Today the Stakes Are High—Strengthen the Organization to Confront Them

At the end of March, the ICC held its 15th Congress. The life of a revolutionary organisation is an integral part of the proletariat’s struggle. It is therefore their responsibility to set before their class, and notably before their sympathisers and the other groups of the proletarian camp, the results of the work at their Congresses, these being moments of the utmost importance in the organisation’s existence. This is the purpose of the article that follows.

The 15th Congress held a particular importance for our organisation, for two main reasons.

First, since the last Congress held in spring 2001, we have witnessed a major aggravation of the international situation, at the level of the economic crisis and above all at the level of imperialist tensions. More precisely, the Congress took place while war was raging in Iraq, and our organisation had the responsibility to make its analyses more precise in order to make the most appropriate intervention, given the situation and the stakes involved for the working class in this new plunge by capitalism into military barbarism..

Secondly, this Congress took place after the ICC had been through the most dangerous crisis in its history. Even if this crisis has been overcome, it is vital for our organisation to draw the maximum number of lessons from the difficulties it has been through, to understand their origins and the way to confront them.

All the work and discussions at the Congress were animated by an awareness of the importance of these two questions, which are part of the two main responsibilities of any congress: to analyse the historic situation and to examine the activities which the organisation has to carry out within it. This work was undertaken on the basis of reports previously discussed throughout the ICC, and led to resolutions being adopted that give a frame of reference for the continuation of our work internationally.

In the previous issue of the International Review, we published a resolution on the international situation adopted by the Congress. As any reader can see, we analyse the present historical period as the final phase in capitalism’s decadence, the phase of the decomposition of bourgeois society as it rots where it stands. As we have already said on many occasions, this decomposition is the result of the inability of either of society’s two antagonistic classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – to impose their own response to the irrevocable decadence of the capitalist economy: world war for the former, and world communist revolution for the latter. As we shall see, these historic conditions determine the main characteristics of the life of the bourgeoisie today, but they also weigh heavily on the proletariat and on its revolutionary organisations.

It was therefore within this framework that the Congress examined not only the aggravation of imperialist tensions that we are witnessing today, but also the obstacles that the proletariat encounters on its path towards its decisive confrontation with capitalism as well as the difficulties that our own organisation has encountered.

The analysis of the international situation

For certain organisations of the proletarian camp, notably the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, the organisational difficulties encountered by the ICC recently, like those in 1981 and in the early ‘90s, derive from its inability to develop an appropriate analysis of the current historical period. In particular, our concept of decomposition is seen as an expression of our "idealism".

We think that the IBRP’s evaluation of the origins of our organisational difficulties reveals in fact an under-estimation of the organisation question and of the lessons drawn by the workers’ movement on this subject. However, it is true that theoretical and political clarity is an essential arm of any organisation that claims to be revolutionary. In particular, if it is not able to understand what is really at stake in the historic period in which it carries out its struggle, it risks being cast adrift by events, falling into disarray and in the end being swept away by history. It is also true that clarity is not something that can be decreed. It is the fruit of a will, of a combat to forge the weapons of theory. It demands that the new questions posed by the evolution of historical conditions be approached with a method, the marxist method.

This is a permanent task and responsibility for the organisations of the workers’ movement. The task has had more acute importance in certain periods, for example at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The development of imperialism heralded capitalism’s coming entry into its decadence. Engels, projecting marxist analysis into the future in the 1880s, was able to announce the historic perspective looming on the horizon: socialism or barbarism. At the 1900 Paris Congress of the Socialist International, Rosa Luxemburg foresaw capitalism’s entry into its decadence and envisaged the possibility that the new period might begin with war: "It is possible that the first great expression of the bankruptcy of capitalism which lies before us may be, not the crisis, but a war". In 1899 Franz Mehring, one of the spokesmen of the left of the Social-Democracy, measured the full weight of responsibility which was going to lie on the shoulders of the working class: “The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of the bankruptcy of capitalism. If the working class is not up to the task [of overthrowing it] then the whole of humanity is under threat”. But this determination to analyse and understand the period in order to forge the weapons for the coming struggle was not universal in the Social-Democracy. Without going into Bernstein’s revisionism, nor into the speechifying of the worshippers of the “tried and trusted tactic”, Kautsky – the theoretical reference for the whole Socialist International – defended orthodox marxist positions but refused to use them to analyse the new period that was opening. The renegade Kautsky (as Lenin was later to call him) was already present in the Kautsky who refused to look the new period in the face and to recognise the inevitability of the war between the great imperialist powers.

In the midst of the counter-revolution, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, and the French Communist Left, continued the effort to analyse, “without any ostracism” (as the Italian Fraction wrote in their review Bilan), both past experience and the new conditions. This attitude is part of the struggle which the marxist wing has always conducted in the workers’ movement in facing up to historical evolution. It is a million miles removed from the religious vision of “"invariance” dear to the Bordigists, which sees the programme not as the product of a constant theoretical struggle to analyse reality and draw out its lessons, but as a dogma revealed in 1848, of which “not a comma need be changed”. On the contrary, the task of updating and enriching the programme and our analyses is a vital responsibility in the struggle.

This was the concern which inspired the reports prepared for the Congress and the debates of the Congress itself. The Congress approached this challenge within the framework of the marxist vision of the decadence of capitalism and of its present phase of decomposition. The Congress recalled that this vision of decadence was not only that of the Third International, but is indeed at the very heart of the marxist vision. It was this framework and historical clarity that enabled the ICC to measure the gravity of the present situation, in which war is becoming an increasingly permanent factor.

More precisely the Congress had to examine the degree to which the ICC’s analytical framework has been capable of accounting for the current situation. Following this discussion, the Congress decided that there was no question of putting this framework into question. The evolution of the current situation is in fact a full confirmation of the analyses the ICC adopted at the end of 1989, at the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc. The present events, such as the growing antagonism between the USA and its former allies that has manifested itself so openly in the recent crisis, the multiplication of military conflicts and the direct involvement within them of the world’s leading power - which has made increasingly massive displays of its military power – all this was already foreseen in the theses which the ICC produced in 1989-90.[1] The ICC, at its Congress, reaffirmed that the present war in Iraq cannot be reduced, as certain sectors of the bourgeoisie would like us to believe (in order to minimise their real gravity), to a “war for oil”. In this war, the control of oil is primarily a strategic rather than an economic objective for the American bourgeoisie. It is a means of blackmailing and pressuring the USA’s principal rivals, the great powers of Europe and Japan, and thus of countering their efforts to play their own game on the global imperialist chessboard. In fact, behind the idea that the current wars have a certain “economic rationality” is a refusal to take into account the extreme gravity of the situation facing the capitalist system today. By underlining this gravity, the ICC has placed itself within the marxist approach, which doesn’t give revolutionaries the task of consoling the working class. On the contrary it calls on revolutionaries to assist the proletariat to grasp the dangers which threaten humanity, and thus to understand the scale of its own responsibility.

And in the ICC’s view, the necessity for revolutionaries to explain to the working class the profound seriousness of what’s at stake today is all the more important when you take into account the difficulties the class is experiencing in finding the path of massive and conscious struggles against capitalism. This was thus another essential point in the discussion on the international situation: what is the basis today for affirming the confidence that marxism has always had in the capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and liberate humanity from the calamities into which it is now leading it?

What confidence can we have in the working class’ ability to face up to its historic responsibilities?

The ICC has on numerous occasions argued that the decomposition of capitalist society exerts a negative weight on the consciousness of the proletariat.[2] Similarly, since the autumn of 1989, it has stressed that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would provoke “new difficulties for the proletariat” (title of an article from International Review n°60). Since then the evolution of the class struggle has only confirmed this prediction.

Faced with this situation, the Congress reaffirmed that the working class still retains all the potential to assume its historic responsibilities. It is true that it is still experiencing a major retreat in its consciousness, following the bourgeois campaigns that equate marxism and communism with Stalinism, and that establish a direct link between Lenin and Stalin. Similarly, the present situation is characterised by a marked loss of confidence by the workers in their strength and in their ability to wage even defensive struggles against the attacks of their exploiters, a situation which can lead to a serious loss of class identity. And it should be noted that this tendency to lose confidence in the class is also expressed among revolutionary organisations, particularly in the form of sudden outbursts of euphoria in response to movements like the one in Argentina at the end of 2001 (which has been presented as a formidable proletarian uprising when it was actually stuck in inter-classism). But a long term, materialist, historical vision teaches us, in Marx’s words, that “it’s not a question of considering what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, takes to be true today, but of considering what the proletariat is and what it will be led to do historically, in conformity with its being” (The Holy Family). Such an approach shows us that, faced with the blows of the capitalist crisis, which will give rise to more and more ferocious attacks on the working class, the latter will be forced to react and to develop its struggle.

This struggle, in the beginning, will be a series of skirmishes, which will announce an effort to move towards increasingly massive struggles. It is in this process that the class will once again recognise itself as a distinct class with its own interests, and rediscover its identity; and this in turn will act as a stimulus to its struggle. The same goes for war, which will tend to become a permanent phenomenon, each time uncovering a little more the serious tensions between the major powers, and above all revealing the fact that capitalism is incapable of eradicating this scourge, that it is a growing menace for humanity. This will give rise to a profound reflection within the class. All these potentialities are contained in the present situation. It is vital for revolutionary organisations to be conscious of this and to develop an intervention which can bring this reflection to fruition. This intervention is particularly important with regard to the minority who are looking for political clarification internationally.

But if they are to be up to their responsibilities, revolutionary organisations have to be able to cope not only with direct attacks from the ruling class, but also to resist the penetration into their own ranks of the ideological poison that the ruling class disseminates throughout society. In particular, they have to be able to fight the most damaging effects of decomposition, which not only affects the consciousness of the proletariat in general but also of revolutionary militants themselves, undermining their conviction and their will to carry on with revolutionary work. This is precisely what the ICC has had to face up to in the recent period and this is why the key discussion at this Congress was the necessity for the organisation to defend itself from the attacks facilitated by the decomposition of bourgeois ideology.

The life and activities of the ICC

The Congress drew a positive balance-sheet of the activities of our organisation since the last Congress, in 2001. Over the past two years, the ICC has shown that it is capable of defending itself against the most dangerous effects of decomposition, in particular the nihilistic tendencies which have seized hold of a certain number of militants who formed the “Internal Fraction”. The ICC has been able to combat the attacks by these elements whose aim was clearly to destroy the organisation. Right from the start of its proceedings, the Congress, following on from the Extraordinary Conference of April 2002,[3] was once again totally unanimous in ratifying the whole struggle against this camarilla, and in denouncing its provocative behaviour. It was fully convinced about the anti-proletarian nature of this regroupment. And it was no less unanimous in pronouncing the exclusion of the elements of the “Fraction”, which has crowned its anti-ICC activity by publishing on its website information which can only play directly into the hands of the police – and by justifying these actions.[4] These elements, although they refused first of all to come to the Congress (as they were invited to do) and then to present their defence in front of a commission specially nominated by the latter, have found nothing better to do in their bulletin n°18 than to continue their campaigns of slander against the organisation. This has provided further proof that their concern is not at all to convince the militants of the organisation of the dangers posed it by what they describe as a "leadership" dominated by a “liquidationist faction”, but to discredit the ICC as much as possible, now that they have failed to destroy it.[5]

How could these elements have developed, within the organisation, an activity which threatened to destroy it?

In approaching this question, the Congress highlighted a certain number of weaknesses, linked to the revival of the circle spirit and facilitated by the negative weight of social decomposition. An aspect of this negative weight is doubt in, and loss of confidence in, the working class: a tendency to see only its immediate weaknesses. Far from facilitating the party spirit, this attitude can only allow friendship links or confidence in particular individuals to substitute themselves for confidence in our principles of functioning. The elements who were to form the “Internal Fraction” were a caricature of these deviations and this loss of confidence in the class. Their dynamic towards degeneration made use of these weaknesses, which weigh on all proletarian organisations today, and weigh all the more heavily in that the majority of these organisations have no awareness of them at all. These elements carried out their destructive activities with a level of violence never before seen in the ICC. The loss of confidence in the class, the weakening of their militant conviction, were accompanied by a loss of confidence in the organisation, in its principles, and by a total disdain for its statutes. This gangrene could have contaminated the whole organisation and sapped all confidence and solidarity in its ranks – and this undermined its very foundations.

Without any fear, the Congress examined the opportunist weaknesses which enabled the clan that called itself the “Internal Fraction” to become such a danger to the very life of the organisation. It was able to do so because the ICC will be strengthened by the combat that it has just waged.

Furthermore, it is because the ICC does struggle against any penetration of opportunism that it seems to have such a troubled life, that it has gone through so many crises. It is because it defended its statutes and the proletarian spirit that animates them without any concessions, that it was met with such anger by a minority which had fallen deep into opportunism on the organisation question. At this level, the ICC was carrying on the combat of the workers’ movement which was waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in particular, whose many detractors castigated their frequent organisational struggles and crises. In the same period, the German Social-Democratic Party was much less agitated but the opportunist calm which reigned within it (challenged only by “trouble-makers” on the left like Rosa Luxemburg) actually prefigure its treason in 1914. By contrast, the crises of the Bolshevik party helped it to develop the strength to lead the revolution in 1917.

But the discussion on activities did not limit itself to dealing with the direct defence of the organisation against the attacks it has been subjected to. It insisted strongly on the necessity to develop its theoretical capacities, while recognising that the combat against these attacks had already stimulated its efforts in this direction. The balance-sheet of the last two years shows that there has been a process of theoretical enrichment, on such questions as the historical dimension of solidarity and confidence in the proletariat; on the danger of opportunism which menaces organisations who are unable to analyse a change of period; on the danger of democratism. And this concern for the struggle on the theoretical terrain, as Marx, Luxemburg, Lenin, or the militants of the Italian left and many other revolutionaries have taught us, is an integral part of the struggle against opportunism, which remains a deadly danger to communist organisations.

Finally, the Congress made an initial balance sheet of our intervention in the working class regarding the war in Iraq. It noted that the ICC had mobilised itself very well on this occasion: before the start of military operations, our sections sold a lot of publications at a number of demonstrations (when necessary producing supplements to the regular press) and engaging in political discussions with many elements who had not known our organisation previously. As soon as the war broke out, the ICC published an international leaflet translated into 13 languages[6] which was distributed in 14 countries and more than 50 towns, particularly at factories and workplaces, and also posted on our Internet site.

Thus this Congress was a moment that expressed the strengthening of our organisation. The ICC affirms with conviction the combat it has been waging and which it will continue to wage – the combat for its own defence, for the construction of the basis of the future party, and for the development of its capacity to intervene in the historical movement of the class. It has no doubt that it is a link in the chain of organisations that connect the workers’ movement of the past to that of the future.

ICC, April 2003

In the last issue of this Review we published an article on Polanski’s film The Pianist [3], whose subject was the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews. Sixty years after the unspeakable horrors of this campaign of extermination, one might have expected to find that anti-Semitism was a thing of the past – the consequences of anti-Jewish racism being so clear that it would have been discredited once and for all. And yet this is not at all the case. In fact, all the old anti-Semitic ideologies are as noxious and as widespread as ever, even if their main focus has shifted from Europe to the “Muslim” world, and in particular, to the “Islamic radicalism” personified by Osama Bin Laden, who in all his pronouncements never fails to attack the “crusaders and Jews” as the enemies of Islam and as suitable targets for terrorist attack. A typical example of this “Islamic” version of anti-Semitism is provided by the “Radio Islam” website, which has as its motto “Race? Only One Human Race”. The site claims to be opposed to all forms of racism, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that its main concern is with “Jewish racism towards non-Jews”; in fact, this is an archive of classical anti-Semitic tracts, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Czarist forgery from the late 19th century which purports to be the minutes of a meeting of the world Jewish conspiracy and was one of the bibles of the Nazi party, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the more recent rantings of the Nation of Islam leader in the USA, Louis Farrakhan. 

Such publishing ventures – and they are assuming massive proportions today – demonstrate that religion today has become one of the main vehicles for racism and xenophobia, for stirring up pogromist attitudes, for dividing the working class and the oppressed in general. And we are not talking merely about ideas, but about ideological justifications for real massacres, whether they involve Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats or Bosnian Muslims in ex-Yugoslavia, Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, Muslims and Christians in Africa and Indonesia, Hindus and Muslims in India, or Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine.

In two previous articles in this Review – “Resurgent Islam, a symptom of the decomposition of capitalist social relations [4]” (International Review n°109) and “Marxism’s fight against religion: economic slavery is the source of the religious mystification [5]” (International Review n°110), we showed that this phenomenon was a real expression of the advanced decomposition of capitalist society. In this article we want to focus on the Jews in particular. Not simply because Karl Marx’s famous essay On the Jewish Question [6] was published 160 years ago, in 1843, but also because Marx, whose entire life was dedicated to the cause of proletarian internationalism, is today being cited as a theoretician of anti-Semitism - usually disapprovingly, but not always. The Radio Islam site is again instructive here: on it, Marx’s essay appears on the very same web page as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even if the site also publishes Der Sturmer type cartoons insulting Marx for being a Jew himself.

This accusation against Marx is not new. In 1960 Dagobert Runes published Marx’ essay under his own title A World Without Jews, which implied that Marx was an early exponent of the “final solution” to the Jewish problem. In a more recent history of the Jews, the right wing English intellectual Paul Johnson raised similar charges, and did not hesitate to find an anti-Semitic component in the very idea of wanting to abolish buying and selling as a basis for social life. At the very least, Marx is a “self-hating” Jew (today, as often as not, a sobriquet pinned by the Zionist establishment on anyone of Jewish descent who expresses critical attitudes towards the State of Israel).

Against all these grotesque distortions, our aim in this article is not only to defend Marx from those who are seeking to use him against his own principles, but also to show that Marx’s work provides the only starting point for understanding and overcoming the problem of anti-Semitism.

The historical context of Marx’s essay On the Jewish question

It is useless to present or quote from Marx’s article out of its historical context. On the Jewish question was written as part of the general struggle for political change in semi-feudal Germany. The debate about whether Jews should be granted the same civil rights as the rest of Germany’s inhabitants was one aspect of this struggle. As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx had originally intended to write a response to the openly reactionary and anti-Semitic writings of one Hermes who wanted to keep the Jews in the ghetto and preserve the Christian basis of the state. But after the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer entered into the fray with two essays ‘The Jewish Question” and “The capacity of present day Jews and Christians to become free”, Marx felt it was more important to polemicise with what he saw as the false radicalism of Bauer’s views.

We should also recall that in this phase of his life, Marx was in a political transition from radical democracy to communism. He was in exile in Paris and had come under the influence of French communist artisans (cf. “How the proletariat won Marx to communism” in International Review 69); in the latter part of 1843, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he identified the proletariat as the bearer of a new society In 1844 he met Engels, who helped him to see the importance of understanding the economic basis of social life; the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written in the same year, are his first attempt to understand all these developments in their real depth. In 1845 he wrote the Theses on Feuerbach which express his definitive break with the one-sided materialism of the latter.

The polemic with Bauer on the question of civil rights and democracy, published in the Franco-German Yearbooks, was without question a moment in this transition.

 At that time Bauer was a spokesman for the “left” in Germany, although the seeds of his later evolution towards the right can already be noted in his attitude to the Jewish question, where he adopts a seemingly radical position which actually ended up as an apology for doing nothing to change the status quo. According to Bauer, it was useless to call for the political emancipation of the Jews in a Christian state. It was necessary, first of all, for both Jews and Christians to give up their religious beliefs and identity in order to achieve real emancipation; in a truly democratic state, there would be no need for religious ideology. Indeed, if anything, the Jews had further to go than the Christians: in the view of the Left Hegelians, Christianity was the last religious envelope in which the struggle for human emancipation had expressed itself historically. Having rejected the universalist message of Christianity, the Jews had two steps to make while the Christians had only one. 

The transition from this view to Bauer’s later overt anti-Semitism is not hard to see. Marx may well have sensed this, but his polemic begins by defending the position that the granting of “normal” civil rights for Jews, which he terms “political emancipation”, would be “a big step forward”; indeed it had already been a feature of earlier bourgeois revolutions (Cromwell had allowed the Jews to return to England and the Napoleonic code granted civil rights to Jews). It would be part of the more general struggle to do away with feudal barriers and create a modern democratic state, which was now long overdue in Germany in particular.

But Marx was already aware that the struggle for political democracy was not the final aim. On the Jewish question seems to express a significant advance over a text written shortly before, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, In this text Marx pushes his thought to the extreme of radical democracy, arguing that real democracy – universal suffrage – would mean the dissolution of the state and of civil society. By contrast, in  On The Jewish Question, Marx affirms that a purely political emancipation – he even uses the term a “perfected democracy” - falls far short of real human emancipation.

It is this text in which Marx clearly recognises that civil society is bourgeois society – the society of isolated egos competing on the market. It is a society of estrangement or alienation (this was the first text in which Marx used these terms) in which the powers set in motion by man’s own hands – not only the power of money, but also the state power itself – inevitably become alien forces ruling man’s life. This problem is not solved by the achievement of political democracy and the rights of man. This is still based on the notion of the atomised citizen rather than on a real community. “None of the so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species-being, his species life itself – society – rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic interest”.

Further proof that alienation does not disappear as a result of political democracy was, Marx pointed out, provided by the example of North America, where religion was formally separated from the state and yet America was par excellence the country of religious observation and religious sects.

Thus: while Bauer argues that it is waste of time fighting for the political emancipation of the Jews as such, Marx defends and supports this demand:  “We thus do not say with Bauer to the Jews: You cannot be politically emancipated without radically emancipating yourselves from Judaism. Rather we tell them: because you can be emancipated politically without completely and fully renouncing Judaism, political emancipation is by itself not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be politically emancipated without emancipating yourselves humanly, the incompleteness and contradiction lies not only in you but in the essence and category of political emancipation”. Concretely, for Marx this meant that he accepted the request of the local Jewish community to write a petition in favour of civil liberties for Jews. This approach towards political reforms was to be the characteristic attitude of the workers’ movement during the ascendant period of capitalism. But Marx is already looking further down the road of history - towards the future communist society –even if this is not yet named as such in On The Jewish Question. This is the conclusion to the first part of his reply to Bauer “Only when the actual individual man  has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and in his individual relationships has become a species being, only when he has recognised and organised his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as a political power, only then is human emancipation complete”.

Marx’s alleged anti-Semitism

It is the second part of the text, replying to Bauer’s second article, which has drawn most fire onto Marx from numerous quarters, and which the new wave of Islamic anti-Semitism is misusing in support of its obscurantist world view. “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of mankind – and converts them into commodities. Money is the general, self-sufficient value of everything. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper worth. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularised and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god…”. This and other passages in On the Jewish questionhave been seized upon to prove that Marx is one of the founding fathers of modern anti-Semitism, whose essay has given respectability to the racist myth of the blood-sucking Jewish parasite.

It is true that many of the formulations Marx uses in this section could not be used in the same way today. It is also true that neither Marx nor Engels were entirely free from bourgeois prejudices and that some of their pronouncements about particular nationalities reflect this. But to conclude from this that Marx and marxism itself are indelibly stained with racism is a travesty of his thought. 

All these phrases must be put in their proper historical context. As Hal Draper explains in an appendix to his book Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. I (Monthly Review Press, 1977), the identification between Judaism and “hucksterism”, or with capitalism, was part of the language of the time and was taken up by any number of radical thinkers and socialists, including Jewish radicals like Moses Hess who was an influence on Marx at the time (and indeed on the essay itself).

A historian of religion like Trevor Ling criticises Marx’s essay from another angle: “Marx had a mordant, journalistic style and decorated his pages with many a clever and satirical turn of phrase. The kind of writing of which examples have just been given is good vigorous pamphleteering, intended no doubt to stir the blood, but it has little to offer by way of useful sociological analysis. Such grand superficialities as ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’, when used in this sort of context, have no correspondence with historical realities; they are labels attached to Marx’s own artificial, ill-perceived constructs” Ling, Karl Marx and Religion, Macmillan Press, 1980). But a few mordant phrases by Marx usually provide far sharper tools for examining a question in depth than all the learned treatises of the academics. In any case Marx is not trying here to write a history of the Jewish religion, which cannot be reduced to a mere justification for commercialism, not least because its ancient origins lie in a social order where money relations had a very subordinate role, and whose substance also reflects the existence of class divisions among the Jews themselves (for example, in the diatribes of the prophets against the corruptions of the ruling class in ancient Israel). As we have seen, having defended the need for the Jewish population to have the same “civil rights” as all other citizens, Marx merely uses the verbal analogy between Judaism and commodity relations to call for a society free of commodity relations, which is the real meaning of his concluding phrase, “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism”. This has nothing to do with any scheme for the physical elimination of the Jews, despite Dagobert Rune’s disgusting insinuations; it means that as long as society is dominated by commodity relations, human beings cannot control their own social powers and all will remain estranged from each other.

At the same time, Marx does provide the bases for a materialist analysis of the Jewish question - a work carried on by later Marxists, such as Kautsky and in particular Abram Leon.1 Marx points out, contrary to the idealist explanation which sought to explain the stubborn survival of the Jews as a result of their religious conviction, that the survival of their separate identity and of their religious convictions had to be explained on the basis of their real role in history: “Judaism has survived not in spite of but by means of history”. And this is indeed deeply connected to the Jews’ connection to commerce: “let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion but rather for the secret of the religion in the actual Jew”. And it is here that Marx uses the word play between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a synonym for bargaining and financial power, which was based on a kernel of reality: the particular social-economic role played by the Jews within the old feudal system. 

Leon, in his book The Jewish Question, a Marxist Interpretation, bases his entire study on these few limpid sentences in On The Jewish Question, and on another one in Capital which talks about “the Jews (living) in the pores of Polish society”(Vol. III, p 447) in a manner comparable to other “merchant-peoples” of history. From these few nuggets he developed the notion that the Jews, in ancient society and in feudalism, functioned as a “people-class” who were largely bound up with trade and money relations in societies which were predominantly founded on natural economy. In feudalism in particular this was codified in the religious laws, which forbade Christians to engage in usury. But Leon also shows that the Jewish connection to money relations was not always limited to usury. In both ancient and feudal society the Jews were very much a merchant people, personifying commodity relations which did not yet rule over the economy but simply linked dispersed communities where production was largely geared to use, and the bulk of the social surplus was appropriated and consumed directly by the ruling class. It was this peculiar social-economic function (which was of course a general tendency rather than an absolute law for all Jews) which provided the material basis for the survival of the Jewish “corporation” within feudal society; a contrario, where Jews engaged in other activities, such as farming, they tended to assimilate very quickly.

But this did not imply that the Jews were the first capitalists (a point which is not yet entirely clear in Marx’s text, because he has not yet fully grasped the nature of capital); on the contrary, it was the rise of capitalism that coincided with some of the worst phases of anti-Jewish persecution. Contrary to the Zionist myth that the persecution of the Jews has been a constant throughout history – and that they can never be free from it until they are gathered together in their own country2 - Leon shows that as long as they were playing a “useful” role in these pre-capitalist societies, the Jews were more usually tolerated, and often specifically protected by the monarchs who needed their financial skills and services. It was the emergence of a “native” merchant class, which began to use its profits to invest in production (for example, the English wool trade, key to the origins of an English bourgeoisie) which spelt disaster for the Jews, who now embodied an outmoded form of commodity economy and were seen as an obstacle to the development of its new forms. This tended to force more and more Jewish traders into the only form of commerce open to them – usury. But this practise brought the Jews into direct conflict with the principal debtors in society – the nobles on the one hand, and the small artisans and peasants on the other. It is significant, for example, that the worst pogroms against the Jews in western Europe took place in this period when feudalism had begun to decay and capitalism was on the rise. In England in 1189-90 the Jews of York and other English towns were slaughtered and the entire Jewish population expelled. Pogroms were often provoked by nobles who owed large amounts to the Jews and who found ready followers among the smaller producers who were also often in debt to Jewish money-lenders; both could hope to benefit from the cancellation of debt thanks to the murder or expulsion of the usurers, and the seizure of their property. The Jewish emigration from western Europe to Eastern Europe at the dawn of capitalist development was a move back to more traditionally feudal areas where the Jews could return to their own more traditional role; by contrast, those Jews who were left behind tended to become assimilated into the surrounding bourgeois society. In particular, a Jewish fraction of the capitalist class (typified by the Rothschild family) was the product of this period; parallel to this, came the development of a Jewish proletariat, although both eastern and western Jewish workers tended to be concentrated in the artisanal areas, away from heavy industry, and the majority of Jews continued to be disproportionately concentrated in the petty bourgeoisie, often in the form of petty tradesmen.

These layers  - small tradesmen, artisans, proletarians -  are thrown into the most abject misery by the decay of feudalism in the east, and the emergence of a capitalist infrastructure which already displays many features of its decline. In the late 19th century we now see new waves of anti-Semitic persecution in the Russian empire, provoking a new Jewish exodus to the west, which again “exports” the Jewish problem to the rest of the world, not least Germany and Austria. This period sees the development of the Zionist movement, which from right to left argues that the Jewish people could never be normalised until they had their own homeland – an argument whose futility was, for Leon, confirmed by the Holocaust itself, since none of this could have been prevented by the appearance of a small “Jewish homeland” in Palestine.3 

Leon, writing in the midst of the Nazi holocaust, shows how the paroxysm of anti-Semitism reached in Nazi Europe is the expression of the decadence of capitalism. Fleeing the Czarist persecution in eastern Europe and Russia, the immigrant Jewish masses found in western Europe not a haven of peace and tranquillity, but a capitalist society that was soon to be wracked by insoluble contradictions, ravaged by world war and world economic crisis. The defeat of the proletarian revolution after the first world war opened the door not only to a second imperialist butchery, but also to a form of counter-revolution which exploited age-old anti-Semitic prejudices to the hilt, using anti-Jewish racism both practically and ideologically as a basis for completing the liquidation of the proletarian menace and for gearing society for a new war. Like the International Communist Party (ICP) in Auschwitz, the Grand Alibi, Leon focuses in particular on the use that Nazism made of the convulsion of the petty bourgeoisie, ruined by the capitalist crisis and easy meat for an ideology which promised them that they would be not only free of their Jewish competitors but also be officially permitted to lay their hands on their property (even if the Nazi state did not really allow the German petty bourgeoisie to benefit from this but appropriated the lion’s share to develop and maintain a vast war economy).

At the same time, as Leon points out, the use of anti-Semitism once again as a socialism of fools, a false criticism of capitalism, enabled the ruling class to drag in certain sectors of the working class, particularly its more marginal layers or those crushed by unemployment.  Indeed, the notion of “national” socialism was one of the  direct responses of the ruling class to the close link that had been established between the authentic revolutionary movement and a layer of Jewish workers and intellectuals who, as Lenin had pointed out, naturally gravitated towards international socialism as the only solution to their situation as a homeless and persecuted element of bourgeois society. International socialism was branded as a trick of the world Jewish conspiracy and proletarians were enjoined to combine their socialism with patriotism. It should also be pointed out that this ideology was mirrored in the Stalinist USSR, where the campaign of insinuation against “rootless cosmopolitans” was a cover for anti-Semitic slurs against the internationalist opposition to the ideology and practise of “socialism in one country”. 

This emphasises that the persecution of the Jews also functions at an ideological level and requires a justifying ideology; in the Middle Ages, it was the Christian myth of Christ killers, well-poisoners, ritual murderers of Christian children: Shylock and his pound of flesh.4 In the decadence of capitalism, it is the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy that has conjured up both capitalism and communism to impose its rule over the Aryan peoples.

In the 1930s, Trotsky noted that the decline of capitalism was spawning a terrible regression on the ideological level:

“Fascism has opened up the depth of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing up from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the psychology of National Socialism” (“What is National socialism”, 1933).

These elements all come together in the Nazis’ fantasies about the Jews. Nazism made no secret of its ideological regression – it openly harked back to the pre-Christian gods. Nazism, in fact, was an occultist movement that had seized direct control of the means of government; and like other occultisms, it saw itself doing battle with another hidden and satanic power – in this case, the Jews. And these mythologies, which can certainly be examined in their own right, in all their psychological aspects, take on a logic of their own and fuel the juggernaut that led to the death camps.

 However, this ideological irrationality is never divorced from the material contradictions of the capitalist system – it is not, as numerous bourgeois thinkers have tried to argue, the expression of some metaphysical principle of evil, some unfathomable mystery. In the article on Polanski’s film The Pianist in IR 113 we cited the ICP on the cold calculating “rationale” behind the Holocaust – the industrialisation of murder, where the maximum of profit was squeezed from every corpse. But there is another dimension, which the ICP does not go into: the irrationality of capitalist war itself. Thus the “final solution”, in the image of the world war which provided its background, is provoked by economic contradictions and does not renounce the hunt for profit, but at the same time becomes an added factor in the exacerbation of economic ruin. And if use of forced labour was demanded by the war economy, the whole machinery of the concentration camps also became an immense burden on the German war effort.

The solution to the Jewish problem

160 years on, the essence of what Marx put forward as the solution to the Jewish problem remains valid: in the abolition of capitalist relations and the creation of real human community. Of course this also is the only possible solution to all surviving national problems: capitalism has proved incapable of resolving them. The current manifestation of the Jewish problem, which is specifically linked to the imperialist conflict in the Middle East, is the best proof of this.

The “solution” put forward by the “Jewish national liberation movement”, Zionism, has become the kernel of the problem. The greatest source of the current anti-Semitic revival is no longer linked directly to the particular economic function of the Jews in the advanced capitalist states, nor to a problem of Jewish immigration into these regions. Here, since world war two, the focus of racism has shifted to the waves of immigration from the former colonial regions; most recently, with the furore over “asylum seekers”, it is aimed first and foremost at the victims of economic, ecological and military devastation that decomposing capitalism is inflicting on the planet. “Modern” anti-Semitism is first and foremost connected to the conflict in the Middle East. Israel’s nakedly imperialist policies in the region and the support unwaveringly given to these policies by the USA has been a shot in the arm for all the old myths of a world Jewish conspiracy. Millions of Muslims are convinced by the urban myth that “40,000 Jews stayed away from the Twin Towers on September 11 because they had been warned in advance that the attack was coming” – that “the Jews did it”. And this notwithstanding  that this claim is happily put forward by people who also defend Bin Laden and applaud the terrorist attack!5 The fact that several leading members of the clique around Bush, the “neo-conservatives” who are today the most vigorous and explicit advocates of the “new American century”, are Jews, (Wolfowitz, Perle, etc) has added grist to this mill, sometimes providing it with a left wing twist. In Britain recently there was a controversy around the fact that Tam Dalyell, an “anti-war” figure on the Labour left, spoke openly about the influence of the “Jewish lobby” on US foreign policy and even on Blair; and he was defended from charges of anti-Semitism by Paul Foot of the Socialist Workers Party who only regretted that he had talked of Jews and not Zionists. In actual practise, the distinction between the two has become increasingly blurred in the discourse of the nationalists and jihadists who lead the armed struggle against Israel. In the 60s and 70s the PLO and its leftist supporters claimed that they wanted to live in peace with the Jews in a democratic secular Palestine; but today the ideology of the intifada is overwhelmingly that of Islamic radicalism, which makes little secret of its wish to expel the Jews from the region or exterminate them outright. As for Trotskyism, it  has long joined the ranks of the nationalist pogrom. We have already mentioned Abram Leon’s warning that Zionism could do nothing to save the Jews of war-torn Europe; today we can add that the Jews most threatened with physical destruction are located precisely in the promised land of Zionism. Zionism has not only built a huge prison-house for the Palestinian Arabs who live under its humiliating regime of military occupation and brutal violence; it has also imprisoned the Israeli Jews themselves in the gruesome spiral of terrorism and counter-terror which no imperialist “peace process” seems able to overcome.

Capitalism in its decadence has conjured up all the demons of hatred and destruction that have ever haunted humanity, and armed them with the most devastating weapons ever seen. It has given rise to genocide on a scale unprecedented in history, and shows no sign of abating; despite the Holocaust of the Jews, despite the cries of Never Again, we have seen not only a virulent revival of anti-Semitism but also ethnic massacres on a scale which bear comparison with the Holocaust, such as the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda in the space of a few weeks, or the continuous rounds of ethnic cleansing that ravaged the Balkans throughout the 90s. This revival of genocide is characteristic of decadent capitalism in its final phase – that of decomposition. These terrible events give us a glimpse of the future that the final playing out of decomposition holds in store: the self-destruction of humanity. And  as with Nazism in the 30s, we see alongside these massacres the return of the most reactionary and apocalyptic ideologies all over the planet  -  Islamic fundamentalism, founded on racial hatred and the mysticism of suicide, is the most obvious expression of this, but not the only one: we can equally point to the Christian fundamentalism that has begun to influence the highest echelons of power in the most powerful nation of earth; to the growing grip of Jewish orthodoxy on the Israeli state, to Hindu fundamentalism in India which, like its Muslim mirror image in Pakistan, is armed with nuclear weapons; to the “fascist” revival in Europe. Neither should we leave the religion of democracy out of this list; just as it did during the period of the Holocaust, democracy today, the banner flown by US and British tanks in Afghanistan and Iraq, has shown itself to be the other side of the coin to the more overtly irrational faiths; a fig-leaf for totalitarian repression and imperialist war. All these ideologies are expressions of a social system which has reached an absolute dead-end and offers humanity nothing but destruction.

Capitalism in its decline has created a myriad of national antagonisms, which it has proved unable to resolve; it has merely used them to pursue its drive towards imperialist war. Zionism, which has only been able to establish its goals in Palestine by subordinating itself to the needs first of British, then of American imperialism, is a clear example of this rule. But contrary to the anti-Zionist ideology, it is by no means a special case. All nationalist movements have operated in exactly the same way, including Palestinian nationalism which has functioned as the agent of various imperialist powers large and small, from Nazi Germany to the USSR and Saddam’s Iraq, not forgetting some of the contemporary powers of Europe. Racism and national oppression are realities in capitalist society, but the answer to them does not lie in any schemes for national self-determination, or in the fragmentation of the oppressed into a host of “partial” movements (blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, etc). All such movements have proven to be an added means for capitalism to divide the working class and prevent it from seeing its real identity. It is only by developing this identity, through its practical and theoretical struggles, that the working class can overcome all the divisions within its ranks and forge itself into a power capable of taking on the power of capital.

This does not mean that all national, religious and cultural issues will automatically disappear once the class struggle reaches a certain height. The working class will make the revolution long before it has cast off all the baggage of the ages, or rather in the very process of casting it off; and in the period of transition to communism it will have to confront a host of problems relating to religious belief and cultural or ethnic identity as it seeks to unify the whole of humanity into a global community.  It is axiomatic that the victorious proletariat will never forcibly suppress particular cultural expressions any more than it will outlaw religion; the experience of the Russian revolution has demonstrated that such attempts only serve to reinforce the grip of outmoded ideologies. The mission of the proletarian revolution, as Trotsky forcefully argued, is to lay the material foundations for the synthesis of all that is best in the many different cultural traditions in man’s history – for the first truly human culture.  And thus we return to the Marx of 1843: the solution to the Jewish question is real human emancipation, which will finally allow man to abandon religion by extirpating the social roots of religious alienation.

Amos  

The Massive Attacks of Capital Demand a Mass Response From the Working Class

Faced with the head-on attack on pensions in France and Austria, all sectors of the working class have joined the struggle with a determination unknown since the end of the 1980s. In France, weeks of repeated demonstrations brought together hundreds of thousands of workers from both public and private sector: 1½ million workers were in streets of the main cities in France on the 13th May, almost one million took part in a single demonstration in Paris on the 25th May, and on the third of June 750,000 more people mobilised. Workers in the education sector were at the forefront of the social movement, especially because they were the hardest hit. Austria witnessed the most massive demonstrations since the end of World War II against similar attacks on pensions: more than 100,000 people on the 13th May, and almost one million on the third of June (this in a country of less than 10 million inhabitants). In Brasilia, the administrative capital of Brazil, 30,000 public sector employees demonstrated on the 11th June against a reform in taxation and Social Security, but also against a reform of pensions imposed by the new "left-wing government" of Lula. In Sweden, 9,000 municipal and public sector workers have gone on strike against cuts in social budgets.

The bourgeoisie makes the working-class pay for capitalism's crisis

Up to now, the bourgeoisie has more or less succeeded in spreading out its anti working-class attacks over time, and in separating them by sector, by region, or by country. The major characteristic of the evolution of the present situation is that, since the end of the 1990s, these attacks have been undertaken more brutally, more violently, and more massively. This is an indication of the acceleration of the world crisis which is expressed in two major and concomitant phenomena on an international level: the return of the open recession, and the new surge in debt.

The countries at the heart of capitalism are now deeply affected by the new plunge into recession: this has been true for Japan for several years and is now the case in Germany. Officially, Germany has already entered a new period of recession (for the second time in two years). Other European states, in particular Holland, are in the same situation. The United States has been seriously threatened by recession for two years: unemployment, the trade deficit, and the federal budget deficit are all on the rise once again. The French newspaper Le Monde (16th May) sounds the alarm over the danger of deflation and the return of the spectre of the 1930s: “not only is the hope of a recovery following the war in Iraq fading by the day, its place is being taken by growing fear that the American economy is going to plunge into a spiral of falling prices (...) A scenario for disaster in which the price of services and consumer goods is in constant decline, profits collapse, companies reduce their workforce and announce redundancies, bringing in their wake the new decline in consumption and in prices. Households and companies are too indebted to meet their commitments, while exhausted banks are forced to restrict credit under the impotent gaze of the Federal Reserve. These are not merely the hypotheses of experts in search of strong sensations. This has been the situation in Japan for more than 10 years, punctuated by brief periods of remission”. What the bourgeoisie calls deflation is nothing other than a lasting plunge into recession, where the scenario described above becomes a reality, and where the bourgeoisie is no longer able to use credit to launch a recovery. This completely refutes the arguments of all those who thought that the war in Iraq would make possible the recovery of the world economy. In reality, the war and the drawn-out occupation which has followed it, are first and foremost a heavy burden for the American and British economies ($1 billion a week for the American occupying forces alone). Moreover, workers all over the world are paying for the accelerating arms race (amongst others, through various new European military programmes).

The second characteristic of the economic situation is a further increase in an already enormous level of debt, which represents a veritable time-bomb for the period to come, and which affects every level of the economy from households, to companies, to national governments, whose level of debt has never been so high (see the article on the crisis in this issue of the Review).

As always, capitalism is trying to overcome the crisis and its contradictions using the two only methods which it has at its disposal:

• on one hand, intensifying the productivity of labour by increasing the pressure on the workers who produce surplus value;
• on the other hand, directly attacking the cost of variable capital, in other words by reducing the rate of pay of the workforce. There are several methods for this: proliferating redundancy plans; reducing wages, most commonly via “delocalisation” and the use of immigrant workers to reduce the cost of labour as much as possible; and the reduction in the cost of the social wage by cutting all the social budgets (pensions, health, unemployment benefit).

Capitalism is forced to act more and more simultaneously on all these levels, in other words the state everywhere is pushed to attack at the same time every aspect of working-class living conditions. In the logic of bourgeois profit there is no other solution than to undertake these massive and head-on attacks. Obviously, the ruling class is careful to plan and to co-ordinate the rhythm of these attacks according to the country, in order to avoid simultaneous social conflicts on the same question.

Since the 1970s, with a generalisation of massive unemployment and the sacrifice of thousands of companies and of the less profitable sectors of the economy, millions of jobs had disappeared and the bourgeoisie has revealed its inability to integrate new generations of workers into the productive process. But today, we are at a new watershed: not only is the ruling class continuing to make large numbers of workers redundant, it now has the social wage in its sights. In some central countries, like United States, “social protection” has always been virtually non-existent. But in these cases, and in the USA in particular, pensions were generally financed by the employer. At the root of the “financial scandals” of recent years, of which the most spectacular example is that of Enron, is the fact that companies used their pension funds to invest on the stock exchange and this money has been lost in doubtful speculation, leaving the companies unable to pay out a decent pension or to compensate their despoiled workforce, who are now reduced to dire poverty. In countries like Great Britain, social protection has already been to a large extent dismantled. The British case is a particularly edifying example of what the working class can expect: since the “Thatcher years”, 20 years ago, pensions have been based on private pension funds. But the situation has become much worse since then. By transforming pensions into private funds, the idea was that shares in these funds would bring in a lot of money as the stock exchange rose. The opposite has happened. With a collapse in share prices, hundreds of thousands of workers are reduced to poverty (the basic state pension is only about €120 a week). Some 20% of pensioners live below the poverty line, condemning many of them to continue working beyond the age of 70, generally in poorly paid and precarious jobs. Many workers find themselves in the agonising situation of being unable to pay for their lodging or for their medical expenses. Elderly people dependent on expensive treatment can no longer rely on hospital care. British clinics and hospitals thus refuse dialysis to elderly patients who are unable to pay for it, directly condemning them to death. More generally, the seizure of houses or flats whose owners can no longer pay their mortgage has quadrupled in two years, while 5 million people are living below the poverty line (this figure has doubled since the 1970s) and unemployment is rising faster than at any time since 1992. The first capitalist country to have set up the welfare state after World War II, has become the first test bed for its dismantling.

The turning point in the violence of the attack

Today, these attacks are becoming general, “globalised”, shattering the myth of “social gains”. The nature of these new attacks is significant. They are targeting pensions, unemployment benefit, and healthcare. More and more clearly, they reveal everywhere the bourgeoisie’s growing inability to finance the social budget. The scourge of unemployment and the end of the Welfare State are two major expressions of the global bankruptcy of capitalism. This is illustrated by the recent attacks in several countries:

In France, the government intends to go further than merely aligning state sector pensions with the private sector by raising the number of years worked from 37.5 to 40 in order to gain access to a “full” pension. It has also announced that the number of years worked will be further increased to 42, and then increased beyond that depending on the level of employment. Contributions will be raised for all wage earners in order to refill the pension funds' coffers, not to mention the requirement to make contributions to new “top-up” pension funds. According to official propaganda, the reasons are purely demographic: the ageing of the population is supposedly responsible for the deficit in the pension funds and is destined to become an intolerable burden of the economy. Apparently there will not be enough young workers to pay the pensions for a growing number of old people. The reality is that young people enter working life increasingly late, not only because the technical progress of production requires longer training but also because they have an ever greater difficulty in finding a job (raising the school leaving age is moreover another means of hiding unemployment amongst young workers). In reality the main reason for the fall in contributions and the deficit in the pension funds is the inexorable rise in unemployment (which represents at least 10% of the working population) and in precarious employment. In reality, many employers have no interest in keeping older workers on the payroll, since they are usually better paid than young workers, while being less resilient and less “adaptable”. Behind all the talk on the need to work longer there lies in fact a huge drop in the level of pensions. As soon as they are put into place the planned measures will immediately reduce pensioners’ purchasing power by between 15 and 50%, including for the worst paid workers. Another “reform” is that of the social security system, to be announced this coming autumn, which has already begun with the withdrawal of 600 medicines from the approved list, with a further 650 to follow by ministerial decree in July.

In Austria, an attack comparable to that in France is aimed mainly at pensions. Whereas the length of working life was already set at 40 years, it is now to rise to a minimum of 42 years and 45 years for most workers, with a decrease in pensions of up to 40% for some categories. The conservative Chancellor Schlüssel has made the most of early elections in February to form a new homogeneous government of the right, following the “crisis” of September 2002 which put an end to the cumbersome coalition with Haider's populist party, leaving the bourgeoisie with its hands free to undertake these new attacks.

In Germany, the red-green government has begun an austerity programme baptised "agenda 2010" attacking several aspects of the social wage simultaneously. In the first place, there is a drastic reduction in unemployment benefits. The duration of benefits will be reduced to 18 months from 36 months for workers over 55 and to 12 months for the rest. After that, and redundant workers will have no other resource than “social pay” (which represents about €600 per month). This is the equivalent of halving retirement pensions for 1½ million unemployed workers, just as the number of unemployed in Germany is rising above 5 million. As for the health service, the plan is to reduce the level of health benefits (reduction in the repayment of medicines and doctor’s visits, restriction in the number of sick days). For example benefits will be stopped after the sixth week of sickness per year, and people will be obliged to top up with private insurance. These restrictions in healthcare go together with an increase in contributions for all wage earners since the beginning of 2003. At the same time pensions are also under attack in Germany: the retirement age, which is already 65 years on average, will be raised as will wage earners' contributions, while the automatic annual revaluation of pensions is to be suppressed. Since the beginning of the year taxes have been raised (paid at source on wages), measures adopted to encourage temporary work, while the precarity of work continues to increase with the number of part-time or limited duration contracts.

In Holland, the new coalition government (Christian-Democrats, liberals, reformists) has followed Austria in getting rid of its populist wing and announced an austerity plan based on budget restrictions in the social domain (with a view to saving €15 billion), notably for a radical reform of unemployment benefit and the criteria for disability pensions as well as the general revision of wages policy.

In Poland, healthcare is also under attack. While the most serious illnesses continue to be taken in charge, most healthcare will only be reimbursed at 60 or at 30 percent. “Benign” sicknesses like flu or tonsillitis will not be reimbursed at all. State employees are no longer protected from redundancy.

As we have already seen above, in Brazil Lula's Workers' Party is at the forefront of the cuts in social budgets Latin America.

Within the framework of the enlargement of the European Union the International Labour Office directive of 9th June stipulates that for 5 out of the ten countries concerned (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Estonia), pension funds should be financed solely by wage earners' contributions, whereas previously they were financed jointly by the employer, the state, and the wage earner.

We can thus see that whatever the government, whether it be right or left, the same attacks are under way.

They are accompanied by a wave of massive redundancies: 30,000 job cuts at Deutsche Telekom, 13,000 at France Telecom, 40,000 in the Deutsche Bahn (German railways), 2,000 job cuts at the SNCF (French Railways). Fiat has just announced 10,000 job cuts on the European continent after laying-off 8,100 workers at the end of 2002 in Italy itself. Alstom has announced 5,000 job cuts. Swissair plans to eliminate a further 3,000 jobs in a sector which has been particularly hard hit by the crisis during the last two years. The American merchant bank Merrill Lynch has laid off 8,000 employees since last year. In Britain, 42,000 jobs have been lost during the first quarter of 2003. Not a country, not a sector is spared. It is forecast for example that between now and 2006, 400 companies per week will close in Britain. Everywhere job insecurity is becoming the rule.

The mobilisation of the working class in the recent struggles was thus a response to this qualitative aggravation of the crisis and the attacks against its living conditions which are the result.

The balance of class forces

The first thing to be said about the struggles is that they are a stinging refutation of all those ideological campaigns that followed the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes. No, the working class has not disappeared! No, its struggles do not belong to the distant past! These struggles show that the perspective is still towards class confrontations, despite the confusion and the enormous ebbing of class-consciousness provoked by the upheavals of the period since 1989. An ebb which has been still further deepened by the ravages of advanced social decomposition, that has tended to deprive the workers of their reference points and their class identity, as well as by the bourgeoisie's antifascist and pacifist campaigns, and “citizens’ mobilisations”. Confronted with this situation the attacks of the bourgeoisie and the state are pushing the workers once again to assert themselves on a class terrain and eventually to rediscover their past experience and vital needs of the struggle. The workers are thus called to renew their experience of the sabotage of the struggle by the trade unions and the leftists - the organs which the bourgeoisie uses to control the class. Still more importantly, despite the bitterness of their defeat in the immediate, deeper questions are beginning to emerge within the working class about the way society functions, and these in turn tend to call into question all the illusions sown by the bourgeoisie.

In order to understand the implications of these attacks and what these events represent for the evolution of the balance of class forces, it has never been the Marxist method to concentrate on the workers’ struggles alone, but on the contrary to discern what is the main purpose of the enemy class, what is its strategy, what the problems are that it confronts at a given moment. For in order to struggle against the ruling class, the working class must always not only identify who are its enemies, but also understand what they are doing and how they manoeuvre against it. The study of bourgeois policy is usually most important key to a deeper understanding of the overall balance of forces between classes. Marx spent far more time, pages, and energy in examining, dissecting the behaviour, and dismantling the ideology of the bourgeoisie in order to reveal its inner logic, its flaws and the contradictions of capitalism, then he spent in describing or examining the workers’ struggle in itself. This is why for example, in dealing with an altogether more important event, The class struggles in France of 1848 analyses essentially the mainsprings of bourgeois policy. As Lenin wrote in What is to be done? (1902) “The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life (...) Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats”, in other words not real revolutionaries. In the resolution on the international situation adopted at its 15th Congress, the ICC wrote “Marxism has always insisted that it is insufficient to look at the class struggle only in terms of what the proletariat itself is doing; since the bourgeoisie also wages a class struggle against the proletariat and its coming to consciousness, it has always been a key element of Marxist activity to examine the strategies and tactics used by the ruling class to forestall its mortal enemy” (International Review n°113). The failure to study the class enemy has always been typical of workerist, councilist, and economist tendencies within the workers movement. Such a vision forgets a fundamental given which should serve as a compass in the analysis of any situation, which is that outside a directly pre-revolutionary situation, it is never the proletariat which is on the offensive. In other cases it is always the bourgeoisie, as the ruling class, which is on the attack and which forces the proletariat to respond; the bourgeoisie constantly organises not only to adapt itself to the workers’ reactions but to plan ahead to confront these reactions. The ruling class keeps its indomitable enemy under constant surveillance. To do so it possesses specific instruments which allow it constantly to take the temperature of the social situation: its spies, the trade unions.

And so, in the present situation, the first question which has to be asked is why the bourgeoisie carried out these attacks in the way it did.

The bourgeoisie's strategy to push through its economic attacks

The media has compared the movement in France at length with the public sector strikes against the Juppé government during November to December 1995, which witnessed similar demonstrations. In 1995, the main objective of the government was to make use of the whole bourgeoisie’s ideological campaign on the supposed bankruptcy of Marxism and communism following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, and to exploit the ebb in class consciousness, to strengthen and renew the credibility of the trade union control apparatus by wiping out the accumulated experience of the workers’ struggles between 1968 and the 1980s, especially on the trade union question. Even though part of the Juppé plan (the reform of social security financing and the creation of a new income tax) was put through on the sly by the Jospin government in the months that followed, the part devoted to pension reform (with the abolition of the “special status” of the public sector) was deliberately sacrificed by the bourgeoisie in order to present this as a “victory for the trade unions”. The bourgeoisie wanted the strike to be seen as a “working class victory” thanks to the trade unions, which had apparently forced the government to retreat, and as an example to be followed. The movement was thus given enormous media coverage internationally. The working class around the world was thus invited to make “the French December 1995” a reference for all its struggles to come, and above all to see in the trade unions which had been so “combative”, so “united” and so “determined” throughout these events, the best allies they could have to defend them against the attacks of capital. Indeed the movement provided an essential reference for the trade union struggles in Belgium immediately afterwards and in Germany six months later, by polishing up the image of trade union militancy which had been considerably tarnished in the past. Today the level of the economic crisis is no longer the same. The gravity of the capitalist crisis forces the national bourgeoisie to attack the problem head-on. The threat to the pension system is only one of the first measures in a long series of new massive and frontal attacks that are in preparation.

The bourgeoisie never improvises when it confronts the working class. It always tries to weaken it as much as possible. To do so, it often uses the tactic of sparking off social movements before large masses of the working class are ready for them, by provoking certain sectors which are more ready to launch themselves immediately into the movement. The most striking historical example comes to us from January 1919: the crushing of the Berlin workers, who had risen against a provocation by the Social-Democratic government but who remained isolated from their class, which was not yet ready as a whole to undertake a general confrontation with the bourgeoisie. The present attack on pensions in France was also accompanied by a strategy aimed at limiting the working class reaction which must, sooner or later, respond to this attack. Since it could not avoid the struggle, the bourgeoisie had to arrange things so that it should end in a painful defeat for the working class, such that the proletariat should once again doubt its own ability to react to the attack as a class. The bourgeoisie therefore chose to burst the abscess and to provoke the personnel of the education sector by further and particularly heavy attacks aimed specifically at them, in order that the latter should start the struggle first, exhaust themselves as much as possible, and suffer the most stinging defeat. It is not the first time that the French bourgeoisie and its European colleagues have provoked one sector as part of a manoeuvre against the whole working class. The same tactic had already been used for example in 1995 with the railway workers of the SNCF.

Under the Jospin government, the bourgeoisie - through its mouthpiece Allègre - had already announced its intention to “slim down the mammoth” of the education system which employs by far the greatest proportion of state employees. Like most of the public sector (except defence, the police, and the legal system, in other words the bodies responsible for state repression), it had already suffered budget cuts which planned the non-replacement of departures in three jobs out of four, teachers excepted. Then came the announcement at the end of 2002 of the elimination of thousands of “teaching auxiliary” jobs which had been created in the primary schools as part of the previous government’s youth employment scheme, and of monitors in the secondary education system. These job cuts, apart from making many young people redundant, mean an intolerable increase in the burden on the teachers, leaving them isolated in the front line faced with students who are more and more difficult as a result of the growing weight of social decomposition (drugs, violence, delinquency, social and family problems, etc).

The education sector, already in difficulty, thus not only had to suffer the general attack on pensions: it had inflicted on it yet another, specific attack, the project to decentralise the non-teaching personnel. For the latter, this meant being employed no longer by the national authority but by regional authorities, with an inferior and eventually more precarious work contract. This was thus a real provocation in order to concentrate the conflict in this sector. The bourgeoisie also chose the moment to attack which gave it two buffers to stop any mobilisation: for the teachers, the period of exams for the baccalaureate, and for the working class as a whole the period of the summer holidays. Similarly, in order to break the movement's combativeness, to divide and isolate it, the government had planned in advance to give some ground on the decentralisation proposals. It thus withdrew a small part of the specific attack, that is to say the decentralisation for the personnel who are closest to the teachers (psychologists, orientation councillors, and social assistants). By giving a special treatment to a minority of the personnel in question (about 10,000 employees) to the detriment of the technicians and maintenance workers (100,000 employees), the bourgeoisie was also able to divide the unity of the movement and to defuse the anger of the teachers. To complete the defeat, the government refused to negotiate the payment of strike days and applied the law in all its rigour by refusing to spread out the loss pay over more than two months: as Raffarin said, “by law, strike days are not paid. The government is applying the law”. The bourgeoisie knew also that it could count on the complete collaboration of the trade unions and leftists to share out the job of dividing and disorientating the movement, holding some back to discourage them from entering the struggle, while on the contrary pushing the others resolutely into the movement, exhorting the first to be“responsible”, “reasonable” and the others “to hang on” and to “spread” the struggle with calls for a general strike just as the movement was ebbing in order to extend the defeat especially amongst the teachers.

We thus find ourselves today in a classic schema of the class struggle: first the government attacks, and the trade unions preach union unity in order to start the massive movement of the workers behind the unions and under their control. Then the government opens negotiations where the unions divide amongst themselves in order to spread division and disorientation in the workers' ranks. This method, which plays on the trade unions’ division in the face of rising class struggle, has been thoroughly proven by the bourgeoisie as a means to preserve union control overall by concentrating as far as possible the loss in credibility on one or other trade union apparatus appointed in advance. This also means that the unions are once again put to the test, and that the inevitable development of the struggles to come once again poses the problem for the working class of the confrontation with its enemies in order to assert its class interests and the needs of its struggle.

Each national bourgeoisie adapts to the level of workers’ militancy in order to impose its plans. The 35 hour week is presented everywhere as a social gain, when in reality it constitutes an attack of the first order against the proletariat in Germany and in France where the laws on the 35 hour week have allowed the bourgeoisie to generalise the "flexibility" of the workforce and to adapt it to the needs of the company (increasing productivity, reduction or suppression of breaks in the working day, weekend working, unpaid overtime, etc). The workers in the old East German Länder have recently “won” the promise that by 2009 they too will "benefit" from the 35 hour week like workers in the West, this measure having been refused previously under the pretext of Eastern workers’ inferior productivity. The IG-Metall engineering union has been constantly trying to turn the workers away from their demands (in particular for raising wages) by organising a whole series of strikes and demonstrations on this theme. And today IG-Metall is pushing the workers in the East to demand the 35 hour week immediately, in other words encouraging them to be more exploited as quickly as possible. At the same time, the same trade union has done nothing but circulate petitions against the austerity measures of the government’s “agenda 2010”, with the exception of demonstrations in one or two towns (in Stuttgart on the 21st May for example), while at the same time the service union was organising a national demonstration reserved for workers in this sector in Berlin on the 17th May.

The prospects for the future of the class struggle

For years, confronted with the aggravation of the crisis whose first consequence for the working class has been a brutal rise in unemployment and considerable impoverishment, the bourgeoisie has undertaken a policy aimed first and foremost at masking the extent of the phenomenon. To do so it has constantly manipulated official statistics, massively deprived the unemployed of benefit and therefore removed them from the figures, and encouraged part-time working, limited contracts, the return of women to the home, underpaid or unpaid training schemes and youth employment schemes. It has also constantly encouraged older workers to take early retirement, holding up the perspective of a reduction in the number of years at work while at the same time highlighting the rise in the population's life expectancy (whose benefits the workers share the least moreover). At the same time, for those still at work, this propaganda aimed at making them accept a dramatic deterioration in their working and living conditions as a result of the job cuts carried out in the name of modernisation in the face of competition. The workers have been asked to submit to the hierarchy, and to the demands of productivity to save their jobs. In order to contain the rise in social discontent as a result of this accelerating deterioration in their conditions of existence, a reduction in the age of retirement has been used as an outlet orchestrated by the bourgeoisie and even deliberately put into operation by lowering the legal retirement age in certain countries. In France in particular, the reduction by law of the retirement age to 60, adopted under the left government, was presented as a social victory when in fact it was little more than a recognition of existing social reality. Today the aggravation of the crisis no longer allows the bourgeoisie to pay the workers to retire and to reimburse their medical costs. With a parallel increase in unemployment a growing number of workers will be less and less able to cash in an adequate number of years’ contributions to qualify for a decent retirement. Once a worker has stopped producing surplus value, he becomes a burden on capitalism such that the best solution for this system, and one towards which it is cynically moving, is that he dies as soon as possible.

This is why the brutal and open attack on pensions is expressed in the deep anxiety that is really working on the workers’ militancy. But it also opens the door to a more profound questioning about the real perspectives for the future but capitalism can offer society.

In 1968 one of the main factors in the resurgence of the working class and its struggle on to the scene of history at the international level, was the brutal end of the illusions encouraged by the period of reconstruction, which for a whole generation had offered the working class full employment and clear improvements in its living conditions after the unemployment of the 1930s and the rationing and famine of the war and the immediate post-war period. With the first expressions of the open crisis, the working class felt itself under attack not only in its living and working conditions, but also in terms of a blockage in the perspectives for the future, of a new period of increasing economic and social stagnation as a result of the world crisis. The size of the workers’ struggles following May 1968 and the reappearance of the revolutionary perspective showed clearly that the bourgeoisie's mystifications about the “consumer society” and the “bourgeoisification” of the working class were wearing thin. Though we must keep things in proportion, there are analogies between the present attacks and the situation at that time. Obviously there is no question of identifying the two periods. 1968 was a major historical event which marked the emergence from more than four decades of counter-revolution. It had an impact on the importance of the international proletariat incomparably greater than that the present situation.

Nonetheless today, we are witnessing a collapse of what appeared in a sense as a consolation after years in the prison of wage labour, and which has been one of the pillars that has allowed the system to hang on for 20 years: retirement at the age of 60, with the possibility at that age of enjoying life free from many material constraints. Today, the workers are being forced to abandon the illusion of being able to escape for the last years of their life from what is increasingly experienced as a purgatory: a working environment where there are always too few people for the job, the amount of work is constantly increasing, and the rhythm of work is constantly speeding up. Either they will have to work for longer which means a reduction in the length of the period when they could at last hope to escape from wage labour, or else because they have not contributed for long enough they will be reduced to a wretched poverty where deprivation takes the place of overwork. For every worker, this new situation poses the question of the future.

Moreover, the attack on pensions concerns all workers, and bridges the gap that had arisen between the generations of workers in a period when the weight of unemployment was bourne above all by the younger generations and tended to isolate them in the feeling that the future held nothing for them. This is why all the generations of workers, even the youngest, felt involved and alerted by this attack on pensions whose very nature is such that it creates a feeling of unity in the class and plants the seeds of a deep reflection on the future that is waiting for us in capitalist society.

With this new stage in the deepening of the crisis conditions are ripening for a calling into question of some of the ideological barriers set up by the bourgeoisie during the previous years: that the working class no longer exists, that it is possible to improve living conditions and reform the system if only to benefit from a peaceful retirement -- everything that encouraged the workers to resign themselves to their fate. This brings with it a ripening of the conditions for the working class to recover its consciousness with a revolutionary perspective. The attacks unify the conditions for a working-class counter-attack at an ever wider level, beyond national boundaries. They are laying down the same warp and weft for more massive, more unified, and more radical struggles in the future.

They constitute the yeast for a slow rising of the conditions for the massive struggles which will be necessary for the working class is to recover its identity. Little by little, they will tear down the illusions in the possibility of reforming the system. It is the action of the masses themselves which will make possible the re-emergence of the consciousness of being an exploited class that bears with it a different historical perspective for society. In this sense, the crisis is the ally of the proletariat. This being said, the road the working class must travel in order to assert its own revolutionary perspective is no motorway: it will be terribly long and difficult, strewn with the pitfalls that its enemy will inevitably put in its path.

The working class has just suffered a defeat in its struggle against the state's attack on pensions, notably in France and in Austria. Nonetheless, the struggle was a positive experience for the working class in the first place because it reasserted its existence in its mobilisation on its own class terrain. Faced with the other attacks which the bourgeoisie is preparing against it, the working class has no other choice than to develop its own combat. Inevitably, it will suffer further defeats before being able to put forward the revolutionary perspective. As Rosa Luxembourg forcefully declared in her last article, Order reigns in Berlin, written on the eve of her assassination at the orders of the Social-Democrat government: “individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of ‘war’ -- and this is another peculiar law of history -- in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats’ (...) There is but one condition. The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered" (Die Rote Fahne, 14th January 1919). For these defeats to lead to the final victory, the proletariat must be able to draw lessons from them. In particular, it will have to understand that the trade unions are everywhere organs for the defence of the interests of the state against its own interests. But more generally, it must become aware that it has to confront an enemy which knows how to manoeuvre in order to defend its own class interests, which can count on the whole panoply of instruments to protect its domination, from its police and its prisons to its left parties and even its certified “revolutionaries” (the leftist groups, especially the Trotskyists), and above all which has all means (including its university academics) to draw its own lessons from past confrontations. Once again, as Rosa Luxembourg said: “The revolution does not develop evenly of its own volition, in a clear field of battle, according to a cunning plan devised by clever 'strategists'. The revolution’s enemies can also take the initiative, and indeed as a rule they exercise it more frequently than does the revolution” (ibid). In its gigantic battle with its capitalist enemy, the proletariat can only count on its own strength, on its self-organisation and above all on its consciousness.

Wim, 22nd June, 2003

Vietnam War: divergences on imperialist policy shake US bourgeoisie

American involvement in Vietnam began following French imperialism’s defeat in Indochina when the US moved in to pick up the pieces for the West. The strategy, again a manifestation of containment, was designed to prevent what Eisenshower’s Secretary of State Dulles had called the “domino theory” – one country after an another falling to Russian imperialism like dominoes. The aim was to transform the temporary separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern zone created by the Geneva agreements into a permanent division, as in the Korean peninsula. In this sense the American policy of subverting the Geneva agreements began under the Republican Eisenhower regime and continued under Kennedy, who began dispatching military advisers to Vietnam in the early 1960s. The Kennedy administration played an integral role in running the country, even authorising a military coup and the assassination of President Diem in 1963. The impatience of the White House with the general who delayed in assassinating Diem, has been well documented. Following the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, Johnson continued the American intervention in Vietnam, which mushroomed into America’s longest military war.

The American bourgeoisie was united behind this venture, even as a vocal anti-war movement, under leftist and pacifist auspices began to grow. The anti-war movement was largely marginal in American politics from 1965 until 1968, a safety valve for radicalised students and black activists. The Tet Offensive launched in January 1968 by North Vietnam and the NLF in the South, which included suicide attacks on the American embassy and presidential palace in Saigon, actually ended in bloody defeat for the Stalinists, but the very attempt completely exploded the American military’s long standing propaganda that the war was going so well that victory was just a few months away. Important elements within the bourgeoisie began to go sour on the war as it was now clear that the war in Vietnam would be a long drawn out affair, an orientation in stark contrast to Eisenhower’s warning, when he left office, about avoiding getting bogged down in a protracted land war in Asia.

Simultaneously another strategic orientation for American imperialism crystallised around the necessity to switch focus towards the oil rich, strategically important Middle East, where Russian imperialism was making headway in the Arab world.

President Johnson was approached by a committee of Democratic Party elder statesmen and urged to discard his plans to run for re-election, and to concentrate on ending the war – essentially an internal palace coup. In March, Johnson went on television to declare that he would not seek, nor would he accept, his party’s nomination for re-election, and that instead he would devote his energies to ending the war. At the same time, reflecting the growing divergences on imperialist policy within the bourgeoisie, the American mass media jumped on the anti-war bandwagon. and the anti-war movement was brought in from the leftist margins to the centre of American politics. For example, Walter Cronkite, the news anchorman for one of the major television networks, who ended each broadcast with his slogan “and that’s the way it is”, went to Vietnam and came back and announced that the war had to be stopped. The NBC network began a Sunday evening broadcast called Vietnam This Week, which featured at the end of every show a segment where they displayed photos of the American 18 and 19 year old boys who had been killed that week in Vietnam – an anti-war propagandistic gambit to personalise the war.

Johnson’s troubles were exacerbated by the onset of the open economic crisis and the fact that the proletariat was ideologically undefeated, and that the attempt to implement a policy of “guns and butter” – to wage the war without the necessity of material sacrifice on the home front –proved too costly to sustain. The onset of the open crisis, and the return of the class struggle was echoed in the US by a growing wave of wildcat strikes that continued from 1968 through 1971, often involving angry and disgruntled Vietnam veterans, and which caused serious political difficulties for the American ruling class. The year 1968 in fact symbolised the divisive upheaval in the US as the internal dispute within the bourgeoisie heated up, at the same time as unrest grew on the home front. A couple weeks after Johnson announced his withdrawal from the presidential race, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who had joined the anti-war chorus in 1967 and who was rumoured to be on the verge of renouncing non-violent protest, was assassinated, triggering violent riots in 132 American cities. In early June Robert F Kennedy, younger brother of John F. Kennedy, who had participated in his brother’s cabinet as Attorney General, who was present in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis advocating war with Russia, and again in 1963 as the Kennedy Administration waited impatiently for the assassination of Diem, and had now become an anti-war candidate for president in the Democratic primaries, was also assassinated after winning the California primary. There were violent clashes in the streets outside the Democratic convention in July, as the left of the Democratic Party fought bitterly against the Humphrey forces who were bound to continue the war. Nixon, the conservative Republican, won the presidency, promising that he had a secret plan to end the war.

Meanwhile, by October 1969, the NY Times was listing the schedule of events for the Vietnam Moratorium demonstrations on page 2 of the newspaper to help assure a massive turn out. Mainstream politicians and celebrities began to speak at the rallies. The Nixon administration negotiated with the Vietnamese Stalinists but were unsuccessful in terminating the war. Despite the continuation of the war, however, Nixon was pressed to make strides in implementing the détente suggested by Johnson, including diplomatic state visits to Moscow, and negotiating arms control agreements. Though of course they don’t have a Marxist understanding of capitalism’s global economic crisis, even bourgeois analysts have observed that American interest in détente with Russia and scaling back the cold war temporarily were prompted by US economic difficulties that accompanied the onset of the crisis and the return of the proletariat to class struggle. For example David Painter noted that “the war had exacerbated long-standing economic difficulties” for the US, “feeding inflation and further undermining the US balance of payments position (Encyclopedia of US Foreign Policy, p.283-284), Brzezinski cited “US economic difficulties,” (op. cited. P. 200), and George C. Herring observed, “By 1969 it (the war) had raised critical economic and political problems and compelled a reassessment of policies that had gone unchallenged for more than twenty years. Massive military expenditures caused a runaway inflation that undercut postwar prosperity and aroused growing discontent,” all of which “induced the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon to seek détente with the Soviet Union (Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p. 121).

In 1971, Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods economic system that had been in place since 1944 by suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold, which led immediately to the free floating of international currencies and a de-facto devaluation of the dollar. At the same time, Nixon imposed a 10 percent protective tariff on imports, and wage and price controls on the domestic economy. Some capitalist analysts and journalists even began to talk of a permanent decline of American imperialism and the end of the “American century.”

The divisions within the bourgeoisie that insisted on disengagement from Vietnam and a switch in focus to the Middle East were reinforced by continuing unrest and difficulties in the Middle East region, including the Arab oil boycott. Kissinger simultaneously and unsuccessfully handled negotiations with the Vietnamese and personally engaged in shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. Nixon’s détente initiatives included an opening towards China, which had broken ideologically with Moscow, thus opening up still further opportunities for American imperialism. The cold war posture of refusing to recognise Mao’s regime and insisting that Taiwan was the legitimate government of all of China, maintained with great anti-communist, “freedom loving” ideological rhetoric throughout the 1950s and 1960s was discarded in favour of a project to woo China to switch to the American side in the cold war, which would encircle Russian imperialism with military threats not only from the west in Europe, the south in Turkey, the north (from the US and Canadian based missiles launched over the pole), but also from the east.[1] This new imperialist option only served to increase demands to terminate the war in Vietnam within the American ruing class as liquidation of the war was a precondition for China’s alliance with the US. As a regional power, China had strong interests concerning a conflict in south-east Asia, and was at the time a supporter of North Vietnam.

It was his failure to complete the shift in foreign policy emphasis towards the Middle East and to liquidate the war in order to bring China into the western bloc, that led to the incredible political turmoil of the Watergate period and Nixon’s being driven from office (Agnew, Nixon’s bellicose, hatchet man vice president had been forced to resign earlier on corruption charges in preparation for an orderly transition to an acceptable presidential replacement – Gerald R. Ford).

Within 8 months of Nixon’s removal, with Ford in the White House, Saigon fell to the Stalinists, and American imperialism withdrew from its Vietnam imbroglio, a war that cost 55,000 American and upwards of 3,000,000 Vietnamese. Carter entered the White House in 1977; by 1979 the US had switched to official recognition of mainland China, which now took China’s seat on the Security Council.

The period of 1968-1976 illustrated the tremendous political volatility that accompanies serious political divergences within the American ruling class on imperialist policies. In 8 years, there were four presidents (Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter), of whom two presidents had been driven from office (Johnson and Nixon); Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated and an attempt had been made on the life of George Wallace, right wing populist third party candidate (1972); and the FBI’s and CIA’s role in domestic spying on political adversaries of the administration had brought those two agencies into disrepute with “reform” legislation formally curtailing their powers. The fact that the ruling clique under Nixon used the agencies of the state (FBI/CIA) to gain a decisive advantage over the other clique was intolerable for those fractions of the ruling class who found themselves threatened as a result. The so-called national security crisis following 9/11 has permitted these agencies to once again function completely unfettered.

After the Cold War US imperialist policy adjusts to the absence of a bipolar world

The collapse of the Russian bloc at the end of the 1980s was an unprecedented event. An imperialist bloc disappeared not because it was defeated in imperialist war but because it imploded under the pressure of the historic impasse in the class struggle, the economic crisis and an inability to continue to compete in the arms race with the rival bloc. While American propaganda celebrated its victory over Russian imperialism, and lauded the triumph of democratic capitalism, 1989 proved a Pyrrhic victory for American imperialism, which quickly saw its hegemonic dominance challenged, even within its old alliance, as the discipline that held the two blocs together disappeared. The sudden disappearance of the bipolar confrontation that had characterised the imperialist arena for 45 years eliminated any compulsion for secondary or tertiary powers to adhere any longer to bloc discipline, and the “each for himself” tendency within capitalist decomposition quickly asserted itself on the international level, as newly emboldened smaller imperialisms began playing their own cards, declining any longer to subjugate their interests to those of American imperialism. The first expressions of this decomposition had appeared a decade earlier in Iran, where the Khomeini-led revolution became the first instance in which a country came to break with the US bloc, without the US being able to bring it back into line, and at the same time without it going over to the Russian bloc. Previously, countries on the periphery of world capitalism might play one bloc off against other, and might even switch sides, but none had succeeded in remaining outside the bipolar system. By 1989 this tendency became dominant on the inter-imperialist terrain.

American policy makers suddenly had to adapt to the new array of forces on the international terrain. The expansionist activities of German imperialism were particularly alarming to US imperialism. The Gulf War against Iraq, which had as its pretext Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, an “aggression” that US imperialism itself had set in motion when the American ambassador told the Iraqis that the US would not interfere in an Iraqi-Kuwaiti conflict, was a vehicle for American imperialism to reassert its dominance, and to remind an “everyman for himself” family of nations that the US was the world’s only remaining superpower, and was prepared to exert its military power as the world’s policeman. Against their will, and against their better judgements the European powers, even those who had been cultivating economic and political relationships with Iraq, found themselves obliged not only to formally approve the American war plans, but even to join the “international coalition.” The war was a tremendous success for American imperialism, demonstrating its military superiority, including its smart weaponry, and willingness to exercise power. At home, Bush, the elder, enjoyed incredible political popularity – at one point getting over a 90% approval rating in the opinion polls following the war.

However, Bush proved incapable of consolidating the American success in the Gulf. The restraint against other powers playing their own cards on the international level proved to be a very temporary phenomenon. German imperialism’s advances into the Balkans continued anew, with an acceleration in the splintering of the Yugoslavia, and “ethnic cleansing.” The Bush administration’s inability to consolidate the gains of the Gulf War and formulate an effective strategic response in the Balkans was a central factor in Bush’s failure to be re-elected in 1992. During the presidential campaign, Clinton met with the Pentagon chiefs and assured them he would authorise air strikes in the Balkans and pursue an assertive policy establishing American presence on the ground in that region, a policy that has been an increasingly important aspect of American imperialist policy over the past decade. Despite Republican criticism of Clinton’s policy of committing troops to military interventions without an exit plan during the 2000 campaign, the Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan, plans for invasion of Iraq, and dispatch of troops to countries around the globe (US troops are currently stationed in 33 countries) represents a continuity and further evolution of the Clinton policy.

During the Clinton administration a significant policy divergence developed within the American bourgeoisie in regard to Asia, with the far right opposing the strategy to partner with China in the far east rather than Japan. The right wing saw China as an anachronistic communist regime, at risk of implosion, and an unreliable ally – a potential enemy in fact. It was this dispute that underlay the various scandals during late 1990s and the Clinton impeachment. However, all living former presidents, from both parties (with the exception of Alzheimer’s patient Reagan) endorsed the China policy strategy and opposed the impeachment. The right wing paid a heavy price for failing in its attack on Clinton. Newt Gingrich was forced from politics, and other leaders of the impeachment forces were removed from office. In this context it is important to note is that when there are significant imperialist policy disputes within the bourgeoisie and the stakes are high, the combatants do not demur from risking destabilisation of the political order.

Recent divergences within the US ruling class on unilateral action in Iraq

In 1992 Washington adopted a very clear, conscious orientation to guide its imperialist policy in the post cold war period, based on “a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor. No coalition of great powers without the United States will be allowed to achieve hegemony” (Prof. G.J. Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct. 2002, p.49). This policy seeks to prevent the rise of any power in Europe or Asia that could challenge American prominence and serve as a pole of regroupment for the formation of a new imperialist bloc. This was initially spelt out in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance policy statement drafted by Rumsfeld in1992, during the last year of the first Bush administration which clearly established this new grand strategy: “To prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat of the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union…These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia…the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests…in the non-defence areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order…we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

The policy continued during the Clinton administration, which undertook a tremendous weapons development programme designed to discourage the ambitions of any potential rival, and further enunciated the policy in the 1997 National Military Strategy: “The United States will remain the world’s only global power for the near-term, but will operate in a strategic environment characterised by rising regional powers, asymmetric challenges including WMD, trans-national dangers, and the likelihood of wild cards that cannot be specifically predicted.” The policy was further reiterated by the current Bush administration in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report, issued September 30, 2001, less than three weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, which identified as an “enduring national interest” the goal of “precluding hostile domination of critical areas, particularly in Europe, Northeast Asia, the East Asian littoral,[2] and the Middle East and Southwest Asia.” The Quadrennial report argued that “well targeted strategy and policy can…dissuade other countries from initiating future military competitions.” And in the National Security Strategy 2002 the Bush administration asserted: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States.“ In June 2002, speaking at a West Point graduation ceremony, President Bush affirmed yet again that “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenges—thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”

All of this combines to demonstrate the essential continuity in American imperialist policy, across party lines, for well over a decade since the end of the cold war. Continuity of course does not imply that the implementation of this orientation is identical in all respects. Obviously there has been an evolution , especially on the level of the practical application of this orientation, as the world situation has changed over the past decade. For example, the ability of US imperialism to organise an international “coalition” to endorse its military adventures increasingly runs into greater difficulties as time progresses, and the tendency for the US to increasingly go it alone, to act unilaterally, in its strategic efforts to prevent the rise of a rival in Asia or Europe has reached proportions that have triggered serious debates within the ruling team itself.

This debate reflects a recognition of the difficulties American imperialism faces. Though it is incapable of a “complete” consciousness of the development of social and economic forces in the world in the Marxist sense, it is clear the bourgeoisie, and the American bourgeoisie in particular, is quite capable of recognising certain key features in the evolution of the international situation. For example, an article entitled, “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire,” by Sebastian Mallaby, noted that US policy makers recognise growing “chaos” in the international arena, the phenomenon of “failed” states that are incapable of maintaining a modicum of stability in their societies, and the consequent dangers of massive uncontrolled migration and flow of refugees from the periphery to the metropoles of world capitalism. In this context, Mallaby writes, “The logic of neo-imperialism is too compelling for the Bush administration to resist. The chaos in the world is too threatening to ignore, and existing methods for dealing with that chaos have been tried and found wanting” (Foreign Affairs, Mar/Apr, 2002, p.6). Mallaby and other American bourgeois foreign policy theorists advocate the need for the US as the world’s superpower to act to stem the tide of this chaos, even if it has to do so alone. They even talk openly of a “new imperialism” that the US must implement to block the centrifugal forces that threaten to rip global society apart. In the current international situation, they also recognise that the possibility of pressuring America’s erstwhile allies into an international “coalition” in the manner of the 1990-91 Gulf War is virtually zero. Hence the pressure, previously identified in the ICC press, for the US to act unilaterally on the military level is growing immeasurably. The recognition of the need to be prepared to act unilaterally can be traced back to Clinton administration officials who began to openly discuss this option, and lay the groundwork for unilateral action by American imperialism. (See for instance Madeline Albright’s “The Testing of American Foreign Policy’ in Foreign Affairs, Nov./Dec 1998). So in this sense, in Afghanistan when the US secured the “blessing” of the international community for its military operations based on its ideological and political manipulation of the 9/11 aftermath, but then conducted the actual military operations on the ground on their own, even freezing out its close buddy, Great Britain, the Bush administration was acting in continuity with the policy initiated under Clinton.

Even if the bourgeoisie is aware of the need for the US to ultimately act unilaterally, the question of how soon to go how far in acting unilaterally is a serious tactical question for US imperialism, the answer to which is not guided by the precedents of the cold war, when the US frequently acted without consultation with its NATO and other allies, but could count on its power and influence as bloc leader to get the others to fall in line (as it did in Korea, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, in Vietnam, in the case of the Pershing and Cruise missiles in the early ’80’s, etc.). That answer will also have a profound impact on the future evolution of the international situation as well. It is particularly notable that the debate that occurred over the summer months of 2002 took place primarily within the Republican Party leadership itself, within the traditional foreign policy establishment of the Republican Party, in fact. Kissinger, Baker, Eagleburger, even Colin Powell, raised a cautionary warning not to act unilaterally too soon, and argued that it was still possible, and preferable, to secure UN approval for the US hostilities towards Iraq. Some bourgeois commentators in the US even raised the possibility that the Republican foreign policy elders might have been speaking on behalf of George Bush the elder as they argued for a repeat of the approach which guided the previous Gulf War. The Democrats, even the left of that party, were remarkably silent in this dispute within the ruling party, with the sole exception of a brief foray into the spotlight by Gore who tried to score points with the left of the Democrats by issuing a statement that war with Iraq would be an error, distracting attention and focus from the war against terrorism.

The question for us is what is the significance of these divergences within the bourgeoisie of the world’s only superpower.

First, it is important not to exaggerate the significance of the recent debate. Historical precedent demonstrates amply that when there are serious imperialist policy disputes within the American bourgeoisie, while the antagonists understand that the stakes are high, they do not shy away from pursuing their policy orientations even at the risk of provoking political turmoil. Clearly these political consequences were not present in the recent debate, as they were, for example during Vietnam. In no way did this debate reflect any break in the fundamental unity of the American bourgeoisie on imperialist policy. Second, the disagreement was not on the question of war against Iraq, upon which there is nearly complete agreement within the American ruling class. All sides agree with this policy objective, not because of anything that Saddam Hussein has done or threatens to do, or out of a desire to avenge the failings of Bush the elder, or the desire to boost Exxon’s oil profits in any vulgar materialist sense, but because of the necessity to serve a warning again to the European powers who would play their own card in the Middle East, Germany especially. This warning is meant to serve notice that the US is not afraid to use military force to maintain its hegemony. Therefore, it was no accident or particular surprise that it has been German imperialism that has been most vehement in its opposition to the US war preparations, since it is its imperialist interests that are primarily targeted by US imperialism’s offensive.

The debate within the US ruling circles has focused on when and on what basis to unleash the war, and perhaps more critically how far should the US go in acting alone at the present time. The American bourgeoisie knows on the one hand that it must be prepared to act unilaterally, and that acting unilaterally will have significant consequences for it on the international terrain. It will undoubtedly contribute to further isolation of American imperialism, provoke greater resistance and antagonism on the international level, and potentially push other powers to look for possible alliances to counter American aggressiveness, all of which will further impact on the difficulties facing American imperialism in the coming period. So the actual moment when the US discards any pretext of securing international endorsement of its military actions and acts unilaterally is in fact a tactical decision that has serious strategic implications. In March, 2002, Kenneth M. Pollack, currently a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director at the Council on Foreign Affairs and formerly Director for Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration openly talked of the need for the government to act quickly to unleash war against Iraq before the war fever whipped up so successfully in the US following 9/11 and the international sympathy created by the terrorist attacks that facilitated other nations into acquiescing in the US military operations evaporated. As Pollack put it, “Too much delay could be as problematic as too little, because it would risk the momentum gained from the victory over Afghanistan. Today the shock of the September 11 attacks is still fresh and the US government and public are ready to make sacrifices – while the rest of the world recognises American anger and may be leery of getting on the wrong side of it. The longer the wait before an invasion, the harder it will be to muster domestic and international support for it, even though the reason for invading would have little or nothing to do with Iraq’s connection to terrorism…The United States can afford to wait a little while before turning to Saddam, in other words, but not indefinitely” (Foreign Affairs, Mar-Apr 2002, p.47). The opposition to US military intervention in Iraq, both within the US working class, which is not all lined up behind this coming war, and around the world among secondary and tertiary powers implies in fact that the US may have indeed delayed too long before attacking Iraq.

It is clear that the more cautious elements within the ruling team, notably Colin Powell, who advocated diplomatic arm twisting to gain Security Council endorsement for military action against Iraq, prevailed within the administration last fall, and, as events have demonstrated, their tactical approach has proven quite effective, in gaining a unanimous vote, which gives the US the pretext to unleash war against Iraq when it wants. But clearly by February any momentum gained last fall has been largely dissipated, as France, Germany, Russia and China have openly opposed American war plans, with three of them (China, France and Russia) having veto power in the Security Council. Critics within the American bourgeoisie have raised concerns that the Bush administration lacks sufficient skill in manoeuvring to gain international endorsement for war (see for example recent comments by Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).

The contradictions inherent in the present situation raise extremely serious problems for the US. Decomposition and chaos on the international level pose the impossibility of creating new “coalitions” on the international level. Thus in fact Rumsfeld and Cheney are right when they insist that it will never again be possible to constitute an international coalition on the level of 1990-91. Yet it is impossible to imagine that US imperialism could permit such a situation to block it from ever again taking military action in pursuit of its own imperialist interests. On the other hand, if the US does take unilateral military action, whatever the short term success it will achieve, it will only isolate the US further on the international level, alienate the smaller countries, and make them contestationist, more resistant to the bully superpower. On the other hand, if the US backs off and does not wage unilateral warfare in the current framework, it would be a serious show of weakness by the superpower, that would only embolden smaller powers to play their own cards and directly challenge US dominance.

The issue for revolutionaries is not to fall into the trap of predicting at what precise moment the American bourgeoisie will unleash unilateral war, whether in Iraq in the near future, or in some other venue at a future date, but to understand clearly the forces at work, the nature of the debate within the US ruling circles, and the serious implications for further chaos and instability on the international situation in the period ahead.

JG

Marxism, an indispensable weapon for the working class

Internationalism, as part of the communist left, has never hidden its belonging to the political milieu which claim its adherence to marxism, the communist theory that has historically best expressed the movement of the working class towards its political and economic emancipation. Marxism has demonstrated its superiority over all other social theories by being able to offer a global understanding of the movement of human history and to predict the broad lines of its future evolution. Moreover marxism as the theoretical viewpoint of the revolutionary class in capitalism , is the most advanced point of human thinking about social reality. At the same time marxism is not a kind of neutral science that can be learned in the unie that can be learned in the universities for the sake of learning. Marxism is over all a weapon of combat of the working class in its revolutionary struggle against capitalism, a tool for the advance of proletarian consciousness through the exposure of bourgeoisie mystifcations and the expelling of all bourgeoisie’s ideological influences from the working class. For us only those political organizations which base themselves in Marxism can be truly meaningful in the struggle to overthrow capitalism by the working class.

Of course we know that one is not a revolutionary simply because it swears to be a "marxist". In fact for the greatest part of the last century most of the forces of the left wing of the political apparatus of the bourgeois state, have, cynically, called themselves "marxists". All around the world every school children is taught that the political continuator of the Socialist parties that helped massacre the proletariat during W.W.I and the Communist parties of the Stalinist counterrevolution are marxist organizations –the supposed defenders of the interest of the working class. And the same is said of their leftist appendages, the troskist, moist and other so-called marxist-leninist gruplets that chant, with a more radical tone, the same counterrevolutionary songs than the former outionary songs than the former organizations. Indeed the bourgeois media goes as far as calling ‘marxist’ many currently demonized little sanguinary dictators like Castro, Milosevic, Kim Sung, and even Sadam Hussein!

In other words the dominant class has learned a long time ago that to better attack the consciousness of the working class was not enough with openly attacking marxism, as it did at the beginning of the communist movement during the XIX century. In fact the bourgeoisie on its permanent struggle to undermine the consciousness of the proletariat, has found more effective to pretend from the left of its political apparatus to represent ‘marxism’, while from the right accuses it of some of the worst crimes that capitalism has committed against humanity.

Thus we are aware that the allegiance to marxism is not enough to judge the class nature of a political organization –which is determined by their whole practice expressed in their program, political orientations, activities and political origins. On the other hand we know that there are well meaning individuals that want to be revolutionaries while they are at the same time caught in the trap of the "anti-marxist" campaigns that the bourgeoisie has so much developed since the collapse of the Stalist re collapse of the Stalist regimes. Yet, instead of capitulating to the pressure of bourgeois ideology and the confusions of these elements, this makes even more important for marxist revolutionaries to defend marxism.

As far as ND is concerned, according to its elements themselves, they are not "marxists", but the declared enemies of marxism. For us they are not confused well meaning militants, but individuals with a coherent bourgeois orientation and practice.

Is the Defense of Marxism paranoia?

On our statement on ND we essentially said that:

-ND, because of its political activity and main self-declared porpouse –"our goal is to spread an alternative to marxsim"-, is in general sense a bourgeois group, which main function is to spread distrust in the revolutionary traditions of marxism.

-yet, ND, because its main field of action, seems more precisely to be an organized effort of the bourgeoisie to infiltrate the so-called "non-market, anti-satist, libertarian socialist" political milieu of which Discussion bulletin is its main forum.

-and we finished by calling this milieu –particularly its De Leonist 0;particularly its De Leonist components, which consider themselves officially marxist- to react against ND’s activities and in particular for DB to stop being a willing vehicle of the propaganda of this group.

This was and is our position about ND and if the publisher of DB wanted to disagree with us, defend ND or whatever he should at least took up the trouble to quote our statement so that his readers, particularly those which don’t know Internationalism, could have formed an opinion for themselves. The accusation that we are "paranoid" because we defend marxism seems so baseless –even strangely foolish coming from somebody who considers himself a marxist- that hardly deserves a serious response. Any children knows how to use that term to mean that somebody has lost all sense of reality and is victim of delusions of persecution. Well, not even FG can’t deny the reality of ND attacks to marxism (he prefers to use the term "rejection"), is he also without knowing "paranoid"? Of course FG could have said that we are "paranoid" because we have the suspicion that ND is "an organized effort of the bourgeoisie". About this question obviously we don’t have the prove that ND is so, other than calling the attention to its politics and behavior, bs politics and behavior, but this does not change a iota of the fact that ND is a bourgeois group.

However, it seems to us that what Frank G. is avoiding with the polemic trick of labeling us as "paranoid", is to take himself a stand in relation to the class nature and activity of ND. Here are some questions that he should consider answering: Does he consider this group despite its anti-marxism and its bourgeois democratic ideology a genuine political expression of the working class? Does he considers ND to be a part of what DB terms "the real revolutionaries of our era: the non-market, anti-statist, libertarian socialists."? Furthermore, we know that DB considers itself a forum for the debate and discussion between the components of this "political milieu", then, how does his publisher explains that ND has never taken the trouble to respond to the critics of other groups and contributor of DB?

In any case even if FG does not want to take a clear position on ND, he should at least explain his suspicion of paranoia symptoms on those who defend marxism vis a vis the campaigns of slanders of its declared enemies. For our part we think that the defense of marxism is our most elementary responsibility, and call again those with an adherence to DeLeonism –which claimso DeLeonism –which claims a historical affiliation to marxism- to do likewise. This activity is particularly crucial on face of a new generation of militant workers without political culture and almost not experience in the working class struggle.

Eduardo Smith.

The debate on the means of struggle

The revolutionary events of 1905 in Russia provoked something like an earthquake in the whole workers' movement. As soon as the workers' councils were formed, as soon as the workers launched mass strikes the left wing of Social Democracy (with Rosa Luxemburg in her text Mass strike, Party and Trade Unions, Trotsky in his text on 1905, Pannekoek in several texts, especially on parliamentarism), started to draw the lessons of these struggles. The emphasis on the self-organisation of the working class in councils, the critique of parliamentarism, which was pushed forward in particular by Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek, was not the result of a tendency towards anarchism but was a first attempt at grasping the lessons of the new situation at the onset of capitalism’s decadence and of trying to understand the new forms of struggles.

Despite the relative international isolation of revolutionaries in Japan the debate on the conditions and means of struggles that also arose in Japan reflected the tumult in the working class and its revolutionary minorities on a world scale.

Much more clearly than before, two tendencies clashed.

On the one hand the tendency around Kotoku, with strong anarchist leanings, since their whole emphasis was on “direct action” along anarchist lines: a general strike and revolutionary syndicalism. Kotoku went to the USA in 1905/06 and became acquainted with the positions of the syndicalist IWW[1] and established contact with Russian anarchists. The anarcho-syndicalist current published the paper Hikari – The Light – from 1905 on.

On the other hand, Katayama defended unconditionally the parliamentary road to socialism in Shinkigen (New Times). Despite the divergences between these two wings they joined in 1906 to form the Socialist Party of Japan (Nippon Shakaito), which – as Katayama suggested – was to fight for socialism "within the limits of the constitution".

The Socialist Party of Japan existed from 24/02/1906 until 22/2/1907 and published the paper Hikari until December 1906.[2]

In February 1907 the 1st Congress of the new socialist party was held, where different points of view clashed. After having elected a delegate for the Stuttgart Congress of the 2nd International the discussion began. Kotoku spoke up vigorously against parliamentary work and demanded direct action (chokusetsu kodo). "We will absolutely not be able to carry out a real revolution for the objectives of socialism through universal suffrage and parliamentary politics. There is no other possible method than the direct action of the united workers (...) Three million men preparing for elections is worth nothing [for this] does not represent three million conscious and organised men". Tazoe defended the struggle on the strictly parliamentary terrain, while the majority adopted a compromise resolution tabled by T. Sakai. This went no further than to remove from the statutes the words "within the limits of the constitution".

At the same time the members were entitled to choose whether or not to take part in the movement for general voting rights, in anti-militaristic and anti-religious movements.

The positions and critique of Kotoku degenerated into anarchism and failed to take up the critique which began to be put forward by the left wing of the 2nd International of the opportunism of social-democracy, against parliamentarism and trade unionism.

Following this debate, Kotoku, who considered himself an anarchist from 1905 onwards, acted more and more as an obstacle to the construction of an organisation; above all he prevented searching elements from dealing in more depth with Marxism. He wanted to propose the perspective of "direct action". Instead of pushing forward the theoretical clarification of political positions, thus contributing to the construction of the organisation, he felt an urge for frenetic activism.

As soon as the congress was over the Socialist Party was forbidden by the police.

After a renewed resurgence of strikes in 1907 there was another reflux of the class struggle between 1909-1910. During this time police hunted revolutionaries like dogs. The mere carrying of red flags was already considered a crime. In 1910 the anarchist Kotoku Shusui was arrested and accused of having plotted to assassinate the emperor. Many left socialists were also arrested. In January 1911 Kotoku and eleven other socialists were sentenced to death and executed – under the pretext of wanting to assassinate the emperor. The socialist press was banned, meetings were prohibited, and socialist books, which could be found in bookshops and libraries, were burnt. In the face of this repression, a large number of revolutionaries went into exile or withdrew. The long period of the “Japanese winter” (fuyu) began.

Revolutionaries who had not gone into exile and intellectuals now used an editing house – Baibunsha – for publishing their texts in conditions of illegality. In order to escape censorship, the articles had to be written in an ambiguous way.

In Europe repression and the imposition of the anti-socialist laws were not able to stop the growth of Social Democracy (for example the German SPD or, still more severely repressed, the RSDLP in Russia and the SdKPIL in Poland & Lithuania). The workers' movement in Japan faced even more difficulties to grow under conditions of repression and to gain in strength and set up revolutionary organisations functioning with a party spirit, in other words of going beyond the practice of small circles where the role of individuals was preponderant, a practice whose weight had always dominated the movement in Japan.

Neither on a programmatic nor on an organisational level had the movement reached the step where a marxist wing could become significant. Despite the first contacts with the 2nd International closer links were still to be established. The movement in Japan was still dominated by the circle spirit and individual leaders continued to play a dominant role. Anarchism, pacifism and humanitarianism still had a big influence.

Despite these specificities, we can see that the working class in Japan had become “integrated” into the international working class, and, although lacking the long experience of class struggle accompanied by the major programmatic and organisational acquisitions of the revolutionary movement in Europe, it faced much the same questions and showed similar trends as the class elsewhere. In this sense the history of the working class in Japan has more parallels with the history of the class in the USA or other more peripheral countries, where a marxist wing had not been able to gain the upper hand and where anarcho-syndicalism still played a major role.[3]

The Working Class and World War I

Although Japan declared war on Germany at the end of 1914 in order to snatch the colonial assets from Germany (within a few months Japan conquered German colonial outposts in the Pacific Ocean and Tsingtao [China]), Japanese territory was never touched by the fighting.

Since the centre of the war lay in Europe, Japan only participated directly in the war in its early phase. After these early military successes against Germany it refrained from further military activities and in a certain sense played a ”neutral role”. Whereas in Europe the working class was more and more urgently confronted with the problem of the war, in Japan the class war provoked an economic boom. Japan had in fact become a major arms supplier, and had an enormous need for manpower. The number of factory workers doubled between 1914 and 1919. In 1914 some 850,000 employees worked in 17,000 companies, by 1919 1,820,000 employees worked in 44,000 companies. While male employees still counted for a weaker part of the total workforce, in 1919 they had risen to almost 50%. By the end of the war there were 450,000 miners. The Japanese bourgeoisie thus became one of the big beneficiaries of the war – it became a big war supplier and at the same time it was spared the mass mobilisations and the total militarisation that occurred in the European powers.

Because Japan found gigantic outlets in the armaments sector during World War I it could evolve from a still mainly agriculturally dominated society into an industrial society. The increase of production between 1914 and 1919 was 78%.

Because Japanese military involvement remained very limited,, the working class in Japan did not face the same situation as in Europe. Unlike the ruling class in Europe, the Japanese bourgeoisie did not find it necessary to undertake the mass mobilisation and militarisation of society. This made it possible for the trade unions in Japan to abstain from establishing a "holy alliance” with capital, as the unions did in the European countries, and so to avoid being unmasked as pillars of capital. Whereas the workers in Europe were confronted both with starvation and enormous imperialist massacres with a total loss of 20 million lives, years of trench warfare, and the loss of the flower of working class youth, the proletariat in Japan was saved from this choice between life and death. Thus the driving force of the struggle against war, which had pushed the working class in Europe, in Germany and Russia in particular, into struggle, and radicalised it, was missing. There was no fraternisation, as occurred between Russian and German soldiers or on the Western Front.

This contrast in the situation of different sectors of the world proletariat during World War I was an indication that, contrary to what revolutionaries thought at the time, the conditions of imperialist war were not the most favourable for the development and generalisation of the world revolution.

Revolutionaries in Europe, who put forward internationalist positions and perspectives shortly after the beginning of World War I and who met in Summer 1915 in Zimmerwald and later in Kienthal could refer to a revolutionary tradition of the period leading up to World War I (the position of Marxists in the 19th century, the statements of the 2nd International at the congresses of Stuttgart and Basle). However, socialists in Japan had to pay the price of their relative isolation in relation to this question, because their internationalist resistance could not base itself on a more profound, solidly anchored position in Marxism. As in 1904/05 most of the voices raised against the war were pacifist or humanist, and revolutionaries in Japan failed to take up the perspective propagated by the revolutionary vanguard in Zimmerwald – the 2nd International is dead, a new International must be formed, war can only be finished through turning the imperialist war into a civil war.

Nevertheless the tiny minority of revolutionaries in Japan did recognise the responsibility which lay on their shoulders. They raised their internationalist voice in illegal[4] newspapers, they continued to meet in secret,

and despite their limited forces, they did their best to spread internationalist positions. While Lenin and the activities of the Bolsheviks were hardly known, the internationalist position of the German Spartakists and the courageous fight of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg received a lot of attention.[5]

Food Riots in August 1918

Although Japan had experienced a certain economic boom during and because of the war, the onset of the period of capitalist decadence in 1914 was fundamentally an economic phenomenon on a world scale that made itself felt in every country, including those that had been spared the military ravages of World War I. Japanese capital could not hold itself aloof from the permanent crisis of overproduction, brought about by the relative saturation of world markets. Likewise, the working class in Japan would have to face up to the same change in conditions and perspectives forced on the proletariat on a world scale.

Although wages had risen in all industrial sectors by 20-30%, due to a labour shortage, prices increased between 1914-1919 by 100%. Real wages fell altogether from a level of 100 in 1914 to 61 in 1918. These big price increases forced the working class into a series of defensive struggles.

Between 1917 and 1918 the price of rice doubled. In the summer of 1918 workers started to protest against the price increases. There are no reports about strikes in the factories and a generalisation of demands to other areas. Apparently thousands of workers took to the streets; however these demonstrations did not take on a more organised form, or formulate any specific aim or demand. Shops seem to have been plundered. In particular agricultural workers and the recently proletarianised workforce, as well as Burakumin (social ”outcasts”) seem to have played a very active role in the looting. Many houses and company offices were looted. There seems to have been no unification of economic and political demands. Unlike the development of the struggles in Europe there were no mass meetings and no workers' councils. After the repression of the movement some 8,000 workers were arrested. More than 100 people were killed. The government resigned for tactical reasons.

The working class had arisen spontaneously – but at the same time the political immaturity of the class became glaringly clear.

Although workers' struggles can erupt spontaneously, the movement can only develop its full strength if it can draw upon a political and organisational maturation. Without this more profound maturation a movement will quickly collapse. This was the case here; they collapsed as fast as they had arisen. There doesn’t seem to have been any organised intervention by a political organisation.

Without the persevering activities of the Bolsheviks and Spartakists the movements in Russia and in Germany would have faltered very quickly. In Japan such an organised intervention was fatally missing.

But despite the different conditions of experience in Europe and in Japan, the working class was to make a big step forward.

The Echo of the Russian Revolution in Japan

When in February 1917 the working class in Russia put the revolutionary process into motion and took power in October, this first successful proletarian rising also found its echo in Japan. The Japanese bourgeoisie immediately understood the danger springing from the revolution in Russia. From April 1918 it was one of the first to participate in the most ruthless manner in the setting up of a counter revolutionary army. Japan was the last country to withdraw its troops from Siberia in November 1922.

While news about the Russian revolution spread very quickly from Russia to the west, and the revolutionary development in Russia had a great impact in particular in Germany and led to a destabilisation of the armies in Central Europe, the echo of the revolution was still very limited in Japan. Not only geographical factors contributed to this – several thousand kilometres separated Japan from the centre of the revolution and Petrograd and Moscow – but also the lower level of radicalisation in Japan due to the war. However, the working class in Japan was to take part in the international wave of revolutionary struggles that unfolded between 1917-23.

The Reaction of Revolutionaries

In the beginning, news about the Russian revolution only spread very slowly and patchily to Japan. Only in May and June 1917 were the first articles about the revolution published in the socialist press.

Sakai drafted a message of greetings under conditions of illegality, which was printed by Katayama in the USA in the migrant workers’ newspaper Heimin (Commoners), in the IWW paper International Socialist Review and also in Russian papers. In Japan Takabatake was the first to give an account of the role of the Soviets in "Baibunsha", emphasising the decisive role of revolutionaries. However, the different roles that the parties played during the revolution in Russia was not yet known.

The level of ignorance about events in Russia and about the role of the Bolsheviks can be seen through the first statements of the best known revolutionaries. Thus Arahata wrote in February 1917: "None of us knew the names of Kerensky, Lenin and Trotsky". And in the summer of 1917 Sakai called Lenin an anarchist, and even in April 1920 he claimed that “Bolshevism is somewhat similar to syndicalism”. Even the anarchist Osogui Sakae wrote in 1918 that “Bolshevik tactics were the tactics of anarchism”'.

Out of enthusiasm about the development in Russia Takabatake and Yakamawa drafted a Manifesto (ketsugibun) in May 1917 in Tokyo, which they sent to the RSDLP. However, due to the chaos in transport it never reached revolutionaries in Russia, and since there was hardly any direct contact between the milieu of revolutionaries in exile (most Japanese revolutionary elements living abroad such as Katayama lived in the USA) and the centre of the revolution, the manifesto was only published two years later at the founding congress of the Communist International in March 1919.

This message from Japanese Socialists declared:

“Since the very beginning of the Russian revolution we have followed your fearless activities with enthusiasm and deep admiration. Your work has had a great influence on our people’s consciousness. Today, we are indignant that our government has sent troops into Siberia under whatever pretext. This undoubtedly serves as an impediment to the free development of your revolution. We deeply regret that we are too weak to counter the peril with which you are threatened by our imperialist government. We are quite unable to do anything because the government is persecuting us with severity. However, you may rest assured that the red flag of revolution will wave over all of Japan in the not too distant future.

Along with this letter, we are sending you a copy of the resolution approved at our May 1, 1917, rally.

With revolutionary greetings, the Executive Committee of the Socialist Groups in Tokyo and Yokohama”

The "Resolution of the Japanese Socialists" read as follows:

"We, the socialists of Japan, assembled in Tokyo May 1, 1917, express our deepest sympathy for the Russian revolution, which we follow with admiration.

We recognise that the Russian revolution is both a political revolution of the bourgeoisie against medieval absolutism and a revolution of the proletariat against modern-day capitalism.

Transforming the Russian revolution into a world revolution is not a matter for only the Russian socialists; it is the responsibility of socialists of the entire world.

The capitalist system has already reached its’ highest stage of development in all countries, and we have entered the epoch of fully developed capitalist imperialism.

In order not to be deceived by the ideologists of imperialism, socialists of all countries must steadfastly defend the positions of the International, and all the forces of the international proletariat must be directed against our common enemy, international capitalism. Only thus will the proletariat be able to fulfil its’ historic mission.

Socialists of Russia and of all other countries must do everything in their power to put an end to the war and assist the proletariat of the warring countries to turn their weapons, today aimed at brothers on the other side of the trenches, against the ruling classes of their own countries.

We have faith in the courage of the Russian socialists and of our comrades around the world. We are firmly convinced that the revolutionary spirit will spread and permeate all countries.

The Executive Committee of the Socialist Group in Tokyo” (Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919, published in Premier Congrès de l’Internationale Communiste, p. 224).

“At the same time that the Russian revolution signifies, in one of its aspects, a political revolution by the rising commercial and industrial class against the politics of a medieval despotism, it is also, in another of its aspects, a social revolution by the class of common people (heimin) against capitalism.

Therefore on this occasion it is the responsibility of the Russian revolution - and, at the same time, of socialists in all countries - to resolutely insist on an immediate end to the war. The class of common people (Gemini) in all the warring countries must be rallied and its fighting strength redirected, so that it is aimed in each case at the ruling class in its own country. We have confidence in the brave struggle of the Russian Socialist Party and the comrades in all countries and look forward to the success of the socialist revolution" (resolution of 7/5/17, from Tokyo-Yokohama socialists).

The same socialists of Tokyo sent another telegram to Lenin, of which they sent a copy to the USPD and to the SPD in Germany.

“The moment, when in view of the social reorganisation of the world, our movement will be reconstituted and when together with the comrades of all countries we shall work together as best as we can, this moment probably is not so far from now. We hope that in this critical phase of truce and in view of all these important events we can take up contact with you. As far as the foundation of an International of Socialists, which is planned for the near future, is concerned, if we can we want to send a delegation and we are still in the process of making preparations to do so. Hoping that you recognise our organisation (Baibunsha) and hoping for your support and much advice (...) the representatives of socialists of Tokyo greet you”.

This message shows the internationalist orientations, the efforts towards regroupment and the support for the foundation of a new International. However, it is hard to assess which precise preparations to set up an organisation were taken by Baibunsha at that moment.

While this message was intercepted by the secret police and it probably never reached the Bolsheviks, the SPD and USPD, however, kept it secret and never published it.

As these statements show the revolution acted as a powerful spark on revolutionaries. At the same time, the impact of the revolution on the working class as a whole was certainly weaker.

In contrast to many countries to the west of Russia (Finland, Austria, Hungary, Germany etc), where the mere reception of the news about the overthrow of the Tsar and the successful taking of power through the workers’ councils had created such enthusiasm and such an overwhelming wave of solidarity, that the workers themselves intensified the struggles “in their own country”, there was no direct reaction amongst the broad working masses in Japan. After the end of World War I militancy as a whole was on the increase – however, not explicitly because of the revolution ignited in Russia. The reason had more of an economic background: because the export boom sparked off by the big growth in exports during the war period had collapsed shortly after the end of the war. In 1920 a depression started. Workers' anger was aimed mainly at price increases and a wave of lay-offs. In 1919 there were some 2,400 “labour disputes” with 350,000 workers on strike; there was a decline of the movement in 1920, when 130,000 workers struck in about 1,000 separate disputes. The movement seems to have retreated from 1920 onwards.

Workers' struggles remained more or less contained within an economic terrain, and hardly any political demands were raised. This is why there were no workers' councils – unlike Europe or even the USA and Argentina, where the Russian revolution had inspired workers on the US West coast and in Buenos Aires to radicalise their movement

Between 1919 and 1920 some 150 unions were founded, all of which acted as an obstacle against the radicalisation of the workers. The unions were the spearhead and most pernicious weapon of the ruling class to counter-act the rising combativity. Thus in 1920 the Labour Union League, Rodo Kumiai Domei, a national Trades Union Federation, was founded. Until then the union movement was split into more than 100 single unions.

At the same time a large “democracy movement” was launched with the help of the bourgeoisie in 1919, putting forward the demand of general voting rights and electoral reform. As in other Western European countries parliamentarism served as a bulwark against revolutionary struggles. Japanese students were the main protagonists of this demand.

The debate on the new methods of struggle

Under the impact of the Russian revolution and the wave of international struggles, a process of reflection also set in amongst revolutionaries in Japan.

Inevitably this process of reflection was marked by contradictions. On the one hand the anarcho-syndicalists (or those who claimed to be so) claimed adherence to the positions of the Bolsheviks, since they were the only ones who had successfully completed a revolution and aimed at the destruction of the state. This current maintained that the politics of the Bolsheviks proved their rejection of a purely parliamentary orientation (a debate known as the Gikau-sei-saku versus Chokusetsu-kodo line).

In this debate in February 1918 Takabatake defended the idea that economic and political struggles were very complex. The struggle could involve both dimensions – direct action and the parliamentary struggle. Parliamentarism and syndicalism were not the only elements composing the socialist movement. He spoke up against the anarcho-syndicalist rejection of the “economic struggle” as well as the individualistic attitude of Osugi. While Takabatake in a very confused manner placed “direct action” and mass movement on the same level, his text was part of a general process of clarification of the means of struggle in this epoch.

Yamakawa stressed that the identification of a political movement with parliamentary politics was not valid. Moreover he stated, “I believe syndicalism has degenerated because of reasons which I do not understand sufficiently”.

In view of the limited experience and the limited level of theoretical-programmatic clarification of these questions, it is important to recognise that there were voices in Japan who put into question the old methods of trades' union and parliamentary struggle and were searching for answers to the new situation. This demonstrates that the working class was also confronted with the same questions and that revolutionaries in Japan were also involved in the same process of trying to come to grips with the new situation.

At the founding congress of the German KPD the lessons of the new epoch in relation to the union and parliamentary question were beginning to be drawn albeit in a groping manner. The discussion of the conditions of struggle in the new epoch were of a world historical importance. Such questions could only be clarified if there was an organisation and a framework for discussions.

Without an organisation and still isolated internationally, clarification in the revolutionary milieu in Japan was to remain difficult. Therefore it is all the more important to be aware of these efforts during that phase to put into question the former methods of trades' union and parliamentary methods, without falling into the trap of anarchism.

Attempts at clarification and the construction of an organisation

The revolution in Russia, the new historical conditions of the decadence of capitalism, the unfolding of the international wave of struggles confronted revolutionaries in Japan with new challenges. It was obvious that clarification and the search for answers to these questions could only make headway if there was a Marxist pole of reference. The formation of such a pole came up against big obstacles, because its precondition was a clear cut delineation between an anarchist wing, hostile to political organisations, and a wing which affirmed the necessity of a revolutionary organisation but which, however, was still unable to tackle its construction in a determined manner.

Hampered by a tendency to still remain oriented towards and centred on Japan, marked by a predominance of a circle spirit and well-known personalities, who had only recently become more familiarised with marxism, and a weak determination to set up a fighting organisation, these elements were slow in facing up to the task of the hour.

Thus amongst the most famous leading personalities (Yamakawa, Arahata and Sakai) Yamakawa was still convinced in 1918 that he ought to write a “critique of Marxism”. However, in the May edition of New Society, Sakai, Arahata and Yamakawa proclaimed their support for Bolshevism. In February 1920 they reported the foundation of the Comintern in their paper New Social Review (Shin Shakai Hyoron – which in September 1920 changed its name to Shakaishugi [Socialism]). At the same time these revolutionaries were still active in study circles such as the Friday Society (Shakai shugi kenkyu -Studies in Socialism) and Wednesday Society (Shakai mondai kenkyu -studies on social problems).

Their activities were less geared towards the construction of an organisation, than the publication of papers, which were mostly short-lived and which were not anchored in any organisational structure. Against the background of these confusions and hesitations on the organisation question amongst revolutionaries in Japan, the Comintern itself was going to play an important part in the attempts to set up an organisation.

DA

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the multiplication of wars and genocide quickly cancelled all the speeches about the so-called the new world order that was supposed to result from it. On the other hand, we have to recognise that all the ideological campaigns on democracy and capitalist prosperity met a certain echo and still weigh heavily on the class consciousness of the exploited.

The collapse of the eastern bloc was supposed to open up huge "new markets" and give rise to a new phase of economic development, peace and democracy. During the 1990s, predictions about this so-called economic development were supported by the media barrage about the "emerging countries" like Brazil or the countries of South East Asia. At the end of the 90s the "new economy" took up the baton, supposedly opening a new phase of expansion based on a technological revolution. What has the real story been? It has shown that all these have been false prophecies! After the poorest countries of the third world, which for two or three decades have seen a net fall in their GNP per inhabitant, we saw the fall of the "second world" with the economic collapse of the countries of the eastern bloc, and the bankruptcy of Russia and Brazil in 1998; Japan broke down at the beginning of the 90s and, eight years later, the whole of South East Asia was in serious trouble. The latter, which for a long time had been seen by the ideologues of capitalism as the new pole of development for the 21st century, began to fall by the wayside, along with a whole number of other "intermediate" or "emerging" countries. While the e-economies in the developed countries fell into an e-recession in 2000-2001, the emerging countries became the plunging countries. In these areas, the fragile economies were not capable of rising above debts amounting to tens of percent of the GNP. Thus, after the Mexican debt crisis at the beginning of the 80s, other countries lengthened the list: Brazil, Mexico again in 1994, the South East Asian countries, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, etc. The recession hitting the most developed countries was no longer limited to the old technological sectors (coal, steel, etc), or ones which had already reached their peak (shipbuilding, cars, etc) but the very sectors billed as the spearheads of the "new economy", the "new industrial revolution": computers, Internet, telecommunications, aeronautics, etc. In these branches, there have been hundreds of bankruptcies, restructurings, fusions, take-overs - and hundreds of thousands of redundancies, wage cuts and attacks on working conditions.

Today, with the crash in stock-exchange values in the sector that was supposed to be the key to this new prosperity, and with the recession already displaying its devastating effects, the ideological mystifications of the bourgeoisie about the crisis have begun to be seriously eroded. This is why the bourgeoisie is coming up with all sorts of false explanations about the current difficulties. It is obliged to hide as much as possible the gravity of the sickness affecting its system in order to prevent the proletariat from becoming aware that capitalism has reached a dead-end.

Speculative bubble following the crisis in Asia

Capitalism plunges inexorably into the crisis

As opposed to what the ruling class tells us, the latest dive in the economy is not the product of the collapse of the Twin Towers in the United States, even if that was an exacerbating factor, in particular for certain economic sectors such as air transport or tourism. The slow-down of American growth goes back to the bursting of the internet bubble in March 2000 and the level of economic activity was already weak at the end of summer 2001. As the experts of the OECD emphasised "the economic deceleration which began in the United States in 2000 and spread to other countries has been transformed into a world reflux of economic activity, from which few countries or regions have escaped" (Le Monde, 21 November 2001). The current economic crisis thus has nothing specifically American about it.

OECD GDP growth 1962-2002: Gradual decline of mean growth per decade since the 1960s

The capitalist system has entered its sixth phase of recession since the resurgence of the crisis at the end of the Sixties: 1967, 1970-71, 1974-75, 1980-82, 1991-93 and 2001 -?, without counting the collapse of the South East Asian countries, of Brazil, etc in the years 1997-98. Since the Sixties, each decade has shown a growth rate lower than the preceding one:

1962-69 = 5.2%

1970-79 = 3.5%

1980-89 = 2.8%

1990-99 = 2.6%

2000-02 = 2.2%

In 2002, growth in the Euro zone hardly reached 0.7%, and although the USA stayed at 2.4% this was still a less elevated figure than during the 1990s. As a matter of fact, if we look at the "fundamentals", the US economy has been marking time since 1997, because that was when the rate of profit stopped progressing.

What characterises the current recession, according to the bourgeois commentators' own statements, is the speed and the intensity of its development. The United States, the first economy of the world, very quickly plunged into recession. The fall of the American GDP is faster than at the time of the preceding recession and the aggravation of unemployment has reached a record unequalled since the 1974 crisis. Japan, the second economy of the world, fares no better. Even with negative real interest rates (in Japan, households and enterprises actually gain money by borrowing!) consumption and investment have not picked up. Despite massive revival plans, the Japanese economy has just plunged into recession for the third time. It's the strongest crisis for 20 years and according to the IMF, Japan could, for the first time since the war, go through two consecutive years of contracting economic activity. This latter accounts for 130% of GDP today and should reach 153% in 2003.

The intensification of the contradictions of decadent capitalism

In the 19th century, during the ascendant period of capitalism, the net budgetary position of public finance (the difference between income and expenditure) of the six big countries (the US, Japan, Canada, France, GB, Italy) was only occasionally in deficit, primarily due to wars. This balance was otherwise stable and in constant improvement between 1870 and 1910. The contrast is striking in decadence, where the deficit is quasi-permanent except for four years at the end of the Twenties and twenty years between 1950 and 1970. Here again the main reason for this is war, as well as economic crises.

The weight of the national debt expressed as a percentage of the GDP decreases throughout the ascending period. In general it never exceeds 50%. This ratio explodes at the time of the entry into decline, to ebb only during the period 1950-80, but without ever going down below 50%. It then goes up during the years 1980-90.

This mountain of debts which are accumulating not only in Japan but also in the other developed countries constitutes a real powder keg that could have major destabilising effects in the long term. Thus, a rough estimate of the world debt for the entirety of economic agencies (states, companies, households and banks) oscillates between 200% and 300% of world production. Concretely, that signifies two things. On the one hand, that the system has advanced the monetary equivalent of two to three times the value of world production in order to mitigate its crisis of overproduction; and on the other hand, that it would be necessary to work two to three years for nothing to repay this debt. While such massive debt can still be borne by the more developed economies, it is by contrast about to strangle the "emerging" countries one by one. This phenomenal debt on a world level is historically without precedent and shows what a dead-end the capitalist system has reached - but also reveals its capacity to manipulate the law of value in order to ensure its survival. Although in the recent period, "as the dominant world power, the US has arrogated to itself the right to finance its effort of investment and to support a very vigorous growth of consumption" ("After the euphoria, the hangover", International Review 111), no other country could have allowed itself the commercial deficit which went with growth in the US. "the result was a classic crisis of overproduction which was materialised in a reversal of the profit curve and a slow-down in economic activity in the US, several months before September 11" (ibid.). There is therefore no basis for speculations about a new phase of growth based on a so-called technological revolution. The theoretical speeches about the "new economy", the whole bluff around it, and the recent accounting frauds have seriously put into question the reliability of national accounting, which is the basis for calculating GNP - especially in America. With the scandals around Enron, Andersen, etc, we can see that a good part of the new economy was pure fiction. Hundreds of billions of dollars imputed to the accounts of such enterprises were simply made up and vanished in a flash. This cycle ended with a particularly severe stock market crash in the sector that was supposed to carry the new capitalism to the baptismal font. 

The myth of "less state"

"The direct causes of the strengthening of the capitalist state in our epoch express all the difficulties resulting from the definitive loss of correspondence between capitalist relations of production and the development reached by the productive forces" (The Decadence of Capitalism, ICC pamphlet).

We are supposed to believe that with liberalisation and globalisation, states have almost nothing more to say, that they have lost their autonomy to the markets and supranational organs like the IMF, WTO, etc. But when we look at the statistics, it has to be said that despite 20 years of "neo-liberalism", the overall economic weight of the state (more precisely, of the sector referred to as "non profit making", the expenditure of all public administration, including the cost of social security) has in no way diminished. It continues to grow, even if at a slower rhythm, to reach a crest of 45% to 50% for the 30 OECD countries with a low of around 35% for the United States and Japan, and a high of 60% to 70% for the Scandinavian countries. Oscillating at around 10% throughout the ascendant phase of capitalism, the share of the state (ie the non-market sector) in the creation of added value climbs gradually during decadence to almost 50% in 1995 in the OECD countries (source: The World Bank, Report on Development in the World, 1997).

These statistics also reveal the artificial swelling of growth rates in decadence, insofar as national accounting partly counts the same thing twice. In practice, the selling price of products in the market incorporates the taxes that are used to pay national expenditure, namely the cost of non-market services (teaching, social security, public sector personal...). The bourgeois economy calculates the value of these non-market services as being equal to the sum of wages paid to the personnel who provide them. Now, in national accounting, this sum is tacked on to the added value produced in the market sector (the only productive sector), even though it is already included in the selling price of market products (the knock-on effect of taxes and social security contributions on product prices). Consequently, in decadence, the GNP and the growth rate of the GNP inflate artificially insofar as the share of the public expenditure increases with time (from 10% in 1913 to 50% in 1995).

This share having remained quasi-constant (10%) during the course of the ascendant phase, then, if the GNP is over-estimated by 10%, the growth rates during the ascendant phase correctly reflect the reality of the development of the productive sector. In decadence on the other hand, the explosion of the unproductive sector - and particularly between 1960 and 1980 - artificially dopes capitalism's performance. In short, to correctly evaluate real growth in decadence it is necessary to deduct nearly 40% of the current GNP corresponding to the growth of the unproductive sector since 1913!

As for the political weight of the states themselves, it has indeed increased. Today, as throughout the 20th century, state capitalism does not have a precise political colour. In the United States, it is the Republicans (the "right") who are now taking the initiative for a state-supported economic revival and who subsidise the airline and insurance companies. The central power also directly supports such companies through the law of "Chapter 11", which authorises firms to protect themselves from their creditors. The budgetary revival programmed by Bush has led to the federal balance going from a surplus of 2.5% of GNP to a deficit estimated by the IMF at 1.5% of the GNP in 2002, an incomparably higher rate of public spending than the most spendthrift European states. The Federal Reserve Bank, very closely related to the authorities, lowered its interest rates as the recession took shape, in order to contribute to the revival of the economic machine: from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 2% at the end of the year. Among other things this made it possible for heavily indebted households to get their hands on further loans or to renegotiate them. To be coherent, this new orientation meant a fall of the dollar, allowing American products to become more competitive and to regain parts of the global market. In Japan, the banks were re-floated twice by the state and some were even nationalised! In Switzerland, it was the state that organised the gigantic operation of re-floating the national airline company Swissair. Even in Argentina, and with the blessing of the IMF and the World Bank, the government had recourse to a vast public-works programme to try to recreate employment. If in the 19th century the political parties used the state to advance their interests, in decadence it is urgent global and imperialist economic requirements that dictate the policy to be followed and determine the colour of the government in place. This fundamental analysis, developed by the communist left, was amply confirmed throughout 20th century and is more than ever relevant today when the stakes are even higher.

Total state spending as a percent of GDP

The development of military expenditure

It was Engels who at the end of the 19th century anticipated what would be the historical alternative of the phase of decadence: "socialism or barbarism". Rosa Luxemburg developed a number of political and theoretical implications from this and the Communist International defined the characteristics of the new period: "the era of wars and revolutions". Finally, it was the left communists, and in particular the Communist Left of France, who systematised and deepened the place and the significance of war in the ascendance and decadence of capitalism.

Without question one can affirm that, in contrast to the ascendant phase, the decadence of capitalism has been characterised by war in all its forms: world wars, permanent local wars, etc. In this connection, as a very useful historical complement, we cannot resist the temptation to quote extracts by the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) in his book The Age of Extremes, who - by means of comparative assessments - masterfully distinguishes the fundamental differences between the "long 19th" and the "short 20th century: "How are we to make sense of the Short Twentieth Century, that is to say of the years from the outbreak of the First World War to the collapse of the USSR which, as we can now see in retrospect, forms a coherent historical period that has now ended? ... in the Short [Twentieth] Century more human beings had been killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before in history ... it was without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it, barely ceasing for a moment in the 1920s, but also by the unparalleled scale of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history, to systematic genocide. Unlike the ‘long nineteenth century', which seemed, and actually was a period of almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress, that is to say of improvement in the conditions of civilised life, there has, since 1914, been a marked regression from the standards then regarded as normal in the developed countries... In the course of the twentieth century, wars have been increasingly waged against the economy and infrastructure of states and against their civilian populations. Since the First World War, the number of civilian casualties in war has been far greater than the number of military casualties in all belligerent countries except the USA. ... In 1914 there had been no major war for a century ... Moreover, most wars involving major powers at all had been comparatively quick... The length of war was measured in months or even (like the 1866 war between Prussia and Austria) in weeks. Between 1871 and 1914 there had been no wars in Europe at all in which the armies of major powers crossed any hostile frontier... There had been no world wars at all... Between 1815 and 1914 no major power fought another outside its immediate region ... All this changed in 1914. In short, 1914 opens the age of massacre. Most non-revolutionary and non-ideological wars of the past had not been waged as struggles to death or total exhaustion... Why, then, was the First World War, waged by the leading powers on both sides as a zero-sum game, i.e., as a war which could only be totally won or totally lost? The reason was that this war, unlike earlier wars, which were typically waged for limited and specifiable objects, was waged for unlimited ends... It was an absurd and self-defeating aim which ruined both victors and vanquished. It drove the defeated into revolution and the victors into bankruptcy and physical exhaustion... Modern warfare involves all citizens and mobilises most of them; it is waged with armaments which require a diversion of the entire economy to produce them, and which are used in unimaginable quantities; it produces untold destruction and utterly dominates and transforms the life of the countries involved in it. Yet all these phenomena belong to the wars only of the twentieth century... Did war advance economic growth? In one sense it plainly did not... About this rising curve of barbarism after 1914 there is, unfortunately, no serious doubt." (our emphases)

This "age of massacres" inaugurated by the First World War and contrasting so clearly with the long and much less murderous 19th century, is further attested by the relatively low level of military expenditure in world production throughout the ascendant phase of capitalism, and by its powerful growth in the ensuing period. From 2% of world production in 1860, to 2.5% in 1913, it rose to 7.2% in 1938, reached around 8.4% in the 60s and again went up to about 10% at the height of the cold war at the end of the 80s (sources: Paul Bairoch for world production and the SIPRI for military expenditure). The particularity of armaments is that, unlike machinery or consumer goods, they can't be consumed in a productive manner (they can only rust or destroy other forces of production). They thus correspond to a sterilisation of capital. To the 40% growth of unproductive expenditure in the period of decadence, we thus have to add another 6% corresponding to the relative increase in military expenditure...which gives us a world production overvalued at nearly 50%. This gives a rather more accurate picture of the great performance of capitalism in the 20th century and shows the contrast with the  "almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress" of the long 19th century. 

The future remains in the hands of the working class

What is absolutely certain it is that with the development of the recession at the international level the bourgeoisie will impose a new and violent degradation of the living standards of the working class. Under the pretext of a state of war and in the name of the higher interests of the nation, the American bourgeoisie is carrying out the austerity measures it had already long envisaged, since they were necessitated by a recession which had been underway for a year: massive lay-offs, increased production rates, emergency regulations in the name of anti-terrorism which are used as a testing ground for the maintenance of social order, etc. After the collapse of the eastern bloc, the arms race slowed down for a few years but took off again in the mid-90s.  September 11 has made it possible to justify an even greater development of armaments. The military expenditure of the USA represents 37% of world spending on arms, which is rising in all countries. All over the world, unemployment levels are on the rise even though the bourgeoisie has managed to partly conceal their real extent by introducing all kinds of insecure jobs and by gross manipulation of the statistics. Everywhere in Europe, the budgets are revised downwards and new austerity measures are programmed. In the name of so-called budgetary stability, which has nothing to do with the proletariat, the European bourgeoisie is re-examining the question of retirement (lowering pension rates and lengthening working life are on the agenda) and new measures are planned to remove "the brakes on the development of growth", as the experts of the OECD say euphemistically. They talk about  "attenuating rigidities" and "making work more available" by making it far more precarious and reducing all the social benefits (unemployment, health care, various allowances, etc.). With the fall in the stock exchange, the use of pension funds for capital investment is revealed for what it is: another trick to despoil working class incomes. In Japan, the state has planned to restructure 40% of public organisations: 17 will close and 45 others will be privatised. Lastly, while these new attacks come to hit the proletariat in the heart of world capitalism, poverty develops in a breathtaking way on the periphery of capitalism. The situation of the "emerging" countries is significant for this reason, especially countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. In Argentina the average income per inhabitant has been divided in three over the last three years. The debacle is greater than what befell the US in the 30s. Turkey and Russia are not far behind.

Faced with this situation of economic dead-end, social chaos and increasing misery, the working class has only one answer: the massive development of struggles on its own class terrain in all countries. Because no "democratic alternative", no change of government, no other policy can bring any other remedy for the fatal disease of capitalism. The generalisation and the unification of the combat of the world proletariat, towards the overthrow of capitalism - this is the only alternative able to take society out of this dead end. Rarely in history has it been so evident that you cannot fight the effects of the capitalist crisis without destroying capitalism itself. The level of decomposition reached by the system, the grave consequences of its very existence, are such that the question of going beyond capitalism will more and more appear as the only realistic way out for the exploited. The future remains in the hands of the working class.

December 2002: extracts from the report on the economic crisis adopted by the 15th Congress of the ICC

Sources

• "Growth in GNP: (1962-2001"): OECD
• The ratio between the budgetary balance and the GNP (in percentage of GNP): Paul Mason and Michael Muss: "Long term tendencies in budget deficits and debts", working documents of the IMF 95/128 (December 1995)
• Alternatives Economiques : "L'etat de l'economie 2003"
• Maddison: "L'economie mondiale 1820-1992", OECD, and "Deux siecles de revolution industrielle", Pluriel H 8413