The political organizations of the proletariat draw their life from the living, historic practice of their class. The ICC doesn’t escape this law and its Third Congress was, in all aspects, con­fronted with the problems that are now being posed in the struggles of the working class. The Congress began by drawing up a balance-sheet of two years of activity in the class struggle: after three and a half years of existence as a centralized international organization, the ICC has an experience which is limited but rich in a number of important lessons. The first lesson is that our organizational inexperience is accom­panied by a theoretical weakness, a difficulty in deepening the questions posed in the workers’ movement of the past. In the constant process of deepening our understanding of social reality, both contemporary and historical, the ICC is still groping its way forward, like all other revolu­tionary organizations and expressions of the wor­king class struggle. The second lesson is the difficulty -- but also the necessity and possibi­lity -- of living with political divergences. A better ability to pose the questions which come out of the class struggle presupposes a contin­uous debate, which inevitably gives rise to poli­tical divergences, to different appreciations which must be able to be resolved inside the same organization. The third lesson is the necessity to adapt and modulate one’s intervention to the period one is in. All these aspects of the activity of a revolutionary organization -- theor­etical and political formation, development of the organization and the regroupment of revolu­tionaries, active intervention in the struggles of the working class -- were more than ever examined as a totality, a coherent whole which is linked more and more directly to the practice of the working class itself. There was also a particular emphasis on the question of the publi­cations of the organization.

This is why the work of the Congress consisted mainly of a balance-sheet of the international situation. At the Second Congress we were able to confirm the analysis which we had already put forward before the official constitution of the ICC, viz: the end of the period of reconstruction and the opening up of a new phase of the perman­ent, historic crisis of the system. We were also able to point out and explain the slow develop­ment of the crisis and show the reasons for this slowness. Contrary to the apologists of the system or the confused elements who were inspired by the slow rhythm of the crisis to invent falla­cious theories and vain hopes about possible ways out of the crisis (restructuring of the productive apparatus, opening up the Chinese market, the eastern bloc, and various other fantasies), we applied a Marxist analysis and proclaimed the permanent, historic character of the crisis. We insisted that it wasn’t a purely contingent affair but would inevitably deepen, that because of the immanent laws of decadent capitalism the crisis could only have one outcome: the march towards generalized war.

This analysis, as is forcefully underlined by the report on the ‘Crisis and Inter-Imperialist Conflicts’, has been fully confirmed by the evolu­tion of the crisis over the last two years. Basing ourselves on this analysis of the evolution of the crisis and on a precise study of the condi­tion of the working class in the present period, we pointed out the inevitability of a resurgence of proletarian class struggle, the enormous, intact capacity of the class to confront the mea­sures of austerity which capitalism is attempting to impose on it. This perspective of a revival of proletarian struggle which was also put for­ward at the Second Congress has now also been fully confirmed and verified.

It’s true that we have sometimes made errors of appreciation and exaggerations about momentary, immediate struggles and that we didn’t always immediately see how the movement of the proleta­riat follows a jagged course. But these errors -- which we in any case corrected more or less quickly -- have never invalidated our basic pers­pective. In order to respond to all the pessi­mistic tendencies which have appeared, even in our own ranks, each time the workers’ struggle entered into one of the troughs of this up-and-down movement; in order to arm ourselves in advance against all tendencies towards skepticism, who can’t see the forest for the trees; in order to respond in detail to all the objections which we’ve already heard and which can always appear again; in order to base our perspectives on solid ground, it was considered necessary to present a report on the ‘Evolution of the Class Struggle’ – a report which is long and detailed, but which is essential if we are to understand this perspective and the orientation of our practical activity.

It’s the same thing with regard to the question of the historic course. It’s absolutely neces­sary to reject the absurd theory of two parallel courses, one towards war, the other towards revolution, which go on infinitely without ever meeting each other, without acting and reacting on each other. Such a ‘theory’ is a bit like the response of a Norman peasant: “Maybe yes, maybe no”. A revolutionary class can’t be content with a theory which simply affirms a fatality, a theory of “we’ll see when we see”.

It’s a thousand times better to investigate some­thing, with all the risks of error that this involves, than not to investigate at all. The investigation which the ICC has undertaken shows the validity of our approach and enables us to give an answer not to the question: what are the forces pushing us towards war?, but, in what way, by whom, are these forces of war being held back, so that they are unable to reach a culminating point? This is what our report on the ‘Historic Course’ is responding to -- a report which is an integral part of our general analysis of the period and evolution of the crisis.

However, it is not the same with our analysis of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie and of the necessity for the left to come to power, which for some years and notably at the Second Congress was the axis of our political conclu­sions about the short term. A specific contribution on this question completes the reports on this change in the situation and its implications for our intervention.

The Congress also adopted a ‘Resolution on the International Situation’, which makes a synthesis of the three general reports on the current situation.

Another part of the work of the Congress was the adoption of a ‘Resolution on the State in the Period of Transition’, a concretization of several years of discussion on the question, a question which will be the subject of a pamphlet publishing the debates that have gone on inside the ICC. An indispensable complement to our intervention and our analysis of the current situation, the theor­etical questions of the period of transition, the content of socialism, the ‘general goals of the movement’ remain a constant concern in the orientations of the ICC.

Finally, we were able to welcome to the Congress delegations from the Communist Workers’ Organiza­tion, Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and Il Leninista, and a comrade who has been participa­ting in the communist conferences in Scandinavia. Debates in the ICC are debates in the workers’ movement and have nothing confidential about them; inviting these groups to the Congress can only contribute to a clearer, more direct knowledge of the positions of the ICC and thus to political clarification within the revolutionary milieu.

The unfolding of the world situation is determined by the complex interactions between the course of the economic crisis and the course of the proletarian class struggle. The course of the economic crisis -- which has become permanent in the epoch of capitalist decadence -- is basica­lly determined by the blind laws which regulate the capitalist accumulation process, which condemn capitalism to survive in a cycle of depression - war - reconstruction, and which inexorably drives the bourgeoisie to imperialist world war as the only capitalist response to the open crisis of generalized over-production. The course of proletarian class struggle, while closely linked to the course of the economic crisis, is also the product of a series of super-structural elements and is not in any way mechanistically determined by the unfolding of the economic crisis. Thus, if the course of the economic crisis, when it erupts in a world-wide depression, is a powerful factor pushing the working class to struggle against a constant worsening of its living and working conditions, the capacity of the proletariat to generalize and politicize its struggles is in the final analysis determined by the development of its class consciousness, its autonomous organization, its revolutionary minorities and the relative weight of bourgeois ideology (nationalism, legalism, electoralism, anti-fascism, national ‘communism’, etc) in its ranks.

The course of the proletarian class struggle its­elf becomes an extremely important factor which affects the very course of the economic crisis. By preventing the operation of capitalist palliatives (deflation, incomes policies, social pacts, lay-offs, ‘rationalizations’, militarizat­ion of labor, etc) the combativity of the working class greatly intensifies the crisis and hurls the bourgeoisie into turmoil and disarray. And if in the midst of a world-wide depression a descendant course of class struggle opens the way for the capitalist ‘solution’ of world war, an ascendant course of class struggle, with its development of class consciousness and the growth of both the unitary and political organs of the class, can turn the economic crisis into a revolutionary crisis, the beginning of the communist transformation of society.

It is on the basis of understanding this very complex interaction between the economic crisis and the action of the proletariat -- which is the essence of Marxism -- that revolutionaries can determine whether the historic course is today towards imperialist world war or towards rising class struggle. And it is on this determination that the form of the intervention of the revolut­ionary organization in the struggle of its class depends.

In this report on the international situation we will first analyze the course of the economic crisis, as well as both the incredible sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonisms which a world­wide depression has brought in its wake, and the political crisis into which the growing economic catastrophe has thrown the bourgeoisie of each nation. We will then trace the course of the proletarian class struggle and its impact on the unfolding of the economic crisis and on the mount­ing tendencies which propel the bourgeoisie towards world war. Finally, on the basis of our study of the interaction between the course of the economic crisis and the course of the prolet­arian class struggle -- of the rapport de force between the bourgeoisie and the working class -- we will show the nature of the historic course today and the factors which could bring about a change in it.

The Economic Crisis

Twelve years after the countries ravaged by the second imperialist world war (Europe, Japan) had again achieved positive trade balances and were able to compete with the US on the world market, thus signaling the end of the post-war reconstruction; eight years after tale collapse of the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods inaugurated a period of unceasing monetary chaos; four years after the sharpest decline in world production and trade since the 1930s -- the world economy in 1979 stands poised on the brink of new and even more devastating economic cataclysms!

In the industrialized countries of the US bloc (the OECD) while industrial production rose over 60% between 1963-73, the rise was less than 13% between 1973-78, or two-fifths the rate achieved before. This drastic slowdown in the growth of industrial production -- now verging on stagnat­ion -- is the grim testimony to the saturation of the world market and to the open crisis of over­production which afflicts the globe’s industrial giants.

One of the most glaring manifestations of the crisis of overproduction is the underutilization of productive capacity, idle plants. The US, even at the cost of new destruct­ive galloping inflation (prices are rising at a yearly rate of over.19%), which if it is not quickly checked threatens economic ruin, has not been able to duplicate its feats of the booms of the 50s and 60s when industry ran almost flat out: in 1978 manufacturing industry ran at only 83% of capacity, and in a key industry like steel production had fallen 7% from the already low level of 1974. But it is America’s allies who are today most devastated by the plague of excess productive capacity, which in a number of vital industries has reached epidemic proportions and is spawning a series of emergency plans to try and eliminate surplus capacity in a coordinated fashion throughout the bloc so as to avert the danger of internecine trade wars.

The contraction in steel production has already reached monumental proportions: between 1974-78 output has dropped 9.4% in Britain, 12% in Japan, 18% in France, 20.5% in West Germany, 22%; in Holland, 26.2% in Belgium and 26.6% in Luxemburg. And there is no end in sight! In Belgium, the steel industry is working at only 57%; of capacity, while in Japan 20% of the country’s blast furnaces are in mothballs. The magnitude of the steel glut is strikingly manifested in the brand new 3 million tons a year blast furnace near Tokyo which its owner, Nippon Kokan, hesitates to even start up since it can only add to the existing overcapacity, and in a new mill in France’s Lorraine province which is being allowed to rust even before it produces any steel whatsoever.

The situation in shipbuilding is even more catastrophic. World orders which stand at 74 million gross registered tons in 1973 fell to only 11 million gross registered tons in 1977 (not even enough to keep Japan’s ship­yards busy, let alone the whole bloc); moreover, orders have declined by 30% since 1977! It is the countries of the American bloc which have been the hardest hit by this virtual collapse of the shipbuilding industry. In France, for instance, new orders will keep no more than a quarter of the present capacity at work. Japan -- which builds half the world’s ships -- is planning to eliminate at least 35% of its ship­building capacity, while the EEC plans to cut almost half its capacity.

In chemicals, the West German industry -- which dominates the world market, even as its giant companies dominate the German industrial scene -- is operating at just 70% of capacity. In petro­chemicals there is a 30% overcapacity in the EEC -- and it is growing. In synthetic fibers, plants in the EEC are now working at 66% capacity, and a 3-year plan of ‘disinvestment’ aimed at reducing capacity by 20% has been drawn up. Meanwhile, Japan’s Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) says that its fibers industry must permanently eliminate 25 of its bloated capacity.

In industries like shipping and automobiles the picture is equally bleak for capital. In countries where shipping is a mainstay of the economy much of the once busy fleets are now idle; in Greece 11%, in Norway 23%; in Sweden 27%. In the automobile industry, while production in the EEC is now running at around 10.6 million cars a year, factories are capable of turning out 12 million cars a year -- and on the basis of current projec­tions, the industry’s capacity will rise to over 13 million cars by 1982. A planned and coordinat­ed contraction (as in steel, shipbuilding and fibers), a spate of bankruptcies or protection­ism are the only alternatives for this key indus­try too.

The concomitant of a persistent and indeed growing excess capacity in key industries has been an alarming sluggishness in investment in new plant, or, to be more precise, the growing obstacles to the realization of surplus value have brought in their wake a slackening in the rate of accumulation. In a world burdened by the weight of idle capacity, investments in new plant cannot fail to stagnate and then decline. And this, as we shall see when we trace the economic perspectives for the 80s, is but the harbinger of a new and violent collapse of production!

The bankers and technocrats vainly seeking to coordinate the economies of the US bloc -- despite the impotence of their economic ‘science’ -- have at least been able to recognize the problem. Thus the savants of the OECD point to “... the slowness in the expansion of the fixed investments of enterprises observed in recent years in practica­lly all member countries ... Even in countries where the sum-total of capital expenditures has increased, until recently, at a relatively high rate, fixed investment of enterprises has remained weak relative to its previous highs.” (Perspect­ives Economiques de 1’ OCDE, July 1978) .

The Bank for International Settlements also points to “... the persistent weakness in expenditures on the fixed capital of enterprises ...” (Banque des Reglements Internationaux, 47 Rayport Annuels , Bale 1977) .

The magnitude of the problem can clearly be seen in the case of West Germany, where the average annual growth rate of manufacturing capacity declined from 6.1% during 1960-65 (the last phase of the post-war reconstruction) to 3.9% during 1966-70 (the onset of the open crisis) and then to 1.8% in 1975, 1.5% in 1976, and 1% in 1977. This catastrophic decline in the rate of accumula­tion in West Germany with its still fat trade sur­plus well illustrates the economic disaster thro­ugh which the world is going. While incapable of grasping either the fundamental or immediate causes of the world economic crisis, the bourgeoi­sie sometimes formulates its dilemmas of idle capital and the utter senselessness of new invest­ment in a perceptive way: “If the United States had to invest approximately 20%, of its GNP in new capacity, there would not be enough warehouses to store all the unsold merchandise, nor enough electronic calculators to make out the unemployment cheques.” (Business Week, Jan. 16, 1977).

The dimensions of the present economic crisis can also be seen in the huge and ever-growing mass of unemployed workers. There are now 18 million unemployed workers in the industrialized countries of the American bloc! This legion of the unemployed does not simply constitute an industr­ial reserve army which exercises a downward pressure on wages, as it did during the ascendant epoch of capitalism in the last century. Nor are the unemployed merely the by-product of the bourgeoisie’s offensive against the proletariat, the fruit of its effort to ‘rationalize’ product­ion and extract more surplus value from even fewer workers. While both of these tendencies are cert­ainly at work, the unemployed in their present massive numbers, far from being a boon to capital­ism have become an incredible burden on the profitability of global capital, which the bourgeoisie is helpless to control. Today, unemployed workers are one more manifestation of the insurmountable contradictions of the capitalist mode of production; they are first and foremost the materialization of the chronic overproduction of the commodity labor power.

To the overproduction of constant capital exemplified by surplus manufacturing capacity and idle plant, must be added the overproduction of variable capital exemplified by the living hell of unemployment on a mass scale. To the growing volume of idle money for which no productive investment is possible must be added an idle generation of young workers (in France, for example, 1 out of every 7 workers under twenty-five years of age is unemployed) whose labor power can no longer increase capital. The agony of a dying capitalism has confirmed the forecast of Marx and Engels of a capitalist mode of produc­tion which “... is incompetent to assure an existence to its slaves within their slavery, because it cannot help letting them sink into such a state that it has to feed them, instead of being fed by them.” (The Communist Manifesto).

The world economic crisis of capitalism, in total disregard of the Trotskyists’ insistence that the countries of the Russian bloc are ‘workers' states’ (sic), has not spared the 10 nations of COMECON1. The violent shockwaves of the open crisis of world overproduction have also convulsed the Russian bloc, and have brought about the same drastic slowdown in the growth of industrial production and fall in the rate of accumulation that afflict the rest of the capitalist world.

In Russia the annual rate of growth of industrial production which was around 10% in 1950-60, declined to around 7% between 1960-70, and for the last Five-Year Plan (1971-76) fell to an anemic 4.5% -- only slightly above the average annual rate of growth for the countries of the OECD during the same period. Moreover, the Russian planners have already had to concede that the objectives for industrial growth of their present Five-Year Plan (1976-80) will not be achieved. In every one of Russia’s satellites in Eastern Europe, the growth in industrial production in 1978 fell below planned targets. And in East Germany, where GNP grew at around 4% in 1978 instead of the planned for 5.2%, hopes for attaining the goals of the Five-Year Plan have been abandoned.

The countries of the Russian bloc are also suffering from a decline in the rate of accumulation. Thus, in Bulgaria, the growth of investment slackened from 6% in 1977 to only 4.4% in 1978. In Hungary, new investments will be practically frozen in 1979 (a rise of little more than 1% forecast), and not a single big investment project will be started this year.

A number of key industries in the Russian bloc are already directly plagued by overproduction and the limits of the saturated world market. Industries which produce largely for the world market, like Poland’s shipyards, the huge new auto plants in Poland and Russia which turn out Polski’s and Lada’s, and engineering factories like Poland’s RABA which sells a quarter of its 930 million annual production to the west, all face the bitter alternative of idle capacity or systematic dumping. This latter, to which these industries have turned, is merely another manifestation of the crisis of overproduction -- and one whose ramifications will be felt through­out the countries of the Russian bloc as the sale of commodities below their cost of production in one group of industries must be compensated for by higher costs in other sectors.

However, the bulk of the industry of the Russian bloc has not directly come up against the limits of a saturated world market. Indeed, Russia and her satellites are caught in the grip of chronic scarcity of capital, seemingly the very opposite of the crisis which is battering the metropoles of the US bloc. Yet both the idle capital in the US bloc and the dearth of capital in the Russian. bloc -- the excess productive capacity in the US bloc and the insufficient productive capacity of the Russian bloc -- are the different manifestations of the same global crisis of overproduction brought about by the saturation of the world market.

The specific manifestations of this crisis in the countries of the Russian bloc -- the lack of capital -- are the result of the relative backwardness of these economies. The GNP of all of Russia’s East European satellites does not equal the GNP of France alone; Russia’s own GNP does not match the combined GNP of Britain, France and Italy (which are certainly not the industrial giants of the US bloc), This backwardness is manifest in all the key areas which determine the competitiveness of an economy on the world market. Despite the almost complete statification of industry in COMECON , the concentration of capital in large-scale enterprises is much more advanced in the US bloc (the fifty largest companies account for nearly one third of America’s industrial production; in Russia, it takes the output of the 660 largest enterprises to reach a comparable figure) . The organic composition of capital is much higher in America than in the Russian bloc (Czechoslovak industry -- one of the most technically advanced in COMECON -- uses a quarter more workers than the average for the EEC2, therefore permitting the US to approp­riate a disproportionate share of global surplus value. The productivity of labor is also much greater in the US bloc than in the Russian bloc (Russian skilled workers are only three-quarters as productive as skilled workers in the US). Finally, the Russian bloc is burdened by a backward and labor-intensive agriculture (between 25-40% of the active population of the COMECON countries still works on the land, while in practically all of the industrialized countries of the US bloc the figure is under 10%).

The fact that Russian capitalism really only began its bid for world power when the capitalist mode of production was already in permanent crisis meant that it could not duplicate the feat of the already dominant economic -- and hence imperialist -- powers who had achieved a formidable accumulat­ion of capital on a still expanding world market. The saturation of the world market, the global crisis of overproduction, placed severe limitat­ions on the development of Russia’s export industries, on her capacity to realize surplus value beyond her frontiers (despite recourse to systematic dumping during the open crisis of the 30s and today), and thereby drastically restricted her capacity to import the advanced technology necessary to overcome her relative backwardness. Despite a forced capitalization, the attempt to compensate for her dearth of capital through an almost total statification (as well as the pillage of the capital stock of the countries conquered in World War II), imperialist Russia has not been able to close the economic gap which separates her from the rival US bloc. The deepen­ing of the present open crisis of world overprod­uction has only accentuated Russia’s economic backwardness, her inability to produce on the same scale as her competitors, and manifests itself east of the Elbe in the form of a chronic dearth of capital in the bulk of industry and agriculture, and in the dumping without which the output of certain key export industries would be un-saleable. Thus, the same global economic crisis brought about by the saturation of the world market, with different economic manifestations, has already led to a persistent and growing slowdown in the rise of industrial production and to a pronounced slackening in the rate of accumulation in both the American and Russian blocs.

In the under-developed countries, where most of the world’s population lives, the open crisis of world overproduction has greatly accentuated the dependence and backwardness to which these ‘independent’ nations are irredeemably condemned by the decadence of capitalism. The mere hand­ful of countries among the under-developed nations where industry has attained a consider­able weight in the national economy are convulsed by the same slowdown in the growth of industrial production, fall in the rate of accumulation and mass of unemployment on a rapidly growing scale which afflict the industrial giants -- despite the pervasive protectionism designed to stave off the competition of the industrial behemoths like the US, West Germany and Japan, as well as dumping by Russian industry. In Argentina, industrial production fell by 6% in 1978 and whole sectors of industry -- automobiles, (Gen­eral Motors has closed all its plants), agricult­ural machinery, steel, chemicals, petrochemicals have their backs to the wall. In Brazil, the anticipated growth in GNP of 5% this year (which has already become problematical in the face of a credit squeeze brought on by a skyrocketing annual inflation rate of over 60%) is only half the annual rate achieved during the economic ‘miracle’ a decade ago, and much too low to per­mit the creation of the l.5 million new jobs each year without which unemployment will soar. In Mexico, where real GNP rose 6-8% annually between 1958-73, the growth in GNP was only 2.5% in 1977. Investment, which grew at an annual rate of 23.1% between 1965-70, slowed to an annual rate of 17.8% between 1971-78; moreover, whereas the state acc­ounted for just one-third of this investment in 1965-70, the still high rate of investment between 1971-78 was only possible because the state, as a result of very heavy borrowing from foreign banks, provided about 90% of it -- producing not an accumulation of capital but an accumulation of debt. To all this must be added the fact that total or partial unemployment is already the lot of 52% of the active population! In South Africa, economic growth slowed last year to a weak 2.5%, far too low to prevent a rise in unemployment from an already staggering 2 million workers.

In the vast bulk of under-developed countries, the national economy revolves almost exclusively around the extraction of raw materials of agric­ultural production (usually one or two cash crops) The open crisis has exacerbated to an incredible degree the tendencies which have characterized these economies since the very onset of capitalist decadence more than seventy years ago: permanent agricultural crisis and absolute dependence on imported foodstuffs in what are predominantly agrarian economies; the enormous growth of a sub-proletariat cut off from the rural villages from which capital has separated it and condemned to a jobless existence in the vast shanty towns and bidonvilles which have grown up around the comm­ercial and political urban centers; in short, mass starvation and destitution.

The impossibility of the under-developed countries overcoming their backwardness and dependence is all too clear: assuming zero-growth in the indust­rialized countries of the western bloc, those under-developed countries which already have an industrial base (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, etc) would take sixty-five years of growth at their 1970-76 rate to catch up to the per capita GNP of the industrialized countries; for the bulk of the under-developed countries -- assum­ing the same conditions -- it would take 746 years! Yet while the crisis inexorably drives the indust­rialized countries towards stagnation and even decline in industrial output, it even more surely condemns the under-developed countries to economic collapse, thus making absolutely certain that the already enormous gap between the industrial giants and the under-developed countries will widen over the coming decade.

The global slowdown in the growth of production and in the rate of accumulation has brought in its wake a slowdown in the growth of world trade. After the sharp decline of around 10% in the trade of the OECD countries in the first half of 1975, these countries’ foreign trade jumped in 1976 only to virtually stagnate the next year; after another jump in 1978 -- though much weaker than in 1976 and largely due to America’s reflations -- their foreign trade is now again practically stagnant. The foll­owing table, which traces the growth of the value of imports and exports of the seven principal coun­tries of the OECD (USA, Japan, West Germany, UK, Canada, Italy) which account for the vast bulk of the world’s trade, clearly illustrates the stag­nation which characterizes the vital element in the health of the global capitalist economy which is international commerce.

GROWTH IN THE VOLUME OF IMPORTS AND EXPORTS OF THE 7 PRINCIPAL COUNTRIES OF THE OECD (WITH RESPECT TO THE PRECEDING HALF YEAR)
	1976	1977	1977	1978	1978	1979*	1979*
	II	I	II	I	II	I	II
Imports	12.7	3.9	1.2	7.2	8.5	4.5	3.5
Exports	6.9	5.9	4.4	5.0	6.0	4.5	4.5
Source: Perspectives Economique de l’OCDE, 23/24 * estimates

However, the inability of world trade to develop is minimized and considerably obscured by the very statistics with which the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF and other capitalist agencies and instit­utions use to monitor the condition of internat­ional commerce3. The bourgeoisie fails to appreciate the significance of the fact that 70% of the foreign trade of the OECD countries is among themselves -- and that it is this intra-bloc trade that accounts for most of the growth that the stat­istics indicate4. When world trade dropped off so quickly and catastrophically in the open crisis of the 1930s, six of the seven of today’s principal trading countries (Canada was the exception) were then bitter imperialist rivals. Today, all seven of these countries find themselves firmly within the same imperialist bloc and the trade between them indicates as much the nature of the complex division of labor and economic interpenetration which the US has imposed on its bloc as a real growth in what has traditionally been international commerce. Much the same can be said about the fact that 50% of the trade of the Comecon countries is with each other, and that this too is the fastest growing component of each country’s trade.

Moreover, in tracing the very slow growth in world trade over the past five years, the bourgeoi­sie is incapable of grasping the significance which must be attached to the composition of this trade. Approximately 25% of the value of world trade in 1977 consisted of foreign travel, invest­ment income and other ‘services’ which represent paper or fictitious values and unproductive expenses which in no way constitute a real expan­sion of trade. Similarly, a considerable portion of both the value and volume of world trade con­sists directly of armaments (43.7 billion dollars between 1971-75, 76% of which is with the underdeveloped countries) which from the standpoint of global capital represents not a growth but a sterilization of value, not an expansion but a destruction of global capital5. The fantastic development of unproductive expenditures -- the hallmark of capitalist decadence -- one aspect of which is the growth of the arms trade, is obscured by the fact that a very considerable part of world trade which is actually for military purposes is hidden in the figures for the growth in trade in raw materials like crude oil, copper, nickel, tin, lead, zinc, molybdenum, etc of which around 10% at least is for armaments and the trade in electronic equipment and heavy machinery much of which (nuclear reactors for example) is for military production.

Finally, a huge part of the growth in world trade – particularly over the past five years – has its counterpart rapidly growing trade deficits and an astronomical rise in the foreign debt of the underdeveloped countries. The overall trade deficit of the underdeveloped countries rose from 7.5 billion dollars in 1973 to 34 billion dollars in 1978; the foreign debt of these same countries grew from 74.1 billion dollars in 1973 to 244 billion in 1978, and is the essential element in financing these mounting trade deficits. This huge debt indicates that the growth in trade which bourgeois economists have recorded hides the fact that there has been no real expansion of the world market. Indeed, as we shall see, effective demand on a world scale is shrinking at a rate which the expansion of world credit can no longer compensate for.

The stagnation of world capital over the past four years – which shattered the hopes that the bourgeoisie entertained of a recovery from the sharp downturn of 1974-75 -- now threatens to give way to another and much more devastating collapse of pro­duction, investment and world trade as the crisis of overproduction relentlessly deepens.

After the economic downturn which shook the countries of the US bloc in 1970-71, virtually all governments reflated (and the credit expansion fuelled the galloping inflation which followed). In the aftermath of the much more severe downturn of 1974-75 -- which convulsed both blocs simultan­eously -- only the US reflated and to it fell the burden of propping up the rest of its bloc for the next few years. Meanwhile, West Germany and Japan hurled themselves into an export offensive which fattened their trade surpluses and profits while their home markets stagnated. By 1978, however, the declining competitiveness of American goods of the world market, the US’s astronomical trade deficits and the collapse of the dollar, meant that Washington too would have to put on the economic brakes. The Bonn summit last July was intended to pressure West Germany and Japan to rein in their exports and to reflate their economies so as to relieve the pressure on the US while keeping the world economy from collapsing anew.

The months which followed the economic summit were to demonstrate that the US had succeeded to a considerable degree in imposing its diktat on its reluctant allies. Japan projected a budget defi­cit this fiscal year of 80 billion dollars equal to 40% of its total budget and larger than America’s), and Japan’s imports have been growing at a rate twice as fast as its exports, West Germany adopted a budget which would inject an additional 15.5 billion Deutsche Marks into its economy (equal to 1% of GNP). One result of more restrictive monetary police in the US, and German and Japanese reflation, was a dramatic rise of the dollar: between November 1978 and April 1979 the dollar rose more than 10% against the DM and 22% against the Japanese yen.

However, even the most optimistic forecasts of the bourgeoisie (the OECD for example) indicated that German and Japanese expansion in 1979 would not compensate for the slackening in the growth of America’s GNP. Therefore, a realistic appraisal of economic trends could only lead to the conclusion that the stagnation of the past few years would give way to a downturn in 1979. Rea­lity though has been even more brutal in the first months of 1979. GNP in the US grew at only 0.7% in the first quarter (less than half the rate forecast by the OECD last December) and is now actually declining. The galloping inflation which is today raging in the US precludes any significant stimulation by fiscal or monetary policy to halt the decline. Meanwhile the stimulative monetary policies and reflationary budgets in West Germany and Japan quickly ignited the fires of galloping inflation in those countries (the annual rate of inflation was 10% in West Germany in March and 11% in Japan in February); this has now provoked a credit squeeze and the aborting of reflationary policies, which has rudely shattered the hopes for substantial rises in GNP to even partially offset the decline in America. The nightmare that has haunted the technocrats and bankers of the OECD and the IMF is becoming a reality: virtually all of industrialized countries of the US bloc will be deflating their economies simultaneously!

Idle manufacturing capacity and deflation through­out the US bloc cannot be offset by a new expansion of trade with either the Russian bloc or the under­developed countries. The hard currency indebted­ness of the countries of the Russian bloc to the US bloc has risen from 32 to 36 billion dollars in 1976 to around 50 billion today. Poland -- which owes a staggering 15 billion dollars is already tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Western bankers, trying to salvage their previous invest­ments, are in no position to grant the huge new credits that alone would make possible the financing of the mounting trade deficits of the Russian bloc with the west -- which rose from 4.9 billion dollars in 1977 to 6 billion dollars in 1978. Moreover, the preoccupation of the bureaucrats of the countries of the Russian bloc today is to limit their imports from the west -- even as they engage in massive dumping of their own commodities on western markets -- so as to reduce their spiraling trade deficits.

Turning to the underdeveloped countries, the countries of the US bloc face the same dilemma. With 244 billion dollars in foreign debt, the underdeveloped countries are virtually bankrupt and reduced to calling for debt moratoria. In countries like Algeria, Zambia, and Zaire the foreign debt is equal to more than half the annual GNP. The 5 billion dollar service on Brazil’s foreign debt in 1978 was equal to about 55% of the total value of its exports for the year. Mexico spent 6 billion dollars servicing its foreign debt in 1979, while its huge oil resources yielded only 1.7 billion dollars in exports. In the face of the sheer magnitude of such debts and the growing difficulty in servicing them, new loans -- which the west is increasingly hesitant to make -- far from expanding trade will be used primarily to assure the servicing of past debts and to avert the financial debacle for western banks which defaults would bring in their wake.

While the enormous expansion of credit within the US bloc, to the Russian bloc and to the under­developed countries over the past decade had to an extent masked the shrinking of effective demand on a global scale, the harvest of galloping inflation and un-payable debts -- a mass of paper values -- has virtually put an end to recourse to such a palliative today.

The Chinese market, which only a year ago aroused such hopes in business and financial circles throughout the US bloc, cannot provide sufficient outlets for the idle plant in major industries. China’s need for massive imports of technology and machinery is not matched by the resources with which to pay for these imports. After the ambitious plans announced in March 1978, China had to freeze thirty major plant import deals with Japan this February, when the Peking bureau­cracy thought twice about the consequences of its original ‘modernization’ plans. China will certainly grow as a market for the US bloc (part­icularly for armaments), but not as fast as the west thought a year ago; nor will China compensate for the stagnation and imminent downturn in world trade -- particularly as in the intense competition for the Chinese market between western countries there will be more losers than winners. Moreover, the Chinese will try to flood saturated western markets with textiles, shoes etc, thus compound­ing the global overproduction which already characterizes the consumer goods industries where Chinese capitalism is even now competitive.

For West Germany and Japan -- the countries of the US bloc whose economies are most competitive on the world market -- the end of reflation at home and the severe limits to extending credit abroad mean that an unrestrained export offensive at the expense of their trade rivals within the bloc looms as the most viable way to try to weather the growing economic storms. Such a move by the German and Japanese bourgeoisies cannot fail to fan the flames of protectionism smoldering just beneath the surface of the weaker economies of the US bloc (Britain, France, Italy) , and even in the US. The possible response in the form of competitive devaluations and import controls which would upset the European Monetary System and abort the just-concluded ‘Tokyo Round’ orchestrated by American imperialism, accelerating the collapse of world trade and producing a rush to autarchy, are issues we will take up when we discuss the political crisis of the bourgeoisie. For the moment it is sufficient to point out that a new German and Japanese foreign trade offensive can only deepen the world crisis.

The inexorable deepening of the global crisis of overproduction, and the failure of the several palliatives with which the bourgeoisie has vainly sought to stem the ravages of the blind laws which determine the course of the economic crisis, has brought world capital to the brink of another decline in industrial production, investment and trade -- sharper than the downturns of 1971 and 1974 -- as the 1980s begin6.

Inter-Imperialist Antagonisms

There is only one section of the world economy which will grow significantly over the next several years: the armaments industry, war production. The case of Syria where military expenditure con­stitutes 57.2 per cent of the state’s budget, while the productive sector of the economy coll­apses, is typical of the underdeveloped countries today. Those ex-colonies with any appreciable industrial sector, like South Africa, Israel, Argentina and Brazil, are spending billions of dollars to build nuclear bombs and delivery systems while galloping inflation and astronomical foreign debts ravage their economic base. Even countries whose industry remains confined to a few pitiful islands in an ocean of backward agricul­ture and cottage industries, like India and Pakistan, are exhausting dwindling exchange resources to expand and develop a capacity to wage nuclear war. In the imperialist metropoles, armaments production will zoom upwards while the rest of the economy contracts over the coming years. The Russian bloc is deploying its new SS-20 nuclear missiles which are capable of destroying every major city in Western Europe, and is augmenting its land armies so as to be able to reach the Atlantic coast in a few days march; to this must be added the prodigious development of the Russian navy, by which the Kremlin is determined to challenge America’s hegemony on the seas. The countries of the US bloc too are signi­ficantly increasing their military budgets, even as they slash other expenditures (France’s mili­tary budget increased 5 per cent this year while the Barre Plan calls for the scaling down of whole sectors of the economy). NATO is both planning to introduce a new system of nuclear missiles capable of hitting targets in Russia from Western Europe, and greatly expanding the whole infra­structure of ports, air fields, fuel depots, storage facilities etc, so as to facilitate the speedy transport of American troops and equipment to the European front in the event of war. Mean­while, the US is already re-examining its decision not to produce the neutron bomb, and is preparing to build a completely new intercontinental ball­istic missile system - the MX. Finally, the US bloc has enthusiastically joined Peking in its massive and costly program to modernize all branches of the Chinese armed forces.

The war economy, where the production of the means of destruction becomes the very axis of industrial production, is not a new phenomenon. The out­break of the first imperialist world war in 1914, which clearly marked the entrance of world capital into its decadent phase, had as its corollary the development of the war economy. Just as capita­lism’s historic crisis is a permanent one, so too is each national capital characterized by a permanent war economy in this decadent epoch of capitalism. However, just as the permanent crisis is marked by a cycle of depression-war-reconstruc­tion, a cycle in which there are passing respites from the ravages of open crisis and the devasta­tions of world war, so the permanent war economy is marked also by a zig-zag movement in which there are sometimes short periods when a decline in war production occurs (Europe and the US during the reconstruction of the 1920s; the US between the end of World War II and the outbreak of the Korean war, 1946-50). Nonetheless, like the historic crisis itself, the war economy has been a constant feature of capitalism since 1914. The present phase of world-wide depression, though, is bringing in its wake an incredible strengthen­ing of the war economy -- not simply on a national scale but dictated, coordinated and organized by the mammoth continental state capitalism, the US or Russia, which dominates each of the two contending imperialist blocs.

The present phase of monstrous growth of the war economy is neither a palliative for the rapidly deepening economic crisis nor a factor which can provide even a momentary facade of ‘prosperity’. Under all conditions, by its hyper-development of the unproductive sector of the economy, war pro­duction drains surplus value from the remaining islands of profitable activity. In all circum­stances, the war economy involves an assault on the proletariat: “... war is realized at the expense of the working masses, who are drained y the state (through various financial devices -- taxes, inflation, loans and other measures) of values with which it constitutes a supplementary and new purchasing power” (‘Report on the International Situation’, National Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France, July 1945). If the rearmament programs of Hitler, Blum and Roosevelt in the 1930s could temporarily stimulate their economies and even lead elements of the communist left to think that the war economy might open up an epoch of economic expansion and bring with it a rise in the living standards of the working class7, both the short-lived economic stimulant and the illusions it produced were due to the massive state debts incurred and the inflationary policies pursued by the capitalist governments. Today, however, the strengthening of the war economy in the midst of an already intolerable level of state debt and rampant inflation (themselves in large part the ransom capital has paid for some forty years of almost uninterrupted growth in arms production), and therefore recourse to debt and inflation as the specific way to make the working class pay for the war economy is impossible. Instead, the present phase of expanding war production will be accompanied by deflation, budget cuts in all non-military areas and draconian austerity programs, thereby precluding even a momentary stimulative effect on the economy as a whole. Indeed, because of the enormous waste represented by the surplus value crystallized in armaments, whose realization intensifies the inflationary spiral and which cannot re-enter the productive cycle, thereby becoming a dead-loss for global capital, the war economy can only exacerbate the economic decline and accelerate the fall in the living standards of the proletariat.

Nevertheless, war production will continue its dizzying growth at the expense of all other econo­mic activity, swallowing up whole sectors of industry (shipbuilding, electronics, construction etc) as their ‘civilian’ activities relentlessly shrink. The strengthening of the war economy is an absolute necessity for capital, though the “object of war production is not the solution of an economic problem” (ibid). The war economy is vital to capitalism only because of the inevitabi­lity of imperialist world war if the proletariat does not smash the bourgeoisie. War production as the axis of the economy is the bourgeoisie’s response to the blind laws which, in condemning capitalism to an inexorable deepening of the economic crisis, sharpen inter-imperialist antagonisms to the breaking point. The sole function of the war economy is ... imperialist world war!

In its decadent phase, imperialist world war has become the very condition for the survival of capitalism:

“The more the market contracts, the more bitter becomes the struggle for sources of raw materials, and for the mastery of the world market. The economic struggle between differ­ent capitalist groups concentrates more and more, taking on its most finished form in struggles between states. The aggravated economic struggle between states can only be finally resolved by military force. War be­comes the sole means, not of resolving the international crisis, but through which each national imperialism tries to overcome its problems at the expense of rival imperialist states.” (ibid)

While it is the economic crisis which creates the necessity for the bourgeoisie to unleash a world war, the capacity of the bourgeoisie to impose its ‘solution’ of imperialist war is strictly determined by the rapport de force between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is to this question that we will return in the discussion on the historical course.

Before discussing the actual strategies of the contending imperialist blocs today and surveying the zones of inter-imperialist confrontation, there are some general comments on the physiognomy of capitalism in the imperialist epoch which we think it is important to make. All the more so as confusion has existed and persists within the revolutionary movement on a number of characteristics in the epoch when it is permanently convulsed by latent or open imperialist war.

The process of concentration and centralization of capital, which is one of the hallmarks of the bourgeois mode of production, has been transposed by some revolutionaries onto the imperialist chessboard where it emerges as almost a teleologi­cal process bringing about an ultimate world unity of capital as the outcome of the concentra­tion process in the imperialist epoch:

“It is necessary ... to see in the wars of the imperialist epoch the decisive moments in the process of world concentration of capital and of power; not simply struggles for a new division of the world, but the advance towards the universal domination of one single exploiting group ... And the limit of this process is -- if the proletarian revolution doesn’t intervene -- the domination of the world by a single imperialist state ...” (Pierre Chaulieu, ‘Situation de 1’Imperialisme et Perspectives du Proletariat’, Socialisme ou Barbarie, no.14)

This view of imperialist wars as bringing about the world unity of capital, which is an updated version of Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism, this time realized not peacefully but through imperialist butcheries, “... loses contact with the reality of the decadent capitalist world: despite the inter-imperialist antagonisms which make the capitalist world momentarily appear as two single fighting units, the tendency is for the decadent capitalist world to go towards disintegration, disorganization, the dislocation of units ... It is in the tendency of decadent capitalism to greater and greater division, to chaos, that the necessity for socialism bringing about the world as a unity resides” (Internatio­nalisme, no.37, 1948) . Through state capitalism, national liberation struggles and world wars, capital in its decadent phase tends to destroy the limited degree of unity which it had itself brought about in its ascendant phase with the formation of the world market and the internatio­nal division of labor. In their place, decadent capitalism imprisons the productive forces within the narrow limits of a veritable plethora of separate national states8. Together with the sterilization of value through war production and the enormous destruction of imperialist war, the formation of new national states is one of the manifestations of decadent capitalism’s complete inability to develop the productive forces.

The formation of two giant imperialist blocs, dominated by Russia and America, led some revolu­tionaries to see the ruling class in each national state as the simple pawn or fifth column of Moscow or Washington. Thus, for the French Bordigists of the late 1940s, the Stalinist par­ties then vying for power in Western Europe could only be the pure and simple instruments of the Russian ruling class: “In order to succinctly characterize the different Communist Parties, we would say that they are fifth columns of Russian imperialism in the enemy camp” (Chaze, ‘L’ Imper­ialisme Russe Contre-Attaque’, L’Internationaliste, November 1947). Such a view completely fails to grasp the fact that the constitution of the two great blocs is not simply a function of the imperialist interests of Moscow and Washington, but also of the necessity for each local bourgeoisie to advance and defend its own national interests and imperialist interests as best it can:

“In the epoch of imperialism, the defense of national interest can only take place within the enlarged framework of an imperialist bloc. It is not as a fifth column, as a foreign agent, but as a function of its immediate or long-term interests, properly understood that a national bourgeoisie opts for and adheres to one of the world blocs which exists. It is around this choice for one bloc or the other bloc that the division and internal struggle within the bourgeoisie takes place; but this division always takes place on the basis of a single concern and a single common goal: the national interest, the interest of the national bourgeoisie.” (L’Internationalisme, no.30, 1948)

Closely related to the inability to see the vital interests of each national bourgeoisie in the constitution of, and the choice between, contend­ing imperialist blocs, is the view of the Communist Workers’ Organization (CWO) that in the present epoch, while other countries may ‘aspire’ to become imperialist, only Russia and the US are imperialist states:

“... imperialism is a policy of the major capitalist powers ... the idea that all coun­tries are imperialist undermines the idea of imperialist blocs .., how could it be argued that, for example, Israel was an independent imperialist power?” (Revolutionary Perspectives, no. 12)

Certainly, Israel is not an ‘independent’ power, whatever such a term is intended to mean by the CWO. The Jewish state is forced by the realities of decadent capitalism to try and satisfy its very real and voracious imperialist appetites (Greater Israel -- all of the old Palestine mandate, Lebanon south of the Litani River, the Syrian Golan Heights, part of the Sinai, almost all of Jordan), and to defend its no less real -- though more modest – imperialist acquisitions, within the framework of an imperialist bloc. From Rosa Luxemburg’s grasp of the fact that during the first world war a state like little Serbia was “reaching out toward the Adriatic coast where it is fighting out a real imperialist conflict with Italy on the backs of the Albanians ...” (Junius Pamphlet), to the ICC’s recognition that the recent clashes between Vietnam and Cambodia turned into a full scale invasion by Hanoi as “ … the consequence of the imperialist interests of the two countries, and particularly of Vietnam whose crushing military superiority made it possible to realistically envisage an ‘Indo­chinese Federation’ placed under its domination.” (Internationalisme, no.29, February 1979), revolutionary Marxists have understood that in decadent capitalism every national state is imperialist. It is only by starting from this fact that the complex inter-relation between the national interests of a local bourgeoisie and the overall needs of the imperialist bloc to which it is bound can be grasped, and the real nature of localized inter-imperialist wars and national liberation struggles understood.

Some revolutionaries argue that the basis for antagonisms between states and therefore, the composition of an imperialist bloc is solely determined by the prevailing trade or commercial rivalries on the world market. This is the view of the PCI (Programma Comunista) which in its analysis of inter-imperialist antagonisms in Africa has fixated on the clashes between the US, West Germany, France, Britain, and Italy which are today the result of trade rivalries, almost to the exclusion of the titanic struggles between the US and Russian blocs in which geopolitical, military and strategic necessities -- strictly limited to the overall economic interests of each -- are the determining factors. But it is in the hands of Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC) that this view, which mistakenly reduces economic interests to only one single factor, the present source of a country’s imports and the destination of its exports, has become the basis of a ‘new’ theory which makes it absolutely impossible to understand the unfolding of inter-imperialist antagonisms today. Because West Germany and Japan are the biggest trade rivals of the US, the PIC for several years has insisted on a crumbling of the US bloc; because trade between West Germany and Russia’s East European satellites has grown so prodigiously, the PIC has insisted on a crumbling of the Russian bloc. This, together with the belief that the strictly commercial interests of the US and Russia are complementary (Russia needs American technology and capital, while the US wants Russia’s raw materials), has led the PIC to put forward the theory of the emergence of new blocs: the US and Russia as one bloc; a German-dominated Europe, Japan and China as the other!

Neither the constitution of imperialist blocs nor the outbreak of imperialist wars can be explained simply by reference to the trading interests of the various national states. Were narrow commer­cial interests the determining factor that the PIC thinks they are, then an imperialist war between Great Britain and the US (and not the struggle between Anglo-American and German imperialism) would have broken out in the 1930s; America was a far more dangerous commercial rival of Britain’s in the markets which were critical to the Empire’s trade and payments surpluses (India, China, Australasia, Canada, South America) than Germany, which challenged Britain only in the less important central and Eastern European markets. It was the geopolitical and strategico-military considerations that a German dominated Europe would condemn the British Empire -- dependent as it was on the Mediterranean life-line -- to economic extinction that determined the ultimate configuration of the imperia­list blocs. Similarly, were trades what most concerned American imperialism in the 1930s, Washington would have infinitely preferred Japan (which was an excellent trading partner) to China (where opportunities for trade were not nearly so good). However, not trade in the strict sense, but the geopolitical question of military -- and hence overall economic -- domination of the Pacific dictated the course of events which would explode in imperialist war between America and Japan.

Today, the crushing economic superiority of America over its bloc (the dollar as the dominant reserve currency, the role of the IMF, the ‘Tokyo Round’, etc), and the absolute strategic-­military dependence of Western Europe and Japan on American imperialism (oil, raw materials, pro­tection of sea lanes) on the one hand, and the overwhelming military superiority of Russian imperialism throughout its borderlands (Warsaw Pact) on the other, conclusively demonstrate that the dominant tendency is that of the consoli­dation and strengthening of the existing US and Russian blocs. The consolidation of the war economy on the inter-continental scale of each bloc and the lines of localized inter-imperialist wars all indicate that the blocs are already con­stituted for a third imperialist butchery. The third world war towards which the blind laws of capitalism and the course of the economic crisis relentlessly drive the ruling class -- and to which only the class struggle of the proletariat now bars the way -- can only be a titanic conflict between Russian and American imperialism for world dominion9.

The basic strategies of Russian and American imperialism are determined by their relative economic weight on the world market. Because of its competitive weakness and technical backward­ness, the fate of Russian imperialism is integra­lly linked to the acquisition of an advanced industrial infrastructure and technology, which in the present epoch is dependent on its capacity to militarily dominate the West European and/or Japanese heartlands. The GNP of Russia in 1976 was less than half the GNP of America. With the addition of Japan’s industrial base, the Russian bloc would match America’s productive output; with the addition of Western Europe’s industrial might, Russian imperialism would easily outstrip its American rival in productive capacity and effectively challenge her in war-making potential. It is for this reason that the real object of Russian imperialism is the giant industrial centers of Europe and the Far East, and why a direct challenge to either would immediately lead to the outbreak of hostilities between the US and Russia. However, the strategy of Russian imperialism is not one of frontal attack, but to cut Europe and Japan off from their sources of energy and vital raw materials in the Middle East and Africa, to sever the trade routes on which their economies depend, and thereby to put enormous pressure on their ruling classes to preserve their national and imperialist interests through a reorientation towards the Russian bloc. In this sense, Moscow’s sustained efforts to destabilize the Middle East and Africa through national libera­tion struggles, and to acquire secure military bases in these regions, has as its real objective the industrial potential of Europe and Japan; the underdeveloped countries of the southern hemisphe­re are the soft underbelly through which Russian imperialism seeks to gain its overall objective of decisively altering the balance of power between the blocs.

If one vital element in the strategy of US imper­ialism is the protection of the vast areas it gobbled up in the two preceding imperialist butcheries, this is not to say that the posture of America is purely defensive. The two-thirds of the world which American imperialism already dominates are no longer sufficient to preserve its economic equilibrium. The devastating blows of the economic crisis dictate that the US fight for an even bigger share of world production, of the global surplus value, and thus for control of even greater numbers of workers, and even more of the world’s resources of raw materials and industrial capacity. The depth of the crisis is such that only the unimpeded control of the whole world market can now afford America even the very short respite which is all that is possible in decadent capitalism. And yet, the very nature of capitalism in the imperialist epoch, with its dominant tendency towards divisions and disaggregation precludes even this.

The past several years have seen a considerable strengthening of American imperialism and weaken­ing of its Russian rival. The integration of China into the US bloc and the commitment to Peking’s massive rearmament mean that the Kremlin will face an increasingly powerful force on its eastern frontier -- and one which can firmly bar the way to the industrial riches of Japan. Not even Russian imperialism’s effort to outflank China through the Indo-Chinese peninsula can minimize this victory for US imperialism in the Far East. In the vast Islamic belt that stretches across Asia from India to Turkey, despite Russian domination of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah in Iran, this vital area is far from having fallen to the Kremlin. The prospect of the disintegration of Iran and the growth of national liberation struggles among the Azarbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans, may benefit America and not Russia, while the American-backed Islamic resistance to the Kabul regime may yet spell defeat for Russia in Afghanistan. In the Middle East, while a Pax Americana is far from complete and the Palestine abscess continues to fester giving Russian imperialism ample scope to destabi­lize the region, the opposition of even hitherto pro-Russian Arab regimes like Iraq to the Russian-inspired invasion of North Yemen by South Yemen indicates the difficulties of Russian imperialism in this crucial area. Finally, in Africa, America’s economic weight and France’s (and soon Egypt’s) military intervention is and will con­tinue to be a formidable obstacle to new Russian initiatives. In Africa, the Kremlin’s foothold is far from secure anywhere. While the next few years will see new and bloody inter-imperialist confrontations in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the response of American imperialism to the Russian onslaught has so far been generally crowned with success.

The Political Crisis of the Bourgeoisie

The economic collapse, in the face of which all palliatives have proven useless, the incredible sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the growing combativity of the proletariat have thrown the bourgeoisie into turmoil, and exacer­bated the divergences within its ranks. The bourgeoisie is incapable of achieving unity and coherence as a class; it is divided not only into a multiplicity of irreconcilable national factions but also into a number of different and competing factions within the frontiers of each national state. In the ascendant phase of capitalism, the divisions within each national bourgeoisie largely corresponded to the different types of capital engaged in the accumulation process (industrial capital, commercial capital, bank capital, land­lords etc), to the types of commodities produced (heavy industry, light industry, mining etc), or to the size of the capital (big, medium and small capitalists). In decadent capitalism, where state capitalism is a universal tendency, the bourgeois as an individual owner of a particular quantum of the global national capital is either expropriated by the state or through the gradual fusion of big capital and the state it merges and overlaps with the state bureaucracy. The result is that the individual bourgeois -- parti­cularly in its upper layers -- is no longer solely or even primarily interested in the profits of one particular company or the valorization of his personal capital; rather the interests of each bourgeois are increasingly bound up with the interests and profitability of the global national capital and its personification, the capitalist state.

However, the fact that the bourgeoisie of each national state undergoes an increasing homogeni­zation of its interests around the needs of the global national capital, expressed through the growing power of the totalitarian state apparatus, does not eliminate divergences and factions within the ruling class. Questions of how to interpret the needs of the national capital, the program or orientations which best express these needs, the precise way to assure the stability of the state, produce divisions within the bourgeoisie. Thus, at the present time, divisions occur in virtually every national faction of the bourgeoisie over:

-- the degree of statification (with the more anachronistic sectors of the bourgeoisie vainly trying to resist the advance of state capitalism);

-- the economic policies to pursue in the face of the crisis (inflation vs deflation, protectionism vs ‘free trade’) ;

-- which imperialist bloc provides the best framework for the defense of the national capital, or the degree of integration into the bloc to which a particular national state is bound;

-- which strata or classes of the population to support in order to try to constitute a mass base in support of the needs of the national capital, which mystifications are most appropriate (nationalist, religious, populist, ‘democratic’, racist, ‘socialist’).

While debates rage over each of these issues in the higher circles of the bureaucracy, the military and the great economic and financial entities in each national state, as we enter the 1980s in the beginning of a world-wide resurgence of class struggle, it is the containment of the proletariat that most preoccupies the bourgeoisie everywhere today. In the industrialized countries of the US bloc, while the left in power over the last several years has been the best vehicle for the state capitalist measures which the deepening of the economic crisis makes necessary and for the more thoroughgoing integration into the US bloc which the heightening of imperialist antagon­isms dictates, the right in power, too, is capable of implementing these policies. However, only the left has a real chance of containing an undefeated proletariat. This was the essential task of the left as it came to power, shared power or prepared to assume power in country after country on the crest of the wave of prole­tarian struggles that began in 1968 and lasted until 1972-74. In Portugal, Britain and Italy, for instance, where the violence of the working class shook the bourgeoisie to its very founda­tions, the left in power (or providing indispen­sable support for the government in the case of Italy) achieved remarkable success over the past few years in drastically reversing the balance between profits and wages to the benefit of capital, in imposing draconian austerity on the prole­tariat and in breaking the first violent response of the working class to the open crisis.

However, as this past winter’s wave of strikes which shattered the social contract in Britain clearly demonstrated, the left in power, or moderating its ‘proletarian’ rhetoric in quest of power, has by now alienated its worker base and lost the tenuous ideological hold over the prole­tariat which it briefly regained between 1972-78. A cure of opposition, during which time the left can ‘radicalize’ its language and once again appeal to combative workers in the name of ‘socialism’ and ‘proletarian revolution’ is now vital if the left is to even have a chance of fulfilling its indispensable role of containing and diverting the class struggle.

Today it is imperative for the bourgeoisie that the resurgence of class struggle find the left not in power but in opposition. It will be on the crest of this new wave of class struggle that a more ‘extreme’ left will come to power as the last rampart of capital. The eruption of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie’s preparations to meet it with the left in opposition irrefutably demonstrate the truth of Marxism’s understanding that the class struggle is the motor of history.

The Second International Conference of groups of the Communist Left (November 1978) showed that there is today an extreme confusion in the ranks of the revolutionary movement about the present historical period, and more precisely about:

-- the existence of a historic alternative (proletarian revolution or generalized imperialist war) opened up by capitalism entering a new phase of acute crisis (the summit of this confusion obviously being reached by those groups who don’t even see that there is a crisis);

-- the possibility of making pronouncements about the nature of the historical course (war or revolution);

-- the nature of the present course;

-- the political and organizational implications of the analyses made about the course;

More generally, there are misunderstandings about:

-- the possibility and necessity for revolutio­naries to make predictions;

-- the existence of different periods in the course of the class struggle and in the nature of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

This text aims to give answers to all these questions.

1. Can revolutionaries make predictions?

The very nature of all human activity presupposes foresight, prediction. For example, Marx wrote:

“The operations carried out by a spider resem­ble those of a weaver, and many a human architect is put to shame by the bee in the constr­uction of its wax cells. However, the poorest architect is categorically distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built it in his head.” (Marx, Capital, Vol. I)

Every human act works in this way. Man constantly uses foresight. Only by transforming hypotheses based on an initial series of experiences into predictions, and by confronting these predictions with new experiences, can the researcher verify (or invalidate) these hypotheses and advance his understanding.

Based as it is on a scientific approach to social reality, the revolutionary thought of the proletariat necessarily functions in this way. The only difference is that, in contrast with resear­chers, revolutionaries cannot create the condi­tions for new experiments in laboratories. Only social practice can confirm or refute the perspec­tives they put forward, verify or invalidate their theory. All aspects of the historical move­ment of the working class have been based on predictions. It is this which allows the forms of its struggle to adapt to each epoch in the life of capitalism; above all, the communist project is based on prediction, particularly on the perspective of the collapse of capitalism. Like an architect’s plan, communism is first conceived -- obviously in its broad outlines -- in the minds of men before it can be built in reality.

Thus, contrary to Paul Mattick for example, who considers that the study of economic phenomena can’t provide any predictions that can be useful in the activity of revolutionaries, the defini­tion of a perspective -- in other words, prediction -- is an integral and very important part of revolutionary activity.

Having established this, the question which must be asked is the following: what is the field of application of prediction for revolutionaries?

-- the long term? Certainly, the communist project can’t be based on anything else.

-- the short term? Obviously, it’s part of human activity so it must be part of the activity of revolutionaries.

-- the middle term? Because it can’t be res­tricted to generalities like long-term predic­tions, and because it has less elements at its disposal than short-term prediction, it’s undoubt­edly the hardest kind of prediction the proleta­riat can make, but it’s not something that can be neglected because it directly conditions its mode of struggle in each period in the life of capitalism.

The question can thus be posed more precisely: in the context of middle-term predictions, can and should we foresee the evolution of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat? This presupposes that you admit that such an evolution can take place, and that you have answered the preliminary question.

2. Are there different periods in the course of the class struggle?

It may seem strange to pose such an elementary question. In the past, it seemed so obvious that revolutionaries hardly thought about posing it at all. The question they asked wasn’t “is there a course in the class struggle?”, or “is it possi­ble and necessary to analyze it?”, but simply “what is the nature of the course?”. It’s on this question that there have been debates between revolutionaries. In 1852, Marx described the particularly uneven course of the workers’ class struggle:

“Proletarian revolutions … constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interrup­tions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again ... they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever; they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals ...” (Marx, 18th Brumaire)

Over a century ago, the question appeared to be clear. But it has to be said that the terrible counter-revolution that we’re only just coming out of has left so much confusion in the revolu­tionary milieu (cf the letter from Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionnaire (FOR) to Revolution Internationale published in RI, nos 56-57) that we do have to pose questions like this all over again.

Confusions in this area are based on an ignorance of the history of the workers’ movement (but, as Marx said, ignorance is no excuse). Studying the workers’ movement allows us to confirm what Marx said about this alternation between forward thrusts in the proletarian struggle (some of them extremely powerful like the movements of 1848-49, 1864-71, 1917-23) and retreats (as in 1850, 1872, 1923) , which have led to the disappearance or degeneration of the political organizations which the class secreted in the period of rising struggle (the Communist League, created in 1847, dissolved in 1852; the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) , founded in 1864, dissolved in 1876; the Communist International, founded in 1919, degenerated and died in the mid-1920s. The Socialist International followed a broadly similar course, but not in such a clear way). It’s prob­ably because of the extreme length of the counter­revolution (half a century) which followed the post-1917 revolutionary wave, during which the working class everywhere was in an extremely weak position, that we find revolutionaries today who are incapable of understanding that there is this alternation between periods of advance and retreat in the class struggle. An unprejudiced study of the workers’ movement and of Marxist analyzes (even though it’s much more comfortable not to study and not to ask questions!) would have allowed these revolutionaries to shake off the weight of the counter-revolution. It would also have allowed them to see that outbreaks of class struggle take place when capitalist society is in crisis (economic crisis as in 1848, or war, as in 1871, 1905, 1917). This is because of:

-- the weakening of the ruling class;

-- the necessity for the workers to resist the deterioration of their living standards;

-- the exposure of the contradictions of the system, which tends to elevate class consciousness.

3. Can we make predictions about the historic course of class struggle?

History shows that revolutionaries can commit major errors in this domain. For example:

-- the Willich-Schapper tendency in the Commu­nist League, who didn’t understand the reflux in the struggle after 1849 and were pushing the organization towards adventurist actions;

-- the Bakuninist current in the IWA, which was still expecting an imminent revolution after the crushing of the Commune of 1871, and turned its back on long-term preparation;

-- the KAPD, which was unaware of the retreat in the revolution in the early 1920s, and lost itself in voluntarism and even putschism;

-- Trotsky, who declared in 1936 that “the revolution had begun in France” and at the lowest ebb of the class struggle in 1938, founded the still-born ‘Fourth International’.

However, history has also shown that revolution­aries have had the means to analyze the course correctly and make accurate forecasts about the future of the class struggle:

-- Marx and Engels who understood the change of perspective after 1849 and 1871;

-- the Italian Left, which understood the reflux in the world revolution after 1921 and drew the correct conclusions about the tasks of the party and about the meaning of the events in Spain in 1936.

Experience has also shown that, as a general rule, these accurate forecasts weren’t a matter of chance but were based on a very serious study of social reality; on a general analysis of capitalism, especially the economic situation, but also of the social struggle, on the level of both combativity and consciousness. In this way:

-- Marx and Engels were able to see that there had been a reflux in the revolution in the early 1850s and that the crisis of 1847-48 was being followed by a period of economic recovery;

-- Lenin and the Bolsheviks foresaw a revolu­tionary upsurge during the First World War, based on the fact that the imperialist war was a mani­festation of the mortal crisis of capitalism, and would put the system in a situation of extreme weakness.

But although it is a necessary precondition for a proletarian upsurge, the crisis of capitalism isn’t a sufficient precondition, contrary to what Trotsky thought after the 1929 crisis. Similarly, workers’ combativity isn’t a sufficient indication of a real, durable upsurge if it’s not accompanied by a tendency to break with capitalist mystifications. This is what the minority of the Italian Fraction failed to understand when they saw the mobilization and arming of the Spanish workers in July 1936 as the beginning of the revolution, when in fact the Spanish workers had been politically disarmed by anti-fascism and were unable to mount a real attack on capitalism.

We can thus say that it is possible for revolut­ionaries to make forecasts about the evolution of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat; and that, far from approaching this task as though they were taking part in a lottery, they can use criteria drawn from experience which, although not infallible, do enable them to avoid going forward blindly. But certain revolution­aries raise another objection: “even if it is possible to make forecasts about the historic course, it’s of no interest for the class struggle and in no way conditions the activity of commu­nists. All this is intellectual speculation with no impact on practice”. We must now deal with these arguments.

4. Is it necessary to make forecasts about the historic course?

In answering this question, we could almost say that the facts speak for themselves, but the counter-revolution has caused so much havoc among certain revolutionary groups that they’re either plainly ignorant of these facts or are incapable f interpreting them correctly. To convince ourselves of the necessity for a revolutionary organi­zation to have a correct analysis of the historical perspective, it’s enough to remind ourselves of the tragic fate of the German Left, which, despite the value of its programmatic positions, was completely disoriented, dislocated and ultimately destroyed by its errors on the course of the class struggle. We should also remember the sad end of the minority of the Italian Fraction who joined up with the anti-fascist militias, and the no less pitiful fate of the Union Communiste who carried out a policy of critical support for the left socialists of the POUM, hoping that it would give rise to a communist vanguard capable of putting itself at the head of the ‘Spanish Revolution’. We can see that a failure to understand the problem of the course have a disastrous impact on revolutionaries.

The analysis of the course of the class struggle directly conditions the organization and intervention of revolutionaries. When you’re swimming upriver you swim at the side of the stream; when you’re going downriver, you swim in the middle. Similarly, the relationship that revolutionaries have with their class differs according to the course of the struggle. When the class is moving towards revolution, they have to put themselves at the head of the movement; when the class is falling into the abyss of the counter-revolution, they have to struggle against the stream.

In the first case, their essential preoccupation is to avoid being cut off from the class, to follow attentively each of its steps, each of its struggles, in order to push forward the potentia­lity of the struggle as far as it will go. With­out any neglect of theoretical work, direct parti­cipation in the struggles of the class has a privileged place. On the organizational level, revolutionaries can have a confident and open attitude towards the other currents that arise in the class. While firmly standing by their principles, they can hope for a positive evolu­tion of these currents, for a convergence of their respective positions. The task of regroupment can thus be given maximum attention and effort.

It’s quite different for revolutionaries in a period of historic reflux. Then the main task is to ensure that the organization can resist this reflux and preserve its principles from the pernicious influence of bourgeois mystifications, which will tend to drown the whole class. Their task is also to prepare for the future resurgence of the class, by dedicating most of their weak forces to the theoretical work of drawing up a balance-sheet of past experience, notably the causes of the defeat. It is clear that this will tend to cut revolutionaries off from the rest of the class, but this is something they have to accept the moment they admit that the bourgeoisie has triumphed and the proletariat has been drag­ged off its class terrain. Otherwise they run the risk of being dragged in the same direction. Similarly, on the level of regroupment, without ever turning their back on this effort, it would be pointless for revolutionaries in such periods to hold out a very positive perspective; the tendency would be rather towards the organization turning in on itself and jealously guarding its own positions, towards the maintenance of dis­agreements which couldn’t be surpassed because of the absence of class experience.

We can thus see that the analysis of the course has a considerable impact on the mode of activity and organization of revolutionaries and that this has nothing to do with ‘academic speculations’. Just as an army needs to know at every moment the precise nature of the balance of forces with the opposing army, to see whether it should attack or retreat in good order, so the working class needs to have a correct appreciation of the balance of forces with its enemy, the bourgeoisie. And it’s up to revolutionaries, as the most advanced ele­ments of the class, to provide the class with the maximum amount of material for making this appreciation. This is one of the essential reasons for their existence.

In the past, revolutionaries have always assumed this responsibility with more or less success; but the analysis of the historical course takes on an even greater importance when capitalism enters into its period of decadence, since the stakes involved in the class struggle are that much higher.

5. The historic alternative in the period of capitalist decadence

In line with the Communist International, the ICC has always insisted that the decadence of capita­lism is “the epoch of imperialist wars and prole­tarian revolutions”. War isn’t specific to deca­dent capitalism, just as it isn’t specific to capitalism in general. But the form and function of war changes according to whether the system is progressive or whether it has become a barrier to the development of society’s productive forces.

“In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars (whether national, colonial, or of imperial conquest) represented the upward movement of ripening, strengthening and enlarging the capitalist economic system. Capitalist pro­duction used war as a continuation by other means of its political economy. Each war was justified and paid its way, by the opening up of a new field for greater expansion, assuring further capitalist development.

In the epoch of decadent capitalism, war, like peace, expresses this decadence and greatly accelerates it.

It would be wrong to see war as negative by definition, a destroyer and shackle on the development of society, as opposed to peace, which would appear as the normal and positive course of continued development of production and society. This would be to introduce a moral concept into an objective, economically determined course.

War was the indispensable means by which capi­tal opened up areas external to itself for development, at a time when such areas existed and could only be opened up through violence. In the same way, the capitalist world, having historically exhausted all possibility of development, finds in modern imperialist war the expression of its collapse, which can only engulf the productive forces in any abyss, and accumulate ruin upon ruin in an ever accelerating rhythm, without opening up any possibility of the outward development of production.

Under capitalism there exists no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and deca­dent phases of capitalist society, and thus a difference in the function of war (and in the relation of war to peace) in the respective phases. While in the first phase, war has the function of assuring an expansion of the market, and so of the production of the means of consumption, in the second phase production is essentially geared to the production of means of destruction, ie to war. The deca­dence of capitalist society is strikingly expressed by the fact that, whereas in the ascendant period wars served the process of economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is geared essentially to war.

This does not mean that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this is always the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism.” (Report on the Inter­national Situation, July 1945 Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France)

We can draw three conclusions from this analysis of the relationship between decadent capitalism and imperialist war:

1. Left to its own dynamic, capitalism can’t escape imperialist war: all the bourgeoisie’s babbling about ‘peace’, all the Leagues of Nations and United Nations, all the goodwill of capital's’ ‘great men’ can’t change this, and per­iods of ‘peace’ (ie periods when war isn’t generalizing) are simply moments during which capital is reconstituting its forces for even more destructive and barbaric confrontations.

2. Imperialist war is the most significant expres­sion of the historic bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production; it highlights the urgent necessity to supersede this mode of production before it drags humanity into the abyss of des­truction; this is the real meaning of the CI’s formula cited above.

3. In contrast to wars in the ascendant period, which only affected limited areas of the planet and didn’t condition the whole of social life in each country, imperialist war is extended onto a world scale and subordinates the whole of society to its needs, in particular the class which pro­duces the bulk of all social wealth: the prolet­ariat.

Because it’s the class which can put an end to all wars and which holds the only possible future for society -- socialism; because it’s the class which stands in the front line of the sacrifices imposed by imperialist war; because, excluded from any property, it’s the only class that really does have no fatherland, that is really internation­alist: for all these reasons, the proletariat holds in its hands the fate of the whole of human­ity.

In a more direct sense, the ability of the prol­etariat to react to the historic crisis of capit­alism on its own class terrain will determine whether or not this system will be able to impose its own solution to the crisis: imperialist war.

When capitalism entered its decadent phase, the implications of the question of the historic course could hardly be compared to what they had been in the previous century. In the twentieth century, the victory of capitalism means the name­less barbarism of imperialist war and the threat of the extinction of the human race. The victory of the proletariat means the possibility of the regeneration of society, the “end of human pre­history and the beginning of its real history”; “leaving the kingdom of necessity and reaching the kingdom of freedom”. These are the stakes revolutionaries must have in mind when they exam­ine the question of the historical course. But this isn’t the case with all revolutionaries, notably those who refuse to talk about the hist­oric alternative (or, if they do talk about it, don’t know what they are talking about) and those for whom imperialist war and proletarian upsurge are simultaneous or even complementary.

6. The opposition and mutual exclusion of the two terms of the historical alternative

On the eve of World War II there developed within the Italian Left the thesis that imperialist war would no longer be the product of the division of capitalism into antagonistic states and powers, each struggling for world hegemony. It was claim­ed that the system would only resort to this extreme measure in order to massacre the proletar­iat and hold back the upsurge of the revolution. The Gauche Communiste de France argued against this conception when it wrote:

“The ‘era of wars and revolution’ does not mean that the development of war corresponds to the development of revolution. These two courses, though their source is the same historic situation of capitalism’s permanent crisis, are nevertheless essentially different and the relationship between them is not directly reciproc­al. While the unfolding of war becomes a factor directly precipitating revolutionary convulsions it is never the case that revolution is a factor in imperialist war.

Imperialist war does not develop in response to rising revolution; quite the reverse, it is the reflux following the defeat of revolutionary struggle, the momentary ousting of the menace of revolution which allows capitalism to move towards the outbreak of a war engendered by the contradictions and internal tensions of the cap­italist system.” (ibid.)

Other theories have also arisen more recently, acc­ording to which “with the development of the crisis of capitalism, both terms of the contradiction are reinforced at the same time: war and revolution don’t exclude each other mutually but advance in a simultaneous and parallel manner, without it being possible for us to know which one will reach its culminating point before the other. The main error in this conception is that it totally neglects the factor of class struggle in the life of society, just as the conception developed by the Italian Left was based on an overestimation of the factor. Beginning from the phrase in the Communist Manif­esto which says that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”, the Italian Left applied this mechanically to the analysis of imperialist war and saw imperialist war as a response to the class struggle; it failed to see that, on the contrary, imperialist war could only take place thanks to the absence or weakness of the class struggle. Although it was wrong, this conception began from correct premises; the mistake lay in the way these premises were applied. In contrast, the theory of parallelism and simultaneity of the course towards war and the course towards revolution plainly casts aside this basic Marxist premise, because it holds that the two principal antagonistic classes in society can go on preparing their respective responses to the crisis – imperialist war for one, revolution for another – completely independently of each other. If it can’t be applied to something which is going to determine the whole historic alternative for the life of society, the schema the Communist Manifesto has no reason for existing and we can consign Marxism to a museum alongside other outmoded products of human imagination.

In reality, history itself disproves this conception of ‘parallelism’. In contrast to the proletariat which doesn’t have any contradictory interests within itself, the bourgeoisie is a class profoundly divided by the antagonism between the economic interests of its various sectors. In an economy where the Commodity reigns supreme, competition between factions of the ruling class is, in general, insurmountable. Therein lays the underlying cause of the political crises which plague this class, as well as the tensions between countries and blocs, which can only sharpen as the crisis makes competition more intense. The highest degree of unity which capital can achieve is at the national level; it is one of the essential attributes of the capitalist state that it has to impose this discipline on the various sectors of national capital. Beyond this we can say that there is a certain ‘solidarity’ between nations of one imperialist bloc: this expresses the fact, that, alone against all the others, a national capital can do nothing and is obliged to give up a part of its independence in order to defend its overall interests. But this doesn’t eliminate:

-- rivalries between countries of the same bloc

-- the fact that capitalism can never unify itself on a world scale (contrary to Kautsky’s theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’). The blocs continue to exist and the antagonism between them can only worsen.

The only moment when the bourgeoisie can attain unity at a world level, when it can silence its imperialist rivalries, is when its very survival is threatened by its mortal enemy, the proletar­iat. History has shown that at such moments it’s capable of displaying a solidarity which it lacks at all other times. This was illustrated:

-- in 1871, in the collaboration between Prussia and the Versailles government (the freeing of French soldiers who were used during the ‘bloody week’).

-- in 1918, when the Entente showed its solidari­ty towards a German bourgeoisie threatened with proletarian revolution (the freeing of German soldiers who were then used to massacre the Spartacists).

Thus the historic tendencies towards war or revol­ution develop not in a parallel and independent way, but in an antagonistic and mutually determining manner. What’s more, as the responses of two historically antagonistic classes, imperialist war and revolution mutually exclude each other not only for the future of society, but also in the day-to-day manner that these two alternatives being prepared.

The preparation of an imperialist war means that capitalism has to develop a war economy, and it’s the proletariat which has to bear most of its weight. Already the workers’ struggle against austerity is holding back these preparations and shows that the class isn’t prepared to make the even more terrible sacrifices which the bourgeoisie will demand during an imperialist war. Thus, the class struggle, even when it’s for limited objectives, means that the proletariat is breaking the bonds of solidarity with ‘its’ national capital -- the very solidarity that the bourgeoisie demands so strongly during a war. It also expresses a tendency to break with bourgeois ideals like ‘democracy’, ‘legality’, ‘the country’ and phoney ‘socialism’: ideals in whose defense the workers will be called upon to massacre themselves and their class brothers. Finally, the class struggle allows the proletariat to forge its unity, an indispensable factor if the class is going to prevent -- on an international scale -- a showdown between the imperialist gangsters.

When capitalism entered into a phase of acute econ­omic crisis in the mid-1960s, the perspective out­lined by the CI was opened up again: “Imperialist war or proletarian revolution”, as the specific response to the crisis of each of the two principal classes of society. But this doesn’t mean that the two terms of this perspective can develop in a simultaneous manner. The two terms appear in the form of an alternative, ie they reciprocally exclude each other:

-- either capitalism imposes its response and that means that it has first defeated the resistance of the working class;

-- or the proletariat imposes its solution, and it goes without saying that this means stay­ing the murderous hands of imperialism.

The nature of the present course -- whether it’s towards imperialist war or class war -- is thus an expression of the evolution of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat. It’s this balance of forces which we’ve got to study, as most revolutionaries before us have done, Marx in particular. But we’ve got to have the criteria in order to make such an evaluation, and these criteria are not necessarily identical to those used in the past. The definition of these crit­eria presupposes that we know what these criteria were in the past, that we can distinguish between those which are still valid and those which have become obsolete given the evolution of the histo­ric situation, and finally that we take into account possible new criteria which this evolution has brought out. We cannot mechanically apply the scenarios of the past -- although we must begin from a study of these scenarios. This is particularly true when we examine the conditions which permitted the outbreak of imperialist war in 1914 and 1939.

7. The conditions for imperialist war in 1914 and 1939

“... it is the cessation of class struggle, or more precisely the destruction of the prole­tariat’s class power and consciousness, the derailing of its struggles (which the bourgeoi­sie manages through the introduction of its agents into the class, gutting workers’ struggles of their revolutionary content and putting them on the road of reformism and nationalism) which is the ultimate and decisive condition for the outbreak of imperialist war. This must be understood not from the narrow, limited viewpoint of one nation alone, but internationally.

Thus the partial resurgence, the renewed growth of struggles and strike movements in Russia (1913) in no way conflicts with our assertion. If we look a little closer, we can see that the power of the international proletariat, on the eve of 1914 -- its electoral victories, the great Social Democratic parties, the mass union organizations, pride and glory of the IInd International -- were only a facade hiding a ruinous ideological condition under its veneer. The workers’ movement, undermined and rotten with an authoritative opportunism, could only topple like a house of cards at the first blast of war.

Reality cannot be understood in the chronologi­cal photography of events, but must be seized in its underlying, internal movement, in the profound modifications which occur before they appear on the surface and are registered as dates. It would be committing a serious mis­take to remain faithful to the chronological order of history, and see the 1914-18 war as the cause of the collapse of the IInd Inter­national, when in reality the outbreak of war was a direct result of the previous opportunist degeneration of the international workers’ movement. The fanfares of internationalism sounded louder on the outside, while within the nationalist tendency triumphed. The war only brought into the open the ‘embourgeoise­ment’ of the parties of the IInd International, the substitution of their original revolutio­nary program by the ideology of the class enemy, their attachment to the interests of the national bourgeoisie.

The internal process of the destruction of the class’ consciousness revealed its completion in the outbreak of war in 1914, which it had itself permitted.

World War II broke out under the same condi­tions. We can distinguish three necessary and successive phases between the two imperialist wars.

The first was completed with the exhaustion of the great revolutionary wave after 1917, and sealed by a string of defeats, with the defeat of the Left and its expulsion from the Comintern with the triumph of centrism, and with the USSR’s commitment to its evolution towards capitalism through the theory and practice of ‘socialism in one country’.

The second stage was that of international capitalism’s general offensive aimed at liquidating the social convulsions in Germany, the centre where the historical alternative between socialism and capitalism was decisively played out, through the physical crushing of the proletariat, and the installation of the Hitler regime as Europe’s gendarme. Corres­ponding to this stage came the definitive death of the Comintern and the collapse of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which, incapable of regrouping revolutionary energies, engaged through coalition and fusion with opportunis­tic groups and currents of the socialist left, in an orientation towards the practice of bluff and adventurism in proclaiming the formation of the IVth International.

The third stage was that of the total derail­ment of the workers’ movement in the democra­tic countries. Under its mask of the defense of ‘liberties’ and workers’ ‘conquests’, threatened by fascism, the real aim was to join the proletariat to the defense of demo­cracy -- that is, its national bourgeoisie, its national capital. Anti-fascism was the plat­form, capital’s modern ideology which the proletariat’s traitor parties used as wrapping for their putrid merchandise of national defense.

In this third stage occurred the definitive passage of the so-called Communist Parties into the service of their respective capitals, the destruction of class consciousness through the poisoning of the masses, their adhesion to the future inter-imperialist war by means of the ideology of anti-fascism, their mobilization into the ‘Popular Front’, the derailment of the strikes of 1936, the ‘anti-fascist’ Spanish war; at the same time the final victory of state capitalism in Russia was revealed in its ferocious repression of the slightest impulse to revolutionary action, its adhesion to the League of Nations, its integration into an imperialist bloc and installation of the war economy in preparation for imperialist war. This period also saw the liquidation of numer­ous revolutionary groups and Left Communists thrown up by the crisis in the CI, who, through their adhesion to anti-fascist ideology and the defense of the ‘workers’ state’ in Russia, were snatched into the cogs of capitalism and lost forever as expressions of the life of the proletariat. Never before has history seen such a divorce between the class and the groups that express its interests and its mission. The vanguard found itself in a state of complete isolation and reduced quantita­tively to negligible little islands.

“The immense revolutionary wave, which burst out at the end of the first imperialist war, threw international capitalism into such terror that it had to dislocate the proletariat’s very foundations before unleashing another war.” (Ibid)

We can add the following elements to this luminous passage:

-- the opportunist evolution and treason of parties of the IInd International was made possi­ble by the characteristics of capitalism when it was at its zenith. Economic progress, the appa­rent absence of profound convulsions, the reforms that capitalism was able to grant to the working class -- all this nourished the idea of a gradual, peaceful, legal transformation of bourgeois society into socialism;

-- one of the essential elements in the disarray of the proletariat between the two wars was the existence and policies of the USSR, which either repelled the workers from any socialist perspec­tive; or led them into the clutches of social democracy; or, for those who still saw the USSR as the ‘socialist fatherland’, led them to subordinate their struggles to the defense of its imperialist interests.

8. The criteria for evaluating the historic course

By analyzing the conditions which made it possible for the two imperialist wars to break out, we can draw the following general lessons:

-- the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat can only be assessed on a world scale, and can’t be based on exceptions which may arise in secondary areas: it’s essentially by studying the situation in a few large countries that we can deduce the real nature of this balance of forces;

-- in order for an imperialist war to break out, capitalism needs first to inflict a profound defeat on the proletariat -- above all an ideological defeat, but also a physical one if the proletariat has shown a strong combativity (Italy, Germany and Spain between the wars);

-- this defeat must not just leave the class passive but must get the workers to adhere enthusiastically to bourgeois ideals (‘demo­cracy’, ‘anti-fascism’, ‘socialism in one country’); adhesion to these ideals presupposes:

a. that they have a semblance of reality (the possibility of an unlimited, problem-free development of capitalism and ‘democracy’, the proletarian origins of the regime in Russia);

b. that they are in one way or another associated with the defense of proletarian interests;

c. that this association is defended among workers by organizations which have the confidence of the workers, due to the fact that, in the past, they did defend their interests. In other words, those bourgeois ideals are propagated by former proletarian organizations which have betrayed the class.

In broad outline these are the conditions which, in the past, allowed imperialist wars to break out. That is not to say that, a priori, a future imperialist war would need to have identical conditions. But to the extent that the bourgeoisie has become conscious of the dangers involved in a premature outbreak of hostilities (despite all its preparations, even World War II gave rise to working class reactions in Italy in 1945 and Germany 1944-45), it would be a mistake to con­sider that it would launch itself into a confron­tation unless it knew it has the same degree of control as it had in 1939, or at least 1914. In other words, for a new imperialist war to be possible, then at least the criteria listed above must be present, and if not, some others which can compensate for them.

9. The comparison between today’s situation and the situation in 1914 and 1939

In the past, the principal terrain where the historic course was decided was in Europe, notably in its three most powerful countries, Germany, Britain and France, plus secondary countries like Spain and Italy. Today the situation is partially similar, to the extent that Europe is still at the heart of the confrontation between the two imperialist blocs. Any evaluation of the course must therefore include an examination of the situa­tion of the class struggle in this continent, but it wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t take into account the situation in Russia, the US and China.

If we look at all these countries, we can see that, for several decades, the proletariat has nowhere suffered a physical defeat; the most recent defeat of this kind took place in a country as marginal as Chile.

Similarly, in none of these countries has there been an ideological defeat comparable to what happened in 1914, leading the workers to adhere enthusiastically to the national capital:

-- old mystifications like ‘anti-fascism’ or ‘socialism in one country’ have been worn out, mainly because of the absence of a fascist bugbear and the exposure of the real nature of ‘socialism’ in Russia etc;

-- belief in a permanent, peaceful progress for capitalism has been seriously shaken by over half a century of convulsions and barbarism; the illu­sions which developed during the post-war recon­struction are now being undermined by the crisis;

-- chauvinism, even if it does maintain its hold over a certain number of workers, doesn’t have the same impact it had in the past:

a. its foundations have been shaken by the develop­ment of capitalism itself, which daily abolishes national differences and specificities a little bit more;

b. apart from the two main powers, Russia and USA, it comes up against the necessities of mobilizing the population not behind a country but behind a bloc;

c. to the extent that the workers are being asked to make sacrifices to get over the crisis in the name of the ‘national interest’, the workers will more and more be able to see this ‘national interest’ as the direct enemy of their own class interests.

At the present time, chauvinism, under the mask of national independence, can only find a real refuge in the most backward countries:

-- the defense of ‘democracy’ and ‘civilization’ which now takes the form of Carter’s campaigns about ‘human rights’, and which sets out to achieve an ideological unity for the whole western bloc, is not having a great deal of success today; it may affect the habitual petition-signers of the intellectual milieu, but it has little impact on the new generations of workers who can’t see the connection between their own interests and these ‘human rights’, which are in any case cynically flouted by the very people who promote them;

-- the former workers’ parties -- Social Demo­crats and ‘Communists’ -- betrayed the class too long ago to be able to have the same impact as in the past. For sixty years the Social Democrats have been loyal managers of capitalism. Their anti-proletarian function is clear and has been recognized by many workers. And it’s these par­ties which, in most West European countries, have today taken on the task of leading governments that are synonymous with austerity and anti-work­ing class measures. As for the Stalinist parties, it can hardly be said that the workers have con­fidence in them in countries where they are in power: the workers there hate them. In countries whose membership of the western bloc keeps the CPs in opposition -- and thus allows them to have a certain impact on the class -- this impact can’t be used directly to mobilize the class behind the US bloc, which the CPs portray as the ‘main enemy’ of the peoples of the world. In order to be really effective, the treason of the workers’ party must be fairly recent. Like a match it can only be used once for a massive mobilization behind imperialist war. This was the case with the Social Democrats, whose open treason took place in 1914, and to a lesser extent with the ‘Communist Parties’ who betrayed in the 1920s before playing the role of drum-majors for the war in the 1930s (the lapse between the two dates was partially compensated by the fact that the CPs were formed precisely as a reaction to the treason of Social Democracy). Today, the bour­geoisie no longer enjoys this decisive advantage. The leftists, especially the Trotskyists, have certainly done enough dirty work to pose as the successors to the Social Democrats and Stalinists, but they suffer from two fundamental handicaps: on the one hand, their impact is far less than that of their elders, and, on the other hand, before this impact could really grow, they would openly reveal their bourgeois nature as speciali­zed touts for the left parties.

As we can see, none of the conditions which made it possible for the proletariat to be dragooned into the imperialist conflicts of the past exist today, and it’s hard to see what new mystifica­tion could now take the place of those which have been used up. Such an analysis was already the basis for the position taken by Internacional­ismo comrades when, at the beginning of 1968, they said that the coming year would be rich in promise for the class struggle against the re-emerging crisis. It was this same analysis which allowed Revolution Internationale to write in 1968, before the Italian Hot Autumn of 1969, the insurrection of the Polish workers of 1970 and the whole wave of struggles which lasted until 1974:

“Capitalism has at its disposal less and less mystifications which it can use to mobilize the masses and hurl them into a massacre ... in these conditions, the crisis has, from its first manifestations, appeared to be what it really is: its initial symptoms are going to give rise to increasingly violent mass reac­tions in all countries … the whole signifi­cance of May ‘68 was that it was one of the first and one of the most important reactions by the mass of workers to a steadily deteriora­ting world economic situation.” (RI, Old Series, no.2)

It is this analysis, based on the classical posi­tions of Marxism (the ineluctable character of the crisis and the provocation of class confron­tations by the crisis), and on the experience of over half a century, which allowed our current -- while many other groups only talked about the counter-revolution and saw nothing coming -- to forecast the historic reawakening of the class after 1968, as well as the present resurgence after the reflux of 1974-78.

But there are still revolutionaries who, ten years after ‘68, have still not understood its significance, and prognosticate a course towards a third world war. Let’s look at their arguments.

10. Arguments in favor of the idea of a course towards World War II

a. The Present Existence of Local Inter-Imperialist Conflicts

Certain revolutionaries have clearly understood that so-called national liberation struggles are a mask for inter-imperialist conflicts (a mask that is wearing so thin that even a current as myopic as the Bordigists is sometimes forced to recognize this). The fact that these conflicts have been going on for decades hasn’t led them -- quite rightly -- to the conclusion that they are signs of a revolutionary upsurge, which is what the Trotskyists think. We agree with them on this point. But they go further and conclude that the mere existence of these conflicts and their recent intensification signify that the class is beaten on a world scale and cannot prevent a new imperialist war. The question they fail to pose reveals the error of this approach: why hasn’t the multiplication and aggravation of local con­flicts already degenerated into a generalized conflict? Some, like the CWO (cf the Second Conference of November 1978) reply because the crisis isn’t deep enough or that the military and strategic preparations haven’t been completed. History itself refutes such interpretations:

-- in 1914, the crisis and the scale of arma­ments were less advanced than today when the conflict over Serbia degenerated into world war;

-- in 1939, after the New Deal and Nazi econo­mic policies, which had partially re-established the situation of 1929, the crisis was no more violent than it is today; also, as this time, the blocs aren’t completely constituted since the USSR was virtually on the side of Germany, and the USA was still ‘neutral’.

In fact the conditions for a new imperialist war are more than ripe. The only missing ‘military’ element is the adhesion of the proletariat … but it’s by no means the least.

b. The New Arms Technology

For some people, following in the footsteps of those who once said war was impossible because of poison gas or aeroplanes, the existence of atomic weapons prevents any resort to a new generalized war, which would threaten society with total des­truction. We’ve already denounced the pacifist illusions contained in such a conception. On the other hand, some people consider that the develop­ment of technology makes it impossible for the proletariat to intervene in a modern war, since it would mainly use highly sophisticated arms handled by specialists, rather than masses of soldiers. The bourgeoisie would then have a free hand to wage atomic war without fear of the kind of mutinies which took place in 1917-18. This analysis ignores the fact that:

-- atomic weapons are a long way from being the only weapons at the bourgeoisie’s disposal. Expenditure on classical armaments is much higher than on nuclear weapons;

-- when the bourgeoisie goes to war, it doesn’t do so a priori to destroy as much as possible. It does so to seize markets, territories and wealth from its enemy. That’s why, even if it will use them in the last resort, it has no interest in using atomic weapons straight away. It still faces, therefore, the problem of mobili­zing men for the occupation of conquered terri­tory. As in the past, capital still has to mobilize tens of millions of workers if it’s going to wage imperialist war.

c. War by Accident

In the process of generalizing an imperialist conflict, there is an involuntary aspect which escapes the control of any government. This leads some people to say that, whatever the level of class struggle, capitalism could plunge humanity into generalized war ‘by accident’, after losing control of the situation. Obviously, there’s no absolute guarantee that capitalism won’t serve up a menu like this, but history shows that the system is much less likely to slide in this direction if it feels threatened by the proletariat.

d. The Insufficiency of the Proletariat’s Response

Some groups, like Battaglia Comunista, consider that the proletariat’s response to the crisis is insufficient to constitute an obstacle to the course towards imperialist war. They consider that the struggle must be of a ‘revolutionary nature’ if it’s really going to counteract this course, basing their argument on the fact that in 1917-18 only the revolution put an end to the imperialist war. Their error is to try to trans­pose a schema which was correct at the time to a different situation. A proletarian upsurge during and against a war straight away takes the form of a revolution:

-- because society is plunged into the most extreme form of its crisis, imposing the most terrible sacrifices on the workers;

-- because the workers in uniform are already armed;

-- because the exceptional measures (martial law etc) which are in force make any class confrontation frontal and violent;

-- because the struggle for war immediately takes on the political form of a confrontation with the state which is waging the war, without going through the stage of less head-ons economic struggles.

But the situation is quite different when war hasn’t yet been declared. In these circumstances, even a limited tendency towards struggle on a class terrain is enough to jam up the war machine, since:

-- it shows that the workers aren’t actively drawn into capitalist mystifications;

-- imposing even greater sacrifices on the workers than the ones which provoked their initial response runs the risk of provoking a proportionately stronger reaction.

Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century there were many threats of imperialist war, many opportunities for unleashing a generalized war (the Russo-Japanese war, Franco-German conflicts over Morocco, Balkans conflicts, invasion of the Tripolitaine by Italy). The fact that these conflicts didn’t generalize was to no small extent linked to the fact that, up until 1912, the work­ing class (through mass demonstrations) and the International (special motions at the Congresses of 1901 and 1910, Extraordinary Congress on the question of war in 1912) mobilized themselves each time there was a local conflict. And it wasn’t until the working class, anaesthetized by the speeches of the opportunists, stopped mobilizing itself against the threat of war (between 1912 and 1914) that capitalism was able to unleash an imperialist war, starting with an incident (the Sarajevo assassination) which seemed much less serious than the previous ones.

Today the revolution doesn’t have to be knocking at the door for us to say that the course towards imperialist war is barred.

e. War as a Necessary Condition for Revolution

The fact that, up to now, the great revolutionary upsurges of the proletariat (1871 the Commune, 1905, and 1917) arose out of wars led certain currents, like the Gauche Communiste de France, to consider that a new revolution could only come out of a new war. Although wrong, such an argu­ment was more defensible in 1950; holding on to it today betrays a fetishistic attachment to the schemas of the past. The role of revolutionaries isn’t to recite catechisms learned from history books with the idea that history is going to repeat itself in an immutable way. In general history doesn’t repeat itself, and although we must know about it in order to understand the present, the study of this present with all its specificities is even more necessary. The scen­ario of revolution coming only out of imperialist war is doubly wrong today:

-- it ignores the possibility of a revolutio­nary upsurge coming out of economic crisis (this was the scenario envisaged by Marx, if that’s any comfort to the fetishists);

-- it’s based on a perspective which is by no means ineluctable (as the result of the 1939-45 war showed); and it presupposes a step -- a third generalized war -- which, because of the means of destruction that exist today, contains a strong risk that humanity will once and for all time be deprived of the possibility of building socia­lism, or even of safeguarding its own existence.

Finally such an analysis can have disastrous implications for the struggle.

11. The implications of an erroneous analysis of the course

As we have seen, an erroneous analysis of the course has always had grave consequences. But the degree of gravity depends on whether the course is towards class war or imperialist war.

To be in error when the class is in reflux can be catastrophic for revolutionaries themselves (the example of the KAPD), but it has little impact on the class itself since, in such periods revolut­ionaries only have a small audience in the class. On the other hand, to make a mistake when the class is on the move, when the influence of revolutionaries is growing, can have tragic consequences for the whole class. Instead of pushing the whole class to struggle, of encour­aging its initiatives, of developing the potential of its struggles, a Jeremiah-like attitude at such a moment will help to demoralize the class and will become an obstacle to the movement.

That’s why, in the absence of decisive criteria proving that they’re in a period of defeat, revolutionaries have always emphasized the positive side of the historic alternative, have based their activities on the perspective of rising class struggle, not of defeat. The error of a doctor who gives up on a patient when he’s still got a chance of living, no matter how small, is much worse than that of the doctor who keeps trying when the patient has no chance.

That’s why today, it’s not so much up to the revolutionaries who foresee a course towards class war to provide irrefutable proof of their analy­sis: rather that’s the task of those who propose a course towards war.

It’s quite impossible to say to the working class right now that -- although we’re not quite sure -- the perspective before it is one of new imperial­ist war, during which it might -- perhaps -- be able to fight back. If a chance exists, however small, for the struggle of the class to prevent the out­break of a new imperialist holocaust, the role of revolutionaries is to put all their strength behind this chance and encourage the struggles of the class as much as they can, pointing out what’s at stake in these struggles, for the working class and the whole of humanity.

Our perspective doesn’t foresee the inevitability of the revolution. We aren’t charlatans, and we know quite well -- in contrast to certain fatalist­ic revolutionaries -- that the revolution isn’t “as certain as if it had already taken place”. But, whatever the final issue of the struggle today -- which the bourgeoisie is trying to muzzle in order to inflict on the class a series of partial defeats which will be a prelude to a more definitive defeat -- capitalism, right here and now, is unable to impose its own response to the crisis of its relations of production without directly confronting the proletariat.

Whether these struggles are going to result in victory, in revolution and communism, depends in part on the ability of revolutionaries to be equal to their tasks, notably in defining a concrete perspective for the movement of the class.

F.M.

It only needs a brief glance to show that while the political crisis of the bourgeoisie really is developing, the left’s coming to power hasn’t been verified, or rather, over the last year the left has been systematically pushed away from power in most European countries. We only have to look at the examples of Portugal, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, France, Belgium, Holland, Britain and Israel. There are practically only two countries in Europe where the left is still in power: Germany and Austria.

This immediately poses the question: was the ICC wrong for all those years in our analysis of the international situation and perspectives, notably the thesis of the left coming to power? We can reply categorically: no. As far as the general analysis is concerned, the present situation, as can be seen in all the reports, amply confirms our analysis. Regarding the question of the left in power, the answer is more complex, but it’s still no.

With the appearance of the crisis and the first signs of the workers’ struggle, the ‘left in power’ was capitalism’s most adequate response in those initial years. The left in government, and the left posing its candidature to govern, effectively fulfilled the task of containing, demobilizing and paralyzing the proletariat with all its mystifications about ‘change’ and about electoralism.

The left had to remain, and did remain, in this position, as long as it enabled it to fulfill its function. Thus, we weren’t committing any error in the past. Something different and more sub­stantial has taken place: a change in the align­ment of the political forces of the bourgeoisie. We would be committing a serious error if we didn’t recognize this change in time and contin­ued to repeat ourselves emptily about the danger of ‘the left in power’.

Before continuing the examination of why this change has taken place and what it means, we must particularly insist on the fact that we’re not talking about a circumstantial phenomenon, limited to this or that country, but a general pheno­menon, valid in the short and possibly the middle-term for all the countries of the western world. This initial recognition is necessary if we are to examine and understand the change that has taken place and the implications it has, notably concerning the necessary rectification of our political aim in the near future.

Having effectively carried out its task of immobilizing the working class during these initial years, the left, whether in power or moving towards power, can no longer perform this task except by putting itself in the opposition. There are many reasons for this change, to do with the specific conditions of various countries, but these are secondary reasons. The main reasons are the wearing-out of the mystifications of the left, of the left in power, and the slow disillu­sionment of the working masses which follows from this. The recent revival and radicalization of workers’ struggles bears witness to this.

Let’s remind ourselves of the three criteria for the left coming to power which are outlined in our previous analyses and discussions:

1. Necessity to strengthen state capitalist measures.

2. Closer integration into the western imperialist bloc under the domination of US capital.

3. Effective containment of the working class and immobilization of its struggles.

The left fulfils these three conditions most effectively, and the USA, leader of the bloc, clearly supported its coming to power, although it has reservations about the CPs. These reserva­tions gave rise to the policy of ‘Eurocommunism’ by the CPs of Spain, Italy and France, attempting to give guarantees of their loyalty to the western bloc. But while the USA remained suspicious about the CPs, it gave total support for the mainten­ance or arrival of the socialists in power, wherever that was possible.

It would be wrong to think that the reason for pushing the left away from power is based on this distrust for the CPs, even if this reason had some importance in certain countries like France and Italy. The fact that the socialists have also been pushed out of government -- as in Portugal, Israel, Britain and elsewhere -- shows that this is a phenomenon which goes beyond the simple distrust towards the CPs. The reasons for it must be sought elsewhere.

Let’s return to our criteria for the left being in power. When we examine them more closely, we can see that while the left fulfils them best, they aren’t all the exclusive patrimony of the left. The first two, state capitalist measures and integration into the bloc, can easily be accomplished, if the situation demands it, by other political forces of the bourgeoisie parties of the centre or even outright right-wing ones. Recent history is full of examples of this and we don’t have to elaborate on it. On the other hand, the third criterion, the containment of the working class, is the exclusive property of the left. It is it’s specific function, its raison d’être.

The left doesn’t accomplish this function only, or even generally, when it’s in power. Most of the time it accomplishes it when it’s in the opposition because it’s generally easier to do it when in the opposition than when in power. As a general rule, the left’s participation in power is only absolutely necessary in two precise situa­tions: in a Union Sacree to dragoon the workers into national defense in direct preparation for war and in a revolutionary situation to counteract the movement towards revolution1.

Outside of these two extreme situations, when the left can’t avoid openly exposing itself as an unconditional defender of the bourgeois regime by directly, violently confronting the working class, it must always try to avoid betraying its real identity, its capitalist function, and to maintain the mystification that its policies are aimed at the defense of working class interests.

Every bourgeois party is motivated by its own interests, its own clique-demands and electoral clientele, competing with other parties to get into power. But no party can escape from the imperatives of its class function, which must predominate over its immediate clique interests if that party is to stay alive. This is equally true for the parties of the left who must above all carry out the imperatives of their function. Thus, even if the left like any other bourgeois party aspires ‘legitimately’ to government office, we must note an important difference between these parties and other bourgeois parties con­cerning their participation in power. That is that these parties claim to be ‘workers’ parties’ and as such are forced to present themselves with ‘anti-capitalist’ masks and phrases, as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Being in power puts them in an ambivalent situation, more difficult than for more frankly bourgeois parties. An openly bourgeois party carries out in power what it says it’s going to do: the defense of capital and it in no way gets discredited by carrying out anti-working class policies. It’s exactly the same in opposition as it is in government. It’s quite the opposite with the ‘workers’ parties’. They must have a working class phraseology and a capitalist practice, one language in opposition and an absolutely opposed practice when in govern­ment. All the overtly bourgeois parties shame­lessly deceive the popular masses. The working masses are not, however, their clientele. The workers know who they are and don’t have many illusions in them. But the working masses are the main clientele of the left parties whose main function is to mystify, deceive, and derail the workers. In opposition the left parties say what they don’t do and will never do. Once in govern­ment they are forced to do what they have never said, have never dared to admit.

They can fulfill their bourgeois functions in contradictory conditions. In the ‘normal’ situations of capitalism, their presence in government makes them more vulnerable; being in power wears out their credibility more quickly. In a situa­tion of instability this tendency is even more accelerated. Then, their loss of credibility makes them less able to carry out their task of immobilizing the working class and this also makes their presence in government superfluous.

Their incommodious position can be summed up as follows: being in power while pretending not to be effected by being in power. That’s why their stays in office can’t last long. Like certain marine species who have to come constantly up to the surface in order to breathe, the left has an imperious need to go through constant rest cures in opposition. This has nothing to do with a Machiavellian plot on the part of the bourgeoisie.

It’s a necessity imposed on it as an exploiting class; this division of labor and function is indispensable to ensuring its rule over society. As an exploiting, ruling class, the bourgeoisie must occupy every inch of social space; it can’t allow any element in society, above all the work­ing class, to escape its control. If a ‘workers’ party’ for one reason or another slips up in its task of derailing working class struggle, the bourgeoisie has to quickly put forward a new party more capable of carrying out this job. In general, like a spider’s web which has several alternative strands, the bourgeoisie engenders several parties, each more to the left than the other (SPs, left socialists, CPs, leftists etc). This function is so important that it can’t allow any break in this chain. Thus, the advantage that the left parties have in being just as effec­tive in government as the right-wing parties in certain extreme situations, can become their Achilles heel in ‘normal’ situations. They then have to resume their place in the opposition, where they are infinitely more effective than the right wing parties.

Today we are in such a situation. After an explo­sion of social discontent and convulsions which caught the bourgeoisie by surprise, and which were only neutralized by bringing the left to power, the crisis deepened, illusions in the left began to weaken, the class struggle began to revive. It then became necessary for the left to be in opposition and to radicalize its phraseology, so as to be able to control the re-emerging struggle. Obviously this couldn’t be an absolute, but it is today and for the near future a general rule.

It’s characteristic that the countries where the left is still in power, like Germany and Austria, are precisely those countries where the class struggle has been weakest. Not only is the left moving away from power, it must also give the impression of becoming more radical. This is obvious with the CPs -- for example in Italy where they are breaking with the ‘historic compromise’ and in France where the CP provoked the break-up of the Union of the Left and the Programme Commun on the eve of the elections, and is now talking about a union at the base. It’s put away the slogan of the union of the French people and now prefers to talk about defending the workers and being the party of class struggle. At its Twenty-third Congress the French CP drew a “generally positive balance-sheet” of socialism in the east, after its Twenty-second Congress had abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat and made a violent critique of the lack of demo­cracy in the ‘socialist’ countries, rejecting the Russian model2.

This hardening of the CPs is also forcing the SPs -- in countries with a strong CP in direct competi­tion with the SP -- to radicalize its phraseology so that it doesn’t lose its grip on the workers. This is the case for example in France where at the last Congress the Mitterand leadership broke with the Rocard current and moved towards the left-wing CERES group. We even saw the SP associating itself with the 23 March demo, in opposition to the CFDT. But the same thing is also happening in countries where there is no competition from a strong CP. It’s the case in Britain where the Labor Party has put an end to the Social Contract by calling the election; in Portugal where Soares has got rid of a tendency that was too right wing; or in Spain where the SP Congress got rid of the Gonzales leadership by a large majority, reproaching his ‘consensus’ politics and arguing for a party based on ‘Marxism’. Once we’ve noted the end of the phase of the left in power, we can ask what impact will its return to opposition have. The political and trade union left is going to try to restore its image and make us forget what it did yesterday; instead of its former policy of opposition to all struggles, it’s going to ‘radicalize’ struggles, multiplying them while at the same time dispersing them, in order to sabotage them from within: making itself seem more ‘left’ in order to keep things under control. In sum, instead of driving the train into a siding by being in the drivers’ seat, it’s going to try to derail it in a more pernicious way. The left will be even more dangerous as the ‘defenders’ of the class than when it was its accuser. This is the danger the working class will have to confront, and one that it’s going to be difficult to fight against. In this situation, the leftists will run the risk of losing their distinct identity as an extreme left. After being the champions of the CP/SP in power, they will now put more emphasis on the united front, on committees at the base initiated by the reunified left parties and unions.

We must have no illusions. The left and the leftists have an enormous capacity for recuperation and manipulation. We’ll have to fight them in new conditions. Yesterday when they were in government leading the workers’ train onto capi­talist lines we could only be on the side of the tracks, calling on workers to leave the train. Today, when the workers’ train is slowly moving along class lines we have to be in the train, participating actively in the struggle, strength­ening the way forward and warning against acts of sabotage by all capitalist agents. It’s inside the struggle, during the course of its develop­ment, that we must concretely denounce what the left is doing, tearing off its ‘radical’ mask. It’s a task which is all the more difficult because we have no experience of such a situation. It’s not a question of submitting to an excess of radicalism, but of knowing practically, concretely, on every occasion, what lies behind the ‘radicalism’ of the left. This vision fits perfectly into our general analysis of the inter­national situation and of the resurgence of class struggle. It’s a piece that was missing from the overall picture, especially with regard to the historic course. A course towards war doesn’t make it necessary for the left to radicalize itself in opposition. On the contrary, an atom­ized, apathetic working class gives the left a free hand and makes it both possible and necessary for it to associate itself with the government.

We must be able to adapt our intervention and activity to this new situation -- a situation full of pitfalls, but also full of promise.

1. Except for a few particularly short-sighted revolutionaries, no-one today would dream of denying the reality of the world crisis of capi­talism. Despite the differences in form with the 1929 crisis -- which are seized upon by those who try to minimize the gravity of today’s crisis -- the real depth of the crisis can be seen:

-- in the massive and growing under-utilization of means of production and labor power, notably in the main industrial countries of the US bloc, where significant sectors like steel, shipbuilding and chemicals are in complete disarray;

-- in the increasingly apparent inability of the eastern bloc countries to realize econo­mic plans which are in any case less and less ambitious, accentuating the lack of competitivity of their commodities on the world market;

-- in the catastrophes hitting the underdeveloped countries, where Brazil-type ‘miracles’ have long ago given way to unbridled inflation and colossal debts;

-- in the continuing fall in the growth of world trade.

While the official figures clearly reveal the current difficulties of the world economy and show that the causes of these difficulties reside in a general glut on the world market, they often mask the full gravity of the situation because they don’t show the enormous pure waste of the productive forces because armaments don’t enter into any further productive cycles either as variable or constant capital.

After more than ten years of the slow but ineluc­table deterioration of its economy and the failure of all its ‘salvage’ plans, capitalism is supplying the proof to what Marxists have said for a long time: this system has entered into a phase of historic decline and it is absolutely incapable of surmounting the economic contradictions which assail it.

In the coming period, we are going to see a fur­ther deepening of the world crisis of capitalism, notably in the form of a new burst of inflation and a marked slowdown in production, which threatens to go far beyond the 1974-5 recession and lead to a brutal increase in unemployment.

2. The disintegration of the economic infra­structure has its repercussions on the whole of society, in particular through an exacerbation of inter-imperialist tensions. As these conflicts are aggravated we can see clearly the absurdity of the theory of the ‘weakening of the imperialist blocs’. In reality, the corollary of the aggra­vation of these conflicts is the stronger and stronger integration of each country into one of the two blocs. This is illustrated, for example, by:

-- the fact that France is more and more taking on the tasks of the US bloc, particularly as its gendarme in Africa;

-- the complete insertion of Vietnam into the Russian bloc;

-- the growing integration of China into the US bloc.

Even more than on an economic level, the rein­forcement of the imperialist blocs on the military level is a reality entirely in line with the preparations for capitalism’s only ‘way out’ of the crisis: generalized imperialist war.

Similarly it would be wrong to think, as some people do, that we are heading towards a reorgani­zation of the basic alliances that exist today, and that this is an indispensable precondition for a generalized war to take place. To begin with, experience has shown that changes of alliance can take place even after war has broken out. Secondly, the breadth of the economic, political and military links which unite the main powers in each bloc would not permit a brutal reshuffle leading, for example, to the reconstitu­tion of the blocs which existed during World War II. Today such a reshuffle could only involve the peripheral countries, particularly in the third world -- countries which are precisely the principle arena for the settling of scores bet­ween imperialist bandits.

In 1978 the African continent was in the front line of these confrontations. The relative stabilization of the situation in this zone, linked essentially to Russia’s backing-off, has in no way meant an end or even a pause to these conflicts. As soon as they were contained in one area, the flames of imperialism burst up again in the Far East, exposing the myth of national liberation and ‘solidarity between socialist countries’. Because they directly involved the two main military powers in the region, because they hurled hundreds of thousands of men into the battlefield and in a few days left thousands dead, the confrontations between China and Vietnam constitute an important moment in the aggravation of imperialist tensions. They give the workers of the world a hideous foretaste of what lies in store for the whole of society if capitalism is left with a free hand.

3. The crisis of the economy not only leads to the aggravation of divisions between national factions of the bourgeoisie. It also has its repercussions within each country in the form of a political crisis. This affects every part of the world but takes on its most violent forms in the backward countries. The example of Iran is particularly significant. The departure of the Shah has not managed to stabilize the situation and the unanimity of the forces which stood against him has now given way to chaotic confrontations.

But the political crisis is also hitting the most developed countries, and in recent months has had important effects in Europe.

A political crisis is in general the result of the difficulties of the capitalist class in adapting to contradictory necessities arising out of contradictions in the economic infrastructure. In Europe in recent years the axis of this adapta­tion has been the strengthening of the left, in particular social democracy, as a governmental alternative. This orientation corresponded both to concerns about international policies (the social democrats’ loyalty to the US bloc) and about domestic policies (strengthening of state capitalist measures and derailing the working class discontent). But today we see a tendency for the forces of the left to be pushed into opposition. This doesn’t mean that these forces have lost their essential function of defending capitalism from the working class. It’s a way of better adapting themselves to this function in a situation where:

-- the left parties have largely discredited themselves in countries where they were running the government, as the situation in Britain illustrates so strikingly;

-- the mystification of a ‘left alternative’ has worn thin in countries where it hasn’t actually been put in office, as in France;

-- it has become necessary to sabotage ‘from inside’ the workers’ struggles which are now re-emerging after being contained and derailed by illusory alternatives.

Thus after several years in which its main enemy was the left in power or moving towards power, the working class will in the coming period generally find the same enemy in the opposition, radicalizing its language in order to sabotage the struggle even more effectively.

4. The main elements of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie illustrate the growing weight of the class struggle in the life of society. This expresses the fact that after a period of relative reflux during the mid-seventies the working class is once again tending to renew the combativity which it showed in a generalized and often spectacular manner after 1965. This wave of proletarian combativity, which an important num­ber of revolutionary currents (like FOR and Battaglia Comunista) were unable to recognize, was the first response of the working class to the capitalist crisis which came with the end of the reconstruction period. It showed that the terrible counter-revolution which descended on the working class after the 1920s was now over. After an initial period of surprise, the bourgeoi­sie responded with a counter-offensive spear­headed by the left. Taking advantage of the weaknesses which are inevitable in a movement which is only just beginning, the bourgeoisie managed to channel and stifle the struggle through:

-- the democratic mystification;

-- the perspective of the left in power;

-- ‘national solutions’ to the crisis.

This ideological stifling and containment of the workers was completed by a considerable reinforce­ment of state terror, especially at the time of the Baader affair in Germany and the Moro affair in Italy. This showed clearly that if certain revolutionaries were incapable of understanding the resurgence of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie was a lot more lucid about it!

The present tendency towards the development of struggles (US miners in the Appalachians, German steelworkers, Italian hospital workers, lorry drivers and public sector workers in Britain, workers in Spain, telephone workers in Portugal, steelworkers in France, etc) is a sign that the bourgeoisie’s counter-offensive is wearing out; far from being a flash in the pan, these struggles are harbingers of a general resurgence of the proletariat, a resurgence which will close the gap that has opened in recent years between the gravity of the crisis and the response of the working class, to the detriment of the latter. As it continues to force down the living standards of the proletariat, the crisis will oblige even the most hesitant workers to return to the path of struggle.

Even if it doesn’t appear immediately in a clear way, one of the essential characteristics of this new wave of struggles will be a tendency to take off from the highest qualitative level reached by the last wave. This will express itself in a more marked tendency to go beyond the unions, to extend struggles outside professional and sectional limits, to develop a clear awareness of the international character of the class struggle. Another element will tend to play a decisive role in the struggle: the development of unemployment. Although when it first appeared on a massive scale after 1974 this helped to paralyze the proletariat, today unemployment is becoming an explosive factor in the mobilization of the class, forcing workers to transcend straightaway the various sectional divisions. The European bourgeoisie has understood this quite well, which explains its present campaign about the 35-hour week.

5. Thus, although, on the one hand, the aggrava­tion of the crisis is pushing the system inexorably towards imperialist war, on the other hand, it’s pushing the working class into more and more bitter struggles against capital. Thus once again we are faced with the historic alternative defined by the Communist International for the period of capitalist decadence: imperialist war or proletarian revolution. The question posed to revolutionaries -- to which they are presently giving all kinds of contradictory answers -- is therefore: does capitalism have a free hand to impose its ‘solution’ to the crisis -- imperialist war; or, on the contrary, does the rise of the proletariat stand in the way of such a catastrophe for the moment?

A correct answer to this question presupposes that one poses the question correctly. In particular this means rejecting the idea of two simultaneous, parallel and independent courses towards imperia­list war and towards class war. In fact, as the responses of two irredeemably antagonistic clas­ses, these two ways out are themselves antagonis­tic and mutually exclude each other. History has shown that as a class divided into numerous factions with contradictory interests, the bour­geoisie is only capable of uniting when it’s faced with a working class offensive. This is why, since the beginning of the century, revolu­tionaries have affirmed that the class struggle is the only real obstacle to imperialist war.

The question which must be answered, therefore, is: is the present level of workers’ combativity enough to bar the way to world war? Some revolu­tionaries, basing themselves on the fact that only a revolution put an end to imperialist war in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany, consider that only revolutionary struggles can prevent a new conflict, and that since these don’t exist as yet, the way is open for capital. In reality, the problem is posed in different terms depending on whether a generalized war has already broken out or whether it’s only in a state of preparation. In the first case, history has effectively shown that struggles with a revolutionary character were needed to end the war. In the second case, it has shown, especially with the long prepara­tions for World War II that capitalism can only launch into such a venture when it has dragooned the working class behind the national capital. A comparison between the situations of 1914 or 1939 and today shows that capitalism has not brought together the conditions which would allow it to carry out its own solution to the crisis -- generalized imperialist war. Although on the level of the depth of the crisis, and of the military and strategic preparations, the conditions for a new holocaust have matured long ago, the present combativity of the working class constitutes a decisive obstacle to such a holocaust.

6. To the extent that capitalism can only impose its own solution to the crisis after breaking the combativity of the workers, the current perspective is not one of a generalized imperia­list confrontation but of a class confrontation. The present battles of the class are preparing the way for this decisive confrontation: decisive because the future of society depends on them. The role of revolutionaries is, therefore, to intervene in these struggles in order to show precisely what’s at stake in them. Any attitude they might have of underestimating what really is at stake, any conception which neglects the essential role of these struggles as an obstacle to imperialist war, or which demoralizes the workers by -- wrongly -- announcing that the war is inevitable, will serve only to weaken these struggles and facilitate the final victory of capitalism.

Today, only a determined attitude by revolution­aries, demonstrating the crucial importance of these struggles -- not in order to paralyze them but to stimulate them -- only such an attitude will contribute to a positive outcome in the confrontation we are heading for, to the victory of the proletarian revolution and the triumph of communism.

During the period of transition the division of society into classes with antagonistic interests will give rise to a state. Such a state will have the task of guaranteeing the advances of this transitional society both against any exter­nal or internal attempt to restore the power of the old exploiting classes and maintaining the cohesion of society against any disintegration of the social fabric resulting from conflicts betw­een the non-exploiting classes which still subsist.

The state of the period of transition has a certain number of differences from previous states:

-- for the first time in history, it is not a state in the service of an exploiting minority for the oppression of the majority, but is on the contrary a state in the service of the majority of the exploited and non-exploiting classes and strata against the old ruling minority.

-- it is not the emanation of a stable society and relations of production, but on the contrary of a society whose permanent characteristic is a constant transformation on a greater scale than anything else in history.

-- it cannot identify itself with any economically dominant class because there is no such class in the society of the period of transition.

-- in contrast to states in past societies, the transitional state does not have a monopoly of arms

For all these reasons Marxists have talked about a “semi-state” when referring to the organ that will arise in the transition period.

On the other hand, this state still retains a number of the characteristics of past states.

In particular, it will still be the guardian of the status quo, the task of which will be to codify, legalize and sanction an already exist­ing economic order, to give it a legal force which has to be acknowledged by every member of society.

In the period of transition, the state will tend to conserve the existing state of affairs. Bec­ause of this, the state remains a fundamentally conservative organ that will tend:

-- not to favor social transformation but to act against it

-- to maintain the conditions on which its own life depends: the division of society into classes

-- to detach itself from society, to impose itself on society, to perpetuate its own existence and to develop its own prerogatives

-- to bind its existence to the coercion and viol­ence which it will of necessity use during the period of transition, and to try to maintain and reinforce this method of regulating social relations

-- to be a fertile soil for the formation of a bureaucracy, providing a rallying point for elements coming from the old classes and offices which have been destroyed by the revolution.

This is why from the beginning Marxists have always considered the state of the period of transition to be a “scourge”, a “necessary evil”, whose “worst sides” the proletariat will have to “lop off as much as possible” (Engels). For all these reasons, and in contrast to what has happ­ened in the past, the revolutionary class cannot identify itself with the state in the period of transition.

To begin with, the proletariat is not an econom­ically dominant class, either in capitalist society or the transitional society. During the transit­ion period it will possess neither an economy nor any property, not even collectively; it will struggle for the abolition of economy and prop­erty. Secondly, the proletariat, the communist class, the subject which transforms the economic and social conditions of the transitional society, will necessarily come up against an organ whose task is to perpetuate these conditions. This is why one cannot talk about a “socialist state”, a “workers’ state” or a “proletarian state” during the period of transition.

This antagonism between the proletariat and the state manifests itself both on the immediate and the historic level.

On the immediate level, the proletariat will have to oppose the encroachments and the pressure of a state which is the manifestation of a society divided into antagonistic classes. On the hist­oric level, the necessary disappearance of the state in communist society, which is a perspective which Marxism always defended, will not be the result of the state’s own dynamic, but the fruit of the pressure mounted on it by the prol­etariat in its own movement forward, which will progressively deprive it of all its attributes as the progress towards a classless society unfolds. For these reasons, while the proletariat will have to use the state during the transition period, it must retain a complete independence from it. In this sense the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be confused with the state. Between the two there is a constant relation of force which the proletariat will have to maintain in its favor: the dictatorship of the proletar­iat is exerted by the working class itself through its own independent armed unitary organs: the workers’ councils. The workers’ councils will participate in the territorial soviets (in which the whole non-exploiting population is represent­ed and from which the state structure will emanate) without confusing themselves with them, in order to ensure its class hegemony over all the structures of the society of the transitional period.

 

1. Introduction

No-one can deny that the present situation of the class struggle is very different from what it was in 1977-78. At this time apathy and disorientation reigned among the workers, espec­ially in the European countries. Dark clouds loomed over the horizon: austerity plans, massive lay-offs, a dangerous aggravation of imperialist wars ... Capitalism could impose all this with­out provoking much of a reaction by the working class. It’s not the same today: the whole of Europe has been hit by a wave of struggles which began with the strikes in the US and Germany in 1978 and culminated in the formidable battles of Longwy and Denain in the Spring of 1979. In the face of the capitalist crisis and its funereal march towards the holocaust, the proletarian giant is once again raising its head, threatening to transform the crisis into a revolutionary crisis which will open the door to the communist emancipation of humanity.

Of course, there is still much doubt, hesitation and mistrust in the proletariat’s ranks: the more combative workers are themselves not always aware of the scope and importance of the struggles they’ve been through. The workers have not yet rediscovered the enthusiasm and determination of the last revolutionary wave, and frequently dis­play a certain apathy and disorientation. This is quite understandable seeing that we are only at the very beginning of a new revolutionary wave. As Rosa Luxemburg said:

“The unconscious precedes the conscious and the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its protagonists.” (‘Marxism against Dictatorship’)

This report, which expresses the discussion which took place at our Third International Congress on the present state of the class struggle, has a clear, practical and militant objective: to make the combative workers conscious of the “logic of the historic process”, ie of the overall context -- economic, political, social -- of the struggles we are now seeing, of their effects and their perspectives. Only by grasping this “logic of the historic process”, or as the Communist Manifesto put it, “clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”, will our class be able to strengthen its confidence in itself, redouble its determination and annihilate the power of its class enemy.

However, in the revolutionary movement today there are still too many blind men who don’t see this or don’t want to see it. This is the case with the FOR (Ferment Ouvrier Revolutionnaire), PCI (Battaglia Comunista) and the PCI (Programma Comunista). These groups refuse to see the essential, underlying aspects of the present struggles. And this isn’t new: these groups also have a low opinion of the huge workers’ struggles which shook the five continents in the 1960s, seeing them as somewhat unimportant skirmishes.

More precisely, this report will serve to reaffirm the essential axes of the present historical period, against the obvious blindness of these comrades:

1. The struggles of the sixties (May ‘68, Poland, Italy) represented the end of the period of counter-revolution which descended on the working class from the 1920s on, opening up the perspec­tive of a new revolutionary period.

2. The relative reflux which dominated the European proletariat after 1973-74 was due to the weaknesses which characterized the post-‘68 wave of struggle, and to the bourgeoisie’s counter attack.

3. This reflux was in no way a defeat, and did not overturn the course towards revolution which opened up in the sixties.

4. The struggles which have broken out since Autumn 1978 in a great number of countries, part­icularly the capitalist metropoles, announce the end of the period of calm and the maturation of a new proletarian offensive.

Programma Comunista and Battaglia Comunista are beginning to see that something is going on: even though their analyses are contradictory, they are beginning to see the importance of the present struggles. But the FOR continues unheedingly in its blindness, in its Olympian disdain for the present struggles: for them, all that happened in Iran was just a manipulation by the Ayatollah and the events in Longwy and Denain were completely recuperated by the unions.

The FOR pushes to its logical, caricatural extreme the attitude of all the revolutionary groups and militants who don’t understand the dynamic of the situation and the characteristics of the class struggle -- who don’t even attempt to find a con­crete perspective for the present historic course.

To fail to see the perspectives which are emerging out of today’s ‘poor little strikes’ amounts, comrades of the FOR, to denying the “logic of the historic process”, to leaving militant proleta­rians at an unconscious stage, to putting obsta­cles in front of the development of class cons­ciousness. The FOR defends the essential class positions, but at a time when it has to under­stand reality, understand the evolution of the class struggle, it doesn’t put them into practice. That’s because class positions aren’t something that have to be repeated parrot-fashion till they enter into people’s heads; they’re not a nice sermon aimed at converting people; they’re not a good news sheet for proselytes. They are above all a global framework for understanding the class struggle, for seeing where we are going and how, through what process and with what perspec­tives. They are an instrument for understanding the logic of the historic process and acting consciously towards its fruition. Defending class positions in a general way while at the same time failing to see the reality of the present struggles and lacking a concrete perspective for the period, as the FOR comrades do, amounts to throwing away a precious treasure, a priceless implement for understanding the reality of the class struggle, for participating in it and giving it a revolutionary direction. It amounts to reducing class positions to mere ideology.

The present text contains our conclusions on:

-- the conditions which determined the relative reflux of 1973-78;

-- the evolution of the crisis, of the deepening political crisis of the bourgeoisie, and of the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which have determined the end of the reflux;

-- the balance-sheet and concrete perspectives of the struggles since November 1978.

It is a militant appeal for the whole revolutio­nary movement to make an effort to arrive at a global understanding of the proletarian movement, of the steps it has already made and the ones which lie before it; to be at all times conscious of where we are and where we’re going in the current proletarian movement.

2. Why the reflux?

After 1973-74, the huge wave of struggles which began in the 1960s virtually disappeared from the central countries of capital, giving way to a phase of social calm. Why this reflux?

In the report on the international situation which our organization elaborated in early 1978 (see International Review, no.13), there is a general explanation of why the movement of the working class has never followed a straight line but goes through a series of flux and reflux. This ‘saw-tooth’, uneven character is accentuated in the period of capitalist decadence, owing to:

-- the state totalitarianism which -- either by repression or integration, or a combination of both -- prevents the existence of any permanent mass organizations of the working class;

-- the impossibility of winning any lasting reforms and improvements, which prevents any stable, structured struggle.

We must understand the reflux which followed the struggles of the sixties within the context of the general characteristics of the proletarian struggle, to which must be added:

-- the weaknesses of the post-1968 wave of struggle;

-- the ideological and political counter­offensive of the bourgeoisie.

Concerning the first point, this is not the place to make a complete balance-sheet of these struggles: this has already been done in several texts of our organization (cf RI, Old Series; the texts ‘World Perspectives of the Class Struggle’ in Accion Proletaria, nos .12 & 13, trans­lated in English in World Revolution nos.15 & 16; ‘On the Present State of the Class Struggle’, AP no.18; ‘May ‘68’ in IR no.14). Here we will limit ourselves to:

-- a schematic reminder of the main weaknesses of the movement of the sixties: illusions about a radical form of economism; a frequent break with the trade union form, but not with its con­tent; the relative isolation of the struggles; their lack of perspectives;

-- looking at the general conditions in which the wave took place (a still limited level of the crisis; the slow, uneven rhythm of the crisis; the limited experience of the proletariat which was starting from scratch after fifty years of counter-revolution), in order to get to the roots of these weaknesses;

-- and finally, understanding these weaknesses as an integral part of the first stage in a new revolutionary epoch, which alongside its great revolutionary potential inevitably contains all sorts of immaturities and weak spots.

Concerning the second point, it is important to understand that the bourgeoisie consciously took advantage of these limitations and weak spots in order to mount a vast political and ideological counter-offensive which aimed at holding back and undoing the proletariat’s advance. Basing itself on the general conditions from which the struggles of the sixties arose, the bourgeoisie streng­thened its mystifications, its anti-working class offensive.

The struggles following May ‘68 took place in the first phase of the capitalist crisis (the recession of 1966-67 and 1970-71); this made it difficult to see how profoundly sick senile capi­talism was, especially with the mini-boom of 1972, when a number of countries achieved the highest levels of production in the post-war period. This boom was in many ways the swan song of capitalism’s famous period of ‘prosperity’.

The struggle unfolded then in the context of:

-- a slow development of the crisis;

-- its uneven development nationally, regionally and industrially;

-- the general, marked tendency toward increa­sing state capitalism which allowed the bourgeoi­sie to initially avoid a frontal assault on the workers. The effects of the crisis could be partially diverted away from the central sectors of the class to hit those at its margins or even weaker elements of the population. This inhibited the development of the struggle and became the soil that nurtured all manner of illusions in the workers’ ranks, thus allowing a counter-offensive to be effectively mounted by the bourgeoisie.

The slow development of the capitalist crisis took its toll on the consciousness of the class:

-- it had difficulty in understanding the nat­ure of the capitalist crisis;

-- trade union-style, reformist illusions caused the class to believe that it could protect itself from a degradation in its living standards by means of legal ‘guarantees’. Self-management and ‘workers’ power’ are the most radical expres­sions of such illusions;

-- the illusion persisted that, given social contracts and negotiations, workers could participate in the administration of capitalist society and benefit accordingly;

-- the workers over-estimated the stability and coherence of the capitalist system, continuing to believe that the ruling class could govern eternally.

The uneven development of the capitalist crisis between different firms, regions and countries facilitated:

-- the illusion that a national solution could be found for the crisis. This illusion entailed the acceptance of class collaboration and ‘sacrifices for all’;

-- trust in the effectiveness of defensive struggles waged at a sectoral level -- factory by factory, sector by sector, or category by category -- heightened the workers’ belief that solutions to the crisis could be found at the level of the individual factory, sector or region.

Finally, the acceleration of state capitalist measures at the first signs of the crisis strengthened various illusions held by the class:

-- the bourgeoisie identified state capitalism with socialism by presenting the intervention of the state in the economy and nationalizations as so many steps toward socialism;

-- measures taken by the bourgeoisie to indirectly concentrate capital, or divert the consequences of the crisis onto the middle classes or anachronistic sectors of the population, were presented to the working class as proof of the ‘just’ , ‘social’ and ‘progressive’ character of the capitalist state;

-- the left and the unions were given a ‘prole­tarian’ and ‘combative’ image by means of the bourgeois mystification that a ‘workers’ govern­ment’ and the ‘union of the left’ would provide a solution to the crisis, favorable to the working class’.

All of this provided the material basis for a general political and ideological strengthening of the bourgeoisie, which allowed it to assume a counter-offensive against the class. The principal positions governing this offensive, which ended up bridling and demobilizing the proletariat were:

1. The democratic mystification -- it was brought to bear in periods of intense social unrest in the form of ‘direct democracy’ and ‘popular power’. As the intensity of the struggle diminished, democratic mystifications assumed their ‘classical’ form.

2. the left in power -- was presented as the great legal, peaceful, though very radical ‘change’ which would provide a solution to all problems.

3. the national solution to the crisis -- required ‘the solidarity of all the classes in the nation’ so that social contracts, plains to restructure the economy, etc, could be implemented. This mystification was used to justify the sacrifice workers were being asked to make.

An active factor in the ideological and political rearming of the bourgeoisie was the re-adaptation of the union and left-wing machines at the end of the 1960s to the new climate of class struggle:

-- they ‘democratized’ and ‘de-bureaucratized’ themselves;

-- they ‘radicalized’ their own outlook, inte­grating all the components of the ‘modern struggle’, such as self-management and the need for radical ‘changes in daily life’, into their arsenal of attack against the class;

-- they proposed ‘new programs’ and ‘social change’, linking the class struggle to a ‘legal’ terrain.

The leftists were precisely those ‘anti-bodies’ secreted by the bourgeoisie which were needed, initially, to immobilize the struggle and give credibility to the ‘renovation’ of the unions and left parties.

The bourgeois state, rigidified by the years of social calm and too preoccupied with all the problems of the reconstruction period, also underwent a rapid re-adaptation in face of the new conditions of class struggle brought to life by the crisis. This re-adaptation allowed the state to present itself as a ‘neutral organ’ standing between the classes, which could provide the means for the participation of all citizens in the life of society because it was a ‘democratic instrument’ of the popular will.

The process by which the bourgeoisie mounted its ideological and political attack on the class can be seen in the following:

“In a great many countries, particularly in those where the working class had shown the greatest combativity in its struggle, the bourgeoisie launched a campaign of mystifica­tion which tried to demonstrate:

-- that class struggle didn’t pay;

-- instead, ‘changes’ were needed in order for the country to face up to the crisis;

Depending on the country, these ‘changes’ took the form:

-- in Great Britain, of the assumption of power by the Labor Party at the end of the wave of big strikes in the winter of 1972-73;

-- in Italy, of ‘the historic compromise’ and the participation in government of the PCI, designed to make political life ‘moral’;

-- in Spain, of the ‘democratic break’ with the Franco regime;

-- in Portugal, of ‘democracy’ initially, and later of ‘popular power’;

-- in France, of the ‘Common Program’ and the ‘Union of the Left’, which was supposed to bring to an end twenty years of ‘big capital’ politics.” (‘Report on the World Situation’, IR, no. 13)

The process by which the bourgeoisie rearmed itself allowed the bourgeois state initially to isolate the most dangerous struggles of the class in order to liquidate the general social unrest. Steps were taken to channel workers’ struggles into an impasse, on to a false terrain of struggle which would lead to their demoralization. This allowed the unions to redeploy themselves, to take the struggles in hand by mounting sham strikes that would end in demobilizing the working class.

Confidence in all sorts of ‘legal’ actions, inter-­classist campaigns and government programs took the place of the workers’ trust in their own strength. France is a good example of this. Hav­ing got through the most difficult phase repres­ented in May ‘68, the French bourgeoisie set about isolating the strongest struggles still taking place -- the SNCF railway strike waged in 1969 for example. It left the radical strikes of 1971 and 1972 to rot in isolation, while it staged itself, via the unions, the famous ‘new May’ of 1972, 1973 and 1974. The ‘new May’ was nothing but the means used by the bourgeoisie to prevent another May ‘68 from reoccurring. Since 1975, we have seen a period of maximum social calm during which all the perspectives of the struggle were turned around into support for the sinister ‘Common Program’ of the left.

Trade union and democratic mystifications were used to crush, like a steamroller, the first cycle of open struggle that came to life in the sixties. Thus, the immense deepening of the economic crisis in 1974-75, the first clear indication of the decisive, mortal nature of today’s economic depression, hit the demobilized workers hard, producing an aggravation in the reflux in the class struggle.

“The intensification of the crisis at the start of 1974, essentially marked by the explosion in unemployment, did not immediately provoke a response in the class. On the contrary, to the extent that the crisis hit the class hardest at a time of reflux in the preceding wave of struggle, it engendered a temporary tendency of great disarray and great apathy in the ranks of the class.” (‘Report on the World Situation’, IR, no.13)

1977 saw the deepest moment in the reflux of proletarian struggle. This capitalist offensive had important anti-working class consequences, both on the economic level and on the level of repression.

1. On the economic level, we can say that between 1975 and 1976, the bourgeoisie was extremely cautious, only gradually increasing its economic attack on the working class. But once the class had been relatively demobilized, the bourgeoisie attacked brutally, especially in 1977 and 1978. Today we can draw up a balance-sheet that shows a significant fall in the living conditions of the working class:

-- wages, which kept pace with inflation without much trouble until 1974, have now been slashed, and the phenomenon of an absolute cut in wages has become generalized;

-- unemployment has not only assumed monstrous quantitative proportions, it has also increased qualitatively, affecting more and more the large, concentrated units of production;

-- speed-ups in work rates have increased in an uninterrupted fashion throughout the last fifty years -- but even these rising norms have accelerated in the last three years;

-- the working day has increased in length in a constant fashion, but this increase has expressed itself in different forms: certain, holidays have been done away with, hours have been increa­sed, etc. Union demands for a 35-hour week represent a tactical, temporary maneuver by the bourgeoisie, which won’t alter the tendency towards a longer working day;

-- social services have been cut on both a quantitative and qualitative level;

-- retirement pensions have dwindled;

-- the famous promises about free education, public housing, etc have all disappeared.

2. On the level of repression, the sinister, anti­terrorist ideology employed to the hilt by the West German bourgeoisie in relation to the Baader gang; by the Italian bourgeoisie in relation to the Moro affair; and by the Spanish bourgeoisie in regard to ETA, has served to:

-- strengthen the police and juridical machinery of the capitalist state;

-- create a climate of terror and insecurity in the population.

The strengthening of the state apparatus was des­igned to prevent inevitable class confrontations by giving the state a gigantic arsenal of physical and military repression. The climate of fear created by the anti-terrorist campaign was meant to paralyze the class from within.

On a general level, this strengthening of the state apparatus on the basis of ‘anti-terrorism’ can be seen in the following:

“Even before the working class, with the excep­tion of a tiny minority, had understood the inevitability of violent class confrontations with the bourgeoisie, capitalism had already stationed itself for the fight.” (ibid)

3. Conditions for a proletarian revival

The struggles in Germany and in the United States at the start of 1978; the short, but nonetheless, violent succession of struggles that happened in May and June in France in 1978; the big class move­ment in Iran; the hospital strike in Italy; the struggles in the steel industry in Germany and the big struggles in Longwy and Denain; the strikes in Spain since the beginning of 1979; the telephone strike in Portugal -- taken together, can all of these class movements be interpreted as an effec­tive revival in the class struggle? Do they represent a new landmark in the revolutionary epoch opened by the strikes of 1968?

Prudence is necessary to avoid a premature evaluation of the situation. However, equivocation would leave us paralyzed, stuck between the ill-defined and the possible. It is necessary to take up a position and say clearly in what context these struggles have happened and what perspectives they have opened up. Better to have an erroneous position, than the security of a vague, eclectic, wait-and-see attitude. To take up a clear and decisive position carries risks, but that is nec­essary if revolutionaries are to accomplish their task of being an active factor in the class struggle.

The great fear than can assail us is: are these strike movements the last flares of proletarian resistance? It would be pessimism to give into such a theory. The weaknesses that have been manifested in these struggles -- their more or less general inability to extend themselves (except in Great Britain, France and Iran); the relatively effective control the unions appear to have over them; in general, the non-appearance of forms of self-organization by the class -- all of these things are used by every type of pessi­mist to justify their contention that ‘there hasn’t been a revival in the class struggle; these movements have simply been the last shocks from before’.

In order to answer this argument, it is necessary to recall clearly, a general theoretical point. The direction taken by the proletariat’s struggle cannot be measured by looking at the forms of struggle and organization created by the class in themselves. It is an erroneous argument that maintains that in relation to the extension of the struggle, today’s strikes have given rise to forms of struggle and organization which are less well-developed than those present in 1968. There­fore, we are witnessing a reflux in the struggle today.

It’s true that at both a quantitative and quali­tative level, today’s strikes are weaker than those of 1968, but it is wrong to conclude that this means a reflux in the struggle. Experience has shown that when a great avalanche of prole­tarian struggle unrolls, it takes a certain time for the class to take up again the highest forms of struggle, to maximize the content and organization, produced in its previous struggles.

For us, what is most important to see is the general social context in which the struggles are developing, to understand the unfolding of the crisis and the evolution of the balance of forces existing between the classes.

The mistake made by the ‘autonomes’ and other currents, which look at the workers’ struggles in themselves as if they took place independently from social reality, is that they forget that the proletariat doesn’t exist in capitalism by itself, but that the action of the class takes place in the midst of a number of social conditions engen­dered by the general movement of capitalism. The autonomy of the working class is not realized by the working class becoming a class which acts outside of the conditions imposed on it by capi­talism. The autonomous action of the class is expressed in its movement within the social conditions created by capitalism in its struggle to oppose such conditions and constitute itself as a revolutionary force capable of destroying them.

This is the reason why we must reply to the question posed at the beginning of this section as follows:

1. by saying that the reflux of 1973-78 was a relative reflux; not a decisive defeat for the proletariat but a phase of calm and retreat which still presaged new advances by the proletariat;

2. by analyzing the global conditions confronting the struggle (the development of the crisis, the impact of the bourgeoisie’s political and ideological weapons);

3. by drawing up a balance-sheet of the struggles which have gone on since November 1978 throughout Europe, and which have more and more clearly represented a resurgence of the proletariat;

Here we will develop the first and second points; the third will be dealt with in another section.

1. In Accion Proletaria, no.18 we explained why the period of social calm during the reflux could not be seen as a defeat for the class:

“What is the meaning of this reflux? Does it mark the definitive defeat of the proletariat? Has it changed the course of history, elimina­ting all hope of revolution? A global, world­wide analysis of the class struggle allows us to affirm that we find ourselves in a phase of momentary retreat in the class struggle, but the proletariat is not faced with a decisive defeat which would put an end to the revolu­tionary perspective opened up by the struggles of the 1960s:

1. The proletariat has not suffered a decisive defeat in any country. Where important, par­tial defeats of the class have happened -- as in Chile, Argentina or Portugal -- the working class wasn’t beaten into the ground because new, powerful struggles began to reappear, especially in Argentina.

2. The bourgeoisie couldn’t launch a total, definitive attack against the proletariat, in the first place because the economic crisis had not reached such an extreme level as to oblige the capitalists to impose an open war economy based on draconian austerity measures, and in the second place, because the bourgeoi­sie has been concentrating more during this time on preparing its future attack on the class rather than unleashing a decisive con­frontation. For these reasons, the bourgeoisie and proletariat have not confronted each other in a decisive way.

3. Despite the reflux in struggle in the major capitalist countries, the proletariat’s strug­gle has developed strongly in the periphery of the system. Despite the weaknesses of these struggles, they have a great importance for the world proletariat:

-- they have demonstrated that in countries where exploitation has reached extreme limits, the proletariat is far from accepting the self-sacrifice demanded by capitalism;

-- in Algeria, Morocco, Egypt or Israel, strikes have momentarily restrained imperialist war;

-- these strikes have contributed to the development of class consciousness, allowing the class to understand the objective basis of its unity as a world class.

4. Even in Europe, despite the reflux at a general level, hard struggles have surged up. And these struggles -- like those in Poland and Spain in 1976 -- are important, although they have been isolated and sporadic. The strikes which have begun in Germany, as well as the strike of the American miners, are equally of value.” (AP, no.18)

One thing which shows in a conclusive manner the relative nature of the passing reflux in the proletariat’s struggle is the limited result and weak impact of the left within the proletariat. If we compare today’s situation with the 1930s, the vast difference between the two is obvious. At that time, in a practically total fashion, the left and the unions could mobilize the enthusiasm and voluntary adhesion of enormous numbers of workers behind the criminal policies of anti-fascism, the Popular Front, the defense of demo­cracy etc ... Today such nightmares seem to be excluded from history. The left and the unions are able to impose themselves on the class only because the class lacks its own perspectives for its struggle, and suffers from momentary confusions. Workers don’t adhere to the politics of the left and the unions enthusiastically, as they did in the 1930s. This means that: a. the control of the left and the unions over the proletariat rests on a precarious basis; b. we are far from being in a period of defeat for the proletariat, the material basis of which is the atomization and rout of the class. This is what caused the workers to adhere in despera­tion to the program of the bourgeoisie in the past.

Generally speaking, to summarize the analysis made above, it is possible to say that the class follows the propositions put forward by the unions and the left today without having a great deal of confidence or illusions in them. These propositions seem to constitute the ‘lesser evil’ and are taken up by the class on that basis.

This represents a positive precondition for the development of class consciousness in the future. In this connection, we have seen, for example, how the great ‘brain-washing’ of the French elections of March 1978 did not intimidate the class, but rather acted to fire the explosions of class struggle which followed in May and June. Even while adopting a necessarily prudent attitude, it is possible to affirm that the myth of the ‘Union of the Left’ and the ‘Common Program’ has died its death even faster than we had forecast.

As a parallel development to this, we can note that in a period of reflux in the class struggle, the slow maturation of class consciousness con­tinues to follow its course. The workers’ nuclei, discussion circles and action groups have not disappeared and, although they are dispersed and fiddled with confusions, they express the effort within the class to come to consciousness. In the same manner, the relatively frequent ‘crises within the rank-and-file’ which have affected many leftist groups, and even the central unions, reveal the contradictory, but real, tendency for fractions of the proletariat to separate them­selves from the ideological control of the bourg­eoisie. In certain leftist groups, ideological crises have appeared, causing small fractions of these groups to split in a more or less clear attempt to find revolutionary positions.

Finally, revolutionary groups, the expression of the most advanced consciousness within the class, have developed, have strengthened themselves and their programmatic positions, and have extended the scope and impact of their intervention. Al­though these groups still manifest great weak­nesses, and although they remain a tiny minority within the class, their progress is a testimony to the advancement of consciousness within the class.

As Marx said, the consciousness of the class is like a mole, which slowly -- in the depths of society -- nibbles away at all the political and ideological foundations of the bourgeoisie. Already you can catch the sound of the mole nibbling, but it has yet to come up into the light, even though its existence is beyond dispute. In periods of social calm, a somber mood of passivity, apathy and hesitation seems to grip the workers. While in contrast, the bourgeoisie appears to be at once very active and a spectator watching its own activity, given the nature of this class as one based on exchange relationships. This gives rise to the impression that the bourgeoisie exer­cises a control and domination over society which does not, in fact, correspond to social reality.

At the base of society, among the exploited, doubts and a lack of confidence, mingled with intuition, are always present. Significant events, the most decisive workers’ struggles, and the activity of revolutionaries will transform the doubts into certainties, and the intuitions into conclusions and programs of action for the class.

Sooner or later, the monolithic edifice of bourg­eois order will reel under a new avalanche of proletarian struggle.

There you have in outline, the reply to the init­ial question we posed ourselves. The answer has taken shape: the reflux today is temporary. In response to it, in embryonic form, the struggle and class consciousness itself are developing, allowing us to conclude that the reflux will dis­appear in a new round of proletarian assaults on capitalism.

2. Now to reply to the second question. We have witnessed since 1974-75, an important worsening in the capitalist crisis. Illusions concerning the so-called recovery of 1975 have given way to an explosive increase in unemployment and a gene­ral degradation in the workers’ living standards. Unemployment has not only hit the major branches of production -- steel, shipbuilding, textiles, metallurgy, etc -- but also the principal capita­list countries, such as Germany, France and the US ... It has ceased to affect only the marginal or peripheral sectors of the working class -- some­thing which had prevented the class from becoming conscious of the gravity of the situation -- and now attacks even the biggest concentrations, the vital centers of the proletariat.

This further worsening in the crisis is one of the fundamental factors influencing the class struggle. It opens the workers’ eyes, causing them to become aware of the necessity of defending themselves, and ignoring the promises, programs and solu­tions emanating from the ruling class.

But is the crisis by itself enough to cause new explosions of class struggle? No! The crisis causes both a series of convulsions within the social order of the bourgeoisie, and the revolt of the working class, but it is necessary to under­stand on what level these convulsions are taking place and to what degree the proletariat has attained its own autonomy.

A second condition affecting the class struggle is the political crisis of the ruling class. As a general principle, the bourgeoisie has never had, and will never have, unified class interests. The overriding interest governing the bourgeoisie is its exploitation of the working class, but this gives rise to a constant struggle within the bourgeoisie for the distribution of surplus value. The bourgeoisie is thus divided; it has a thou­sand particular interests which hurl one faction against another.

The general tendency governing the development of state capitalism in the period of decadence neit­her unifies nor homogenizes the bourgeoisie. State capitalism doesn’t eliminate the internal conflicts within the bourgeoisie. On the cont­rary, it magnifies these conflicts, raising them to the level of the social activity of the state as a whole where they gain added resonance and a greater implication in social life.

In reality, the internal conflicts besetting the bourgeoisie could only be attenuated and limited when the capitalist system was expanding into non-capitalist areas of the world, developing its own tendency to socialize and universalize commodity production. But when this process had reached its objective limits at the beginning of this century with the onset of decadence, and when the internal conflicts within the bourgeoisie had themselves multiplied to an impossible degree, state capitalism appeared as a desperate last resort. Through state capitalist policies, the bourgeoisie attempted to regulate its own internal conflicts by means of the concentration of all the strength of capital at a national level. But if the bourgeoisie was successful, temporarily, in limiting the contradictions wracking it as a class, this only meant that these contradictions would reappear later in a sharper, more brutal fashion.

State capitalism has, thus, accentuated the inter­nal conflicts of the bourgeoisie, and these conflicts express themselves in constant political crises which convulse the bourgeois governmental machine. This means:

a. the weakening of the power and cohesion of the state, diminishing its authority, especially over the exploited;

b. the disunity and fragmentation of the bourgeoi­sie, which bring to light the divisions and con­tradictions which afflict it;

c. the viability and coherence of the various programs and alternative programs of the bourgeoisie are locked within a political frame­work of compromise and underhand deals, which try to reconcile the increasingly insurmountable div­ergences dividing the bourgeois class;

d. the impact of anti-proletarian mystifications weaken the more the conflicts, maneuverings, and dirty deals enacted in the bourgeois camp increase and become obvious. This undermines the credi­bility of these mystifications in the eyes of the workers. The political crisis of the bourgeoisie, flowing from the historical crisis of capitalism, facilitates the unfolding of the workers’ struggle since it:

i. demonstrates the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to ‘govern as before’;

ii. breaks the hold that fear and passivity exert over the workers;

iii. exposes the weakness and lack of authority of the bourgeoisie and by implication the possi­bility of a successful struggle against it.

The second precondition -- the political crisis of capital -- is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for class struggle. It requires another: the given relationship of strength between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

If the proletariat has previously been defeated, completely atomized and flattened, neither the development of the economic crisis nor the poli­tical crisis engulfing the bourgeoisie can aid the development of the class struggle. On the contrary, both are converted into the means by which the struggle is annihilated.

If the proletariat has been beaten and atomized already, the economic crisis is the vehicle which carries it further into demoralization and toward a total rout. The crisis is thus converted into an increasingly grave factor adding to the degradation and disintegration of the class. This is what happened after 1929.

But if the proletariat is undefeated, and has already experienced much in its recent struggles as the crisis unfolds, then the crisis adds to the proletariat’s indignation and its understan­ding of the poverty of the bourgeois social order; it can serve to provoke further struggle. The crisis is transformed into a factor acting to mobilize the class against capital, as happened after a certain point in the revolutionary crisis of 1917.

In the same way, if the proletariat finds itself defeated and atomized at a time of political crisis affecting the bourgeoisie, this situation won’t stir the consciousness of the proletariat, but will be used by the ruling class to mystify and mobilize the class behind one or other of the contending bourgeois factions. The 1930s are a good example of how the proletariat was transfor­med into cannon-fodder, caught up as it was in the internal struggles of the bourgeoisie in defense of the Popular Front, ‘socialism in a single country’, or democracy against fascism. It is precisely the pinning down of the proleta­riat in this way that allows the bourgeoisie to limit its internal class conflicts.

But today, the tendency of the proletariat to develop its own political independence and class unity (even in a period of retreat which can give the impression that both have disappeared) is accentuated in the face of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie. It becomes transformed into a factor that leads to disobedience and revolt in the ranks of the workers; the prestige of the ruling class diminishes, animating the struggle and the search for a proletarian alternative to capitalism.

We have said that three big mystifications have been used to immobilize and bridle the offensive of the working class struggle since 1968. These mystifications are:

-- the left in power;

-- the national solution to the crisis;

-- the democratic and anti-terrorist ideologies.

Today we can see that given the combination of the crisis, the political convulsions of the bourgeoisie, and the non-defeat of the proletariat, the weight of these mystifications has reduced and slowly the conditions are appearing for the proletariat to free itself from them.

In a number of countries, the solution of a ‘left government’, put forward by the bourgeoisie as a way to pin down and mystify the class, has -- at least temporarily -- been used up. We don’t doubt for a minute that the bourgeoisie will be able to revitalize this mystification under a different cover. In those countries where there has been little experience of the left in power (in Spain, for example), or in other countries where the left has undergone a restorative spell in opposi­tion (eg Portugal), the bourgeoisie can still resort to this lie with a certain success. But it is incontestable that the ‘Union of the Left’ has lost much of its credibility:

In France: the difficulties the Common Program came up against dealt a strong blow to electoral illusions held by the class, as well as its illu­sions concerning the ‘working class’ or ‘progres­sive’ character of the Common Program. We don’t believe, at least in the short term, that a spell in opposition will increase the abilities of the French Communist Party to mobilize the workers, since its policies rest for the present on an ultra-nationalist footing.

In England: two Labor Party governments in the last twelve years , both tied to tight wage freeze policies and other anti-working class measures, have caused the confidence of the proletariat in the Labor Party to dwindle. The alternative of the Labor Left won’t alter this situation, at least not in the short term.

In Germany: ten years of the Social Democracy in power have depreciated, slowly but effectively, the ‘alternative’ of the left. Its ‘anti­terrorist’ measures, its attacks on the workers’ conditions, and the impact of the workers’ strug­gles in 1978/9 have led to a weakening in the social influence of the left.

In an overall sense, two things undermine the credibility of the left vis-a-vis the working class:

-- the gradually developing lack of faith in electoralism;

-- the requirements imposed on the left by the general political crisis of the bourgeoisie.

Parliament and elections regained some of their previous attraction in the workers’ ranks, rela­tively speaking, between 1972 and 1978. In the face of the not as yet decisive development of the crisis, and the need for overall political alternatives, there was a certain renewal of confidence in electoralism in the working class. The clearest expression of this was the rise of the Common Program of the French left in that period. Its rapid falling apart and subsequent checkmate are the very signs of a changing ten­dency developing within the class -- the develop­ment of an understanding about the mystifying, anti-proletarian role of parliamentarism and electoralism. We can see a certain confirmation, as yet not absolute, of this same tendency in the increase in abstentions registered in the Spanish elections.

There is another factor that has undermined the prestige of the left among the workers: the poli­tics the left is obliged to adopt given the inter­nal conflicts of the bourgeoisie, at both a national and an international level.

At an international level, the inevitable align­ment of the major capitalist countries within the western bloc has prevented their Communist Parties from using a powerful mystification against the working class: the myth of the existence of ‘socialist countries’ and its offshoot that ‘socialism is possible in a single country’. Both of these lies have wrought havoc in the working class in the past.

The famous ‘Eurocommunism’ which took the place of other ideological screens covering Stalinism, like ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘proletarian internationalism’, was adopted by the European Communist Parties (as the ICC has shown elsewhere) because they are the most faith­ful representatives of the national capital. Given the constant proof that the needs of the majority of these countries -- and the only option open to them in the middle term -- lay in remaining in the US bloc, the western CPs were forced, more or less strongly, to distance themselves from the Russian bloc.

All of this has obliged the CPs to change their language. But such a change has important reper­cussions on the CPs’ ability to control the proletariat. The new language lacks the concrete content and combative power of the old. ‘Socia­lism within Freedom’; ‘the consolidation and deepening of democracy’; or ‘national unity’ have a less mystifying weight and are distinctly inferior to the mystifications contained in slo­gans such as ‘socialism in a single country’, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, or ‘prole­tarian internationalism’, particularly when the crisis is deepening and the class struggle is developing.

At the level of the internal conflicts of the bourgeoisie in each country, the obligation to maintain at all costs the cohesion of the national capital restrains the left, causing it to make ‘concessions’ to backward sectors of the bourgeoi­sie, or those linked to particularistic interests within the national capital. Such concessions have meant that the left has been forced to adopt a more ‘conciliatory’ language, speaking less of ‘class struggle’. It has been forced to moderate its old mystifying slogans (‘state capitalism = socialism’; ‘the right = capitalism’) and has been led more and more to ameliorate its relations with the Church, the army, the fascists and all sorts of factions and institutions of capitalism which are very obviously counter-revolutionary. This deprives the left from using its ‘ringing’, ‘denunciatory’ language. The old mystifications fitted together like cogs in a wheel, but the new lack the same solidity and coherence.

Certainly, it is possible to see within the CPs (and the same tendency also exists within certain sectors of the Socialist Parties), that they seek a cure for their present problems by being in oppo­sition. This will allow them to furnish them­selves with a more combative, working class lan­guage, designed to give them the ability to corral and imprison the proletariat. However, we should not exaggerate the possibilities of their success in doing this despite the enormous enthusiasm this move has given rise to in the leftist milieu. The left finds itself torn between two requirements:

-- on the one side, the increasingly onerous demands of the national capital, on account of the development of the crisis and the tendency towards greater state capitalist measures. This extracts the greatest of compromise from the left. These compromises, whether direct or indirect, between the left and the national government push the left into a politics of ‘moderation’, ‘conciliation’, ‘Eurocommunism’ and ‘national solidarity’;

-- on the other side, the need to imprison and mystify the proletariat forces the left into opposition, and into using a more combative lan­guage -- all within the general context of a wearing away of the old mystifications inherited from the 1930s. The see-sawing of the left part­ies between these two requirements continually reduces their capacity to mystify the class, especially when the class struggle is developing.

It has been shown that mystifications don’t occur in a vacuum; they can’t be administered at will like a drug. On the contrary, in order for mystifications to gain a hold over the working class, they must be rooted in real problems and real necessities, which are then interpreted in a totally idealist fashion within the framework of bourgeois politics.

All the components of the analysis we’ve made above, allow us to see how -- little by little --the material basis of the mystifications of a ‘left government’ and ‘the unity of the workers’ parties’ are being eroded, thereby undermining these pillars of bourgeois order within the working class.

The huge myth of the possibility of a national solution to the crisis has been the strongest weapon for:

-- impeding the independent struggle of the proletariat;

-- inculcating into its ranks the necessity for sacrifice and austerity.

We have seen the material basis for such a mytho­logy in previous sections: the slow development of the crisis, its uneven development in different countries. However, this slow and unequal rhythm of the crisis is beginning to disappear. The important acceleration of 1974-75 has given way to a pure and simple collapse without visible perspective of recovery, while at the same time the conditions for a new acceleration of the crisis continue to develop.

In the first place, the acceleration of the crisis towards pure and simple collapse is sweeping away the possible hopes and illusions which many workers could harbor in the system. The horizon seems to be getting darker and darker, and workers are beginning to understand that the only pers­pective which capitalism offers is a re-run -- only worse -- of the world war and post-war period of our elders, who were told that the ills of that time were the promise of eternal prosperity.

In the second place, the workers of the most prosperous countries, regions and firms, are seeing their conditions of work fall to the same, or similar, levels as those of their less fortunate comrades. We are moving towards an equali­zation of misery for workers in all countries, firms and regions. This is a tendency which always can be seen and which denies any real basis for the mystification of national, regional, technical solutions, nationalizations etc. On the contrary, it encourages the general conditions for the unification and internationalization of struggles. For all its weaknesses and limitations, the objective internationalization of struggles is one of the most outstanding features of the recent wave of workers’ combativity in the central countries of capitalism; we will analyze this in Part Four.

The third great axis of capital’s ideological offensive against the proletariat -- the democratic and anti-terrorist mystification -- is losing its anti-proletarian impact.

It was in Germany in 1977 that we saw the most historic moments of capital’s anti-terrorist campaign and where it was transformed from an ideological intoxication to a concrete mobiliza­tion of the workers. Strikes were proposed as a sign of mourning for the death of the businessman Schleyer. Those strikes had to be reduced to symbolic actions of 1 to 5 minutes; as has been indicated by our German comrades, the workers used these breaks as an opportunity for chatting or smoking a cigarette.

Some months after these events, the strikes of January and April 1978 occurred, and revealed that the anti-terrorist poison had much less impact than was hoped for.

In Italy, the most intense moments of the anti­terrorist campaign occurred during the kidnap of Aldo Moro in April 1978. The Italian comrades reported the same phenomena; the passivity of the workers in the face of summonses to strike and demonstrate; the growth of class conscious­ness in the form of workers’ circles which dis­tanced themselves both from the anti-terrorist ideology and from the myth that a ‘combative worker is an armed worker’ etc, etc. As a matter of fact, the huge strike of hospital workers in October 1978 was a promising harbinger of a proletarian revival in Italy.

In Spain, the gigantic anti-terrorist campaign deployed by the Spanish bourgeoisie immediately after the exploits of the ETA, were a resounding political failure -- heralding the failure of the constitutional referendum and the legislative elections. Thus, the anti-terrorist demonstra­tions called for after a hysterical campaign by the CCOO, UGT, etc, achieved a poor attendance and there was no way of organizing strikes, assemblies or anything else.

The relative, and at the least momentary failure of the anti-terrorist and democratic mystifications is simply the fruit of the obvious decompo­sition of the whole of bourgeois ideology, and the patent gangsterism and racket-like character of all inter-bourgeois confrontations. Thus, these intestinal struggles cannot be presented as easily as before under the disguise of a great moral ideal capable of mobilizing the proletariat and the whole of the population.

Concerning this third point, the employment of new mystifications could have great importance, as we have just seen, by combining mystification and repression.

One of the most important problems confronting the bourgeoisie is the reappearance of clashes between the proletariat and the unions. Since recovered the initiative between 1972 and 1978, the bourgeoisie’s union bastion seems to be veering again into a period of erosion and of violent confrontations with the workers. The signs seen in the Italian hospital workers’ strike are beginning to be extended, although very weakly, to France, Britain, Spain etc. Do the unions have new bases for ideologically confronting the proletariat?

Like, in general, their mother parties, the unions are going through a rest-cure in opposition in a great many countries. Such opposition remedies allow them to recuperate their ‘combative’ and ‘proletarian’ image, which gives them, for a certain time, a capacity to lead strikes and to defuse them with more or less success. Although they will not be able to break up the more radical movements, they will at least try to keep up the idea that the unions may be tail-ending the struggles, but they are still with them. One myth which may become strong is that unions and assemblies or workers’ councils are not incompatible.

Another tendency which is beginning to show itself is that the unions are beginning to distance themselves from parties and politics. The cur­rents of ‘revolutionary’ syndicalism and an anarcho-syndicalism may be acquiring a certain prestige as the last effort of the union appara­tus to recuperate some of its old stature. The rebirth of the CNT or the USI in Italy is in no way a movement by syndicalism towards proletarian positions, but a rejuvenation of capital’s union bulwark in order to confront the proletariat more effectively.

Finally, the tendency towards a single, unified union machine is another element which, although very hackneyed, is beginning to be put forward as a ‘guarantee’ for an ‘effective’ and ‘combative’ trade unionism.

Thus we can say that we are witnessing the bank­ruptcy of the bourgeois mystifications which momentarily cut short the proletarian resurgence in the period 1965-72; what’s more, looking at things at a historical level, we are seeing the beginning of the collapse of all the myths of fifty years of counter-revolution. Obviously the weight of such deceits will not disappear over­night. On the contrary, their pernicious effects will still linger on in the ranks of the prolet­ariat.

Ideologies and mystifications are engendered by capitalist relations of production, but they then become an active factor in the conservation and defense of the existing order, in such a way that they acquire a degree of relative autonomy, which allows them to survive -- for a certain time, and at particular levels -- the collapse of the social conditions which created them and made them poss­ible.

And so the weight of the intense ‘brainwashing’ of the recent years of the bourgeoisie’s offensive, of all the theoretical and ideological effects of fifty years of counter-revolution, is still going to be very strong and is going to undermine the strength of many workers’ struggles.

“Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language.” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

The effects of these ‘dead generations’ is going to be considerable and is going to weigh very heavily on the proletarian revival:

First; there will continue to exist over a cer­tain time, a lack of correspondence between the gravity of the crisis and the strength of the prol­etarian response.

Second; there will be a considerable difference between the objective strength of the movement and the consciousness it has of its own strength.

Third; the gap between the size and strength of revolutionary organizations, and the maturation of the conditions for revolution, is greater than it was in the past.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that the counter-tendencies which have just been indicated do not cancel out the general course towards a new world proletarian revolutionary upsurge which opened in the 1960s. Indeed, the conscious and global recognition of all the dangers, risks and weaknesses which confront our class must be the material basis for confronting and eliminating them.

Another consequence of the weight of the ‘dead generations’ is that not only do we suffer from them to the hilt in the first steps of the prol­etarian revival which is now maturing; above all, they will be a powerful negative factor in a period of insurrection and revolution. This weight of the past generations will form the material basis for all the forces which will try to divert, divide, undermine and weaken the prol­etarian revolution. These forces will constitute capital’s fifth column against the revolutionary proletariat.

And so the slow decline of bourgeois ideology and mystifications which we are seeing today does not mean that the most patient, intransigent, tenacious and detailed denunciation of these mys­tifications is no longer needed. Today, as yest­erday, the weapons of critique will continue to be the necessary preparation for the critique by weapons of this criminal capitalist order.

4. Balance sheet of the recent struggles

Before defining the perspectives which we can draw out of all the conditions which we have analyzed, it is necessary to make a balance sheet of the proletarian upsurges of October/November 1978 to January/March 1979, to justify our consideration that they are indicators of a general revival of class struggle. This balance sheet must perforce be provisional and limited given that we lack distance from the period and that many of the struggles still have not finished.

The most important lessons to draw out are:

1. First and Foremost: The Objective Internation­alization of the Struggles.

Important strikes, relatively of course, but some as serious as those in Britain, have broken out simultaneously in the central countries of capit­alism: France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, USA...

On the other hand, the re-emergence of the prol­etariat in the central countries has been accomp­anied by the continuation of the struggles in the peripheral countries: Iran, Morocco, Mexico, Saudi-Arabia, Zaire, Polynesia, Jamaica ... are the most recent examples.

Crystallizing the recognition by the class of this internationalization, we can see how, in Belgium and Luxembourg, there have been solidarity strikes with the workers in Lorraine. Without being the most adequate demonstration of the international solidarity of the proletariat, it is, at the very least, a very important step.

There is a general lesson in this international­ization; internationalist agitation, the defense of internationalism, is going to rest more and more on concrete and relatively immediate events and experiences. It will cease to be a ‘theoret­ical’ or distant question as it has appeared until now.

We said in our ‘Report on the World Situation’ of January 1978 that one of the characteristics of the next proletarian revival must be:

“A greater consciousness of the international character of struggle, which will express itself in practice through movements of inter­national solidarity, the sending of delegations of workers in struggle from one country to another (and not of union delegations).” (International Review No 13)

Up to a certain point, and still with very many limitations, this tendency is beginning to loom up on the horizon.

2. The Re-emergence of the Open Confrontations between the Proletariat and the Unions.

The union apparatus, hard hit by the blows of the first proletarian waves of the 1960s, has been able to refurbish its image, consciously taking advantage of the weaknesses of that proletarian wave, and restoring quite a strong control over the workers since 1972.

In the recent struggles we can see something small, but promising:

-- the appearance of extra-union strikes;

-- the autonomous initiative of the workers is reappearing, without waiting for union calls;

-- there are beginning to be frontal blows bet­ween the unions and the proletariat.

These three tendencies, clearly closely connected, are minor aspects of the totality of struggles, but, though the example which they give, the force which they have taken and the dynamic which they appear to open, their qualitative weight is far superior to their weak numerical weight.

The rupture and confrontation between the prolet­ariat and unions is going to be a very arduous process but for a whole period it will become a central axis of the class struggle.

We say that it is going to be arduous because the unions are, as is known, the principal bastion of bourgeois order against the working class, and their weapons of deceit and control tend to be the most refined. In many ways the unions which today confront the working class are not the same ones the workers confronted in the 1960s: their arsenal of mystification and their machinery of control are far superior and are much more complete.

As a result, the rupture will be more difficult and painful, but at the same time much more dec­isive, because it will have, without the ambiguit­ies and obstacles of the past, a completely polit­ical and revolutionary character. If in the struggles of the 1960s, the political potential of the break with unionism could be camouflaged and diverted by the myths of ‘debureaucratization’ or of union unity, today, those myths are beginn­ing to crumble and are much more difficult to use in stifling the class struggle.

Although in the more radical and advanced strugg­les, a total and absolute rupture, without any ambiguities, between the strikers and the unions is vital, we must not see the formal fact of this rupture as a thermometer to measure the strength and effect of each concrete struggle.

In the majority of cases, there will tend to be a balance of forces between the proletariat and the unions. Crystallizing in different ways at a formal level, this balance of forces will represent the future and the limitations of the strug­gle. In the worst cases, it will be the dominat­ion of the union organizations which will indicate the loss of all immediate perspectives for the struggle, in the best of cases it will be the triumph of anti-union strike committees which will open up a dynamic for the radicalization of the struggle.

Revolutionaries will have to fight from the very beginning for strikes to be organized in assembl­ies. They will have to show why the assemblies should be really sovereign and why there should not be the least ambiguity in the rupture and confrontation with the unions. This doesn’t mean that the dimensions, consequences and perspectives of a struggle will have to be measured exclusively by the concrete form in which, in a given moment, the balance of forces between the proletariat and the unions has crystallized.

The danger of the simple defense of forms, without sufficiently linking form to content, is that it can provide a basis for a new bourgeois deceit which we may see in the future: the creation of ‘anti-union committees’ based on ‘assemblies’ but with identical functions to the unions. In real­ity, with these myths, the attempt is not simply to oppose struggles, but, above all, to limit their scope, block their growth, divert their content by emphasizing extra-union forms in themselves.

In the ‘Report on the World Situation’ we foresaw a second aspect of the future proletarian revival:

“A much clearer break with the unions than in the past, and its corollary: the tendency towards a wider self-organization of the working class (sovereign general assemblies, elected and revocable strike committees, co-ordination of these between places of work and within the same city, region, etc).” (International Review No 13)

This is what we are now beginning to see, but there’s a long way to go and many mystifications to be confronted.

3. All the Struggles have Constituted a Confront­ation between the Proletariat and the Austerity Plans of Capital.

This is the material basis of their objective internationalization. Thus these struggles are a harbinger of proletarian resistance against the tendencies towards austerity and imperialist war which capitalism carries within itself. They establish the basis for the transformation of the sharpening capitalist crisis into a revolutionary crisis.

We have seen something that the years of social calm have covered up somewhat: that proletarian struggle against austerity is possible, that it can bear fruit, although temporarily. The proletarian remedy to the crisis is neither to accept sacrifices nor to limit its demands in order to ‘reduce unemployment’; it is on the contrary to deepen the class struggle.

4. A Point that Some of the Struggles of Recent Times have Shown is that the Proletariat is the Historical Candidate for the Emancipation of the Whole of Humanity.

Iran has shown that the proletarian struggle gives a completely distinct, uncontrollable impetus to the perspectiveless revolt of the marginal strata, poor peasants and impoverished petty bourgeoisie. Iran has posed a possibility, a potential which the proletariat contains irrespective of the fact that, in Iran, this potential hasn’t been completely realized.

That old principle of the workers’ movement -- the proletariat is the only class capable of emancipating itself and of emancipating the whole of humanity -- becomes a real, concrete problem in this recent period. After fifty years of counter-revolution that famous phrase by Lenin is once again becoming a reality:

“The strength of the proletariat in a capita­list country is infinitely more than its numerical proportion within the population. And this is so because the proletariat occu­pies a key position at the heart of the capi­talist economy and also because the proleta­riat expresses, in the economic and political domain, the real interests of the immense majority of the laboring population under capitalist domination.”

During the hospital workers’ strikes in Italy, the workers carried a placard which read: “WE ARE NOT ACTING AGAINST THE SICK; WE ARE ACTING AGAINST THE UNIONS, THE MANAGEMENT AND THE GOVERNMENT!”

This preoccupation of the proletariat with win­ning to its struggle all the oppressed and exploited strata is a promising sign of the general maturation of the consciousness of the class. But more than this, it’s the conscious­ness of a problem the class is going to be posed with again and again in the future; the bour­geoisie is aware that the intervention of the proletariat can give an uncontrollable character to the protests of the oppressed strata; it is definitely conscious that the working class can direct the unrest of the oppressed strata towards the revolution. That’s why one of the essential policies of the bourgeoisie is, and will be, to neutralize the marginal strata, to isolate them, to separate them politically from the proletariat and, if possible, to set them against the proletariat.

In Britain, the bourgeoisie has mounted a hyst­erical campaign against the strikes of the lorry drivers and the public service workers. It has mounted demonstrations of housewives and has organized ‘citizen’ pickets against the workers’ strike pickets. The whole axis of its campaign has been to arouse petty bourgeois sentiments, the paranoia of these strata, to use them against the proletariat.

The errors which have been made by some revolu­tionary groups of seeing these strata as enemies of the proletariat must be eliminated. In them­selves they are vacillating strata who tend towards decomposition and proletarianization; in themselves they have no will of their own. If the bourgeoisie succeeds in using the reactionary characteristics of their condition and winning them to utopian program for ‘non-monopoly capitalism’ etc, then they will be channeled against the proletariat. But if the proletariat, without yielding an inch to program which benefit the petty bourgeoisie, struggles autono­mously and makes them see that they have no al­ternative, no other future, then these strata can be won over to the struggle against capital.

This perspective does not in any way diminish the autonomy of the proletariat and is the concrete answer to the mystifications which the bourgeoi­sie will launch very frequently in the future:

-- the proletariat mustn’t ‘prejudice’ the people in its struggle;

-- the proletariat must sacrifice itself for the triumph of the people in general;

-- the movement of the proletariat and the movement of the people are identical.

Understanding the need for the proletariat to win over the marginal and oppressed strata doesn’t mean:

Mean

•

-- lowering the maximum program of the prole­tariat or any of its immediate demands;

-- supporting the reactionary and illusory programs which derive from the social position of the petty bourgeoisie;

-- dissolving the proletariat into the ‘popular movement’.

 

5. Class Violence and the Struggle against Repression.

 

As we saw earlier, bourgeois repression is going to be more and more open, massive and systematic. The problem of struggle against repression and of class violence will be posed in all its sharpness. On this point we can draw out two very clear lessons from the living experiences in the recent period:

1. The famous position of ‘workers’ terrorism, which some comrades within the ICC, the PCI (Programma Comunista) and people of the ‘Area de la Autonomia’ in Italy have seen as an effec­tive means for preparing the struggle or for triggering off workers’ consciousness, has dissol­ved like sugar in water in the face of recent experiences. In Iran, mass strikes and revolts have paralyzed the repression of one of the most powerful armies in the world, they have sharpened its internal convulsions, and have made a consid­erable part of their ultra-modern armaments fall into ‘uncontrollable hands’. In France, what was the main defense of the workers of an occupied factory faced with a police blockade and the management militia? It was precisely the huge demonstration of the workers of other factories surrounding the besiegers. Our theorists of ‘workers’ terrorism’ will have seen that their vaunted ‘combat groups’ have not appeared any­where and that class violence, which they called ‘an abstract and mystifying innovation’, has appeared in a clear and concrete form.

2. Contrary to the mystifications which the opposition factions of the bourgeoisie will, without a doubt, launch, the major defense against repression is not, and never will be, legal and juridical guarantees of the ‘right to strike’ etc, but the proletariat’s own struggle. It will not be a ‘democratic’, ‘national’, or ‘people’s’ police; as the PCF shouts to the four winds, but mass assaults of workers on the police stations to release arrested comrades from the police cells, it will not be a left government which supposedly will be ‘less repressive’ than one of the right, but the workers breaking out of all the union, legal, and leftist straitjackets.

 

6. The Proletariat as a Brake on Imperialist War.

 

Iran has confirmed a tendency which has manifested itself, although still in a weak and embryonic way, in the whole international proletariat; that it is the only world force capable of opposing the tendency to imperialist war. In Iran, a repository for ultra-sophisticated and modern armaments has found itself totally disorganized, faced with the impact of class confrontations. And it cannot be said that this repository, abandoned by the US bloc, has now passed into the USSR bloc; the latter at least for the moment, has kept its distance for fear of getting its hand bitten. In Egypt and Israel, one of the factors which has moved the bourgeoisie to search for peace at any price has been the prole­tarian struggles in both countries, The Morocco/Algeria skirmish has been held back not only by the turn taken by inter-imperialist maneuvers, but also by the bitter strikes which happened in Algeria in May and June 1978 and more recently in Morocco. Cuba hasn’t got such a free hand to be the pawn of Russian imperialism thanks to the strikes and social convulsions which took place in April last year. The strike of the French armaments workers in June 1978 directly hit the war industry, as has the recent strike of the British atomic submarine shipbuilders. It remains to be seen what will be the response of the proletarians of Russia, China and Vietnam against the preparations for war, but the road of proletarian resistance has begun to open up.

 

7. Perspectives and Intervention by Revolutionaries

 

The perspective opening up is one of a new offensive by the world proletariat. As we have been able to see throughout this report, we have some powerful indicators, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the perspective is not immediate and that the road in that direction is bristling with various grave difficulties. With­out forgetting the fragility of this new proletarian impulse, we must take into account that it has much greater repercussions than anything that a purely immediatist view could understand. We are at the beginning of the end of the epoch of counter-revolution. All the historical condi­tions which have allowed fifty years of counter­revolution are beginning to effectively dissolve before the impulse of the capitalist crisis and the slow revival of proletarian struggle. The struggles of the sixties were skirmishes which opened the first breach in the monolith of the counter-revolution and prepared its future downfall.

This means that revolutionaries must:

-- avoid false quarrels as the First Congress of the ICC indicated, and strengthen the effort towards discussion and regroupment, with the perspective of providing the revolutionary energies maturing in the class with the most unified framework possible;

-- reinforce the programmatic framework at all levels and thus the work of intervention;

-- become an active and positive factor in the class struggle, surpassing the previous stage of re-appropriating the positions of the class, of programmatic and organizational reconstruction.

5. Perspectives

The struggles which we have just mentioned are preparing a new worldwide proletarian offensive, for which we can draw out the following perspec­tives:

1. International Generalization of the Proletarian Struggle.

We want to underline this point which we raised previously, emphasizing that while the focus of the struggle has once again shifted to the big working class concentrations of Europe and the US, this doesn’t mean that there has been a reflux in the Third World. On the contrary, the struggle there has become more intense.

Brazil, one of the most important proletarian concentrations in the periphery, was hit by major strikes in May 1978, and particularly in March 1979, where a general solidarity strike broke out in Sao Paolo, with massive general assemblies of 50,000 and 70,000 workers against police repression. In Iran, the dockers’ strike in Korramanshar-Abadan as well as the movement of the unemployed show that Khomeini and his clique haven’t managed to put an end to the proletarian struggle. In South America, militant strikes have taken place in Mexico, Peru, E1 Salvador, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, as well as in Jamaica and Guyana. In Africa, the Moroccan proletariat has fought through a wave of strikes outside the unions and the bourgeoisie’s National Unity. We should also mention the workers’ strikes and revolts in Liberia, Zaire, the Central African Empire and Uganda before and after the fall of Amin. In Asia, there have been strikes in India, the big oil workers’ strike in Dehrram, Saudi Arabia, and revolts in China. In the Eastern bloc, despite the blocking of information by the Iron Curtain, news of strikes in East Germany, Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia has filtered in.

The simultaneous response of the proletariat in the five continents provides the best conditions for the class to affirm its international unity and develop its revolutionary alternative.

2. The Slow Development of the Class Movement.

It’s possible to feel disappointed by the slow, difficult way the proletarian offensive is evolving. But this slowness isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness but evidence of the depth and breadth of the class confrontations that lie ahead. Unlike in the struggles of the sixties, the proletariat is no longer dealing with an enemy that has been somewhat surprised by the sudden reawakening of the proletariat after so many years of counter-revolution. It’s facing up to a capitalism armed to the teeth and prepared to meet workers’ struggles with all its ideological, political and repressive machinery. On the side of the proletariat, the spectacular but short-lived outbursts of the sixties have -- as the recent battles in Longwy and Denain have shown -- cleared the way for a more tenacious struggle, where the constant attempts of the unions, police and government to bury the move­ment have failed one after the other, leaving the field free for an intermittent agitation which is extremely difficult to discourage. It’s important that we make it clear that the slowness of the class movement in no way facilitates a gradualist, step-by-step approach. We will see a remorseless accumulation of struggles, blow-­for-blow confrontations, which will prepare the way for more profound and radical proletarian explosions.

 

3. The Capitalist Response to the Struggle.

 

Repression is more and more becoming the capita­list response to class struggle. Italy proves this, with the massive arrests of anti-union militants in the factories, organized by all the forces of the ‘historic compromise’: bosses, police, unions, Communist Party and Christian Democrats. In France, we’ve not only seen the brutal repression of struggles by the CRS, but also trials against the proletarian fighters arrested on the 23 March demo in Paris or after the battles in Longwy and Denain. But we shouldn’t forget that repression will go hand in hand with a strengthening of mystification, thanks to the ‘opposition rest cure’ of the left and unions, through which they’ll try to refur­bish a more combative, working class image. Their aim will be to destroy workers’ struggles from within, not simply holding back or side-tracking the proletarian train before it gets going, but derailing it at full speed. However, this ten­dency has objective limits, limits imposed by the deepening of the bourgeoisie’s internal conflicts and by the frenzied rhythm of the crisis. The fact that the left has to deal with these con­flicts, with the crisis, makes its task of mysti­fication much more difficult. As the crisis brings out all the contradictions of the bour­geoisie at all levels of society, the tendency will be for the state more and more to shed its ideological garb and strengthen out-and-out repression; and this will have to be supported by the ‘Fifth Column’ inside the workers’ movement: the left, the leftists and the unions.

4. The Clear Affirmation of the Proletarian Alternative to the Historic Crisis of Capital.

If 1979 has shown anything, it’s been the end­less spectacle of the inexorable barbarism of capital: nuclear power stations, the Indochinese refugees, Skylab, the horrible massacres in Nicaragua, the ‘instructive’ spectacle of the ‘Islamic revolution’ in Iran ... All this has underlined the irremediable decadence of the system, the collapse of capitalist civilization into a bloodbath. This means that the masks the bourgeoisie has been using for years to hide this barbarism and disorientate the proletariat are now falling to pieces: ‘Socialism in one country’, ‘national liberation’, ‘democracy’, ‘the rights of man’ ... In this putrid atmos­phere which is stifling and poisoning humanity, at the head of all the disinherited of the earth, the poor peasants, the marginal strata, the proletariat is beginning to affirm itself as the only revolutionary force, the only hope of liberation from the barbarism of capital:

-- because its ‘modest’ and ‘humble’ defensive struggles, so despised by everyone, including many revolutionary groups, show that it is possible to push back the attacks of capital, to respond to them blow for blow, to undermine the blind laws of the system;

-- because, with its practical struggles, its formidable examples of solidarity and class violence, the proletariat shows that it alone has an answer to repression, wars, and all the other effects of capitalist barbarism which plague humanity.

 

Conclusion

 

All the political and ideological weapons of the bourgeoisie (mass-media, parties of the left and right, unions ...) try to fill our heads with the image of the proletariat as an amorphous mass of hopelessly passive citizens. But the impetus of the crisis, the class consciousness reawakened by the struggles of the sixties, the weight of two centuries of heroic proletarian struggles, the very position of our class at the centre of society -- all this is pushing the proletariat to react against this tissue of passivity and impotence and open the door to the world revolution.

The road is going to be more difficult than ever; there are going to be bitter moments of hesita­tion and temporary defeat; but we must go down that road, because it’s a question of life or death, because it’s the only way out of the nightmare of capitalism.

COMMUNISM OR BARBARISM! WORKERS – IT’S YOUR TURN TO SPEAK!