History does not obey the dates on a calendar and yet decades often become symbols for specific historical events. The thirties bring to mind the depression which hit capitalism fifty years ago; the forties, the war which destroyed the equivalent of a country life France or Italy. On the threshold of the eighties, how can we characterize the decade just ending and what will be the major phenomena of the new one just beginning?

The crisis? The crisis certainly made its mark on the 1970s but it will mark the 1980s even more. Between the sixties and the seventies there was a real change in the economic situa­tion of the world: the sixties were the last years of the reconstruction period when the dying fires of an artificial ‘prosperity’ still burned; artificial because this ‘prosperity’ was based on the ephemeral mechanisms of the reconstitution of the industrial and commercial potential of Europe and Japan destroyed during the war. Once this potential was realized capitalism found it­self once again facing its fatal impasse: the saturation of markets; that is why the sixties ended in ‘prosperity’ and the seventies in para­lysis. But there will be no difference of this sort between the seventies and the eighties except that economic stagnation will be even worse.

Slaughter and suffering? The coming years pro­mise to be particularly ‘rich’ in this domain. Never before has there been so much famine, so much genocide in the world. With all the ‘liber­ation’ of peoples, with all the aid given to them mostly in the form of war machines, the great powers will soon have erased them from the map. This apocalypse is not new, but in the coming decade with the deepening of the crisis, there will be more and more Cambodias despite all the petitions and humanitarian campaigns. Cambodia is simply a more terrifying example of the horrors which have followed in an unbroken line since World War II and which have plunged a large part of humanity into total hell. In this sense the eighties will be ravaged by the same specter of genocide as the seventies.

However recent events show very important changes developing in the very depths of society; these changes are less to do with the economic infra­structure or the degree of misery and poverty than with the behavior of the major classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

In a sense the seventies were the years of illu­sion. In the major centers of capitalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat came up against the stark reality of the crisis, often in a very brutal way. But at the same time, and particu­larly in the more advanced countries, these two classes which decide the fate of the world have had a tendency to blind themselves to this rea­lity: the bourgeoisie because it finds it unbear­able to face the historical bankruptcy of its system and the proletariat partly because it suffers from the illusions of bourgeois ideology and partly because it is not easy for the prole­tariat to understand and shoulder the crushing historic responsibilities which the crisis and the understanding of its implications place on the shoulders of the revolutionary class. For years now the bourgeoisie has been grasping at straws trying to prove that the crisis can have a solution. And it is true that since 1967 the regularly recurrent recessions (1967, 1970-71, 1974-75) accompanied by chronic inflation have been followed by a ‘recovery’. The recovery of 1972-73 led to the highest expansion rates since the war (particularly in the US). Although there were waves of galloping inflation, certain govern­ment deflationary policies were (at least, some­what) effective in keeping inflation to less than 5 per cent a year. The bourgeoisie had only to keep applying these policies and all would be well. Obviously the bourgeoisie began to realize that these reflationary policies just reflated inflation and that the deflationary policies led to recession. But even if things were not going as well as they used to, the bourgeoisie could not give up the idea that it could just continue to cut away the dead weight of the economy, to impose austerity and unemployment and one day business would be back to normal.

Today the bourgeoisie has abandoned this illusion. After the failure of all the remedies administered to the economy (see the article ‘The Acceleration of the Crisis’ in this issue) which have only managed to poison it, the bourgeoisie has discov­ered in a muffled but painful way that there is no solution to the crisis. Recognizing the impasse, there is nothing left but a leap in the dark. And for the bourgeoisie a leap in the dark is war.

This march towards war is nothing new; in fact since the end of World War II capitalism has never really disarmed as it at least partially did after the first war. And since the end of the sixties when capitalism experienced once again a decline in its economic situation, inter-imperialist tens­ions have increased and armaments have grown phen­omenally. Today a million dollars a minute are being poured into the production of the means of destruction and death. Up to now the bourgeoisie has been following the path to war in a more or less conscious way. The objective needs of its economy have been pushing it towards war but the bourgeoisie has not really been aware that war is indeed the only perspective its system can offer to humanity. The bourgeoisie is not fully aware of the fact that its inability to mobilize the proletariat for war constitutes the only serious obstacle barring the way.

Today with the total failure of the economy, the bour­geoisie is slowly realizing its true situation and is acting on it. On the one hand it is arming to the teeth. Everywhere military budgets are sky­rocketing. The already terrifying weapons at its disposal are being replaced by even more ‘effic­ient’ ones (‘Backfires’, Pershing 2s, neutron bombs, etc). But armaments are not the only field of its activity. As we pointed out in the ICC declaration on the Iran/USA crisis, the bourgeoisie has also undertaken a massive campaign to create an atmosphere of war psychosis in order to prepare public opinion for its increasingly war-like projects. Because war is on the cards and because people are not prepared for this perspective, all possible pretexts must be exploited to create ‘national unity’, ‘national pride’ and guide opinion away from sordid struggles of self-interest (meaning class struggle) towards the altruism of patriotism and the defense of civilization against the threatening forces of barbarism like Islamic fanaticism, Arab greed, totalitarianism or imperialism. This is the language the ruling class is using all over the world.

The bourgeoisie’s speeches to the working class are indeed changing. As long as it seemed as though the crisis could have a solution the bourgeoisie lulled the exploited with illusory promises: accept austerity today and everything will be better tomorrow. The left was very successful with these kinds of lies: the crisis is not the result of the insurmountable inner contradictions of the system itself, but simply a question of ‘bad management’ or ‘greedy mono­polies’ or ‘multinationals’ -- voting for the left will change all this! But today this language does not work anymore. When the left was in power it did no better than the right and from the workers point of view, often worse. Since the promise of a ‘better tomorrow’ does not fool anyone anymore, the ruling class has changed its tune. The opposite is starting to be trumpeted now: the worst is ahead of us and there is noth­ing we can do, ‘the others are to blame’, there is no way out. The bourgeoisie is hoping in this way to create the national unity which Churchill obtained in other circumstances by offering the British population “blood, sweat, tears and toil”.

As the bourgeoisie loses its own illusions it is increasingly forced to speak clearly to the work­ing class about the future. If the workers today were resigned and demoralized as they were in the thirties this language could be effective. Since we are going to have war anyway we might as well try to save what we can: ‘democracy’, the ‘land of my forefathers’, my ‘territory’; so we have to accept war and sacrifices. This is the response the ruling class would like us to make. But unhappily for them the new generations of workers do not have the resignation of their forebears. As soon as the crisis began to affect the workers, even before the crisis was recognized as such by anyone except tiny minori­ties of revolutionaries who had not forgotten the lessons of Marxism, the working class began to struggle. Its struggles at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies showed by their broad scope and militant determination that the terrible counter-revolution which weighed on society since the crushing of the first revo­lutionary wave after World War I, was now over. It was no longer ‘midnight in the century’ and capitalism had to confront the proletariat once again -- that giant it thought had been safely put to sleep. But although the proletariat was full of vitality it lacked experience and it let it­self be taken in by the traps the bourgeoisie set once it had recovered from shock. Relying on the fact that its crisis was developing at a slower pace than in the thirties, the bourgeoisie managed to communicate its own illusions about a ‘solution’ to the crisis to the workers. For several years the working class believed these stories about the ‘left alternative’ -- whether it was called the Labor government, popular power, the Programme Commun, the Social Contract, the Moncloa Pact or the historic compromise. Leaving aside open struggle for a while the workers let themselves be paraded around in electoral dead-ends adjusting themselves, almost without any reaction, to greater and greater doses of unemploy­ment and austerity. But what the first wave of struggles in 1968 already showed is being con­firmed again today: bourgeois mystifications do not have the force they used to have. After so much use the speeches on ‘the defense of democracy and civilization’ or on ‘the socialist fatherland’ wear out their impact. And the ‘national inter­est’, ‘terrorism’ or other ideological gadgets cannot replace them. As we say in our article ‘Our Intervention and its Critics’ (in this issue) the proletariat has once again taken up the path of struggle and obliged the left, if it was in government, to move into the opposition in order to accomplish its capitalist task by radicalizing its verbiage.

With a crisis whose effects weigh more and more heavily on the working class with each passing day, with the experience of a first wave of struggle and an awareness of the traps laid by the bourgeoisie to stop it, and with the very hesitant but real emergence of revolutionary minorities, the working class has returned to assert its force and its enormous reservoir of combativity. If the bourgeoisie has nothing but generalized war to give humanity as its future, the class struggles developing today prove that the proletariat is not ready to give the bourgeoisie free rein. The working class has another future to propose, a future of communism where there will be no wars, no exploitation.

In the decade beginning today, the historical alternative will be decided: either the proleta­riat will continue its offensive, continue to paralyze the murderous arm of capitalism in its death throes and gather its forces to destroy the system, or else it will let itself be trapped, worn out, demoralized by speeches and repression and then the way will be open for a new holo­caust which risks the elimination of all human society.

If the seventies were years of illusion both for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; because the reality of the world will be revealed in its true colors, because the future of humanity will in large part be decided, the eighties will be the years of truth.

The so-called ‘economic explanations’ that the ruling class soaks into the public mind through the press, radio and TV, almost always have one clear and avowed purpose: to justify in the name of ‘economic science’ the sacrifices which capital demands from those it exploits.

The ‘experts’ take the floor and quote their statistics only to ‘explain’ why we have to acc­ept the growth of unemployment, resign ourselves to a decline in real wages, pay more taxes but still work harder; why immigrant workers have to be thrown out of the country -- in short, why we have to remain forever under the domination of the laws of capitalism even though these laws are leading humanity to ruin and despair.

To refuse these laws and to fight against them means rejecting the ‘economic’ justifications governments use to impose their system of exploi­tation. It is not enough to say: “It doesn’t matter what they say because it is all lies any­way”. The how and the why has to be understood if we want to be able to build something really different tomorrow.

The proletarian revolution is and must be a cons­cious revolution. The proletariat cannot rid humanity of the paralyzing obstacles of capita­lism without knowing what they are. Understanding the economic situation of capitalism is essential to any conscious action in society because up to now humanity has been dominated by economic needs.

Under capitalism, as in all social systems in history, understanding the world is first of all understanding economic life. Understanding how to destroy capitalism is understanding how it is weakening, understanding its crises.

The aim of this article is to elucidate recent developments in the crisis and to clarify the perspectives. Its intention is to show that today’s aggravation of the crisis is the harbin­ger of a recession in the 1980s of unprecedented proportions since the end of World War II.

The article contains a considerable amount of statistics but these dry figures are necessary to an analysis of the crisis, to seeing where it is heading. The article uses ‘official’ statis­tics despite an awareness of their limitations. Economic statistics suffer from ideological as well as technical distortions. Because the so-called ‘economic science’ is part and parcel of the ideology and propaganda of the ruling class, statistics can always be manipulated to justify the defense and survival of the system. The ‘experts’ of the bourgeoisie do not necessarily do this with Machiavellian forethought: they themselves are the victims of the ideological poison they secrete. But it is not only a ques­tion of ideological distortions. The statistics also suffer from technical errors due to the decomposition of the economic system itself. In fact, the measurement used in most economic stat­istics is money, the dollar or another currency. But inflation and the increasingly violent con­vulsions of international exchange rates make monetary values less and less valid as measurements of real economic activity. This is particularly true for the measurement of economic aggregates in terms of volume (the volume of the gross national product, for example), that is, in terms of ‘constant money’, a theoretical abstraction of money which is not devalued by inflation.

But whatever the known faults of existing econo­mic statistics, they are the only ones available. If they lack precision, they do, however, in one way or another, reflect the direction of major economic trends. In any case, using capitalism’s own statistics to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the system and the possibility of destroying it does not weaken the force of the arguments; on the contrary, it tends to strengthen it.

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

The world economy enters the 1980s sliding into a new recession, the fourth since 1967.

In the eastern bloc countries, growth rates have fallen to the lowest level since World War II (4 per cent growth in 1978).

The Secretariat of the OECD, an organization which groups the twenty-four most industrialized count­ries of the western bloc, announced a growth rate of 3% in 1979 for the whole of its zone and pre­dicted a decline to 1.5% in 1980. This means a quasi-stagnation of economic activity.

The US and Great Britain are the first to slide into this new recession. The first and fifth greatest powers in the bloc -- which together account for 40% of the production of the OECD countries -- will have a negative growth in 1980. This means that the mass of production realized everyday will not only cease to grow but will actually diminish in absolute terms.

What will be the extent of this recession? How many countries will it affect? How long will it last? How deep will it be?

The recession gives indications of being the most geographically widespread since World War II: for the first time all regions of the planet will be simultaneously affected.

It risks being the longest lasting.

It will probably be the most profound in terms of the decline in growth and thus in terms of unemployment.

In other words, the workers of the entire world will experience the most brutal degradation of their living conditions since World War II. Mill­ions more workers will be laid off in all count­ries, even those who seemed to be able to keep their head above water. Wages will be drastica­lly cut by the combined effects of wage-freeze policies and inflation.

The last crumbs given by capitalism in the years of the relative prosperity of reconstruction are being taken back by capitalism ... and they will not think of offering them again. The various nations of this world are preparing to undergo another round of economic and social convulsions.

But what allow us to assert that the recession capitalism is sliding into will be the longest and the deepest since the war?

Three types of factors:

-- first of all, the broad scope of the present decline in the world economy;

-- secondly, the increasing inadequacy of the means at capitalism’s disposal to re-launch the economy;

-- thirdly, the growing impossibility for the different national governments to continue to use reflation policies.

In other words, the fatal disease of capitalism is passing through a phase of major decline; not only are the usual drugs administered by the dif­ferent governments having less and less of an effect but the abusive use of these remedies have poisoned the patient. Like the doctors who frantically tried to keep the dying Franco ‘alive’, the bourgeoisie today is using desperate therapies even though they serve no scientific purpose!

Each of the three aspects mentioned will be further expanded in the article: the intensifica­tion of the present crisis on the one hand, and on the other the inadequacy of present methods available to induce recovery and the impossibil­ity of increasing their scope without further accelerating the crisis.

The present deepening of the crisis

For the moment, among the major industrial coun­tries of the western bloc the US and Great Britain are the hardest hits. Growth rates have declined most sharply in these countries in the course of 1979 as the following table shows:

 

Table I Rate of Growth Of the Gross National Product (Percentage of Variation)
	1978	1979
United States	4.0	2.8
Great Britain	3.2	1.3
Japan	5.6	5.5
France	3.3	3.0
Canada	3.4	3.5
Italy	2.6	4.3
Source: Economic Perspectives of the OECD, July 1979

 

But no-one has any illusions about the possibility of other countries of the bloc keeping up their growth rates for very long if the US goes into a recession because the economies of Japan and Europe are totally tied to their economic and military leader.

This dependency, which rests primarily on the absolute supremacy of the leader of the bloc within its sphere (and the same is true in the Russian bloc), has in fact increased since the beginning of the 1970s. By reducing the growth of their production, the US hopes to reduce their imports. But by reducing their buying power on the world market, they directly or indirectly limit outlets for European and Japanese production.

Contrary to the assertions of certain econom­ists, present growth rates in Europe and Japan cannot be maintained to compensate for a collapse in the US. On the contrary, like in 1969, the fall in growth in the US is simply an immediate precursor of the fall in all other industrial countries.

The annual report of the Common Market Commission, which published its forecasts for the 1980s in October, has already announced a slowdown of 3.1% in growth for EEC countries in 1979 and 2% in 1980; an acceleration of inflation and an increase in unemployment from 5.6% to 6.2%, “the highest increase foreseen since the Commission began to establish its statistics in 1973” (Le Soir, Bruxelles).

At the end of 1979 lay-off announcements prolifer­ated in all western countries. But the specifi­city of these announcements was that they concer­ned not only sectors already in difficulty, but also sectors which had been considered relatively safe from the effects of the crisis up to now. The lay-offs continue to grow in hard-hit sectors: the largest steel producer in the US, US Steel, has announced the closing of ten factories and lay-offs affecting 13,000 workers in Great Britain the British Steel Corporation intends to reduce its workforce by 50,000 workers.

But now it is also the motor industry and electr­onics, the sectors considered to be the ‘locomo­tives of the economy’ which are being hit. In the US, motor car production fell by 25% between December 1978 and December 1979. “One hundred thousand car workers (one out of every seven) are from now on indefinitely unemployed and forty thousand others are temporarily unemployed follow­ing one--or-two-week shutdowns in several states” (Le Monde, France). In Germany, whose economy is the envy of governments all over the world, car production fell 4% in a year. Opel had to put 16,000 on partial unemployment for two weeks and Ford-Germany 12,000 for twenty-five days. The vanguard sector, electronics, has just been hit by the collapse of the German company, AFG-­Telefunken, which predicts 13,000 lay-offs.

In the underdeveloped countries, the economic crisis, which has long since plunged most of them into total economic atrophy, has now hit certain countries which used to be considered economic ‘miracles’. Whether we look at countries which experienced a relative industrial development in recent years like South Korea or Brazil, or oil-producing countries like Venezuela or Iran, these countries are now experiencing a violent degrada­tion of their economic situation ... and along with this, the collapse of all the myths about their eventual ‘economic take-off’.

The eastern bloc countries too are experiencing a powerful exacerbation of their economic diffi­culties. Despite policies designed to reduce their debt to the west, these debts have only increased.

According to the UN Economic Commission for Europe, these debts have increased more than 17% in 1978 in relation to the previous year. If we turn to the internal situation, the investigation of the economic situation undertaken by Russian leaders for the Autumn 1979 Session of the Supreme Soviet drew a particularly somber balance sheet in such important areas as transportation, agricultural production and oil production. In the satellite countries, such as Poland, govern­ments are beginning to speak officially of unem­ployment and especially inflation. Inflation, that disease which Stalinist dogma pretends to reserve only for western countries, is increasing on an unprecedented scale.

So much for the immediate situation. In itself, by the scope and rapidity of the economic decline, the situation can be seen as but the beginning of a new recession of which the worst is yet to come.

The techniques of ‘recovery’

I. The Growing Inadequacy of Reflation Techniques

One of the major characteristics of the econo­mic evolution of the world, particularly in the west since the 1974-75 recession, is that con­trary to what happened after the recessions of 1967 or 1970, reflation policies have brought more and more mediocre results, if any at all, despite all the considerable governmental efforts.

With the definitive end of the mechanisms of reconstruction in the mid-sixties, western capita­lism has had to adapt itself to a life of perpet­ual downward swings whose scope is increasingly large and violent. Like an enraged animal stri­king its head against the bars of its cage, west­ern capitalism has more and more violently come up against two dangers: on the one hand deeper and deeper recessions and on the other hand more and more difficult and inflationary recoveries. The graph below, which traces the evolution of the growth in production for the seven major powers of the western bloc (the US, Japan, West Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Canada) shows how these swings have been more and more drastic, ending in the striking failure of refla­tion policies from 1976 to 1979.

graph 1

The major stages of the crisis in the western economy since 1967 can be summarized as follows:

-- in 1967 slowdown in growth;

-- in 1968 recovery;

-- from 1969 to 1971 a new recession, deeper than 1967;

-- from 1972 to the middle of 1973 a second recovery breaking up the international monetary system with the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 and the floating of the major monetary parities; governments financed the general recovery with tons of new paper money;

-- at the beginning of 1973 the seven major powers had the highest growth rate in eighteen years (8 and a third as an annual base in the first half of 1973);

-- the end of 1973 to the end of 1975 a new recession, the third, the longest and deepest; in the second half of 1973 production increased at a rate of only 2% a year; more than a year later in early 1975 it regressed at more than a rate of 4.3% per year;

-- 1976-1979, third recovery; but this time despite recourse to the Keynesian policy of reflation through the creation of state budgetary defi­cits, despite the new market created by the OPEC countries which due to the rise in oil prices represented a strong demand for manufactured goods from the industrialized world1, despite the enormous deficit in the trade balance of the US which due to the international role of the dollar, created and maintained an artificial market by importing much more than it exported, despite all these methods put into place by governments, economic growth after the brief recovery in 1976 kept losing ground, slowly but surely.

 

Yet the doses of the remedies applied by the governments were particularly strong:

 

Table 2 Growth in the Volume of GNP (Percentage of annual variation)
	1976	1977	1978	1979
The 7 great powers	5.4	4.1	4.0	3.5
All 24 of the OECD countries	5.1	4.1	4.0	3.5
Source: Economic Perspectives of the OECD, July 1979

 

Budget deficits: since 1975 the major industrial countries have had recourse to uninterrupted increases in state expenditures over and above that of revenues in order to create a demand capable of re-launching growth. This led to perm­anent budget deficits which reached levels equi­valent to more than 5% of national production in some cases (5.8% for Germany in 1975; 5.4% for Japan in 1979) and went above 10% for weaker countries like Italy (11.7% in 1975; 11.5% in 1979). The average of these budget deficits for the five year period between 1975 and 1979 is in itself eloquent enough.

 

Table 3 Public Administration Deficits (As a percentage of GNP) Average 1975-1979
United States	1.9 (a)
Japan	4.1
Germany	4.7
France	1.7
Great Britain	4.3
Canada	2.7
Italy	10.2
Source: Idem (a) 1975-1978

 

The financing of growth in the bloc through the trade deficit of the US: by buying much more than they managed to sell, the US was an import­ant factor in the growth of the economy of their bloc from 1976-79. In fact, since the conclusion of the reconstruction of Europe and Japan at the end of the sixties and with the war in Vietnam, the growth of the western bloc has, in part, been artificially financed by the trade deficit of the US. Because the US dollar serves as the medium of exchange and reserve on the world market, other countries are obliged to accept the artificial money of the US as payment.

Thus the recovery after the 1970 recession was ‘stimulated’ by two years of a particularly large US deficit. And after the 1974-75 recession, the US again had recourse to this policy to an unpre­cedented extent. In the last three years the US has increased its imports more rapidly than the other powers in its bloc as the following figures show:




 

Table 4 Increase in the Volume of Imports (Percentages of annual variation) Average 1977-1979
Unites States	8.1
Japan	6.6
Germany	6.6
France	5.3
Great Britain	4.8
Italy	5.5
Canada	4.2
Source: Idem

 

This policy led to a dizzying growth of the trade deficit of the US. This deficit momentarily allowed the other countries of its bloc to have positive trade balances.

 

Table 5 Current Trade Balance of the Major Countries of Western Bloc (in Billions of dollars, averages 1977-1979)
United States	-14.3
Japan	+9.3
Germany	+6.1
France	+1.4
Great Britain	+0.5
Italy	+4.4

 

It is clear that both the ‘budget deficit’ remedy and the ‘US trade deficit’ remedy (“injecting dollars into the economy”) have been administered in massive doses over the past few years. The mediocrity of the results obtained proves only one thing: their effectiveness is steadily decrea­sing. And that is the second reason why we fore­see an exceptionally deep recession for the beginning of the 1980s.

But there are even more serious reasons. Because governments have had such extensive recourse to these artificial stimulants in increasing doses, they have ended up by completely poisoning the body of their economies.

II. The Impossibility of Continuing to Use the Same Remedies

Among other economic shocks, the year 1979 was marked by the most spectacular monetary alert that the system has experienced since the war. While capitalism celebrated the fiftieth anniver­sary of the 1929 crash, the price of gold shot up to incredible heights. In several weeks the price of gold went over $400 an ounce. The alert was not simply an accident due to speculation. At the beginning of the seventies the official price of gold was S38 an ounce (after the first devaluation of the dollar in 1971). Nine years later ten times more greenbacks were needed for an ounce. But the price of gold has not just increased in dollar terms. It has shot up in terms of all currencies. This really means that the buying power of all currencies has drastically fallen.

The recent gold crisis represented nothing less than the real threat of a definitive collapse of the international monetary system, the threat of the disappearance of the tool which conditions all the economic transactions of capitalism from the buying of soap powder to the joint financing of a dam in a third world country.

The monetary crisis sanctions the impossibility not only of continuing to run capitalism through national and international monetary manipulations but in fact, the impossibility of even surviving in the endless spiral of inflation and monetary credits. The debt of the entire world economy has reached critical proportions in all spheres: the debts of third world countries which for years bought factories on credit without being able to find any markets for their products; the debts of eastern bloc countries which are contin­ually growing without any hope of repayment. The debts of the US have flooded the world market with dollars (Eurodollars or petro-dollars); in recent years the US has experienced a wild acceleration of its domestic debts.

According to Business Week one of the most cohe­rent spokesmen of big business in the US: “Since the end of 1975 the US has stimulated the economy through indebtedness and has provoked such a wild explosion of credit that it has left far behind even the fever which marked the beginning of the 1970s” (16 October, 1978). According to the same article from 1975-78 the debts of the state (government loans) have increased 47% reaching $825 billion in 1978, more than a third of the GNP of the country. This year’s debts of all economic agents (that is, companies, individuals, the government etc) has reached 3900 billion dollars, almost double the GNP! Faced with the growing impossibility of selling what it is able to produce, capitalism is increa­singly living on indebtedness towards the future. Credit in all its forms has allowed it to put off facing the real, fundamental problems for a while. But this has not solved the problem, on the contrary, it has only aggravated it. By con­tinuing to push payment deadlines forward, world capitalism has become highly fragile and unstable as the ‘gold crisis’ of Autumn 1979 proves.

Capitalism, at the beginning of the 80s, faces two alternatives: either to continue reflation policies in which case the monetary system will completely collapse, or to stop the artificial remedies and face recession.

The US government has already been forced to choose the latter ‘solution’ ... and so has made the choice for the entire world.

A false alternative for the workers

In this context all the governments in the world try to convince the workers that they must accept wage cuts and lay-offs so that ‘things can get better tomorrow’. 'Restructure our national economy and we'll make it’ is supposed to be the precondition for recovery.

Certainly market difficulties oblige national capitals to become as competitive as they can (and this implies lay-offs and wage-cuts). The few existing markets will go to those capitalists who manage to sell at the best price. But dying last is not escaping from death. All countries are facing the scarcity of markets; the world market is shrinking. And whatever the order in which countries fall, they will all fall.

The restructuration of the productive apparatus today is not a preparation for a new take-off, it is a preparation for death. Capitalism is not experiencing growing pains but the death rattle. For the workers, accepting sacrifices today will not solve the problems of tomorrow. The only thing they will gain is getting an even more bru­tal attack from capitalism later. Submitting to capitalism in its death throes is simply preparing the way for the only solution to its crises that capitalism has been able to find in sixty years: war. But resisting the attack now is in fact forging the will and the strength to destroy the old world and build a new one.

RV

 

The agitation and combativity that appeared during the negotiation of the last pay agreement in the textile industry have not disappeared. A general assembly, called by the textile union (SUTISS), ended by naming a ‘conflict committee’ at the regional level, with the aim of organizing a workers’ counter attack. That this committee was dominated by unionists of the PAD1 does not at all diminish the importance of the fact that a need was felt, however confusedly, for a combat organization distinct from the union apparatus. This is similar to the engineers’ demand for the presence at the negotiating table of a delegate elected by the general assembly. The ‘conflict committee’ put forward the idea of a regional strike for 17 October 1979. The union Federation was reticent at first, but finally gave way to the committee (even lending it their premises), and after a bit of diplomacy to try to get the CTV’s2 consent, a strike call was finally put out for Wednesday, 17 October. The CTV then began to talk about a national strike for 25 October. What was about to happen in Aragua was seen as a test which would determine the course of events to come.

“Follow Aragua’s Example!”3

The dawn of 17 October found Maracay (capital of the state of Aragua) paralyzed; in several out­lying districts, all kinds of obstacles dumped in the streets interrupted the traffic. The workers arrived at their factories, and then made their way towards the Plaza Girardot in the town centre. The unions had distributed the strike call, but they intentionally remained silent about the time and place for the assembly. The union lead­ership wanted the strike to be a numerical success, but they were just as concerned that it should remain under their control. This explains why they put out the strike call, and why they kept a monopoly of information about the action that was planned. Nonetheless, the workers didn’t want to lose this opportunity to demonstrate their discontent, and accepted these conditions in their desire to unite in the street with their class brothers.

At 10am the Plaza was full of people. The vast majority was workers; a whole host of hastily-made banners were visible, indicating the presence of particular factories, demanding wage rises, or simply affirming a class viewpoint (for example, “they have the power because they want it”).

Then began the never-ending speeches, whose main lines were: the rise in prices, the need for wages to be adjusted, the government’s bad admini­stration, the struggle against the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the preparation for the national strike.

In the crowd, you could feel that the workers interpreted the strike as well as the assembly as the beginning of a confrontation with the bour­geoisie and its state. Clearly, the mass of workers weren’t satisfied with listening passively, but wanted to express themselves as a collective body, which they could only do by marching through the streets. The pressure on the union leaders was so strong that they ended up by call­ing for a march down the Avenue Bolivar as far as the provincial Parliament, despite the fact that they had only planned on an assembly.

Beforehand, groups of young workers had patrolled the streets of the city centre, closing down all the shops (except the chemists’), with an attitude of determination to enforce the strike, but with­out any attempt at personal violence or individual aggression. In the same way, they intercepted buses and taxis, made the passengers get out and left the vehicles to go on their way without the slightest hindrance.

The demonstration gets out of control

The working class practically took possession of the streets of the city centre, it blocked the traffic, shut the shops, let its anger burst out, imposed its power. From this moment, events took on their own dynamic. The 10-15,000 demon­strators (the press talked of 30,000 probably because of the great fright the day gave them, for example, E Mendoza’s heart attack4, began to take up improvised slogans, especially insist­ing on ones that expressed their class feelings (“the discontented worker demands his rights”, “in shoes or sandals, the working class commands respect” were a couple of them). It was imposs­ible to go back to the whining tones of the CTV’s explicit support for the wages law. The only fig­ure put forward was for a 50% rise, but in general the demonstrators didn’t formulate precise ‘demands’; they expressed their rage and their will to struggle. There were frequent comments about the total uselessness of this famous law, about the beginning of the war of “poor against rich”. Near the Palace of Parliament there sud­denly appeared a small detachment of the ‘forces of order’. Those at the front of the demonstra­tion hurled themselves against it, and the police were obliged to run for shelter in the Palace, where they felt more protected. Immediately, the crowd concentrated before the entrance, which was obviously locked. The demonstration had not been prepared for this, and decided not to try to force an entry, but it fully felt the difference between ‘the people’ in the street and their ‘representatives’ barricaded in the Palace. Pre­dictably, the union bureaucracy made every effort to pacify the demonstrators and to divert atten­tion by calling for a return to the Plaza Girardot to close the day. After some hesitations, the cortege started off again, but instead of going straight to the Plaza Girardot, it preferred to make a tour of the ‘Legislative Palace’. Thus the workers marked out the places they would have to occupy tomorrow. One after another, spontaneous orators spoke standing on car rooves and the demonstrators savored the taste of being masters of the street, in contrast to the aggrava­tions and impotence that they are daily subjected to.

At the Plaza Girardot, a new series of union speeches greeted them, with the aim of putting a stop to ‘all that’. But part of the demonstration, once it arrived at the Plaza, carried on to the Labor Inspectorate building. It was, of course, shut. So they returned to the square. There, thousands of workers, already tired, were sitting in the street on the pavement. They don’t have any clear idea of what to do, but no-one seems to feel like going home to the intolerable, monoto­nous round of daily life. The leaders had already left, and the union militants were rolling up their banners. Apparently, this is the end.

But it goes on …

Suddenly, at midday, a small demonstration of textile workers appeared. Things got lively again, and a wild march began all through the town, and this time without the union leadership.

First of all, it decided to march together onto the Municipality, where, after filling the staircases on all four floors, the workers demanded a confrontation with the Municipal councilors. These latter didn’t seem to appreciate the insis­tence of an elderly worker knocking on the door with his stick. Then someone put forward the idea of marching on the premises of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where, strangely, nothing was to be found apart from a few cases of mineral water, which were swiftly used to calm the collective thirst. From there, the workers decided to go to the transport terminus. On the way they closed down a construction site and looked up the foreman in order to give him a bit of ‘advice’. With an elevated social and demo­cratic sentiment, they divided up the contents of a poultry shop which had had the unfortunate idea of staying open.

It was after 2 O'clock in the afternoon, and the demonstration had travelled some ten kilometers. Hunger, heat and fatigue had considerably reduced the number of demonstrators. It was time to put an end to the collective intoxication and bring them back to sad reality. Given that the union leadership had failed, this task fell to other organisms. With truncheon blows and other ‘persuasive’ methods5, the ‘forces of order’ showed for the nth time that the streets don’t yet belong to the people, out to the police. At 3 O'clock in the afternoon, order reigned in Maracay.

The day had been extremely rich in lessons. Instinctively, the working class had identified several nerve centers of power; parliament, the Municipal Council, the Ministry of Labor, the unions and the passenger terminus, this latter as a springboard for extending the struggle outside Maracay. It was like a kind of reconnaissance mission for future struggles. Apparently, there were demonstrations during the night in some districts. It was a proletarian holiday.

CTV: Oil on troubled waters

If any worker might have entertained some illu­sions about this being a first step in a series of triumphant struggles, apparently thanks to the support of the union apparatus, the next day’s papers took care to remind them of their condi­tion as an exploited and manipulated class. In fact, the CTV, as if by magic, transformed the national strike into a general mobilization ... for 4 O'clock in the afternoon of 25 October. Clearly, the CTV didn’t want to be overtaken again by the spontaneous initiative of the masses, and this time on a national scale. Let the workers work all day first, and then go and demonstrate, if they still feel like it! The night would calm down any hot-heads. For the unions, it was now a matter of trying to arrange an impressive demonstration, but without a strike, a formula which would allow them to maintain social control without losing an appearance of militancy. More­over, some industries in Aragua, profiting from the strike of 17 October’s juridical illegality, carried out massive lay-offs (especially in La Victoria, an industrial town in Aragua, where some 500 workers were made redundant). In this way, they put into practice already planned pro­jects of ‘reduction of personnel’, ‘industrial mobility’, and ‘administrative improvement’. The object was to confront as cheaply as possible the particularly critical financial situation of the small and medium-sized businesses. This maneuver created a very tense situation in La Victoria, with marches and protests opening up a perspective for new struggles in the weeks to come, but this time without the fake support of the CTV. Either the workers of La Victoria will learn to struggle for themselves, or they will be forced to accept the conditions of the dictatorship of capital.

In spite of everything, anger explodes

Despite the characteristics we have described above, the day of ‘national mobilization’ on 25 October gave rise to new demonstrations of the workers’ combativity. In the state of Carabobo, and in Guyana6, there were region-wide strikes with massive and enthusiastic marches. In the capital, Caracas, where union prestige demanded that the demonstration should be well attended, the CTV even took it on itself to bring in coach-loads of workers, who for their part took advan­tage of their first opportunity in years to express their class hatred. Aware, after the events of the 17th, of the danger of a working class outburst, the government could not allow the demonstration to invade the centre of the capital, as had happened at Maracay. Furthermore, the ‘forces of order’ had themselves decided to confront the workers practically from the outset. This wasn’t an ‘excess’ or a ‘mistake’; the police were just valiantly carrying out their class function. The confrontation took place. Instead of running in panic as usual, the demon­strators put up a stubborn resistance for several hours; they destroyed symbols of bourgeois luxury in the neighborhood, and a climate of violence persisted for several days in the working class districts, especially in “23 de Janero” (a working class district with a very concentrated and combative working class), leaving a balance-sheet of several dead.

Meanwhile, in Maracay, the mass of workers who had already tasted the events of the 17th were not won over to participation in what seemed to everybody to be a watered-down repeat perform­ance. Very few workers bothered to turn up to the meeting. By contrast, the false rumor that a student had been assassinated in Valencia7 (in fact there really had been a death in Valencia: a worker) brought some 2,000 students into the streets. It’s typical of students to be shocked by the murder of one student by the police, and to remain blind to the less spectacular daily destruction of the working class in the factories: 250 fatal accidents and more than a million industrial injuries and diseases a year reveal capitalism’s violence to the full.

It was a student demonstration; the working class character of the 17th had disappeared, the whole affair was drowned in a sea of university, youth and other slogans. Despite this, it was worth noting the absence of the traditional student organizations, and the participation of many ‘independent’ students, who could in the future converge with the emerging workers’ movement. Only a group of teachers -- they were on strike -- maintained a certain class character.

The working class had shown its readiness to express its extreme discontent as soon as the opportunity arose, but it was not, and is not yet, prepared to try to create this possibility autonomously through its own initiative.

From the street to Parliament

Without losing any time, the CTV at once conclu­ded that such an opportunity should at all costs be prevented from arising. In fact, for the moment a relative calm is being imposed -- a situation that could well be overturned when the year’s end bonuses come up, given the financial diffi­culties of some companies. There is less and less talk of mobilizations, and more of parlia­mentary negotiations, which are supposed to put through the famous law proposed by the CTV; but this time, there’s no question of applying pres­sure at street level. On 29 October, the CTV’s consultative council concretized the results of negotiations between social democrats and Christian democrats, and decided that from now on the centre should be informed beforehand when­ever a strike movement is decided by the local or craft federations. This was to keep control of any dangerous situation. And once this point was granted, all strikes in the ministries were declared illegal. If the centre behaves like this towards its own federations, you can imagine its attitude when confronted with a workers’ movement acting independently of the unions.

All this throws a clear light on the alternative which supposedly characterizes the unions: of being complaints bureaus or instruments of struggle. In reality, the unions are complaints bureaus in periods of social calm and organs of sabotage of the workers’ struggle as soon as it raises its head.

The old mole shows its nose and the leaders contemplate the heavens

The present situation is one of resurgence of the proletariat on the national scene. This is simi­lar to what happened at the beginning of the sixties and during 1969-72. This resurgence is the product of the end of the oil boom, and of the national bourgeoisie’s delusions of grandeur. Today the bill has to be paid, which in plain language means rationalization of production, bringing bankruptcy in its wake for small and medium-sized companies (the maintenance of whose profits is one of the main preoccupations of our ‘socialists’ -- ah how beautiful capitalism was before there were any monopolies!), and intensi­fied exploitation of the working class.

The liberation of prices is only one weapon of the policy of restructuring the country’s produc­tive apparatus -- a policy which must be carried out along the only lines left to the capitalists: crisis and recession. Contrary to the assertions of the university professors, this policy is not mistaken -- it is inevitable within the framework of the capitalist system. To struggle against this policy without attacking the very foundations of the capitalist system (like those who demand the resignation of the economics cabinet for being supposedly ‘misinformed’ or ‘too ignorant’) is to show a socio-political shortsightedness which comes down to rejecting revolutionary struggle.

What must be put forward in the face of the problems that the development of capitalism imposes on the masses, is the imperative need to go beyond, relations of production determined by money and the market, to the takeover of produc­tion and distribution by the freely associated producers.

The bourgeoisie tries to divert the masses’ attention by orienting it towards a wages law, which is reduced to its bare bones thanks to the unions’ own fear of mobilizing the masses. In fact, this law hardly aims to compensate for infla­tion at the rate measured and recognized by the Venezuelan Central Bank since prices were liberated. Those who claim to be more ‘radical’ do so by demanding a higher percentage or even the nec plus ultra of a sliding scale of wages (which at best comes down to definitively tying the workers’ income to the oscillations of the bourgeois economy). While we’re on the subject, it’s inter­esting to note that the Brazilian workers have just opposed a similar law, because they say it would diminish their ability to struggle at fac­tory level to win rises much higher than inflation, as did indeed happen at the beginning of the year.

The problem isn’t the percentage of the wage rises. What’s needed is to push forward all those struggles which tend to show up the autonomy of workers’ interests against those of bourgeois society, those struggles which tend to generalize, unifying and extending themselves beyond narrow craft limitations to all sectors in struggle, all those which tend to attack the very existence of wage labor. It’s not so much the particular reasons behind each struggle which matter but the organizational experience gained during them. It’s possible, moreover, to distin­guish a watershed in the proletariat’s activity when we consider that since 1976, the number of strikes has not stopped growing, while the same has not been true for the deposition of the ‘claim casebooks’ demanded by law. This seems to indicate that the working class feels itself less and less concerned with bourgeois legality, that its action tends more and more to be a direct function of its interests.

Confronted with the liberation of prices, the workers will have to impose a liberation of wages; just as they will have to tear into shreds the schedules laid down in wage agreements. They will have to prepare themselves for a daily and permanent struggle in their workplaces and in the street.

The workers in Venezuela are not alone

What’s happening in Venezuela is not unique in the world; on the contrary, we are simply taking part in a phenomenon of universal dimensions. Nowhere has capitalism succeeded, and nowhere will it succeed, in satisfying humanity’s needs in a stable way. Unemployment in Europe and China, inflation in the USA and in Poland, nuclear inse­curity and insecurity in the food supply, with the social struggles they engender, are the witnesses.

The battle-cry of the Ist International is still on the order of the day:

“The emancipation of the working class will be the work of the workers themselves.”

Venezuela,

November, 1979

Ten months after a ‘revolution’ which accomplish­ed the great feat of setting up an even more ana­chronistic regime than the one before it, the situation in Iran has forcefully returned to the centre of world affairs, giving rise to a tidal-wave of curses against the ‘barbarism’ of Iranians and Muslims, and of alarmist predictions about the threat of war or economic catastrophe. In the midst of all this noise and furor, so complacently spread around by the mass media, it’s necessary for revolutionaries to look at the situation clearly and in particular to ans­wer the following questions:

1. What does the seizure of hostages in the Ame­rican embassy tell us about the internal situat­ion in Iran?

2. What impact does this operation and this sit­uation have on the world situation, in particular:

*** -- what are the big powers playing at?

*** -- is there really a danger of an armed conf­lict?

3. What lessons can be drawn from it about the general perspectives facing society in the next decade?

1. The taking of diplomatic personnel as hostag­es by a legal government is a sort of ‘first’ even in the agitated world of contemporary capit­alism. The taking of hostages in itself is a common occurrence in the convulsions of a decade­nt capitalism: in all inter-imperialist confron­tations entire populations can fall victim to this without causing any anxiety to the interna­tional community of imperialist brigands. The particularity and ‘scandalous’ character of what’s been going on in Teheran resides in the fact that this has upset the elementary rules of etiq­uette which these brigands have established.

Just as it’s the golden rule in the world of gangsters to keep quiet in front of the police, so respect for diplomats is the golden rule of the leaders of capitalism. The fact that the leaders of Iran have adopted or sanctioned the kind of behavior that is generally reserved to ‘terrorists’ speaks volumes about the level of political decomposition in this country.

In fact, since the departure of the Shah, the ruling class of Iran has shown itself incapable of ensuring the most elementary level of polit­ical stability. The near-unanimity which was achieved by the forces of opposition against the bloody and corrupt dictatorship to the Shah has rapidly disintegrated, owing to:

*** -- the heterogeneous nature of the social forces fighting against the old regime;

*** -- the completely anachronistic character of the new regime, which bases itself on medieval ideological themes;

*** -- the inability of the regime to give any satisfaction to the economic demands of the poor­est strata, in particular the working class;

*** -- the significant weakening of the armed forces, which were partly decapitated after the

fall of the Shah, and in which demoralization and desertion are becoming rife.

In just a few months, opposition to the governm­ent has developed to the point of totally under­mining the cohesion and the economic base of the social edifice. This includes:

*** -- the opposition from the ‘liberal’ and mod­ern sectors of the bourgeoisie;

*** -- the secession of the Kurdish provinces;

*** -- the resurgence of proletarian struggles which are more and more threatening what is almost the only source of the country’s wealth: the production and refining of oil.

Faced with the general decomposition of society, the leaders of the ‘Islamic Republic’ have gone back to the theme which managed to achieve an ephemeral unity ten months ago: hatred for the Shah and for the power which supported him until his overthrow and is now harboring him. Whether the occupation of the American embassy was ‘spontaneous’ or was wanted by the ‘hardline’ Iranian leaders (Khomeini, Bani-Sadr) doesn’t alter the fact that the bugbear of the Shah has -- like the fascist bugbear in other circumstances -- been used to re-establish a momentary ‘national unity’, expressed by:

*** -- the cease-fire of the Kurdish nationalists;

*** -- the banning of strikes by the ‘Council of the Revolution’.

But in the long run the remedy chosen by Khomeini and Co will make things worse than ever and show that the present ruling team is in an impasse: by choosing a political and economic confrontat­ion with the USA, it can only end up by aggravat­ing the internal situation, especially on the economic level.

2. The convulsions which are now shaking Iran are a new illustration of:

a. the gravity of the present crisis of world capitalism, expressing itself in increasingly profound and frequent political crises in the advanced countries, and, in the backward countries, in the almost total decomposition of the social body;

b. the impossibility of any real national ind­ependence for the under-developed countries: either they must align themselves tamely behind one bloc or the other, or they will be plunged into such instability and economic chaos that they will sooner or later be forced to tow the line in the same way: it’s impossible to see Iran under the Imam Khomeini succeeding where De Gaulle’s France and Mao’s China failed.

3. Contrary to all the alarmist rumors, the present convulsions in Iran are not giving rise to the immediate threat of a major military conf­rontation in the region. The essential reason for this is that, despite the whole anti-American campaign being conducted by Khomeini, there is no possibility today of Iran going over to the Russian bloc. As has been shown many times in the past, notably in the Cyprus affair of 1974, the difficulties and instability that may arise in a country within the US bloc, in so far as they weaken the cohesion of the bloc, may be a generally favorable factor for Russia, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Russians are in a position to really take advantage of the situ­ation. At the present moment, the USSR, which is already having great difficulties with the Muslim guerillas in Afghanistan and which has to bear in mind the possible threat of nationali­st agitation among its own Muslim populations, is not in a position to get its hands on a country which is being swept by the ‘Islamic wave’. This is all the more evident when we consider that there is no political force in Iran capable of leading the country into the Russian bloc (the CP is weak and the army is well controlled by the US bloc).

4. For some months the situation in Iran has been getting out of the US control. The US made the mistake of supporting for too long a regime that was completely discredited, even in the eyes of most of the ruling class; this led to the failure of its last-minute attempts to achie­ve a smooth transition to a more ‘democratic’ regime (in the person of Bakhtiar) capable of dampening down popular discontent. Once the army began to fall apart in February 1979, this transition took place in a heated atmosphere, in favor of a political force which was momentarily the most ‘popular’ but which in the long run is the least capable of managing Iranian capital in a lucid and effective manner. At the present time we are seeing a new stage in the US bloc’s efforts to regain control of the Iranian situation: after the failure of the ‘progressive’ solution represented by Bazargan, it’s now letting the local situation go to pieces. Like the declaration of war on the US and the European powers by the Venezuelan dicta­tor Gomez in the 1930s, the Iranian decision to declare not just a ‘holy war’ but an economic war on the US is truly suicidal: the interrup­tion of trade between Iran and the US may cause minor perturbations for the latter, but it will condemn Iran to economic strangulation. The US policy therefore boils down to letting the present regime stay in the impasse which its now reached, allowing it to isolate itself from the various sectors of society, so that it can pick the fruit when it’s ripe, replacing the Khomeini clique with another governmental team, which would have to have the following characte­ristics:

*** -- being more conciliatory towards the US;

*** -- being more capable of controlling the situation;

*** -- having the support of the army (if it’s not the army itself), seeing that the army is crucial to the political life of all third world countries.

Without pushing the analogy too far, it’s prob­able that Iran will go through a similar process as Portugal did. Here political instability and the preponderance of a party that was hostile to the USA (the PCP) -- the result of the late and brutal transition from a completely discredited dictatorship -- were eliminated following pressure from the US bloc on the diplomatic and econ­omic level.

5. There is every reason to suppose that this trial of strength between Iran and the USA, far from representing a weakening of the American bloc, will serve to strengthen it. Apart from the fact that it will sooner or later allow the US to get a firmer grip on the Middle East situation, it will constrain the western powers (Europe, Japan) to strengthen their allegiance to the leading country of the bloc. This allegiance has been somewhat disturbed recently by the fact that these powers were (apart from the backward non-oil producing countries) the main victims of the oil price-rises underhand­edly encouraged by the USA (cf. International Review, no.19). The present crisis highlights the fact that these powers are much more depend­ent on Iranian oil than America. This compels them to close ranks behind their leader and collaborate in its efforts to stabilize this part of the world. The relatively moderate way that these powers (notably France) have con­demned Khomeini shouldn’t delude us: if they didn’t tie their hands straight away, it’s beca­use this will leave them better placed to make a contribution -- especially on the diplomatic level -- to the US bloc regaining control of the situation. As we’ve already seen in Zaire, for example, one of the strengths of this bloc is its ability to have its less ‘compromised’ members intervene in situations where the domin­ant power itself is unable to act directly.

6. While one of America’s objectives in the present crisis is to strengthen the internation­al cohesion of its bloc; another, even more impor­tant objective is to whip up a war psychosis. Never has the misfortune of fifty American citi­zens caused so much concern to the mass media, the politicians and the churches. A torrent of war hysteria like this hasn’t been seen for a long time; it’s even reached the point where the government, which orchestrated the campaign in the first place, is now playing the role of mode­rator. Faced with a population that has tradit­ionally not been favorable to the idea of foreign intervention, a population which was only mobilized for world war by the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and which has been mark­edly cool towards adventures of this kind since the Vietnam war, the ‘barbarous’ acts of the ‘Islamic Republic’ have been an excellent theme for the war campaigns of the American bourgeoisie. Khomeini has found the Shah to be an excellent bugbear to use for re-forging the unity of the nation. Carter -- whether, as it would seem, he deliberately provoked the present crisis by let­ting the Shah into the States, or whether he’s merely using the situation -- has found Khomeini to be an equally useful bugbear in his efforts to reinforce national unity at home and get the American population used to the idea of foreign intervention, even if this doesn’t happen in Iran. The difference between these two maneuvers is the fact that the first is an act of desp­eration and is going to quickly rebound on its promoters, whereas the second is part of a much more lucid plan by American capital.

The USA isn’t the only country to use the present crisis to mobilize public opinion behind prepar­ations for imperialist war. In Western Europe, with themes adapted to the local situation, the whole barrage about the ‘Arab’ or ‘Islamic’ peril (similar to the old ‘Yellow Peril’) being the source of the crisis, is part of the same kind of preparations, the same kind of war psychosis.

As for the USSR, even if, for the reasons that we’ve seen, it isn’t trying to exploit the situation from the outside, it is trying to respond to the western campaign about ‘human rights’ by denouncing the ‘imperialist threats’ of the USA and proclaiming its solidarity with the anti-American sentiments of the Iranian masses.

7. Even if it’s reached a caricatural level in Iran, as in all the under-developed countries, the decomposition of Iranian society is by no means a local phenomenon. On the contrary, the virulence of the ideological campaigns being waged by the main powers indicates that the bourgeoisie everywhere is up against the wall; that it’s more and more taking refuge in a headlong flight towards a new imperialist war; and that it feels the masses’ lack of enthusiasm for its warlike objectives as a major obstacle to its plans.

For revolutionaries, the task is once again:

*** -- to denounce all these ideological campaigns, wherever they come from, whatever mottoes they use (human rights, anti-imperialism, the Arab menace, etc.), and whoever their promoters are -- right or left, east or west;

*** -- to insist that humanity’s only alternative to a new holocaust, the only way to avoid its own destruction, is the intensification of the proletarian offensive and the overthrow of capitalism.

28 November, 1979, ICC.

Afghanistan: There’s only one way to fight the threat of world war: By strengthening the proletarian struggle

With the events in Afghanistan and all their reper­cussions, capitalism has taken one more step towards world war. It would be criminal to hide this fact.

Up till now, through its struggle, through its ref­usal to submit passively to the diktats of austerity the world proletariat has prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its apocalyptic solution to the crisis of its economy. It must now take its struggle onto a higher level. In order to do that, the workers must not abandon their struggles of economic resist­ance, but on the contrary unify them, generalize them, and above all take up their real meaning in a resolute and consistent manner: in other words, see them as part of the struggle to do away with the barbarism of war by destroying the capitalist economic laws which give rise to it.

Once again, the threat of war is shaking the world. Only a year ago, under the pretext of ‘punishing’ Vietnam for its actions in Cambodia, China went onto the offensive with over 300,000 soldiers in a war that left tens of thousands dead in a few days. Today, another so-called ‘socialist’ country, under the guise of ‘helping a regime threatened by the hands of imperialism’, has sent 100,000 soldiers of its ‘Red Army’ to put another country under military occupation. But whereas last year the specter of world war was quickly extinguished after the initial alert, today there’s nothing fleeting about this threat. On the contrary, even before the USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan, the danger of war was being frantically stirred up in the press, on television, and in the speeches of the politicians.

What is the meaning of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan?

What underlies the present campaigns about the threat of war?

How can a third imperialist holocaust be prevented?

The lies of the bourgeoisie and the threats of war

Like the time that it invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the USSR claims that it has sent in its divisions ‘at the request of a friendly people threatened by imperialism’. This lie is as old as war itself. Capitalism has always launched its imperialist wars to ‘defend itself from foreign threats’ or to ‘protect’ this or that people. Hitler invaded Cze­choslovakia in 1938 to ‘protect’ the German-speaking population of the Sudetenland. In the mid-sixties, the USA sent in half a million soldiers to ‘defend’ South Vietnam against ‘Communist aggression’. Imp­erialist propaganda has a long list of lies. Today the American bloc is playing the game of denouncing the Russian intervention and its hypocritical just­ifications, because it will use every chance it can get to step up its own propaganda in favor of its own imperialist designs and war preparations. Under the pretext of facing up to the ‘Russian danger’ -- which is the subject of a deafening bar­rage by the press, radio and television -- the American bourgeoisie and its allies are pushing ahead not only with their ideological campaigns, but also with an enormous deployment of military forces (the Pershing II missiles in Europe, naval forces in the Indian Ocean, the supplying of arms to China and Pakistan).

This ideological campaign isn’t new. It’s already several years since Carter and his friends began preparing public opinion for the idea of a war ag­ainst the USSR under the pretext of ‘defending human rights’. More recently the oil price rises, and above all the seizure of the hostages in Tehran, have been used as an excuse to step up the whole war-campaign: in order to ‘defend our security’ and ‘protect our interests’, we must be prepared for military intervention abroad. Today, with the invasion of Afghanistan, the campaign has reached new heights. Using all the means at its disposal, the bourgeoisie is trying to get us used to the idea that ‘war is becoming inevitable’, that its ‘some­one else’s fault’, that whether we like it or not there’s no alternative and we’d better get ready for it.

Is war inevitable?

It is from capitalism’s point of view. Two world­wide butcheries have shown that generalized war is the only response that this system can have to the aggravation of its economic crisis.

War doesn’t happen simply because there are part­icularly warlike regimes -- Germany yesterday or Russia today. All countries are preparing for war, all governments are continuously increasing their military budgets, all governments and all parties -- including the so-called workers’ parties -- call for ‘defending the fatherland’, for the national defense which has cost humanity more than 100 million lives since 1914. All of them bear the same responsibility for the holocausts of the past and for those future holocausts which capitalism is preparing. When gangsters are settling scores amongst themselves, what’s the point in asking who fired the first shot? Before a war, the imperialist gangsters who’ve got the most loot generally have the luxury of presenting themselves as the ‘victims of aggression’. After the war, it’s always discover­ed, as if by chance, that the ‘aggressors’ were the losing side. In imperialist wars, all countries are ‘aggressors’; the only victims of aggression are the exploited masses who are sent to the slaught­er to defend their respective bourgeoisies.

Today the bourgeoisie in all countries is accentuat­ing its preparations for war because the crisis of its economy has got it by the throat. For years, it has tried to overcome the crisis by all sorts of policies, all of which had one thing in common: austerity for the workers. But despite this ever-increasing austerity, each one of the remedies tried out by the bourgeoisie has only made the disease worse. Each time it has tried to reduce inflation it’s only succeeded in reducing production; each time it’s tried to raise production it’s only succeeded in raising inflation. As long as it thought it could get out of this situation, it kept telling the workers that they must ‘make sac­rifices today so that things will get better to­morrow’. But reality is more and more giving the lie to such optimism. More and more, the impasse facing its economic system has forced the bour­geoisie to make a ‘retreat forward’ -- and that can only mean towards war. In the last few years there has been a proliferation and aggravation of local wars behind which the major imperialist powers have confronted each other: Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam-China, and now Afghanistan. The USSR’s invasion of this country in no way means that ‘socialism is essentially warmongering’. What it does show is that this country -- like China and all the others that call themselves ‘social­ist’ -- is capitalist and imperialist like all the rest, that it is subject to the same world crisis which is hitting the entire capitalist system, that everywhere capital is incapable of overcoming the crisis and is everywhere being pushed towards war.

Thus, all over the world, the bourgeoisie is inc­reasingly becoming aware that the only perspective it has is a new generalized war.

In fact, from the point of view both of the level of the crisis and the level of armaments, the cond­itions for a new world butchery are much riper than they were in 1914 or 1939. What, up to now, has stayed the criminal hands of the bourgeoisie is its incapacity to mobilize the population, and the working class in particular, behind its imperialist objectives. The workers’ struggles which have dev­eloped since 1968 are the sign that, up to now, the bourgeoisie has not had a free hand to impose its own response to the insoluble crisis of its econ­omy: world war.

And it’s precisely to change this state of affairs that the bourgeoisie is now intensifying its ideol­ogical barrage about the danger of war.

The bourgeoisie is less and less pretending that ‘things will be better tomorrow’. On the contrary, it’s now demanding sacrifices from the workers while letting them know that it’s going to demand more and more sacrifices, including the supreme sacrifice -- their lives, in a generalized war. It is now feeding us the following line: it’s true that there’s a danger of war, but war is an inevitability which doesn’t depend on us and which we can’t avoid. We must therefore strengthen national unity, accept sacrifices, put up with all the austerity implied by all the armaments prog­rams.

What is the way out for the working class?

It’s true that war is an inevitability for the bourgeoisie! From its point of view, in its logic, its the only perspective it can offer society. And its whole campaign today has no other aim than to get the working class to accept this point of view, this logic. While it expresses a real threat hanging over humanity, the whole deafening barrage about war is aimed at instilling a mood of resig­nation in the workers, an acceptance of a new hol­ocaust that will be even more terrible than the two previous ones.

And if the workers accept the logic of the bour­geoisie, then yes, world war is inevitable!

If the workers capitulate to the lies of the ruling class, if they accept the growing sacrifices demand­ed of them without responding, if they consent to abandoning their class struggle in the name of ‘national unity’ or the ‘national interest’, which is nothing but the interest of capital, then yes, the bourgeoisie will have a free hand to unleash a new imperialist butchery which, this time, threat­ens to destroy the whole of humanity.

Workers of the whole world,

You bear an immense responsibility on your shoulders.

The whole of society is threatened by the insol­uble contradictions of capitalism. But only the working class is in a position to stay the criminal hands of this system. In order to mobilize the population for war, the ruling class and its state require ‘discipline’ and ‘obedience’. And who else but the proletariat, through its intransigent stru­ggle, is capable of breaking out of the discipline of capital?

Only by taking up its struggles to resist auster­ity, unemployment and poverty, by strengthening them against the barriers which the unions and left parties -- even if they do it with a radical lang­uage -- constantly put against them, only in this way will the proletariat be able to hold back capitalism’s inherent tendency towards generalized war.

But even this is not enough! The only way that the working class will really be able to dispel the threat of war is by clearly understanding that the struggle against austerity and the struggle against war are one and the same struggle, that it’s not enough to resist austerity on the economic level alone, but that it’s necessary to go onto the offensive against the whole system of bourgeois power.

The proletariat’s struggles will only attain their full scope and effectiveness if the class draws all the lessons it can from them, if it sees them as a preparation for the decisive, generalized con­frontation which, by overthrowing capitalism, will free humanity from all the calamities which this system imposes on it: exploitation, poverty, famine, genocide, and imperialist holocausts.

International Communist Current

20 January 1980

 

Introduction

 

The renewal of working class combativity over the last year obliges revolutionary organizations to develop their intervention. More than ever, we have to know how to grasp quickly what’s at stake in a given situation, how to intervene putting forward the “general goals of the move­ment” in a concrete and comprehensible way.

Concrete intervention in the class struggle is a test, a measure of the theoretico-political and organizational solidity of a revolutionary group. Ambiguities or beatings about the bush at the programmatic level are inevitably translated into erroneous, shaky, fragmented interventions, or even into a total paralysis when faced with the reality of a rising tide of struggle. For example, in all the present and future struggles an understanding of the role of the trade unions is absolutely key to the development of proletarian autonomy. If a revolutionary group has not understood that the unions are no longer organs of the working class and have once and for all become weapons of the capitalist state inside the class, then that group won’t be able the contribute to the development of class consciousness.

The action of the class itself demands clear answers concerning all the theoretical bases of a class program, whether we’re talking about the economic crisis, national liberation strug­gles, or the various expressions of the general decomposition of the bourgeois order. This is why discussion and reflection within revolutionary groups today and between groups on the internat­ional level must have the aim of clarifying, criticizing, completing and actualizing the whole inheritance of the political positions of Marxism, especially of the last great international workers’ organization, the Communist Internatio­nal.

But concrete intervention in class confrontations doesn’t only measure the ‘theoretical’ or ‘progr­ammatic’ capacities of an organization: it’s also a measure of the organizational capacities of a proletarian political group. Over the ten years which separates us from the wave of struggles of 1968, the revolutionary milieu has worked long and hard to understand the necessity for an organized activity on an international scale, to set up and develop a revolutionary press, and to build organizations worthy of the name. In the present period of rising class struggle, a group which isn’t capable of mobilizing itself, imprinting its political presence, and intervening energe­tically when things really get going is doomed to impotence and failure. However correct its po­litical positions may be, they will become mere verbiage and empty phrases. For a proletarian organization, the effectiveness of its interv­ention depends both on its programmatic principles and its ability to develop an organizational framework in conformity with these principles. But if these are necessary conditions, they are not in themselves sufficient conditions. The ability to create an appropriate political organization doesn’t derive automatically from a theoretical understanding of communist principles; it demands a specific grasp of the question of the revolutionary organization (assimilating the lessons of the past and adapting them to the present period). Similarly, effective intervention in the class struggles of today isn’t the autom­atic result of a theoretical or organizational understanding. Reflection and action form a cohe­rent whole called praxis; but each aspect of the whole brings its own contribution to it and has its own specific characteristics.

On the theoretical level, you have to know how to analyze the balance of forces between classes, but on a fairly wide time-scale, through whole historic periods. Class positions, the communist program, evolve and are enriched slowly, as historical experience gives those who are conc­erned with these questions time to assimilate its lessons. Moreover, theoretical study allows you, if not in an integral manner, then at least in an adequate one, to understand historical materialism, the functioning of the capitalist system and its fundamental laws.

Similarly, concerning the question of organizat­ional practice, whilst theoretical knowledge can’t replace the organic continuity that has been broken by the convulsions of the twentieth centu­ry, the will, effort, and limited but still real experience of our own generation can help to clarify matters. It’s quite different, however, with regard to timely interventions in the heat of events. Here you have to analyze a conjuncture not on a scale of twenty years, or even five years, but to see what’s happening in the short-term -- a few months, weeks, even days. In any trial of strength between the classes, there are rapid, important fluctuations, and you have to know how to orientate yourself, to use your prin­ciples and analyses as a guide without getting swept away. You have to know how to join the flow of a movement, how to make the "general goals" more concrete, how to respond to the real preocc­upations of a struggle, how to be able to support and stimulate its positive tendencies. Here theoretical knowledge can’t replace experience. But the limited experiences which the working class and its revolutionary minorities have been able to participate in since 1968 aren’t enough to provide us with a sure way of judging things.

No more than the working class as a whole, the ICC hasn’t suddenly ‘discovered’ intervention. But we do want to contribute to the development of an awareness of the immense possibilities of the struggles in the years ahead of us. This is something that’s going to go well beyond the experience of the immediate past. The present outbreaks of struggle, and above all the ones to come, are going to face revolutionaries with great responsibilities, and the whole workers’ milieu must be able to profit from the experiences of everyone in it, in order to be able to correct our weaknesses and prepare ourselves more effecti­vely for the future. That’s why we are returning here to the struggles in France last winter and the ICC’s intervention in them from the steel­workers’ attack on the Longwy police station in February 1979 to the march on Paris of 23 March. Since then there have been other important experiences of intervention, notably in the Rotterdan dockers’ strike in autumn 1979 (see Internationalisme, the paper of the ICC’s section in Belgium). But we’re devoting this article to the events around the 23 March because this has given rise to numerous criticisms of the ICC by other political groups; these criticisms are often delivered as if from a great height, gener­ally by those who didn’t intervene at all, with the apparent aim of giving us lessons about what we should have done.

The ICC has never claimed to possess an inborn science or completed program. We inevitably make mistakes and we try to recognize those mistakes so that we can correct them. At the same time, we want to reply to our ‘critics’ with the aim of clarifying an experience for everyone and not of encouraging a sterile in-fight among political groups.

The meaning of the ‘March on Paris’

If we look at the demonstration of 23 March 1979 on its own, as an isolated event, we won’t be able to understand why it should have given rise to so much discussion and polemic. A demonstration in Paris led by the CGT isn’t something new.

An enormous crowd marching for hours isn’t in itself anything to stimulate the imagination. Even the exceptional mobilization of the police force and the violent clashes between thousands of demonstrators and the forces of order weren’t entirely new. We’ve seen such things before. But the picture changes radically and takes on a very different meaning as soon as one abandons a circumstantial perspective and situates the 23 March in a more general context. This context indicates a profound change in the evolution of the proletarian struggle. It wasn’t the 23 March which brought about this change, but this change does allow us to understand the meaning of the 23 March, which was one of its expressions.

What does this new situation consist of? The answer is: the advent of a new wave of hard, violent workers’ struggles against the aggrava­tion of the crisis and the draconian austerity measures which capital is imposing on the prole­tariat: lay-offs, unemployment, inflation, falling living standards, etc.

For four or five years, from 1973 to 1978, capita­lism in Europe managed to block the discontent of the workers by dangling in front of them the prospect of a ‘change’. The ‘left in power’ was the main weapon for mystifying the working class and channeling its discontent into the dead-end of elections. For years the left used all its strength to minimize the world-wide, historical scale of the crisis, reducing it to the mere ‘bad management’ of the right-wing parties. The crisis wasn’t presented as a general crisis of capitalism but as something restricted to each country and thus the fault of right wing govern­ments. It followed from this that a solution to the crisis could also be found at the national level, by replacing the right with the left in government. This mystifying theme was very effective in demobilizing the working class in all the countries of Western Europe. During these years, the illusory hope that the workers’ living conditions could be improved by the left coming to power served to anaesthetize the combat­ivity of the first wave of workers’ struggles. Thus the left was able to put into practice the ‘Social Contract’ in Britain, the ‘Historic Compromise’ in Italy, the ‘Moncloa Pact’ in Spain and the ‘Programme Commun’ in France.

But as Marx wrote, “it is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, may imagine for the moment to be the aim. It is a question of what the proletariat actually is and what it will be compelled to do historically as the result of this being” (The Holy Family).

The weight of bourgeois ideology and mystifica­tions can momentarily win out over the workers’ discontent, but it can’t indefinitely stop the course of the class struggle. In the present his­toric conditions, the illusions about the ‘left in power’ couldn’t stand up for long against the aggravation of the crisis, this was true both in countries where the left was already in government and in countries where it was still only moving towards office. The barrage about the ‘left in power’ began to wear thin and slowly receded in the face of a workers’ discontent that was every day growing more visible and less controllable.

It was the unions, the capitalist organs most directly implanted in the class, in the work­places and factories, which first and most clear­ly noted this change that was about to take place in the class, which first saw the danger of an explosion of class struggle. They were aware that from the position they were currently occupying, ie supporting the ‘left in power’, they would be unable to control such struggles. It was they who put pressure on the political parties of the left -- of which the unions are an extension -- and showed them the urgent need for a move into opposition, which was the most adequate place for derailing the train of the newly resurgent struggle. No longer able to do what they had been doing before -- opposing and preventing the outbreak of strikes and other struggles -- the left parties and above all the unions now had to give the appear­ance of supporting the class struggle. They had to radicalize their language in order to be able to sabotage struggles while they were underway.

Revolutionary groups were and remain late in fully understanding this new situation, character­ized by the left in opposition, with all that this implies. Restricting themselves to generalities and not taking the concrete changes into account, their interventions inevitably remain abstract and their shots can’t help but miss the target.

The 23 March wasn’t an isolated event but was part of the general course towards a resurgence of struggle. It was preceded by a series of strikes, all over France, and particularly in Paris: hard strikes with a high level of combat­ivity. It was above all the direct product of the steelworkers’ struggle in Longwy and Denain, which involved violent confrontations with the armed forces of the state. It was the workers of Longwy and Denain, in struggle against the threat of massive lay-offs, who put forward the idea of a march on Paris. Should revolutionaries support this initiative and participate in this action? Any hesitation on this question was absolutely inadmissible. The fact that the CGT, after doing all it could, along with the other unions, to delay this project and undermine it, then decided to participate in it, to take on the task of ‘org­anizing’ the march, in no way justified abstention by revolutionaries. It would be extremely stupid for any revolutionary to wait for ‘pure’ struggles, in which the working class has already completely thrown off the influence of the unions, before deigning to take part in anything. If that were to be so, revolutionaries would never participate in the struggles of the working class, up to and including the revolution. At the same time you would provide convincing proof that the very existence of revolutionary groups was completely pointless.

By formally taking the initiative for the 23 March demonstration, the CGT proved not the inanity of the demonstration, but that union’s extreme ability to adapt to the situation, its enormous capacity for maneuver and recuperation in order to be able to derail and sabotage the actions of the proletariat. This ability of the unions to sabotage workers’ struggles from within is the greatest danger confronting the working class in the coming months and for a long time ahead. It also faces revolutionaries with their most difficult tasks in combating these most effective agents of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionaries must learn to fight these organs within the struggle itself, and not from the sidelines. Revolutionaries will only be able to unmask the unions and denounce their anti-working class role in practice; not through abstract generalities, but with concrete examples put forward during the course of the struggle, understandable and convincing to every worker.

Our critics

The approach of our eminent critics is quite different. We won’t talk about the modernists, who are still preoccupied with the question: who is the proletariat? They spend all their time looking for the subversive forces that can change society. It’s a waste of time trying to convince them. Perhaps we’ll come across them again after the revolution, if they last that long! There are others, the intellectuals, who are too busy writing their great oeuvres ... they haven’t got the time for such trifles as the 23 March. There are also the ‘old fighters’, now become skeptics who look at the present struggles and shrug their shoulders. Exhausted and dis­illusioned by the struggles of the past in which they once took part, they don’t have much faith in the struggles of today. They prefer to write their memoirs and it would be inhuman to disturb their sad retirement. There are also those well-meaning spectators, who sometimes write a great deal but who are nevertheless rigorous ‘anti-militants’. They only ask to be convinced and so they ... wait for something to happen. They wait, and they don’t understand that others are already engaged in the struggle. But there are also political groups for whom militant intervent­ion is the reason for their existence, but who find much to criticize in our intervention of 23 March.

Ferment Ouviere Revolutionnaire (FOR), for example. Despite its activism and voluntarism, the FOR refused to participate in the demonstration, probably because it was axed around the struggle against lay-offs. The FOR only recognizes a ‘crisis of civilization’ and denies that there is an economic crisis of the capitalist system. For them lay-offs, unemployment, and austerity are mere appearances or secondary phenomena which can’t provide a basis for the mobilization of the class. However, the FOR has frequently devoted itself to elaborating economic demands, like massive wage rises, refusal of overtime, and, notably in ‘68, the 35-hour week. One could easily believe that all this was just a sign of a pronounced taste for verbal radicalism and for being the highest bidder. The presence and leadership of the CGT in the demonstration completed the FOR’s reasons for denouncing it.

Another example: Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC). This group, which has made intervention its hobby horse, distinguished itself by its abs­ence precisely in the turbulent months of struggle at the beginning of 1979. In 1974 -- the very time the struggle was reaching a state of stag­nation and reflux -- the PIC set off at full steam, pretending that it was ‘intervening’ in every small localized strike, proposing to produce lots and lots of factory bulletins, etc. Now, like a bad sportsman, the PIC arrives exhausted and out of breath at the very moment it has to leap for­ward. Obviously, the PIC doesn’t think to ask itself whether the reason for the repeated fail­ures of its artificial ‘campaigns’ (committees to support the Portuguese workers, conference of groups for workers’ autonomy, anti-election blocs, international meetings) might lie in its incomp­rehension of what intervention can and should be, in its willful ignorance of the need to establish a relationship between communist intervention and the state of the class struggle. For the PIC, intervention is a pure act of will: just as it doesn’t understand that you must swim on the edge of the river when you want to go upstream, it also doesn’t see that you should be swimming in the middle of the river when you’re going down­stream. All these arguments are ancient Hebrew to the PIC, which prefers to invent other explanations to justify and -- inevitably -- theorize its absence. Thus dead-end interventions, the illusion of intervening, are now transformed into a real non-intervention.

Just at the point when the class is beginning to erupt, when it shows a militant will to face up to the attacks of capital, its austerity policies and its lay-offs, the PIC discovers that these struggles, like all struggles for economic demands, are just reformism. Against these resistant struggles the PIC proposes to launch a new campaign around the slogan ‘abolition of wage labor’.

We know by experience what lies behind these campaigns of the PIC: soap bubbles, appearing and disappearing in a few moments. What’s more interesting, is the PIC’s rediscovery of the language of the modernists, its recuperation of the ‘revolutionary phraseology’ which used to be so typical of Union Ouvriere -- whose empty chair the PIC now wants to sit on, perhaps. But let’s return to the definition of reformism, which the PIC wrongly identifies with the workers’ resist­ance to the immediate attacks of the bourgeoisie1. Reformism in the workers’ movement before 1914 did not consist in the defense of the immed­iate interests of the working class but in the separation it made between the defense of immed­iate interests and the ultimate goal of the proletariat -- communism, which could only be ach­ieved through revolution.2

The ideologues of the radical petty bourgeoisie, the vestiges of the student movement, the anarch­ist continuators of the Proudhonist school, all of them spear out against reformism with their fiery, pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, but they share with reformism with the artificial separation between immediate struggles and the final goal, between economic demands and political struggles. The slogan of the reformists ‘the movement is everything, the goal is nothing’ (Bernstein) and the modernist idea that the ‘goal is everything, the movement nothing’, only oppose each other in appearance. In fact they end up going in the same direction. Revolutionary Marxists have always fought against both conceptions. They always vigorously opposed any attempt to make a separation of this kind. They have always shown the indivisible unity of the proletariat, which is both an exploited class and a revolutionary class, and the indivisible unity of its struggle, both for the defense of its immediate interests and for its historical goals. Just as in the ascendant period of capitalism, when it was possible to obtain long-lasting improvements, the abandonment of these revolutionary historical goals amounted to a betrayal of the proletariat, so in the period of decadence the impossibility of such improve­ments can never be a justification for the renunciation of working class resistance and the abandonment of the struggle for the defense of the immediate interests of the class. However radical it might sound, such a position could only mean deserting and abandoning the working class.

It’s a shameful distortion to use the slogan ‘abolition of wage labor’ as a counter-weight to the violent struggle the working class is launching against the lay-offs that threaten it today. Misusing this famous slogan -- which appears in Marx’s 1865 expose against the Owenite J. Weston in the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, now known as Wages, Prices and Profit -- and quoting it out of context results in a gross deformation of the letter and spirit of its author. This deform­ation, rooted in what Marx calls a “false and superficial radicalism” (Wages, Price and Profit), is based on a separation, an opposition, between the defense of the living conditions of the class and the abolition of wage labor. In that remark­able expose, Marx insisted on showing the possibi­lity and the necessity for the working class to conduct the day-to-day struggle for the defense of its economic interests -- not only because this was in its immediate interest but above all because this struggle was one of the main pre­conditions for the development of the revolution­ary struggle against capital. Thus he warned that:

“If he (the proletarian) resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave.” (ibid).

And, further on, after showing that “the general tendency of capitalist production isn’t to raise the average standard of wages, but to sink them”, Marx came to the following conclusion:

“Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches beyond salvation.” (ibid).

And further on:

“By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.”

Contrary to what those braggarts who gargle with ‘revolutionary’ phraseology would have us believe, Marx never entertained the absurd notion of rais­ing the slogan ‘abolition of wage labor’ in opposition to the immediate struggle, the latter being defined and rejected as reformist. No: it was specifically to counter the illusion and lie of a possible harmony between the proletariat and capital, based on a false, abstract notion of justice and equality, that Marx put forward the formula:

“Instead of the conservative motto, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they (the workers) ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchwords ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”

Let’s also remember Rosa Luxemburg’s struggle against the separation between the minimum pro­gram and the maximum program. In her speech at the founding Congress of the KPD in 1918, she defended the unity of the proletarian program, showing that the immediate economic struggle and the political struggle for the final goal were two aspects of a single historic struggle. In the same spirit, Lenin, who is so deeply abhorred by the PIC, argued that “behind every strike stands the hydra of revolution.”

For the PIC on the other hand, a struggle against lay-offs amounts to a demand for ... wage labor, just as for Proudhon the association of the workers and going on strike amounted to recognizing capit­al. This is how our severe critics understand, interpret, and distort Marxist thought.

As for the Bordigist PCI, it wasn’t far behind when it came to minimizing the importance of the 23 March demonstration or presenting it as something completely different to what it really was. Le Proletaire (No.288) had most of its front page taken up with an article on the 1 May, even though this has for so long been nothing but a festival of exploitation, a sinister masquerade orchestrated by the worst enemies of the working class, the unions and left parties. In contrast to this, both before and after 23 March, the PCI made only a few furtive comments on the subject of the steelworkers’ demo, tending to interpret this demonstration as just another union ‘day of action’. Thus, before 23 March, it said in Le Proletaire, (No.285, p. 2):

“As soon as these forces were contained, there was nothing left but this ‘broad action’ of the national day of action variety, which by giving the illusion of solidarity, destroyed its real class base, leading to no other out­come than an intervention on the parliamentary terrain.”

After 23 March, the PCI could still see nothing in it but:

“a predictable waste of workers’ energies, an enterprise of division and demoralization, an occasion for bluff, chauvinist bleatings, social pacifism and electoral cretinism.” (‘Some Lessons of the March on Paris’, Le Proletaire, No.287)

Thus, locked up in its outdated schemas, the PCI largely stood on the sidelines during the class confrontations of last winter. This didn’t stop it denouncing:

“the new, more ‘romantic’ forms of opportunism which will inevitably flourish in reaction to reformist and centrist sabotage -- ie the various forms of syndicalism, councilism, autonomism, terrorism, etc.” (Le Proletaire, No.285)

Without being paranoid, we think the PCI is talk­ing about us when it refers to ‘councilism’, since this is how they always characterize our organization, and since at various public meetings their militants have not hesitated to attack our ‘opportunism’ and ‘suivism’ with regard to the struggles of early 1979 in France. You’d think they never look at themselves in the mirror! Don’t they know you should never discuss rope in the house of someone who’s been hanged?

It’s a bit much to be told off in this way by a ‘Party’ (sic) which still talks about the unions having a proletarian character simply because they’re made up of workers -- an argument as specious as the Trotskyist idea that the Russian state is ‘still proletarian’. It wasn’t long ago that the PCI was verifying the noble credentials of the CGT, because of its proletarian origins which disting­uished it from other union confederations whose origins were more dubious. And what are we to make of the PCI’s list of immediate demands which call, among other things, for the right of the unemployed ... to remain members of the trade unions? And what about their demand that immigrant workers should have equal rights to vote? We also haven’t forgotten the great zeal with which the members of the PCI who were acting as stewards on the demonstration of the Sonacotra hostels forbade the selling of revolutionary newspapers, on the pretext of apoliticism. And how are we to interpret the PCI’s support for the Coordinating Committee of the Sonacotra hostels, when, at the recent public meeting of the Gauche Internation­aliste, they gave out a leaflet calling for a meeting in Saint-Denis, countersigned by trade union sections and the local CFDT, and moreover bearing the precision that it was a “meeting supported by the Socialist Party in Saint-Denis”? Does the PCI recognize its own politics when it reads in the leaflet “Today, all the democrats of this country must take a position....”?

These formidable warriors against opportunism, who still advocate the oh-so-revolutionary tactic of the Trade Union United Front -- a tactic daily applied by the CGT and the CFDT to contain and immobilize the workers in struggle -- are not really in a very good position to give lessons to anyone. By identifying reformism with the unions in general, they spread the greatest confusion among the workers. Revolutionaries could and were obliged to participate in the union movement in the ascendant period of capitalism, despite the fact that the orientation of the unions and the majority inside them were reformist. It’s not the same today, in the period of decadence, when the unions had to become and have become organs of the capitalist state in all countries. There is no place in such organizations for the defense of the class, and thus for revolutionaries.

By failing to take into account this fundamental difference between reformism and the unions today, by identifying these two things and calling these unions reformist, the PCI renders a great service to the bourgeoisie, by helping them to get the workers to see the unions as their organ­izations. They gratuitously hand the bourgeoisie a sizeable present: the PCI’s revolutionary seal of approval for the unions, which can be used as a G-string to cover up the nudity of the unions, their anti-working class nature and function. When the PCI has understood this difference, then it may be in a better position to judge what is a revolutionary intervention, and what opportunism and suivism mean.

The CWO and our intervention

To finish in a more detailed way, we want to look at Revolutionary Perspectives No.15, in which the Communist Workers Organization in Britain makes a learned dissection of what should have been done and could have been done on 23 March, all of this with a minimum of information about what happened and a maximum of outrageous remarks about the ICC, and all in the noble cause of polemics.

“..given the outlook of this group, dominated by spontaneism and economism, their interventions were a series of disconnected and conf­usionist endeavors .... While they made an early intervention in the steel towns, denoun­cing the unions and calling on workers to organize and spread the struggle, they rejected any vanguard role for themselves, true to their councilist tendencies. They refused to attempt to channel the demand of some workers for a march on Paris into a practical course, prefer­ring to tell the workers that they must “org­anize themselves”. On occasions they did over­come this hesitation, as for example in Dunkirk, where ICC militants successfully helped steel workers to turn a union meeting into a mass assembly. But this was done empirically, without any real transcending of their spontaneist and councilist notions. The ICC, in its “practical turn”, is likely to end up in opportunism, rather than in a coherent practice of intervention, since it lacks any overall understanding of conscious­ness and the role of the communist vanguard.” (Revolutionary Perspectives, No.15, p. 38)

The CWO, on the other hand, which has a perfect understanding of consciousness and of the leading role of the party, understood all about 23 March: “In relation to 23 March, it is clear that only a rearguard action was possible by this time.” What magnificent clarity, telling us six months after the events that they weren’t worth fussing over!

What deep analysis does the CWO base this luminous clarity on? What do they say about the political and social situation in France? In RP No.10, at the time of the elections in France, the CWO (along with everyone else) was saying that “the initiative lies firmly with the ruling class” and that there had been relative social peace in France for five years. In RP No.15, in October 1979, the CWO reprinted this passage but added “Since then we are pleased to report that the situation has changed.” Thanks for the good news! To make a note of reality when it’s right before your eyes is hardly a basis for intervention. You can’t prepare an intervention by getting excited about things after they’ve happened and thus giving yourself a sense of importance: it’s a question of refining one’s political analysis in time to do something. This is no easy thing for an isolated revolutionary group like the CWO but the same limitations apply to all other revolution­ary organizations today. Despite the difficulty of grasping all the nuances of a moving reality, even before the March 1978 elections the ICC (in IR,No.13) drew attention to the fact that the conditions of the reflux were beginning to wear out and that new outbreaks of class combativity were looming up. This perspective was shown to be correct by the strikes in spring 1978 in Germany, USA, Italy, and France. This perspective enabled us to be vigilant, to recognize the importance of the first signs of struggle and to be present in those struggles; subsequently this analysis enabled us to warn the class about the dangers of the left in opposition. The CWO says nothing about this analysis, again perhaps for polemical reasons. To acknowledge the existence of a new situation is better than the attitude of those revolutionary groups who refuse to recognize the resurgence of class struggle, but it’s not enough if we are to orientate ourselves rapidly in the face of sudden upheavals.

If the CWO can’t reproach us for failing to prepare ourselves for a resurgence of class struggle, it does attack us for failing to be the ‘vanguard’ of a movement which could only be a ‘rearguard action’. This notion of the ‘vanguard of the rearguard’ gives them the impression that the CWO has its head on back to front, or at least that it’s rather fond of contortions.

What brilliant analysis leads the CWO, from its exalted throne, to say that the 23 March was doom­ed in advance? What was the real situation?

The combativity of the workers exploded at Longwy with the general mobilization of the steelworkers against lay-offs, attacks on police-stations, destruction of dossiers in the bosses’ HQ; it was a situation of open struggle which began to escape the control of the unions and which was denounced by them. The movement spread to Denain and the rest of the steel industry. Moreover, in Paris a number of strikes broke out against lay-offs, aust­erity, and miserable working conditions: in French TV (SFP), in the banks, the insurance companies, the post office. In a situation that was full of potential, and in the whole context of the crisis, what was to be done? Was it enough to talk vague­ly about the need to generalize the struggle, to go beyond regional and sectional boundaries? The workers themselves had already begun to think of ways of concretizing this extension of the struggle and were talking about a march on Paris -- Paris, which throughout the history of the workers’ move­ment in France has always been the centre for the detonation of social struggles. How could we not support this need, expressed and demanded by the workers from the areas in struggle, to direct their energies towards Paris? Why was it that, for over a month, the unions tried to deal with this initiative by putting it off day after day? Wasn’t it because they hoped to destroy it completely or at least to disperse it.

But even before they had fixed the date for the end of March (sufficiently late for them to be able to bludgeon the workers back into line), the unions had already set about their job of under­mining the whole movement. They used the tactic of divisions between the unions to break up any tendency towards unity on the part of the workers. The CGT (the CP union) took on the task of ‘organ­izing’ the march, the better to sabotage it from within, while the CFDT went about proclaiming that it was against ‘diversionary days of action’. At the beginning, no one could say for certain just how far the 23 March demonstration could go. The whole question depended on the potentialities of the struggles that were unfolding at that moment. Ten days before the demonstration, it was still possible for this march to act as a concrete cata­lyst of the will to extend the struggle, to unite the steelworkers with the workers on strike in Paris, to take the march outside of the unions. But while revolutionaries (ie those who didn’t believe that everything was doomed in advance) were aware of this potentiality, so were the bourgeoisie and its union army. The unions set to work and a few days before 23 March, they rushed through the return of all the strikers in the Paris region. One by one these struggles were extinguished, thanks to the unions’ redoubled efforts. In any case, it is clear that the late date of the demonstration was chosen by the union in order to carry through this tactic.

We distributed leaflets to the strikers, calling on them to go on the march, for unity in the struggle, for going outside the unions. But the pressure coming from the bourgeoisie won out over these initial expressions of workers’ militancy. Already in the northern towns the workers were rightly showing distrust for the CGT, which was taking the whole thing in hand. Although we said that the march shouldn’t be restricted to union delegations, that the workers should go en masse, -- which was the only way the march could be saved -- we became aware of the fact that the delegation from Denain, for example, would be much smaller than it could have been.

What was to be done? Go on as though nothing had changed? Of course not. In the days before 23 March, the ICC prepared a leaflet for the demon­stration which said that only going outside the unions could give the march the real content the workers had hoped for.

The CWO accuses the ICC of distributing a leaflet which called the demonstration “a step forward”. It’s easy to take a phrase out of context to make it mean its opposite. In fact the leaflet says “In order for the 23 March to be a step forward for all of our struggles...”, and the content of the leaflet leaves no doubt about the need to break out of the union jail. The unions understood this well enough, because their service d’ordre tore up the leaflets and attacked our militants selling RI, No 59, whose headline said “No extens­ion of the struggle without going outside the unions” and “Greetings to the workers of Longwy”.

But watch out! The CWO would have done things differently. They give us a lesson: first we should have “channeled” the march into a “practical course”, instead of “telling the workers that they must ‘organize themselves’”. What does “channeling” the march actually mean? Before the demonstration, the ICC should have intervened to denounce the march as a “maneuver… to derail the class struggle”. Should we have done this in early February, or only after the CGT had taken the march in hand and got the Paris workers back to work? The CWO doesn’t bother to clarify these small details. It doesn’t seem to understand that a class movement goes very quickly and that you have to assess the balance of forces between classes while it’s all happening. But the ICC should have “called for an alternative route and function to the march, ie to go to the factories in Paris and call for strike action in solidarity ...” We did call for solidarity from the enter­prises of Paris. But if we understand the CWO, they say that the march was doomed in advance. Should we have denounced it and proposed another (where? On the TV? By pulling rabbits out of a hat?), and during the course of this alternative march, gone to the factories (which ones? None were on strike at the time)? The CWO has to make up its mind. Either a demonstration is doomed in advance, in which case one must rigorously denounce it with no ideas about ‘diverting’ it; or a demon­stration has an important potential, in which case you don’t denounce it. As for the idea of an ‘alt­ernative’ march, it’s as absurd as the suggestion of a handful of workers in Longwy who asked if we could put them up in Paris if 3,000 of them came down. To think that we could offer such an altern­ative today is to have one’s head in the clouds of rhetoric; it amounts to believing that we are in a quasi-insurrectional period. The question isn’t to imagine the impossible on paper, but to carry out everything that’s possible in practice.

The CWO thinks that it was possible for a revolut­ionary minority to divert this demonstration. Once again it neglects to say how and in what circumstances. It’s a strange conception the CWO seems to have -- seeing the revolution at every street corner the moment the infallible party gives the right directives, no matter what degree of maturity the class has reached.

However, despite the most refined, systematic sabotage, despite a service d’ordre of 3,000 CP heavies, despite the fragmentation of the most combative workers the moment they arrived in the outskirts of Paris, despite military-style disper­sion in the streets around L’Opera, the 23 March wasn’t an empty procession like the sinister May­day parades. On 23 March, the combativity of the workers couldn’t find an outlet through which to express itself, so it exploded into a fight in which hundreds of workers confronted the union service d’ordre. But here again the CWO has its own version of reality: “To go along and mind­lessly join those workers in a futile fight with the CRS/CGT was an act of desperation” on the ICC’s part.

The CWO tries to paint a picture of a ‘mindless’ intervention which boiled down to going along to fight the cops alongside the workers in a ‘futile’ battle. Coming from any other publication this accusation wouldn’t be quite so astounding. Do we really need to affirm that our comrades didn’t go looking for a brawl, but defended themselves against the CRS charges like the other workers and alongside them? They retreated with the demon­strators until the march had been completely disp­ersed, all the while continuing to distribute leaflets and to discuss. The ICC has never exalted violence in itself, neither today nor tomorrow, as can be seen by the texts we have published on the period of transition. The CWO now reproaches us for being obliged to defend ourselves against the police, whereas in RP, No.13 it says “the ICC is under the growing influence of liberal and pacifist illusions” (p6). The CWO must decide. On the one hand it says that the ICC are ‘dreamers’ and ‘utopians’ because we are against violence within the class during the revolution (whereas the CWO, as if it were the schoolmaster of the revolution, is already rubbing its hands in expectation of the lesson in lead it’s going to give to the workers who don’t get it right). On the other hand, when the ICC confronts the police in a demonstration, the CWO finds this ‘mindless’. Confronting the police is ‘futile’, but killing each other is a truly revolutionary ‘tactic’!

We have said that the march on Paris could have been a concretization of the necessity to gener­alize the struggle, an occasion for showing the real strength of the working class. The fact that this potentiality wasn’t realized wasn’t because of us. Although we tried to put forward the idea of an on-the-spot assembly, the rapidity of the police charge combined with the dispersion organized by the unions prevented the thousands of workers who were unwilling to disperse from holding such a meeting.

The fact that the 23 March demonstration didn’t end up doing much more than what the unions wanted it to do doesn’t mean that it never had any potential. Despite all the sabotage that took place before the march, despite the fact that it was put off until after the strikes in Paris were over, it could still have turned out differently, as was shown a few days later at a demonstration in Dunkirk; here the union meeting which concluded the demonstration was transformed into a workers’ assembly where a significant number of workers denounced the unions. Following the CWO’s logic revolutionaries shouldn’t have participated in this demonstration because it was still contained by the unions and was in many ways much more ‘artificial’ than the 23 March demonstration. But this would have deprived them of the possibility of making an important and relatively effective intervention, as happened with the PCI which had a similar analysis to the CWO’s.

After the march, the ICC distributed to all the factories where it intervenes regularly a leaflet analyzing how the unions had carried out their sabotage. The leaflet said that the essential lesson of this struggle, in which the unions had unmasked themselves as defenders of the police against the anger of the workers, was that there was no other way forward for the workers except to go outside the unions.

For the CWO, the ICC’s intervention throughout the period of the French steelworkers’ struggle was simply the culmination “of a long series of political capitulation by the ICC”. This group doesn’t know how to measure its words. Apart from the fact that its remarks about what a “genuine (!) revolutionary intervention” would have looked like don’t stand up to scrutiny, nothing in what the ICC did justifies the charge of “political capitulation”. The ICC was faithful to its principles and to a coherent orientation. Agitation is a difficult weapon to master and you can only learn to do so in practice. We don’t claim that each of the seven leaflets we distributed in six weeks was a master-piece, but there’s absolutely nothing in any of the CWO’s criticisms which shows that we abandoned our principles. We are happy to note that the gentlemen who aspire to be the ‘leaders’ of the working class tomorrow recognize that the ICC’s intervention doesn’t have a substitutionist style. But when it comes to real practical questions they bring nothing precise to the discussion, and in the end their words are nothing but hot air.

The CWO ends its bad-faith assault on the ICC, by saying that on many vital issues facing revolutionaries today, such as “‘should they help in setting up unemployed circles?’, ‘Should they be in favor of workers’ groups?’, Should they attend unofficial international meetings of workers if there is still union influence in them?’ ... the ICC can only leave its members stumbling in the dark, and eventually collapsing into opportunism”. Here again it’s lost any sense of proportion. The CWO attended the ICC’s Third Congress where these questions were discussed, but the CWO seems to have been deaf at the time or has had amnesia since. It has to be said that when, as is the case with the CWO, you’re not used to elaborating political positions inside an international organization, and when you think monolithism is the best armour for a revolutionary organization, then you’re going to have a hard time finding your feet in a Congress where different proposals are inevitably put forward, and where there is a real confront­ation of ideas. But if the CWO is already shut up in a watertight case today, what will it do in the whirlpool of the class struggle, when all the workers will feel the need to debate and discuss?

We don't pretend to have all the answers – no more than the CWO, who in a sudden outburst of realism, admit that they have “not yet formulated a total picture on these questions”. But in the questions posed above, the ICC has already replied yes in its own practice (cf the unemployed committees of Angers, the Rotterdam strike, the international dockers’ meeting in Barcelona). While we support every tendency towards the self organization of the working class, we must also know how to orientate these efforts, what dangers to avoid, what specific contribution to make. And in this we can only rely on our principles and on what we learn from experience.

It’s in this sense that we affirm the necessity to give our support to all the struggles which the proletariat wages on its own class terrain. We support the demands decided on by the workers themselves on the condition that they conform to the interests of the class. We reject the auctioneering games of the leftists (the unions and the left ask for 20 centimes, so the leftists ask for 25!) as well as the PCI’s absurd idea of making up a ‘list of demands’ instead of the workers.

The greatest obstacle facing workers’ struggles today is the union apparatus. In a period of rising class struggle we try to denounce the unions not only in a general, abstract way, but above all in a concrete manner, inside the struggle, showing how they sabotage the workers’ militancy on a day-to-day level.

The essential thing in any workers’ struggle today is the thrust towards extending it, towards forging the unity of the class against a decompos­ing capitalist system, towards going beyond categories, regions, and even nations. An isolat­ed struggle can only end in defeat. The only way to force capital to retreat is to unify and generalize the struggle. Here the situation today is different from last century, when the length of a struggle was an essential factor in its success. Faced with a boss-class that was much more disp­ersed than it is today, stopping production for a long period could mean catastrophic economic loss­es for the enterprise and was thus an effective way of pressuring the owners. Today on the other hand, there is much greater solidarity between all sectors of the national capital, mainly under the aegis of the state, and this allows an enterprise to hold out much longer (especially in a moment of overproduction and excess stocks). Because of this, a struggle that goes on and on has every possibility of being lost, due to the economic difficulties facing the strikers and the exhaustion that eventually sets in. This is why the unions don’t mind playing the game of ‘class war’ and declaring ‘we’ll hold out for as long as it takes’. They know the struggle will be broken in the long run. On the other hand, it’s no accident that they will try to sabotage any move to generalize the struggle: what they fear more than any other section of the bourgeoisie is having to deal with a movement which doesn’t simply affect this or that sector of the class, but tends to generalize to the whole class, uncovering the fact that the struggle is between two antagonistic classes, not just between a group of workers and a boss. In such situations the bourgeoisie is faced with economic and polit­ical paralysis, which is why one of the most vital weapons of the struggle is the tendency towards extending itself, even if this doesn’t happen right away. The bourgeoisie is much more scared of strikers who go from one factory to another trying to convince their comrades to join the struggle, than of strikers who shut themselves up in one factory, even when they’re determined to hold out for two months.

The generalization of the struggle is the leit­motif of revolutionary intervention today because it is the prefiguration of the revolutionary battles that will embrace the whole class tomorrow.

In order to be able to wage the struggle outside and against the unions, the working class is organizing itself, in a hesitant manner at first, but nonetheless in a way that already allows us to foresee the general self-organization of the proletariat (cf the Rotterdam strike of September ‘79). With all our strength, we support these expressions which serve to enrich class conscious­ness on this vital issue.

As for the most combative workers, we stimulate them to regroup themselves, not to set-up new trade unions, or to lose themselves in a sterile apoliticism which comes from a lack of confidence in themselves, but in workers’ groups, action committees, collectives, co-ordinations, etc, meeting places between workers, open to all workers to discuss the basic questions facing the class. Without falling into over-enthusiasm and without bluffing, we can say that the formation of such combative minorities is a sign of the ferment going on in the whole class. Such minorities contribute to the development of class conscious­ness not so much through the individuals directly involved at a given moment, but through the histor­ic thread which the class is once again taking up, by opening up discussion and debate in its own ranks.

On these questions as on the 23 March demonstration it has to be said there are no eternally valid recipes. Tomorrow many other expressions of class combativity will come to our attention, all of them showing the strength of the proletar­iat. Like the class as a whole, revolutionaries are faced with the most vital tasks: defending a perspective by taking a precise situation into account; knowing when to go from a general denunciation to a concrete denunciation based on the immediate facts; when to act at a faster pace; how to appreciate the real level of struggle; how to define, at each stage, the immediate goals, and how to relate these to the revolutionary perspective.

In the whole world today there are only a handful of revolutionary militants. We must have no illusions about revolutionaries having a direct influence today, nor about the difficulty the working class has in reappropriating Marxism. In the coming storms of the class struggle, in this work “of consciousness, will, passion and imagination that is the proletarian struggle”, revolutionaries will only be able to play a role “if they haven’t forgotten how to learn”.

JA/MC/JL/CG

 

Introduction

In International Review, no.10 (June/August 1977), we began publication of the texts of the Mexican Communist Left. As we proposed, we are continuing this work (after some delay, it is true, although this was contrary to our wishes) with the publica­tion in the last IR, no.19, of the text on ‘Nationalizations’, in which the Mexican Left vig­orously denounced this mystification, which is used chiefly by the so-called workers’ parties to shamelessly defeat the working class, binding it more firmly to the defense of capitalism. Today, as yesterday, nationalization remains the platform of these parties, and the acceleration of the development towards state capitalism is always presented by them as the proletarian alternative to the crisis of capitalism. And, just like yes­terday, the Trotskyists and the other leftists continue, on this question as on so many others, to fall into line, to act as very devoted servants of capital.

The two texts we are publishing now are, to the best of our knowledge, the last this group pub­lished, in their magazine Comunismo, no.2, Decem­ber 1938. The violent hostility of all the forces of the bourgeoisie, left and right; the Stalinist-style campaign of public denunciation by the Mexi­can section of the IVth International of the militants and the group as ‘provocateurs’, ‘agents of Hitler and Stalin’; the repression (see their ‘Appeal’ in IR, no.10) handed out by the left government; and above all, the storms of the evermore rapidly approaching war -- all these, along with the weak forces of the Mexican Left and its extreme youth, meant it could not long resist such a coalition of enemy forces. The Marxist Workers’ Group of Mexico disappeared in the turmoil of 1939. But, in the short two years of its existence the Mexican left communist group made an effective contribution to the defense of fundamental communist positions. Its place, and its contribution, in the darkest hours of the international revolutionary movement, should not remain unrecognized by new generations.

The first text is a vital example of how revolu­tionaries in an underdeveloped country defend class positions, and denounce all the lies of a ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie. A good example, not only in contrast to the Trotskyist support of Cardenas, but also against the Bordigists of today, who can find nothing better than to criti­cize the ‘weaknesses’ of the left government of Allende as regards Pinochet, reproaching him for his hesitations, and giving him, after the event, edifying advice on the question of ‘revolutionary violence’. We should also recall the apologies made by the Bordigists for the exemplary ‘revolu­tionary terror’ of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is towards them, too, that the conclusion of the article of the Mexican left is addressed. Denouncing the lie of ‘social revolution’ lauded by the revolutionary National Party (the govern­mental party), the Marxist Workers’ Group pro­claimed:

“What a glorious ‘social’ vision: to establish in this country the peace of the cemetery, and call it a ‘classless society’ ... as these generals understand it.”

The second text is an analytical study of the Theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on the national and colonial ques­tions. It is absolutely inevitable that any communist grouping disengaging itself from the long course of the degeneration and final betra­yal of the IIIrd International will have to not only denounce the Stalinist counter-revolution, but also undertake a detailed critique of the work of the Communist International, from its first years, from the glorious times of Lenin. Like the Italian and Belgian fractions of the International Communist Left, the Mexican left could not simply be satisfied with a flat apology for all that came from Lenin, as the Trotskyists did, nor as the Bordigists do today. The Mexican left would have the greatest difficulty in recognizing the Bordigists as the continuation of Bilan, since they have regressed on so many questions, that they now look like a variant of Trotskyism.

Just as revolutionaries on the outbreak of World War I could not content themselves with a simple denunciation of the betrayal of the IInd Inter­national, but had to submit the whole of its development and history to a critical examination, so the left communists could not and should not have been content with a characterization of the Stalinist counter-revolution but had to seek to lay bare its roots, not the least of which lay in the immaturity of the thought and organization of the communists movement itself. Stalinism did not fall from the sky, nor did it arise from a void. And if it is absurd to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so it is absurd to condemn the Commu­nist International because Stalinism developed and triumphed from within it (see, for example, the ‘modern’, oh-so-severe judges like the PIC and the Gauche Internationaliste in France). But it is no less absurd to pretend that the dirty bathwater was always absolutely pure and limpidly clear and to present the history of the Communist International as divided into two neat periods, the first when it was pure, revolutionary, spotless, without weakness, until sharply interrupted by the explosion of the counter-revolution. These images of a happy paradise and a horrible hell, with no link between them, have nothing to do with a real movement, such as the history of the communist movement, where continuity flows through profound splits and where future ruptures have their seeds in the process of this continuity.

Only this inexorable critical examination, this constant self-criticism, allows the revolutionary movement of our class to overcome the weaknesses and the immaturity of yesterday, to correct the errors of the past, and create the possibility of raising itself to fulfill its historic tasks, of evolving its positions through its experience.

It is not surprising that the Mexican left placed the examination of the national question at the heart of its preoccupations. Alongside the ques­tions of the historic period of decadence and its implications, trade unions, electoral questions, the question of fascism and anti-fascism, the national question is one of those which have con­tained the most ambiguities, allowing for oppor­tunist interpretations, and lending strength to all kinds of dubious currents.

In the first part of this text the Mexican left, recalling the first and second paragraphs of the second Thesis, endeavors to show how the Trotsky­ists and other ‘anti-imperialists’ shamelessly distort the principled position developed in the Theses of the Second Congress. It defends the internationalist principle as a gain of the comm­unist movement, and denounces any alteration of it as a regression towards nationalist, bourgeois positions. The Mexican left then proposes to make a critique of the inadequacies and ambigui­ties still contained in the Theses of the Commu­nist International, most notably in the third point of the second paragraph. The first two points in this paragraph clearly put the accent on the fundamental separation between the class interests of the exploited, and the mystifying bourgeois concept of the so-called national interest, common to all classes. The third point is much more vague, a simple description of the extreme exploitation of the majority of the under­developed countries by a minority of countries where capitalism is highly developed, and draws no conclusion other than the statement that this is “characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism”.

What flows from this statement? For the centrist majority of the International, around Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, it followed that in certain circumstances, and more particularly in a revo­lutionary period, the proletariat concentrated in the most developed capitalist countries could find, in its assault on the capitalist world, support in the underdeveloped countries, which has been exposed to the oppression of the major powers. The error of such a position lays in the mechanical way it proceeds from observing the antagonism between dominant and dominated countries to affirming that this antagonism repre­sents an irreconcilable historic opposition to the existing order. Bourgeois society is not a harmon­ious society, but is founded on many antagonisms: between highly developed capitalist countries and underdeveloped countries, and between developed countries themselves and between one bloc of countries and another for the domination of the world, which culminates in the period of genera­lized imperialist wars. The question is to understand whether these antagonisms put into question the bourgeois order, whether they offer a solution to the contradictions which are tear­ing it apart and leading it towards catastrophe, or whether these antagonisms are merely manifesta­tions of the existing order, of its mode of existence?

For Marxists, only the class antagonism of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie offers a revolutio­nary dynamic, not only because it is the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors, but be­cause it is the proletariat which bears within it the solution to all these antagonisms and contra­dictions in which society is floundering; and this solution is the establishment of a new soc­ial order, a society without classes, and without national divisions: communism. The ambiguity of this position started the Communist International on a dangerous slope. The shattering contradic­tions and successive setbacks which this policy led to (support for Kemal Pasha in Turkey or Chiang Kai-shek in China) only served to grease the slope, and accelerate the degeneration of the International.

From an ‘occasional possibility’ the position be­came a constant rule and the possibility of the proletariat finding support in the national strug­gles of colonial countries was transformed into unconditional support by the proletariat of national and nationalist struggles. In this way the Trotskyists ended up by participating in the imperialist war and in national defense in the name of anti-fascism, and the Bordigists, turning their backs on the concept of an international revolution, constructed a theory of geographical areas, where, for some (a minority) proletarian revolution was on the agenda, and for others (a category comprising the vast majority of countries and of the world population), ‘the anti-imperia­list bourgeois-democratic revolution’ was on the agenda.

The disappearance of their magazine in 1939 impe­ded the Mexican left from pursuing its implacable critique of the ambiguous positions of the IIIrd International. But the first part of their study was already an important contribution to this work. It is the task of revolutionaries today to take up this critique and to continue it.

MC

The Party of the Mexican Revolution ‘recognizes the class struggle’ to combat the proletarian revolution

One of the most characteristic features of poli­tical life today, is the fact that the bourgeoi­sie, in order to derail the attack of the starv­ing and desperate masses, hypocritically and demagogically presents itself as the opposite of what it really is, ie it tries to pass as the defenders of the masses against the bourgeoisie itself. Of course, in order to succeed in such a shameless and absurd fraud, the bourgeoisie has to divide itself into two parts: one the ‘oppressor’, the other the ‘protector’, and these two factions, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ capita­lists must be seen to be engaged in a ‘struggle’.

In some cases, in ‘democratic’ countries, where the dictatorship is disguised, the sector composed of ‘good’ capitalists, holds state power, and in the other, the countries with an overt dictator­ship, ‘bad’ capitalists do so. In the latter case, the ‘good’ capitalists, the ‘protectors of the masses’ are in a position of ‘irreconcilable opposition’, in their own terms. But in both cases it is a question of one capitalist sector ‘defending’ the masses against another capitalist sector. The workers and poor peasants, in order to liberate themselves from the capitalist yoke, need only link their destinies to their own capi­talists -- the ‘good’ ones of course, those who are disguised as their ‘friends’.

And this total surrenders to the class enemy, which naturally demands enormous sacrifices: economic, political, and even of life itself (like today in Spain and China), in order to ‘protect’ the proletarians and peasants from the other ‘reactionary’, ‘fascist’ or ‘imperialist’ capita­lists, such an abandonment of struggle is ironi­cally called ‘struggle’. In Mexico, today the tropical garden of demagogic exuberance, this is even called ‘class struggle’.

When you read the following phrases in the dec­laration of the ‘new’ PRM (‘Party of the Mexican Revolution and authentic representative of the workers’) and the Editorial entitled ‘On Patrio­tism’ in E1 Nacional, 21 April 1938, you could easily believe you were in a madhouse:

“The class struggle is recognized by the PRM and by the consensus of workers’ opinion throughout the country, as an insuperable reality, a phenomenon inherent to the capita­list system of production. We can hope for social peace only when this system has been replaced. We revolutionaries conceive of society as divided into two strata, superimposed by the force of an economic law imposed by capitalism. This conception is still valid, even if only in a transient sense. The mayan peasant is more a brother to the Finnish fish­erman, living by his icy waters, than to the white landowner, son of the same soil, and protected by the same institutions, who only uses what he has in common with his serf to better rob him.”

And who is it saying these things? The true representative of the bourgeoisie, the true rep­resentative of the capitalist system, the true representative of the white owners, the irrecon­cilable enemy of the mayan peasants and of the Finnish fishermen, the party of the so-called ‘Mexican Revolution’!

The oppressors want to lead the struggle of the oppressed

Thus the Mexican landowners ‘recognize’ the class struggle, but naturally they do not refer to the struggle between them and the oppressed masses, but to the struggle of the oppressed and exploited against the other landowners and capitalists, the ‘baddies’, the ‘fascists’. Against the latter, the ‘good’ Mexican bourgeoisie, led by the ‘demo­cratic’ generals, struggle side by side with the workers and peasants, and not only do they parti­cipate in this ‘class struggle’, they also lead it! Of course, such a ‘class struggle’, controlled by a sector of the bourgeoisie itself, is not a struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors, but, on the contrary, is a struggle of the oppressors against the oppressed. It is the class struggle of the bourgeoisie and land­owners, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ together, against the proletarians and the peasants.

The Mexican bourgeoisie ‘recognizes’ the class struggle, with the aim of distorting the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters, and using this combativity to strengthen the struggle of the exploiters against the exploited. This is the key to the confusion which today reigns among the proletariat and the peasantry in this country, and the explanation for their numerous defeats.

There is a need for a Party of the proletarian revolution!

The triumph of the ‘classist’ demagogy of the Mexican bourgeoisie can be explained by the lack of a proletarian class party in Mexico.

There does not exist, outside of our organization, any group, however small, which tries, on the basis of Marxist positions, to combat the lies of the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie of this country. So the demagogy of the PRM and all their great ‘workerists’ in the government, has a clear run and can reach limits unheard of in other countries.

“Someone who only accepts the class struggle is not yet a Marxist, and can still remain within the framework of bourgeois politics and thought ... Only those who extend the recognition of the class struggle to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat are Marxists.” (Lenin, State and Revolution)

Fighting the bourgeoisie and destroying it com­pletely through the proletarian dictatorship, is, for Marxists, for communists, the only way to ‘substitute’ for the present system one which would finally establish ‘social peace’ (to use the words of the PRM’s declaration).

The generals of the PRM and their astute ‘worker­ist’ advisers have, of course, an entirely diff­erent conception. For them, to substitute one system for another means simply changing its label, and naturally they can and must do these themselves. In other words, they are not con­cerned solely with a so-called ‘class struggle’, but with a ‘social revolution’ ... under the direction of the generals!

What a glorious ‘social’ vision! To establish in this country the peace of the cemetery, and call it a ‘classless’ society ... as these generals understand it!

An analysis of the theses of Second Congress of the Communist International (1920)

On the national and colonial questions

“Abolish the exploitation of man by man, and you have abolished the exploitation of one nation by another.” (The Communist Manifesto)

The text of the second paragraph of the Theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on the national and colonial questions says:

“As the conscious expression of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national ques­tion on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly, it should emphasize the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly, it must empha­size the equally clear division of the oppres­sed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, exploiting, privileged nations, as a counter to the bour­geois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capi­talist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.”

We shall analyze this paragraph point by point.

The struggle against democracy

Without doubt the most significant point in this paragraph is its opening: the clear and unequivo­cal declaration that the primary task of the world Communist Party is not the renowned ‘defense of democracy’, about which we hear so much today from so-called ‘communists’, but, on the contrary, the struggle against democracy!

This affirmation, which was reiterated many times in other Theses of the International in the time of Lenin, although roundly denied today by the organization which still bears this name, served Lenin and his comrades as a point of departure for the study of national and colonial questions. There is no other point of departure! Those who do not accept the struggle against bourgeois democracy as a fundamental task of communists can never offer a Marxist solution to these questions.

The lie of equality within the capitalist system

The first paragraph of the Theses explains in more detail what these “abstract and formal prin­ciples” are that the party of the revolutionary world proletariat must reject as a basis for its tactics on the national and colonial questions:

“An abstract or formal conception of the question of equality in general and national equality in particular is characteristic of the bourgeoisie by its very nature. Under the pretence of the equality of the human person in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited, and thus deceives the oppressed classes in the highest degree. The idea of equality, which is itself a reflection of the relations of commodity production, is trans­formed by the bourgeoisie, under the pretext of the absolute equality of the human person, into a tool in the struggle against the abolition of classes.”

Of course, the struggle for the abolition of classes would be superfluous if, in reality, as the bourgeoisie declares, equality were possible within the present society, despite its division into classes. The truth is that not only is there no equality within the present society, but there can never be any. Therefore the Theses add at the end of the paragraph quoted: “the true significance of the demand for equality lies only in the demand for the abolition of classes” and again, paragraph four speaks of: “... victory over capitalism, without which the destruction of national oppression and equality is impossible.”

In other words, the affirmation of the exis­tence of equality, or at least the possibility of its existence, within the present society, tends to preserve exploitation and the oppres­sion of classes and nations. The demand for equality, on the basis of the abolition of classes, tends towards the opposite goal: the destruction of present day society and the con­struction of a new classless society. The first is the chosen weapon of all reformists in their service of the counter-revolution. The second is the demand of a proletariat conscious of its class interests, the demand of the party of the revolutionary world proletariat.

The proletariat has no national interests

In accord with the 2nd part of the Thesis quoted, the world Communist Party has to reject “the general concept of so-called national interests” because these do not nor cannot exist when all nations are divided into classes, with conflicting and irreconcilable interests, so that those who speak of ‘national interests’ either consciously or unconsciously defend the interests of the dominant classes. The affirmation that ‘national interests’ exist, means interests common to all the members of the nation, and is based precisely on this supposed “formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited” hypocritically proclaimed by these very owners and exploiters. In the way indicated by Marx and Engels we must fight the lie that, for example, ‘all Mexicans’ are equal and have common interests and therefore a common fatherland to defend. The fatherland isn’t theirs. The workers, as the Communist Manifesto, with its absolute clarity, asserted a hundred years ago, have no fatherland. The future, which is ours, will not have different fatherlands in whose names the owners will command the dispossessed on the battlefields, but one fatherland: the human society of producers.

The good neighbor of the Mexican bourgeoisie

In order to successfully struggle against the bourgeoisie and destroy this society we must reject not only the lie of the equality of men within each nation, but also the lie of the equality of nations. We must show, as the first part of the Thesis indicates, that “the enslavement of the vast majority of the population of the world, by an insignificant minority of advanced capitalist countries”'(USA, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan) is “characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism”, and that this enslavement therefore cannot dis­appear with a few farcical declarations against imperialism and in favor of a so-called ‘good neighbor’ policy, but only with the disappear­ance of capitalism itself, with its violent destruction by the world proletariat.

We can never weary of repeating this fundamental truth, not in a general or abstract way, but by concretely and daily unmasking this democratic hypocrisy which the Theses speak of. In the case of Mexico this means, precisely, unmasking the lie that an advanced, and therefore imperialist, capitalist country like the USA could be the ‘good neighbor’ of a backward country like Mexico. We must destroy the myth that the treaty which, at the present time, is being forged between the North American exploiters and the only good neigh­bors that they have in Mexico, the servile Mexi­can exploiters, means a treaty between the North American and Mexican peoples, as the exploiters of both countries would have us believe. We must insist that, on the contrary, our only good neighbors are the proletarians and all the oppressed of the US and the whole world, and with whom truly common interests unite us against all the exploiters and their respective fatherlands.

The counter-revolutionary patriotism of the Stalinists and the Trotskyists

All this is recognized ‘theoretically’ by the so-called communists of the Stalinist and Trotskyist varieties, but practically they act in contra­diction to it. The Stalinists of Mexico and the US, today stand in the front line of those who praise the ‘new policy’ of North American imperialism. The Trotskyists do not do this overtly, but follow the indirect method of exclu­sively attacking the ‘bad neighbors’ of the Mexican bourgeoisie: English, German or Japanese imperialism ...

But their struggle against fundamental positions of the Communist International of Lenin’s time goes beyond this. With a trickery characteristic of renegades, the Stalinists and Trotskyists ‘forget’ that part of the Theses quoted which speaks of the “clear separation of the interests of oppressed classes, the workers, the exploited, from the general concept of the so-called ‘national interest’ which really means the inte­rests of the ruling class” and fix exclusively on the other part, which speaks of “the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations ...from the oppressing, exploited, privileged nations”.

Trotsky, for example, does this in his attacks on our position on the Chinese war (see the Internal Bulletin, no.1, of the Internationalist Communist League of Mexico). With this method he arrives at exactly the same positions as the Stalinists: instead of showing the Chinese proletarians that their class interests are irreconcilable with the so-called ‘national interest’ (in reality the interests of the Chinese exploiters), and that they must struggle as much against their ‘compat­riot’ enemies as against the invading enemy, through fraternization with the Japanese soldiers and revolutionary defeatism, instead of all this Trotsky tries to convince the exploited of China that their class interests coincide -- to a certain extent, of course -- ie on the decisive point of the defense of the so-called ‘fatherland’-- with the ‘national interests’ of their exploiters!

For Trotsky, the proletariat ‘in general’ has no fatherland. And so in ‘theory’ ('theoretically’) he remains faithful to Marxism. But in the con­crete case of the proletariat of China, of Mexico, of all the oppressed and dependent countries, ie in the cases of the overwhelming majority of the countries of the world he sees no application of this fundamental law of Marxism. “Chinese patr­iotism is legitimate and progressive” affirms that renegade! Clearly for him and his followers so also is Mexican, Guatemalan, Argentinian, Cuban patriotism, etc.

The workers have no fatherland. Not even in the oppressed countries!

For a Marxist there can be no doubt that the most essential of the three points in the Theses of the Second Congress is the second, which empha­sizes the non-existence of ‘national interests’, and insists that the distinction made in the third point, between “oppressed nations” and “oppressing nations” must be understood in this light. In other words, even in the oppressed nations there are no ‘national interests’ other than those of the dominant class. The practical conclusion of this theoretical position is that the fundamental rules of communist politics must be applicable to all countries, imperialist, semi-colonial, and colonial. The struggle against patriotism, fraternization with the oppressed of all countries, including the uniformed proletar­ians and peasants in the armies of the imperialist countries, is one of the tenets of communist politics which can allow no exceptions.

“From the principles set forth it follows that the whole policy of the Communist International on the national and colonial question must be based mainly on the union of the workers and toiling masses of all nations and countries in the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and the bourgeoisie. For only such a union can secure victory over capitalism, without which the destruction of national oppression and equality is impossible.”

The application of this cornerstone to concrete situations clearly excludes any ‘legitimate patriotism’ or ‘national defense’. In the case of the Chinese war, for example, what other appli­cation can there be of the general rule of “the common struggle of the workers and toiling masses of all nations and countries against the landlords and the bourgeoisie”, than that of fraternization between the Chinese and the Japanese soldiers in a common struggle against the Chinese and Japanese owners and capitalists, revolutionary defeatism on both sides. And where does this policy proposed by Trotsky of “participation in the military struggle under the command of Chiang Kai-shek” fit into this general rule?

A change of tactics, not of principles!

In answer to us Trotsky cites the case when Marx and Engels supported the Irish war against Great Britain and that of the Poles against the Czar, although in these two national wars the leaders were mostly bourgeois, and at times, almost feudal! Trotsky, despite his great understanding, fails to understand the primordial importance of the first of the points that the Theses of the Second Congress saw as the prime key to the national question: “an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu”.

Does our great un-Marxist historian not at least recall that communist tactics cannot be the same in the ascendant phase of capitalism (from which he has cited two examples of progressive wars) and in its phase of decomposition, the imperialist phase in which we are now living? The economic and historic circumstances have changed to such a degree since the time in which Marx and Engels supported the Irish war and that of the Poles, that it would be suicidal for the proletariat today to follow the same tactics as in that period.

Of course, these changed tactics should not nor cannot go beyond the framework of already established communist principles, whose validity events have already proved a thousand times. Far from going beyond this framework, each tactical adjustment must be a more correct, more strict application of these principles, for it is not merely new situations which oblige us to make such changes, but also historic experiences, that is to say, the study of our past errors. Only in this way can we maintain the continuity of the communist struggle, through the decomposi­tion of the old proletarian organs and the creation of new ones.

The renegade Trotsky revises the Communist Manifesto and the Theses of the Second Congress

One of the fundamental principles which must rule all our tactics on the national question is anti­-patriotism. “The workers have no fatherland”. Whoever proposes a new tactic which goes against this principle abandons Marxist guidelines and goes over to the service of the enemy.

So, the interesting thing is that this same Trotsky, who insists that the proletariat today must follow the same tactics as in the time of Marx and Engels, openly abandons the principles already set down by these two men in the Communist Manifesto. In his preface to the new edition of the Communist Manifesto published recently in South Africa this renegade openly declares: “... it is very clear that the ‘national fatherland’ which, in the advanced countries has been transformed into the worst historic fetter, still remains a relatively progressive factor in the backward countries, which are obliged to struggle for their independent existence.”

In this way the renegade Trotsky wants to put the clock back a hundred years!

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