Crisis of overproduction, state capitalism, and the war economy

(Extracts from the report on the international situation, 5th Congress of Revolution Internationale.)

An understanding of the critique of the ‘theory of the weakest link’ must not make us forget what the Polish workers actually did. This struggle showed the international proletariat what a mass movement looks like, and it posed the problem of internationalization even if it couldn’t resotlve it -- thus also posing the question of the revolutionary content of the workers’ struggle in our epoch, which can’t be separated from the question of internationalization. The ICC has dealt at length with the question of internationalization and with the class struggle in Poland1. On the other hand we haven’t spent enough time talking about the revolutionary content of the struggle -- a prob­lem the Polish workers came up against but didn’t understand. However, this question was still posed, particularly with regard to the ‘economic’ question -- as, for example, when the workers first began to criticize Solidarnosc in an open, direct way; when, in the name of the ‘national economy’ and ‘self-management’ Solid­arnosc directly opposed the strikes which broke out in the summer of ‘81. During these strikes, to use their own terms, the workers were prep­ared to put even the most popular Solidarnosc leaders (Walesa and Co.) “in the cupboard”, and to carry on their strikes “till Christmas and longer if necessary”. The only thing that sto­pped them doing so was their lack of a perspect­ive. In the situation of generalized scarcity which dominates the eastern bloc countries, the Polish workers left to themselves weren’t able to go forward. This situation will inevitably arise again, but in the developed countries the simultaneous existence of generalized overprod­uction and of an ultra-developed technical appar­atus will make it possible for the workers to put forward their own revolutionary, internationalist perspective.

The development of the class struggle and of the objective conditions which determine it -- the crisis of capitalism -- confirms the bankruptcy of all the idealist conceptions which deny the existence of the ‘catastrophic crisis’ of capitalism as an objective basis for the world communist revolution.

The crisis signals the failure of the whole notion of ‘ideology’ being the motor-force of revolution. This notion is, in fact, a rejection of the marxist theory which holds that the relations of production determine all social relations. It’s the failure of the theories of the Situationists, who said of Revolution Internationale's analysis of the crisis in 1969 that “the economic crisis was the eucharistic presence which sustains our religion”. It also means the bankruptcy of the ­pathetic notion of the Fomento Obrero Revolucion­ario for whom “will-power” is the motor of revol­ution. It is the end of the line for all the theories which came out of Socialisme ou Barbarie asserting that state capitalism and militarism represent a third alternative, a historical sol­ution to the contradictions of capitalism.

But affirming that the historic catastrophe of capitalism is the necessary and objective basis for the communist revolution is not enough. Today it is absolutely vital to show why and how it is. This is the aim of the present study.

It is not surprising that all the groups mentioned above defend a ‘self-management’ conception of the revolutionary transformation of society. The present historical situation not only marks end of the line for idealist notions but also for all the populist, third-worldist conceptions supported by the theories of the ‘weakest link’ and the ‘labor aristocracy’ defended particularly by the Bordigist currents.

We not only have to show that the crisis is necessary because it impoverishes the working class in an absolute sense and therefore pushes it to revolt, but also and above all how the crisis leads to revolution because it is the crisis of a mode of production, the crisis of social relations where the nature of the crisis itself, overproduction, poses both the necessity and the possibility of revolution. The very nature of the crisis reveals both the subject and the object of the revolution, the exploited class and the end of all exploiting societies and of scarcity.

The first step in accomplishing this task is to show as clearly as possible the nature of today’s qualitative leap in the economic crisis which has thrown the industrialized metropoles into recession and generalized overproduction.

The period of decadence is not a moment fixed in time, an endless repetition -- it has a history and an evolution. To understand the objective basis of class struggle today, we have to situate the evolution of overproduction and of state capitalism and of their reciprocal relations. In this way we can identify more clearly what we mean by the “qualitative step in the economic crisis” and its consequences for class struggle.

By dealing with all its various aspects -- over-production, state capitalism, militarism -- it will become clear that this qualitative step in the crisis is not just a qualitative leap in terms of the 1970s but in relation to the entire period of capitalist decadence. The crisis today is the crisis of the palliatives which the bourgeoisie has used to deal with the historical crisis of its system up to now. The historical importance of this situation cannot be overestimated.

“The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape”, wrote Marx; that is, the higher form of development of a species reveals in finished form the tendencies and developmental lines of embryonic forms in lower species. The same is true for today’s historical situation which rev­eals, in the highest expression of decadence, the truth and reality of the epoch which goes from the First World War to today.

Overproduction and State Capitalism

State capitalism was never an expression of the health or vigor in capitalism; it was never an expression of a new organic development of capit­alism but only:

-- the expression of its decadence;

-- the expression of its ability to react to this decadence.

That’s why in the present situation we have to analyze the relation between the crisis of capitalism in all its different aspects: social, economic and military. We’ll begin with the latter.

Overproduction and Armaments

The overproduction crisis is not only the prod­uction of a surplus which finds no market, but also the destruction of this surplus.

“In these crises not only is there destruction of a large amount of goods already produced but also of existing productive forces. A social epidemic breaks out which in any other era would be absurd: the epidemic of overproduction.” (Communist Manifesto)

Thus the overproduction crisis implies a process of self-devaluation of capital, a process of self-destruction. The value of non-accumulatable surplus is not stockpiled but has to be destroyed.

The nature of the crisis of overproduction is clear and unambiguous in the relation between the crisis and the war economy today.

The whole period of decadence shows that the over-production crisis implies a displacement of production towards the war economy. To consider this an ‘economic solution’, even a momentary one, would be a serious mistake. The roots of this mistake lie in an inability to understand that the overproduction crisis is a process of self-destruction. Militarism is the expression of this process of self-destruction which is the result of the revolt of the productive process against production relations.

This displacement of the ‘economic’ towards the ‘military’ could hide the general overproduction only for a certain time. In the 30s and after the war, militarism could still create an illusion. But today the situation of the war economy in the general crisis of capitalism reveals the whole truth.

Today there is an enormous development of armaments, for example in the US where: “The Senate broke a record on December 4th by voting $208 billion for the 1982 defense budget. No American appropriations bill has ever been so huge. The final amount was $8 billion more than President Reagan asked for.” (Le Monde, 9.12.81)

But in the overall situation of world capitalism today, and with the financial situation of the different nations of the world, we have to be aware of the fact that such a policy of armaments spending is a very serious factor deepening the economic crisis, accelerating both recession and inflation.

In the present situation such arms budgets not only in the US but everywhere in the bloc (espec­ially in Germany and Japan) cannot maintain the level of industrial production even in the short run as they did in the 30s or after the war. On the contrary, they are rapidly accelerating the decline of production.

Unlike the 30s, today’s armaments policies do not create jobs or only replace a handful of jobs they eliminate. This situation is heightened by the fact that arms development is not accompanied by social spending and public works projects like in the 30s but is carried out in direct opposition to these policies. Moreover, the jobs created by armaments development today concern only a small proportion of very qualified workers, or of tech­nicians with a scientific background because of the highly developed technology of modern weapons.

Thus weapons development today cannot hide the general crisis of overproduction. In fact, with the deepening of the recession and the accelera­tion of inflation which arms investment provokes, the crisis of capitalism is also the crisis of the war economy.

“The Reagan government cannot sustain this milit­ary spending except by imposing an even more restrictive monetary policy, with a restrictive fiscal policy and a limitation on non-military public spending. All these efforts will lead to an increase in unemployment. Beyond this military Keynesianism, the first military depression of the 20th Century is coming.” (‘Un Nouvel Ordre Militaire’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1982)

In this situation, the weight of already-existing weapons and their present increase are seen by the population and particularly by the working class as the direct cause of poverty and unemploy­ment as well as the source of a menacing apocalyptic war. That is why the revolt against war is part of the general revolt of the proletariat even if war isn’t an immediate threat.

It would be simplistic to think that the planning of ultra-modern arms production is the character­istic of the Reagan administration alone. Such industrial preparation cannot be carried out over­night or even in several months. The truth is that the weapons seeing the light of day today were carefully prepared in the 70s under Democratic administrations; but the Democrats couldn’t take direct political responsibility for them without leaving the social front uncovered.

It is not an accident that in today’s historical situation and for the first time in the whole history of decadence, it is the right-wing, the Republicans in the US, who have propelled the armaments policy.

“The military expansion policies in the US are not at all characteristic of the Republicans. The military booms of the last 50 years -- the 1938 expansion, the Second World War, the rearmament of the Korean War and of the Cold War 1950-52, the space and missile boom of 1961-64 and the Vietnam War -- were all inspired by Democratic governments.” (idem)

It is not an accident either that pacifism is today one of the themes preferred by the opposition. We would be wrong to consider pacifism or campaigns over E1 Salvador as only long-term preparations. In the short-term and immediate sense, they contribute to isolating the struggles of the workers in Poland and to getting the so-called ‘austerity’ budgets passed -- budgets which work to the benefit of armaments.

“We must make a distinction between pacifist campaigns today and those which preceded the Second World War. The pacifist campaigns before WWII directly prepared the mobilization of a working class already subjugated by anti­fascist ideology.

“Today the pacifist campaigns still try to prepare a mobilization for war but it is not their direct, immediate task. Their immediate aim is to counteract class struggle and avoid mass movements in the developed countries. Pac­ifism today plays the same role as anti-fascism yesterday.

“For the bourgeoisie, it is vital that no link be made between the struggle against war and the struggle against the crisis. That the alternative ‘war or revolution’ isn’t posed.

“For this, pacifism is a particularly efficient weapon because it responds to a real anxiety in the population while separating the questions of war and crisis, posing a false alternative of ‘war or peace’. At the same time it tries to reawaken nationalist sentiments through a pseudo-‘'neutralism’.

“The false alternative ‘war or peace’ in relation to war complements the other false alternative in relation to the crisis, ‘prosperity or auster­ity’. Thus with the struggle ‘against austerity’ on the one hand and the struggle ‘for peace’ on the other, the bourgeoisie covers all angles of the social revolt. It is the best illustration of what we mean by the ‘left in opposition’.” (from a text of Revolution Internationale of November 1981)

Overproduction and Keynesianism

Just as militarism has never been a field for capital accumulation, so state capitalism in its economic aspects has never been an expr­ession of an organic and superior development of capitalism, of its centralization and con­centration. On the contrary it is the expression of the difficulties encountered in the accum­ulation process. State capitalism, especially in its Keynesian forms, could, like militarism, look convincing from before the war right up to the 70s. Today, the reality is sweeping away the myth.

We have often pointed out that, despite the gigantic debts they contract, the under-devel­oped countries are unable to make a real economic ‘take-off’. On the contrary, it has now reached the point where three-quarters of the credits won from the western bloc only serve to repay prev­ious debts. But this indebtedness is not a priv­ilege of the under-developed countries. What is remarkable is that indebtedness is character­istic of the whole of capitalism, from east to west2, and this is not altered by the many different forms that it takes in the west. As for state capitalism as an economic ‘rudder’, this policy of indebtedness and deficit has finally got the upper hand, far more than the policy of ‘orienting’ the economy. It is the economy that has imposed its laws on the bourgeoisie, and not the bourgeoisie that has ‘oriented’ the economy.

“The US became the ‘locomotive’ for the world economy by creating an artificial market for the rest of its bloc by means of huge commer­cial deficits. Between 1976 and 1980, the US bought $100 billion worth of foreign goods, more than they sold abroad. Because the dollar is the worldwide reserve currency, only the US could put such a policy into practice without being forced to carry out a massive currency devaluation. Afterwards, the US flooded the world with dollars by means of an unprecedented expansion of credit in the form of loans to under-developed countries and to the Russian bloc. This mass of paper money temporarily created an effective demand which allowed world commerce to continue.” (Report on the economic crisis to the 4th ICC Congress, International Review 26)

Here we can take the example of the world’s second economic power to illustrate another aspect of reflation through indebtedness and state deficits:

“Germany set itself to play the ‘locomotive’ yielding to the pressure, it must be said, of the other countries….. The increase in government spending has nearly doubled, growing 1.7 times, like the national product. To the point where half of the latter is centralized by the public sector .... Thus the growth in the public sector debt has been explosive. This indebtedness, stable at around 18% of GNP at the beginning of the 70s, passed abruptly to 25% in 1975, then to 35% this year; its share has thus doubled in ten years. It has reached a level unheard of since the bankruptcy of the inter-war years .... The Germans, who have long memories, are again haunted by the specter of wheelbarrows filled with banknotes of the Weimar Republic.”3 (L’Expansion, 5.11.81)

And rather as in the under-developed countries, the debt is so great that “the debt’s servicing absorbs more than 50% of new credits”.

Here is the hidden face of the late 70s ‘refla­tion’, the ‘secret revealed’ of the cures that have proved worse than the illness.

At the 4th ICC Congress, as well as in other reports and articles published since, we have shown at length that this policy of the late 70s had come to an end. The world’s states have used it to the point that, were they to pursue it, they would head rapidly for financial disaster and an immediate economic collapse. The 1979 dollar crash was the first sign of this disaster, was the clearest signal for the need to change economic policy, of the end of the ‘locomotives’, and of further indebtedness4.

In the light of the development of the economic situation, we can make a first appraisal of the ‘new economic policy’, of ‘austerity’. Here again the US provides a reference point. The most advanced in the policy of ‘indebtedness’, they have also been fist in the policy of ‘monetarism’. The result has not been brilliant; they have cer­tainly avoided collapse, but at what a price.

Production has fallen incredibly in every sector except armaments, and 15% of the working class is now unemployed... We have seen a decline in inflation over these last few months in all the developed countries ... except in France. But here again, the fall in inflation is essentially due to the fantastic fall in production: “The White House has not neglected to celebrate this success. In reality, it is the recession that explains the fall in inflation, rather than this being a sign of a possible reflation.” (Le Monde de 1’Economie , 6.4.82 )

At all events, in the coming months, the problem of ‘financing the crisis’ will be posed still more acutely for the whole of world capital since:

1. the fall in production is necessarily accomp­anied by a proportional fall in state income, made worse by the tax reductions that the differ­ent states are obliged to make to maintain a min­imum level of production;

2) the increase in military spending is a consid­erable weight for all their budgets;

3) the increase in unemployment is itself a cause of deficits in the benefits system.

In all these budgets, only the benefits systems can be put in question, along with the so-called ‘social’ budgets ... education, health, transport, etc. Thus a fall in the social budgets brings about, not an increase in production, but a new fall in the social budgets; falling production brings about ... falling production.

“Having presented himself as the champion of the balanced budget, Mr. Reagan is beating all the records: a deficit of $100 billion is forecast for 1982, and more for the year after.” (Le Monde, 3.4.82)

In fact, capitalism it ‘stuck’: to avoid finan­cial collapse and disaster it provokes a collapse in production whose only advantage -- and even this is not certain -- is that of being controllable.

When economists interpret Reagan or Thatcher’s policies as being less ‘statified’, this is an absurdity. It is not a changed orientation that makes the state’s economic policy less ‘statist’. While the Keynesian aspect of state capitalism is dead, this does not mean that state capitalism is dead, nor that the economic system has been left to its fate. Although no longer able to stave off collapse by a forward flight, the state has not given up. It is resolved to follow the only economic policy open to it: to slow down, and unify throughout the planet, the collapse of capitalism.

Thus the world’s states are organizing the decline into generalized recession, on a worldwide scale. Such a historical situation holds a number of and implications:

and of further indebtedness (5). 1) With the end of the Keynesianism that main­tained an artificial level of capitalist activity, the possibility of polarizing ‘wealth’ in some nations and ‘poverty’ in others is wearing out. The situation in Belgium is, on a small scale perhaps, but in caricature, a striking illustration of this process:

“Belgium has become the sick man of' Europe. Its prosperity after the war, which its neighbors considered ‘insolent’, has progressively declined to the point where today its situation has become literally catastrophic. A budget deficit five times that of France, a more and more unstable balance of' payments, an incredibly high level of debt (both internal and external), unemployment reaching 12% of the active population and, above all, a growing deindustrialization: all risk mak­ing this nation, once one of Europe’s lynch-pins, an under-developed country. One thing is sure, and a worry for all Europeans: for Belgium, but also for the Ten, the hour of truth has struck.” (Le Monde, 23.2.82 )

2) During the 70s, state deficits and indebt­edness were the most effective weapons for holding off class struggle, and spreading illusions among the workers of the eastern bloc. The end of this situation, and the setting up in the developed countries of a ‘fortress state’, pol­iced and militarized to the utmost, which accomp­anies the collapse of capitalism, and makes the workers pay directly for the crisis because it can do nothing else, poses new objective conditions.

of deficits in the benefits system. Today, the objective conditions are changing qualitatively in relation to the 70s. But this is true not only in relation to the 70s, but also to the whole period of decadence. In relation to the 30s, the bourgeoisie no longer possesses the economic means to contain the working class. The 30s were years of a ‘great take-off’ of state capitalism, especially in its Keynesian aspects. If we take the example of the US in the 30s, we can see that:

“The gap between production and consumption was attacked on three fronts at once:

1) contracting a constantly growing mass of debts, the state carried out a series of vast public works …

2) the state increased the purchasing power of the working masses,

a) by introducing the principle of labor contr­acts guaranteeing minimum wages, and limiting the working day, while at the same time strengthening the overall position of workers’ organizations, and especially of unionism;

b) by creating a system of unemployment insurance, and through other social measures designed to prevent a new reduction in the living standards of the masses.

3) moreover, the state tried, through measures such as the limiting of agricultural production and subsidies for agricultural products, to incr­ease the income of the rural population, and to bring the majority of farmers up to the level of the urban middle classes.” (Sternberg, The Conflict of the Century)

During the 30s, the measures of the ‘New Deal’ were taken after the worst of the economic crisis. Today, not only is the ‘New Deal’ of the 70s behind us and the worst of the crisis ahead without any possibility of war offering a way out; we also have not seen in the developed countries such a wave of unionization and ideological enrol­ment as characterized the 30s. On the contrary, since the mid-70s, we have seen a generalized de-unionization, whereas during the 30s, as Sternberg reports:

“Due to the decisive modifications to the American social structure carried out under the aegis of the New Deal, the situation of the unions was totally changed. The New Deal in fact encouraged the unions by every means possible ... In the brief period between 1933 and 1939, the number of union members more than tripled. On the eve of World War II, there were twice as many paid-up members as in the best years before the crisis, many more than at any other moment of American union history.” (idem)

3) The present historical situation is a com­plete refutation of the theory of state capitalism as a ‘solution’ to the contradictions of capit­alism. Keynesianism has been the main smoke­screen hiding the reality of decadent capitalism. With its bankruptcy, and the fact that states can now do no more than accompany capital in its collapse, state capitalism appears clearly for what it has always been: an expression of capitalism’s decadence.

This observation does not have a merely theor­etical and polemical interest as against those who presented state capitalism as a ‘third road’. It is extremely important from the standpoint of the objective conditions and their links with the subjective conditions of the class struggle in relation to the question of the state.

It is not enough to consider state capitalism as an expression of capital’s decadence. Capitalism has only been able to ‘settle’ into decades of decadence after having broken the back of the rev­olutionary proletariat, and in this task state capitalism has been at the same time one of the greatest results of, and one of the most important methods of, the counter-revolution. Not only from a military, but above all from an ideological point of view.

In the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the century, in the 30s and in the reconstruction period, the question of the state has always been at the centre of the proletariat’s political illusions and of the bourgeoisie’s ideological mystifications. Whether it be the illusion that the state, even the transitional one, is the tool of social transformation and of the proletarian collectivity, as in the Russian revolution; whether it be the myth of the defense of the ‘democratic’ state against the ‘fascist’ state during the war and the 1930s; or whether it be the ‘social’ state of the reconstruction period, or again the ‘savior’ state of the left in the 70s -- throughout, the proletariat is led to think that everything depends on the ‘form’ of state, that it can only express itself through a partic­ular form of state; always, the bourgeoisie main­tains in the proletariat a spirit of delegation of power to a representative or to an organ of the state, as well as an attitude of ‘dependency’. It is these myths, widely diffused by the dominant mode of thought; these illusions constantly main­tained within the working class, that Marx was already fighting against when he declared: “Because, (the proletariat) thinks in political forms, it sees will as the reason for all abuses, and sees violence and the overthrow of a determ­ined form of state as the means to set them right.” (Marx’s emphasis: Critical Notes on the Artical, The King of Prussia and Social Reform, by a Prussian).

During the last few decades, the working class has lived through all the possible and imaginable forms of the last form of the bourgeois state, state capitalism -- Stalinist, fascist, ‘demo­cratic’ and Keynesian. Not much mystification is left as to the fascist or Stalinist states: the few illusions left as to the Stalinist state have been swept away by the struggle of the Polish workers. By contrast, the democratic Keynesian state has maintained the strongest illusions among the workers.

The end of the Keynesian state in the developed, and therefore key countries, does not mean that the question of the state has been dealt with. On the contrary, it is beginning to be posed in real­ity with the setting up of the state of open conflict, which throws the left into opposition, and prepares to confront the working class. But in these conflicts, the proletariat will have already experienced the various forms of state that dec­adent capitalism can take on, and the various ways it has been done down by these various forms.

The question of the destruction of the state is posed by the unity between the objective conditions where state capitalism appears not as a superior but as a decadent form, and the sub­jective conditions made up of the proletarian experience.

In this conflict, our task is: first, to remind the proletariat of its previous experience, and secondly, to put it on guard against the supp­osed ease of the struggle by showing, precisely through its experience, that if state capitalism is a decadent expression it is also an expression of the bourgeoisie’s ability to adapt itself, to react, and not to give up without a fight.

The fortress state

If we were to advance a first conclusion from analyzing the relation between the economic crisis, militarism, and state capitalism, with all the implications, objective as much as subjective that we have tried to draw from each of these points, we can say that:

1) The bourgeois state is not giving up the game; it is being transformed into a fortress-state, policed and militarized to the hilt.

2) No longer able to play on the economic and social aspects of state capitalism to put off the crisis and the class struggle, the fortress-state is not waiting hands in pockets for the proletariat to mount the attack, nor is it simply retreating into the ‘fortress’. On the contrary, it is taking the initiative in the battle outside the fortress, on the terrain where everything is decided: the social terrain. This is the funda­mental meaning of what we call the ‘left in opposition’, a movement which is clearly to be seen today in the major industrialized metropoles.

3) With the groundwork being prepared by the left in opposition, the state is developing two essential aspects of its policy:

-- repression and police control;

-- vast and ever more spectacular ideological campaigns (a real ideological terrorism) on all the questions posed by the world situation: war, the crisis, and class struggle.

This is the fundamental meaning of the campaigns for ‘peace’, for ‘solidarity’ with Poland, over El Salvador or the Falklands, and the incessant anti-terrorist campaigns.

4) The question of the state, of its relation to the class struggle, can only really be posed in the developed countries, where the state is strongest materially and ideologically.

Even if the anachronism of state structures in the under-developed countries, or even in the eastern bloc, forms born of the counter-revol­ution, makes them ill-adapted to face up to the class struggle, experience has shown how in Poland the bourgeoisie was able to turn this anachronism, weakness, into weapons of mystific­ation against the struggle as long as the workers in the developed countries did not themselves enter the fight. The struggle for ‘democracy’ in Poland is the best example of this.

In any case, the weakness or inadequacy of states in less-developed countries is largely compensated by the unity of the world bourgeoisie and its different states when confronted with the working class.

Similarly, it would be dangerous and wrong to say that the states in developed countries have been weakened in the face of class struggle because of the profound unity that the bourgeoisie has shown in these countries -- unlike the underdev­eloped countries where the bourgeoisie can play on its divisions to mislead the workers.

Faced with the stakes of the world situation and the class struggle, it is not so much ‘regional’ divisions, for example, that will be the axis of the bourgeoisie’s work against the proletariat.

The essential axis of the bourgeoisie’s work of undermining can only be a false division between right and left, and the ability to set up this false division depends precisely on the bourg­eoisie’s strength, on the strength of its unity.

We must therefore warn against the illusion that the fight against the bourgeois state will be easier in the advanced countries.

Overproduction and technical development

In the first part of this report, we tried to show how over-production is also destruction, waste, and implies for the proletariat an intens­ified exploitation and declining living conditions. This aspect of our critique of the economy is extremely important: firstly, of course, for understanding the evolution of the crisis, and secondly, for our propaganda. The bourgeoisie has not and will not miss an opportunity to explain (as it already has in Poland) that the workers’ struggle worsens the crisis, and is therefore “to everyone’s disadvantage”. To this, we must reply: so much the better if the proletariat accelerates the economic crisis and the collapse of capitalism without leaving the bourgeoisie and the crisis time to destroy a large part of the means of prod­uction and consumption, because the crisis of over-production is also destruction.

But in showing how the crisis of over-production is also destruction, we have only shown one aspect of capitalism’s historic and catastrophic crisis. In fact, the crisis of over-production produces not only destruction, but also an extensive tech­nical development (we shall see later that this is not at all contradictory). The development of the crisis of over-production shows us that over­production is accompanied not only by the destruc­tion or ‘freeze’ of commodities and productive forces, but also by a tendency to the development of the productivity of capital, to compensate for the general over-production and the falling rate of profit in a context of bitter competition. This is why, in recent years, alongside the de-industrialization of old sectors like steel, tex­tiles and shipbuilding, we have seen the devel­opment of other high-technology sectors mentioned above, the whole being accompanied by a concentr­ation of capital.

So, just as all the measures taken to confront the crisis of over-production, and Keynesianism in particular, have only provoked a still more gigantic crisis of over-production, so technical advance has only pushed the contradiction between the relations of production and the development of the forces of production to its utmost.

During the last decade in particular, we have seen a fantastic development of technology on all fronts:

1) - development and application to production of automation, robotics and biology;

- development and application of computers to management and organization;

- development of the means of communication: transportation (especially aeronautics); audio-visual communications, telecommunica­tions and distributed computer processing.

2) And, to support all this, ‘appropriate’ energy supplies, in particular nuclear energy.

For the bourgeoisie, ideologically, we are on the verge of a third ‘industrial revolution’. But for the bourgeoisie, this third ‘industrial revolution’ cannot avoid provoking great social upheavals, and moreover cannot take place without a world war, without a gigantic ‘clean-up’ and redivision of the world. The present economic and military policies of the capitalist world are being put into practice within this perspective, and not simply to confront the immediate situation of the economic crisis.

In an immediate sense, the bourgeoisie worldwide is trying to maintain production as far as it can, and to avoid a brutal economic collapse. But whether it be in the social, military, or economic domain, we must understand that the bourgeoisie is not acting from one day to another, but that it has a definite perspective, which we would be wrong not to take account of. It would be wrong, and we would pay for it dearly, to cry victory simply because the unemployment rates have soared, and to content ourselves with saying ‘how stupid the economists are’. We would be wrong not to take account of the present phenomena and ideologies, and to give them all the importance they deserve. Not only in order to criticize the bourgeoisie on the question of what they call ‘restructuring’ and unemployment, but still more to overthrow their arguments as to the future of this ‘third industrial revolution’ and to give our own vision of what is at stake in the present epoch of human history.

The development of certain techniques of the productivity of labor is in no way contradict­ory with the development of the economic crisis. This technical development is essentially invested in non-productive sectors:

a) Firstly, armaments: the ‘Falklands war’ and the ultra-modern techniques used there (electronics, satellites, etc) give us an idea of what this famous ‘third industrial revolution’ really means.

b) Secondly, in ‘service’ sectors: offices, banks, etc.

In this way, the growth in productivity (which in fact is mainly only potential) is accompanied by an overall deindustrialization, and is far from compensating for the vertiginous fall in production. This is the case for the world’s major power which alone accounts for 45% of world production -- the United States:

“Dividing the labor force into two categories -- those who produce means of consumption or produc­tion and those who produce services -- the weekly Business Week shows that the number of jobs is falling in the first category (43.4% in 1945, 33.3% in 1970, 28.4% in 1980, with 26.2% projected for 1990) and rising in inverse proportion in the second sector (56%, 66.7%, 71.6%, 73.8% respect­ively) .... American big business has for several years gone on a sort of productive investment strike.” (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1982)

Moreover, when productivity does develop in prod­uction, it provokes gigantic unemployment, and subjects those who remain in work to a ‘deskill­ing’ of their labor, and to very difficult and highly policed working conditions. The ‘benefits’ are restricted to a tiny minority of highly qual­ified technicians.

As for the question of the ‘industrial revolution’ itself, the bourgeoisie is aware, because it is directly confronted with the problem, that the world market as it is today, already saturated by the old methods of production cannot provide a springboard for its development.

In its ideology, only a world war could ‘prepare the ground’ for a large-scale development and application of modern production techniques. Anyway the bourgeoisie has no choice.

This is why most of the preparation for this famous ‘industrial revolution’ takes place in the field of armaments, which is where all the best of humanity’s scientific technique is developed and applied.

The same is true for the development of product­ivity and over-production: both lie within the framework of the bourgeois system of destruction. This is what we have to say to the working class. And that, through the development of present-day technical methods and over-production, capitalism has pushed the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production to its extreme limits.

“In the epoch when man needed a year to produce a stone axe, several months to make a bow, or made a fire by hours of rubbing two sticks to­gether, the most cunning and unscrupulous busi­nessman could not have extorted the least surplus labor. A certain level of labolr productivity is necessary for a man to be able to provide surplus labor.” (R. Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy)

For a relationship of exploitation to be installed and to divide society into classes, a certain level of productivity was necessary. Alongside the labor necessary to ensure the subsistence of the producers, there had to develop a surplus labor allowing the subsistence of the exploiters, and the accumulation of the productive forces.

The whole history of humanity from the dissolution of the primitive community to the present day is the history of the evolution of the relation between necessary and surplus labor -- this rela­tionship being itself determined by the level of labor productivity -- which determines particular class societies, particular relations of exploit­ation between producers and exploiters.

Our historical epoch, which starts at the begin­ning of this century, has totally reversed the relation between necessary and surplus labor. Through technical development, the share of necessary labor has become minute in relation to surplus labor.

Thus, if the appearance of surplus labor allowed, in certain conditions, the appearance of class society, its historical development in relation to necessary labor has completely reversed the problematic of societies of exploitation and poses the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution, the possibility of a society of abundance, without classes and without exploit­ation.

The historical crisis of capitalism, the crisis of over-production determined by the lack of solvent markets has pushed this situation to its extreme. To face up to over-production, the bourg­eoisie has developed the productivity of labor, which has in its turn worsened the crisis of over­production, all the more so since world war has not been possible.

Today, this revolt of the productive forces against bourgeois relations of production, expressed in over-production, the productivity of labor and their reciprocal relations, has reached a culmination, and has burst out into the open.

The conditions of the class struggle in the developed countries

“While the proletariat is not yet developed enough to constitute itself as a class, while, as a result, the proletariat’s struggle with the bourgeoisie has not yet a political character, and while the productive forces are not yet developed enough within the bourgeoisie itself to allow an appreciation of the material conditions necessary to the liberation of the proletariat and the formation of a new society, its theoreticians are only utopians .... and they see in misery nothing but misery, without seeing its subversive side, which will overthrow the old society.” (Marx, The poverty of Philosophy)

With the situation that we have just described as a starting-point, we can understand, that the economic crisis is not only necessary for the revol­ution because it exacerbates the misery of the working class, but also and above all because it reveals the necessity and the possibility of the revolution. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of capitalism is not a mere ‘economic crisis’ in the strict sense, but the crisis of a social relation of exploitation which contains the necessity and possibility of the abolition of all exploitation; in this sense, it is the crisis of the economy, full stop.

From this viewpoint, the objective and subjective conditions for the revolutionary initiative, for an international generalization of the class struggle, are posed only in the developed countries, and it is in these countries that the whole revolutionary dynamic essentially depends.

This is no different from what revolutionaries have always thought:

“When Marx and the socialists who followed him imagined the coming revolution, they always saw it as springing up in the industrial heart of the capitalist world, whence it would spread to the periphery. This is how F. Engels expressed it in a letter to Kautsky of 12 November 1882, where he deals with the different stages of transition, as well as the problem posed for socialist thought by the colonies of the imperialist powers: ‘Once Europe, along with North America, is reorganized, these regions will possess such colossal power, and will give such an example to the semi-civilized countries, that these will have to let themselves be drawn along, if only under the pressure of their economic needs.’”(Sternberg, The Conflict of the Century)

The process of the communist revolution being nothing other than the process of unification of the proletarian struggle on a world scale, we are not here rejecting from this process the struggle of workers in less developed counties, and in particular the struggle of the workers in the eastern bloc; we are simply affirming that from the standpoint of its objective and subjective conditions, the revolutionary dynamic can only receive its impulse from the developed countries. This understanding is vital for the unity of the world working class, and does not undermine this unity. On the contrary. The working class’ being has always been revolutionary, even when the objective conditions were not. It is this situation that has determined the great tragedies of the workers' movement. But the great revolutionary struggles have never been in vain, without historic consequences. The workers’ struggles of 1848 showed the necessity of workers’ autonomy; the struggle of the Commune in 1871, the necessity of the total destruction of the bourgeois state. As for the Russian revolution and the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, which took place in historic conditions that were ripe, but unfavorable (the war), these have been an inexhaustible source of lessons for the proletariat. The resur­gence of the class struggle in the heart of capitalism, the ending of the period of counter­revolution, has already begun to show, in the context of a generalized economic crisis, what the revolutionary dynamic of our epoch will be like.

Annex I:

Overproduction and the agricultural crisis

The agricultural crisis is a question we have seldom dealt with, and yet the development today of the general crisis of capitalism also implies a development of the agricultural crisis which cannot help having important consequences for the condition of the working class. Moreover, we can see in the agricultural crisis a striking illustration of two aspects of capitalism’s hist­oric crisis, firstly its generalized nature, and secondly over-production.

On the generalized aspect of the crisis, Sternberg writes in The Conflict of the Century:

“The 1929 crisis was characterized ... both its industrial and its agrarian nature ... This is another phenomenon specific to the crisis of 1929, and which had never appeared during the crises of the 19th Century. The disaster of 1929 struck the USA as violently as Europe and the colonial countries. Furthermore, it was not just a crisis of cereal production, but covered the whole range of agricultural production ... In such conditions, this latter could only aggravate the industrial crisis.”

And as for the agricultural crisis as an illustration of the overall nature of the crisis, we cannot be clearer than Sternberg:

“Nowhere, tin fact, did the particular character of the capitalist crisis appear as clearly as in the agricultural crisis. Under the forms of social organization preceding capitalism, crises were marked by a lack of production, and given the dominant role of agricultural production, by a lack of food production.

... But during the crisis of 1929, too much foodstuff was produced, and hundreds of thousands of farmers threatened with eviction ... while in the cities, people were often unable to buy the most essential supplies.”

We would be wrong to underestimate the question of the agricultural crisis of over-production, whether in our analyses, our interventions, or our propaganda.

In our analyses of the crisis, because its dev­elopment will become more and more important for the condition of the working class. Up till now, ie during the 70s, agricultural over-production was masked and soaked up by state subsidies which maintained agricultural prices, and therefore production. At present, this policy of subsidies, just as for industrial production, is drawing to an end or being seriously reduced. It’s enough to look at the agricultural over-production in Europe and the stir it has provoked in recent months to be convinced. This is true for Europe, but still more so for the US which is one of the world’s foremost agricultural producers: “American farmers are tearing their hair out. 1982 will, they say, be their worst year since the great depression ... The crisis is essent­ially due to over-production, as if the technical progress which has been so profitable for the Middle West was beginning to turn against it…. In 1980 they accounted for 24.3% of world rice sales, 44.9% of wheat, 70.1% of corn and 77.8% of peanuts. At present, one hectare out of every three cultivated ‘works’ for export. The Americans are thus very sensitive to the contraction of external markets provoked by the difficulties of the world economy.” (Le Monde)

From the standpoint of our propaganda, such a situation of over-production in agriculture couldn’t illustrate better the total anachronism of the continued existence of capital, and what humanity will be capable of achieving once rid of the commodity system, the armaments sector and other unproductive sectors. Humanity is in a position never known before now:

“Present cereal production alone could provide in the every man, woman and child with 3000 calories and 65 grams of' protein per day, which is largely superior to what is necessary, even when generously calculated. To eliminate malnutrition, it would be enough to redirect 2% of world cereal production to those who need it.” (World Bank: Report on World Development)

Annex II:

Unemployment and indebtedness

In the USA, unemployment has reached over 10 million. The rate of unemployment is the highest since the Second World War. It is 14% among workers in general and 18% among blacks.

These two graphs illustrate how indebtedness isn't just a characteristic of the under-developed countries, but of the whole of world capitalism. 

The indebtedness of the Federal Republic of Germany has nearly doubled since 1973, in proportion to the GDP, of which it now represents nearly 35%. It is approaching the levels reached after the monetary collapse of the Weimar Republic.

1 See International Review no 23 and no 27.

The two articles that follow are the product of discussion that has been animating the ICC: their main aim is to investigate the bourgeoisie's level of consciousness and capacity for maneuvering in the period of decadence. This is part of the debate on the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, which was one of the issues which gave rise to the ‘tendency' which left the ICC about a year ago[1]. This somewhat informal tendency split into several groups on leaving the ICC: L'Ouvrier Internationaliste (France) and ‘News of War and Revolution' (Britain), which have since disappeared, who together with ‘The Bulletin' (Britain) all made the same critique of the ICC: we have a Machiavellian view of the bourgeoisie and a conspiratorial views of history. Other groups like ‘Volunte Communiste' or ‘Guerre de Classe' in France also accuse the ICC of overestimating the consciousness of the bourgeoisie[2].

But this discussion isn't simply about the concrete question of how the bourgeoisie maneuver in its decadent period: it is also poses the more general question of what the bourgeoisie is, and what this implies for the proletariat.

Why the bourgeoisie is Machiavellian

First let's recall who Machiavelli was: this will help us to understand what we mean when we talk about machiavellianism.

We don't intend here to make an exhaustive analysis of Machiavelli's work and the time he lived in. Our aim is to understand his contribution to the building of bourgeois ideology.

Machiavelli was a statesman in Florence at the time of the Renaissance. He is best known for his book The Prince. Obviously Machiavelli, like every man, was bound to the limits of his own period, and his under­standing was conditioned by the relations of production of that time, the decadent period of feudalism. But his time was also one in which a new class was rising towards power: the bourgeoisie, which was beginning to dominate the economy. The bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class of the period, and was soon aspiring towards political domina­tion over society. Machiavelli's The Prince was not only a faithful portrait of the time in which it was written, a reflection of the perversity and duplicity of governments in the 16th and 17th centuries, Machiavelli first of all understood the ‘effective truth' of the policies of states in his day: the means matter little, the essential thing is the end -- conquering and maintaining power. His concern was above all to teach the princes of that time how to hold on to what they'd acquired how to avoid being dispossessed by somebody. Machiavelli was the first to separate morality from politics, ie, religion from politics. He took up an entirely ‘tech­nical' standpoint. Of course, princes had never governed their subjects for their own good. But under feudalism, princes didn't understand reasons of state very well, and Machiavelli set out to teach them about it. Machiavelli said nothing new when he said that princes must lie if they are to win, or when he pointed out that they rarely kept their word: all this had been known since the days of Socrates. The life of princes -- their cynicism, their lack of faith -- was conditioned by the overwhelming power they already possessed. Having assimilated their cynicism, all that remained for Machiavelli to do was to put faith in question. This is what he did when he questioned morality and its underlying support: religion. In matters of state, means aren't important. Thus, by rejecting all moral prejudices in the exercise of power, Machiavelli justified the use of coercion and opted for the rejection of religion in order for a minority to rule over the majority.

This is why he was the first political ideo­logue of the bourgeoisie: he freed politics from religion. For him, as for the newly rising class, the mode of domination could be atheistic even while making use of religion. While the previous history of the Middle Ages hadn't known any ideological form other than religion, the bourgeoisie was gradually dev­eloping its own ideology which would rid itself of religion while still using it as an accessory. By destroying the link between politics and morality, between politics and religion, Machiavelli destroyed the feudal concept of the divine right to power: he made a bed for the bourgeoisie to lie on.

Actually, the princes Machiavelli was teaching were ‘the princes of the bour­geoisie', the future ruling class, because the feudal princes couldn't listen to his message without at the same time under­mining the bases of feudal power. Machiavelli expressed the revolutionary stand­point of the time: that of the bourgeoisie.

Even in its limitations, Machiavelli's thought didn't just express the limitations of the time, but of his class. When he presented ‘effective truth' as eternal truth, he wasn't so much expressing the illusion of the epoch but the illusion of the bourgeoisie, which like all previous ruling classes in history, was also an exploiting class. Machiavelli posed explicitly what had been implicit for all ruling, exploiting classes in history. Lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination weren't new methods of government: the whole history of the ancient world, as well as of feudalism, showed that quite clearly. Like the patricians of ancient Rome, like the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie was no exception to the rule. The difference was that patricians and aristocrats ‘practiced machiavellianism without knowing it', whereas the bourgeoisie is machiavellian and knows it. It turns machiavellianism into an ‘eternal truth', because that's how it lives: it takes exploit­ation to be eternal.

Like all exploiting classes, the bourgeoisie is also an alienated class. Because its own historic path leads it towards nothingness, it cannot consciously admit its historic limits.

Contrary to the proletariat, which as an exploited class and a revolutionary class is pushed towards revolutionary objectivity, the bourgeoisie is a prisoner to its subjectivity as an exploiting class. The difference between the revolutionary class consciousness of the proletariat and the exploiters' class ‘consciousness' of the bourgeoisie is thus not a question of degree, of quantity: it is a difference in quality.

The bourgeoisie's view of the world inevit­ably bears with it the stigma of its sit­uation as an exploiting, ruling class, which today is no longer revolutionary in any way -- which, since capitalism entered into its dec­adent phase, has no progressive role to play for humanity. At the level of its ideology, it necessarily expresses the reality of the capitalist mode of production which is based on the frenetic search for profit, on the most vicious competition and the most savage exploitation.

Like every exploiting class, the bourgeoisie cannot, despite all its pretensions, help dis­playing in practice its absolute contempt for human life. The bourgeoisie was first of all a class of merchants for whom ‘business is business' and ‘money has no smell'. In his separation between ‘politics' and ‘morality', Machiavelli was simply translating the bour­geoisie's usual separation between ‘business' and morality. For the bourgeoisie human life has no value except as a commodity.

The bourgeoisie doesn't only express this reality in its general relationships with the exploited class, above all the most important one, the working class: it also expresses it within itself, in the very fibers of its being. As the expression of a mode of production based on competition, its whole vision can only be a competitive one, a vision of perpetual rivalry among all individuals, including within the bour­geoisie itself. Because it's an exploiting class, it can only have a hierarchical vision. In its own divisions, the bour­geoisie simply expresses the reality of a world divided into classes, a world of exploitation.

Since it has been the ruling class, the bourgeoisie has always buttressed its power with the lies of ideology. The watchword of the triumphant French republic in 1789 - ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' -- is the best illustration of this. The first democratic states, arising out of the struggle against feudalism in England, France or America, didn't hesitate to use the most repulsive, ruthless methods to extend their territorial and colonial conquests. And when it came to augmenting their profits they were prepared to impose the most brutal repression and exploitation on the working class.

Up to the 20th century the power of the bour­geoisie was based essentially on the strength of its all-conquering economy, on the tumult­uous expansion of the productive forces, on the fact that the working class could, through its struggle, win real improvements in its living conditions. But since capitalism entered into its decadent phase, into a period marked by the tendency towards econ­omic collapse, the bourgeoisie has seen the material basis of its rule undermined by the crisis of the economy. In these conditions, the ideological and repressive aspects of its class rule have become essential. Lies and terror have become the method of government for the bourgeoisie.

The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie isn't the expression of an anachronism or a perversion of its ideals about ‘democracy'. It is in conformity with its being, its true nature. This isn't a ‘novelty' of history -- merely one of its more sinister banalities. Although all exploiting classes have expressed this at different levels, the bourgeoisie has taken it onto a qualitatively new stage. By shattering the ideological framework of feudal domination -- religion -- the bourgeoisie emancipated politics from religion, as well as law, science, and art. Now it could use all these things as conscious instruments of its rule. Here we can see both the tremendous advance made by the bourgeoisie, as well as its limits.

It's not the ICC which has a machiavellian view of the bourgeoisie, it's the bourgeoisie which, by definition, is machiavellian. It's not the ICC which has a conspiratorial, policeman's view of history, it's the bour­geoisie. This view is ceaselessly propounded in the pages of its history books, which spend their time exalting individuals, concentrating on plots, on rivalries between cliques and other superficial aspects without ever seeing the real moving forces, compared to which these epiphenomena are merely froth on a wave.

In the end, for revolutionaries to point out that the bourgeoisie is machiavellian is relatively secondary and banal. The most important thing is to draw out the implica­tions of this for the proletariat.

The whole history of the bourgeoisie demon­strates its intelligence, its capacity for maneuvering -- particularly in the period of decadence which has seen two world wars and in which the bourgeoisie has shown that no lies, no acts of barbarism are too great for it[3].

To believe that the bourgeoisie today is no longer capable of the same maneuverability the same lack of scruple which it shows in its internal rivalries, faced as it is by its historic class enemy, would lead to a pro­found under-estimation of the enemy that the proletariat is going to have to deal with.

The historic examples of the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution have already shown that, in the face of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie can set aside its most powerful antagonisms -‑ those which lead it towards war -- and unite against the class which threatens to destroy it.

The working class, the first exploited revol­utionary class in history, cannot rely on any economic strength to carry out its political revolution. Its real strength is its consciousness, and this the bourgeoisie has well understood. "Governing means putting your subjects in a state where they can't bother you or even think of bothering you", as Machiavelli put it. This is truer than ever today.

Because terror alone isn't enough, all the bourgeoisie's propaganda is used to keep the proletariat tied to the chains of exploita­tion, to mobilize it for interests which aren't its own, to hold back the develop­ment of a consciousness of the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution.

If the bourgeoisie spends so much money on maintaining a political apparatus for con­taining and mystifying the proletariat (parliament, parties, unions,) and keeps an absolute control over all the media (press, radio, TV) it's because propaganda -- the lie -- is an essential weapon of the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie is quite capable of provoking events to feed this propaganda, if need be.

Not to see all this means joining the camp of the ideologues that Marx attacked when he wrote:

"Although in daily life every shopkeeper knows how to distinguish between what an individual claims to be and what he really is, our historiography hasn't yet attained this banal knowledge. It believes word for word what each epoch affirms and imagines about itself."

It actually means failing to see the bour­geoisie, being blind to all its maneuvers because you don't believe the bourgeoisie is capable of them.

Just to take two particularly illustrative examples:

• the international anti-terrorist campaigns to create a climate of insecurity in order to polarize the proletariat's attention and subject it to an ever-increasing police control. The bourgeoisie hasn't only used the desperate acts of the petty bourgeoisie to this end: it hasn't hesitated to foment and organize terrorist attacks in order to feed its propaganda campaigns.
• for a long time, the bourgeoisie has under­stood the essential role of the left for controlling the workers. One of the essential tasks of bourgeois propaganda is to uphold the idea that the Socialist Parties, the Communist Parties, the leftists and the unions really do defend the interests of the working class. It's this lie which weighs most heavily on the consciousness of the proletariat.

This is the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie in the face of the proletariat. It's simply the bourgeoisie's way of being and acting: nothing new in that. To denounce the bourg­eoisie means above all to denounce its maneuvers, its lies; this is one of the most essential tasks for revolutionaries.

The question of effectiveness of the bourg­eoisie's maneuvers and propaganda towards the proletariat is another problem. In the secrecy of its inner cabinets, the bourgeoisie can prepare the most subtle plots and maneuvers, but their success depends on other factors, above all the consciousness of the proletariat. The best way to strengthen this consciousness is for the working class to break with any illusions it might have about its class enemy and its maneuvers.

The proletariat is faced with a class of gangsters without scruples which will stop at nothing of sustain its system of exploit­ation. This is something the proletariat has to understand.

JJ

Notes on the consciousness of the decadent bourgeoisie

1. The proletariat is the first revolutionary class in history with no economic power in the old society. Unlike all previous revolution­ary classes, the proletariat is not an expl­oiting class. Its consciousness, its self- awareness is therefore crucially important to the success of its revolution, whereas for previous revolutionary classes class consc­iousness was secondary or even inconsequential compared to their build-up of economic power prior to the wielding of political power.

For the bourgeoisie, the last exploiting class in history, the tendency towards the development of a class consciousness was taken far further than for its predecessors since it required a theoretical and ideo­logical victory to cement its triumph over the old social orders.

The consciousness of the bourgeoisie has been molded significantly by two key factors:

* by constantly revolutionizing the forces of production the capitalist system constantly extended itself and, by creat­ing the world market, brought the world to an unprecedented state of interconnection;

* from the early days of the capitalist system the bourgeoisie has had to deal with the threat posed by the class destined to be its gravedigger -- the proletariat.

The first factor propelled the bourgeoisie and its theoreticians to develop a general world view while its socio-economic system was in its phase of ascendance, ie, while it was still based on a progressive mode of production. The second factor provided a constant reminder to the bourgeoisie that, whatever the conflict of interest among its members, as a class it had to unite in the defense of its social order against the struggle of the proletariat.

Whatever advance in consciousness was made by the bourgeoisie over that of previous ruling classes, its world view was irrep­arably crippled by the very fact that its exploitative position in society masks from it the historical transiency of its system.

2. The basic unit of social organization within capitalism was the nation-state.

And within the confines of the nation-state the bourgeoisie organized its political life in a manner consistent with its economic life. Classically, political life was organized through parties which confronted each other in a parliamentary forum.

These political parties, in the first insta­nce, reflected the conflict of interests between different branches of capital within the nation-state. From the confrontation of the parties within this forum a means of government was created to control and steer the state apparatus which then orientated society towards the goals decided by the bourgeoisie. In this mode of functioning can be seen the capacity of the bourgeoisie to delegate political power to a minority of its number.

(It should be noted that this ‘classical' organization of bourgeois political life into a parliamentary framework was not a universal blueprint, but a tendency within capitalism's ascendant epoch. The actual forms varied in different countries depend­ing on such factors as: the speed of capital's development; the working-out of conflicts with the old ruling order; the adaptability of the new bourgeoisie; the actual organization of the state apparatus; the pressures imposed by the struggle of the proletariat, etc,)

3. The transition of the capitalist system into its epoch of decadence was swift, as the accelerating development of capitalist pro­duction came hard against the ability of the world market to absorb it. In other words, the relations of production abruptly imposed their fetters on the forces of production. The consequences were seen very quickly in the world events of the second decade of this century: in 1914 when the bourgeoisie demon­strated what its epoch of imperialism meant; in 1917 when the proletariat showed that it could pose its historic solution for humanity.

The lesson of 1917 has not been lost by the bourgeoisie. On a world scale the ruling class has come to appreciate that its first priority in this epoch is to defend its social system against the onslaught of the proletariat. It therefore tends to unite in the face of this threat.

4. Decadence is the epoch of historic crisis of the capitalist system. In a permanent way the bourgeoisie has to face up to the main characteristics of the epoch; to the cycle of crisis, war and reconstruction, and to the threat to the social order posed by the proletariat. In response to these, three developments have taken place inside the organization of the capitalist system:

* state capitalism

* totalitarianism

* the constitution of imperialist blocs

5. The development of state capitalism is the mechanism by which the bourgeoisie has organized its economy within each national framework to meet an ever-deepening crisis in decadence.

Whether by fusion with individual capitals, or by a more straightforward expropriation, the state has developed an overwhelming authority compared to any one unit of capit­al. This provides a coherence in economic organization through the subordination of the interests of each element to those of the national unit. And in the conditions imposed in the epoch of imperialism the basis of the economy has become a permanent war economy, a solid base on which state capit­alism develops.

But if state capitalism was a response in the first instance to crisis at the level of production, the process of statification did not stop there. More and more, institutions have been absorbed by a voracious state machine only to become its instruments, and where instruments were lacking they were created. Thus the apparatus of the state has reached into all aspects of social life. In this context, the integration of the trade unions into the state has been of the greatest necessity and significance. Not only do they exist in this period to keep the wheels of production running but, as the policemen for the proletariat, they become important agents for the militarization of society.

Differences and antagonisms among the bourgeoisie in any one national capital do not disappear in decadence, but undergo a considerable mutation because of the power of the state. In the main, the antagonisms inside the bourgeoisie on a national level are attenuated only to appear in a more intensified competition between nation states at the international level.

6. One of the consequences of state capit­alism is that power in bourgeois society tends to shift from the hands of the legis­lature to the executive apparatus of the state. This has a profound effect on the political life of the bourgeoisie since it takes place within the framework of the state. Consequently, within decadence the dominant tendency in bourgeois political life is towards totalitarianism, as in economic life it is towards statification.

Political parties of the bourgeoisie no longer remain as emanations of different interest groups as they were in the 19th century. They become expressions of state capital towards specific sections of society.

In a sense, one can say that the political parties of the bourgeoisie in any one country are merely factions of a state totalitarian party. In some countries the existence of the one-party state is always clear to see -- as in Russia. However, the effective existence of the one-party state in the ‘democracies' is shown starkly only at certain times. For example:

* the power of Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in the US in the late 1930s and during the Second World War;

* the ‘suspension of democracy' in Britain during the Second World War and the creation of the War Cabinet.

7. In the context of state capitalism, the differences between the bourgeois parties are nothing compared to what they have in common. All start from an over-riding premise that the interests of the national capital as a whole are paramount. This premise enables different factions to work together in a very close way -- especially behind the closed doors of parliamentary committees and in the higher echelons of the state apparatus. Indeed, only a very small fraction of the bourgeois­ie's debate takes place in the parliamentary arena. Members of bourgeois parliaments have in fact become state functionaries.

8. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie in any nation-state always has disagreements. However, it is important to distinguish among them:

• Real differences of orientation. Different factions can see the national interest at a given moment lying in quite different directions as, for example, in the dispute between the Labor and Con­servative Parties in the 1940s and 1950s over what was to be done with the British Empire. (It is also possible, as can be seen time and again in the third world for differences between parties, especially over the issue of which bloc to join, to lead to war. In such instances, pronoun­ced schisms can develop in the state and even major breakdowns in its functioning).
• Differences which arise because of the pressures which are imposed on various factions of the bourgeoisie because of their functions in the bourgeois state. Consequently, there can be agreement about general orientations, yet disagreements over the manner of their implementation - as was seen, for example, in Britain over the efforts to strengthen the grip of the trade unions over the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
• Differences which are false and diversionary charades for the mystific­ation of the population. For example, the whole ‘debate' over the SALT 2 rat­ification in the US Congress in the summer of 1979 was an ideological operation which covered over the fact that the bourgeoisie had taken several important decisions concerning preparations for the Third World War and the strategy by which they wanted that war pursued.

Often, however, there are strands of several of these present in the bourgeoisie's disagreements, especially during elections.

9. As the antagonisms between nation-states have intensified through the epoch, so world capital has attempted to take the development of state capitalism onto the international level through the formation of imperialist blocs. If the organization of the blocs has permitted a certain attenuation of the anta­gonisms among the member states of each bloc this has only led to a heightening of the rivalry between the blocs -- the final cleavage of the world capitalist system where all its economic contradictions find a focus.

In the formation of the blocs, previous allia­nces among groups of (more or less) equal capitalist states have been replaced by two groupings in each of which the lesser capitals are subordinate to one dominant capital. And just as in the development of state capital the apparatus of the state reaches into all aspects of economic and social life, so the organization of the bloc reaches into every nation-state in its member­ship. Two examples of this are;

• the creation of means to regulate the entire world economy since the Second World War (the Bretton Woods agreement, the World Bank, the IMF, etc.) and a theory to go with it (Keynesianism);
• the creation of a unified military command structure in each bloc (NATO, Warsaw Pact) .

10. Marx said that it was really only in times of crisis that the bourgeoisie became intelligent. This is true but, like many of Marx's insights, has to be considered in the light of the change in historical period. The overall vision of the bourgeoisie has narrowed considerably with its transformation from a revolutionary to a reactionary class in society. Today the bourgeoisie no longer has the world view it had last century and in this sense is far less intelligent. But, at the level of organizing to survive, to defend itself -- here, the bourgeoisie has shown an immense capacity to develop techniques for economic and social control way beyond the dreams of the rulers of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has become ‘intelligent' confronted with the historic crisis of its socio-economic system.

Despite the points just made about the three significant developments in decadence, it is possible to reaffirm the basic constraints on the consciousness of the bourgeoisie -- its incapacity to have a united consciousness or to fully understand the nature of its system.

But if the development of state capitalism and bloc-wide organizations has not given them the impossible it has provided them with highly-developed mechanisms for acting in concert. The bourgeoisie's ability to organize the functioning of the whole world economy since the Second World War in a way in which extended the period of reconstruction for decades and phased-in the reappearance of open crisis so that 1929-type crashes did not recur is testimony to this. And these actions were all based on the development of a theory about the mechanisms and ‘shortcomings' (as the bourgeoisie might call them) of the mode of production. In other words, these actions were performed consciously.

The capacity of the bourgeoisie to act in concert on diplomatic/military levels also has been shown time and again -- not least in the actions of both blocs in the Middle East over the past three decades.

However, the bourgeoisie has a relatively free hand in its activity on the purely economic or military levels -- that is to say, it is only dealing with itself. The functioning of the state is more complex where it has to deal with social questions -- for these involve the movements of other classes, particularly the proletariat.

11. In confronting the proletariat the state can employ many branches of its apparatus in a coherent division of labor; even in a single strike the workers may have to face an array of trade unions, press and television propaganda campaigns of different hues, campaigns by several political parties, the police, the ‘welfare' services and, at times, the army. But to see a concerted use made of all of these parts of the state does not imply that they each see the total framework in which they are each carrying out their function.

In the first place, it is unnecessary for the whole bourgeoisie to understand what is going on. The bourgeoisie is able to delegate this responsibility to a minority of its number. Hence the state is not hampered to any signif­icant degree by the fact that the entire ruling class does not see the whole picture. It is therefore possible to talk, say, about the ‘plans of the bourgeoisie' while in fact it is only a small proportion of the class actually making them.

This only works because of the way in which the different arms of the state interlock. Different arms of the state have different functions and as well as dealing with the section of society to which this function corresponds, they also communicate to the higher echelons of the state the pressures they are under, and therefore help determine what is possible and what is not.

At the heights of the state machine it is possible for those in command to have some kind of general picture of the situation and what options are realistically open to them to confront it. In saying this, however, it is important to note:

• that this picture is not a clear, unmystified view (of the kind that the proletariat can have) but a pragmatic one;
• that it is not a unified picture, but a divided one, ie. that it may be ‘shared' among several factions of the bourgeoisie;
• that the inevitable contradictions faced by the bourgeoisie make for considerable disharmonies.
• In appreciating how this whole apparatus works it is important to recognize that:
• a distinction must be made between a consciousness which permits an understanding of the capitalist social system (that of the proletariat) and a consciousness which is required only to permit a defense of that system (that of the bourgeoisie). Thus the army of social analysts used by the state can help it defend its system but never to understand it;
• the activity of the bourgeoisie is ini­tiated not by the subjective whims of ind­ividuals and factions among it, but in response to the dominant forces active in its system at the time.

12. Consequently, maneuvers of the bourgeoisie have a structure to them, whether they are aware of it or not, and are confined within and determined by a framework set by:

• the historic period (decadence);
• the conjunctural crisis (whether it has opened or not);
• the historic course (towards war or revolution);
• the momentary weight of class struggle (in upsurge or reflux).

According to the evolution of the actual period, the hand of particular key factions of the bourgeoisie is strengthened inside the state apparatus, as the importance of their role and orientation becomes clearer for the bourgeoisie. In most countries in the world this process automatically leads to the gover­ning team chosen -- as a result of the mech­anism of the one-party state.

However, in the ‘democracies' -- generally among the stronger countries -- the pro­cesses of strengthening certain factions in the state apparatus and of choosing the governing team are separated. For example, we have seen in Britain over several years a strengthening of the left in the unions, in the local apparatus of the state, etc while the Labor Party fell from political power. The totalitarian dictatorship of the bourgeoisie remains and by a dexterous legerdemain the population chooses, ‘freely', what the conjurer has already chosen for them. More often than not the trick works -- the ‘democracies' only retain these electoral mechanisms because they have learned how to manipulate them effectively.

The ‘free choice' of the governing team by the electorate is affected by:

• the programs on which the parties choose to stand;
• the propaganda of the TV and the press;
• the endorsements (or otherwise) of major institutions such as unions and employers' organizations for one or other party;
• the existence of third parties to act as ‘spoilers' or as coalition material;
• the re-emphasizing of different parts of the electoral programs according to their effects on the electorate, as indic­ated by poll samples;
• after the results of the election, maneuverings by different factions of the bourgeoisie to get what is required overall.

Without going into details, the following examples illustrate recent uses made of some of these mechanisms:

• Close to the 1976 US presidential election it became clear that a Carter victory was in the balance. Only then did the AFL-CIO apparatus decide to endorse Carter and mobilize the workers to register and vote. Carter's success was ensured only in the last fortnight of the campaign.
• In the 1980 US presidential election Reagan's victory was ensured by two devices: Kennedy made sure that Carter's nomination by the Democratic Party would not have a clear backing; Anderson was run as a ‘serious' third candidate to ‘spoil' the Carter vote, and to enable him to do this, state funding for his campaign was made available.
• ‘Fine tuning' of electoral platforms in response to opinion-poll results is openly acknowledged in the US by the media.
• Through the Lib-Lab pact it was possible for the minority Labor government to remain in power despite several parliament­ary crises.
• Through the minority parties coming to­gether with the Conservatives in a vote of no-confidence in the Labor government it was possible to put Labor in opposition in the face of the 1979 upsurge of class struggle.
• In February 1974, Heath called an election to try to get support to break the miners' strike. The result permitted him to form a government -- which he attempted to do with the Liberals. However, in rec­ognition of the need for Labor to come to power to get the workers' struggle under control the Liberals refused and opened the way to Wilson and the period of the ‘social contract'.

These instances demonstrate the mechanisms the bourgeoisie has at its disposal and which it knows how to use. However, the bourgeoisies of different countries have various degrees of flexibility in their apparatus. In this respect, Britain and the US probably have the most effective machinery in the ‘democracies'. An example of relatively inflexible machinery, and of the fallibility of the bourgeoisie, is to be seen in the results of the 1981 French presidential elections.

13. The question of the framework imposed by the period on the bourgeoisie's maneuvers has already been mentioned. In periods when the class struggle is relatively quiet the bourg­eoisie chooses its governing team according to criteria primarily concerning economic and foreign policies. In such instances, the objectives of the bourgeoisie can be seen relatively clearly in the actions of the government. Thus, through the 1950s the government in Britain -- the Eden faction of the Conservative Party -- corresponded to a decision by the bourgeoisie to hold onto the Empire against the onslaught of the US. The effort was wrecked on the reef of the Suez adventure in 1956. Yet, the British economy could function under the Conservatives (who, under the Macmillan faction, took on more of the Labor Party's orientations in this area) until 1964. In other words, in such periods there is not necessarily an absolute criterion against which to judge whether a given government is the best one for the bourgeoisie or not.

This is not the case at all in a period of class upsurge, as over the period since 1968. As the open crisis shows itself and the struggle intensifies, then so the framework imposed on the bourgeoisie becomes more defined and more binding, and the consequen­ces of their falling outside the framework more dangerous.

Through the 1970s the bourgeoisie sought to resolve its economic crises, palliate the class struggle and yet prepare for war -- all at the same time. In the 1980s it makes no attempt to resolve its economic crisis since it is generally appreciated that it cannot do so. The framework for the bourgeoisie is now determined by the class struggle and by pre­parations for war, the latter now being recognized as being dependant on its ability to deal with the former. In such a situation, the way in which the bourgeoisie presents its policies to the working class is crucial for in the absence of solutions its mystifications become enormously important.

The bourgeoisie has to confront the working class today:

• when its economic palliatives have been used up;
• when the working class has been through a whole period of ‘social contracts' and can no longer be mobilized on that terrain;
• when the bourgeoisie has to foist even further levels of austerity on an unde­feated working class.

Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is confronted with the immediate necessity of crushing the working class.

This is what makes the framework of the left in opposition a crucial factor in today's situation for the bourgeoisie. It becomes a criterion for evaluating the preparedness of the bourgeoisie to face the working class.

14. It has already been argued that in the face of the proletarian threat, the bourge­oisie tends to unite and its consciousness tends to become ‘more intelligent'. Expre­ssions of this process have been clear over the past decade and more:

* In the events of 1968 and its immediate aftermath each national capital tended to deal with its ‘own' proletariat, In this one could see the bourgeoisie organized as a state capital confronting a rising working class for the first time.

* As the wave of struggle developed yet further, the bourgeoisie was forced to confront the proletariat, organized as a bloc. This was seen first in Portugal, then in Spain and Italy, where only through the support of other nations in the bloc were the resources and mystifications found to palliate the workers' struggle.

* Over Poland in 1980-81, for the first time, the bourgeoisie has had to organize across the blocs to deal with the proleta­riat. In this we can identify the beginn­ings of the process where the bourgeoisie will have to set aside its imperialist rivalries in order to deal with the proletariat, a phenomenon not seen since 1918.

Thus we are in a period where the bourgeoisie is beginning to organize on a world scale to confront the proletariat, using mechanisms created for the most part in response to other necessities.

15. As the proletariat enters a period of decisive class confrontation, it becomes imperative to measure the strength and resources of the class enemy. To under­estimate these would be to disarm the proletariat which requires clarity of consciousness and not illusions if it is to meet its historic challenge.

As this text has attempted to show, the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie is strengthening all over the world to confront the proletariat. We can expect this process to continue -- for the state to become more sophisticated, and for the consciousness of the bourgeoisie to become more alert and to become an even more active factor in the situation. However, this does not mean that the proletariat's enemy is becoming ever-stronger. On the contrary, the strengthening of the state is taking place on foundations which are crumbling. The contradictions of the bourgeois order are causing society to come apart at the seams. However much the state is strengthened it will not be able to redress the decay of the system which has been brought about by historic factors. The state may be strong, but it is a brittle strength.

Because the social system is falling apart the proletariat will be able to confront the state at the social level, attacking its foundations by widening the breach caused by the social contradictions. The success of the proletariat's drive to further open the breach will hinge on its confrontation with the bourgeois state's first line of defense -- the trade unions.

Marlowe

[1] See ‘Crisis in the Revolutionary Milieu', IR 28.

[2] The Bulletin, Ingram, 580 George St, Aberdeen, UK.

Revolution Sociale, BP 30316, 74767 Paris, Cedex 16, France.

Guerre de Classe, c/o Paralleles, 47 Rue de St. Honore, 75001, Paris, France.

[3] The episodic scandals which come to the surface, like noxious marsh gas, are a good illustration of the repulsive state of decomposition reached by this machiavellain class, the bourgeoisie. The Lockheed affair which showed the real corruption of international commerce; the case of the Loge P2 in Italy which revealed the occult operation of the bourgeoisie within the state, miles away from its ‘democratic' principles, the De Broglie affair where a former influential minister appeared at the center of a whole network of counterfeit money, arms dealing and international financial fraud; the Matesa affair in Spain..... the list is endless, showing the complete lack of scruples of this class gangster. The international political scene of the bourgeoisie is rich in political assassinations (Sadat and Gemayel being recent examples) in plots, in coup d'états fomented with the aid of the secret services of one or the other of the dominant factions of the world bourgeoisie.  

The propaganda barrage about the killings tin the Palestinian camps of' Sabra and Chatila in West Beirut -- both the propaganda and the killings being the work of the western bourgeoisie -- is yet another reminder that the survival of the laws of capitalism is leading the world into barbarism. This deluge of' blood and iron (which descended on men, women and children for three days), highlighted for reasons of propaganda, is one more massacre in the death-throes of a system which daily piles up its victims through industrial accidents and ‘natural' disasters, through repression and war.

Since the beginning of this century the Middle East has been a battle-field for the major powers, a favorite war-zone for capitalism. Since the Second World War it has been fought over by the two great imperialist blocs of' America and Russia. Today the western bloc is pushing its rival out of the Middle East and strengthening its grip on the region. Its aim is to turn the region into a military bastion against the Russian bloc. The ‘Pax Americana' is a culmin­ating point in the strategy of eliminating any significant Russian presence and consolidating the position of the USA -- partly in order to compensate for and counteract the destabilization of' Iran, and respond to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in the summer of 1982, and the installation of American, French and Italian troops, is all part of this strategy. It's the local populations who pay the price of this bloody game.

Why has the western bourgeoisie made so much noise about the massacre in the Palestinian camps

In Lebanon itself', this kind of thing has often happened, and on both sides. Other, similar massacres in the world haven't been ‘favored' in the same way. The propaganda about this one has a dual aspect: on the one hand, it clearly demonstrates the impossibility of appealing to the other bloc for help and this sanctifies the victory of the west. On the other hand, it is a continuation of the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns around themes which inculcate a feel­ing of' powerlessness and terror (such as pacif­ism, anti-terrorism, agitation about the danger of war) and which present military interventions as the only way of ensuring peace. The Falklands War was stage-managed principally with the aim of testing out the ideological impact of a military expedition in a big capitalist country[1]. With the sending of troops to Lebanon, bourgeois propaganda is pursuing the same goal by using an event with very different roots -- the confrontation between imperialist blocs.

In the face of an open crisis which offers a more and more catastrophic perspective, the bourgeoisie has no choice but to push towards its ‘solution' of generalized imperialist war. But the road to war is barred by the working class, which hasn't suffered a decisive defeat. Despite the relative quiescence of struggles, especially after the 1980-81 movements in Poland, the working class does not adhere en masse to any of the bourgeoisie's ideals. This is why the ruling class has to mount all its ideolog­ical campaigns -- to occupy the whole social terrain, to put a stop to the resurgence of struggle which took place in the advanced coun­tries in the late 70s, to prevent it from leading into a massive, international struggle of the working class, the only force which can offer an alternative to the barbarism of the capitalist system.

The barbarism of capital

The whole history of humanity is pitted with massacres, wars and genocides. Capitalism, the last society of exploitation of man by man, has in the last sixty years, since the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the ensuing triumph of the counter-revolution, taken such barbarities to their extreme limit, to the point where it threatens the actual destruction of humanity in a third world war.

The wars of the 20th century have claimed many more victims than previous wars, from Antiquity to the Hundred Years War, from the feudal to the Napoleonic Wars. 20 million dead in 1914-18. 50 million in 1939-45. Tens of millions since then. And the ruling class now possesses weapons that could wipe out the planet several times over.

Millions have also fallen victim to the counter­revolutionary repression that has descended on the working class: in Germany in 1918-23 and under the Nazis; in Russia after the failure of the 1917 revolution and the advent of Stalinism; in China in 1927; in Spain in the ‘civil war' of 1936-39, etc. The number of victims is so huge that all the massacres from the Spartacus slave revolt to the repression of the Communards in 1871, only represent a small proportion of the bloodbaths that humanity has been through.

Capitalism, while taking humanity through a gigantic leap forward, has also developed exploitation to an unprecedented degree. It arose by throwing whole populations into misery, by dispossessing them of their former means of subsistence and turning them into proletarians who owned nothing but their labor power. In the ascendant period of capitalism, this situation was the heavy price paid for a real development of the productive forces. In the period of decadence, it is the consequence of the fact that capitalism can no longer develop towards the satisfaction of human needs. On the contrary, it can only survive through destruction.

The killings done by capitalism are only the tip of the iceberg. The submerged part is made up of the daily barbarity and absurdity of exploitation and oppression. When the bourgeoisie makes a campaign about a massacre, it does so in order to create a screen or an alibi[2] for other massacres, to justify a system which lives through an infernal cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-crisis. This cycle has already mani­fested itself twice this century and will end up with the total destruction of humanity if the proletariat doesn't demolish world capital­ism once and for all.

The list is long of the high deeds of capitalist terror. When the bourgeoisie highlights a particular episode in this gloomy history, it's because it wants us to see the trees and miss the forest.

In Lebanon, the bourgeoisie is trying to kill two birds with one stone: to complete a ‘clean­up' operation through sowing terror, and to feign indignation for propaganda reasons. After several months of intensive bombardment, of imperialist pillage, the lamentations about the Lebanon are pure hypocrisy. The whole world bourgeoisie, east and west, but particularly the rulers of the ‘democratic countries' have blood on their hands.

All the capitalist states -- and all the states in the world today (including ‘potential' states like the PLO) are capitalist with all their parties and unions, the guarantors of bourgeois order and the defenders of the fatherland -- are responsible for these massacres. Reagan, Castro, Thatcher, Mitterand and Brezhnev -- all have shed their tears over a butchery carried out in a country where around eleven occupying armies are present. The theme of ‘there was nothing anyone could do' has been used to preach passivity and to introduce the idea that the ‘only thing to do' is to send back the armies of the USA, France and Italy -- for reasons of ‘safety'. And this, in effect, was the goal of the operation.

Imperialist conflicts and ideological campaigns

Because of its geographic situation as a passage-way between Europe, Africa and Asia, and because of its oil reserves, the Middle East has always figured at the heart of the war strategies of the 20th century. It has been a vital 'theatre of operation', to use the terms of the bourgeois strategists. World capitalism fashioned the Middle East into a constellation of states through international treaties and the armies of the main capitalist powers.

After being dominated by the Turks at the begin­ning of the century, by Anglo-French imperialism between the two world wars, the Middle East was placed under Anglo-American domination by the Tehran Conference and the Yalta agreements at the end of World War II. Today, after being disputed by the Russian bloc for over 20 years, the region is on the way to being completely under the hegemony of the western bloc.

Over the last ten years, we have seen a system­atic reversal of the positions Russia painfully acquired during the 1950s. First Egypt went back to the American camp after the Israel-Egypt war of 1973. From 1974 onwards, America's retreat from Vietnam, apart from being the result of a deal with China, also marked the accentuation of an American military and diplomatic offensive in the Middle East. This was Kissinger's ‘small steps' strategy, which opened up talks with everyone in the region; one of the results of this was the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. Once the Egyptian front was neutralized, under American control, and Israel began to withdraw from the Sinai, the offensive was now directed towards the north (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon). This involved

-- disciplining Iraq

-- immobilizing Syria through manipulations on the internal level, particularly through the ‘Muslim Brotherhood', through military intimid­ation[3], and through considerable financial aid from Saudi Arabia

-- neutralizing any pro-Russian influences inside the PLO, by rallying it to western plans and dispersing the military apparatus to various countries.

This last development has been going on for several years: Arafat's speech at the UN in 1976 officially marked the beginning of the PLO's passage towards control by western diplomacy, a movement which has since gone much further. On the ground, Israel was the executor of this ‘clean-up'.

Today, the military phase of the operation is moving into a more ‘diplomatic' phase. This threatens to deprive Israel of its role as a privileged ally, as a unique military strong­hold, and it's not happening without friction. It's even possible that Israel has somewhat overshot the precise objectives fixed for it by the Reagan administration. Whatever the case, this in no way relieves America of responsibility for the massacres. On the contrary: it would only show the perfidy of the bourgeoisie, which is quite capable of liquidating the executors of its base deeds once the job is done, of using them as a scapegoat for its own crimes. The methods the bourgeoisie uses to defend its interests are the methods of gangsters.

In any case, the Israeli bourgeoisie will have to give way. It owes all its economic and military strength to its powerful allies. Like all states in the region, Israel is a pawn in the imperialist war, and it's population, like all those in the region, is a victim exploited, militarized and dragooned for interests that are not its own.

Feigning disapproval and indignation towards the state of Israel fulfills several objectives for American imperialism:

-- carrying through its strategic plan by relieving Israel of military and strategic privileges

-- moving from the ‘clean-up' phase of its operation to the diplomatic phase, which will push the imperialist front towards Iran and Afghanistan

-- trying to cover up its responsibilities in the massacres so that the mystifications of defending the ‘Palestinian cause' won't lose all credibility in the eyes of the Middle East populations as the PLO changes its shirt.

The ‘Palestinian cause' was the ideological justification for lining up behind the pro-Russian camp, promising a ‘return home' to the millions of refugees who for 40 years have served as a source of cannon-fodder and political maneuverings -- just as the ‘holocaust of the Jew' was the ‘grand alibi' for the anti-fascist war, then for the mobilizations in the Middle East.

The ‘civil war' in the Lebanon has never had the character of the oppressed against their oppress­ors, or of a war of liberation against imp­erialism, any more than other wars this century. Contrary to the proclamations of the left of capital and of the Bordigists, the workers have no camp to support in the Middle East war. The population there has been mobilized by various bourgeois militias armed by all the arms-dealers on the planet.

More than in Iran where workers' struggles have arisen, in Israel where there have been move­ments against price rises and wage freezes, or Egypt where the workers have on several occasions come out against hunger; Lebanon, where the proletariat is very weak, is a concentrated expression of the absurdity of imp­erialist war. In this sense, if these events represent a victory for the western bloc against the eastern bloc, a strengthening of the former thanks to a greater degree of coll­aboration within it, they also represent a victory for the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, which has nowhere reacted to them.

The key to the situation is in the advanced countries

The situation doesn't depend on what happens on a local level, but on what goes on in the capitalist metropoles. The balance of forces can only be established in favor of the prol­etariat at a world level. If the proletariat, where it is strongest and most concentrated, remains paralyzed and submits to the attacks of the bourgeoisie without reacting, then the way will be opened for the preparations for capitalist war to be pushed on to a higher level.

After more than ten years of open crisis, what has prevented war from generalizing is the revival of class struggle since the late sixties, in the advanced countries and the rest of the world. After a period of reflux, there was a new surge of the class struggle in the late seventies (USA, Germany, France, Britain). This culminated in Poland where the world working class launched the mass strike, posed the question of internationalizing its struggle[4], and highlighted the decisive importance of the development of the class struggle in the industrialized countries, especially Western Europe[5].

The bourgeoisie has already felt that the working class is an obstacle to the perpetuation of its system. It unified itself on a world level to face up to the movement in Poland. Its propaganda today is much more aimed at deafening the proletariat than at finding alibis (which it's more or less run out of) for a mobilization for war against the Russian bloc -- an imperialist bloc that is historically weaker and is weakened still further by the economic crisis and the combativity of the proletariat.

"The strengthening of the blocs, which is a prerequisite for war against the rival bloc, is now a direct and immediate preparation to confront the proletariat wherever it challenges the rule of. capital."[6]

With the events in the Lebanon, a wave of propaganda has been unleashed to inculcate feelings of terror and fatalism, and to reinforce the lie of a ‘democratic', ‘humane', ‘peace-keeping' capitalism. The aim, for imper­ialism, is to profit from one of its military victories by using it against the proletariat. The trick consists of focusing attention on a search for the ‘guilty' ones, when the only real criminal is capital and all its agents.

It's up to the world proletariat to respond to the offensive of the bourgeoisie by embark­ing on an international struggle. Only the working class can put an end to all forms of barbarism -- by putting an end to capitalism.

MG

[1] See IR 30 ‘The Falklands War'

[2] See the PCI pamphlet Auschwitz or the Grand Alibi, on the justification for anti-fascism.

[3] During the aerial combats, Syria lost 86 planes, and Israel none.

[4] See IR 23-29 on the lessons on the struggle of Poland.

[5] See, in this issue, ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Heart of the Class Struggle'.

[6] ‘Report on the Crisis and Inter-Imperialist Conflicts' to the 4th Congress of the ICC, IR 26.

(Critique of the Theory of the ‘Weakest Link')

1. From the beginning, the workers' move­ment has insisted on the world-wide character of the communist revolution. Internationalism has always been a touchstone in the struggles of the working class and the program of its political organizations. Any deviation from this essential principle has always been syn­onymous with a break with the proletarian camp and a passing over to the bourgeois camp. However, while for over a century it has been clear to revolutionaries that the movement of the communist revolution is bound up with the process towards the world-wide generalization of workers' struggles, the characteristics of this process haven't been clearly understood in all phases of the history of the workers' movement. There have actually been regressions on this question: thus for over 60 years, the workers' movement has been tied down with two ideas:

• that world imperialist war creates the most favorable conditions for a revolutionary outbreak
• that it's in the countries where the bourgeoisie is weakest (the "weakest link in the capitalist chain") where such a movement will first arise, then extending to the most developed countries.

These two ideas do not belong to the classic heritage of marxism left us by Marx and Engels. They appeared during the course of the First World War and were part of the errors sanct­ified by the Communist International, trans­formed into a dogma by the defeat of the world revolution.

However, contrary to other false positions of the CI, which were energetically fought against by the communist left, these two ideas for a long time enjoyed the favor of authentic revolutionary currents[1], and today remain the alpha and omega of the perspective defended by the Bordigist groups. This is largely due to the fact that these errors -- as has often happened in the workers' movement -- derived from an intransigent defense of authentic class positions.

Thus:

• the first error came out of the defense of the correct slogan ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war', adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 and taken up during the First World War by Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the pacifist currents who called for ‘arbitration' to put an end to the conflict, and against the ‘jusqu' au boutistes' who held that peace was only possible through the victory of their own country;
• the second error came out of the struggle waged by the revolutionaries, and not­ably the Bolsheviks, against the reformist and bourgeois currents (Mensheviks, Kautskyites, etc) who denied that there was any possibility of a proletarian revolution in Russia and who ass­igned the proletariat there the task of simply supporting bourgeois democracy.

The triumph of the proletarian revolution in Russia demonstrated the validity of the princi­pal positions defended by the Bolsheviks, notab­ly that the world war, a characteristic of the 20th century, showed that the capitalist system as a whole had entered its phase of hist­oric decline, posing the necessity for the socialist revolution as the only alternative.

On the other hand the international isolation of this first proletarian attempt tended to hide the partial character of these positions and the erroneous nature of some of the arguments used in their defense. The victory of the world counter-revolution finally led to these weaknesses being used to justify the bourgeois politics of the so-called ‘workers' parties. The denunciation of these bourgeois politics cannot therefore be limited to a simple reaff­irmation of the true positions of Lenin and the CI, as the Bordigists propose. It requires a critique of the errors of the past, a reject­ion of all formulations which are vulnerable to being taken up by the bourgeoisie.

2. The ICC has for some time now been engaged in a critique of the thesis which holds that the best conditions for the revolution, and for the generalization of the struggles which lead up to it, are provided by imperialist war[2]. On the other hand, while we have implicitly rejected it in our analyses, the theory of the ‘weakest link' has not yet been explicitly and specifically criticized. This is what we propose to do in the present text, since.

• the two theses are closely linked, both with regard to the historic conditions which gave rise to them, and to the view of the capitalist world and of the revolution which underlies them: any critique of one, if it is to be complete, must be a critique of the other;
• even more than the thesis of war as the condition for the revolution, the thesis of the weakest link opens the door to dangerous and even bourgeois analyses. It is based on a version of the theory of the ‘unequal development of capitalism', which contains the seeds both of the idea of ‘socialism in one country'[3] and of the third-worldism of the Maoists and Trotskyists, and which, even inside the proletarian camp, have led the Bordigists and someone like Mattick to say that the bourgeois democratic revolution is on the agenda in certain ‘geo­graphic areas', and to hail the ‘progressive' nature of Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh[4]
• even groups who have unambiguously rejected all third-worldist temptations have had some difficulty in dispensing with the conception of the ‘weakest link' in their analysis of the situation in Poland after the summer of 1980, and have therefore shown tenden­cies to overestimate the level of the struggle (this was notably the case with the Communist Workers Organization with its slogan ‘Revolution Now'), and also to overestimate the importance of the defeat for the world proletariat const­ituted by the imposition of military law on 13 December 1981.

Although the ICC, as a fundamental part of its perspective, has on several occasions strongly reaffirmed the necessity for the world-wide generalization of the class struggle, it has not up to now made explicit the characteristics of this generalization. In particular, it has not up to now expressly replied to two questions:

• will this generalization take the form of a convergence of simultaneous movements touching all countries in the world?
• if this generalization takes the form of an earthquake with shockwaves irradiating towards all countries, where will the epicenter of the earthquake be? Can it be in any zone of capitalism, and more particularly can it be outside its main industrial concentrations, in the so-called ‘weak links'?

Behind this question of the ‘weakest link', the whole vision of the historic perspective of the revolution is at stake. Thus it is necessary to take another look at the general conditions for the proletarian revolution.

3. Following on from the classic view of marxism, as contained for example in the Communist Manifesto, the conditions for the comm­unist revolution, in a schematic way, are as follows:

• a sufficient development of the produc­tive forces, to the point where the relations of production which had formerly allowed them to expand have become fetters further growth, and where the material conditions exist for a process of overturning these relations of production (the material necessity and possibility of the revolution);
• the development of a revolutionary class charged with the task of "carrying out the sentence passed by history", "gravedigger" of the old society that is now moribund.

These conditions, which are valid for all the revolutions in history (notably the bourgeois revolution), take a particular form in the case of the proletarian revolution:

• the material premises for the revolu­tion are given (or not yet given) on a world level, and not on the level of a country or region of the world: the development of the productive forces, the historic crisis of the capitalist relations of production;
• this crisis of the relations of produc­tion takes the form of a crisis of overproduc­tion, of the saturation of solvable markets(and not of human needs obviously);
• for the first time in history, the rev­olutionary class is a class which is exploited in the old society; having no economic power of its own, this class, much more than any other historic class, draws its force from its num­bers, its concentration at the point of produc­tion, its education and its consciousness.

4. Since the First World War, the material conditions for the communist revolution have indeed existed on a world scale. On this point Lenin was quite right, deriving the proletarian nature of the revolution in Russia not from the specific conditions in that country (as the Mensheviks did, and later on, as the various councilist groups did and still do), but from the world situation. The fact that it's the whole of capitalism that has entered its dec­adent phase does not however mean that there are not enormous differences between various regions of the world at the level of the devel­opment of the productive forces, and of that principle productive force, the proletariat. Far from it.

The law of the unequal development of capitalism, on which Lenin and his epigones base their theory of the weakest link, was expressed in the asc­endant period of capitalism through a power­ful push by the backward countries towards cat­ching up with and even overtaking the most dev­eloped ones. But this tendency tends to reverse itself as the system as a whole reaches its objective historic limits and finds itself in­capable of extending the world market in relat­ion to the necessities imposed by the development of the productive forces. Having reached its historic limits, the system in decline no long­er offers any possibility of an equalization of development: on the contrary it entails the stagnation of all development through waste, unproductive labor and destruction. The only ‘catching up' that now takes place is the one that leads the most advanced countries towards the situation existing in the backward countries -- economic convulsions, poverty, state capital­ist measures. In the 19th century, it was the most advanced country, Britain, which showed the way forward for the rest: today it is the third world countries which, in a way, indicate the future in store for the advanced ones.

However, even in these conditions, there cannot be a real ‘equalization' of the situation of the different countries in the world. While it does not spare any country, the world crisis exerts its most devastating effects not on the most powerful, developed countries, but on the countries which arrived too late in the world economic arena and whose path towards develop­ment has been definitely barred by the older powers[5].

Thus the law of uneven development, which, at one time, allowed for a certain equalization of economic situations, now appears as a factor which aggravates inequalities between countries. While the solution to the contradictions of this society -- the world proletarian revolution -- is the same for all countries, it remains the case that the bourgeoisie as a whole enters its period of historic crisis with considerable differences between the various geo-economic zones.

It's the same for the proletariat, which con­fronts its historic tasks in a unitary fashion, while at the same time facing considerable differences from one country to the next. This second point derives from the first one, to the extent that the characteristics of the proletariat in one country, and notably those which determine its strength (number, concen­tration, education, experience) are closely dependent on the development of capitalism in that country.

5. Only by taking into account these differences bequeathed to us by capitalism, by integrating them into the general perspective of the revol­ution, can we establish the latter on a solid basis. We must avoid drawing false conclusions from correct premises, and above all avoid ex­pecting the revolution to begin in places where it cannot, as in the theory of the weakest link developed by the ‘Leninists'.

The argument of the latter is based on trans­posing an image from physics -- the chain subjected to tension breaks at its weakest point -- applying it to the social sphere. They thus totally ignore the difference between the in­organic world, and the living, organic world, above all the human world, which is a social sphere.

A social revolution is not simply the breaking of a chain, the breakdown of the old society. It is at the same time an action for the con­struction of a new society. It is not a mech­anical event but a social fact indissolubly linked to the antagonism of human interests, to the aspirations and struggle of social classes.

Imprisoned by a mechanistic vision, the theory of the weakest link looks for the geographical points where the social body is weakest, and bases its perspective on these points. This is the root of its theoretical error.

Marxism -- that of Marx and Engels -- never saw history in this way. For them, social revolut­ions did not take place where the old ruling class was weakest and its structures the least developed, but, on the contrary, where its structure had reached the highest point compatible with the productive forces, and where the class bearing the new relations of product­ion destined to replace the old ones was strong­est. Whereas Lenin banked on the points where the bourgeoisie was weakest, Marx and Engels looked for and based their perspective on the points where the proletariat was strongest, most concentrated and best placed to carry out the social transformation. Because, while the crisis hits the underdeveloped countries most brutally precisely as a result of their econ­omic weakness and their lack of a margin for maneuver, we must not forget that the source of the crisis lies in overproduction and thus in the main centers of capitalist development. This is another reason why the conditions for a re­sponse to this crisis and for going beyond it reside fundamentally in the main centers.

6. The unconditional defenders of the theory of the weakest link will reply that the October 1917 revolution confirms the validity of their conceptions, since we know from Marx that "man demonstrates the validity of his thought in practice". The question is how you read and interpret this "practice", how you distinguish the exception from the rule. And, from this point of view, we should not make the 1917 rev­olution any more than it meant. Just as it does not prove that the best conditions for the proletarian revolution are given by war, so it also does not prove the validity of the theory of the weakest link, for the following reasons:

a) despite its overall economic backward­ness, Russia in 1917 was the fifth industrial power in the world, with immense concentrations of workers in several towns, notably Petrograd. At that time, Putilov, with its 40,000 workers, was the biggest factory in the world;

b) the 1917 revolution took place in the middle of a world war, which limited the poss­ibility of the bourgeoisie of other countries coming to the aid of the Russian bourgeoisie;

c) the country concerned was the most extensive in the world, representing one sixth of the surface of the planet. This further obstructed the response of the world bourgeoisie, as could be seen during the civil war;

d) it was the first time the bourgeoisie had been confronted by a proletarian revolut­ion, and was surprised by it. Thus:

• in Russia itself, the bourgeoisie did not understand in time the need to withdraw from the imperialist war;
• on an international scale, the bourge­oisie took a major risk by continuing the war for another year.

On this last point, we must note that the bour­geoisie quickly drew the lessons of October 1917. As soon as the revolution began in Ger­many in November 1918, it stopped the war and collaborated closely to crush the working class (liberation of German prisoners by the countries of the Entente, derogation of the armist­ice and peace agreements which enabled the German army to retain a contingent of 5000 machine gunners).

The bourgeoisie's growing awareness about the proletarian danger was further confirmed before[6] and during[7] the Second World War. Thus, clear-sighted revolutionaries were not surprised to see the formidable collaboration between the various sectors of the world bourgeoisie in the face of the struggles in Poland in 1980-81.

If only because of this last point -- the bour­geoisie today won't be surprised as it was in the past -- it would be quite pointless to wait for a replay of the 1917 revolution.

As long as the important movements of the class only hit the countries on the peripheries of capitalism (as was the case with Poland) and even if the local bourgeoisie is completely outflanked, the Holy Alliance of all the bourgeois­ies of the world, led by the most powerful ones, will be able to set up an economic, political, ideological and even military cordon sanitaire around the sectors of the proletariat involved. It's not until the proletarian struggle hits the economic heart of capital,

• when it's no longer possible to set up an economic cordon sanitaire, since it will be the richest economies that will be effected;
• when the setting up of a political cor­don sanitaire will have no more effect because it will be the most developed proletariat con­fronting the most powerful bourgeoisie; only then will the struggle give the signal for the world revolutionary conflagration.

Thus it is not when the proletariat attacks a ‘weak link' of world capital that the latter is in danger of being overthrown. It's only when the class attacks the strongest links that the revolutionary process can get underway.

As we said before, the image of the chain to de­pict the reality of the capitalist world is a false one. A better image would be of a net­work, or rather of an organic tissue, a living body. Any wound that does not reach the vital functions heals up (and we can trust capital to secrete the antibodies it needs to eliminate the risk of infection). Only by attacking its heart and head will the proletariat be able to defeat the capitalist beast.

7. For centuries, history has placed the heart and head of the capitalist world in Western Europe. The world revolution will take its first steps where capitalism took its first steps. It's here that the conditions for the revolut­ion, enumerated above, can be found in the most developed form. The most developed productive forces, the most important working class concentrations, the most cultivated proletariat (because of the technological needs of modern production) are centered in three major zones of the world:

• Europe
• North America
• and Japan.

But these three zones are not equal in their revolutionary potential.

To begin with, central and eastern Europe are attached to the most backward imperialist bloc: the important working class concentrations that exist there (in Russia there are more industrial workers than in any other country) are working with a backward industrial potential and are faced with economic conditions (above all, scar­city) which are not the most favorable to a movement whose aim is to create a socialist society. Moreover, these countries still suffer most heavily from the weight of the counter­revolution in the form of a totalitarian regime which is certainly rigid and thus fragile, but in which democratic, unionist, trade unionist and even religious mystifications are much hard­er to overcome by the proletariat. These coun­tries, as has been the case up till now, will probably see more violent explosions, and each time that this proves necessary, these outbreaks will be accompanied by the appearance of forces for derailing the movement like Solidarity. In general they will not be the theatre for the dev­elopment of the most advanced class conscious­ness.

Secondly, areas like Japan and North America, while they contain most of the conditions necessary for the revolution, are not the most favorable for the unleashing of the revolutionary process, owing to the lack of experience and ideological backwardness of the proletariat.

This is particularly clear in the case of Japan, but it also applies to North America, where the workers' movement developed as an app­endage to the workers' movement in Europe and where, through specific elements such as the ‘frontier', and then through the highest work­ing class living standards in the world, the bourgeoisie has had a much firmer ideological grip over the workers than in Europe. One of the expressions of this phenomenon is the absence in North America of big bourgeois parties with a ‘working class' coloring. Not that these parties are expressions of proletarian conscious­ness, as the Trotskyists claim, but simply because the weaker level of experience, politicization and consciousness of the workers, their stronger adherence to the classic values of cap­italism, enables the bourgeoisie to do without more elaborate forms of mystification and control.

It is thus only in western Europe, where the proletariat has the longest experience of struggle, where it has already been confronted for decades with all the ‘working class' mystifications of the most elaborate kind, can there be a full development of the political consciousness which is indispensable in its struggle for revolution.

This is in no way a ‘Euro-centrist' view. It is the bourgeois world itself which began in Europe, which developed the oldest proletariat with the greatest amount of experience. It is the bourgeois world itself which has concentrat­ed in such a small part of the globe so many advanced nations, which greatly facilitates the growth of a practical internationalism, the joining up of proletarian struggles in the different countries. (It's no accident that the British proletariat was at the centre of the foundation of the 1st International, or that the German proletariat was so crucial to the foundation of the IInd International). Finally, it is bourgeois history itself which has placed the frontier between the two great imperialist blocs of the late 20th century in Europe (and more specifically in Germany, the ‘classic' country of the workers' movement).

This does not mean that the class struggle or the activity of revolutionaries has no sense in the other parts of the world. The working class is one class. The class strug­gle exists everywhere that labor and capital face each other. The lessons of the different manifestations of this struggle are valid for the whole class no matter where they are drawn from: in particular, the experience of the struggle in the peripheral countries will influ­ence the struggle in the central ones. The revolution will be worldwide and will involve all countries. The revolutionary currents of the class are precious wherever the proletariat takes on the bourgeoisie, ie, all over the world.

Neither does it mean that the proletariat will have won the war once it's overthrown the capitalist state in the main countries of Western Europe: the last great act of the revolution, the one that will probably be decisive, will be played out in the two huge imperialist monsters: the USSR and above all the USA.

What it does mean, basically, is:

• that the world-wide generalization of struggles won't take the form of a convergence of a series of simultaneous struggles in var­ious countries, all on the same level and all equally important, but will develop out of battles in the vital centers of society;
• that the epicenter of the coming revol­utionary earthquake will be in the industrial heart of western Europe, where the best condit­ions exist for the development of revolutionary consciousness and a revolutionary struggle. The proletariat of this zone will be in the vanguard of the world proletariat.

It also means that it's only when the proletariat of these countries detaches itself from the most sophisticated traps laid by the bourgeoisie, particularly the trap of the left in opposition that the chimes will ring for the world-wide generalization of proletarian struggles, for the revolutionary confrontation.

The road leading to this is long and difficult. The mass strike developed in Poland but then fell into the trade unionist impasse. It's when this impasse is overcome that the mass strike, and with it, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, the rev­olution, can come into their own, in western Europe as in the rest of the world.

The road is long, but there is no other road.

FM

[1] In May 1952, our direct ‘ancestor', Internationalisme, could still write: "The process that leads to the development of revolutionary consciousness in proletariat is directly linked to the return of the objective conditions which will enable this consciousness to arise. These conditions can be summarized in one general point: the proletariat is ejected from society, capitalism is no longer able to ensure the material conditions of its existence. This condition is provided by the culminating point of the crisis. And the culminating point of the crisis, in the era of state capitalism, is to be found in the war."

[2] See the texts in International Review n°26.

[3] The preface to the selected works of Lenin in French is enlightening: "In the articles, "The Slogans of the United States of Europe', and ‘The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution' which are based on the law of the uneven development of capitalism, discovered by him, Lenin drew the brilliant conclusion that the victory of socialism was in the beginning possible in a few capitalist countries, or even just one." "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. It therefore follows that the victory of socialism is at first possible in a small number of capitalist countries, or even in one capitalist country on its own." (p. 651, French Edition). "This was the greatest discovery of our era. It became the guiding principle for the whole activity of the Communist Party in its struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution and the construction of socialism in our country. Lenin's theory about the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country gave the proletariat a clear perspective for its struggle, giving free rein to the energy and initiative of the workers of each country to march against their national bourgeoisie, inspiring the party and the working class with a firm confidence in the possibility of victory." (Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1960).

[4] The Bordigists reached the heights of this aberration when they criticized the pusillanimity and lack of combativity of Allende and the democratic Chilean bourgeoisie, and when they sang about the ‘radicalism' of the massacres committed by the Khmer Rouge.

[5] The spectacular development of certain third world countries (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil), owing to the very particular geo-economic conditions, should not be the tree that hides the forest. What's more, for most of these countries, the hour of truth has arrived - a collapse even more spectacular than their ascent.

[6] See the report on the historic course [8] to the 3rd Congress of the ICC (International Review n°18)

[7] See the text on the conditions for generalization for the 4th Congress of the ICC (International Review n°26)