absolutely and in relation to the sur­plus value. Hence the contradictory phenomena that the old capitalist cou­ntries provide ever larger markets for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet on the other hand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with non-capitalist countries. The conditions for the capitalization of surplus value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital -- a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a count­erpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate." (The Accumulation of Capital, p.367)

In other words, relatively less and less of the mass of surplus value produced is dest­ined for capitalization, but this is still ‘excessive' in relation to the effective demand. And this ‘less and less' surplus value (over and above the value which mere­ly replaces the initial capital outlay) is the result of the ever higher organic comp­osition of capital.

It thus becomes clearer that the two contr­adictions traced by Marx do not exclude each other but are two sides of one overall pro­cess of value production. This ultimately makes it possible for the ‘two' theories of crisis to become one.

Political consequences

We have tried to indicate that, in the final analysis, the ‘rate of profit' and the ‘mar­ket' problems can be theoretically reconcil­ed, although the Grossman-Mattick approach cannot do this as long as it ignores or downplays the problem of realization of surplus value. The weaknesses of Mattick's theory at the ‘economic' level also has, or rather implies, certain inadequacies at the level of political conclusions which derive from it. Although we must restrict ourselv­es here to a brief mention of these weak­nesses, and although we repeat our warning against mechanistically deriving political positions from economic analyses, this does not mean that there are simply no political consequences involved. These consequences take the form of tendencies rather than iron laws, and they are more pronounced in some than in others, but nevertheless, certain common characteristics do appear to be shar­ed by the different currents who take up Mattick's economic theory.

Beginning from an analysis of the falling rate of profit alone, it is extremely diff­icult to define the historical course of the capitalist crisis. This applies both to the retrospective identification of the onset of the decadent period, and to the analysis of the perspectives for the devel­opment of the crisis today. We would say that this is because Mattick's theory leaves a number of basic questions unanswered or answered inadequately, for example: if the falling rate of profit is the only real problem for capital, why should the division of the world amongst the imperialist powers and the creation of a world capitalist econ­omy have plunged capitalism into its hist­oric crisis? At what point did the organic composition of capital on a global scale reach a level when the counter-tendencies to the falling rate of profit could no long­er be offset? When in the future will the rate of profit be too low to prevent capital continuing to accumulate without another war? And why indeed has war become the mode of survival of capital in this era? We would say that none of these questions can be answered without bringing in the question of the market. But, failing to do this, Mattick can only give vague answers to these questions. There is no real consistency in his understanding of the present epoch. In the 1930s his writings indicate an underst­anding that the permanent crisis of capital was an immediate reality and that it could only be offset by world war. In his post­war writings, however, he seems to question whether capitalism had really entered a new epoch at the time of the Russian Revolution, implying sometimes that the historic crisis only began in 1929, while at other times hinting that the falling rate of profit will only create major problems for capital around the year 2000, so perhaps capitalism is not yet decadent at all! In short, with Mattick there is no consistent awareness of decadence as the period of crisis-war-recon­struction decisively inaugurated by World War I, or of today's crisis as the direct manifestation of that historical cycle and not just a temporary hiccough in a period of growth. This lack of clarity about what decadence actually is leads him to under­estimate the gravity of the present crisis and reinforces his tendency towards academ­icism, which goes all the way back to the 1940s. Since, in his view, the ‘real' crisis is a long way away, the prospect of major outbreaks of class struggle at the present time is not very bright. There can be little point, therefore, in engaging in militant political activity today.

The CWO, despite their reliance on Mattick's economic theory, have a much clearer understanding of decadence, the present crisis, and the political conclusions flowing from them. They have tried to demonstrate how the period opened up by World War I can be explained with reference to the falling rate of profit (especially in ‘The Economic Foundations of Capitalist Decadence' in Revolutionary Perspectives, no.2). This is a serious effort which requires a more det­ailed critique than can be attempted here. Such a critique would have to centre round certain crucial questions, such as: how coherent is their application of Mattick's economics to the framework of decadence they use? How far can decadence be analyzed on the basis of the falling rate of profit without bringing in the markets problem; and how coherent would the CWO's view of decad­ence be if they had not been influenced by other tendencies -- notably the ICC -- who do consider the problem of the market as fund­amental in the explanation of decadence? In other words: how far is the CWO's analysis of decadence a consistent continuation of Mattick's theory, and how much is it implic­itly or explicitly molded by a more unitary theory of decadence. What we have written above about the impossibility of ignoring the realization problem already indicates what our answer to these questions will be.

More important, perhaps, is to point out that, while not necessarily following Matt­ick into the extremes of academic withdrawal, the ‘falling rate of profit' school share a tendency to see the ‘real' crisis as being a long way away; since some of these comrad­es also exhibit a somewhat mechanistic con­ception of the link between levels of crisis and levels of class struggle, they generally conclude that the prospects for class strug­gle and revolutionary regroupment are also somewhat distant. Thus Battaglia Comunista only saw the present crisis emerge in 1971, and for them the resurgence of the internat­ional organization of the class will only take place sometime in the future; the CWO see both capital's preparations for imper­ialist war and the workers' preparation for class war as something ‘for tomorrow', when the crisis will have reached a new level. The regroupment of revolutionaries is post­poned in a similar way. Many of the Scand­inavian comrades, closer to Mattick and still cocooned to some extent by the ‘prosperity' of Scandinavia, continue to see the tasks of revolutionaries as ‘study' and reflection divorced from any militant activity. We don't think these ‘attentist' attitudes are accidental. They are linked to the short­comings of the Mattick theory, which finds it hard to show that decadence is indeed a permanent crisis, the result of the disappearance of the conditions which allowed for healthy capital expansion in the nineteenth century. The ‘Luxemburg' theory, by showing the diseased nature of all accumulation in this epoch, makes it easier to show the limitations of the period of reconstruction, and to understand that the crisis, the war economy and the class struggle are all very much realities of today. In fact we would say that the response of the class is alre­ady lagging behind the development of the crisis and the bourgeoisie's preparations for war. This does not mean that the crisis has hit rock bottom, or that war or revol­ution are on the immediate agenda, and that therefore we should embark upon a course of frenzied activism (like the PIC, whose inn­ate activism is reinforced by a faulty appl­ication of Luxemburg's crisis theory). Capital still has mechanisms for staving off the crisis, and a whole series of economic and social processes have to unfold before the crisis resolves itself in either war or revolution. Nevertheless, it is important to see that these processes are already underway, so that the tasks facing revolutionaries today are extremely urgent and can­not be put off until ‘tomorrow'. As Bilan put it, "Can tomorrow be anything else than the development of what is happening today?" (Bilan, no.36)

As Lukacs pointed out in his essay ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg', the validity of Luxemburg's accumulation theory as a contri­bution to the proletarian world view lies in the fact that it is based on the "category of totality", the specifically proletarian category of perception. The problem of accumulation investigated by Luxemburg is only a problem at the level of total or global capital; the vulgar economists who depart from the standpoint of the individual capital were unable to see that there was a problem at all. This ‘vulgarity' can be applied to Mattick to some extent; since he has a strong tendency to view each national capital in isolation .This distorted per­spective leads to a number of errors:

-- ambiguities about the possibility of nat­ional liberation, since small nations acc­ording to Mattick, can withdraw from the world market into autarky or the protection of the so-called ‘state capitalist bloc';

-- parallel to this, Mattick has asserted that Russia, China, etc are not wholly reg­ulated by the law of value and are not really imperialist, having no inner compunction to expand onto the world market. He has even called them ‘state socialist' societies.

These mistakes very much derive from an in­ability to see these nations as part of the whole capitalist world market. On this question again the CWO among others have gone well beyond Mattick, affirming the imp­ossibility of national liberation and that Russia and China are capitalist economies regulated by the law of value. Even so, their analysis contains a number of weaknesses which can be connected to their economic theory. Finding it hard to analyze part­icular phenomena from the standpoint of the whole, they show a certain inability to see state capitalism and the war economy as fundamentally determined by the national capital's need to compete on the world mar­ket; for them state capitalist measures are primarily a response to the falling rate of profit in particular industries whose high organic composition makes it necessary for the state to bail them out. But this is only a partial explanation, since the stake does this precisely to increase the compet­ivity of the entire national capital. In a similar vein is the CWO's idea that Russia, China etc can be termed ‘integral' state capitalisms whose development proves that "capital accumulation is possible in a closed system" (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.1, p.13). This ‘fact' allegedly refutes Luxemburg's economics, while the notion of ‘integral' state capitalism still leaves room for the idea that these economies are somehow ‘different' and need to be explained in a particular way. And the explicit or implicit claim that autarkic development is possible could have various political ram­ifications. On the national question, for example, the CWO has the right political conclusions, but it is worth asking how con­sistent their conclusions are with their economic analysis. Is Mattick's idea that underdeveloped nations could grow on the basis of their own internal market a more logical consequence of his economic theory?

We are not implying that the CWO has any fundamental confusions on the national ques­tion, nor that their explanation for the impossibility of national liberation does not have a coherence of its own. But any inconsistency today can open the doors to real errors tomorrow. And we would add that there are already noticeable weaknesses in the CWO's approach to the national question: a difficulty in seeing the voracious imper­ialist appetites of all national capitals today, even the smallest; and a pronounced pessimism about the perspective for the class struggle in the Third World. On the first point, they argue that only Russia and America can ‘really' act as imperialisms to­day, other national capitals being only pot­entially or tendentially imperialist. This obscures the reality of local inter-imperial­ist rivalries which have a role to play within the overall confrontation between the blocs, a reality strikingly confirmed by the recent conflicts in the Horn of Africa and South East Asia. On the class struggle in Third World countries, the CWO regularly make statements like "we can only expect positive developments...when the workers in the advanced countries have taken the rev­olutionary road, and given a clear lead" (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.6). Such a view belittles the importance of the present struggles of the Third World workers in the international development of class consciou­sness, and makes a rigid separation between today and tomorrow, advanced and backward capitals, which can only obscure our understanding. These inadequate analyses of imp­erialism and the class struggle are both rooted in the economic analysis which argues that only countries with a high organic composition of capital are genuinely imperial­ist, and only the proletariat in such count­ries has much importance. On both counts, we see a tendency to fragment both world capital and the world proletariat.

This tendency of the ‘rate of profit' theor­ists to view the problem from the standpoint of the individual and not global capital could have implications for the discussion on the period of transition. Thus, if cap­ital accumulation can proceed in one country, then why not envisage autarkic ‘communist' economies as well? At any rate, the CWO believes that proletarian bastions that have withdrawn from the world market can, temp­orarily at least begin building a communist mode of production. This misconception can only be coherently criticized from a persp­ective which sees capital and the world mar­ket as a totality; again we would say that Luxemburg's framework provides us with the theoretical tools for seeing why such isol­ated bastions could in no way escape the effects of the world market.

Having pointed these things out, we must make two important qualifications:

-- that these erroneous positions are linked mainly to a unilateral ‘falling rate of pro­fit' theory like Mattick's or the CWO's;

-- that even then they do not flow directly and inexorably from an erroneous economic framework.

When we look at the errors of a revolutionary group, it is important to examine the total­ity of their history and political positions. Many of the errors mentioned above have their roots in more fundamental experiences and misunderstandings: Mattick's academicism, for example, is based on a whole experience of the counter-revolution, which led him into a deep pessimism about the perspectives for class struggle, and a serious underestimat­ion of the need for revolutionary organizat­ion. The CWO's errors on regroupment and the present period are also to a large ext­ent the result of their difficulty in apprec­iating the question of organization, while their errors on the transition period are very largely due to an inability to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution. Equally, in the ‘Luxemburgist' context, the PIC's activism, we would argue, is much more the result of a deep confusion about the role of revolutionaries than of their economic anal­ysis. We would say that errors on the level of economics tend to reinforce errors deriv­ing from the totality of a group's politics. Any incoherence in a group's analysis can open the door to confusions of a more general kind; but we are not dealing in irrevocable fatalities. Comrades who hold the ‘falling rate of profit' analysis do not necessarily have to assimilate all the organizational confusions of Mattick, the CWO, or Battaglia Comunista, or their misreading of the Russian Revolution. At the same time, organizational or other confusions -- like the sectarianism of the CWO -- can actually accentuate weaknesses in economic analysis. It is not hard to see, for example, that, the CWO's growing effort to deny the problem of overproduction is connected to their need to distinguish them­selves from certain other groups who hold a different view of decadence...Comrades who depart from a ‘falling rate of profit' anal­ysis can and must be able to develop a more global view which does not deny the problem of the market. Of course, we think that, in the end, this will lead them to become ‘Luxemburgists', but only an open and con­structive debate can really clarify this.

This allows us to come to a general conclu­sion about the importance of this debate. The debate is of considerable importance, because just as economic weaknesses can pave the way to or reinforce more general polit­ical errors, so a coherent analysis of the economic foundations of decadence will make our understanding of decadence and the pol­itical conclusions which derive from it that much stronger. The issue, therefore, must be discussed as part of the totality of comm­unist politics.

Having understood its importance as part of a more general coherence, the debate can be put in the correct perspective. Since an analysis of the economic foundations of dec­adence is part of a more global proletarian standpoint, a standpoint which demands an active commitment to ‘change the world', the discussion can never stand in the way of organized revolutionary activity. And since the political conclusions defended by revol­utionaries do not derive in a mechanical way from a particular analysis of economics, the discussion can never be a barrier to regroup­ment. As the ICC has always maintained, the debate can and must proceed within a unified revolutionary organization. Different econ­omic theories have not prevented revolution­aries in the past from joining together, and they need not do so today or in the future. Indeed, this is one of the questions that we shall probably still be debating some time after the proletariat has wiped capitalism off the face off the earth...

C D Ward.

The first part of this article attempted to show how the nature of the Russian Revolution was determined, not by the particular char­acteristics of Russia at the time of the revolution, but by the overall development of world capitalism, whose passage into its epoch of historic decline was marked by the imperialist war in 1914. The objective conditions for the proletarian revolution existed internationally, and the Russian Revolution could only be part of this world revolution. Thus we rejected the theories of the ‘councilists’, for whom the Russian Revolution was a ‘bourgeois’ revolution. We showed that such an analysis led:

-- either to the conception held by the Mensheviks and Kautsky, which led to a bet­rayal of the working class;

-- or to the Stalinist conception of the pos­sibility of ‘socialism in one country’,

-- or to the anarchist conception which iden­tifies socialism with ‘self-management’ by workers in individual enterprises;

-- or to the conception of the right-wing social democrats for whom the proletarian revolution was not on the agenda in any country in 1917.

Finally we showed how the councilists’ anal­ysis led them to turn marxism on its head, even though they believed that this was the basis of their analysis.

************

In fact the aberrations of councilism are fundamentally the expression of the terrible weight, felt by all the revolutionary minori­ties of the class, of the longest period of counter-revolution which the working class has ever undergone. Confronted with the monstrous state apparatus which developed in Russia in the wake of the degeneration of the revolution and compelled -- unlike the Stalinists or even the Trotskyists -- to denounce the counter-revolutionary nature of this state, the various currents of the communist left found it very difficult to understand the origins and causes of what was happening in Russia in a situation of defeat for the class. But it would be wrong to think that the councilists were the only ones to lose their way in this difficult situation. Leaving aside Trotskyism whose theory of ‘Bonapartism’ was used to explain the phenomenon of Stalinism while justifying its continued defense of the Russian state, other currents of the communist left were also very confused on this question. Thus while the Italian Left, through its publica­tion Bilan, made many important contributions towards a correct understanding of post-­revolutionary Russia, it still remained im­prisoned for a long time by the conception of Russia as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. However, one of the most important confusions in the left communist movement came with the elaboration of the Bordigist theory of the double revolution, which represented a part­ial return to the absurdities of the coun­cilist analysis.

Holy duality according to the Bordigist doctrine

“This is the explanation of the ‘degen­eration of the USSR’: the October Revolu­tion, when the communist proletariat seized power, could do no more than smash the remnants of feudalism which remained a barrier to the capitalist development of the productive forces. Political dictatorship of the proletariat with a capi­talist economy; this describes Russia at the time of NEP. With the help of the world revolution, the Bolshevik Party would have been able to suppress the mer­cantile economy, and afterwards introduce socialism. Isolated at the head of a formidable capitalist machine, stuck out on a limb, the Bolshevik Party was forced to submit to the mercantile machinery and become a cog in the process of capitalist accumulation.” (Programme Communiste, no.57, p.39)

One sees at once what distinguishes this Bordigist conception from the councilist one. For the latter, the economic and political aspects of the revolution are intimately connected: the installation of capitalism is marked by the coming to power of a party that councilism considers to be bourgeois. For the former, on the contrary, the two aspects are completely distinct: Bordigism recognizes the proletarian character of October on a political level, but it rejoins councilism by asserting that, on an economic level, it was a bourgeois revolution. More­over one could find many passages which demonstrate the convergence of the two analyses, Bordigist and councilist, even though Bordigism is very scornful of coun­cilism. For example:

“If it is permissible to talk of the ‘turning point’ of April 1917, it must be well understood that this is nothing to do with an advanced capitalist country giving way to a communist revolution: it marks no more than the decisive moment of a bourgeois and popular revolution, occurring in a feudal country in an advanced state of decay.” (Programme Communiste, no.39, p.21)

One might well be reading Pannekoek! And in fact the Bordigist conception of the ‘double revolution’ reveals itself as funda­mentally ambiguous. Its defenders are forced to contradict themselves from one article to another, if not from one phrase to another. Thus the above quotation is taken from an article entitled ‘The April Theses of 1917, Programme of the Proletarian Revolution in Russia’. In the same article we can find the following commentary on the second thesis:

“Lenin does not accord here any adjective to the word revolution, but we can do so without hesitation ... it was always a question of a bourgeois and democratic revolution, an anti-feudal and not a socialist revolution.”

In another article entitled ‘Marxism and Russia’ (Programme Communiste, no.68, p.20) we read, “For us, October was socialist”. Thus we can clearly and unambiguously sum­marize the Bordigist conception in the fol­lowing terms: the October Revolution was proletarian and not proletarian, socialist and not socialist. What opaque lucidity!

But the contradictions and incoherence which mark this conception of Bordiga and his epigones do not disturb the latter: they are used to it. On the other hand, what they really find hard to stomach is the fact that they are putting forward an interpreta­tion of the October Revolution which is directly opposed to that of Lenin. For according to the Bordigist credo, Lenin only made two mistakes in his life (and these were just ‘minor’, ‘tactical’ errors): on the question of the ‘united front’ and ‘revo­lutionary parliamentarism’. For the Bordigists:

“In April 1917, it was solely a question of recuperating the social forces of the anti-tsarist revolution, not to do more than had been attempted in 1905, but to remedy the fact that so far, less had been achieved; the program of the capitalist revolution under the democra­tic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants had yet to be realized.” (PC, no.39, p.25)

For Lenin on the contrary, “the whole of this revolution (of 1917) can only be under­stood as one of the links in the chain of proletarian socialist revolutions, provoked by the imperialist war” (Preface to State and Revolution). Thus for Lenin it was a question of ‘doing more’ in 1917 than in 1905, whose objectives he had defined more modestly:

“This victory (the decisive victory over Tsarism) will still not transform our bourgeois revolution into a socialist revolution. The democratic revolution has not come directly out of the frame­work of bourgeois social and economic relations; but this victory will none the less provide immense opportunities for the future development of Russia and the whole world.” (Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution)

One could find many other examples where Bordigist texts take up positions directly opposed to Lenin’s own conceptions. We will content ourselves with a single example:

“Thus the party of the proletariat must not reject the soviet, this historical form created in the bourgeois Russian Revolution…..They (the soviets) express what Lenin defined as the democratic dictatorship ….the particular form of the Russian anti-feudal revolution could not be the parliamentary assembly as in France, but a different organ based solely on the class of workers in the towns and the countryside.”

For Lenin, on the contrary:

“It is necessary only to discover the practical form which allows the proleta­riat to exercise its domination. This form is the soviet regime with the dicta­torship of the proletariat. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: until now this phrase was Greek to the masses. Now, thanks to the spread of the soviet system throughout the world, this Greek has been translated into all the modern languages: the working masses have discovered the practical form of their dictatorship.” (Opening Remarks to the First Congress of the Communist International, March 1919)

“... the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat already worked out in reality, that is, the soviet power in Russia, the system of workers’ councils in Germany ... and other soviet institutions in other countries.” (‘Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictator­ship’, First Congress of the CI)

It is not in order to hide behind the auth­ority of Lenin that we have drawn on these various quotations, but to show that even if Lenin himself made mistakes, even if his conception of October 1917 was, in some respects, ambiguous, the inanities put for­ward by Bordigism in the name of fidelity to the positions of Lenin, have actually nothing to do with Lenin’s conceptions.

Refutation of the ‘double revolution’

We will not repeat here what was said in the preceding article, where we showed that in Russia, as in the rest of the world, the bourgeois revolution was not on the agenda in 1917, since the material conditions for the communist revolution already existed on an international level. What was said against the councilist and Menshevik concep­tions applies equally to the conceptions of the Bordigists. However, it is necessary to refute certain confused ideas which arise from the notion of the double revolution.

In the first place, the idea that the proletariat would carry out the bourgeois revolution is false. Even though Marx could defend such an idea in 1848, and Lenin also took it up in 1905, there is no example in history of one class being able to substitute itself for another in the accomplishment of an historic task. A revolution is the act whereby the class which is the bearer of the new relations of production made necessary by the development of the productive forces, seizes political power. History has shown many times that the revolutionary class can­not achieve political domination until after, and in general until well after, the necess­ity and the material conditions for the revolution become apparent. This is the classic phenomenon, clearly demonstrated by Marxism, of the slow adaptation by the super-structure of society to changes in its infrastructure. In particular this phenomenon allows us to understand the occurrence of periods of decadence within society, when the old relations of production have become fetters on the development of the productive forces, while the class which is the bearer of new relations of production has not yet acquired sufficient power -- in particular political power -- to overthrow the old social order. Consequently, if a class is strong enough to seize political power, the economic and political tasks with which it is faced are those of developing its own relations of production, not substituting itself for the preceding historical class and accomplishing tasks which are in fact no longer on the agenda. The proletariat like the peasants and artisans could participate in bourgeois revolutions, but as an auxiliary force, never the main protagonist. It could even play an extremely active role in the radicalization of these revolutions, by giv­ing its support to the most energetic sections of the bourgeoisie. But when its own class interests became apparent, these were immediately opposed to those of all sections of the bourgeoisie, including the most radi­cal: for example, the Levellers against Cromwell during the English civil war; Babeuf against the Montagnards in the French revolution; and the Parisian proletariat against the provisional government in June 1848.

The other aspect to this notion of the ‘double revolution’ concerns the Bordigist understanding of the type of economic mea­sures that the proletariat can take at the start of the revolution. The Bordigists correctly criticize the Trotskyist idea that ‘unemployment benefits’ or ‘the elimination of private ownership from large scale indus­try’ are ‘socialist’ measures. For them these are nothing more than ‘welfare state’ measures in the first case, and ‘state capitalist’ measures in the second. The “socialist economy commences with the des­truction of capital” (PC, no.57, p.25). In this sense the Bordigists have understood that the economic measures adopted by the proletarian power in Russia were still capi­talist measures, and do not attempt to glor­ify them as ‘socialist’, as the Stalinists and Trotskyists do. However, the Bordigists’ error is revealed in the following passage:

“In the advanced countries, the dictator­ship of the proletariat will be able to embark at once on the planned production of physical quantities. In the other countries, while awaiting the extension of the revolution, the proletariat will manage capitalism, concentrating the productive forces as far as is possible in the hands of the state, at the same time as adopting measures to protect the wage-earning class, measures that would be impossible for a bourgeois party in the same circumstances. In all cases the seizure of power by the proletariat is nothing but the first stage of the world revolution, which must conquer or be con­quered. Either it will generate other revolutions and extend through revolutio­nary war; or it will perish in the civil war, or in the case where the proletariat has to manage a young capitalism it will degenerate into a bourgeois power.” (PC, no.57, p.36)

Now we have it! It is only “in the case where the proletariat has to manage a young capitalism” that the “revolution will degen­erate into a bourgeois power” (as if capita­lism, whose senility is an international phenomenon, could be ‘young’ in certain areas). Thus the revolution degenerated in Russia because it remained isolated in an only partially industrialized country (which PC wrongly defines as a ‘young’ capitalism). But if the revolution remained isolated in a heavily industrialized country it would not, following this line of reasoning, degen­erate, and the relations of production that were established there would cease to be capitalist. In other words, socialism would be possible in a single country, as long as the country in question was an ‘old’ capitalism. If pushed to their logical conclusion, the Bordigist conceptions, just as those of the councilists, lead to the Stal­inist thesis. The Bordigists must decide: either the “seizure of power by the prole­tariat is nothing but the first stage of the world revolution” in all cases, or only in certain cases. In fact the notion of the ‘double revolution’ seems finally to lead to a ‘double conception’: one which alternates between internationalism and nationalism.

In reality whatever the level of development of a country where the proletariat seizes power, it cannot hope to immediately adopt ‘socialist’ measures. It will be able to take a whole series of measures such as, the expropriation of private capitalists, equal remuneration, aid to the most under-privi­leged, free distribution of certain consumer goods etc, which can lead on to socialist measures, but which in themselves are per­fectly able to be recuperated by capitalism. While the revolution remains isolated in a single country, or a small group of countries, the economic policy which it can pursue is largely determined by the economic relations which this or these countries retain with the rest of the capitalist world. These relations can only be trade relations: the zone where the proletariat is in power must sell a part of its production on the world market in order to be able to buy, on the same market, all the indispensable goods which it cannot produce for itself. Because of this, the whole of the existing economy in this zone is still strongly characterized by the need to produce goods at the lowest possible prices in order to find buyers in competition with goods produced in countries where the proletariat has not yet seized power. This in turn must inevitably impose restrictions on the consumption of the work­ing class, restrictions whose purpose is not only to allow the future development of the productive forces (the indispensable basis of communism) but more prosaically, to acquire a surplus which can be exchanged on the world market and to preserve competitiveness. It is clear that the proletarian power must take all possible measures to safeguard it­self against the corrupting effects that this typically capitalist practice will inevitably produce in the zone of proleta­rian power and its institutions;1 but it is equally clear that persistence of these practices in the case of the continuing isolation of the revolution can only lead to the downfall of the proletarian power itself. And what is true for the strictly economic sphere, applies equally in the military sphere. Isolated, the revolution will have to deal with the attempts of capitalism to crush it. This means that from the day that the proletariat seizes power, many features of capitalist society will necessarily have to be maintained: armaments production which will depress the workers’ living standards and prevent the development of the material conditions for communism; the existence of an army which remains (even a ‘red’ army) an institution of a fundamentally capitalist nature: a machine whose function is to kill and coerce in an organized and systematic manner. Here also it is easy to understand the seriousness of the threat which these necessities will pose for the proletarian power. All this is equally applicable to an advanced as to a backward country. In fact, a heavily industrialized country is even more dependent on the world capitalist market. It would not be too absurd to suggest that the revolution, had it been isolated in a country like Germany, would have degenerated even more rapidly than in Russia. Thus it was not simply Russia’s backwardness which explains the capitalist nature of the econ­omic measures adopted in the first years of soviet power. If we examine those which would have been taken in Germany in the case of a proletarian victory we can see that they would have been very similar:

“1. Confiscation of all crown estates and revenues for the benefit of the people.

2. Annulment of the state debts and other public debts, as well as all war loans, except those subscribed within a certain limited amount, this limit to be fixed by the Central Coun­cil of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.

3. Expropriation of the land held by all large and medium-sized agricultural concerns; establishment of socialist agricultural cooperatives under a uni­form central administration all over the country. Small peasant holdings to remain in possession of their pre­sent owners, until they voluntarily decide to join the socialist agricul­tural cooperatives.

4. Nationalization by the Republic of Councils of all banks, ore mines, coal mines, as well as all large industrial and commercial establishments.

5. Confiscation of all property exceeding a certain limit, the limit to be fixed by the Central Council.

6. The Republic of Councils to take over all public means of transport and communication.

7. Election of administrative councils in all enterprises, such councils to regulate the internal affairs of the enterprises in agreement with the workers’ councils, regulate the condi­tions of labor, control production, and, finally, take over the administ­ration of the enterprise.” (From the Program of the Spartacus League of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), quoted from the article by Rosa Luxem­burg ‘What Does Spartacus Want?’ in the pamphlet Spartacus, Merlin Press.)

The major error of the Bordigists is to con­sider that the world is divided into differ­ent ‘geo-economic areas’: those where capi­talism has reached a mature or even a senile phase of development, and those where it is still ‘young’ or ‘juvenile’. Incapable of understanding that it is as a world system (and in this it differs from all past systems), that capitalism experienced an ascendant phase and then, since 1914, a decadent phase, they are equally incapable of understanding that, since 1914, the task of the proleta­riat is the same in all areas of the world: to destroy capitalism and install new relations of production. For the Bordigists there are some areas of the world where a ‘pure’ proletarian revolution is on the agenda and others where a ‘double revolu­tion’ is required. This schema implies that:

-- on the one hand, within a process of the socialist transformation of society, the tasks of the proletariat are conceived of as different in different regions. The pro­letariat in the advanced countries can adopt socialist measures straight away, while in the backward countries the proletariat must first devote itself to the development of capitalism in order to develop the condi­tions for socialism;

-- on the other hand, in the short term, the proletariat and revolutionaries must give their support to the various so-called ‘national liberation struggles’, which the Bordigists see as providing the basis for the development of ‘juvenile’ capitalism in these countries.

Recently we have seen the aberrations which arise from this latter implication of the Bordigists’ conception: apology for the massacres perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge on the population of Cambodia, which are des­cribed as ‘Jacobin radicalism’; participation in the Stalinist and Trotskyist chorus of praise for Che Guevara, that “living symbol of the democratic anti-imperialist revolu­tion ... shamefully assassinated by ... Yan­kee imperialism and its Latin American lack­eys” (PC, no.75, p.51), and various other instances of more or less critical support for this or that participant in recent inter-imperialist conflicts (Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique etc).

Concerning the first implication, it revives the absurd bourgeois idea that the proleta­riat in each country must, once it has seized power, ‘look after its own affairs’. In reality it is the whole world proletariat which must tackle all the economic problems existing in the various regions of the world, problems determined by the dual task faced simultaneously by the proletariat: to deve­lop the productive forces particularly in the backward regions and to progressively transform the relations of production in the direction of communism. Once it has taken power on a world scale, the proleta­riat has therefore no capitalist tasks of any sort to accomplish. It is within the framework of the socialist transformation of society that the proletariat begins to develop the productive forces, which are condemned to stagnation by the historical decadence of the capitalist mode of produc­tion. It is within this framework that the proletariat must eliminate the surviving vestiges of pre-capitalist society -- through the integration of the enormous strata of small-scale agricultural producers and arti­sans, which still constitute the vast majo­rity of the world population today, into associated production in the socialized sec­tor. And this takes place not only in the backward countries, but also in a number of important advanced countries like Japan, France, Italy and Spain, where smallholders still exist in their tens of millions, as well as agrarian workers languishing in social conditions close to feudalism. Why don’t the Bordigists talk about the ‘double revolution’ in these countries as well? Thus on the one hand their conception sets tasks for the proletariat in an advanced country where the revolution remains isola­ted which are far too ambitious. But on the other hand, it underestimates the histo­rical tasks which will face the world prole­tariat once it has taken power all over the world, by advocating capitalist development in certain countries, at a time when capita­lism everywhere has reached the end of the road.

In the first part of this article we saw how the councilists, after having saluted the achievement of October 1917, joined the social democratic and anarchist chorus of denunciation of the revolution. The Bordi­gists on the other hand, intransigently defend the revolution. They have an under­standing, which the councilists lack, of the primacy of political over economic aspects of the revolution, which is sometimes expressed very clearly:

“The October Revolution must not primarily be considered from the point of view of the immediate transformation of society …. of forms of production and of the economic structure, but as a phase in the international political struggle of the proletariat.” (PC, no.68, p.20)

But, unfortunately, the Bordigists show themselves incapable of rejecting the Menshe­vik assertions which were later taken up by the councilists. On the contrary, on the basis of a religious adherence to the analy­sis of Lenin (particularly on the national question, whose erroneous nature has been shown by more than half a century’s exper­ience), they are not able to understand the fundamental achievement of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, nor the significance of the experience of the October Revolution for the proletarian program. The October Revolu­tion must therefore endure, not only the lies and attempted recuperation of the bourgeoi­sie, not only the absurd denunciations made by the councilists, but also the well-meaning but disastrous analysis put forward by its most zealous defenders, the Bordigists.

Nature and role of the Bolshevik Party

A defense of the proletarian character of the October Revolution would not be complete if it didn’t also deal with the nature of the Bolshevik Party, which was one of its main protagonists. As with the revolution itself, the class nature of this party was in no doubt amongst any of the revolutionary currents of the day. It was only later on that the idea of a non-proletarian Bolshevik Party developed, other than for Kautsky and social democracy. The Theses on Bolshevism of the councilists are quite explicit on this question:

“Bolshevism, in its principles, tactics and organization, is a movement of the bourgeois revolution in a preponderantly peasant country.” (Thesis 66)

Although the Theses are somewhat contradic­tory:

“The Russian social democratic movement, in its professional-revolutionary leader-element constitutes primarily a part of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie.” (Thesis 16)

Bourgeois, petty bourgeois or ‘state capita­list’, the different versions of the counci­list analysis all agree on one point: deny­ing any proletarian character to the Bolshe­vik Party. Before going any further and examining the reasoning behind this analysis, we should remind ourselves of some elementary facts about the origins and positions of Bolshevism, in particular the struggles it waged against other political tendencies:

Bolshevism appeared as a marxist current, an integral part of Russian social democracy, as such it fought successive battles:

1. Against populism and agrarian socialism.

2. Against legal marxism and the defenders of Russian liberalism.

3. Against terrorism as a method of struggle, defending instead the mass struggle of the working class.

4. Against ouvrierist economism which reduced the proletarian struggle to the level of economic demands within capitalism, defen­ding instead the global, political struggle of the proletariat, the histori­cal tasks of the class.

5. Against intellectualism, the intelligent­sia, those dilettantish, dubious camp-followers of the workers’ movement, and in defense of the idea of the militant commitment of revolutionaries within the class.

6. Against Menshevism and its support, under the guise of ‘marxism’, for the liberal bourgeoisie in the 1905 Revolution.

7. Against the ‘liquidators’ who, after the crushing of the 1905 Revolution, began to deny the necessity for the political organization of the proletariat.

8. Against the defenders of the imperialist war, for a genuine internationalism which clearly separated itself from mere humanist pacifism.

9. Against the Provisional Government which came out of the revolution of February 1917, against any ‘critical or conditio­nal’ support for the government, for the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’.

These points allow us to have a clearer idea of the Bolshevik Party than the one put for­ward by the councilists. In fact, the prac­tice of the Bolshevik fraction meant that in all circumstances it was fighting alongside the working class. This was particularly the case in the 1905 Revolution which shook Rus­sian society. The Bolsheviks took an active part in it:

-- in the struggle for the destruction of the Tsarist regime;

-- in the soviets, alongside the soviets;

-- in the insurrection, against the Men­sheviks who said that the workers should not have taken up arms.

It is true that the Bolsheviks’ analysis of 1905 (seen as a bourgeois revolution) was incorrect. But their position was an exact copy of Marx’s position in 1848 on the bour­geois revolution in Germany: they stressed the active and autonomous role of the prole­tariat in the revolution, instead of calling on it to trail behind the bourgeoisie. It is this which marks the class frontier, rath­er than the understanding that from now on bourgeois revolutions were no longer possible. The Bolsheviks’ analysis lagged behind reality, but since this was a turning point between two epochs, no-one in 1905 was aware that capitalism was on the eve of its historic crisis, its period of decline. It was not until 1910-11 that Rosa Luxemburg began to raise the question of a change in histori­cal perspective.

The activity and positions of the Bolsheviks were not only concerned with the problems that emerged in Russia. Along with the whole of Russian social democracy they were an integral part of the IInd International, within which they were part of the left wing on all the major questions under discussion. They stood against reformism, revisionism, and colonialism. In particular, they were in the vanguard of the struggle for inter­nationalism.

In 1907, at the Stuttgart Congress, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg signed an amendment (subsequently adopted) which strengthened a somewhat timid resolution on war and which was to serve as the basis for the position of the internationalists in 1914:

“Should war break out in spite of this, it is their (the socialists) duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.”

In 1912, at the Extraordinary Congress in Basle, which dealt with the threat of imper­ialist war, the left wing called upon the workers to oppose national defense and ad­here to proletarian internationalism.

In 1914, the Bolsheviks were the first to get on their feet after the collapse of the International. They were the first to put forward the slogan which translated the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions into pract­ice: ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’. They were the first to understand the need to break not only with the social democratic chauvinists, but also with the ‘centrists’ like Kautsky, and to construct a new International free of the opportunism which had corrupted the IInd, and whose immediate task would be to prepare the socialist revolution.

In 1915, at the Zimmerwald Conference (5-8 September), Lenin and the Bolsheviks were at the head of the left, whose motion, written by Radek and amended by Lenin, stipulated that:

“The struggle for peace without revolu­tionary action is an empty, deceitful phrase; the only road to liberation from the horrors of war is the revolutionary struggle for socialism.”

This motion was rejected without being stud­ied, and in the end the left (8 delegates out of 38) rallied behind the manifesto written by Trotsky (the main animator of the ‘centre’, to which the two Spartacist delegates also adhered). While expressing serious reserves about it: “a timid, inconse­quential manifesto” (‘The First Step’ an article in Social Democrat, 11 October 1915). In order to defend its own position the left set up a ‘Permanent Bureau of the Zimmerwald Left’ alongside the ‘International Socialist Commission’. This Bureau was also animated by the Bolsheviks.

In 1916, at the Kienthal Conference (24 April), the Bolsheviks were once again at the head of the left, whose position was strengthened (12 delegates out of 43), mainly because the Spartacists came to the position of the left, which validated the stand it had taken at Zimmerwald.

In 1917, the preparation of the October Revolution was taken up by Lenin in his struggle against the imperialist war and for proletarian internationalism:

“It is impossible to slip out of the imperialist war and achieve a democratic non-coercive peace without overthrowing the power of capital and transferring state power to another class, the proletariat ...

The international obligations of the working class of Russia are precisely now coming to the forefront with particular force ...

There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is -- working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this line, in every coun­try without exception.” (The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, 10 April 1917)

“The great honor of beginning has fallen to the Russian proletariat; but it must not forget that its movement and its revolution are only a part of the world revolutionary proletarian movement, which is growing stronger and stronger every day, for example in Germany. We can only determine our tasks from this standpoint.” (Opening Speech at the Conference of April 1917)

In March 1919, the Communist International was founded in Moscow. Its fundamental task was summed up in the name it gave itself: World Party of the Communist Revolution. This was the culmination of the efforts of the Bolsheviks since Zimmerwald. It was the Bolshevik Party (now the Communist Party of Russia) which called the Congress; it was two Bolsheviks, Lenin and Trotsky, who wrote its two major texts: ‘Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictatorship’ and the ‘Manifesto’. It was not only because the revolution had taken place in Russia that the two members of its Executive Commit­tee, Lenin and Zinoviev, had already been among the three members of the Permanent Bureau of the Zimmerwald Left. This was simply an expression of the consistent and irreproachable internationalism which the Bolsheviks defended until the reflux of the revolution led them towards the enemy camp. This is how Bolshevism acted in the convul­sions which shook capitalism at the begin­ning of the century. And there are still revolutionaries who think that this was a bourgeois current! Let’s examine their arguments.

1. The ‘substitutionism’ of the Bolsheviks

“The basic principle of Bolshevik policy -- the conquest and exercise of power by the organization -- is jacobinical.” (Theses on Bolshevism, Thesis 21)

“As a leader-movement of jacobinical dictatorship, Bolshevism in all its phases has consistently combatted the idea of self-determination of the work­ing class and demanded the subordination of the proletariat to the bureaucratized organization.” (Thesis 21)

Before going any further, and in order to rectify a few legends, let’s look at what Lenin had to say:

“We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled laborer or a cook cannot immed­iately get on with the job of state admin­istration. In this we agree with the Cadets, with Breshkovskaya, and with Tsereteli. We differ, however, from these citizens in that we demand an immediate break with the prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from rich families, are capable of administrating the state, of performing the ordinary, everyday work of administration. We demand that training in the work of state administration be conducted by class-conscious workers and soldiers and that this training be begun at once, ie, that a beginning be made at once in training all the working people, all the poor, for this work.”

“It goes without saying that this new apparatus is bound to make mistakes in taking its first steps. But did not the peasants make mistakes when they emerged from serfdom and began to manage their own affairs? Is there any way other than practice by which the people can learn to govern themselves and to avoid mistakes? Is there any way other than by proceeding immediately to genuine self-government by the people ... The chief thing is to imbue the oppressed and the working people with confidence in their own strength, to prove to them in practice that they can and must themselves ensure the proper, most strictly regulated and organized distribution of bread, all kinds of food, milk, clothing, housing, etc, in the interests of the poor .....The conscientious, bold, universal move to hand over administrative work to pro­letarians, will, however, rouse such unprecedented revolutionary enthusiasm among the people, will so multiply the people’s forces in combating distress, that much that seemed impossible to our narrow, old, bureaucratic forces will become possible for the millions, who will begin to work for themselves and not for the capitalists, the gentry, the bureaucrats, and not out of fear of punishment.” (Lenin, Can The Bolsheviks Retain State Power, October 1917)

These are the words of Lenin the ‘Jacobin’. “But”, some people will say “this was before the October Revolution; this language was pure demagogy and had the sole purpose of winning the confidence of the masses in order to take power in place of them. Afterwards, all this changed!” Let’s see what Lenin-Robespierre said after October:

“The venal bourgeois press can crow as much as it likes about the mistakes made by our revolution. We’re not afraid of mistakes. Men don’t become saints just because the revolution has begun. The toiling classes, oppressed, brutalized, forcibly kept in a state of misery, ignorance, and barbarism for centuries, can’t carry out a revolution without making any mistakes ... For every hundred errors we make and which cause such glee among the bourgeoisie and its lackeys (including our Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries), there are ten thousand great and heroic acts -- all the more great and heroic because they are simple, invisible acts hidden in the daily life of a workers’ neighborhood or a remote village, because they are accomplished by men who are not used to shouting about their success from the rooftops ... But even if things were the other way round, even if for every hun­dred good actions there were ten thousand mistakes, our revolution would still be great and invincible, because for the first time it’s not a minority, not the rich or the educated, but the immense majority of the workers who are them­selves building a new life, and on the basis of their own experience, solving the arduous problems of organizing socialism.

“Each error in this work, which is being consciously and sincerely undertaken by tens of millions of simple workers and peasants in order to transform their lives, each one of these errors is worth thousands, millions of infallible ‘suc­cesses’ by the exploiting minority ... Because it is only through these errors that the workers and peasants can learn to build a new life, to do without the capitalists. Only by surmounting a thou­sand obstacles can they build the road which leads to the triumph of socialism.” (Letter to American Workers, 20 August 1918)

This might temper the usual image of Lenin as a sardonic bogeyman solely preoccupied with maintaining his own dictatorial power and “consistently combating the idea of the self-determination of the working class”. And one could cite dozens of other texts from 1917, 1918, 1919, expressing the same ideas. Having said this, it’s true that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had the erroneous idea that the seizure of political power by the proletariat meant the seizure of power by its party -- a schema deriving from the bourgeois revolution. But this idea was held by all the currents of the IInd Inter­national, including its left wing. It was precisely the experience of the Russian Revolution, of its degeneration, which made it possible to understand the fundamental difference between the proletarian revolu­tion and the bourgeois revolution. For example, to the end of her life in January 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, whose differences with the Bolsheviks on the organization question are well known, held the same erroneous idea:

“If Spartacus takes power, it will be with the clear, indubitable will of the great majority of the proletarian masses.” (Founding Congress of the KPD, 1 January 1919)

Are we to conclude that Rosa Luxemburg her­self was a ‘bourgeois Jacobin’? But what kind of ‘bourgeois revolution’ were she and the Spartacists fighting for in the industrial Germany of 1919? Perhaps she had this position because she had also been the lead­er of a party (the SDKP) which conducted its activities in the Polish and Lithuanian provinces of Tsarist Russia, ‘where only a bourgeois revolution was on the agenda’? However ridiculous such an argument might be, it’s no more so than the one which por­trays Lenin, who spent the major part of his life as a militant in Germany, Switzerland, France and England (ie the most developed countries of that time), as a ‘pure product of the Russian soil’, of the bourgeois revo­lution which this country is supposed to have been pregnant with.

2. The agrarian question

“The Bolsheviks ... perfectly expressed in their agrarian practice and slogans (‘Peace and Land’) the interests of the peasants fighting for the security of small private property, hence on capita­listic lines, and were thus, on the agrarian question, ruthless champions of small-capitalist, hence not socialist-proletarian interests against feudal and capitalist landed property.” (Thesis 46)

Here again, some basic truths have to be reasserted. If the Bolsheviks made mistakes on this question, we have to criticize their real position, as Rosa Luxemburg did in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution, and not a position invented in order to prove an argu­ment. This is what appeared in the ‘decree on the land’ put forward by Lenin and adop­ted at the Second Congress of Soviets on the very day of the October insurrection:

“1. Private ownership of land shall be abolished for ever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated.

All land, whether State, crown, mona­stery, church, factory, entailed, private, public, peasant, etc, shall be confiscated without compensation and become property of the whole peo­ple, and pass into the use of all those who cultivate it...

3. Lands on which high-level scientific farming is practiced -- orchards, plan­tations, seed plots, nurseries, hot­houses, etc -- shall not be divided up, but shall be converted into model farms, to be turned over for exclusive use to the state or to the communes, depending on the size and importance of such lands.

Household land in towns and villages, with orchards and vegetable gardens, shall be reserved for the use of their present owners, the size of the hold­ings, and the size of tax levied for the use thereof, to be determined by law...” (‘The Land Decree’, quoted in The Russian Revolution & The Soviet State 1917-21 Documents, ed Martin McCauley)

This is very different from a defense of “small private property ... on capitalist lines”. The latter was “abolished forever”.

These decrees were a concretization of the ‘Model Decree’ drawn up in August 1917 on the basis of 242 local peasant mandates. In his report Lenin explained:

“Some people will argue that the decree itself and the mandates were established by the Social Revolutionaries. Does it matter whose work it is? We, as a demo­cratic government, cannot evade the deci­sion of the rank and file of the people, even if we do not agree with it. In the fire of life, by applying it in practice, by carrying it out on the spot, the pea­sants themselves will come to understand what is right ... Life is the best tea­cher and will prove who is right; let the peasants starting from one end, and us starting from the other, settle this question.” (Lenin, Works, xxii, 23)

The position of the Bolsheviks was clear: if they made concessions to the peasantry, it was because they could not impose their program on them by force; but they didn’t renounce this program. What’s more, at the very time that the decree was adopted, the peasants had almost everywhere begun to divide up the land. As for the slogan ‘land to the peasants’, it was not the product of “ruthless champions of small capitalist ... interests”, but an attempt to expose all the bourgeois and conciliator parties, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were simply deceiving the peasants with promises of agrarian reform -- a reform which they had neither the intention nor the capa­city to implement. In this, these parties were simply confirming what Lenin and the whole marxist left had been saying for years: the bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries was no longer able to accomplish any ‘progressive’ historical tasks, in par­ticular the elimination of feudal laws and structures and the imposition of peasant property in land, as the bourgeoisie had done in the advanced countries at the begin­ning of capitalism. On the other hand, Lenin was wrong to think that these tasks, uncompleted by the bourgeoisie, could be taken in hand by the proletariat. If the bourgeoisie was unable to accomplish these tasks, it was because, historically, they were no longer realizable: they were no lon­ger demanded by necessity, by the development of the productive forces, and were in fact in opposition to the tasks facing society. And Rosa Luxemburg was right to stress that the dividing up of the land “piles up insur­mountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian relations” (The Russian Revolution).

Rosa Luxemburg called for “the nationaliza­tion of the large and middle-sized estates and the union of industry and agriculture.” But instead of denouncing the Bolsheviks as ‘defenders of small-capitalist ... interests’, she wrote quite correctly:

“That the soviet government in Russia has not carried through these mighty reforms -- who can reproach them for that! It would be a sorry jest indeed to demand or expect of Lenin and his comrades that, in the brief period of their rule, in the centre of the gripping whirlpool of domes­tic and foreign struggles, ringed about by countless foes and opponents -- to ex­pect that under such circumstances they should already have solved, or even tack­led, one of the most difficult tasks, indeed, we can safely say, the most diffi­cult task of the social transformation of society! Even in the West, under the most favorable conditions, once we have come to power, we too will break many a tooth on this hard nut before we are out of the worst of the thousands of complicated difficulties of this gigantic task!” (The Russian Revolution)

3. The national question

“The appeal to the international proleta­riat was only one side of a largely-laid policy for international support of the Russian Revolution. The other side was the policy and propaganda of ‘national self-determination’ in which the class outlook was even more definitely sacrifi­ced than in the concept of ‘people's revolution’, in favor of an appeal to all classes of certain peoples.” (Thesis 50)

It’s difficult to believe that, ever since its foundation in 1898, Russian social demo­cracy (and not only the Bolsheviks), follow­ing the lead of international social democ­racy, had adopted the slogan of ‘the right to national self-determination’, simply as a ‘tactic’ to defend a revolution that did not take place till 1917, and in a country and a way that no-one had foreseen. Are we to believe that Gorter and Pannekoek, who criticized Lenin’s positions on this ques­tion, had in mind the future defense of a ‘bourgeois revolution’ in Holland, when they made an exception in their analysis and cal­led for self-determination of the Dutch Indies?

As for sacrificing the ‘class outlook’, let us see what Lenin said in the middle of his polemic with Rosa Luxemburg on this question:

“Social democracy, as the party of the proletariat sees as its main positive task to cooperate in the free disposition, not of peoples and nations, but of the proletariat of each nationality. We have always unconditionally supported the closest union of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it’s only in particu­lar, exceptional cases that we can act­ively put forward demands for a new class state or for the replacement of the over­all political unity of the state by a looser federal union.” (Iskra, no.44)

Having established this -- and it’s worth pointing out that, most often, those who denounce Bolshevism as bourgeois, know even less about it than those who defend it to the letter -- it must be said that the ‘right to national self-determination’ must be categorically rejected, because of its erro­neous theoretical content and, even more, because experience has shown what this slo­gan has meant in practice. The ICC has devoted many texts to this question (espec­ially the pamphlet Nation or Class?), so it’s not necessary to go over it again here. But it is important to show what significance this slogan had for the Bolsheviks, to point out the fundamental difference between a mistake and a betrayal. Lenin and the majo­rity of the Bolsheviks, basing themselves on the interests of the world socialist revolu­tion, believed that it was possible to use the position of ‘the right to national self-determination’ against capitalism; and on this they were completely mistaken. But the renegades and traitors of all kinds, from the Socialists to the Stalinists, have used this position to develop their counter­revolutionary policies, to conserve and strengthen national and international capitalism. There’s the difference. But it has all the thickness of a class line.

It’s quite natural that renegades and trai­tors should try to camouflage themselves by using this or that erroneous phrase of Lenin's; but they arrive at conclusions com­pletely opposed to the revolutionary spirit which guided Lenin’s actions all through his life. But it's stupid for revolutionaries to help them by obliterating the differences between the scoundrels and Lenin, by claiming that they are just the same. It’s stupid to say that Lenin proclaimed ‘the right to national self-determination’, up to and including secession from Russia, in order to defend the national interests of the ‘bour­geois revolution’ in Russia. When we say that the ‘liberation’ of the colonial coun­tries, their formal ‘independence’, is not incompatible with the interests of the colo­nialist countries, we mean that imperialism can easily accommodate itself to this formal independence. But this in no way means that imperialism follows this policy bene­volently or indifferently. All the ‘libera­tions’ have been the product of internal struggles and clashes of interest between different bourgeoisies, of the international intrigues of antagonistic imperialist powers. Later on Stalin was to demonstrate, at the cost of rivers of blood, that the interests of Russia didn’t exactly correspond with the independence of the countries surround­ing it; on the contrary, these interests demanded the forceful incorporation of these countries into the Great Russian Empire.

To explain is not to justify. But those who, in order to condemn an erroneous posi­tion, make an amalgam between the right of peoples to separation and violent incorpora­tion, between Lenin and Stalin, understand nothing, and turn history into an amorphous, insipid porridge. Lenin saw the right to self-determination as a way of denouncing imperialism -- not the imperialism of other countries but the imperialism of ‘his’ own country, his own bourgeoisie. It’s undeni­able that this led to contradictions, as the following passage shows:

“The situation is very confused., but there is one point which allows everyone to remain internationalists; that is, that the Russian and German social democrats demand ‘freedom of separation’ for Poland, whereas the Polish social democrats will struggle for the unity of revolutionary action in their small country as in the big ones, without, in the present epoch (that of imperialist war), calling for independence for Poland.” (‘The Conclu­sions of a Debate on the Right of Nations to Define Themselves’, October 1916)

But as this passage also shows, the contra­dictions, the ‘very confused’ situation his analysis led to, was undeniably animated by an intransigently internationalist concern. At the time he wrote this text, the main counter-revolutionary force was social demo­cracy, the social imperialists as Lenin cal­led them, “socialist in words and imperia­list in deeds”. Without their aid capitalism would never have been able to drag the work­ers into the butchery of world war. These ‘socialists’ justified the war in the name of the national interests the workers were supposed to have in common with ‘their’ bourgeoisie. According to them, the imperialist war meant defending democracy and the workers’ freedoms and conquests, which were being threatened by evil ‘foreign imperia­lisms’. Exposing these lies, these false socialists, was the primary duty, the imperative task for every revolutionary. For Lenin, the right of peoples to self-determination was part of this preoccupation; not for the interests of Russia, but against the national interests of the Russian and international bourgeoisie. As for using this slogan to justify participation in the imper­ialist war, Lenin replied quite clearly:

“Whoever refers today to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Marx’s statement that ‘workers have no fatherland’, a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of the reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution, shamelessly dis­torts Marx and substitutes the bourgeois for the socialist point of view.” (Lenin, Socialism and War)

4. ‘Tactical’ internationalism

“But their revolutionary internationalism was as much determined by their tactic in the Russian Revolution as was later their swing to the NEP.” (Thesis 50)

“The only real danger threatening the Russian Revolution was that of imperialist intervention ... The problem of the active defense of Bolshevism against world impe­rialism consisted, therefore, in counter­attacking in the imperialist centers of power. This was brought about through the two-sided international policy of Bolshevism.” (Thesis 51)

“Thus the concept of ‘world revolution’ has for the Bolsheviks an altogether different class content. It no longer has anything in common with the inter­national proletarian revolution ...” (Thesis 54)

This another well-established legend about the Bolsheviks: their internationalism was just a ‘tactic’ aimed first of all at winning the confidence of the popular masses, who were tired of the war; and secondly at subor­dinating the whole world workers’ movement to a policy of defending the Russian capitalist state.

Concerning the first argument, we recall to the reader the positions the Bolsheviks took up well before the war broke out, par­ticularly at the International Congresses of 1907 and 1912. What’s more, the struggle against war in the conception of the Bolshe­viks had nothing to do with the positions of the pacifist bourgeoisie, which influen­ced certain sectors of the workers’ move­ment. Instead of calling on the belligerent states to make a ‘democratic peace without annexations’, instead even of simply calling for ‘a war against war’, they were the first in the workers’ movement to put forward the truly revolutionary slogan ‘turn the imper­ialist war into a civil war’, pitilessly denouncing all the illusions of pacifism. If their only concern had been to ‘win the masses in order to take power’, why did they need to take up slogans which isolated them from the masses, who were caught up in the idea of ‘fighting on till the end’ – at first in its chauvinist form, then in the guise of ‘revolutionary defencism’? And our Bolshevik-slayers reply: “because they foresaw that the masses, tired of the war and the misfortunes it brought, would turn to them in the end”. But then why didn’t Plekhanov, the Mensheviks, the Social Revo­lutionaries, Kerensky, all the bourgeois factions who also wanted to take power why didn’t they also call for ‘revolutionary defeatism’, ie explain that it was in the interest of the Russian workers that their country be defeated in the imperialist war? These currents should also have played the ‘internationalist’ card, since this was a real winner which didn’t conflict with the interests of Russian capital. After all, these people are supposed to have had the same basic interests as the Bolsheviks. Is the difference between the Bolsheviks and all these others, not a class difference, but simply a difference in clairvoyance, in intelligence? This is what the analysis of our professional detractors would imply. But then, how was it that all the advanced elements of the world proletariat (the Spartacists and the Arbeiterpolitik group in Germany, the elements grouped around Loriot in France, around Russel Williams or The Trade Unionist in England, Maclean in Scotland, in the Socialist Labor Party in the USA, the Tribunists in Holland, the socialist left or the socialist youth in Sweden, the ‘Narrows’ in Bulgaria, the ‘National Bureau’ and the ‘General Bureau’ in Poland, the left socialists in Switzerland, the elements around the ‘Karl Marx Club’ in Austria, etc) -- the great majority of whom were to be in the vanguard of the great class combats which followed the war -- how was it that all these elements (including the ‘future’ councilists) adopted or rallied to a position on the war identical or very close to the position of the Bolsheviks? Why did they collaborate with the Bolsheviks within the Zimmerwald and Kienthal left?

In general, councilism does not dispute the proletarian nature of these currents (and with good reason!). Why then argue that what separated the Bolsheviks from the Men­sheviks was simply a difference of ‘intelli­gence’, whereas the same opposition between the Spartacists and social democrats expres­sed a class difference? Germany, a much older, more powerful and tested capitalism than Russia, was unable to do what its much weaker rival succeeded in doing: produce a political current which was clever enough, as early as 1907 and especially in 1914, to put forward internationalist slogans which, at the given moment, would allow it to rec­uperate the discontent of the masses to its own advantage and to the advantage of the national capital. This is the logical con­clusion to this idea of ‘tactical’ interna­tionalism. And the paradox is even greater when we think that at Zimmerwald it was this bourgeois current which had the most correct position, whereas the proletarian Sparta­cists were sunk in the confusions of the ‘centre’. And when that great revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, wrote this confusion into her pamphlet against the war, The Junius Pamphlet,

“Yes, socialists should defend their country in great historical crises, and here lies the great fault of the German social democratic Reichstag group. When it announced on the fourth of August, “in this hour of danger, we will not desert our fatherland,” it denied its own words in the same breath. For truly it has deserted its fatherland in its hour of greatest danger. The highest duty of the social democracy towards its fatherland demanded that it expose the real back­ground of this imperialist war, that it rends the net of imperialist and diploma­tic lies that covers the eyes of the people. It was their duty ... to oppose to the imperialist war, based as it was upon the most reactionary forces in Europe, the program of Marx, of Engels, and Lassalie.”

it’s really surprising that it was the ‘bourgeois’ Lenin who dealt with her errors as follows:

“The fallacy of his argument is striking­ly evident, ….He suggests that the imperialist war should be ‘opposed’ with a national program. He urges the advanced class to turn its face to the past and not to the future! …. At the present time, the objective situation in the biggest advanced states of Europe is different. Progress, if we leave out for the moment the possibility of tempo­rary steps backward, can be made only in the direction of socialist society, only in the direction of the socialist revolution.” (On the Junius Pamphlet)

Finally, the theory of ‘tactical’ interna­tionalism leads one to argue that the posi­tion on imperialist wars was a secondary point in the proletarian program at that time, since it could quite easily be part of the program of a bourgeois party. This is quite wrong. In fact in 1914 the problem of the war was central to the whole life of capitalism. It uncovered all its mortal contradictions. It showed that the system had entered its epoch of historical decline, that it had become a barrier to the develop­ment of the productive forces, that it could not survive without successive holocausts, repeated and increasingly catastrophic muti­lations. Whatever conflicting interests divided the bourgeoisie of a given country, the war forced all these factions to mobi­lize themselves in defense of their common heritage: the national capital and its highest representative, the state. This is why, in 1914, there appeared a phenomenon which had seemed impossible only shortly before: the ‘union sacree’, which bound to­gether parties and organizations which had been fighting each other for decades. And though conflicts within the ruling class appeared during the war, they did not ques­tion the necessity to grab as much of the imperialist cake as possible; they arose only around the problems of how to go about this. Thus the bourgeois Provisional Govern­ment which took power after the February revolution did not abandon any of the objec­tives agreed upon in the diplomatic settle­ments between Tsarist Russia and the count­ries of the Entente. On the contrary, it was because it considered that the Tsarist regime was not conducting the war alongside France and England with sufficient determina­tion, that the Tsar was being tempted to break his alliances and come to an agreement with Germany, that the faction of the bour­geoisie which dominated the Provisional Government helped to get rid of Nicholas II. If the October Revolution had really been a ‘bourgeois revolution’, with the aim of more effectively defending the national capital, it would not have immediately proclaimed the necessity for peace, published secret diplo­matic agreements, renounced all the war aims which figured in them. On the contrary, it would have immediately taken the necessary measures to ensure a more efficient conduct of the war. If the Bolshevik Party had been a bourgeois party, it would not have been at the head of all the proletarian parties of the day, denouncing the imperialist war and calling upon the workers to put an end to it by making the socialist revolution. During an imperialist war, internationalism is not a secondary point for the workers’ movement. On the contrary it is the line of demarca­tion between the proletarian camp and the bourgeois camp. And this is only an illus­tration of a more general reality: internationalism belongs only to the working class. The proletariat is the only historic class which has no property of its own, and whose rule over society involves the disappearance of all forms of property. As such, it is the only class which can go beyond the ter­ritorial divisions (regional for the nobility; national for the bourgeoisie) which are the geopolitical expression of the existence of property, the framework within which the ruling class protects and defends its prop­erty. And if the constitution of nations corresponded to the victory of the bourgeoi­sie over the nobility, the abolition of nations will only be brought about by the victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie.

This leads us to the second argument which councilism puts forward to show that the internationalism of the Bolsheviks was just a ‘tactic’: that it was a slogan which aimed to subordinate the world workers’ movement to a policy of defending the Russian state, and that the Communist International, from its foundation, was simply an instrument of Soviet diplomacy. This idea is also put forward by Guy Sabatier of the group Pour Une Intervention Communiste in the pamphlet Traite de Brest-Litovsk 1918, Coup d’Arret a la Revolution. For this comrade (who doesn’t fall into the Menshevism of the councilists concerning the ‘bourgeois’ nature of the Russian Revolution):

“The IIIrd International was conceived with the immediate perspective of defend­ing the Russian state in all countries, as a support to diplomacy of the usual kind.” (p.32)

And though he admits that:

“several texts reflect the thrust of the international proletarian movement, like for example, the Manifesto ‘To the Prole­tarians of the Whole World’ written by Trotsky.”

Sabatier considers that:

“The appeal ‘To the Workers of all Coun­tries’ launched by the Congress was the most significant document concerning the real role this world organization was taking up behind a smokescreen of profes­sions of communist faith: the workers were first and foremost called upon to give their unreserved support to the ‘struggle of the proletarian state encir­cled by capitalist states’; and in order to do this, they were to use all means to put pressure on their governments ‘including, if need be, revolutionary means (sic)’. What’s more, this appeal stressed the ‘gratitude’ that was owed to the ‘Russian revolutionary proletariat and its leading party, the communist party of the Bolsheviks’, thus preparing the ground for the ‘defense of the USSR’, the cult of the party-state.” (p.34)

When you want to kill a dog, first of all say that it’s got rabies! It’s somewhat curious to think that the “most significant document” concerning the real role of the CI was a simple memorandum which Sadoul brought to the Congress as the declaration of the French delegation; it is fraudulent to present this text as an “appeal launched by the Congress” because it wasn’t even sub­mitted to ratification! Thus, it is through this quite secondary document that the CI is supposed to have revealed its essential task to the world proletariat; defending the Russian state. And yet the essential texts of the Congress (written by the Bolsheviks -- the ‘Manifesto’ by Trotsky, ‘Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictatorship’ by Lenin, the ‘Platform’ by Bukharin and Albert, the ‘Resolution on the Position with regard to Socialist Currents and the Berne Conference’ by Zinoviev) defended the following positions:

-- denunciation of the Socialist parties as agents of the bourgeoisie and the absolute necessity to break with them;

-- denunciation of all the democratic and parliamentary illusions weighing on the workers;

-- the necessity to violently destroy the capitalist state;

-- the seizure of power by the workers’ councils on a world scale and the establish­ment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And in none of these texts can one find any trace of an appeal to ‘defend the USSR’, not because it would have been wrong to call on the workers of other countries to oppose the support their governments were giving to the White armies and their direct parti­cipation in the civil war, but quite simply because this was not the main function of the CI, which conceived itself as “the instr­ument for the international republic of councils” and “the International of open mass action, the International of revolutio­nary realization, the International of the deed” (‘Manifesto’). Perhaps it could be claimed that Sadoul was being ‘remote-controlled’ or ‘manipulated’ by the Bolshe­viks, to show the workers their duty to ‘defend the USSR’, while they themselves took charge of creating the “smokescreen of professions of communist faith”. This would be further proof of the much-vaunted ‘duplicity’ of the Bolsheviks! But if such a hypothesis was true, it would still be necessary to explain why the Bolsheviks sho­uld have used such a ‘tactic’. If the real aim behind the foundation of the Inter­national was to mobilize the workers behind the ‘defense of the USSR’, would not the best way to achieve this have been to insert the slogan in the official texts of the Congress and to put all their authority be­hind it (an authority which was considerable among the workers of the whole world)? Can one seriously think that such a slogan would have more impact on the proletarian masses if it appeared in an almost confiden­tial manner in a secondary document presen­ted by a militant who was not very well known and who wasn’t even the official dele­gate (the representative of the Zimmerwald left was Guilbeaux)? The poverty of these arguments is further proof of the inconsis­tency of the thesis that the Communist Inter­national was, from the beginning, an instru­ment of Russian capitalist diplomacy.

No, comrade Sabatier! No, dear Bolshevik-slayers! The CI was not bourgeois at its foundation. It became bourgeois. But, at the same time, it died as an International, because there can never be an International of the bourgeoisie. A bourgeois revolution has never given birth to an International: the ‘bourgeois’ revolution of 1917 would be the one exception, and since the councilists, like the Stalinists, say that the October Revolution was no different from the so-called Chinese ‘revolution’ of 1949 (see Theses on the Chinese Revolution by Cajo Brendel), they should explain to us why the latter didn’t give rise to a new Inter­national.

And if the CI, from the very beginning, was nothing but a capitalist institution, it has to be explained why all the living forces of the world proletariat were regrouped within it, including those elements who later became the communist left. Wasn’t the CI’s Bureau in Western Europe led by Panne­koek and his friends? How could a bourgeois organism secrete these communist fractions which, in the midst of the most terrible counter-revolution in history, were the only ones to carry on defending proletarian principles? Are we to imagine that during the great post-war revolutionary wave mil­lions of workers in struggle, as well as all the most conscious and lucid militants of the workers’ movement, had simply come to the wrong door when they rallied to the Communist International? Councilism has an answer to these questions:

5. The ‘Machiavellainism’ of the Bolsheviks

“... the Bolsheviks have ... dropped slo­gans among the workers, eg that of the soviets. Determining for their tactic was merely the momentary success of a slogan which was by no means regarded as an obligation of principle on the part of the party with respect to the masses, but as a propagandistic means or a policy having for its final content the conquest of power by the organization.” (Thesis 31)

“The establishment of the Soviet state was the establishment of the rule of the party of Bolshevik Machiavellianism.” (Thesis 57)

Councilism didn’t invent this idea about the Machiavellianism of the Bolsheviks and of Lenin. The bourgeoisie invented it in 1917. After this, and following on from the anar­chists, the councilists added their voices to the choir. Let’s say straight away that such a viewpoint betrays a policeman’s con­ception of history, characteristic of exploi­ting classes for whom any social movement is simply the product of ‘manipulations’ or ‘ringleaders’. This conception is so absurd from the marxist point of view (and the councilists call themselves marxists) that we will limit ourselves to a few quotations and a few facts about the actions of the Bolsheviks to show how invalid it is. Was it out of ‘demagogy’ or ‘Machiavellia­nism’ that Lenin declared in April 1917:

“Don’t believe in words. Don’t be begui­led by promises. Don’t overestimate your strength. Organize yourselves in every factory, in every regiment and company, in every neighborhood. Work at organi­zing yourself day after day, hour after hour; work at it yourselves, because no-one can do it for you ... This is the essential content of all the decisions of our conference. This is the main lesson of the revolution. This is the main measure of success.

Comrade workers, we call on you to begin a difficult, important, tireless work, which will have to unite the conscious, revolutionary proletariat of all count­ries. This is the only road which can lead anywhere, which can deliver humanity from the horrors of war and yoke of capital.” (Introduction to the Resolution of the Conference of April 1917, Works, vo1.24)

“It is not a question of numbers, but of giving correct expression to the ideas and policies of the truly revolutionary proletariat ... It is better to remain with one friend only, like Liebknecht, (if) that means remaining with the revolutionary proletariat.” (The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution)

Not only did the Bolsheviks say that it was necessary to be able to remain isolated; they effectively did so every time the work­ing class was mobilized on the terrain of the bourgeoisie.

But perhaps it was out of mere ‘demagogy’ that they found themselves alongside the class or at the head of the class when it was marching towards the revolution. All this was just ‘tactics’, and since 1903 they had been consistently deceiving everyone:

-- the Russian proletariat, so they could come to power;

-- the world proletariat, so that it could be used to defend this power;

-- the Russian peasants, who were given the land, the better to take it away from them afterwards;

-- the national minorities;

-- the Russian bourgeoisie;

-- the world bourgeoisie.

And in fact their ‘Machiavellianism’ was so great that they even achieved the tour de force of deceiving themselves ... Pannekoek discovered this when he wrote: “Lenin (who, however was a ‘pupil of Marx’) never unders­tood what marxism really was” (Lenin as Philosopher).

The development of consciousness in the proletariat

We have not undertaken this defense of the proletarian character of the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution in order to piously honor their memory. It’s because the whole conception of them as a bourgeois party or a bourgeois revolution represents a break with marxism, the essential theore­tical instrument of the class struggle with­out which the proletariat will never be able to overthrow capitalism. We’ve seen how the councilist or even the Bordigist conceptions of October 1917 lead to Menshe­vik or Stalinist aberrations. Similarly, any analysis of the Bolsheviks as a bour­geois party is a barrier to understanding the living process by which consciousness develops in the proletariat, a process which it is the task of revolutionaries to accel­erate, deepen and generalize. In order to do this they must understand this process as clearly as possible.

To those who say that the October Revolution was proletarian but that the Bolshevik Party was bourgeois, or who say that both were bourgeois but are unable to deny that:

“The Russian Revolution was an important episode in the development of the working class movement. Firstly, as already men­tioned, by the display of new forms of political strike, instruments of revolu­tion. Moreover, in a higher degree, by the first appearance of new forms of self-organization of the fighting workers, known as soviets, ie councils.” (Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils)

-- to all these people, we pose this question: in an event so important for the life and struggle of the class, how was class cons­ciousness expressed? Can it be that such an event wasn’t accompanied by any develop­ment of class consciousness? That the prole­tarian masses were on the move and giving rise to unprecedented forms of struggle and organization while suffering from the domination of bourgeois ideology in the same way as before? You only have to pose the question to see how absurd such an idea is. But then did this development of cons­ciousness take place in total silence? In which militants, newspapers, and leaflets was it expressed? Was it generalized throughout the class by telepathy or by the mere addition of millions of identical individual experiences? Is it possible that all members and sectors of the working class evolved in a homogeneous, uniform manner? Obviously not! But then, is it possible that the most advanced elements and sectors remained isolated, atomized, without trying to regroup in order to deepen their positions and intervene actively in the struggle and the general process of coming to conscious­ness? Obviously not! Which organization or organizations (in addition to the coun­cils which grouped the whole class and not only its most advanced elements) expressed this coming to consciousness and helped to enlarge and deepen it?

The Bolshevik Party? Some of the people, who think that this was a bourgeois party, think that ‘even so’, or in a ‘deformed way’, it did express this consciousness. Such an analysis is untenable. Either this party was an emanation of capitalism, or it was an emanation of the working class, or of some other class in society. But if it really was an emanation of capitalism (in whatever form) it couldn’t at the same time express the life of its mortal enemy, the proletariat. It could not regroup the most conscious elements of the class, but only its most mystified members.

The anarchist current? This current was very divided and heterogeneous. There was a huge gulf between someone like Kropotkin, who called for a struggle against ‘Prussian barbarism’, and someone like Voline who remained an internationalist even at the worst moments of World War II. As a whole, unable to organize itself, divided into its individualist, syndicalist and communist varieties, and despite the important audience that it had, anarchism was either left be­hind events or, up to October 1917, follow­ed an identical policy to that of the Bolsheviks. If the most conscious elements of the class could not regroup within the Bolshevik Party, it would have been even harder for them to have regrouped in the anarchist current.

The Left Social Revolutionaries? Here again, at its best, this current fought alongside the Bolsheviks: struggling against Kerensky’s Provisional Government, participating in the October insurrection, defending the soviet power. But it saw itself essentially as a defender of the small peasant and after 1917 it rapidly returned to where it had come from: terrorism. If the Bolsheviks weren’t militants of the working class, the Left Social Revolutionaries were even less.

Should we then look for the most advanced elements in the parties which participated in the bourgeois Provisional Government, the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks? Per­haps some councilists think that the latter were the clearest from the proletarian viewpoint, since they borrowed their analysis from them?

In fact the councilist analysis is completely incapable of replying to any of these ques­tions; the only conclusion it can reach is that:

-- either the events of 1917 did not produce or express any development of consciousness in the class;

-- or that this consciousness remained comp­letely dumb, atomized and ‘individual’.

But these are not the only aberrations the councilist analysis leads to. We’ve seen that this analysis ‘demonstrates’ the bour­geois character of the Bolshevik Party by showing that it defended bourgeois positions on certain questions:

-- substitutionism

-- the agrarian question

-- the national question

Although, as we have seen, councilism attri­butes to the Bolsheviks positions they never held (at least up till 1917 and during the first years of the revolution), although it sees behind these positions a coherence which is quite opposite to the one they rea­lly defended, it is necessary to recognize the errors of the Bolsheviks and not hide them, as do the Bordigists for example. The Bolsheviks themselves were the first to admit their errors when they became aware of them. But what councilism refuses to admit is precisely that these positions were errors; for them, they are simply an illustration of the ‘bourgeois nature’ of the Bolshevik Party.

Note the systematic bias of the councilists: when, on any given point, the Bolshevik Party had the most correct position from a proletarian standpoint (the break with social democracy, destruction of the capita­list state, power of the workers’ councils, internationalism) this was just ‘by chance’ or because of ‘tactics’. On the other hand, when they had a position which was less cor­rect than that of other revolutionary cur­rents of the time (agrarian question, national question), this is proof of their ‘bour­geois nature’. In fact, using the criteria of the councilists, you are led to the con­clusion that all the proletarian parties of the time were part of the capitalist class.

For councilism, the IIIrd International, and the parties which belonged to it, were capi­talist organs from the beginning. What then are to think about the IInd Internatio­nal? On the various incriminating points, did it have a better position than the IIIrd International or the Bolsheviks? On the national question for example, and in parti­cular the Polish question which was at the centre of the controversy between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, what was its position? The answer is clear when we recall that Lenin based his position in this debate on the resolutions of the Congresses of the International, which Luxemburg had fought against so resolutely. On the seizure of power by the proletariat, the International considered that this was the task of the workers’ party: Lenin (or Luxemburg) didn’t invent anything here. On the other hand the Socialist parties weren’t all that clear about the need to destroy the capitalist state. We could give many more examples to show that the erroneous positions of the Bolsheviks were simply an inheritance from the IInd International. Therefore, follow­ing the councilists’ analysis, this Inter­national was also a bourgeois organ: poor old Engels, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Pannekoek, and Gorter, who spent so many years as mili­tants inside an institution for defending capitalism! What’s more, it’s hard to see why the Ist International was any more ‘work­ing class’ than the one which followed it. Perhaps the presence within it of positi­vists, Proudhonists, Mazzinists gave it that breath of proletarian air which its successors lacked? Or should we go back to the Communist League to find a real prole­tarian current? Some councilists actually have this idea. We would recommend to them a re-reading of the 1848 Manifesto. They might get a shock to find that the class and the party are identified with each other and that the program of concrete measures it puts forward bear a strong resemblance to state capitalism. In the end, the counci­lists’ analysis leads to the interesting discovery that there has never been an organized workers’ movement. Or rather that such a movement only began with them. And further, there have never been any revolutionaries before them either. Marx and Engels? They were just bourgeois democrats. How else can you explain Engels’ position on the conquest of power through parliament in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggle in France, or Marx’s speech on the same theme at the Hague Congress of 1872, or Marx’s telegram of congratulation to Lincoln, or the attitude of Marx and Engels during the 1848 revolution, when they moved away from the Communist League and got mixed up in Rhenan’s democratic movement ... ?

As with the Bordigists for whom there has been an ‘invariant’ ‘immutable’ program since 1848, the councilist analysis is com­pletely ahistorical because it refuses to admit that the consciousness and political positions of the proletariat are the product of its historical experience. The idea that any error, any bourgeois position held by a proletarian organization means that it is part of the capitalist class, presupposes the absurd idea that communist consciousness can exist straight away in a fully formed manner. This is completely alien to the marxist viewpoint. Class consciousness is the result of a long process of maturation in which theoretical reflection and practice are intimately linked, and in which the wor­kers’ movement stammers and struggles for­ward, stops, re-examines itself:

“... proletarian revolutions ... criticize themselves constantly, interrupt them­selves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, the weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodi­giousness of their own aims, until a sit­uation has been created which makes all turning back impossible ...” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

Expressions of the disarray of a communist current during the most terrible counter­revolution in history, the councilist con­ceptions today seem to have become a refuge for skeptical academics (is it by chance that councilists like Paul Mattick, Cajo Brendel or Maximilien Rubel seem more inter­ested in writing, conferences or marxology than in animating communist political groups?). There’s nothing unusual in this: isn’t it typical of academic mandarins to have this attitude of judging history, of sitting in a high throne and, on the basis of a posteriori criteria, retrospectively condemning the errors or inadequacies of the proletariat and of revolutionaries, instead of drawing lessons from the past in order to fortify the struggle in the future? Councilism ‘discovered’ that the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Party were bourgeois after the event, using criteria established a posteriori and largely thanks to the experience of this ‘bourgeois’ October Revolution.

We’ve seen in this article and in other pub­lished in our International Review (especi­ally ‘The Degeneration of the Russian Revo­lution’ in no.3) that the existence of a capitalist regime in the USSR today can in no way be deduced from the backward state of the country in 1917, nor from the policies carried out by the Bolsheviks once they were in power, even though both have influenced the specific form capitalism has assumed in Russia and its ideological justification. We have seen that the degeneration and fail­ure of the revolution were not the result of the lack of ‘objective material condit­ions’: the latter existed because capital­ism as a whole had entered its epoch of dec­line. The causes of the failure of the revolution reside in the immaturity of the ‘subjective conditions’, ie the level of consciousness in the proletariat. Does this mean that the proletariat was premature to embark upon the revolution in Russia, that the Bolsheviks were wrong to push the class in this direction?

Only academic philistines and reformists could answer yes. Revolutionaries can only answer no. First because the only criteria for judging the level of consciousness in the class, its ability to face up to a situa­tion, are the action and practice of the class itself. And second because this level of consciousness can only be modified in action and through action, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her polemic against Bernstein:

“It will be impossible to avoid the ‘pre­mature’ conquest of state power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘pre­mature’ attacks of the proletariat consti­tute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions for the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proleta­riat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘prem­ature’ conquest of political power by the laboring class appears to be a political absurdity derived from a mechanical con­ception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle. (Reform or Revolution)

The only way the ‘premature’ seizure of power by the proletariat in 1917, its exp­eriences and errors (and thus those of Bolshevism) can be “an important factor of its final victory” is for the proletariat and above all the revolutionaries of today, to make a ruthless critique of these exper­iences and errors. One of the first to do this, even before the future councilists, was Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution. But this means we have to adopt the same attitude as hers against all the detractors of the October Revolu­tion and the Bolsheviks:

“To those who ... shower calumnies on the Russian Bolsheviks, we should never cease to reply with the question: ‘where did you learn the alphabet of your revolution? Was it not from the Russians that you learned to ask for workers’ and soldiers’ councils?” (Speech at the Founding Con­gress of the KPD)

“Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness and consis­tency in a historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western social democ­racy lacked were represented by the Bol­sheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.”

“... theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to BOLSHEVISM.” (Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution)

FM

For more than a year, the ICC and the Inter­nationalist Communist Party have been enga­ged in a political debate with the aim of transcending the sectarianism which still weighs heavily on the re-emerging revolutio­nary movement. As part of this joint effort, the ICC sent an important delegation to the international conference called by Battaglia in Milan last May1, and invited a delega­tion from Battaglia to participate in the work of the Second Congress of the ICC in July. We were thus rather surprised by the publication, immediately after this, of two articles in Battaglia Comunista entitled: ‘The Second Congress of the ICC: Disorientation and Confusion’ in which we are viol­ently attacked for “regressing and moving away from revolutionary Marxism” (Battaglia Comunista, nos.10-11, August/September 1977).

We have already commented on (in Rivoluzione Internazionale, no.10) the marked suspicious­ness of the comrades of Battaglia who see great ‘political novelties’ and innovations in certain draft resolutions which synthe­size positions which have constantly appear­ed in our press (in particular the Resolu­tion on Proletarian Political Groups which is a new version of the article ‘Proletarian Groups and Confused Groups’ which appeared, among other places, in Rivoluzione Inter­nazionale, no.8 and World Revolution, no.11).

Battaglia has been unable to deny the evid­ence and has tried to escape the question by saying that these published texts were not ‘official’. It’s a strange conception which sees published texts as unofficial and draft documents circulated for internal use as official. But leaving aside all other considerations, the positions under­lying the Resolution on the Period of Transition have been expressed not only in a number of articles, but in a Resolution adopted at the Second Congress of our section in France and published as such in the International Review, no.8. Was this also ‘unofficial’?

And in fact the great ‘novelties’ which appeared in the Congress have been at the centre of debate among communist organiza­tions for years; this debate has taken place through different publications and numerous international conferences. What is more, certain groups have used precisely these positions to break all contact with our organization, condemning it as ‘counter­revolutionary’. But for Battaglia all this work, progress and all those errors don’t exist or are just meaningless chit-chat: the discussion begins with their articles -- which are to a large extent a repetition of an analagous attack made by Programma Comunista two years ago.2

We are laying emphasis on this suspicious­ness not to annoy Battaglia but to point to the difficulties met by groups surviving from the old communist left when they try to participate in this debate at the same level as revolutionary groups produced by the recent re-emergence of the class struggle. But while some of these groups have chosen to remain silent, others, more capable of reacting, feel the necessity on all occasions to defend their conceptions vis-a-vis these minorities by adopting a ‘superior’ and inadequate attitude.3

Thus, while the attack launched by Battaglia is violent and superficial, it is itself a symptom of the fact that “the international revolutionary camp is in perpetual movement: regroupment and splits, a maze of polemics, meetings, collisions, show that something is moving” (Battaglia Comunista, no.13, October, 1977), a fact that we welcome. For this reason, we do not present this reply as one of those eternal ‘setting the record straight’ pieces aimed at ‘liquida­ting’ the adversary. On the contrary, it is a reaffirmation of our positions when they have been distorted, and a contribu­tion to redefining the framework in which the debate should go on -- a debate which must clarify what really underlies our differences, especially concerning the nat­ure and function of the proletarian party.

Revival of the class struggle and re-emergence of revolutionary positions

“There’s no point in referring to the groups affiliated to the ‘Current’, to their not-particularly revolutionary history ... In 1968 there were those who were mixed up with the leftists; in any case, so as not to lose their reputation, some people are today hiding behind fict­itious analyses, according to which 1968 was the beginning of the present crisis, an outbreak of big workers’ struggles, the first great response of the class to capital.” (Battaglia Comunista, nos 10-11)

To begin with, we would like to say that if Battaglia has accusations to make, it should make them openly, naming the accused and, above all, documenting their claims. Commu­nists have nothing to hide, including their own errors. Having said this, we would re­mind the rather incautious author of this article that during the events of May/June 1968, our present French section Revolution Internationale didn’t exist (the first ron­eoed issue came out in December 1968) so it didn’t have much chance of getting mixed up with the leftists. At the time there was only a small group of comrades in Venezuela who published the magazine Internacionalismo and collaborated on a workers’ bulletin Proletario with some other non-organized comrades and another left communist group, Proletario Internacional.

During the May events, Proletario Internac­ional allowed itself to get swept up in the general euphoria and, following the Situa­tionists, called for the immediate constitu­tion of workers’ councils:

“And to give an example, Proletario Internacional proposed that the different groups who made up Proletario (considered for the occasion as a sort of workers’ council) should dissolve into it.

All the participants in Proletario follo­wed on this glorious road, except Inter­nacionalismo. Proletario and its self-dissolved participants didn’t survive what they took to be the revolution. The reflux of the May movement led them into the void.” (Revolution Internationale, Bulletin d’Etude et de Discussion, no.10, p. 31)

Thus the few militants who were then defen­ding the positions the Current defends to­day, isolated geographically and beset by disarray and all kinds of illusions, were able to remain solidly attached to the course of history, even at the price of rem­aining isolated. But the events of May 1968 also gave rise to small groups of comrades in France and the US who were able to take up the positions of the communist left def­ended by Internacionalismo. Thus the found­ations for our international regroupment were laid down.

As for May A968, we do indeed recognize it as the first overt expression of the crisis which has inundated the capitalist world after the years of ‘abundance’. But Marxists didn’t need to see the crisis explode in an open way to be able to predict it:

“The year 1967 saw the fall of the Pound Sterling and 1968 the measures taken by Johnson ... We are not prophets and we do not claim to know how and when events will take place. But we are sure that it is impossible to stop the process which the capitalist system is going through with these reforms and other capitalist remedies, and that this process is lead­ing irremediably to a crisis.” (Internacionalismo, January 1968)

We were well prepared to recognize the cri­sis which was just beginning to show itself, and we did recognize it4, despite the laughter of those who talked about ‘the student revolt against the boredom of life’. Today they have stopped laughing.

Turin, Cordoba, Dantzig, Szezecin and all that followed have made it impossible to deny the evidence and Battaglia recognize that capitalism entered into crisis in ... 1971. In order to reject the proletarian nature of the 1968 events in France and the 1969 events in Italy, Battaglia recall how they ended tip and what sort of groupuscules dominated them. The councilists have been using the same method for decades to show that the October Revolution was a bourgeois revolution -- on account of how it ended up ... To deny the class nature of the strikes of those years by referring to the ‘opport­unist’ nature of the groups which led them, should lead one to reject the proletarian nature of the revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 because the majority of the soviets were against the Bolsheviks.

Battaglia points out quite rightly that the physical presence of the workers is no guarantee for the proletarian nature of a movement, and gives the example of the demon­strations for the anniversary of the libera­tion of Italy. But there is a big difference between a political demonstration which celebrates the triumph of the republican state over the class struggle and a wildcat strike, ie an expression of the class struggle. If the Italian Left had taught us only one thing, it would be that commu­nists support and participate in all prole­tarian struggles which take place on the terrain of the defense of the specific inte­rests of the working class, independent of the political nature of those who are dominating the strike.5

It is rather ironic that in their eagerness to justify the absence of the party in the struggles of 1969, the comrades of Battag­lia sin against themselves. In the polemics which preceded the split in the Internat­ionalist Communist Party in 1952 with the predecessors of today’s Programma Comunista, it was the latter who proclaimed the neces­sity not to participate in the general political strikes against American imperia­lism, given the fact that these movements were totally dominated by the Stalinists. And the comrades of the Damen tendency replied:

“The factory and shipyard groups must acquire the capacity (which they don’t yet have) to change the course of the agitation, to go against the spirit and orientation of this agitation ... After openly carrying out their responsibilities and expressing their political positions, they must leave the factory with the majority of the workers when they leave, stay when the majority stays. It’s not a question of conforming to a majority or a minority, but of the communist met­hod, of a basic principle -- being present when the working masses move, discuss and express their desires, which, as we know, are not always in accordance with their class interests ... The so-called Asti comrades (who didn’t participate in the strikes, ed note) are and remain scabs; I would add that if they had been there, their gestures would have provided an invaluable lesson -- it would have been a fine thing to see international­ists attacking other internationalists.”6

What should we conclude from this? That the participation of the class in demonstra­tions which are outside a class terrain is not sufficient to prevent one from ‘being with the workers’, whereas the inevitable immaturity and confusion which accompanies the class’s return to its own terrain are enough to prevent one from participating in the struggle?

This spectacular contradiction is only one example among many others. It is a conse­quence of the attempt to reconcile the myth of the infallible party with prosaic reality -- ie the fact that the party was not there at the rendezvous which it had been waiting for throughout the long years of social peace. It would be absurd today to proclaim our superiority because were able to ‘under­stand May’. But it’s even more absurd for those who saw the events of 1968-9 as a restructuration of capitalism led by the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie to declaim today about: “The real significance of this crisis which the party was the first (!) and only to see and describe”, (Battaglia Comunista, no.13),

Dogmatic invariance and revolutionary reflection

“Revolutionary Marxism, Leninism (as the rigid continuation of the tradition we adhere to) ... against those who, in ord­er not to get ‘sclerotic’, have a need for novelties, for continually harping on about the presumed lacks or ‘errors’ of Marxism-Leninism.”

In the enthusiasm of their polemic against us, Battaglia seem to be accepting the fam­ous Act for communist militants joining the organization, who are supposed to swear “not to revise, add or leave anything aside, to support, defend and confirm the whole as a monolithic bloc, and to do this with all one’s strength” (Bordiga, February 1953).

But in actual fact our ‘steely Leninists’ have made some ‘revisions’ and it was this which enabled them to defend an internatio­nalist and defeatist position during World War II:

“These theses (ie of Lenin), while arri­ving at entirely revolutionary conclu­sions, contain in their premises certain ideas which, if understood wrongly or, more important, applied wrongly, could lead to dangerous deviations and thus to serious defeats for the class ... The notion of class is essentially an inter­national one: this fundamental point in the Marxist conception was examined in a deeper way by Rosa Luxemburg, who, round about the same time as Lenin, arrived via another route at different conclusions, which went beyond those of Lenin ... Briefly, the problem Rosa raised and which conflicted with Lenin’s theses was the following: capitalism, as a world-wide whole, follows an essentially unitary path. Disagreements within it never des­troy the class solidarity which presides over the defense of its fundamental int­erests ... Already in 1914, Rosa was right against Lenin when she said that the epoch of national liberation struggles finished with the constitution of the great European states, and that in the decadent phase of capitalism all wars have a clearly imperialist character (whereas according to Lenin, national wars were still possible and revolutionaries had particular tasks vis-a-vis such wars). We don’t want to make an abstraction out of this, but it remains true that the situation opened up by the war in Africa luminously confirms Luxemburg’s thesis.” (Prometeo, clandestine, 1 November 1943)

Today Battaglia still defends the revolutio­nary position on so-called national libera­tion struggles; but to defend the position against Programma Comunista, whom do they refer to? To Lenin!:

“We must remind our self-proclaimed inter­nationalists what Lenin wrote about so-called ‘national wars’, in fact imperia­list wars ... Lenin insisted that in all wars, the only loser was the proletariat.” (Battaglia Comunista, no.18, December 1976)

In order to have their cake and eat it, to maintain revolutionary positions and Lenin­ist ‘authority’, Battaglia are forced to make Lenin say the opposite of what he said historically, and, among other things, to contradict what they themselves have said, as the quotation from Prometeo shows.

This inability to make a complete critique of the errors of the IIIrd International (in particular on the question of the party) means that even on questions where they have gone beyond the errors of the IIIrd Inter­national, Battaglia has never arrived at complete clarity. For example on the union question Battaglia recognizes that in the revolutionary wave the class will destroy the unions and that it is the task of commu­nists to denounce them as bourgeois now. But at the same time they say:

“(concerning the unions) to move away from the line put forward by Lenin is to fall right into the void ... the frame­work developed by Marx, Lenin and our­selves today remains fundamentally the same.” (Prometeo, no.18, p.9, 1972)

But if nothing has changed, why should the proletariat have to destroy its former organizations, the unions? If the union is ‘the same as ever’ why write in their Platform:

“The party categorically affirms that in the present phase of the totalitarian domination of imperialism, trade union organizations are indispensable to the maintenance of this domination.” (Plat­form of the Internationalist Communist Party, 1952; our emphasis)

The Battaglia comrades accuse us of falsi­fying their position on the Internationalist Factory Groups, which are in fact organs of the party, real transmission belts between party and class. In an article on the rec­ent Oslo conference (Battaglia Comunista, no.13) they even say that the Communist Wor­kers’ Organization has not understood the role of these groups. We think that this misunderstanding is so widespread -- mainly because of the real ambiguity of their role. We are told that they are organs of the party, but how can a party organ be based for the most part on elements who are not militants of the party itself? We are told that the transmission belts between party and class are these groups, and not the workers’ groups or centers of co-ordination which arise spontaneously. Fine. But if words have any meaning, the transmission belt in a motor is the element which ensures the mediation between two other elements (and in fact the Battaglia comrades do talk about ‘intermediary organisms’). But if an organ is an intermediary one, ie half way between the party and the class, how can it be an organ of the party? The Italian Left always opposed the International’s line on organizing the party on the basis of fact­ory cells, arguing that workers were mili­tants of the party just like any other and that only an organization based on territ­orial sections could guarantee the political militant activity of all its members. Batt­aglia seem to resolve the question in a Solomon-like way by advocating, alongside the territorial structure for all militants, an ‘intermediary’ sub-structure reserved for worker-militants. We don’t think this is a step forward.

For the same reason we don’t think it is a “merely intellectual concern” to see a contradiction between denouncing the unions as counter-revolutionary and working inside them, often as union delegates. The more such delegates are combative and devoted to the interests of the class, the more this will strengthen the workers’ illusions in the possibility of ‘using the unions’. That this is not just a pessimist’s moan but a real danger can be seen by the fact that, while having clear ideas on the Fact­ory Councils (Documents of the Italian Left, no.1, p.vii., January 1974), Battaglia has recently said:

“It’s a quite different matter at I.B. Mec in Asti where the participation of the workers is on a large scale. Why? why has the Factory Council at I.B. Mec in Asti acted independently for a long time, or rather acted on the basis of workers’ interests and not according to the arro­gant decrees of Lama and co?” (Battaglia Comunista, no.1, January 1977)

Battaglia thus ends up participating in the chorus which the extra-parliamentary left has been chanting for months: restore the life of the base structures of the unions, the Factory Councils, by counter-posing them to the evil ‘leadership’, ie Lama and co (see the assembly at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, ‘for a union of the Councils’).

If you wanted to indulge in the polemical methods of Battaglia, you could easily say that their only concern is to chase the union bureaucrats from their desks. But this is not true and we know it. On the contrary we think that these errors are the wrong answer to a relevant and fundamental ques­tion: the militant defense of revolutionary positions in the class, in its struggles. We don’t presume to have the truth in our pockets, but the positions we defend are not just “geometrical abstractions” developed in the rarefied atmosphere of the library. Based on the experience of the workers’ circles which arose out of the class strug­gle in Spain, Belgium,, France and elsewhere, these positions are anything but ‘intellec­tualisms’.

Proletarian political groups

“Put forward in a presumptuous manner (since we don’t know why the ICC has the right to take up the role of pure water in the great swamp of confusion made up by the groups of the communist left), this first document departs from a posi­tion ‘above’ all other groups: we are the truth, everything else is chaos.” (Battaglia Comunista, nos.10-11)

A group which imagined itself to be the sole repository of revolutionary truth would certainly be ‘imagining’ things. But if we re-read our Resolution on Proletarian Poli­tical Groups (International Review, no.11) we will find no such stupidities; the Reso­lution ends up precisely with the affirma­tion that we must “avoid considering our­selves as the one and only revolutionary group that exists today”. Far from claiming that we can never make mistakes, we say, “The ICC ... must avoid repetition of past errors like the one which led Revolution Internationale to write ‘we have doubts about the positive evolution of a group which comes from anarchism’ in a letter addressed to Journal des Luttes de Classe, whose members later on founded the Belgian section of the ICC along with RRS and VRS.” (International Review, no.11)

However we could give many examples of the errors of others ... For example, there are groups who claim to have reached perfect clarity, while others are only just beginn­ing to clarify their ideas:

“The tasks of revolutionaries are begin­ning to become clearer in all countries, both where they are organized in the party (Italy) and where they are still acting at the level of small groups in transition, or simply as isolated individuals.” (Prometeo, nos. 26-27, p.16, 1976)

Leaving aside the tone of mythological self-exaltation and the reduction to ‘small groups in transition’ of revolutionary orga­nizations based on a political platform like the ICC, CWO or PIC, we can see from this passage that, for Battaglia, the three other parties in Italy which claim descent from the Italian Left (Programma Comunista, Rivoluzione Comunista, Il Partito Comunista) are not revolutionary or are not parties! But the most striking thing is that, having annulled all traces of Programma Comunista, Battaglia describes as “absurd and ridicu­lous” our criticism of this organization in our Resolution on Proletarian Political Groups. What is our position?

“With regard to this organization, what­ever level of regression it has reached, there are not any decisive elements which allow us to say that it has already gone over as a body into the camp of the bour­geoisie. We must guard against any hasty judgment on this question, because this could stand in the way of helping in the evolution of elements or tendencies who may arise within the organization in order to fight against its degeneration, or to break from it.” (International Review, no.11)

We consider that Programma Comunista is a group which remains in the proletarian camp, and we are therefore open to discussion and political polemic with it. It’s not by chance that in our press we have deplored its display of contempt towards the inter­national conference called by Battaglia (Rivoluzione Internazionale, no.7, p.23). But we were extremely surprised, on finally receiving (after many requests) the list of organizations to which Battaglia had sent its ‘Appeal to the International Groups of the Communist Left’ for the Milan conference, when we found that neither Programma nor the other organizations claiming descent from the Italian Left were included on it. There are two possibilities here: either Battaglia didn’t send the Appeal to these organiza­tions, in which case this would have been an attempt by Battaglia to put itself for­ward on the international level as the only group descended from the Italian Left; or it did invite them, and, faced with their refusal, preferred not to name them. What­ever the case7, it shows that they have not understood that, in relation to political groups who remain on a class terrain, whatever their errors, it is necessary to: “maintain an open attitude to discussion with them, a discussion that must take place in public and not through private corres­pondence (International Review, no.11).

Above all, we must know how to avoid emotional reactions, polemical reprisals, obses­sions with formal questions. This is why our attitude to Programma has not changed just because they recently referred to us as “imbeciles”8.

Battaglia Comunista, the ICC and the CWO

“While the CWO, more seriously, shows that it is open to a critical deepening of these positions, and does not set it­self up as the final authority on commu­nism, the confusionists of the ICC take it upon themselves to pronounce on the confusion of others, including among confused groups the flower of leftist reaction, such as the Trotskyists.” (Battaglia Comunista, no.13)

In order to show us up as “last minute Marx­ists”, Battaglia think it a good idea to con­trast us with a more ‘serious’ group, the Communist Workers’ Organization. But in order to do this it has to attribute us with the erroneous positions of others.

Battaglia doesn’t seem to know that the CWO broke all relations with us in 1976 after defining us, not even as confused, but as counter-revolutionary9. The comrades of the CWO maintained this absurd position for nearly two years, refusing all discussion with us, despite our public proposals for debate (World Revolution, no.6, Internatio­nal Review, nos 9 & 10). This ultra-sectarian attitude has led it to a situa­tion of growing isolation and disintegration: first the split by the Liverpool sec­tion (the former Workers’ Voice), then the split by the Edinburgh and Aberdeen sec­tions, who called for an opening up of dis­cussion with the ICC with a view to inte­grating into the Current.

The remaining comrades of the CWO, even though they still describe us as ‘counter­revolutionary’, finally announced that “the article in International Review, no.10 was politically serious enough to constitute a re-opening of discussions, and that we were thus obliged to attempt once again to make the ICC understand the consequences of their theories” (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.8); and they also maintained a fraternal attit­ude when we were jointly defending revolu­tionary positions at the ‘Non-Leninist Conference’ in Oslo.

Concerning the Trotskyists, our Resolution is clear:

“Among these parties (which have gone over to the bourgeoisie) we can mainly cite the Socialist Parties which came out of the IInd International, the Commu­nist Parties which came out of the IIIrd International, the organizations of offi­cial anarchism and the Trotskyist tenden­cies ...

Thus there is nothing hopeful in the various Trotskyist splits which time and again propose to safeguard or return to a ‘pure’ Trotskyism.” (International Review, no.11)

But while we have never seen the Trotsky­ists as confused, there are unfortunately some who have taken them for revolutionaries: Battaglia Comunista invited two French Trot­skyist organizations to the Milan conference, Union Ouvriere and Combat Communiste; and for a long time they defended this invita­tion against our protests and our firm opposition to discussing with counter­revolutionary groups. This opposition was not only expressed verbally in a meeting with the EC of Battaglia, but also publicly in our press:

“We have criticized its lack of political criteria which has allowed invitations to be sent to the modernist Trotskyists of Union Ouvriere and Maoist-Trotskyists like Combat Communiste, who have no place in a conference of communists.” (International Review, no.8)

After all this you have to be pretty short­sighted to write that it’s we who don’t have clear ideas about the reactionary nature of Trotskyism.

The state in the period of transition

We don’t intend to enter here into a detai­led discussion of a subject as complex as it is vital for revolutionaries, or even to refute the facile simplifications put for­ward by Battaglia (this will be done during the further development of the discussion). We simply want to underline a few basic points and show the framework in which the discussion should take place.

For the Battaglia comrades the draft reso­lution presented by the International Bureau of the ICC is nothing but a negation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of “an organ above classes”, the ‘logical consequence’ of which is to take up the idea of ‘everyone’s state’ defended by the parties of the left.

It is worth recalling here that similar accusations have been made by the CWO, to name but one. What is the balance-sheet of all these accusations today? This is what an important minority of the CWO was itself led to admit:

“(the) CWO claims the ICC favor the working class being subordinate to some ‘all class state’. If this were so then the ICC would have crossed class lines. In reality, if we follow the ICC texts on the period of transition, we find that in fact they defend the same class posi­tions as the CWO ... The ICC clearly states that only the working class can hold political power ... It is clear that only the working class can organize itself as a class; the only concession made as regards this is that peasants can organize on a geographical basis to allow their needs to be made known to the proletariat.”10

The thesis defended in the draft resolution and in many previous texts expresses the idea that the experience of the Russian Revolution has shown in a tragic manner that the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the workers’ councils, cannot be identified with the state, engen­dered by the persistence of class divisions in society after the revolution. It follows that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is not exerted through or in the state, but over the state”, and that this state, as Marxism has always insisted, can only be a ‘semi-state’ destined to wither away progres­sively, and for this reason a state deprived of a whole series of particular characteris­tics, such as the monopoly of arms.

Battaglia gets very indignant about this, “Well, well! The bourgeois state has a monopoly of arms, the state born out of the proletarian revolution does not” (Battaglia Comunista, no.12).

This gives the reader to understand that, according to us, the proletariat must frat­ernally share the arms with the old ruling class, in the name of a super-democratic ‘struggle for the monopoly’. In reality, the resolution says that the state won’t have a monopoly of arms for the simple reason that the class, by not identifying with the state, will not delegate to it this monopoly:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat over the state and society as a whole is based essentially:

-- on the fact that the other classes are forbidden to organize themselves as classes;

-- on the proletariat’s hegemonic partici­pation within all the organizations upon which the state is founded;

-- on the fact that the proletariat is the only armed class.” (International Review, no.11 )

Then Battaglia tries to present us as people blinded by a sort of phobia about the state: the result of “vestigial libertarian preju­dices”:

“ ... to see the principal cause of the degeneration of the October revolution as the negative effects of the state, as this document argues, is to fail to understand the Russian experience and to take effects for causes.” (Battaglia Comunista, no.12)

And Battaglia gets on with the not-too-­difficult task of pointing out the effect that encirclement, the reflux of the revolutionary wave, etc had on the revolu­tion. But to whom are they pointing this out? The ICC has always said that:

“Just as the Russian Revolution was the first bastion of the international revolu­tion in 1917, the first in a series of international proletarian uprisings, its degeneration into counter-revolution was also the expression of an international phenomenon -- the activity of an inter­national class, the proletariat.” (‘The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution’, International Review, no.3)

We have waged strong polemics against those who see the only cause of the degeneration as being the errors of the Bolshevik Party and its identification with the state. The Resolution says that the state was the “main agent”, ie instrument of the counter-revolu­tion, contrary to the expectations of the Bolsheviks, for whom the counter-revolution could only come through the destruction of the Soviet state by the white generals and the invading armies of world capital. How­ever, it was the Soviet state itself, rein­forced to the hilt in order to ‘defend the revolution’ which ended up strangling the revolution and the Bolshevik Party as a proletarian party.

In brief, for Battaglia the Resolution on the period of transition represents “a sud­den turning away from the path of revolutio­nary science”, and this is all the more serious because it has “no other justifica­tion than originality at an price” (our emphasis). Battaglia really isn’t doing too well here. Our discussion on the problems of the period of transition, the contributions which have been elaborated over a num­ber of years, are in direct continuity with the research carried out by the revolutio­nary minorities in the 1930s. This applies in particular to the Italian Left who put forward as a task for revolutionaries the resolution of the “New problems posed by the exercise of proletarian power in the USSR” (Bilan, no.l, November 1933), and who made a contribution on this question which, though not definitive, is still, for us, fundamental:

“But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider the Soviet state as ‘an evil inherited by the proletariat ... whose worse sides the victorious prole­tariat ... cannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible’ (Engels), but as an organism which could be completely identi­fied with the proletarian dictatorship, ie with the party ... Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian Revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilized them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance.”11

One can certainly disagree with these posi­tions and/or with the conclusions drawn from them by the Gauche Communiste de France (Internationalisme) in the 1940s, and by us today: the existence of an open debate on this question in our organization is the best proof of this12. But to present all this work as nothing but a ridiculous con­cern with ‘originality’ is ample proof that Battaglia has been going through a process of sclerosis.

But as soon as the term sclerosis is used the Battaglia comrades feel the blood rush­ing to their heads, seeing it as an attempt of brand them as a bunch of old men with acute arteriosclerosis. But we don’t use the term sclerosis as an insult when we apply it to the groups surviving from older revolutionary currents, any more than we are making a eulogy when we note the agility of all those (Toggliati etc) who have leapt to the other side of the barricade with the greatest of ease. It is nevertheless true that a revolutionary group can’t bear the weight of fifty years of counter­revolution in the ranks of the working class without suffering any adverse conse­quences:

“ ... it is generally the case that their sclerosis is in part the ransom they pay for their attachment and loyalty to revo­lutionary principles, for their distrust of any kind of ‘innovation’, which has been for so many other groups the Trojan horse of degeneration13; it is this distrust which has led them to reject any idea of opening their program to new developments coming out of historical experience.” (International Review, no.11)

Thus, the Internationalist Communist Party was able to maintain a defeatist position during World War II, to a large extent be­cause it was able to denounce and go beyond Lenin’s positions on the national and colo­nial question, positions which had been tot­ally accepted by the Communist Party of Italy. But during the long period of social peace which followed the war, the process of sclerosis undermined much of the work of enriching class positions. While Programma Comunista thought it could resolve all prob­lems by calling for a return to all the old errors of the IIIrd International, Battaglia, as we have seen, has tried to reconcile the defense of class positions with a ‘rigid’ adherence to ‘Leninism’. For example, in an article on the Bolshevik Party which appeared in Prometeo (nos.24/25, p. 35, 1975), the author of the articles on the Second Congress of the ICC, alongside a correct polemic “against the conceptions which iden­tify the exercise of the dictatorship -- which must be done by the class and it alone -- with the dictatorship of the party,” attacks “above all conceptions based on bourgeois prejudices, such as those of Rosa Luxemburg, which hold that the dictatorship consists in the application of democracy and not its abolition”. We don’t think this is the place to reply to these simplifications and distortions of the criticisms of the Bolshevik experience which that great revo­lutionary made. What is more, a few years ago, Battaglia itself took on this task when it published Rosa’s The Russian Revolution as a pamphlet in Italian. At that time the authoritative pen of Onorato Damen affirmed that:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat of tomorrow, in whatever country it arises, will constitute a new experience, in that it will synthesize the revolutionary intuition and optimism of Luxemburg with the hard, implacable teachings of Lenin.” (The Russian Revolution, by Rosa Luxemb­urg, edizione Battaglia Comunista, no date)

But perhaps the author of the article did not know this and allowed himself to succumb to the pleasures of ‘originality at any price’ with regard to his own party. We can only say that this is one of those zig-zags typical of this so-called rigid ‘invariance’.

Debate between revolutionaries and ‘open questions’

“Thus according to the authors of the article (or of all the comrades of the ICC? We doubt it) the state in the period of transition is a question which it is necessary to discuss in a revolutionary organization with international aspira­tions ... What is so unacceptable is the ICC’s presumption that it is an interna­tional organization of revolutionaries. It would probably be better to call it an ‘international study group’ with whom, of course, we think we should collaborate, with the maximum assistance on our part.” (Battaglia Comunista, no.14)

Contrary to what Battaglia Comunista seems to think today the class frontiers which determine whether or not one is part of the proletarian camp were not all codified in the 1848 Manifesto. The Paris Commune of 1871 showed that the bourgeois state had to be destroyed, not changed; and capitalism’s entry into its decadent phase, marked by the outbreak of World War I, rendered all the old reformist tactics useless to the class. In the latter case, it is quite understand­able that revolutionaries at the time were not able to grasp the full significance of this qualitative change. But today, with fifty years of historical evidence, the rejection of these tactics has become a class frontier, the defense of which is the basis for any revolutionary organization. The ICC Platform, a single basis for join­ing the Current in all countries, has this function, and we invite anyone who wants to show that we are not an international organ­ization of revolutionaries to make a criti­que of our platform. It is within this pro­grammatic framework that it is permissible, and even necessary, to discuss all those problems which the historic experience of the class has not resolved. Like Bilan we think that the short exercise of power by the proletariat in Russia, far from con­firming all the old convictions of the wor­kers’ movement, has raised “new problems” which must be solved within a revolutionary perspective. Making a contribution to this solution is a task which animates all the militants of the ICC in this discussion, a discussion situated firmly within the frame­work laid down by the Russian experience (the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the dictatorship of the party etc). But this problem does not only concern the ICC; it is the concern of the whole revolutionary move­ment. This is why the debate is conducted in an open way, in front of the whole class, and why other revolutionary groups are invi­ted to take part in the debate.

This is why we have been able to take on the task of regrouping revolutionaries on an international scale -- a task which we have the ‘presumption’ to make our own. This is why we can undertake discussion with other groups without having to cheer ourselves up by saying that it is simply a question of giving assistance to harmless studies which lack any internal coherence.

The fact that we were able to publish in our international press a text by Battaglia Comunista14 which criticized us strongly is not the result of eclecticism or weakness:

“Far from being in contradiction with each other, firmness in our principles and openness in our attitude mutually complement each other. We are not afraid of discussion precisely because we are convinced on the validity of our positions.” (International Review, no.11)

We firmly insist that public discussion within proletarian organizations and between proletarian organizations is the patrimony of the workers’ movement and not of some International Institute of Social Studies. Thus, concerning the war in Spain, Bilan published texts of the minority which split away from the Fraction. We ourselves have published these texts by reproducing ex­tracts from Bilan on this question:

“It’s not any moral scruples which have motivated this choice; still less has a desire to stand above the debate (since we have an unequivocal position here) led us to publish the texts of the two ten­dencies. Politeness has nothing to do with it. We leave it to the heroes of imperialist wars to enjoy the great satisfaction of giving flowers to the vanquished enemy.

Political debate, for us, is not a ‘beau­tiful gesture’, a ‘touch of class’, some­thing which makes us special and dis­tinct. On the contrary it is an elemen­tary necessity which can in no way be set aside.”15

BEYLE