I

In the period leading up to the First World War, then during the war itself, revolutionary Marxists were obliged not only to denounce the imperialist character of the war, but also to show that war was inevitable as long as capitalism remained the dominant mode of production in the world.

Against the pacifists who pined for a capitalism without wars, revolutionaries insisted that it was impossible to prevent imperialist wars without at the same time des­troying capitalism itself. Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital and Junius Pamphlet, as well as Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, were written with essentially this objective. The methods of analysis in these works, as well as some of their con­clusions, are different, but the underlying concern in them is the same: to hasten the revolutionary action of the international proletariat against capitalist barbarism.

Today, when a new open crisis of capitalism is once again conjuring up the threat of a world imperialist war, while at the same time creating the conditions for a new revolutionary offensive against capital on a world scale, revolutionaries must continue this work of analyzing capitalist society in the same spirit of militant intervention.

Whatever the university professors of marxology might think, Marxism isn’t a branch of political economy: it is the revolutionary critique of political economy. For revolutionaries, the analysis of the present crisis of capitalism can never be an academic speculation floating in the ethereal regions of economic analysis. It is simply a moment in an overall intervention whose aim is to prepare the weapons of the proletarian revolution. It’s not a pure interpretation of the capitalist world, but a weapon for destroying it.

II

Faced with the growing economic convulsions that capitalism is now going through, revolutionaries must underline that the perspective of revolutionary Marxism has been verified. They must do this by showing:

-- that the present crisis isn’t just a passing problem for capitalism, but a new mortal convulsion after more than half-a-century of decadence;

-- that, as in 1914 and 1939, decadent capitalism’s only ‘solution’ to the crisis is a new world war which, this time, puts the very existence of humanity at risk;

-- that the only way humanity can escape from this apocalyptic impasse is by abandoning and destroying all the relations of production which make up capitalism, and installing a society in which the factors which have led humanity to this situation will have disappeared: a society without commodities or exchange, without profit or wage labor, without nations or the state: a communist society;

-- that the only force capable of taking the initiative in such a transformation is the principal producer class itself: the world working class.

III

In order to be able to carry out this task, revolutionaries must be able to express the main foundations of the Marxist analysis of the internal contradictions of capitalism in terms that are clear and broadly verifiable through the reality of the crisis which the whole of society is living through, in particular the working class. To defend the idea of the necessity and possibility of destroying capitalism, without being capable of explaining clearly and simply the origins of the crisis of the system, is to condemn ourselves to appearing like university professors of economics, or utopian illuminati.1 And this necessity is all the more urgent today when everything indicates that, in contrast to the revolutionary movements of 1871, 1905, or 1917-23, the next revolutionary proletarian wave will break out not in the wake of a war but in response to an economic crisis. More and more, the debate on the causes of the crisis of capitalism will take place not just in the theoretical reviews of a few tiny revolutionary groups, but in assemblies of unemployed workers, in factory assemblies, in the very heart of a working class struggling against the growing attacks of a capitalist system that has reached the end of its tether. The task of communists in this domain is to know how to prepare themselves to be effective factors of clarification within this process.

IV

Paradoxically, the question of the foundations of the crisis of capitalism the corner-stone of scientific socialism has been the object of numerous disagreements amongst Marxists, especially since the debate on imperialism.

All communist tendencies generally share the fundamental notion that the installation of a communist society becomes a necessity and a possibility on the historical agenda at the point where capitalist relations of production cease to be indispensable factors in the develop­ment of the productive forces, and transform themselves into fetters; or, to use the formulation in the Communist Manifesto, when “the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”

The disagreements arise when it comes to making more precise how this general contradiction becomes concrete, when it comes to defining the characteristics and timing of the economic phenomenon which transforms these conditions -- wage labor, profit, the nation, etc -- into definite fetters on the development of the productive forces, precipitating capitalism into crisis, bankruptcy, and decline.

These disagreements still exist today; very often they are the same divergences which divided revolutionaries at the beginning of the century.2 However, the extraordinary weakening of the revolutionary forces under the blows of fifty years of counter-revolution, the almost total organic break with the organizations of the past, as well as the extreme isolation communist groups have had to put up with for decades, all this has reduced the debate between revolutionaries on this question to virtual non-existence.

With the resurgence of proletarian struggle and the emergence of new revolutionary groups over the last ten years, there has been a certain revival in the discussion, spurred on by the need to understand the growing economic diffi­culties world capitalism is going through. But very often the debate has got going on a basis which makes it difficult for it to result in an enrichment of Marxist analysis.

It’s quite natural that the debate has re-emerged around the discussions left in suspense by the Marxist theoreticians at the beginning of the century and subsequently taken up by, among others groups like Bilan, Internationalisme, or the review Living Marxism. At the centre of the debate is the confrontation between the analysis of Rosa Luxemburg and those who, rejecting this analysis, defend the idea that it is the tendential fall in the rate of profit which provides the fundamental explanation of the contradictions of capitalism. But, unfortunately, up till now this debate has had the unfortunate tendency to get bogged down in an exegesis of the writings of Marx, one side trying to show that the theses of Rosa Luxemburg are “totally alien to Marxism” or at least a very poor interpretation of the works of the founder of scientific socialism, the other side attempting to show the Marxist continuity in the theses of The Accumulation of Capital.

Important as it is to define any ‘Marxist’ analysis in relation to Marx’s work, the debate will be condemned to a total impasse if it restricts itself to this preoccupation alone. It’s only in the confrontation with the reality that it claims to explain that a theory can be confirmed or refuted. Only in the crucible of the criticism of real events can a system of thought develop positively and find the means to become a material force.

If it is to develop with a constructive perspective, the present debate on the found­ations of the crisis of capitalism must therefore

-- learn to look at the Marxist analyses of the past, including those of Marx himself, not as sacred books which leave us with the simple task of making an exegesis in order to explain all the economic phenomena of present-day capitalism, but as theoretical efforts which must, if they are to be taken up and understood, be placed in the context of the historic conditions under which they were elaborated;

-- make a concrete analysis of the concrete reality of capitalism’s evolution, confronting the different theories that claim adherence to Marxism with this reality.

It’s then and only then that we will be able to begin to really determine whether it’s Luxemburg or Grossmann-Mattick, to take an example, who have provided us with the most valuable instruments for developing the prolet­ariat’s understanding of the objective conditions for its historic action. It’s in this way that we’ll really be able to contribute to the proletariat’s attempt to widen its consciousness of the general conditions of its revolutionary mission.

It therefore seems essential to us to:

1) place the main works of previous Marxists in their historic context, to get a better appreciation of their relevance to the present period;

2) confront these results with the only thing that can allow us to go forward in the debate, ie. the reality of capitalism both its evolution since the First World War and in its present crisis.

MARX

It was at the heart of the economic crisis of 1847-8, and with a view to intervening in the workers’ struggles engendered by that crisis, that Marx developed the main lines of his explanation of the crisis of capitalism, first at the Bruxelles conferences of the Association of German Workers (Wage Labor and Capital) and then in the Communist Manifesto. In a few simple but precise formulae, Marx uncovered the main specificity of the capitalist economic crisis compared to the economic crises of previous societies: in contrast to what happened in pre-capitalist societies where production was immediately geared towards consumption, under capitalism, where the capitalists’ objective is the sale of commodities and the accumulation of capital, and consumption is simply a by-product, the economic crisis doesn’t take the form of a shortage of goods, but of overproduction. The goods needed for subsistence, or the material conditions to produce them exist, but the mass of producers, who only receive from their masters the cost of their labor power, are deprived of the means and the money to buy the goods. What’s more, at the same time as the crisis hurls the producers into poverty and unemployment, the capitalists destroy the means of production that would allow this poverty to be palliated.

At the same time, Marx pointed to the underlying reason for these crises: living in a state of permanent competition amongst themselves, the capitalists can only live by developing their capital, and they can’t develop their capital if they don’t have new outlets at their disposal. This is why the bourgeoisie was compelled to invade the whole surface of the globe in search of new markets. But precisely by continuing this expansion, which was the only way it could overcome its crises, capitalism was narrowing the world market and thus creating the conditions for new, more powerful crises.

To sum up: by the very nature of wage labor and capitalist profit, capital cannot provide the wage-earners with the means of purchasing everything they produce. The buyers of those products that couldn’t be sold to the class it exploited were found by the bourgeoisie in sectors and countries that were not dominated by capitalism. But by selling its production to these sectors, it was forcing them to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, which would eliminate them as outlets and create in turn the need for new markets. As Marx wrote in the 1848 Manifesto:

“For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, to much industry, too much commerce....”

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.” (our emphasis)

What did Marx and Engels mean by “the conquest of new markets”? The Manifesto answers as follows:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle every­where, establish connections everywhere.”

“The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, ie, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image....”

“Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

How did this conquest of the world constitute the means whereby the bourgeoisie could overcome its crises while at the same time condemning it to “more extensive and more destructive crises”? In Wage Labor and Capital Marx replies: “as the mass of production grows, and consequently the need for extended markets, the world market becomes more and more contracted, fewer and fewer new markets remain available for exploitation, since every preceding crisis has subjected to world trade a market hitherto unconquered or only superficially exploited” (Our emphasis).

These formulations certainly represent a masterful summary of the Marxist theory of crises. It wasn’t by accident that Marx and Engels formulated them in the documents that they edited with the aim of presenting to the working class the quintessence of a communist analysis. Neither Marx, nor Engels subse­quently put these formulations into question -- on the contrary. However, in Marx’s subsequent economic works, we don’t find a systematic and completed expose of these theses. There are two main reasons for this:

-- the first is connected to the way Marx wanted to organize his study of the economy. He always envisaged that the part devoted to the world market and world crises would be dealt with last. As we know, he died before he could complete his work on the economy;

-- the second reason, which partially explains the first, is connected to the historical conditions of the period Marx was living through.

The 19th century was the period in which the movement towards the constitution of the world market reached its zenith. The bourgeoisie was invading “the whole surface of the globe” and creating “a world after its own image” as Marx said. But the movement towards the constitution of the world market was not really completed. The movement through which capital “subjected to world trade a market hitherto unconquered or only superficially exploited”, the movement which meant that “the world market becomes more and more contracted”, the historic movement which meant that the bourgeoisie was “paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises, and ... diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented”, this movement had not yet reached the critical point where the world market was so narrow that the bourgeoisie no longer had any means left to prevent and overcome its crises. The contraction of the world market, the contraction of outlets, had not yet reached the level where the crisis of capitalism would become a permanent phenomenon.

The crises of the 19th century which Marx described were still crises of growth, crises which capitalism came out of strengthened. The commercial crises which, in Marx’s words, “by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society”, “were not yet capitalism’s death rattles” -- as Marx himself recognized a few years later in the preface to The Class Struggles in France -- but crises of development. In the 19th century, as Marx said, the bourgeoisie got over these crises “by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones”. This was possible because the world market was still being constituted. After each crisis, there were still new outlets to be conquered by the capitalist countries.

For example, between 1860 and 1900, Britain colonized another 7 million square miles of territory, inhabited by 164 million people (this tripled the surface and doubled the population of its Empire). France expanded its empire by 3.5 million square miles and 53 million inhabitants (this multiplied the extent of its colonies 18 times and of its population 16 times).

Marx was witnessing the evolution of the contradictions of capitalism and he defined the fundamental contradiction which on the one hand impulse this movement and on the other hand condemned it to an impasse. At the zenith of capitalism’s historical power, Marx diagnosed the sickness that would condemn it to death. But this sickness had not yet become mortal. And thus Marx was not able to study all aspects of it.

Just as, when you are measuring the resistance of a given material, you have to push it to breaking point; just as, when you are trying to understand all the effects of a nutritious substance on a living being, you have to deprive the creature of the substance to the point where the consequences of its absence can be seen most clearly, so we had to wait until the world market had contracted to the point of definitively blocking the expansion of capitalism before the fundamental contradictions of the system could be analyzed in all their complexity.

We had to wait until the beginning of the 20th century and the exacerbation of the antagonisms between capitalist countries over the conquest of new markets, up to the point where a world war was on the agenda, before the analysis of the problem could reach a new and higher level of understanding. This is what was done in the debates on imperialism.

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All the same, Marx didn’t stop analyzing the internal contradictions of capitalism after the publication of the Manifesto. In Capital, we can find a number of detailed studies of the conditions of capitalist crises. But in nearly all his studies, he explicitly abstracted the world market, referring the reader to a later study that he proposed to make, Rather than drawing a total picture of the capitalist world, he analyzed the internal mechanisms of “the process of capital as a whole,” making an abstraction of all those sectors of the world market that he had called “new outlets” in the Manifesto.

This was particularly the case with the famous tendential fall in the rate of profit. This law, which he discovered, pointed to the mechanisms through which, in the absence of a certain number of counter-tendencies, the rise in the organic composition of capital (ie the growth of the productivity of labor through the introduction into the process of production of a growing proportion of dead labor -- machines in particular -- in relation to living labor), would lead to a fall in the capitalist’s rate of profit. It described the economic mechanisms which expressed, at the level of capital’s rate of profit, the contradiction between, on the one hand, the fact that capitalist profit can only be drawn from the exploitation of living labor (the capitalist can only rob the worker, not machines), and, on the other hand, the fact that the proportion of living labor contained in each capitalist commodity is continually diminishing in favor of the proportion of dead labor. In a world without workers where only machines produced, capitalist profit wouldn’t exist. The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit describes how, by mechanizing and automating production more and more, the capitalist was forced to resort to a series of measures to prevent the tendency of the rate of profit to fall from becoming an effective fall.

Marx made a study of the measures which were aimed at counter-acting this fall, and which made it a tendential law, not an absolute one. Now, the main factors counter-acting this law were themselves dependent on capital’s capacity to extend the scale of its production, and thus on its capacity to procure new outlets.

Whether we are talking about the factors which compensate the fall in the rate of profit by increasing the mass of profit, or about factors which prevent this fall by intensifying the exploitation of the worker (raising the rate of surplus value) thanks to an elevation in social productivity (falling real wages, growing extraction of relative surplus value), these two kind of factors can only be effective if the capitalist is continuously discovering new outlets allowing him to increase the scale of his production and thus

1) augment the mass of profit

2) increase the extraction of relative surplus value.

This is why Marx insisted so much on the tendential and not the absolute character of this law. This is also why, in his expose on this law and the factors which counteracted it, he, on several occasions, refers the reader to a later study.

The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit describes, in reality, the race between two parallel movements in the life of capitalism: on the one hand, the movement towards the growing mechanization and automation of the productive process, and, on the other hand, capitalism’s movement towards an ever-greater exploitation of the proletariat.3 If the mechanization of capitalist production develops more rapidly than capital’s capacity to intensify the exploitation of the proletariat, the rate of profit falls. If, on the other hand, the intensification of exploitation develops faster than the rhythm of the mechanization of production, the rate of profit tends to increase.

In describing this contradictory race, the law of the falling rate of profit highlights a real phenomenon. But it doesn’t in itself describe all the elements in this phenomenon, its causes and its limits. Take such questions as: what is it that determines the pace of each of these movements? What is it that engenders and maintains the race to modernize the process of production? What is it that permanently provokes the movement towards the intensifica­tion of exploitation? The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit does not answer these questions and, what’s more, doesn’t pretend to. The response can be found in the basic historical specificity of capitalism: the fact that it is a universal system of commodity production.

Capitalism isn’t the first mode of production in history to have commodity exchange and money. In the slave mode of production as in feudalism, commodity exchange existed, but it only affected certain limited aspects of social production. What is specific to the capitalist system is its tendency to universalize exchange, not only across the whole planet, but also and above all across all the domains of social production, particularly labor power. Neither the slaves nor the serfs sold their labor power. The part of social production which went to them depended, on the one hand, on the amount of production carried out, and, on the other hand, on the prevailing rules regulating the distribution of the products.

Under capitalism the worker sells his labor power. The amount of social production that goes to him is determined by the law of wages, ie by the value of his labor power, which capitalism has transformed into a commodity. His ‘share’ is simply the equivalent of the cost of his labor power to the capitalist, and this only on condition that he is not unemployed (something that never happened to slaves or serfs). This is why capitalism can find itself in a situation unknown in history before: overproduction, ie a situation where the exploiters find themselves stuck with ‘too many’ products, ‘too much’ wealth, wealth that they are unable to reintroduce into the process of production.

This problem doesn’t pose itself to capital as long as it has at its disposal markets other than those made up by its own wage-earners. But this very fact means that the life of each capitalist depends on a permanent race for markets. Competition between capitalist, this essential characteristic of the life of capital, isn’t competition for honor or high ideals, but for markets. A capitalist without markets is a dead capitalist. Even a capitalist who managed to work the biological miracle of getting his workers to produce for nothing (thus realizing an infinitely huge rate of exploitation and so an enormously high rate of profit) would go bankrupt the moment he was unable to sell the commodities made by those he’s exploiting.

That’s why the life of capital is constantly faced with the choice: conquer markets or die.

This is the capitalist competition which no capital can escape from. It’s this competition for markets (those which exist already as well as those still to be conquered) which pitilessly compels each capitalist to try to produce at lower and lower costs. The low price of its commodities isn’t just the “heavy artillery” With which capital “batters down all the Chinese walls” that encircled the pre-capitalist sectors; it’s also the essential economic weapon in the competition between capitalist.

It’s this struggle to lower the price of their commodities in order to maintain or conquer markets which constitutes the motor-force of the two movements whose pace determines the rate of profit. The two principal means capital has at its disposal to lower the costs of its production are:

1) a greater mechanization of the productive apparatus

2) the diminution of labor costs, ie an intensification of exploitation.

A capitalist doesn’t modernize his factories because he has modernizing ideals, but because he’s forced to, on pain of death, by the competition for markets. It’s the same with the obligation to intensify the exploitation of the working class.

Thus, whether we look at the falling rate of profit from the point of view of the forces that provoke it, or whether we look at it from the point of view of the factors which moderate it and counter-act it, we are still dealing with a phenomenon which is dependent on capital’s struggle for new markets.

The economic contradiction expressed by this law, like all the other economic contradictions of the system, always boils down to the fund­amental contradiction between, on the one hand, the necessity for capital to enlarge production more and more, and, on the other hand, the fact that it can never create within itself the outlets it needs for this expansion by giving its wage-earners the necessary purchasing power.

This is why, after describing the law of the falling rate of profit, Marx wrote, two sections further on, in the same 3rd volume of Capital:

“The workers’ power of consumption is limited partly by the laws of wages, partly by the fact that they are only employed as long as their labor is profitable to the capitalist class. The ultimate reason for all real crises is always the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses faced with the tendency of the capitalist economy to develop the productive forces as if they had no limit than society’s absolute power of consumption.” (Capital III, section 5, our emphasis)

As we have already said, and for the reasons which were already given (the death of Marx before he could complete his studies of the economy, the limits of the historical period he lived in), Marx wasn’t able to develop and systematize “the ultimate reason for all real crises”. But from the Manifesto to the 3rd Volume of Capital, his approach remained the same.

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An under-consumptionist theory?

In order to make more precise what Marx actually said -- and at the risk of once again making concessions to exegitical discussions -- we should respond to one of the most recent arguments developed by one of the defenders of the idea that the ‘falling rate of profit’ was Marx’s only theory of crisis. According to Paul Mattick, in his book Crise et Theories des crise, Marx’s references to the problems of the market provoked by the inevitably restricted consumption of the workers were either “slips of the pen”, or concessions to under-consumptionist theories, especially Sismondi’s.

Marx criticized Sismondi’s under-consumptionist theory. But what Marx rejected in this theory wasn’t the idea that capitalism faced problems of the market because, even while it was enlarging its field of activity, it was perm­anently restricting the buying-power and consumption of the workers. What Marx rejected in the under-consumptionist theories was:

1) the fact that they envisaged the possibility of avoiding the ‘under-consumption’ of the workers within the framework of capitalism, through wage increases. Marx showed that, in reality, exactly the opposite was the case: the more the capitalists were faced with overproduction and a lack of markets, the more they reduced workers’ wages. For capitalism to be able to resolve its crises by raising wages, the competition which continuously obliged it to reduce its wage costs would have to disappear. In short, capitalism would have to stop being capitalism;

2) Sismondi was in fact an expression of the 19th century petty bourgeoisie, condemned to proletarianization by capitalism. What lay behind his theory was the demand for a capitalism that wouldn’t destroy the petty bourgeoisie. Sismondi’s under-consumptionist theory didn’t try to demonstrate the necessity for humanity to free itself from commodity relations, and thus wage labor, in order to permit the flowering of the productive forces in a communist society, he advocated a return to the past by putting limits on the capitalist growth that was sweeping aside all the pre-capitalist sectors of the petty bourgeoisie. Sismondi said that if capitalism could control its blind thirst for growth, there would be no problem of constantly having to find new markets... and the agricultural, artisan, and commercial petty bourgeoisie would be able to survive. It was this reactionary, utopian vision that Marx rejected, by showing that it ended up denying reality and dreaming of a capitalism that could not exist.

Summarizing Marx’s basic criticism of the under­consumptionists, one could say that he didn’t reject the economic problem they were posing, but 1) the way they posed it 2) the answers they came up with.

Marx’s theory of crisis places at the centre of its analysis the problem of capitalism’s inability to create all the outlets needed for its expansion, and thus the problem of the restricted consumption of the workers. But this doesn’t make it an ‘under-consumptionist’ theory.

From Marx to the debates on imperialism

The last quarter of the 19th century was without doubt the historical apogee of capitalism. Capitalist colonialism dominated practically the whole planet. Capitalism developed at an unprecedented rhythm, both in its outward extension and its internal production. The trade union and parliamentary struggles of the workers’ movement allowed it to wrest real, lasting reforms from capitalism. In the most developed countries the proletariat’s living conditions were substantially improved, while at the same time the formidable expansion of world capitalism seemed to have relegated the great economic crises to mere memories of the past.

This was when the workers’ movement saw the development of ‘revisionism’, ie tendencies which put into question Marx’s idea that capitalism was condemned to go through mortal crises, and which put forward the possibility of peacefully and gradually advancing towards socialism through progressive social reforms. In Bernstein’s words, “the movement is everything, the goal is nothing.”

In 1901, one of the principal ‘Marxist’ revisionists, the Russian professor Tugan-­Baranowski published a book supporting the idea that the crises of capitalism derived not from a lack of salvable consumption in relation to capitalism’s capacity to extend its production, but simply from disproportionality between different sectors of the economy, a disproportionality that could be avoided through suitable government intervention. This was in fact a revival of one of the fundamental theories of bourgeois economy as formulated by JB Say, according to which capitalism could never have a real markets problem.

This thesis gave rise to a debate which led Social Democracy to return to the question of the cause of crises. It fell to Kautsky, who was then still the most widely recognized spokesman for Marx’s theories in the workers’ movement, to reply to Tugan-Baranowski. We cite here an extract from Kautsky’s reply, which shows that in this period there was still no doubt in the workers’ movement that the cause of capitalist crises resided in its inability to create the outlets needed for its expansion:

“Although capitalists increase their wealth and the number of exploited workers grows, they cannot themselves form a sufficient market for capitalist-produced commodities, as accumulation of capital and productivity grows even faster. They must find a market in those strata and nations which is still non-capitalist. They find this market, and expand it, but still not fast enough, since this additional market hardly has the flexibility and ability to expand of the capitalist process of production. Once capitalist production has developed large-scale industry, as was already the case in England in the nineteenth century, it has the possibility of expanding by such leaps and bounds that it soon overtakes any expansion of the market. Thus, any prosperity which results from a substantial expansion in the market is doomed from the beginning to a short life, and will necessarily end in a crisis.

This, in short, is the theory of crises which, as far as we can see, is generally accepted by ‘orthodox’ Marxists and which was set up by Marx.” (Neue Zeit, 1902, Quoted by Luxemburg in the Anti-critique)

Kautsky underlined the political significance of the debate when, in the same article, he wrote:

“It is no mere accident that revisionism attacks Marx’s theory of crises with part­icular vigor.... (revisionism wants to) change social democracy from a party of proletarian class struggle into a demo­cratic party on the left wing of a demo­cratic party of social reform.”

However, although this theory summarized “in short” by Kautsky was “generally accepted” in the Marxist workers’ movement, no one has tried to develop it in a more systematic way, as Marx had intended.

This is what Rosa Luxemburg tried to do during the debates on imperialism at the time of the outbreak of World War One.

The debates on imperialism

The beginning of the 20th century saw the completion of the contradictory tendencies Marx had described. Capital had effectively extended its rule across the whole world. There was hardly a square kilometer on the planet which wasn’t in the hands of one or other of the imperialist metropoles. The process of constituting the world market, ie the integration of all the economies of the world into the same circuit of production and exchange, had reached such a point that the struggle over the last non-capitalist territories had become a life or death question for all countries.

New powers like Germany, Japan, and the USA, were now able to compete with the all-powerful Britain on the industrial level, but at the same time they had little share in the colonial division of the world. In the four corners of the planet, the antagonisms, between all the powers got sharper. Between 1905 and 1913, five times these antagonisms led to incidents which seemed to make generalized war the only way that capitalism could divide up the world market. In the end, the outbreak of World War One, the greatest holocaust humanity had ever been through, showed quite clearly that capitalism couldn’t go on living in the old way. The capitalist nations could no longer go on developing in parallel to each other; letting free exchange and the initiative of explorers determine the extent of their domination. The world had become too narrow for too many capitalist appetites. Free exchange had to give way to war and explorers to cannons. One capitalist nation could only develop at the expense of one or several others. There was no longer any real possibility of enlarging the world market. Now, it could only be re-divided in different ways. Capitalism could therefore only live by wars and by preparing wars for these divisions and re-divisions.

“For the first time, the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only re-division is possible, ie territories can only pass from one ‘owner’ to another, instead of passing as ownerless territories to an ‘owner’” (Lenin -- Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Without destroying world capitalism, humanity would be condemned to live in a semi-permanent state of war. “Socialism or barbarism” became the watchword of all revolutionaries.

The Third International was constituted in 1919 on the basis of a recognition and understanding of this change, this qualitative historical break. Thus, the first point in the platform of the Communist International declared:

“The contradictions of the capitalist system, which lay concealed within its womb, broke out with colossal force in a gigantic explosion, in the great imperialist world war.

…… A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”

With these formulations, the CI reaffirmed its break with the reformist and patriotic tendencies which had developed within the 2nd International and which had just led the proletariat into the inter-imperialist butchery, using their arguments in favor of the possibility of a continuous development of the productive forces, which would allow a peaceful passage from capitalism to socialism.

The CI clearly affirmed:

1) that the world war wasn’t a choice that capitalism could have avoided but an inevitable consequence of capitalism, the violent revelation of its internal contradictions, “which lay concealed in its womb”;

2) that this war wasn’t like previous capitalist wars. It marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new period, “the epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration”;

3) that the entry of capitalism in to this epoch of decline corresponded historically to the proletarian revolution coming onto the agenda, to the beginning of “the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.

Thus the whole Communist International recognized that the First World War was a manifestation of the fact that the internal contradictions of capitalism had reached a point of historical no-return.

However, while all revolutionary Marxists shared these conclusions, it was different when it came to analyzing the precise nature of these contradictions and of their development.

Within what had been the left of the 2nd International, there had been two main theories of imperialism and the economic contradictions in capitalism which gave rise to it. One was Rosa Luxemburg’s, as developed in The Accumulation of Capital (1912) then in The Crisis of German Social Democracy written in prison during the war; the other was that of Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

For these two theories, the analysis of imperialism and the analysis of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism were simply two aspects of the same question. Their works had been aimed at the patriotic Social Democrats who defended a superficial pacifism via the illusion that you could prevent imperialist war and imperialism itself through legal parliamentary struggle that could influence government policy. For Rosa Luxemburg as for Lenin, it was impossible to prevent war without destroying capitalism, because imperialism was simply the consequence of the internal contradictions of capitalism. To answer the question “what is imperialism” therefore implied answering this other question: ‘what is the fundamental contradiction that capitalism is trying to palliate through its imperialist policies?’

Rosa Luxemburg’s response

Rosa Luxemburg’s response saw itself -- correctly, we think -- continuing Marx’s work on the development of capitalism, by looking at it not in the abstract, simplified form of a pure system, operating in a world made up entirely of capitalists and workers, but in its concrete historic form, ie as the integral part of the world market. Her response is a systematic development of Marx’s analysis of crises, as he began to elaborate in the Communist Manifesto and Capital. In The Accumulation of Capital she undertook an analysis of the growth of capitalism in relationship with the rest of the world, the non-capitalist part. Using a thoroughly adept Marxist method, she examined the main historical stages in this growth, and the different theoretical approaches to the problem.

Her response to the question of imperialism was simply an actualization of the analysis in the Communist Manifesto, sixty years on. Capitalism could not create, within itself the outlets needed for its expansion. The workers, the capitalists and their direct agents could only buy a part of the total production. That part of production which they didn’t consume, ie that part of the profit which had to be reinvested in production, capital had to sell to someone outside of the agencies which were subjected to its direct domination, and which capital paid out of its own funds. These buyers could only be found in sectors that were still producing in a pre-capitalist manner.

Capital developed by selling its surplus products first to the feudal lords, then to the backward agricultural and artisan sectors, and finally to the ‘barbaric’ pre-capitalist nations which it colonized.

In so doing, capital eliminated the feudal lords, and transformed the artisans and peasants into proletarians. In the pre-capital­ist nations it proletarianized part of the population and reduced the rest to poverty, destroying the old subsistence economies with the low price of its commodities.

For Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism was essentially the form of life that capitalism took on when the extra-capitalist markets were becoming too narrow for the expansion-requirements of a growing number of increasingly developed powers. The latter were thus forced into permanent and more and more violent confronta­tions to find a place in the division of the world market.

“Modern imperialism … is only the last chapter of its (capital’s) historical process of expansion, it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth”. (Luxemburg, The Anti-critique)

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, ie that which in the last instance determined the lines of action and the life of capitalism, was the contradiction between, on the one hand, the permanent need for the expansion of each national capital under the pressure of competition, and, on the other hand, the fact that by its very development, by generalizing wage labor, capitalism was restricting the outlets that were indispensible for this expansion.

“... by this process capital prepares its own destruction in two ways. As it approaches the point where humanity only consists of capitalists and proletarians, further accumulation will become impossible. At the same time, the absolute and undivided rule of capital aggravates class struggle throughout the world and the international economic and political anarchy to such an extent that, long before the last consequences of economic development, it must lead to the rebellion of the international proletariat against the existence of the rule of capital.”

Luxemburg points out that the final point of this theoretical contradiction will never be reached, “because capital accumulation is not just an economic but also a political process” (Anti-critique)

“Imperialism is as much a historical method for prolonging capital’s existence as it is the surest way of setting an objective limit to its existence as fast as possible. This is not to say that the final point need actually be attained. The very tendency of capitalist development towards this end is expressed in forms which make the concluding phase of capitalism a period of catastrophes.” (Accumulation of Capital)

The exacerbation of inter-imperialist antagonisms over the conquest of colonies at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries obliged Luxemburg, more than Marx, to analyze the importance of the non-capitalist sectors in the growth of capitalism. The historical gap and the specificities of the period which separated her from Marx were at the basis of her conviction of the need to pursue the master’s analysis.

However, in developing her analysis, Luxemburg was compelled to make a critique of Marx’s work on enlarged reproduction (particularly the mathematical schemas) in the IInd Volume of Capital. This critique consisted above all in showing that this work was incomplete, despite the tendency to present it as definitive and final. At the same time she tried to show that the theoretical postulate upon which they were based -- studying the conditions for the enlarged reproduction of capital by making an abstraction of the surrounding non-capitalist milieu, ie considering the world as a purely capitalist world -- does not allow us to understand the totality of the problem.

The publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s work on the eve of the world war provoked is extremely violent and energetic reaction inside the official apparatus of German Social Democracy, generally hiding behind the pretext of wanting to ‘safeguard’ Marx’s work. Rosa, they said, had invented a problem where none existed; the problem of the market was a false problem; Marx had ‘demonstrated’ this with his famous schemas of enlarged reproduction etc. And, behind all these ‘official’ critiques, lay the basic thesis of the future patriots: imperialism isn’t inevitable under capitalism.

Lenin’s response

Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, doesn’t refer to Luxemburg’s work and only deals with the question of the markets in passing. In order to show the inevitable character of imperialism in “decaying” capitalism, Lenin emphasized the phenomenon of the accelerated concentration of capital in the decades leading up to the war. Here his analysis took up Hilferding’s thesis in Finance Capital (1910), according to which this phenomenon of concen­tration was the essential element in the evolution of capitalism in this period. As Lenin wrote:

“If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

Lenin defined five fundamental characteristics of imperialism:

“And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its complete development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: 1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of inter­national monopolist capitalist combines which share the world among themselves, and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”

Of the five “basic features”, three relate to the growing concentration of capital at national and international level. For Lenin, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, the one that led to the stage of imperialism and “decay”, was the contradiction between its tendency towards “monopolism”, which made capitalist production become more and more social, and the general conditions of capitalism (private property, commodity production, competition) which contradicted this tendency.

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads right up to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalist, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”

Then, in the chapter on “The Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism”:

“.... the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is capitalist monopoly, ie monopoly which has grown out of capitalism and exists in the general environment of capitalism, commodity production and competition, in permanent and insoluble contradiction to this general environ­ment.”

This contradiction between the increasingly ‘social’ character which capitalist production acquires as it extends and becomes concentrated, and, on the other hand, the persistence of private capitalist appropriation, is a real contradiction of capitalism, which Marx frequently referred to. But in itself it doesn’t come near providing an explanation for imperialism and the collapse of capitalism.

The tendency towards ‘monopolism’ doesn’t explain why, at a certain degree of development, the capitalist countries were compelled to wage a fight to the death for colonies. On the contrary, it is the necessity to prosecute this increasingly bitter war over the colonies which explains the tendency within each capitalist nation towards the unification and concentration of the whole national capital. The capitalist powers which underwent the most rapid and extensive concentration weren’t those which possessed the biggest empires (Britain, France), but those which had to carve out a place on the world market (Germany, Japan).

By neglecting the problem of the markets, Lenin was led into taking for a cause of imperialism what in reality was a consequence -- like imperialism itself -- of the capitalists’ struggle for new outlets. Similarly he was led to see the export of capital as a fundamental phenomenon of imperialism (“as distinguished from the export of commodities”), whereas in reality the export of capital was simply one of the weapons in the struggle between the powers for markets to place their commodities (Lenin himself recognized this elsewhere in his book: “The export of capital abroad thus becomes a means for encouraging the export of commodities”. Chapter IV)

By taking as his starting point Hilferding’s work on monopolism, it was difficult to come to conclusions that were coherent with his premises. Hilferding was one of the theoreticians of the reformist wing of the 2nd International; behind the disproportionate emphasis which he gave to the phenomenon of the concentration of capital in finance capital, there was the attempt to show that it was possible to reach socialism by peaceful, gradual methods. (According to Hilferding, the growing concentration imposed by monopolism would make it possible to carry out, within capitalism, a series of measures that would progressively lay the foundations of socialism: elimination of competition, elimination of money, elimination of nations... even unto communism). The whole of Hilferding’s theoretical effort was aimed at trying to prove the falsity of the revolutionary road to communism. The whole of Lenin’s effort had the opposite intention. By borrowing from Hilferding the basis for his theory of imperialism, Lenin could only arrive at revolutionary conclusions by subjecting his theory to contradictory contortions.

The position of the Communist International

In its platform, the CI didn’t really take a position on the basics of the debate. However, its interpretation of the evolution of capitalism towards its “inner disintegration” refers explicitly to the monopolism and anarchy of capitalism, whereas the question of the markets is only mentioned as a partial explanation of imperialism:

“Capitalism tried to overcome its own anarchy by organizing production. Instead of numerous competing businessmen, powerful capitalist associations (syndicates, cartels, trusts) were formed; bank capital united with industrial capital; all economic life was dominated by the finance-capitalist oligarchy, who attained sole dominion by organizing on the basis of this power. Monopoly took the place of free competition. The individual capitalist became a trust-capitalist. Insane anarchy was replaced by organization.

But while in each country the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production was superseded by capitalist organization, the contradictions, the competitive struggle, and the anarchy in world economy grew ever sharper. The struggle between the largest organized robber States led with iron necessity to the monstrous imperialist world war. Greed for profits drove world capital to fight for new markets, new investment openings, new raw material sources, the cheap labor power of colonial slaves. The imperialist changed many millions of African, Asiatic Australian, and American proletarians and peasants into beasts of burden, had sooner or later to expose the true anarchist nature of capital in that tremendous conflict. This was the origin of the greatest of all crimes -- the predatory world war.

It would be difficult to draw from these formulations a really clear idea about the question of imperialism and of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. To the question of the internal contradictions of the system, the CI replied, following Lenin and thus the influence of Hilferding, by pointing to the evolution of the system towards monopoly. And, like Lenin, it immediately affirmed the impossibility of a continuous evolution to the point where nations would be eliminated by successive international concentrations. Concentration at a national level meant that “the contradictions, the competitive struggle, and the anarchy in world economy grew ever sharper,” leaving it as read, as Lenin had done, that this tendency towards concentration was the cause and not the consequence of the exacerbation of “the contradictions, the competitive struggle, and the anarchy” at international level.

As for the imperialist policy of conquests, the CI simply talked about “greed for profits” pushing capital “to fight for new markets, new investment openings, new raw material sources, the cheap labor power of colonial slaves”. All this was correct, at the level of denouncing those ideologies which talked about imperialism as a means for spreading ‘civilization’ but at the economic level it’s just a description which doesn’t help you see in what way imperialism is linked to the fundamental contradiction of capitalism.

Finally, in its explanation for the First World War and the reasons for its outbreak, the CI like Lenin and Rosa referred to the fact that “the imperialist states... divided the entire world amongst themselves”, but they don’t say why this division, once completed, should lead inevitably to war, why this division could not be accompanied by a parallel development of the different powers.

As to the question of the crises of overproduction, the world market, its contraction, etc, which the Manifesto talked about, the CI didn’t say a word.

The Communist International as a whole was unable to come to an agreement on this question. What’s more, the Communist Parties in 1919 had much more urgent and important questions to discuss: the proletariat held power in Russia, the outbreak of the German revolution had been a confirmation of the communists’ view that the world war would provoke an international revolutionary movement. But the immediate defeat of this first revolutionary offensive in Germany posed the question of the real strength of this international movement. In such a situation, the question of knowing the theoretical reasons for the outbreak of the world war took a back seat. After the barbarism of war and the fires of revolution, history had already taken charge of sweeping aside all the theories about the continuous development of well-being under capitalism, and peaceful passage to socialism.

The war, the most violent form of human misery, was there. It had engendered and international revolutionary movement and it was inevitably the questions that directly related to the revolutionary struggle that came into the foreground.

But this isn’t the only reason why the CI didn’t reach an agreement on the foundations of the economic crisis of capitalism. The First World War took the form of a total war, ie a war which, for the first time, demanded the active participation not only of the soldiers at the front, but also the whole civil population that had become incarcerated in a state apparatus that was now the omnipresent organizer of the march to slaughter and of the industrial production of the instruments of death.

The monstrous reality of the war was based on factories ‘operating at full steam’, on the mass expenditure of human lives, in uniform or not; this made unemployment ‘disappear’. The first world holocaust, which cost humanity 24 million lives, hid beneath the roar of factories producing for destruction the fact that capitalism was no longer capable of producing. The under-production of armaments concealed the overproduction of commodities. The sales to the state for war purposes hid the fact that the capitalists had no other way selling. They had to sell to destroy because they could no longer produce to sell.

This was certainly the major reason behind the surprising fact that the platform of the CI doesn’t take a single comma from the Manifesto on the question of the crises of overproduction and the contraction of the world market.

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

In conclusion, we can say that the necessity to explain imperialism allowed for a development of the analysis elaborated by Marx. But the very conditions of this crisis (revolutionary proletarian movements which pushed economic-theoretical questions into the background; the recent character of the communists’ break with the 2nd International and the weight of the theories of Social Democratic reformists on the analyses of the revolutionaries; finally the fact that the war hid the fundamental specificities of the crisis of capitalism, in particular overproduction) stood in the way of the revolutionaries of the Communist International coming to an agreement about the causes of the crisis.

RV

The revolutionary milieu in France in the 1930''s was a real microcosm of the revolution­ary currents existing at that time. While Trotskyism was in the process of losing its proletarian character and becoming a real counter-revolutionary force, a few groups clung to class positions during this period. The Italian communist left was the most authentic expression of revolutionary coherence and firm­ness.

The confusion which the group Union Communiste gave into unfortunately meant that it was unable to pass the test of the events in Spain. Born out of confusion, it disappeared in 1939 back into confusion, without making a substant­ial contribution to the proletarian movement.

One of its founders (Chaze), over forty years later, has re-edited a collection of texts from its organ, L'Internationale, and written a preface to it. Unfortunately, by remaining fixated on positions which have become bank­rupt (anarchism, councilism), by slipping into pessimism and bitterness, old proletarian mili­tants often provide a tragic illustration of the gulf between the previous generation of revol­utionaries, exhausted and demoralized by the counter-revolution, and the new generation which has a great difficulty in reappropriat­ing past experience. Let us hope that a critical balance-sheet of the past can stir the flame of proletarians who have not lived through the stifling atmosphere of the counter­revolution.

L'Union Communiste

The war in Spain (1936-39) has provoked a number of studies in recent years, though sadly they are often equivocal and of the academic or ‘memoirs' variety. Often indeed, it is the voice of the ‘Frente Popular', ‘POUmist', ‘Trotskyist' or ‘anarchist', that makes itself heard. All these ‘voices', these multiple ‘visions' come together in chorus to sing the merits of the ‘Frente Popular', the virtues of the collectivizations, or the courage of the ‘anti-fascist fighters'.

The revolutionary voice, by contrast, could only make itself heard faintly. The publi­cation in the ICC's International Review and then in a French paperback edition of texts from Bilan[1] dealing with this period has filled a gap, and has broadcast -- weakly, it's true, -- the voice of the internationalist revolution­aries. The interest in these class positions, defended in total isolation, is a positive sign; little by little, and still too slowly, the grip is loosening of the ideological vice that the world bourgeoisie clamped on the proletariat to annihilate its theoretical and organizational capacity to fight on the only terrain where its real nature can be expressed; that of the world proletarian revolution.

It is, then, with great interest that the small internationalist revolutionary milieu has observed the publication in French of the Chroniques de la Revolution Espagnole, a colle­ction of texts by the Union Communiste, written between 1933 and 1939, one of these texts' main editors was H.Chaze, who republishes them today.

Origins and political itinerary of Union Communiste

Union Communiste was born in 1933. In April of the same year, it had regrouped under the name "Gauche Communiste" the old opposition from the 15th ‘rayon' of Courbevoie and Bagnolet[2], as well as the Treint group (Treint, before being expelled, had been a leader of the French Comm­unist Party), which had broken with the Trotsky­ist Ligue Communiste of Frank and Molinier. In December, 35 expelled members of the Ligue, almost all coming from the "Jewish group", joined with Gauche Communiste in forming Union Communiste.

This group pronounced itself against the form­ation of a 4th international, and against "socialism in one country". Union Communiste (UC) was a revolutionary group, but retained many confusions from its Trotskyist heritage. Not only did it pronounce itself for "the defence of the USSR", but its positions were not clearly distinguishable from the surrounding anti-fascism. In February 1934, it was to call for workers' militias, reproaching the PCF and the SFIO (Socialist Party)[3] for not wanting to set up a "united Front" to beat "fascism". In April 1934, it was pleased to see Marceau Pivert's Gauche Socialiste[4] "taking a revolutionary attitude", pushed "into posing the problem of the revolutionary seizure of power" (L'Internationale, no.5, publication of the UC). In 1935, it was to contact Revolution Proletarienne[5], pacifists, Trotskyists, all "anti-fascists", to advocate a regroupment of these organizations. In 1936, it was to participate, in a consultative capacity, in the creation of a Trotskyist party (Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste).

This goes to show the UC's enormous difficulty in defining itself as a proletarian organization. In the surrounding confusion, which expressed the weight of the counter-revolution, revolutionary militants were reduced to a hand­ful, and their progress towards the clarific­ation of class positions came up against inn­umerable obstacles. In his introduction to Chroniques de la Revolution Espagnole, H.Chaze recognises this, and reviews the past with a critical eye:

"As regards the nature and counter-revolution­ary role of the USSR, we were at least 10 years behind our Dutch comrades (council communists) and the comrades of the German Left."

He adds that this backwardness was to lead some members of the UC to give up:

"...some looking for an audience from Doriot[6] in ‘34-‘35, others because in the UC they couldn't play at ‘number one', still others simply because our rapid evolution frightened them. They left, either on tiptoe, or after a short and friendly discussion. A few years later, almost all these comrades were either in Marceau Pivert's Gauche Socialiste or with the left Stalinists of the group that published Que Faire[7]."

The UC, then, was set up in the greatest polit­ical heterogeneity. It was nonetheless capable -- this is its merit -- of attaching itself pro­gressively to class positions, in rejecting the "defense of the USSR" and the Popular Front, quite rightly defined as a "national front".

Was this clarification really complete? Were the events in Spain, decisive as they were through the massacre of the Spanish prolet­ariat and the preparation of the imperialist war, to lead the UC to break definitively with its past confusions, and to make it a firm aid to revolutionary consciousness?

This is what H.Chaze affirms in his preface:

"After 40 years of Francoism, the Spanish workers have begun to confront the traps of bourgeois democracy in a context of world economic and social crisis....the class struggle cannot be lastingly ensnared... always providing that the workers take account of the lessons of past struggles. It is to help them break the straitjacket they are held in that we publish this chronicle of the 1936-37 revolution."

What kind of "help" is this?

The "teachings" of the "Spanish Revolution" L'Internationale 1936-37

Reading the texts of L'Internationale forces us to the conclusion that they do not help break any straitjackets. L'Internationale like the Trotskyists, thought that the revol­ution had begun in Spain. In October 1936, after the Barcelona workers' 18th July insurr­ection, followed by the insurrection in Madrid, it wrote

"the army, police, and state bureaucracy have been cut to pieces, and the proletar­iat's direct intervention has pulverized the republican remnants. In a few days, the proletariat has created from nothing its militia, its police, its tribunals, and it has laid the foundations of a new economic and social edifice" (no.23).

The UC saw the foundations of the "Spanish revolution" above all in the collectivisations and the formation of base militias.

To support this "revolution", the UC founded, at the end of 1936, a "Committee for the Spanish Revolution" in which Trotskyists and syndic­alists also participated. As H.Chaze reminds us, this included military support, although the UC did not take part formally in the Spanish milit­ias; "Several comrades, who were technicians specializing in arms production and members of the Engineers and Technicians Federation, had asked me to find out from the CNT leaders whether they could be of use. They were ready to leave their jobs in France to go and work in Catalonia".

Here, the UC joined the same chorus as the Trotskyists and the PCF who were demanding arms for Spain. L'Internationale proclaimed that "non-intervention (by the French Popular Front government; our note) means the blockade of the Spanish revolution". Finally, the UC saw the CNT and the POUM as vanguard workers' organizations. The POUM especially, despite its "gross errors" seemed to be "called to play an important part in the international regroup­ment of revolutionaries", provided it rejected "the defense of the USSR". Until its disapp­earance, L'Internationale set itself up as the adviser, first of the POUM, and then of its "left" wing; it saw a revolutionary ferment among the anarchist youth, and congratulated itself on the fact that its paper was being read among young POUMists and anarchists.

All these positions, which we will come back to, were moreover very confused. In the article already quoted, we read that the republican state which has been "pulverized" a paragraph earlier is still alive and kicking: "a lot is left to demolish, for the democratic bourgeoisie is hang­ing on to the last fragments of bourgeois power left to it". Alongside a call for "intervention" in Spain, we read further on "the struggle for a real support for our comrades in Spain in real­ity comes down to the revolutionary struggle against our own bourgeoisie".

Enthusiasm for the "Spanish revolution" was to wane as the days went by. By December 1936, L'Internationale was writing, in its no.24, "The Spanish revolution is in retreat... Imperialist war threatens....the bankruptcy of anarchism faced with the state....the POUM is set on a path which may rapidly lead it to betray the revolution, if it does not radically alter its policies".

In May 1937, the massacre of the Barcelona workers would lead L'Internationale to denounce the treason of the anarchist leaders. It insisted that the counter-revolution had triumphed. It nonetheless continued to see revolutionary possibilities in the POUM's ‘left' wing and in the Friends of Durruti. When war broke out 2 years later, the UC dis­banded.

The counter-revolution in Spain

So what revolution are we talking about?

The only examples that F.Chaze gives are the anarchist collectivisations and the Popular Front "committees" in 1936. Attacking Revolution Internationale, the ICC's publicat­ion in France, he accuses us of speaking only of the counter-revolution, while "denying that there was so much as a revolutionary ferment to provoke this ‘counter-revolution'" , he adds "They affirm that the Spanish proletariat was not organized in ‘councils'". But what then were all these committees born just after the 19th July? In France, the word ‘council' is usually used by the bourgeoisie to describe managerial, juridical and political bodies.

While it is true that 19th July 1936 expressed the Spanish proletariat's revolutionary potential, this was quickly exhausted. It was pre­cisely these committees, often formed at the initiative of anarchists and POUMists that were to line the proletariat up behind the defense of the Republican state. Very rapidly these committees were to enroll the workers in the militias, which took them out of the towns and sent them off to the military front. In this way, the republican bourgeoisie kept its state apparatus practically intact and espec­ially its government, which did not delay in banning strikes and demonstrations in the name of "national unity" for the "defense of the revolution". The Popular Front's openly counter-revolutionary role was to be fully supported by the CNT and the POUM, in which H.Chaze still detects revolutionary virtues 40 years later.

"We know that revolutionaries existed and that they showed themselves, especially during the 1937 May days"

he says in his preface. But the fact that individual revolutionaries remained, and that they took part in the armed struggle against the Republican government in May 1937, should not become a tree hiding in the forest. The in­eradicable lesson of these events is that the policy of POUMists and anarchists led the pro­letariat to the slaughter. It is they who put an end to the general strike in July ‘36; who pushed the workers out of the towns; who supported the "Catalonian Generality"; who made these "committees" into instruments that compelled the workers to "produce first, demand afterwards".

This is the sad result of this ‘revolutionary' policy, whereby the "committees" became instruments of capitalism. Nothing to do with the workers' councils -- real organs of power thrown up by the revolution. It's not just a question of words!

But worst of all in the Union Communiste's pos­ition, which H.Chaze defends to this day, is its call for arms for Spain, the under-estimat­ion, if not the denial of the Spanish war's imperialist nature. H.Chaze still proudly reminds us that his organization put itself at the disposal of the CNT to aid in the fabricat­ion of arms. Doesn't he know that these guns were used to send workers into a massacre? He complains that the Blum government gave no weapons. The USSR did. What were they used for if not to shoot down the Barcelona insurrection­ists in May 1937? Of all this, not a word from H.Chaze. He prefers to hide the counter-revol­utionary nature of these policies by calling them "class solidarity with the struggle of the Spanish workers".

It's painful to see an old militant like H.Chaze hang onto the same illusions as L'Internationale in 1936-39. When, today, he still insists that in the war in Spain, the position of revolutionary defeatism was "madness", he denies the imper­ialist character of this ‘civil war'. "This war is indeed a class war" said L'Internationale in October 1936. H.Chaze repeats it today. And yet the same articles in L'Internationale show clear­ly the war's imperialist nature; "On one side Rosenberg, soviet ambassador in Madrid, is Caballero's ‘eminence grise', on the other Hitler and Mussolini direct the operations.... In the Madrid sky, Russian planes and pilots do battle with German and Italian planes and pilots." (No.24, 5th Dec.1936). This passage, clear as it is, was not enough to clarify the UC (nor H.Chaze today), who wondered "Will the civil war in Spain be transformed into an imperial­ist war?" H.Chaze does not see the transform­ation into imperialist war until after May ‘37, as if this massacre were not the result of the imperialist bloodletting begun in July '36!

"Lies", "Falsification", "Amalgam"?

H.Chaze takes the opportunity offered by the preface to Chroniques de la Revolution Espagnole to settle accounts with Bilan and Communisme, the publications, respectively, of the suppos­edly "Bordigist" Italian and Belgian fractions of the communist left. He says; "A handful of young Belgian Bordigists had, from 1935 and so before publishing Communisme, cheerfully used the practice of lies, the falsification of texts, and amalgams....As regards Spain, they continued to do so in Communisme and were upheld by the leadership of the Italian Bord­igist organization that published Bilan, and often used the same methods, unworthy of revol­utionary militants". And he concludes: "The ‘a priori' position of the Bordigist leadership led them to a monstrous refusal of class solid­arity with the struggle of the Spanish workers." (Preface, p.78).

One looks in vain for any arguments to support such serious accusations. What's certain is that during the war in Spain Bilan and Commun­isme defended internationalist positions with­out any concessions to the prevailing ‘inter­ventionist' atmosphere. They refused to support one or other of the imperialist camps, and untiringly affirmed that only struggle on a "class front" against all bourgeois fractions, including the anarchists and POUMists, could put an end to the massacre on the imperialist "mili­tary front". The "Bordigist" current opposed the only possible internationalist slogan - "make the revolution to turn the imperialist war into civil war" -- to the classic chorus of all traitors to the proletariat "war first, the revolution after­wards". Only the Italian and Belgian left, with the Mexican Marxist Workers' Group[8], firmly defended this position, without concessions, against the tide of resignation and betrayal that carried away even the small communist groups to the left of Trotskyism. Such a position could only leave the Italian and Belgian left communists isolated. They made this choice rather than betray the internat­ional proletariat.

Hidden behind these charges of "falsification", "lies", and "amalgams" is a political intransigence that the Union Communiste group was incapable of adopting. The UC remained in an ill-defined swamp where it tried, for better or worse, to reconcile bourgeois and class positions. This was the reason for the definitive break between the UC and the Italian left who up to then had maintained some links with UC. The "Bordigist" current even thought that the UC had passed to the other side of the barricades during the massacre in Spain[9].

Because it prepared, right from the beginning, the second great imperialist massacre, the war in Spain was a decisive test for all prolet­arian organizations. While the UC did not, like the Trotskyists, pass over to the enemy camp in 1939, its confusions and lack of polit­ical coherence condemned it to disappear with­out leaving the proletariat any real contri­butions.

No doubt H.Chaze thinks he wounds us deeply by representing us as the heirs of the "falsifiers" "our critics of ‘36 have heirs, who rant and rave in their paper Revolution Internationale." We pass over this reduction of the ICC to its section in France -- this is the usual method used to deny our current's international reality. Far from feeling wounded, we can only be flatter­ed to be identified as the "heirs" of the UC's "critics". The Belgian and Italian left commun­ists' heritage, which H.Chaze considers "mons­trous", is one of staunch revolutionary stead­fastness, which allowed them to survive as a proletarian current during the Second World War. What Bilan and Communisme denounced, was precisely the lie of an imperialist war presented to the Spanish workers as a "class war". What they denounced, was the most gigan­tic historical falsification, which dressed up the massacre of workers on military fronts in May 1937 as a "workers' revolution". The worst kind of amalgam was, and still is, to mix up the capitalist and the proletarian terrain when they are mutually exclusive; the proletarian terrain being the destruction of the capitalist state, the capitalist terrain being the prolet­ariat's regimentation in its enemy's cause, in the name of the ‘revolution'.

The lessons of the Communist left are not a dead heritage. Tomorrow, as yesterday, the workers may perfectly well be taken off their class terrain and called to die for their enemy's cause. In a situation as difficult as that of Spain in ‘36, it is decisive to understand -- whatever difficulties the prol­etariat may encounter on a military terrain faced with the advance of capitalist armies -- that these military fronts can only be beaten if the proletariat firmly and resolutely oppo­ses to them its class front. Such a front can be strong only if it stands against the capitalist state and the ‘workers' parties. The proletari­at has no momentary or ‘tactical' alliances to make with them: alone, relying on its own strength, it must do battle with these supposed ‘allies' which seek to paralyze it for the slau­ghter and condemn it to a new May ‘37. The pro­letariat of any given country has no allies other than the worldwide working class.

The road of defeatism or the road of revolution?

H.Chaze explains that he wanted to republish these texts from L'Internationale, to help "break a straitjacket". Sadly, his attempt has the opposite effect. Not only does he not budge an iota from the UC's positions, demonstrating an inability to draw up a serious balance-sheet of the period, but throughout the preface to Chroniques de la  Revolution Espagnole a clearly defeatist tone can be distinguished. While today, a compre­hension of the activity and organization of revolutionaries is fundamental to the prolet­arian struggle, and will be a decisive instr­ument in the maturing of class consciousness, H.Chaze advocates precisely that "libertarian communism" (or socialism) which went so lame­ntably bankrupt in Spain. He rejects any poss­ibility of, or necessity for a proletarian org­anization of revolutionaries, affirming: "the idea of the party (group or groupuscule), the sole bearer of revolutionary ‘truth', contains the seeds of totalitarianism." As for the present period, H.Chaze is the gloomiest of pessimists, saying that he has "few illusions in the international context, hardly any different from what it was in 1936, despite the number of long and bitter wildcat strikes against the policies of one-way austerity of the bosses in the industrialized countries" (...) "the forces of counter-revolution have grown throu­ghout the world." If we are still in a period of counter-revolution, what good will be the "lessons" that H.Chaze wants to give his readers?

H.Chaze is one of those old militants whose imme­nse merit has been to resist the counter-revol­utionary current. But like many who have gone through the blackest period in the history of the workers' movement, tragically impotent, he has been left with an immense bitterness, a disill­usionment in the possibility of a proletarian revolution. H.Chaze's pessimism , the lessons he wants to give, are not our's.[10] Today, the long night of the counter-revolution has been ended for more than ten years. The prol­etariat has appeared once more on the terrain of class struggle. Faced with a capitalism seeking as in the ‘30's to lead it into imper­ialist butchery, its combativity is unbroken it has not been defeated. In spite of the weight of its illusions, which H.Chaze rightly underlines, the proletariat is an immense force which is advancing towards the day when it can stand and proclaim in the face of the capitalist world "I was, I am, I will be".

Roux/Ch

---

[1] See: IR nos. 4, 6, 7

La Contre-Revolution en Espagne, UGE 1979, with a preface by Barrot, whose content we criticize in this issue.

Etcetera editions in Barcelona published in 1978, a translation of some of Bilan's texts on Spain: Textos sobre la Revolution Espagnola, 1936-39.

[2] "Rayon": rank-and-file organization of the Parti Communiste Francais.

Courbevoie, Bagnolet: working class suburbs of Paris.

[3] SFIO: "Section Francais de l'Internationale Ouvriere" ie the 2nd International.

[4] Pivert, Marceau: leading member of SFIO, his Gauche socialiste was a loyal opposition within the SFIO.

[5] La Revolution Proletarianne: a revolutionary syndicalist publication.

[6] Doriot: member of the PC from 1920, leader of the Rayon de Saint-Denis: supported United Front against the PC leadership, was expelled in 1934 and ended up forming his own fascist party in 1936.  

[7] Que Faire, run by Ferrat, was a split from the PCF, and a supporter of the "United Front" with the socialist SFIO. After the war, Ferrat joined Leon Blum's party (the SFIO).

[8] See the Texts published in IR's nos. 10, 19, 20.

[9] The Spanish question brought about the break between Bilan and the Belgian "Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes" in 1937. From this latter emerged the Belgian Fraction, which published Communisme up until the war. The attitude to adopt towards the war in Spain was at the bottom of this split. The LCI had basically the same positions as the Union Communiste of H. Chaze and Lasterade.

[10] The collection of L'Internationale's texts prefaced by H. Chase has found enthusiastic admirers in the PIC (Pour une Intervention Communiste), which publishes Jeune Taupe. In Jeune Taupe no. 30 of March 1980, we find this enticing invitation to "read so as not to die an idiot". For some time, JT has made a speciality of re-editing L'Internationale's texts. Unfortunately, the aim is often to oppose the "clearsightedness" of the UC to Bilan, which the PIC rejects as Leninist. Does this mean that the PIC identifies with the UC's position on Spain, in particular its support for the militias, and sees the CNT and the POUM as authentically ‘revolutionary' forces? While we wait for this point to be determined, we can't help noting that the PIC prefers paddling delightedly in modernism or even flirting with the "left socialists" of the review Spartacus - all of them great admirers of the ‘resistance' and the Spanish ‘anti-fascist revolution' - rather than concerning itself with serious revolutionary work. Apparently the PIC, in such a brilliant company, is abandoning a number of class positions, and is doing its utmost to die an idiot. How wretched to see so sad an evolution on the part of a group which only a few years ago showed a greater revolutionary firmness.

The Third Conference of left communist groups ended up dislocated. Two of the principal groups to have animated previous conferences (the Inter­nationalist Communist Party (Italy) and the Communist Workers' Organization (Great Britain)) made their participation in future Conferences dependent on the closing of the debate on the role of the revolutionary party[1]. The ICC rejected this condition.

For almost four years a number of revolutionary groups have tried to create a framework to facili­tate the regroupment of political organizations of the proletariat. Given the present situation, this effort can be summed up in two phrases:

• there will certainly be no more conferences like the three which have already taken place;
• in order to be viable, the new conferences must: 1. shake off the remains of sectarianism which still weigh heavily on certain groups; 2. be politically responsible.

 

---

 

Readers interested in the detailed unfolding of debate at the Third Conference will be able to read the minutes which will be published shortly. What we would like to do here is to draw the les­sons of the experience coming from the first three conferences.

These four years of strenuous effort "to regroup revolutionaries" have constituted the most ser­ious attempt since 1968 to break down the isola­tion and division among revolutionary groups. Despite the gigantic weaknesses of the confer­ences, it is only by drawing out all the lessons contained in them that the general work of revo­lutionary regroupment can be followed up.

To go forward, it is necessary to understand the reasons which led to the dislocation of the Third Conference and to define from that what is neces­sary in order for the next conferences to take place.

 

The weight of sectarianism

 

A debate took place at the Second Conference between the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista, as its newspaper is called) and the ICC, concerning the sectarian attitude of those revolutionary groups which had refused to participate in the interna­tional conferences. The PCInt rejected the reso­lution, affirming - among other things - that the refusal by groups to participate wasn't a question of sectarianism, but of political divergence. Battaglia stated that we were chasing after a phantom hobby-horse called sectarianism, instead of concerning ourselves with the real question of political divergence. Because the PCInt was, itself, in the act of mounting this particular steed, it didn't see the need to corral it. Sectarianism does exist. It isn't a phantom. We've met it - throughout the work of these conferences.

 

What is sectarianism?

 

Sectarianism is the spirit of the sect, the spirit of the religious splinter group. In the religi­ous world, the question of knowing what's true and what isn't is posed as a pure confrontation of ideas in the ethereal realm of abstract thought.

Since reality, the material practice of living mortals, is never considered to be superior to the sacred texts and their divine interpretation, and is never allowed to resolve debate; each sect - pitted against the others - is faced with only two possibilities. Either it can renounce its divergences and disappear as a separate entity or it can continue to live on its own, eternally isolated from, and opposed to, all the other ‘rival' sects.

Since social and material practice is not permit­ted to determine the truth, each isolated sect, inevitably cut off from all the others, must lov­ingly cultivate within its own pristine cell, its own truth.

In speaking of sects in the workers' movement, Engels said that what essentially characterized their existence was that they always gave pride of place to what differentiated them from the rest of the movement. And certainly it is this, the major expression of the sectarian disease, which isol­ates its victims from reality.

No matter what problem confronts them, sects are concerned with only one thing: how to establish what distinguishes them from the rest of the movement, while ignoring or condemning what they have in common with it. Their fear of openly recognizing what they share with the movement as a whole springs from their fear of disappearing. This caricatural manifestation of sectarianism hamstrung the work of all three conferences of the left communist groups, and finally led to the utter dislocation of the Third.

 

"No common declarations?"

 

The Third Conference opened in May 1980 amid events dominated by the menace of a third world war. All the contributions prepared for the Conference by the participating groups had under­lined the seriousness of the situation, and had affirmed the position of the working class confr­onted with the danger of war: a third world war would have the same nature as the two previous world wars, ie imperialist; the world working class had nothing to defend in any bloc; the only effective struggle against war would be the struggle of the proletariat against world capitalism.

The ICC asked the Conference as a whole to take up a position on this question and proposed a resolution for discussion and amendment, if that proved necessary, which would affirm the position of revolutionaries faced with war.

The PCInt refused to sign it, and the CWO and L'Eveil Internationaliste followed suit. The Conference remained silent. Given the criteria determining participation in the conferences, each of the groups present inevitably shared the same basic positions on what attitude the prole­tariat must have in the event of world conflict or the menace of war. But the partisans of silence told us: "Watch it. As for us, we're not about to sign anything with just anyone. We're not opportunists." And we replied to them: "Opportu­nism is the betrayal of principles at the first opportunity. What we are proposing isn't the betrayal of a principle, but the affirmation of that self-same principle with all of our strength". The principle of internationalism is one of the highest and most important principles of the proletarian struggle. Whatever other divergences may separate the internationalist groups, few political organizations in the world defend it in a consistent way. Their conference should have spoken about the war and in the loudest possible voice.

Instead of that the conference said nothing ... "because divergences exist on what will be the role of the revolutionary party tomorrow". The content of this brilliant, ‘non-opportunist' logic is the following: if revolutionary organi­zations can't succeed in agreeing on all questions, then they must not mention those positions which they do agree on and have agreed on for a very long time.

The specificities of each group are made, on principle, more important than what is common to all of them. That is sectarianism. The silence of all three conferences is the clearest demonstra­tion of how sectarianism leads to impotence. (In all three, the PCInt, followed by the CWO, refused to produce any common declaration, despite the ICC's insistence[2].)

 

Conferences aren't a boxing-match

 

Select. Select. That was the only function which the PCInt and the CWO saw in the conferences.

But how to explain to a sect that it must consider the possibility that ... perhaps ... it could be wrong? How to get the sectarians to understand that in today's conditions it's an absurdity to say, that it's these conferences that will select the groups meant to construct the party of tomorrow?

Certainly in the revolutionary process, selection will take place among groups claiming to be part of the workers' movement. But such a selection arises out of the practice of the class or in rel­ation to world wars, not as a result of discussion conducted behind closed doors. Even a split as important as the one which took place between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks wasn't concretized until the outbreak of war in 1914 and the struggle of 1917.

This is why to begin with, it is necessary not to over-estimate the capacity of ‘self-selection' through simple debate, or through conferences. Secondly, in today's conditions, debates between revolutionaries are far from the point where the questions under debate could be said to have been resolved in common. At the moment, the framework within which a debate can begin to take place in an effective and useful way for the working class has scarcely been created. Selection - speak of that at the required time.

 

Conclude a debate which hasn't happened?

 

Either out of impatience or fear, the PCInt and the CWO refused to continue to the end the debate on the problem of the party. This question is one of the most serious and most important ques­tions confronting revolutionaries today, particu­larly in regard to their appreciation of the practice of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution (the repression of the workers' coun­cils, of Kronstadt, the thousands of deaths orde­red by the Bolshevik Party at the head of the state and the army). The debate on this question has never yet been seriously approached.

However, that didn't prevent the PCInt and the CWO from quite inexplicably deciding, one fine day, to declare the question closed, thus dislo­cating the conferences. They had suddenly dis­covered that they didn't agree with the ‘spontaneists' of the ICC.

Independently of the fact that neither the PCInt nor the CWO know what it means to say that a group is ‘spontaneist' (all they know is that ‘spontaneism' is something different from what they themselves think), it is at least inconsis­tent to declare a debate closed when it has never taken place, especially if the question is con­sidered to be of the greatest importance and if this is used as a justification for remaining silent regarding the danger of world war. The seriousness of the question must make the neces­sity of discussing it that much more important.

 

The necessity for organized debate among revolutionaries

 

This debate must take place. Perhaps we will not succeed in resolving it before a new revolutionary wave of the scope of 1917-23 comes and decides the question in practice. But at least we'll reach the decisive battles with the problems correctly posed, with incomprehension and atti­tudes originating in the sect mentality swept to one side.

In relation to the role of the revolutionary van­guard, the period of struggle between 1917 and 1923 posed more questions than it answered. From the impotence of the newly-created German Commu­nist Party in January 1919 to the bloody repres­sion of Kronstadt by the Bolsheviks in 1921, the experience of the years of failed insurrection has shown us more what shouldn't be done, rather than what should. But still it's necessary to know what those years have shown us and what we can deduce from the experience. This debate isn't new. It has existed in its preliminary stages since the first Congresses of the Communist International. But inevitably, it is this debate which revolutionaries must take up again today in a serious, open, responsible, consistent way, in the face of the working class and all the new revolutionary groups which are developing, and are going to develop everywhere in the world. To consider this debate closed, finished, doesn't merely mean ignoring the meaning of the word ‘debate'; worse still it means running away from the historical responsibility placed on a revolu­tionary organization (even if this could seem an exaggerated contention in relation to some sects).

To refuse to conduct this debate within the frame­work of a conference of revolutionary groups is to refuse to conduct it in the only serious way that could allow it to progress[3].

Those who run away from this debate are really fleeing from the necessities facing the present-day revolutionary movement, such as it actually exists, in order to take refuge within their hard-and-fast, bookish certainties. Whether revolutio­naries today prepare for it or not, this debate will take place within the class in future struggles, in the full glare of all the problems the class will encounter then. But those who refuse to clarify this question today, within an organized framework of discussion, will ensure that it is taken up by the class in the worst of conditions. And this is the case for the super-partyists of Communist Program (the International Communist Party (PCI)), the ‘anti-party builders' of the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste), as much as the ‘non-opportunists' of the PCInt or the CWO.

How to express the tendency for the class                   

The tendency towards unification conforms to the nature of the proletariat as a class. The tendency for revolutionary organizations to unify is a manifestation of this. Like the class whose cause they have adopted, revolutionary organizations aren't divided by material interests. Con­trary to the political organizations of the bourgeoisie, which incarnate and reflect the material interests of different factions of the exploiting class, revolutionary organizations express - above all else - the need for the conscious uni­fication of the class. Revolutionaries debate and often have differences over how to effect this unity, but all their efforts must be given to trying to attain it. To be on a par with their class means that revolutionaries must be capable, first and foremost, of expressing the proletarian tendency towards unity, a tendency which makes their class the bearer of what Marx termed "the human community".

 

A dialogue of the deaf?

 

For a sect, dialogues with others obviously have no purpose. "We don't agree! We don't agree! We're not going to be convinced!" Why can't revolutionary organizations convince other revo­lutionary organizations through debate? They can, because it's only the sects who refuse to question their own certitudes[4].

How did all the revolutionary regroupments of the past come about if it's impossible for anyone to convince anyone else through debate? For the sect, to be convinced by another organization never leads to a new clarity. Debate, for the ‘programmists', is a matter of "fucking or being fucked" (as an article published in Programma Comunista put it). For the CWO and the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), if you're convinced in a debate that means you've fallen victim to the imperialism of another group. In both cases, it's the worst evil that could happen[5]. Something reserved for other groups, but never for one's own. That is the sect spirit.

Certainly debate is difficult. It is very possi­ble, as we said above, that revolutionaries will not succeed in deciding these debates in the absence of great movements of the mass of the working class. But:

1. The fact that the task is difficult isn't an argument against attempting it.

2. Since 1968, new class practice has resurged throughout the entire world - from the USA to Korea, from Gdansk or Togliattigrad to São Paolo. This has created the basis for new reflection within the class and has faced revolutionary min­orities with their responsibilities.

There's nobody deafer than those who don't want to hear. Let us hope that revolutionaries will not wait too much longer before they begin to hear the powerful sound of rumbling within the class, which is even now preparing the historical transformations of the future.

 

What the future conferences must be

 

A Point of Reference

The 1980s will see an unprecedented development of the class struggle under the pressure of the economic crisis. The evident bankruptcy of capitalism, the murderous impasse into which it will lead humanity if the working class doesn't react, makes - and will make - the proletarian revolutionary goal appear less and less as a utopian dream, and more and more as the only way of responding to the world holocaust which the survival of the system of exploitation carries within it.

The development of proletarian struggles is, and will be, accompanied more and more by the upsurge of new elements, circles, revolutionary organizations. These new forces, in seeking to become active and effective factors in the international struggle of the proletariat, are - and will rapidly be - confronted with the necessity of re-appropriating the lessons coming from the past experience of the world proletarian struggle. Whether for good or ill, it is the revolutionary groups whose existence has preceded the growth of these new forces of the class which have sought to define these lessons and have taken up the teachings of the past international workers' movement. Also, it is towards these organizations that the new elements will inevitably turn, sooner or later, in order to try to arm themselves with the fundamental gains of past experience in the wor­kers' movement. One of the most important func­tions of the International Conferences is that of allowing these new forces of the class to find a framework where the task of re-appropriating past lessons can begin to be realized in the best possible conditions. This framework is a frame­work of open, responsible confrontation of positions between organizations situated on the revo­lutionary terrain, a debate linked to the struggles of the class which are actually taking place.

The echo which the three conferences of the groups of the communist left provoked, the interest raised by this experience in the US, in Algeria, Italy, Columbia... demonstrated, above and be­yond the enormous insufficiencies of the confer­ences themselves, that this type of work responds to a real necessity in the revolutionary movement. That is why the continuation of this work consti­tutes, today, one of the first-ranking responsi­bilities in the intervention of revolutionary groups.

Criteria for serious participation in the Conferences

In order for the conferences to fulfill this func­tion they must be organized around precise criteria determining participation, which will permit the best possible delimitation of a class terrain. These criteria can't be the result of a ‘brain­storm' on the part of a few organizations. Contrary to the initial idea of refusing to establish criteria, an idea put forward by the PCInt at the time of the preparation for the First Conference, the ICC has always defended:

1. The necessity for criteria.
2. The idea that the criteria had to respond to two requirements. On the one hand they had to take into account the principal gains coming from the last, international organization of the pro­letariat, which was an expression of the last wave of international revolutionary struggle between 1917-23, in other words the first two Congresses of the IIIrd International. On the other hand, the criteria had to be based on the principal lessons appearing as a result of the experience of World War II: the capitalist nature of the USSR and all the so-called ‘socialist' states, even those in the process of being labe­led as such, the capitalist nature of all organizations from the Communist Parties to the Socia­list Parties and including the Trotskyists, which ‘defend' such states.

The criteria of participation defined by the three conferences constitute, in this sense, a solid base for the future (apart from a few minor reformulations such as replacing the term "science of the proletariat" when speaking of Marxism, with that of "the theory of the proletariat"[6]).

Since the time of the IIIrd International, the important debates which had begun to unfold within it, particularly those between the Bolshe­viks and the different ‘Lefts' from Western Europe, have been illuminated by more than sixty years of critical experience for the class. Ques­tions such as those connected to the Party and its role, the nature of the unions in capitalism after World War I, the nature of ‘national liber­ation struggles', ‘revolutionary parliamentarism' and the tactic of the ‘united front', etc, have not lost any of their significance since then, It's not an accident that these are the questions which still divide revolutionary groups today.

But their importance and their seriousness only make more urgent and more inevitable the organized confrontation of revolutionary positions. The seriousness of the debate doesn't constitute an impediment to it taking place as the CWO and the PCInt (suddenly a ferocious partisan of ‘new cri­teria for selection') pretend. In this sense to close the conferences to groups holding divergent positions on these questions could constitute, in the present state of the movement, condemning the conferences to impotence. It would also mean transforming the conferences, very quickly, into a new form of ‘sect'.

The conferences don't represent regroupment in itself. They provide a framework; they are an instrument in the more overall and more general process of revolutionary regroupment. It's only by considering them as such that they can fulfill their function, not by precipitously searching to transform them into a new, definitive, politi­cal organization[7].

However, experience has proven - especially at the Third Conference - that general political princi­ples don't constitute, in themselves, sufficient criteria. The next conferences must demand from their participants a real conviction in the use­fulness and seriousness of the conferences, and hence how they should be conducted. Groups like the GCI participated in the Third Conference only to denounce it, and to use it as a ‘fishing ground' for recruitment. Such groups will have no place in future conferences.

The most obvious condition for the effectiveness of collective work is that those who want to undertake it are convinced of the usefulness of its goal. That should be self-evident, but it will be necessary to make this explicit in pre­paring future conferences. To remain silent is for revolutionaries to deny their own existence. Communists have nothing to hide from their class. Before their class, the class whose vanguard they hope to be, communists must assume their acts and their convictions in a responsible manner. For this reason, future conferences must break with the ‘silence' of the three previous conferences. Future conferences must learn how to affirm clearly and explicitly in texts and short, precise resolutions - and not in hundreds of pages of written minutes - the results of their work, whether it's a question of illu­minating some divergences and what implications they bear, or whether it's a question of making clear the common positions shared by all the groups present.

The inability of the past conferences to put the real content of the divergences in black-and­white was one indication of their weakness. The self-righteous silence of the Third Conference on the question of the war is shameful. The next conferences must know how to assume their responsibilities, if they want to be viable.

 

Conclusion

 

The regroupment of revolutionaries is a necessity and a possibility which goes hand-in-hand with the movement towards the unification of the world working class.

Those who today remain prisoners of the sect spirit imposed by years of counter-revolution and atomization of the proletariat, who ignore the task demanded of revolutionaries, and whose credo begins with the words "We are the one and only ones" will be mercilessly judged by history as irresponsible, egocentric sects.

As for us, we remain convinced of the validity and the urgency of the work towards revolutionary regroupment, however long, painful and difficult this task may turn out to be. It is within this understanding that we will continue to act.

RV

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[1] Organizations which participated at the Conference:

a. Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt which publish Battaglia Comunista)

b. The International Communist Current (ICC)

c. I Nuclei Leninisti (a fusion of the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and the Il Leninista)

d. Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI)

e. L'Eveil Internationaliste

f. The Communist Workers' Organization (CWO)

g. L'Organization Communiste Revolutionaire Internationaliste d'Algeria (the OCRIA which publishes Travailleurs Immigres en Lutte) sent written contributions.

h. The American group, Marxist Workers' Group, associated itself to the Conference and would have sent a delegate, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute.

[2] At the First Conference even refused to sign a declaration which tried to summarize the divergences.

[3] Nothing can replace organized oral debate concerning the present problems of the class struggle.

[4] It wasn't out of flippancy that Marx said that his personal motto was "Doubt everything". This was someone who never ceased throughout his life to combat the sect spirit in the workers' movement.

[5] Do these groups think that the Left Fractions of the IInd International, which were convinced by the arguments of Luxemburg, Lenin, Pannekoek and Trotsky to conduct the most intransigent struggle against the rottenness of Social Democracy, were victims?

[6] The criteria defined at the Second Conference determining participation in the international conferences were as follows:

• the recognition of the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution;
• the recognition of the split with Social Democracy, effected at the first and second Congresses of the Communist International;
• the unreserved rejection of state capitalism and self-management;
• the rejection of all the Communist and Socialist Parties as bourgeois parties;
• an orientation toward a revolutionary organization which refers itself to a Marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat;
• a refusal to support the dragooning of the proletariat behind, in any form whatsoever, the banners of the bourgeoisie.

[7] The unfolding of the Conferences and their enlarging through the inclusion of other groups has not prevented regroupments from taking place among the participating organizations. Since the first conferences, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and Il Leninista unified to form a single organization. Similarly, most of the elements which constituted the group For Kommunismen in Sweden, a group present at the Second Conference, have since constituted the section in Sweden of the ICC.

When society is in crisis, history seems to accel­erate. In a few weeks, events which, when they took place, shook you to the core, seem like small and distant ephemera. After two months, the Amer­ican raid on Iran of 24 April already seems to have been half-forgotten. However, the problems which it brought to light or underlined remain as important as ever:

-- the crucial role Iran plays in the strategic options of the US bloc;

-- the chaos which continues to reign in Iran: the inability of the legal authorities to solve the problem of the hostages is only one aspect of this chaos, which in turn expresses the general chaos the whole world is descending into;

-- the intensification of war preparations on the part of the imperialist blocs, notably the USA, whose raid on Iran had a significance that goes well beyond the events that are shaking that particular country: as a warning to the other bloc, as a way of tightening up the western bloc around its top nation, as a way of pursuing and intensifying the ideological barrage directed at the American population.

To the extent that it tries to shed light on these different problems, this statement adopted by the ICC following the American raid, retains its contemporary interest despite the fact that it is somewhat ‘dated' on certain events, notably concerning what is happening in Iran.

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

With the US raid on 24 April into Iran, this country was once more placed at the centre of the international political game, as was the threat of world war. Leaving aside all the foggy camp­aigns put about by the bourgeoisie and its mass media, it is important that revolutionaries and the working class have a clear idea of:

-- the true objectives of the US bourgeoisie;

-- the situation which led to the event, both in Iran and internationally.

 

A. The US campaign in Iran wasn't a fiasco. On the contrary, it was a success. You could speak of a fiasco if the objectives envisaged hadn't been achieved, but they were. These objectives were the following:

1. To point out to the Iranian bourgeoisie that the US wasn't inclined to put up with the anarchy reigning in its country for a long time.

2. To point out to the other countries in the bloc that an active solidarity was expected from them, not only as regards Iran, but as regards all the problems which confront the USA and its bloc on the international scene.

3. To point out to Russia that faced with this country's attempt to profit from the situation in order to enlarge its zone of influence, the US was determined not to tolerate another Kabul.

4. To reactivate at home the campaign of ‘national solidarity' already put into gear by the ‘discovery' of Russian troops in Cuba and considerably broad­ened by the taking of the hostages in Tehran and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Clearly if the objective of the US had been to free the hostages, then one could speak of a fiasco. On the other hand if the objectives had been those listed above, then we must speak of a success:

-- the Iranian bourgeoisie hasn't profited in any way from the raid to strengthen its anti-American campaign; on the contrary, the moderation of its response, leaving aside the mistakes made by the most fanatical and stupid elements of the clergy, indicated that they had received the message;

-- the governments of the major countries of the US bloc have all, without fail, given support to Carter after the American operation: it is interesting to note that it was the only point of agreement coming out of the recent summit of EEC countries in Luxemburg;

-- Russia, too, has shown great moderation in its condemnation of American ‘intrigues', content­ing itself with denouncing Carter's irresponsi­bility, thus indicating that it had understood the warning which had been addressed to it;

-- a majority of the American population and the whole US political apparatus gave their support to Carter in spite of the official failure of the operation.

B. What are the reasons that make it necessary to consider these as the main objectives of the US bourgeoisie?

1. Iran constitutes an essential part of the strategic apparatus of the US bloc. First of all its importance as a producer of oil, one of the crucial factors of modern war, goes without saying. But it isn't the essential reason for its importance. The US bloc has considerable oil stocks at its disposal in Mexico, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Iraq (without taking into account that the Iranian oil-fields could, if necessary, be kept for the west by the intervention of Iraq). In fact, more important is the geographic position of this country:

-- which controls the Straits of Hormuz, the route for oil tankers;

-- which has a border of several thousand kilometers with Russia;

-- which constitutes an obstacle against Russia's progression towards the ‘warm seas', towards which taking control of Afghanistan was an important step.

All this gives Iran an exceptional importance to the US bloc and was the motive for providing it, at the time of the Shah, with one of the most powerful armies in the world.

The most important sectors of the Iranian bour­geoisie have always been conscious of this fact and of the interest they have in keeping their country within the US bloc rather than letting it become a satellite of Russia. Even at the most intense moments of anti-Americanism over these last months, the Iranian bourgeoisie hasn't given rise to any major political force favoring the Russian bloc. That is why the events in Iran and the conflict between this country and the US haven't constituted at any time an expression of the conflict between the major blocs; they have always been an internal affair of the US bloc. That, above all, is why the US hasn't inter­vened militarily up to now, preferring to make the greatest effort to take things in hand in a gradual, and therefore, more effective manner.

However, Iran can only assume its role as an essential pawn of America if it maintains a mini­mum of internal stability and a strong political power: its incapacity to play its role as police­man of the region was certainly not ignored in Russia's decision to invade Afghanistan.

But, since the fall of the Shah more than a year ago, Iran has been in a state of anarchy; since that date, it hasn't found any political force within it to take the situation in hand, to constitute a real power. Moreover it was because the US foresaw such a situation -- and not through blindness -- that it supported, practically right up to the last minute, a regime which was unanimously hated. Successively, Bakhtiar and then Bazargan failed in their attempts to put the country into order by taking into account both the national capital and the US bloc. In fact, the considerable weakening of the army because of is too-close ties with the Shah's regime -- the army being in general the only force that can exercise power in an underdeveloped country deprived Iranian capital of a political alterna­tive. The Church has played its role as a force of mystification very well, but hasn't the competence to assume political power.

Me taking of the Tehran hostages:

-- by reforging a national unity badly threat­ened by nationalist revolts and class struggle,

-- by pointing out the impasse into which the most backward and fanatical sectors of the ruling class had dragged the country, and thus isolating them, could have marked the beginning of the situation being taken in hand to the benefit of the US. Bani-Sadr, representing after Bakhtiar and Bazargan, the most modern and lucid sectors of the national bourgeoisie but playing to a larger ‘popular' audience than his predecessors, was able to regain some order for the Americans. His election to the Presidency of the Republic constituted the first step in such a process, but it quickly became apparent that he was incapable of exercising a real authority over the whole of the ruling class, above all over the ecclesiasti­cal sector. For the moment no real power exists in Iran: the legal, state apparatus is paralyzed as much by internal dissensions as by the actions of the numerous social and political forces which do not accept its authority:

-- the working class

-- national minorities

-- the Church

-- ‘Islamic' paramilitary forces (the ‘guardians the revolution') or the ‘Islamic' left (the modjahedin).

The working class has played a decisive role in the overthrow of the Shah's regime: it was its strikes in the Autumn of 1978 which by paralyzing the economic apparatus of the country gave the signal that it was time for the last forces supporting the Shah (namely the USA) to ‘release' him. Since then the different governments which have succeeded each other to head the ‘Islamic Republic' has not really managed to control the working class.

In the same way, national minorities, the Baluchis, the Arabs and especially the Kurds, have profited from the upheavals in Tehran in order to secede. So far successive efforts by the army and the ‘guardians of the revolution' haven't managed to liquidate the secession, despite repeated massacres.

Faced with these two forces of disintegration in the country, Iranian capital has found active support in the Shi'ite church and the ‘guardians of the revolution', who have excelled themselves in repression. But at the same time these forces have profited from their role in this repression in order to act on their own account over and above the legal power, of which the army, despite its disorganization and its internal tensions, would seem to be the only pillar. These divisions between the different sectors of the political apparatus of the country, ideological and military, have only, at the end of the day, encouraged the revolts of the national minorities and the class struggle. Setting the country in order on behalf of the national capital and of the US bloc re­quires first of all setting this apparatus in order, and that finally has to take place around the army and the industrial bourgeoisie.

Thus the message the US sent to the Iranian bour­geoisie through their operation is clear: "put your house in order, or else we will come and do it". And it seems that this message has begun to be understood, notably by Khomeini who has just authorized Bani-Sadr to nominate a new mini­stry as well as to take supreme command of all the ‘forces of order' and control of all the means of information (even if at the same time he is continuing to put a spoke in the wheel with his slogan of "Vote Islam")[1]. Apparently weakened by the US raid, Bani-Sadr has come out, in fact, as one of its beneficiaries: that was one of the US' objectives.

2. Globally, since the beginning of the worsening of the economic contradictions of capitalism at the end of the sixties and of the worsening of inter-imperialist tensions which have come as a result of that, the US bloc has shown a good cohesion, tending to strengthen itself as the tensions became more sharp, and not to crumble, as some groups like the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste) thought. If it has appeared to hold within it different diplomatic or military orientations, this was a result of the fact that:

-- the existence of blocs doesn't eliminate antagonistic interests, above all commercial ones, between the countries which comprise a bloc;

-- it is often easier for the bloc to carry out certain tasks through apparently ‘independent' countries (for example, the military and diplom­atic interventions by France in Africa and the Middle East).

However, this ‘suppleness' of the US bloc, even though relative and limited, is less possible as inter-imperialist tensions worsen, with this exacerbation:

-- national interests must give way more and more to the general interests of the bloc, which to a large extent are identified with the national interests of the leader of the bloc. For example, the ‘bad temper' shown by some allies of the US when they saw that the US was in favor of oil price rises had to give way to a greater ‘discipline';

-- the use for the bloc of an apparent ‘inde­pendence' of some of its constituents, particu­larly effective on the diplomatic level, lessens and tends to become a handicap when the language of arms becomes necessary, to the degree that such an ‘independence' risks being seen, on the international level, as a lack of cohesion, a weakness of the bloc; on an internal level, such manifestations of ‘independence' can get in the way of the bloc's ideological campaigns.

This need for a greater cohesion of the bloc around its leader is necessitated by the new facts of the international situation, but wasn't, as far as the US was concerned, sufficiently perceived by all its allies, especially those who had to be coaxed into associating themselves with the commercial restrictions towards Russia and the boycott of the Olympic Games. This has been confirmed with the fracas of the American raid of 24 April. This operation underlined and concretized the determination of the US to assure a greater solidarity on the part of its allies, a determination which was expressed by Carter's declarations to four European television networks on 13 April. These were received with reticence by some European countries. The operation on 24 April, which contradicted America's assurance that it would not intervene militarily before mid-May, forced the allies up against the wall: on 28 April, at the Luxemburg summit, the nine "reaffirmed their solidarity with the government and the people of the United States". The second objective of the American raid was achieved.

3. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, it did so with the certainty that it wouldn't come up against the armed forces of the western bloc, a certainty which was above all based on the fact that the local policeman of this bloc, Iran, was paralyzed by internal convulsions. The US was obliged to place Afghanistan in the ‘losses' col­umn of their balance-sheet but it was very impor­tant that this misadventure wasn't repeated. They had, therefore, to point out very clearly to Russia that they were also capable of carrying out military actions outside their borders, a thing they haven't done since the Vietnam war. In particular, they had to warn Russia very clearly that they wouldn't accept Russia abandon­ing the prudence it had shown up to now regarding Iran, and use the instability of this country to advance its own pawns. And this warning if it was to be taken seriously, had to be emphasized by a concrete demonstration of American determina­tion: the intervention in Iran equally fulfilled this function. When on 9 May, Carter recalled his words of 23 January: "Any external attempt to take control of the area of the Gulf would be considered as an attack against the vital inter­ests of the US and would be answered by any means, including arms" he was better placed to point out that his determination wasn't only verbal, that it wasn't a matter of impulse, but of a deliberate and resolute political and military choice.

4. Since November 1979, the American population has been subjected to a daily torrent of propa­ganda designed to prepare it for the military needs of its bourgeoisie, and in particular for the idea of a foreign intervention, an idea which has not been very popular since the Vietnam war. On the whole this operation has born fruit, but there were some discords when it came to playing the symphony composed by the maestro Carter:

-- reactions against registration for the draft;

-- persistence of workers' strikes.

In reality, the intensive propaganda put out by the whole media can't be effectively kept up for long, just as it can't make people permanently forget the harsh consequences of the crisis which is hitting the working class. However, the bour­geoisie will continue to relaunch these campaigns at regular intervals whenever there is a specta­cular event.

After the hostages affair the American bourgeoisie exploited the invasion of Afghanistan up to the hilt (even if the importance of the stakes of this latter event goes much further than a simple ideological campaign) and deliberately cultivated anti-Russian feeling, notably through going on about the Olympic Games. But it was useful to flesh out this bellicose campaign by adding ‘deeds to words'. The American raid on Iran was advantageous in three ways:

-- to satisfy the sectors of the population who were demanding that ‘something be tried' to free the hostages;

-- to test how much the population would accept the idea of a foreign intervention;

-- to prepare the population not only in words but in practice for future, more important, interventions.

Although this operation looked like a pitiful fiasco, one can't hide from the fact that the principle behind it has, in the main, received the approval of the US population. Besides, this operation has provided the occasion to demonstrate and further strengthen the unity which exists within the US bourgeoisie on the problems of foreign policy. For example, none of Carter's presidential competitors have tried to gain from the ‘fiasco' by attacking it. On the contrary, we have seen a wonderful unanimity. So we should not see Cyrus Vance's resignation as a manifestation of political crisis. In reality, it is to do with the rigidity of US foreign policy as it moves towards a more and more bellicose and military orientation which isn't put into question by any major sector of the bourgeoisie. Vance, who is a certain type of political man, of a more diplomatic make-up couldn't personally carry that policy out.

C. In relation to the objectives which appear to be essential for the US and its bloc, the US raid of 24 April would therefore seem to be a remarkable success. However this operation is presented, almost unanimously as a ‘fiasco' to the extent that:

1. It didn't achieve its official objective: the freeing of the hostages.

2. It displays a weakness of the US army, both in its equipment and in its personnel, which affects the credibility of US military might in the eyes of the world.

3. It reinforces the image of Carter as a ‘loser', and this puts his re-election at risk.

1. It must be said that the US bourgeoisie cares nothing for the fate of the fifty hostages. On the contrary, up until now the taking of the hostages has served its purposes admirably (cf International Review, nos.20 & 21). For it, the question of the restitution of the hostages (in­sofar as it is at all interested) has the unique value of indicating the capacity of the official Iranian government to take control of the situa­tion and of its policies towards the US: the day the hostages are returned, it would mean that the US could once more count on Iran as a part of its military game. In this sense, the free­ing by force of the hostages would not only have deprived it of one of its most useful themes in its ideological campaign, it would equally have deprived the US government of this indicator. Further, if the expedition had reached Tehran, it would only have been able to free the hostages (those that were still alive that is) at the cost of a murderous slaughter, in particular of Iran­ians; and this wouldn't have made the regulation of the contentious relations between the US and Iran any easier. In any case, Carter in his spectacular declaration announcing the ‘failure' of the operation was insistent that Iranian blood would not have been spilt and that the intention of the operation was ‘simply humanita­rian' and not aggressive towards Iran: the door .was thus left open for an amicable solution to the conflict. Thus the ‘failure' of the US raid was more profitable regarding the regaining of control over Iran by the US, than any ‘success' would have been.

2. Regarding the present ideological campaign of the US bloc, the ‘failure' of the raid was a very positive element: it totally reinforced the false argument that says that the US bloc is weaker than the Russian bloc. To feed a myth there must be a semblance of reality in it: on this level the US ‘fiasco' was a wonderful success. As for the ideas which the governments of the major countries of the world (allies as well as enemies) may form of the real power of the US, they are based on more serious elements than this event.

Thus even where it would appear as a failure, the operation mounted by the US government can be shown to be a success: even if one must be sus­picious of a too Machiavellian interpretation of the gestures and deeds of the bourgeoisie, one can still say that the whole operation, which has been described as a failure, looks very much like a gigantic stage production. This is corro­borated by:

-- the unconvincing nature of technical explana­tions for the ‘failure',knowing as we do the deg­ree of perfection in American armaments;

-- the spectacular and dramatic aspect of the announcement of this ‘failure'.

As for the argument about Carter's image as a ‘loser', the facts don't bear it out:

-- in the first place, this image doesn't seem to have been really affected by this ‘fiasco', nor even have his chances of re-election;

-- in the second place, such an argument spreads the illusion that the policies of the bourgeoisie are still influenced by universal suffrage: when the US bourgeoisie decided to withdraw from Vietnam, it cheerfully sacrificed Johnson's re-election in 1968.

In fact, the US bourgeoisie is already familiar with this kind of ‘catastrophe' which is turned into a success. Just as it has been established that Roosevelt wanted the destruction of the US fleet in the Pacific in 1941 in order to entice the population and reticent sectors of the bourgeoisie into the war against Japan, perhaps one day we will learn that Jimmy Carter's little ‘Pearl Harbor' was a trick.

Whatever the degree of authenticity of the US operation on Iran, it is important to underline that it reveals the following facts about the present international situation:

-- a very clear new sharpening of the bellicose orientation of American politics: if Carter was shown from the very beginning as the man for preparing for war with his ‘preachings' and ‘human rights', today he has amply confirmed this orientation; from now on Russia will no longer have the quasi-monopoly of military expeditions. After having essentially based itself on its economic power, US imperialism will more and more base itself on its military power;

-- a further worsening of inter-imperialist tensions (even if Iran isn't today a direct focus for them) .

More than ever revolutionaries must highlight and denounce these war preparations and make it an element of propaganda in their task of participa­ting in the development of class consciousness.

ICC 6.5.80

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[1] The recent freeing by the British SAS of the Iranian diplomats taken hostage in their Embassy in London, which got the British government the thanks of Bani-Sadr, constitutes the ‘positive' aspect of this message, an expression of the ‘good will' of the western bloc.

 

 

Sectarianism, an inheritance from the counter-revolution that must be transcended

The Third Conference of left communist groups ended up dislocated. Two of the principal groups to have animated previous conferences (the Inter­nationalist Communist Party (Italy) and the Communist Workers' Organization (Great Britain)) made their participation in future Conferences dependent on the closing of the debate on the role of the revolutionary party[1]. The ICC rejected this condition.

For almost four years a number of revolutionary groups have tried to create a framework to facili­tate the regroupment of political organizations of the proletariat. Given the present situation, this effort can be summed up in two phrases:

• there will certainly be no more conferences like the three which have already taken place;
• in order to be viable, the new conferences must: 1. shake off the remains of sectarianism which still weigh heavily on certain groups; 2. be politically responsible.

---

Readers interested in the detailed unfolding of debate at the Third Conference will be able to read the minutes which will be published shortly. What we would like to do here is to draw the les­sons of the experience coming from the first three conferences.

These four years of strenuous effort "to regroup revolutionaries" have constituted the most ser­ious attempt since 1968 to break down the isola­tion and division among revolutionary groups. Despite the gigantic weaknesses of the confer­ences, it is only by drawing out all the lessons contained in them that the general work of revo­lutionary regroupment can be followed up.

To go forward, it is necessary to understand the reasons which led to the dislocation of the Third Conference and to define from that what is neces­sary in order for the next conferences to take place.

The weight of sectarianism

A debate took place at the Second Conference between the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista, as its newspaper is called) and the ICC, concerning the sectarian attitude of those revolutionary groups which had refused to participate in the interna­tional conferences. The PCInt rejected the reso­lution, affirming - among other things - that the refusal by groups to participate wasn't a question of sectarianism, but of political divergence. Battaglia stated that we were chasing after a phantom hobby-horse called sectarianism, instead of concerning ourselves with the real question of political divergence. Because the PCInt was, itself, in the act of mounting this particular steed, it didn't see the need to corral it. Sectarianism does exist. It isn't a phantom. We've met it - throughout the work of these conferences.

What is sectarianism?

Sectarianism is the spirit of the sect, the spirit of the religious splinter group. In the religi­ous world, the question of knowing what's true and what isn't is posed as a pure confrontation of ideas in the ethereal realm of abstract thought.

Since reality, the material practice of living mortals, is never considered to be superior to the sacred texts and their divine interpretation, and is never allowed to resolve debate; each sect - pitted against the others - is faced with only two possibilities. Either it can renounce its divergences and disappear as a separate entity or it can continue to live on its own, eternally isolated from, and opposed to, all the other ‘rival' sects.

Since social and material practice is not permit­ted to determine the truth, each isolated sect, inevitably cut off from all the others, must lov­ingly cultivate within its own pristine cell, its own truth.

In speaking of sects in the workers' movement, Engels said that what essentially characterized their existence was that they always gave pride of place to what differentiated them from the rest of the movement. And certainly it is this, the major expression of the sectarian disease, which isol­ates its victims from reality.

No matter what problem confronts them, sects are concerned with only one thing: how to establish what distinguishes them from the rest of the movement, while ignoring or condemning what they have in common with it. Their fear of openly recognizing what they share with the movement as a whole springs from their fear of disappearing. This caricatural manifestation of sectarianism hamstrung the work of all three conferences of the left communist groups, and finally led to the utter dislocation of the Third.

"No common declarations?"

The Third Conference opened in May 1980 amid events dominated by the menace of a third world war. All the contributions prepared for the Conference by the participating groups had under­lined the seriousness of the situation, and had affirmed the position of the working class confr­onted with the danger of war: a third world war would have the same nature as the two previous world wars, ie imperialist; the world working class had nothing to defend in any bloc; the only effective struggle against war would be the struggle of the proletariat against world capitalism.

The ICC asked the Conference as a whole to take up a position on this question and proposed a resolution for discussion and amendment, if that proved necessary, which would affirm the position of revolutionaries faced with war.

The PCInt refused to sign it, and the CWO and L'Eveil Internationaliste followed suit. The Conference remained silent. Given the criteria determining participation in the conferences, each of the groups present inevitably shared the same basic positions on what attitude the prole­tariat must have in the event of world conflict or the menace of war. But the partisans of silence told us: "Watch it. As for us, we're not about to sign anything with just anyone. We're not opportunists." And we replied to them: "Opportu­nism is the betrayal of principles at the first opportunity. What we are proposing isn't the betrayal of a principle, but the affirmation of that self-same principle with all of our strength". The principle of internationalism is one of the highest and most important principles of the proletarian struggle. Whatever other divergences may separate the internationalist groups, few political organizations in the world defend it in a consistent way. Their conference should have spoken about the war and in the loudest possible voice.

Instead of that the conference said nothing ... "because divergences exist on what will be the role of the revolutionary party tomorrow". The content of this brilliant, ‘non-opportunist' logic is the following: if revolutionary organi­zations can't succeed in agreeing on all questions, then they must not mention those positions which they do agree on and have agreed on for a very long time.

The specificities of each group are made, on principle, more important than what is common to all of them. That is sectarianism. The silence of all three conferences is the clearest demonstra­tion of how sectarianism leads to impotence. (In all three, the PCInt, followed by the CWO, refused to produce any common declaration, despite the ICC's insistence[2].)

Conferences aren't a boxing-match

Select. Select. That was the only function which the PCInt and the CWO saw in the conferences.

But how to explain to a sect that it must consider the possibility that ... perhaps ... it could be wrong? How to get the sectarians to understand that in today's conditions it's an absurdity to say, that it's these conferences that will select the groups meant to construct the party of tomorrow?

Certainly in the revolutionary process, selection will take place among groups claiming to be part of the workers' movement. But such a selection arises out of the practice of the class or in rel­ation to world wars, not as a result of discussion conducted behind closed doors. Even a split as important as the one which took place between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks wasn't concretized until the outbreak of war in 1914 and the struggle of 1917.

This is why to begin with, it is necessary not to over-estimate the capacity of ‘self-selection' through simple debate, or through conferences. Secondly, in today's conditions, debates between revolutionaries are far from the point where the questions under debate could be said to have been resolved in common. At the moment, the framework within which a debate can begin to take place in an effective and useful way for the working class has scarcely been created. Selection - speak of that at the required time.

Conclude a debate which hasn't happened?

Either out of impatience or fear, the PCInt and the CWO refused to continue to the end the debate on the problem of the party. This question is one of the most serious and most important ques­tions confronting revolutionaries today, particu­larly in regard to their appreciation of the practice of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution (the repression of the workers' coun­cils, of Kronstadt, the thousands of deaths orde­red by the Bolshevik Party at the head of the state and the army). The debate on this question has never yet been seriously approached.

However, that didn't prevent the PCInt and the CWO from quite inexplicably deciding, one fine day, to declare the question closed, thus dislo­cating the conferences. They had suddenly dis­covered that they didn't agree with the ‘spontaneists' of the ICC.

Independently of the fact that neither the PCInt nor the CWO know what it means to say that a group is ‘spontaneist' (all they know is that ‘spontaneism' is something different from what they themselves think), it is at least inconsis­tent to declare a debate closed when it has never taken place, especially if the question is con­sidered to be of the greatest importance and if this is used as a justification for remaining silent regarding the danger of world war. The seriousness of the question must make the neces­sity of discussing it that much more important.

The necessity for organized debate among revolutionaries

This debate must take place. Perhaps we will not succeed in resolving it before a new revolutionary wave of the scope of 1917-23 comes and decides the question in practice. But at least we'll reach the decisive battles with the problems correctly posed, with incomprehension and atti­tudes originating in the sect mentality swept to one side.

In relation to the role of the revolutionary van­guard, the period of struggle between 1917 and 1923 posed more questions than it answered. From the impotence of the newly-created German Commu­nist Party in January 1919 to the bloody repres­sion of Kronstadt by the Bolsheviks in 1921, the experience of the years of failed insurrection has shown us more what shouldn't be done, rather than what should. But still it's necessary to know what those years have shown us and what we can deduce from the experience. This debate isn't new. It has existed in its preliminary stages since the first Congresses of the Communist International. But inevitably, it is this debate which revolutionaries must take up again today in a serious, open, responsible, consistent way, in the face of the working class and all the new revolutionary groups which are developing, and are going to develop everywhere in the world. To consider this debate closed, finished, doesn't merely mean ignoring the meaning of the word ‘debate'; worse still it means running away from the historical responsibility placed on a revolu­tionary organization (even if this could seem an exaggerated contention in relation to some sects).

To refuse to conduct this debate within the frame­work of a conference of revolutionary groups is to refuse to conduct it in the only serious way that could allow it to progress[3].

Those who run away from this debate are really fleeing from the necessities facing the present-day revolutionary movement, such as it actually exists, in order to take refuge within their hard-and-fast, bookish certainties. Whether revolutio­naries today prepare for it or not, this debate will take place within the class in future struggles, in the full glare of all the problems the class will encounter then. But those who refuse to clarify this question today, within an organized framework of discussion, will ensure that it is taken up by the class in the worst of conditions. And this is the case for the super-partyists of Communist Program (the International Communist Party (PCI)), the ‘anti-party builders' of the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste), as much as the ‘non-opportunists' of the PCInt or the CWO.

How to express the tendency for the class

The tendency towards unification conforms to the nature of the proletariat as a class. The tendency for revolutionary organizations to unify is a manifestation of this. Like the class whose cause they have adopted, revolutionary organizations aren't divided by material interests. Con­trary to the political organizations of the bourgeoisie, which incarnate and reflect the material interests of different factions of the exploiting class, revolutionary organizations express - above all else - the need for the conscious uni­fication of the class. Revolutionaries debate and often have differences over how to effect this unity, but all their efforts must be given to trying to attain it. To be on a par with their class means that revolutionaries must be capable, first and foremost, of expressing the proletarian tendency towards unity, a tendency which makes their class the bearer of what Marx termed "the human community".

A dialogue of the deaf?

For a sect, dialogues with others obviously have no purpose. "We don't agree! We don't agree! We're not going to be convinced!" Why can't revolutionary organizations convince other revo­lutionary organizations through debate? They can, because it's only the sects who refuse to question their own certitudes[4].

How did all the revolutionary regroupments of the past come about if it's impossible for anyone to convince anyone else through debate? For the sect, to be convinced by another organization never leads to a new clarity. Debate, for the ‘programmists', is a matter of "fucking or being fucked" (as an article published in Programma Comunista put it). For the CWO and the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), if you're convinced in a debate that means you've fallen victim to the imperialism of another group. In both cases, it's the worst evil that could happen[5]. Something reserved for other groups, but never for one's own. That is the sect spirit.

Certainly debate is difficult. It is very possi­ble, as we said above, that revolutionaries will not succeed in deciding these debates in the absence of great movements of the mass of the working class. But:

1. The fact that the task is difficult isn't an argument against attempting it.
2. Since 1968, new class practice has resurged throughout the entire world - from the USA to Korea, from Gdansk or Togliattigrad to São Paolo. This has created the basis for new reflection within the class and has faced revolutionary min­orities with their responsibilities.

There's nobody deafer than those who don't want to hear. Let us hope that revolutionaries will not wait too much longer before they begin to hear the powerful sound of rumbling within the class, which is even now preparing the historical transformations of the future.

What the future conferences must be

 

A Point of Reference

The 1980s will see an unprecedented development of the class struggle under the pressure of the economic crisis. The evident bankruptcy of capitalism, the murderous impasse into which it will lead humanity if the working class doesn't react, makes - and will make - the proletarian revolutionary goal appear less and less as a utopian dream, and more and more as the only way of responding to the world holocaust which the survival of the system of exploitation carries within it.

The development of proletarian struggles is, and will be, accompanied more and more by the upsurge of new elements, circles, revolutionary organizations. These new forces, in seeking to become active and effective factors in the international struggle of the proletariat, are - and will rapidly be - confronted with the necessity of re-appropriating the lessons coming from the past experience of the world proletarian struggle. Whether for good or ill, it is the revolutionary groups whose existence has preceded the growth of these new forces of the class which have sought to define these lessons and have taken up the teachings of the past international workers' movement. Also, it is towards these organizations that the new elements will inevitably turn, sooner or later, in order to try to arm themselves with the fundamental gains of past experience in the wor­kers' movement. One of the most important func­tions of the International Conferences is that of allowing these new forces of the class to find a framework where the task of re-appropriating past lessons can begin to be realized in the best possible conditions. This framework is a frame­work of open, responsible confrontation of positions between organizations situated on the revo­lutionary terrain, a debate linked to the struggles of the class which are actually taking place.

The echo which the three conferences of the groups of the communist left provoked, the interest raised by this experience in the US, in Algeria, Italy, Columbia... demonstrated, above and be­yond the enormous insufficiencies of the confer­ences themselves, that this type of work responds to a real necessity in the revolutionary movement. That is why the continuation of this work consti­tutes, today, one of the first-ranking responsi­bilities in the intervention of revolutionary groups.

Criteria for serious participation in the Conferences

In order for the conferences to fulfill this func­tion they must be organized around precise criteria determining participation, which will permit the best possible delimitation of a class terrain. These criteria can't be the result of a ‘brain­storm' on the part of a few organizations. Contrary to the initial idea of refusing to establish criteria, an idea put forward by the PCInt at the time of the preparation for the First Conference, the ICC has always defended:

1. The necessity for criteria.
2. The idea that the criteria had to respond to two requirements. On the one hand they had to take into account the principal gains coming from the last, international organization of the pro­letariat, which was an expression of the last wave of international revolutionary struggle between 1917-23, in other words the first two Congresses of the IIIrd International. On the other hand, the criteria had to be based on the principal lessons appearing as a result of the experience of World War II: the capitalist nature of the USSR and all the so-called ‘socialist' states, even those in the process of being labe­led as such, the capitalist nature of all organizations from the Communist Parties to the Socia­list Parties and including the Trotskyists, which ‘defend' such states.

The criteria of participation defined by the three conferences constitute, in this sense, a solid base for the future (apart from a few minor reformulations such as replacing the term "science of the proletariat" when speaking of Marxism, with that of "the theory of the proletariat"[6]).

Since the time of the IIIrd International, the important debates which had begun to unfold within it, particularly those between the Bolshe­viks and the different ‘Lefts' from Western Europe, have been illuminated by more than sixty years of critical experience for the class. Ques­tions such as those connected to the Party and its role, the nature of the unions in capitalism after World War I, the nature of ‘national liber­ation struggles', ‘revolutionary parliamentarism' and the tactic of the ‘united front', etc, have not lost any of their significance since then, It's not an accident that these are the questions which still divide revolutionary groups today.

But their importance and their seriousness only make more urgent and more inevitable the organized confrontation of revolutionary positions. The seriousness of the debate doesn't constitute an impediment to it taking place as the CWO and the PCInt (suddenly a ferocious partisan of ‘new cri­teria for selection') pretend. In this sense to close the conferences to groups holding divergent positions on these questions could constitute, in the present state of the movement, condemning the conferences to impotence. It would also mean transforming the conferences, very quickly, into a new form of ‘sect'.

The conferences don't represent regroupment in itself. They provide a framework; they are an instrument in the more overall and more general process of revolutionary regroupment. It's only by considering them as such that they can fulfill their function, not by precipitously searching to transform them into a new, definitive, politi­cal organization[7].

However, experience has proven - especially at the Third Conference - that general political princi­ples don't constitute, in themselves, sufficient criteria. The next conferences must demand from their participants a real conviction in the use­fulness and seriousness of the conferences, and hence how they should be conducted. Groups like the GCI participated in the Third Conference only to denounce it, and to use it as a ‘fishing ground' for recruitment. Such groups will have no place in future conferences.

The most obvious condition for the effectiveness of collective work is that those who want to undertake it are convinced of the usefulness of its goal. That should be self-evident, but it will be necessary to make this explicit in pre­paring future conferences. To remain silent is for revolutionaries to deny their own existence. Communists have nothing to hide from their class. Before their class, the class whose vanguard they hope to be, communists must assume their acts and their convictions in a responsible manner. For this reason, future conferences must break with the ‘silence' of the three previous conferences. Future conferences must learn how to affirm clearly and explicitly in texts and short, precise resolutions - and not in hundreds of pages of written minutes - the results of their work, whether it's a question of illu­minating some divergences and what implications they bear, or whether it's a question of making clear the common positions shared by all the groups present.

The inability of the past conferences to put the real content of the divergences in black-and­white was one indication of their weakness. The self-righteous silence of the Third Conference on the question of the war is shameful. The next conferences must know how to assume their responsibilities, if they want to be viable.

Conclusion

The regroupment of revolutionaries is a necessity and a possibility which goes hand-in-hand with the movement towards the unification of the world working class.

Those who today remain prisoners of the sect spirit imposed by years of counter-revolution and atomization of the proletariat, who ignore the task demanded of revolutionaries, and whose credo begins with the words "We are the one and only ones" will be mercilessly judged by history as irresponsible, egocentric sects.

As for us, we remain convinced of the validity and the urgency of the work towards revolutionary regroupment, however long, painful and difficult this task may turn out to be. It is within this understanding that we will continue to act.

RV

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[1] Organizations which participated at the Conference:

• Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt which publish Battaglia Comunista)
• The International Communist Current (ICC)
• I Nuclei Leninisti (a fusion of the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and the Il Leninista)
• Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI)
• L'Eveil Internationaliste
• The Communist Workers' Organization (CWO)
• L'Organization Communiste Revolutionaire Internationaliste d'Algeria (the OCRIA which publishes Travailleurs Immigres en Lutte) sent written contributions.
• The American group, Marxist Workers' Group, associated itself to the Conference and would have sent a delegate, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute.

[2] At the First Conference even refused to sign a declaration which tried to summarize the divergences.

[3] Nothing can replace organized oral debate concerning the present problems of the class struggle.

[4] It wasn't out of flippancy that Marx said that his personal motto was "Doubt everything". This was someone who never ceased throughout his life to combat the sect spirit in the workers' movement.

[5] Do these groups think that the Left Fractions of the IInd International, which were convinced by the arguments of Luxemburg, Lenin, Pannekoek and Trotsky to conduct the most intransigent struggle against the rottenness of Social Democracy, were victims?

[6] The criteria defined at the Second Conference determining participation in the international conferences were as follows:

• the recognition of the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution;
• the recognition of the split with Social Democracy, effected at the first and second Congresses of the Communist International;
• the unreserved rejection of state capitalism and self-management;
• the rejection of all the Communist and Socialist Parties as bourgeois parties;
• an orientation toward a revolutionary organization which refers itself to a Marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat;
• a refusal to support the dragooning of the proletariat behind, in any form whatsoever, the banners of the bourgeoisie.

[7] The unfolding of the Conferences and their enlarging through the inclusion of other groups has not prevented regroupments from taking place among the participating organizations. Since the first conferences, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and Il Leninista unified to form a single organization. Similarly, most of the elements which constituted the group For Kommunismen in Sweden, a group present at the Second Conference, have since constituted the section in Sweden of the ICC.

The territory of the present day GDR was fear­fully decimated as a result of World War II; its cities reduced to rubble. Food supply, industry and transport had almost completely collapsed by the end of 1945. The Russian ‘liberators’ from Hitler’s fascism began in the Soviet Occupation Zone with the removal of industrial capacity to Russia, and the occupation of all key positions in the East German economy through Soviet Share­holding Companies. The USSR did not relax this iron grip over the East German economy until the early fifties. The industrial capacity of the Soviet Occupation Zone fell through the war and occupation to less than half the level of 1939.

However, the post war reconstruction followed with staggering speed. By 1959 the GDR had reached the ninth rung on the international ladder of indust­rial production. By 1969 the GDR with its 17 mill­ion inhabitants had achieved a higher industrial production than the German Reich of 1936 with its population of 60 million. Just as the ‘Economic Miracle’ of post war West Germany and other western countries became the basis for myths about the development of a crisis free capitalism, the ‘affluent society’ etc, so also was the post-1945 reconstruction boom in the GDR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc used as a proof of the socialist or non-capitalist nature of these economies. For Marxists of course, the ability to accumulate capital fast has never been a proof of socialism -- quite the contrary. Today the reappearance of the world wide economic crisis of capitalism is proving, if not to the Stalinists and Trotskyists, then certainly to the working class, the capitalist nature of the eastern bloc countries.

We have chosen to examine the unfolding of the crisis in East Germany for the following reasons:

-- because this is the most advanced national capital in the Eastern Bloc where the crisis is supposedly hardest to find

-- because, as we point out below, the Eastern Ger­man, along with the Czechoslovakian economy, is a cornerstone of the entire Russian war economy, so that the development of the crisis there is of particular significance

-- because the ability of the class struggle in Eastern Europe to bar the road to war, to throw a spanner in the war economy hinges upon the development of the crisis and of workers’ resistance in East Germany (and in Czechoslovakia). Nowhere in the Russian bloc is the working class so concentrated as in these countries. Moreover, the situation of these two countries bordering directly onto Western Europe, poses the possibility of spreading the struggle across the ‘Iron Curtain’.

For revolutionaries today it is no longer enough to know that there is a capitalist crisis in the countries of the East. More than that it is ess­ential that we understand:

-- the way in which the crisis deepens

-- the exact stage which the crisis has reached in the Russian bloc as a whole, and in each of the national capitals

-- the perspectives for its future development

-- the effects which the crisis is having and will have on

1) the unfolding political crisis of the bourgeoisie

2) the development of the class struggle of the proletariat

3) the behavior of the other social strata, and especially of the huge peasant masses.

The development of the crisis

The open world-wide death crisis of capitalism, in manifesting itself today in East Germany, imperils not only the political stability of the local bourgeoisie, but also the militaty preparedness of the Russian war machine. The GDR is not only the most important supplier of heavy industrial goods to the Russian war economy, it also acts as Moscow’s gendarme on the western frontiers of its bloc.

It is now admitted in East Berlin that the GDR, as much as any other major national capital today, is suffering from the effects of a slowing down of the growth rate of the economy. The high rates of expansion of the fifties and sixties are a thing of the past. This stagnation signifies that the phase of reconstruction following the Second World War is now being followed by general open crisis. The turning point came with the crisis years 1969 and 1970, during which pro­duction was badly interrupted by seizures in the economy. Through an even more energetic interven­tion of the state in the economy; conjunctural development and through the stimulation of exports, it was possible to overcome the bottle­necks and disequilibriums of those two years, and to reach an average expansion of the national income of around 5.5% over the next years. Despite this recovery, there was every sign that the general growth rate was slowing down, so that the 1976-80 5 Year Plan actually reckons from the beginning with a slowing of economic expansion. Already in 1971, and for the first time, less economic investment had been planned. What is certain is that the rate of growth of the national income in the course of the present 5 Year Plan has continually sunk.

“Already before the second oil crisis had taken effect (growth rates) had reached a level where the ‘Neues Deutschland’ now no longer wanted to publish figures on it any more. At best there could be a 4 before the comma, and even then only on paper.” (Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, 21/22, July 1979).

The German Institute for Economic Research reckons with a yearly real reduction in the capital productivity of industry in the GDR of 1% “a scale which corresponds almost exactly to the West German one” (See DDR Wirtschaft, DIW). Apart from this, the Stalinist leaders are blaming their factory managers for the increasingly crass under-utilization of productive capacity. This is caused, not by lack of demand, but by the general and deteriorating economic chaos. Older machinery has to be put in mothballs because there isn’t enough capital available to modernize, to repair or to replace it. Repair services are hard to come by. In particular, there is a shortage of spare parts. The dominant shortage of capital is only exacerbated by the necessity to invest as much surplus value as possible in heavy industry, since this leads to a dramatic disequilibrium throughout the economy, to a deteriorating organ­ization of secondary production, to the turning out of faulty and often unusable end products, to a lessening of exports activity. What we are dealing with here are results of the well-known anarchy of capitalist production, of capitalist crisis.

This stagnation of the economy is reflected in the results of the 5 Year Plans. Efforts at expansion are being planned more and more modestly, and even then are not fulfilled. The present 5 Year Plan ending now was already doomed to failure some time ago. The gigantic control apparatus of the ‘planned economy’ is less and less able to master the chaos. During the year 1978, leading functionaries of the ruling party, the SED, including Honecker and Stoph, mentioned these problems during speeches on the economic situ­ation. The present 5 Year Plan, for example, is being hampered by misinvestment to the tune of billions of marks, it was admitted. Apart from that, the authorities are being forced to take up the fight against a growing black market, not only in consumer goods or the currency market (where the West German mark is now the second currency of the GDR -- some say the first), but also in raw materials and energy. The big state owned companies are engaged in the bitterest competition against each other for possession of these highly valued goods, and exchange or buy/sell raw materials and spare parts feverishly, in order to be able to meet their plan figures. This development is accompanied by massive investment outside the plan, the scale of which is becoming a major problem for the ‘planners’.

The post-war capitalist crisis of the world economy arrived unmistakably in the GDR at the end of the sixties. The massive state-directed expansion of heavy industry, in order to supply Russia with capital goods, led to an overexten­sion of capacities, to overinvestment in certain sectors; all in all to a seizure of the economy in face of a sharpened scarcity of capital. The supply of raw materials and manufactured goods from the neglected branches of industry did rise at a similar pace. There followed a spate of bottlenecks and a swift increase of debts abroad. The goals of the 5 Year Plan 1966-70 had to be reduced. The state intervened, replacing the famous New Economic System of the reconstruction period with a firmer state guidance of the economy.

Negative trade balance sheets in East and West

The GDR has always been known as a big exporter wit­hin Comecon, and achieved between 1960-73 an accumulated trade surplus of around 3% of total imports. During this period East Germany built up a trade surplus of 9% with Comecon and 23% with the West. This rosy balance sheet didn’t survive long under the hammer blows of the world crisis. In order to keep its own economy going, and in face of the growing total debts of the Comecon in the West (well over 50 billion dollars), the USSR was forced to shove the burden of the crisis onto the broader shoulders of its allies. In 1973 the USSR raised the prices of a whole series of its exports of raw materials and energy sources. These measures hit the GDR, which possesses very few raw materials of its own, particularly hard. The accumulated ttrade surplus of the GDR of 5.7 billion valuta mar marks for the period 1960-73 was followed in the two years 1974-75 alone, by a balance of trade deficit of 7.3 billion valuta marks. The export prices of the GDR rose from 1972 to 1975 by about a quarter. Up until the end of 1979, GDR owed West Germany alone 2.6 billion marks, itself only a portion of its sixteen billion mark debt in the West Der Spiegel notes that the GDR has even more debts in the west than Britain! (Spiegel, 16.1.78).

In face of these problems in the west, the p­ortion of foreign trade of the GDR taken by the other Comecon countries has risen to 73.5%. In particular, exchange between the GDR and the USSR has risen. This development is an essential factor in the strengthening of the Russian bloc against the west. Whereas trade between the USSR and the Western industrial countries has expanded at crawling pace, trade between the West and the other Comecon countries has tended to stagnate or even decline. The East European satellites, and especially East Germany, are being tied more firmly to the USSR.

East Berlin’s balance of trade with Russia is also causing worries. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei­tung observed “During 1977 a negative balance of trade of 3 billion Valutamark with the Soviet Union has arisen. With this, the GDR has achieved the relative and absolute highest negative trade figures of any country of the Eastern Bloc with the Soviet Union” (FAZ, 5.7.78). An additional difficulty for the East Germans is created by the competition of Western industrial powers, espec­ially West Germany, on the Russian market. In order to meet this challenge, East Berlin has for example been forced to buy steel and semi-manufa­ctured goods in the West, in order to fulfill its contracts with the Russians on time or at a comp­etitive quality.

What’s happened to the ‘economic miracle’?

The post-war boom was actually made possible by the destruction of World War II and the subsequent dismantling of industry. It became necessary to put the advanced infrastructure and the highly skilled and disciplined work force of East Germany to work in order to fortify the Russian bloc. New, more developed capital goods, esp­ecially from the advanced industrial and still intact Czechoslovakian economy, were delivered to the GDR, and were paid for through an unimaginable exploitation of the defeated and prostrate East German proletariat. In this way, East Germany acquired the most modern industrial foundation in the bloc, set in motion by a working class which would not until 1953 be in a position to resist the capitalist terror.

It was the economic weakness of the Russian bloc as a whole which created the necessity for nation­alizations across the board and state administrat­ion at every level of the economy. This brutal state capitalist control could help for a while in forcing the pace of reconstruction, without however resolving any of the contradictions of the system.

World Imperialism with its gas chambers and mass bombardments did German capitalism, in East and West, an unforgettable favor by slaughtering the unemployed and by liquidating a large portion of the petty bourgeoisie. Freed from these burdens, is it any wonder that capitalism in Germany would soon experience a new expan­sion?

In order to favor post-war economic development, the East German state moved against the remaining small farmers and small producers. Already the ‘Land Reform’ of September 1945 had expropriated all landowners who owned more than 100 hectares of land. The land was divided up among the poor farmers in such tiny uneconomic parcels that they were forced from the very beginning to join the state-led agricultural co-operatives. By 1960 there were hardly any independent farmers left. This crusade against the petty-bourgeoisie served not only to cheapen and rationalize the produc­tion of agricultural and manufactured goods, but also helped to meet the problem of a scarcity of labor power in heavy industry.

Even in the period of reconstruction the state had to struggle against the effects of the capitalist crisis, which under decadent capitalism bec­omes permanent in character. The drawing up of the 5 Year Plans, for example, was even at that time nothing but a crude attempt at managing the crisis. The essential aspect of the Plans is that the production of consumer goods and the expansion of private consumption always remain at the bottom of the scale of growth. The wage rises of the first 5 Year Plan 1951 were wiped out through a chronic shortage of consumer goods; a situation which prepared the way for the workers’ rising of 1953. The following Seven Year Plan 1959-65 was already declared a failure in 1962 and broken off. Instead of rising, the total economic growth rate declined (DIW, DDR Wirt­schaft p.26). The Plan 1965-70 was supposed to overcome these problems through a forcing of exports. But what actually happened? Imports in­creased faster than exports! (ibid p.28). So much for ‘socialist planning’ in the GDR!

What measure are the bourgeoisie taking today to slow down the development of open crisis?

-- Especially since the end of the sixties, attempts have been made to stimulate growth through increased concentration (especially through the formation of combines). The share of nationalized concerns in the production of industrial goods rose from 82% in 1971 to 99% in 1972! During the 1970’s, entire sectors of the economy, such as agricultural machinery, the car industry, science and technology, were reorganized in giant combines. However, much of this concent­ration of industrial production takes place simply on paper, covering up for the very real weaknesses in the coherence of the economy.

-- The attempts to launch new export drives. We have already seen the ‘success’ of these efforts (see above).

-- To the degree that the above mentioned and other measures are being exhausted, it becomes all the more necessary to frontally attack the living standards of the working class. And even this hoped-for defeat of the proletariat can only be a prelude to the ‘solution’ of a third world war.

The GDR and the Russian war economy

The GDR itself, despite its economic capacity, possesses no significant war industry of its own. The NVA (National People’s Army, sic!) is equipped with Russian weaponry. In addition, the GDR invests only 22 million marks a year in military ‘development aid’ to third world count­ries, as opposed to the West German equivalent of 82 billion marks (Spiegel, 30.7.78). But East German industry is involved on a grand scale in the development of the Russian war machine. In fact, East German industry produces principally for the Russian war economy. That is to say, it produces directly or indirectly for the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact. The Russian war econ­omy not only swallows up a lion’s share of the surplus value extracted within the USSR itself. It also burns up an important share of the wealth produced in the Eastern European countries. If it didn’t do this, it wouldn’t have the slight­est chance of keeping up with the military develop­ment of the USA.

Foreign trade between the GDR and the USSR has increased five times over since the early fifties. With a 16% share in Russia’s foreign trade turn­over, the GDR is not only the most important trading partner of the USSR overall. In partic­ular, it is its most important supplier of capital goods. A good quarter of all Russian imports of machinery and spare parts come from the GDR. Whereas the other Comecon countries supply the USSR mainly with raw materials and semi-manufact­ured goods, only the GDR and Czechoslovakia are in a position to meet the demand of the Russian war economy with capital goods. The delivered installations and technology is used in the cons­truction of railways, the development of energy sources, as well as directly in the production of tanks, lorries, warships, etc. There also exists of course direct co-operation in military production between Russia and its allies, such as for example the co-operation between the USSR and the famous Skoda Concern of Czechoslovakia in the production of armory, trucks and nuclear reactors. However the GDR has up to now been excluded from any large scale co-operation of this kind.

The economies of Eastern Europe are under constant strain, engaged as they are in a futile attempt to create a heavy industrial base comparable to that possessed by the American bloc. The strength of the war basis of the two blocs is not only to be measured by the present production of tanks or whatever, but also by the capacity of an econ­omy to double or treble this production over a given period of time. The Russian bloc, no matter how effectively it produces, could never spew up as much armaments as the American bloc. The necess­ity to survive as a separate imperialist bloc has forced the Warsaw Pact to mobilize all available resources for the war economy, in order to remain competitive with the West at this one level. And so whereas we have on the one hand all the signs of a massive over-production in the indust­rialized West (too many workers, too much indust­ry, etc), the crisis in the East takes the form of underproduction, because there is not enough capital and labor available to fuel the needs of the war economy. Whereas the result of the crisis of over-production in the stronger Western bloc is the cutting back of production in every field except the military, we can see that this exclusive development of the military sector has already been in force in the Russian Bloc for years.

This phenomenon of underproduction in the East is an expression of the division of the globe into rival military blocs -- it is a result of the universal shortage of markets. It proves that the fetters of the world market are blocking the dev­elopment of the forces of production. The world market is too small to allow for the realization of all the capital which has been accumulated. After the second world war, the advanced countries of the American bloc, which had at their disposal the greater part of the world market, were able (for a variety of reasons which we cannot go into here) to initiate a certain development of the productive forces at the expense of the impoveri­shment of the rest of the world. As for the Russian Bloc, which got next to nothing out of the imperialist redivision of the world following WWII, only a development of the war economy was possible there. This necessity to expand an already consi­derable war economy from a position of economic and strategic weakness leads to a profound modifi­cation of the operation of the law of value within the Russian Bloc, so that the capitalist crisis there takes on different forms than in the West. These differences are seized upon by Stalinism and Trotskyism in order to ‘prove’ the non-capitalist nature of the Eastern Bloc countries. But none of these lies can hide the devastating effects of the capitalist crisis on the living conditions of the proletarians of Eastern Europe, Russia or China.

In order to develop heavy industry (the basis of the war economy), the Eastern European bourgeoisie must neglect every other branch of the economy. Alone this leads from crisis to crisis. For example, in the GDR only 36% of total gross capital investment falls to the non-producing sector as opposed say to 58% in West Germany. Such investment trends, by leading to an inevit­able narrowing of the field of consumption and of the service sector, lead to a further shrinking of markets, to a lowering of the rate of profit, to a dramatic stagnation of the economy. Because the military sector produces neither capital goods nor consumer goods, but simply swallows up surplus value, without contribution to the renewal of the cycle of accumulation, it threatens to turn stagnation into collapse.

The possibilities open to the East German or to the Russian bourgeoisie cannot be seen as a choice between Stalinist ‘planning’ and a ‘market economy’. In fact, the only alternatives, seen abstractly, are between either a state-led, incre­asingly desperate strengthening of the war economy and its supporting industries -- which can only lead to further stagnation and chaos. Or else they have to slow down growth rates in these industries, in order to even out the general development of all economic sectors -- which would lead to an overall, somewhat ‘smoother’ stagnation. But in reality they cannot choose this second alternative, because it would amount to losing the most important competitive struggle with the American Bloc -- namely the arms race.

The Stalinist leadership has therefore no other alternative but to follow its previous course. And it must above all wage and win a new world war, in order to profit on its massive armaments investment program.

The situation of the working class under the war economy

East Germany has at present the highest rate of persons employed in the world (53.3% of the popul­ation). Whereas between 1950 and 1969 the number of East Germans of employable age dropped by 1.9 million, the actual number of unemployed rose by 700,000 -- by 10%. This increase was made possi­ble by the integration of more women, but also of pensioners, into economic life. In addition, the GDR has only been able to attract a relatively small number of ‘guest workers’ from Poland, the Balkans, etc.

This increasingly severe shortage of labor power is a direct result of the war economy. The state is forced to push the price of the commodity labor power below the level necessary to ensure its renewal and expansion. This necessary level, as Marx explains, is not a-historic absolute, but is altered with the development of society. In a modern industrial society like the GDR, where the workers work under a brutal, automated, scienti­fically guided exploitation, it is an absolute ‘impossibility’ that such workers -- and among families where mostly both parents work, and have to clock up endless overtime and work extra shifts -- have to, on top of that, wait for hours in queues outside shops, or go off bargaining on the illegal black markets in order to acquire the necessities of life. It is an ‘impossibility’ that these workers have to live in tiny flats, often to eight or ten people under one roof because auntie and granny and the two married sons can’t get flats for themselves. It is equally an impossibility that in the big cities and urban sprawls, where the workers live in housing projects miles from their work or from anywhere else, that they have to go on waiting lists for years before they can get any kind of a decent car. It’s no wonder that people used try to escape to the West, as long as the post­war boom continued there, or that so few foreign workers want to go and work in the GDR, or that the East German workers can only afford very small families, despite all the ‘baby-boom’ propaganda of the state. The workers of the GDR know only want, because they have to carry the entire weight of the war economy, that bloody parasite, on their backs.

The price of the commodity labor power, like any other commodity, is determined by its average cost of production, and by the law of supply and demand. Here again the Stalinist state has to intervene, in order to keep the price as low as possible. This intervention in the laws of the economy has a military character. It is the law of the market which dictates that workers will go wherever they can sell their labor power at a higher price. But the East German bourgeoisie have solved this problem. They have constructed a wall along their western frontier and laid it with landmines, barbed wire and sentry posts, because the wages in West Germany are higher than in the East.

Or another example: Where there is a shortage of labor, wages generally tend to rise -- there is a sellers’ market. In order to put this law out of action, the state has made the changing of one’s job or place of residence as difficult as possible.

The attacks against the working class

The deepening of the crisis attacks the living standards of the working class from all sides:

-- Through an increase in the level of exploita­tion

-- Through a lowering of real wages, taking place in any of the following ways:

** The number of goods which are difficult or impo­ssible to obtain, grows rapidly; it ranges from coffee and butter to housing and even electricity, which is being regularly cut off in many parts of the country.

**The quality of the goods available degenerates.

**Inflation is passed on in the form of open or disguised price rises and through the dismantling of state subsidies.

**Social services, medical treatment etc are reduced, thereby lowering the social wage. **Continuous interruptions in the process of pro­duction cause catastrophic falls in the wages of piece-rate workers.

**The ‘New Wage System’, introduced in 1978, converts a wage rise before tax into a wage cut after tax for the majority of workers, through an increase in the tax burden. The SED, as cynical as ever, appealed to all toilers to compensate for ‘possible’ loss of earnings through increased overtime.

**The increase in overtime work and the introduction of extra shifts. Therefore the lengthening of the working day is another feature of the present attacks on the working class. Here again, we posess no statistics on this development.

**There is a slow but sure development of unempl­oyment.

It is a true paradox of the capitalist system that countries suffering from a shortage of labor power should also be hit by unemployment. We know for example that in China (a country where basic production is at such a primitive level that it suffers from labor shortages, despite its one billion inhabitants), there are around 20 million unemployed in the cities. We possess no exact figures for unemployment in the GDR, although it seems safe to assume that the numbers without work are considerably fewer than in the USSR or, say, Poland (600,000). Even when the unemployed in the GDR no longer have to fear landing in con­centration camps, they are nonetheless criminaliz­ed by the state. They receive 1.20 to 2 marks a day plus 35 pence for every family dependant, all paid up by the ‘workers state’. Unemployment in the east is immediately caused by the shortage of capital and the subsequent breaking down of pro­duction. Much more significant in the eastern bloc than open unemployment is a development of hidden unemployment of enormous dimensions.

As a result of more and more frequent bottlenecks and clog-ups in production, significant propor­tions of the productive capacity are always out of action. This chaos leads to a permanent over­manning throughout the economy. This permanent hidden unemployment weighs upon the economy of the Russian bloc every bit as much as does open unem­ployment in the West. Whether in the East or in the West the real cause of unemployment lies in the inability of capitalism to really develop the productive forces.

Perspectives for the class struggle

It is not our intention here to attempt to set out in any detail perspectives for the future course of the crisis and the class struggle. What we want to do is simply to mention some of the most important implications of our analysis of the crisis, and of our estimation of the stage which the crisis has presently reached in the countries of the Russian Bloc. We would draw att­ention to the following:

-- The attempt to gauge the depth of the crisis purely along such traditional lines as the comparison of inflation rates and numbers of unemployed, which tend to indicate that the crisis is ‘younger’, less advanced, in the countries of the Russian Bloc, is in fact a fairly useless method, when it comes to measuring the crisis in the East as against the West.

-- The crisis -- and we are talking here about the historical crisis of decadent capitalism, as it has developed over the whole of the present century -- is actually more acute, at the present time, in the countries of the Russian Bloc than in the most advanced industrial nations of the West.

-- This in turn proves that even the total militarization of the economy, and the complete subjugation of economic life and of civilian society under the most direct, dictatorial control of the capitalist state, does not solve any of the contradictions of decadent capitalism whatsoever. These measures will lead to a modification of the forms under which the crisis appears, and they can even allow for a slowing of the pace of the crisis. But the state cannot stop the degenera­tion of capitalism.

The crisis in the West proceeds as a vast over­production of commodities, followed by drastic cutbacks in production. In the East, the in­ability of the Russian bloc to compete openly on the world market accentuates the fall in the rate of profit to such an extent that the state has to syphon off capital from every other sector in order to ensure any kind of expansion in heavy industry and the war industries at all. This in turn leads to the clogging up of production at every stage, and therefore to massive falls in production, firstly in the realm of consumer goods (such as for example the present decline in agricultural production in the USSR, following the marked stagnation in this sector which has been evident for decades), but then to be followed by declining production in key industries as well (in 1979 Brezhnev himself had to announce stagnating or even declining productivity in the energy sector in Russia).

-- For the working class this will mean -- and in countries such as Poland, Russia and Rumania is already meaning -- the most brutal falls in its living standards, as the bourgeoisie is forced to let the consumer goods sector, the agricultural sector etc, go to complete rack and ruin.

-- It will also imply the necessity for the bou­rgeoisie to enact a complete militarization of the working class. It will mean creating a ‘task force’ of millions of workers who can be sent from one sphere of production to another, depending on where production is actually functioning at a given time, and depending on where bottlenecks have to be cleared away. The militarization of the labor force will allow for a certain easing of the awesome burden of hidden unemployment -- if workers go along with it of course! The ‘hidden’ unemployed will therefore become an open army of the unemployed, living way below the existence minimum.

These perspectives are not mere speculations about the future. In fact they project the quantitative development of tendencies unfolding before our very eyes. Thus, for example, the Polish opposi­tionists around the KOR have reported that a third of all industrial equipment in Poland is at the moment not being utilized. The result of this is of course chronic food shortages, regular break-downs in the supply of electricity to homes and even to industry, the shut-down of a consider­able portion of public transport and other services etc. In Rumania, in Bulgaria, even in Hungary, it is the same story, more or less; in the GDR too, although not yet as extreme. In all of these countries workers are being mobilized for overtime and special shifts, but also for work in mobile brigades, where you can be used to build pipelines in west Russia today, and to dig out lignite in East Germany tomorrow. This is the beginning of the kind of militarization we have just mentioned.

The outbreaks of class struggle in Eastern Europe in response to the crisis since the late sixties (Poland ‘70 and ‘76, Czechoslovakia ‘68, Rumania ‘77 were the most notable of these) have been very powerful, but have all tended to remain sporadic and isolated in character, without evolving to a high level of politicization. It is under­standable in view of the inexperience of the workers involved, the weight of fifty years of counter revolution, the severity of state repression, to name but a few of the factors involved. These struggles didn’t really go beyond the level of defensive fights against fall­ing real wages and rises in the level of exploitation. But the class struggle of the 1980’s will have to go way beyond this level, because what we are being confronted with now -- and we can see this particularly clearly with regard to Eastern Europe -- is the collapse of human society under the weight of capitalist economic and social relations. Capitalism is no longer able to guarantee even the most basic prerequisites for the survival of human society in any shape or form. The food shortages and housing shortages of Eastern Europe -- we are seeing more and more of this in Western Europe as well! -- make this perfectly clear. The working class will be forced to pose the question of power in order to save society from total collapse to save it from capitalism. The deepening of the crisis is there­fore creating the preconditions for the unification and the politicization of the class struggle against the capitalist crisis and the militarization of society. The depth of the crisis, and the workers’ response to it, will enable the proletariat to draw the vast masses of the peasantry and the non-exploiting strata behind it, as the Russian proletariat did in 1917.

The success of this struggle is not certain. It all depends on the ability of the proletariat in these countries to reappropriate the lessons of the past, and, in linking up with workers’ strugg­les in the west, to open its ranks to the polit­ical influence and the solidarity of the revol­utionary movement now forming in the West.

Krespel, November 1979.

The reappearance of texts by Bilan on the events in Spain from 1936 to 1938 in a paperback collection is an important development. For so long drowned in the tide of the counter-revolution, internationalist positions are re-emerging little by little in the memory of the proletariat. In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the communist left in general, and in particular in the real Italian left, repres­ented by Bilan.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the self-proclaimed ‘heirs’ of the Italian left -- the Bordigist current haven’t seen fit to publish the texts of Bilan. Their policy of silence isn’t fortuitous. The Italian left of the 30’s is an embarrassing ‘ance­stor’ they’d rather forget about.

In fact, the Bordigists of today have only a very distant relationship with Bilan and can in no way claim a direct descent. In a few months time, we intend to publish a history of the Italian communist left from 1926 to 1945, in the form of a book, so that its contributions can remain truly alive for the new revolutionary generations.

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

Bilan

In June ‘79, we greeted with the greatest interest the publication of a selection of texts from Bilan on the subject of the Spanish Civil War, edited by J Barrot. Some of these texts had already been republished by the ICC in the Inter­national Review (nos 4, 6 and 7); for our analysis of the importance of the work of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, we refer readers to our introductions to these texts.

With the aim of situating the work of Bilan in the history of the 'left fractions' which struggled against the degeneration of the IIIrd International, Barrot has written a long introduction which, although based on the re-affirmation of revolutionary positions, will certainly leave the unfamiliar reader confused by the disorganization of its presentation: personal opinions are mingled with those of Bilan, historical and present day comparisons, definitions of concepts, histories of other groups and polemics against the ICC and Bilan. Although much of the annotation is correct, and we would not deny the need to criticize Bilan, like all groups, a product of its own period, it must be said that unfortunately Barrot sets himself up as a judge of history, and that his own opinions only serve to obscure political principles which are fundamental for the emancipation of the working class, as well as an understanding of the existence and historical role of the class.

1. ‘Practical measures’ and revolutionary perspectives

The Spanish experience, the spontaneous reaction of Spanish workers to arm themselves against attack by the forces of Franco, despite the attempts at conciliation by the Popular Front; but later these same workers accepting the authority of the left-wing of the Spanish bourgeoisie, shows the nature of the political barriers confronting the proletariat, and the defeat which awaits it if they are not surmounted.

“Bilan tended to see nothing but the defeat of the working class (which was true) and not the appearance of a social movement which, in differ­ent conditions, could have a revolutionary effect.”

“To denounce the counter-revolution without also drawing out the positive nature measures which were taken, and their roots in the same situation, is to act in a purely negative way. The party (or the ‘faction’) is not a mere ‘axe’”

If, by “social movement”, J Barrot means the inevitable overthrow of bourgeois institutions in times of crisis, for example through strikes and the occupation of land, then this is something that was never denied by Bilan. What Bilan said is that this is insufficient without the destruct­ion of the bourgeois state.

When Bordiga said that it was necessary to destroy the capitalist world before attempting to construct a communist society, this was not just another fine phrase; he wanted to show, as Rosa Luxemburg had done before him that revolutionar­ies can do no more than show the way towards communism. But J Barrot undoubtedly thinks, like the ‘utopian socialist’, that it is possible to demonstrate in advance, and in detail, the develop­ment and constitution of a society which will be built by millions of proletarians, of which we know little apart from the broad outlines: that it will involve the ‘withering away’ of the state, the abolition of wage labor, and the end of the exploitation of man by man.1

J Barrot seems to have forgotten the fundamental importance of denouncing bourgeois society as a whole, when he himself, in passing, echoes the, traditional bourgeois accusation that revolutionaries (and in this case Bilan) are merely nihilists!

Thus it is true that, with regard to the massacre of workers in Spain, the role of the Fraction was and could only be that of an axe clearing bourgeois from proletarian ideas, and, without any nihilism, putting forward the perspective of autonomous class struggle -- which since it is autonomous has nothing to do with trade union struggles around demands put forward by the left. Their role was to affirm the need to oppose the sending of arms by one or the other imperialist bloc, and the need for fraternization between workers, without which death awaits them in local wars first of all, then in a global holocaust. These are the concrete political measures to put forward, and these were the ‘measures’ defended by Bilan!

2. Working class crisis, or necessary reassertion of working class independence?

By forgetting half a century of counter-rev­olution, by distorting Bilan’s conception of class autonomy, J Barrot seems to reduce the question of the independence of working class action to the danger that the economic struggle will remain on the economic level (later on he denies the primacy of politics on the grounds that class action must encompass both the political and the economic):

“... In these conditions to insist on ‘autonomous’ class struggle is not enough. Autonomy is no more a revolutionary principle then ‘leadership’ by a minority: the revolution calls for neither democracy, nor dictatorship.”

Although Barrot reminds us here of the import­ance of the content of autonomous class struggle, one might ask what he would see as the content of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of prol­etarian democracy, of the mass organizations of the proletariat?

One should understand that this author does not regard autonomy as a principle because he rejects the idea that the proletariat has a class iden­tity distinct from other classes, that the prole­tariat’s experience is forged from a whole series of struggles taking place in a world dominated by capital. It is he who makes an artificial distinction between economic and political strug­gles, while neither Bilan nor the ICC, whom he accuses of doing this, has ever made one precede the other in a mechanical way; both Luxemburg and Lenin often demonstrated how succeeding economic and political phases of the struggle are intertwined with one another to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish between the two, since they are both parts of the same class struggle against capitalism.

Revolutionaries have always emphasized the need for workers to go beyond the level of struggle for purely economist demands; otherwise the struggle is doomed to failure. The setbacks encountered by workers in numerous struggles over the past few years thus act as stimulants towards the decisive struggles of the future; however J Barrot thinks he sees a contradiction here:

“... a contradiction (which) is the source of a veritable crisis within the proletariat, reflected by, among other things, the crisis of many revolutionary organizations. Only a revolution offers a practical resolution of this contradiction.”

To resolve this apparent contradiction, Barrot resorts to the word revolution as a cure-all, as a charm to chase off the devil.

It would be of little interest here to dwell on the tangled contradictions of Barrot’s own analysis, but if for example he claims that “proletarian experience is always rooted in day-to-day struggles”, how can he also defend the idea that it “is reformist activity around wages struggles which ties workers to capitalism”.?

What does it mean to describe as reformist, workers’ struggles against deteriorating living conditions? For one thing it means that Barrot identifies the working class -- as the leftists do -- with the counter-revolutionary parties who call themselves and pass as “reformists”.

If workers tie themselves to capitalism, then the left wing parties in Spain (and elsewhere!) cannot be held responsible for the imperialist war. Bourgeois ideas are no longer seen as a material force holding back the working class. In fact this conception implies that the proletariat no longer exists as a revolutionary class, and communism is just one more utopia!

Barrot could claim that we are distorting the questions he is asking if the nature of his questions was not confirmed by his own ‘modernist’ answers, and his a-historical judgments.

We have been told first that class autonomy is not a principle, then that workers tie themselves to capitalism. Later on we shall be told that the ICC “understands that the revolution must be an act of destruction, but not how the working class is to acquire the power to do this”. This brings us back to the “concrete measures” advocated by the Barrotian scheme. Here we shall see that it is Barrot who does not understand.

3. No significan change of the social structure is viable without the destruction of the bourgeois state.

We have already noted the incompleteness of certain social upheavals. For the working class to disrupt capitalist production, for landless peasants to expropriate the land, are not revolutionary actions in themselves, but rather moments in the process by which the class hesitantly moves towards its emancipation. But this will not be achieved if the control of production becomes merely self-management, or if the workers, like in Spain, submit to the authority of one fraction of the bourgeoisie in the name of “anti-fascism”. Barrot recognises the limitations of upheavals of this kind, but still presents them as “an immense revolutionary upsurge”.

While recognizing in a partial sense that the republican bourgeois state “disliked” (of course) using methods of social struggle to enlist workers to the imperialist battle front, Barrot thinks that

“The non-destruction of the state prevents socialization and collectivization from organizing an ‘anti-mercantile economy’ on the level of society as a whole”.

This is true in one sense, but for this author socialization and collectivization are quite clearly “a potential tendency” towards communism. For us, if there is a potential tendency towards communism it is expressed in the capacity of the working class to generalize its struggles, to centralize and co-ordinate its organization, to distinguish itself from the bourgeois parties, and to arm itself to put an end to capitalist domination, as a precondition for social transformation -- rather than in the control of produc­tion which aims to ‘organize things better’ than the bourgeoisie, or worse, claims to have inaugurated a new wave of production before the destruction of the bourgeois state!

In Russia in October 1917 the experience of this type of self-management of the factories was short-lived. What is necessary first of all and above all, is the centralization of the struggle, a centralization which either never existed in Spain or else was taken in hand by the bourgeois state. Workers in Russia, after the destruction of the bourgeois state, believed for a short time that they could organize an anti-mercantile economy despite all the apparent difficulties: what this experience continued was the impossibility of doing this within a national framework, even after the destruction of the bourgeois state.

It is evident that in the period of maturation of the revolution before the assault on the state, workers will interrupt the process of exploitation, bring about a reduction in working hours (cf 8 hour day in 1917) and impose their will on questions of land and peace, but these measures in themselves are not communist. Their application is merely the success of demands which capitalism is no longer capable of granting. And even if capitalism gives way on some of the these demands, the understanding acquired by workers during the course of these struggles is of the necessity for political insurrection.

After the insurrection, the proletariat in any one geographical area will continue to be subject to the rule of the law of value. If this is not recognized, then one would have to deny that, as long as capitalism exists, it imposes its domination over the whole planet -- leaving the door open to the Stalinist thesis of ‘soc­ialism in one country’. All that we know is that the proletarian revolution is not associated with a definite stable mode of production; it will have to constantly overturn existing economic relations in an anti-mercantile direction.

To attempt today to show precisely how social wealth will be distributed according to long term needs (quite apart from the satisfaction of immediate needs such as food and shelter, and the abolition of hierarchical wages structures, etc.), would be to indulge in hazardous speculation or political gimmickry. At this stage we find ourselves in a society in transition from capitalism to communism, the necessity of which has always been affirmed by Marxism.

4. From class struggle under capitalism to the affirmation of the proletariat

It is easy for sociological innovators to theorize the weakness of the workers movement -- to see workers as recuperated by the ‘consumer society’ or integrated into capitalism. The aim of these ‘ideas merchants’ is really nothing less than the destruction of Marxism as a method and a tool of class struggle -- which tends towards the destruction of the infrastructure of their own class, the bourgeoisie. Barrot is in great danger of being into this kind of analysis.

Poor workers of Spain 1936 who did not obey the rules drawn up by the great observer of history! At the start, workers “adopt a communist stance, well reported by Orwell”; later “they do not organize in a communist way because they do not act in a communist way”. Understand who can! In reality Barrot is putting the cart before the horse:

“The communist movement cannot win unless workers go beyond struggles (even if they are armed) which do not challenge wage labor itself. Workers, as wage earners, can only wage armed struggle by destroying themselves as workers.”

Barrot plays with dialectics to draw the lesson of events in Spain, failing to see that at this stage it was still not a question of an armed insurrection against the state. After showing himself incapable of understanding how workers, as atomized individuals, can become the proletariat, a revolutionary force against the existing order, except by resorting to formulas like “the destruction of the theory of the proletariat”(!) he now wants us to believe in the simultaneity of the abolition of wage labor and the destruction of the bhourgeois state. Yet another dream of the immediate establishment of communism!

It is true that insurgent proletarians can no longer really be called wage earners, but do they stop working in factories, even with guns in their hands? Will they work for nothing for the millions who have no work? In the sector under proletarian control, will it be possible to do away with remuneration completely, given the legacy of the anarchy of international capitalism, which by its attempts to crush the revolution will make necessary an even greater production of arms and raw materials? And in any case, who can decide the method of remuneration or the best way to move rapidly towards the abolition of wage labor? Marx and his labor-time vouchers, proposed in the Critique of the Gotha Program? Barrot? The Party? Or the living experience of the working class?

Today what distinguishes communists from all those who only construct communism in their imagination, is the affirmation that all the measures for economic or social transformation will be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the political control of this class. There can be no definitive economic measures which in themselves guarantee the victory of communism, or which could not be used against the proletariat, until bourgeois politics has been completely destroyed. Barrot has lifted no more than a corner of the veil obscuring the society of tran­sition towards communism. In fact he defines the revolution itself as “the reappropriation of the social and economic conditions of the new social relations” -- and by revolution he means the decisive insurrectional phase. One can understand why, like all modernists, he reproaches the Italian Left for their “working class formalism amounting to economism”, even though he is obliged to recog­nize the key role of the working class. Surely his lack of clarity on all these questions is based on the implicit rejection of the proletariat as subject of the revolution?

All those who declare that the proletariat is already dead, who would have us believe that there is a “crisis of the proletariat” because it has still not broken from the trivial struggles that tie it to capitalism, all those who envisage the disappearance of the proletariat before the revolutionary assault, before communism, are of no use to the proletariat because they obscure the real difficulties confronting the proletariat on the path towards communism. All their nebulous theories will be consigned to the dustbin of his history!

Far from helping us to appreciate the role of left fractions and the lessons that our generation can draw from their work, Barrot deforms their work by accusing them of political hypertrophy, of refusing to break from a conception of revolution “in stages” (political then economic); and what is more, although Bilan traced the general characteristics of the future communist revolution, Barrot accuses the group of having “opposed” the movement to the final goal.

This type of commentary is simply charlatanism. To see how far the truth is different from Barrot’s description of the group, it is enough to read the selection of texts published in this book. There one can see how carefully Bilan analyses the rel­ation of class forces in order to show the real advances made by the proletariat, the sacrifices undertaken by the working class and to show how the class lives in struggle, even when handicapped by the weight of anarchism in Spain, and diverted from a communist perspective. Bilan shows how the experience of the struggles of 1936 are an irreplaceable part of the experience gained by the class in its long striving towards the final goal, communism.

The war in Spain did not halt the theoretical development of the Italian Left; on the contrary, it verified the analyses of Bilan, confirming that proletarian politics must not be abandoned even under the greatest pressure. As for the “potential” movement which Barrot uses to illustrate his theory, the concrete measures such as socialization and collectivization, their importance has been greatly exaggerated, and they have been used by the bourgeoisie to obscure the fundamental political problem the assault on the bourgeois state.

For Barrot, it is now or never for communism. He announces, to anyone who wants to listen, that “communist theory no longer exists, except as the affirmation of the need for revolution.” (Our emphasis). With this in mind, the reader of the preface to the texts from Bilan might well ask what is the basis of the “Barrotian” revolution -- whether it is more than something that leads nowhere and goes anywhere.

The careful reader will discover from Barrot’s preface that the revolution will come along one fine day to solve the “crisis of the proletariat” by the negation of the proletariat; that it will pass by the trivial little groups of revolution­aries which are “really no more than publishing houses”, and groups like the ICC “who don’t know how the revolution will be made”. Barrot, with his mighty pen, has eliminated the programmatic acquisitions of the revolutionary movement, the debate on the period of transition, rejected class consciousness and the importance of revolutionary activity -- and taken a great leap into the void!

Barrot has one great merit: that of having published texts from Bilan on the war in Spain.

JL