The success of the European Social Forum (ESF) in Paris last November is a striking illustration of the growing strength of the "alternative worldist"[1] [1] movement during the last decade. After some hesitation, the initially fairly limited audience (limited in kind rather than geographically, since the movement quickly attracted an audience amongst "thinkers" and academics) grew to take on all the hallmarks of a traditional ideological current: a popular reputation thanks to the radicalism of the demonstrations in Seattle 1999 during the summit of the World Trade Organisation (WTO); then the media figures, amongst whom José Bové is the uncontested star, and finally the major and unmissable events: the World Social Forum (WSF) which aimed to be an alternative to the Davos forum that brings together the world's major economic players, and whose first three meetings (2001, 2002, 2003) have been held in Porto Alegre (Brazil), a town supposed to symbolise "citizens' self-management".

Since then, the wave has continued to grow: the WSF has sprouted regional subsidiaries (the ESF is one expression, but there have been others, in Africa for example), and now is moving continents, to be held in India during January 2004. Newspapers, magazines, meetings, demonstrations, all are proliferating at a dizzying rate... It is barely possible today to give some thought to social questions without being immediately confronted by a tidal wave of "alternative worldist" ideas.

Such a rapid ascension immediately raises a whole series of questions: why has it happened so fast, so powerfully, and in so widespread a manner? And above all, why now?

For the "alternative worldists" the answer is simple: if their movement has met with such success, it is because it offers a real answer to the problems confronting humanity today. That being said, there is one thing that the "alternative worldists" need to explain: how is it that the media (largely controlled by the same "transnational companies" that they denounce so incessantly) are giving so much publicity to their words and deeds?

True, the success of the "alternative worldist" movement is a sign that it corresponds to a real need, that it serves real interests. The question then is: who really needs the "alternative worldist" movement and what interests does it serve? Does it serve the interests of the oppressed categories (poor peasants, women, pensioners, workers, the "excluded", etc.) that it claims to defend, or does it serve the interests of the social order that promotes and finances it?

The best way to answer these questions is to examine the ideological needs of the bourgeois class today. The fact is that the ruling class is looking for the best way to deal a decisive blow against working class consciousness.

The first point to consider is the economic crisis which - although it has been with us since the end of the 1960s - has now reached such a stage that the bourgeoisie is forced to adopt a relatively realistic language in this respect. The shameless lie which used the two-figure growth rates of the Asian "dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) to demonstrate capitalism's good health in the period following the collapse of the Eastern bloc will no longer hold up: the "dragons" are no longer spitting fire. As for the "tigers" (Indonesia, Thailand, etc.) which were supposed to accompany them, they have stopped roaring and now are begging for mercy from their creditors. The lie that followed, and which replaced "emerging countries" with the "emerging new economy" lasted still less time: the cruel law of value cut its speculative flights down to size, and left a good many companies "out for the count".

Today, the "context of recession", which each national bourgeoisie blames on its neighbours, is a euphemism which can barely hide the gravity of the economic situation at the very heart of capitalism. At the same time we are endlessly told to "make an effort", to "pull in our belts" in order to return the economy to health. Such talk is unable to hide completely the attacks that the bourgeoisie is undertaking against the working class, which the gravity of the crisis demands should be harder, more widespread, and more simultaneous than ever if they are to preserve the interests of the ruling class.

Such attacks cannot but provoke a reaction from the working class, even if such a reaction takes different forms depending on the country and the moment, and lead to a development of the class struggle. And this situation is also igniting the spark of consciousness among elements of the working class. The development of class consciousness is not spectacular. Nonetheless, in the proletariat today a whole series of questions are arising as to the real reasons behind the attacks of the bourgeoisie, the real situation of the economic crisis, but also the real reasons behind the wars that are endlessly breaking out around the world. The question is also posed, of knowing how to struggle effectively against all these calamities, which can no longer simply be palmed off as due to the fatality of "human nature".

Such questions are still embryonic, and a long way from posing a threat to capitalism's political domination. They are nonetheless a concern for the ruling class, for whom it is much easier to nip the danger in the bud than to deal with it once it has bloomed. This concern lies at the heart of the "alternative worldist" ideological apparatus, which constitutes a reaction by the ruling class to the beginnings of a development of consciousness in the working class. We should remember what was the central, endlessly repeated theme after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the so-called "socialist" regimes: "communism is dead, long live liberalism! The confrontation between the two worlds is dead, and so much the better since it was the cause of war and poverty. Henceforth, only one world exists or is possible: the liberal democratic capitalism, source of peace and prosperity".

It did not take long for this &quotbrave new world" to show that it could still start wars, spread poverty and barbarity in its wake, even after the fall of the "Evil Empire" (to use the expression of US president Reagan). And less than ten years after the triumphant assertion that only one world was possible, we have seen the rebirth of the idea that an "alternative world" to liberalism is indeed a possibility. The ruling class has clearly taken the measure of the long-term effects that its systemic crisis is likely to have on class consciousness, and has laid down a thick smoke-screen to turn to working class away from its own perspective of "another world" where, contrary to that of the "alternative worldists", the bourgeoisie will have no place.

The foundations for the development of working class consciousness and the object of the bourgeoisie's attack

It is hardly surprising that the questioning expressed by elements within the working class should fall largely under the following three headings:

• what is the reality of the world situation?
• what is the perspective of a way out?
• and how are we to work towards such a perspective?

These three questions have been central concerns for the workers' movement since its beginnings. It is because the working class is able to understand the fundamental causes underlying the situation, because it can understand that only one perspective offers an alternative to this situation, and finally because it is able to reach an understanding of its own revolutionary role in the situation, that it will be able to arm itself to overthrow capitalism and start building communism.

There are almost two centuries of experience there to show us that we must never underestimate the bourgeoisie's ability to understand the process leading to this consciousness, and the historical dangers that it contains. This is why - despite its variegated appearance - the "alternative worldist" ideology is based essentially on these three themes.

Of these themes, the first - the reality of the world today - immediately highlights how much the "alternative worldist" ideology is an integral part of the bourgeoisie's apparatus of mystification, in that it wholly shares the lies about capitalism's current economic situation. For the "alternative worldists", as for the anarchists and leftists, the reality of capitalism's systemic crisis is hidden behind a constant denunciation of the "great trusts". When a whole region of the planet disintegrates in economic disaster, it is the fault of the multi-nationals. When poverty spreads to the very heart of the industrialised world, then it is the fault of the multi-nationals and their greed for profit. Everywhere, the world is full of endless wealth, which would be there for all if it were not seized by a heartless minority. There is one critical element missing from this apparently coherent schema, if we are to understand the reality of the world situation and its evolution: that is the crisis, the definitive crisis which marks the bankruptcy of capitalism.

It has always been a matter of critical importance for the ruling class to hide the reality that its system is not eternal, that it is condemned one day to leave the historical stage. This is why it tries to minimise capitalism's increasing economic convulsions with its talk of "light at the end of the tunnel", and the good times waiting for us just round the corner. And yet, the more they serve us up this talk, the worse the situation gets. The bourgeoisie hopes to rejuvenate the old lie by giving it a new "alternative worldist" veneer.

However, this does not prevent the "alternative worldist" movement from proposing an alternative to the present world. Or rather, several alternatives. This is its second fundamental theme. Each part of the movement has its own critique of the world today, slightly different from the others: its ideas may be coloured by ecology, by economic theory, by cultural, food, or sexual orientation... the list is endless. And these are not just criticisms: each one has to put forward its own positive solution. This is why the "alternative worldist" slogan has shifted into the plural: "other worlds are possible", from a world without GM foods to a self-managed world, by way of the most classical state capitalism.

There is obviously no danger for the ruling class in putting forward so many political alternatives, since none of them breaks out of the framework of capitalist society. They propose nothing but greater or lesser, more or less utopian improvements to capitalist society, which always remain compatible with the domination of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the latter is able to confront the working class with a whole panoply of "solutions" to the system's ills, all of which contributes to hiding the only perspective able to put an end to its barbarity and poverty: the overthrow of their fundamental cause, which is moribund capitalism.

The third theme of anti-globalisation flows naturally from the first two: after hiding the real reason behind capitalism's poverty and barbarity, after hiding the only perspective for putting an end to it, it only remains to hide the only force capable of doing so. To do so, the anti-globalists promote a multitude of revolts by the peasants in the Third World, or even in Europe as with José Bové's Confédération Paysanne, or of desperate attacks on corrupt banana republics by the local petty bourgeois strata. Obviously, all these revolts express a reaction against the misery imposed on the great mass of humanity, but none of them bears the slightest spark able to overthrow the capitalist order that they are attacking.

For more than a century and a half, the workers' movement has shown that the only force really capable of transforming society is the proletariat. It is not the only class in revolt against capitalism, but it is the only class that holds the key to overcoming it. To do so, it must not only unite internationally; it must act as an autonomous class, independently of all other classes in society. The bourgeoisie knows this perfectly well. By putting forward all these nationalist petty-bourgeois struggles, it aims to tie the proletariat up in a straitjacket where the latter's own consciousness and perspective cannot develop.

This kind of mystification responds to a danger which, for the bourgeoisie, is far from new: the proletariat has had the potential capacity to overthrow capitalism ever since the onset of its decadence at the beginning of the 20th century. The ruling class has understood the danger since the First World War, followed as it was by the revolution of October 1917, and then by the revolutionary wave that threatened capitalism's power for several years, from Germany in 1919 to China in 1927. It did not wait until 1990 to lay down its plan of campaign. The working class has already been subjected to more than a century of ideological attacks as to the real nature of the crisis, the communist perspective, and the potential of the class struggle. The anti-globalist tidal wave is thus not without precedent in the history of bourgeois thought. However, the fact that it is happening expresses a change in the confrontation between classes at the ideological level, which forces the ruling class to adapt its methods of mystification against the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie needs an ideological makeover...

As the sports commentators like to say, "you don't change a winning team". Fundamentally, the mystifications that the bourgeoisie uses to prevent the working class from developing its revolutionary consciousness do not change, since the requirements that they have to answer do not change either, as we saw above. Traditionally, it is the parties of the left (Stalinists, social-democrats) which have served as vehicles for these mystifications aimed at hiding the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, at presenting the working class with false alternatives, and undermining any perspective in its struggles.

These parties have been completely worn out ideologically since the end of the 1960s when the present crisis began, and above all since the proletariat reappeared on the historical scene after four decades of counter-revolution (the immense strike of May 1968 in France, the Italian "hot autumn" in 1969, etc.). Faced with the impetuous rise in proletarian struggles, the left parties began by putting forward the idea of a governmental alternative, which was supposed to answer the aspirations of the working class. One theme of this "alternative" was that the state should play a much greater role in the economy, whose convulsions had been getting worse since 1967 and the end of the reconstruction period that had followed World War II. The left parties told the working class to moderate, or even call a halt to its struggles, in order to demand changes throw the ballot box and left governments which would supposedly favour the workers interests. Since then the left (particularly the social-democrats, but also the "communists" in countries like France) has participated in numerous governments, not to defend the workers but to manage the crisis by attacking their living conditions. Moreover, the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the so-called "socialist" regimes at the end of the 1980s dealt a heavy blow to the credibility of the "communist" parties which had defended these regimes, and deprived them of the greater part of their influence in the working class.

The deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing the working class to return to the struggle, while at the same time a reflection is beginning to spread within the class as to what is really at stake in society. At the same time, the parties which traditionally defended the interests of capitalism within the workers' ranks are thus seriously discredited, which makes it more difficult for them to play the same role that they used to in the past. This is why they are not in the front line of the grand manoeuvres designed to derail the questioning and the discontent within the working class. The anti-globalisation movement is in the limelight, having adopted most of the old themes that used to be the left parties' stock-in-trade. Indeed, this is why the left parties (especially the "communist" parties) are so at home in the waters of the anti-globalisation movement, even though they remain discreet and "critical" in order to allow the latter to seem really "innovative"[2] [2] and avoid discrediting it in advance.

This remarkable convergence between the mystifications of the "old left" and those of the "alternative worldists" can be seen in some of the latter's central themes.

...or how to repaint an old façade

To get an idea of the main themes of the "alternative worldist" current, we will base ourselves on the writings of ATTAC,[3] [3] which serves as the movement's main "theoretician".

This organisation was officially born in June 1998 after an upsurge of contacts that followed an editorial by Ignacio Ramonet in the December 1997 issue of the French paper Le Monde Diplomatique. An indication of ATTAC's success can be seen in the fact that it had grown to 30,000 members by late 2000. Amongst the membership are more than 1,000 organisations (unions, community groups, local council delegates' associations), some hundred French members of parliament, a large number of state employees especially teachers, and numerous political and artistic celebrities grouped in 250 local committees.

This powerful ideological organism was created around the idea of the "Tobin tax", which we owe to the Nobel prize-winner for economics, James Tobin. Tobin suggested that a tax of 0.05% on financial transactions would allow the regulation of these transactions and make it possible to avoid the excesses of speculation. According to ATTAC, this tax would above all make it possible to allocate the funds collected to aid the development of the poor countries.[4] [4]

Why such a tax? In order to both counter and profit from these exchange and other financial transactions (which is contradictory to say the least: why would one want something to disappear if one profits from it?), that symbolise the globalisation of the economy which - in short - enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor.

The point of departure of ATTAC's analysis of present society is the following: "Financial globalisation aggravates economic insecurity and social inequality. It bypasses and degrades the choice of peoples, democratic institutions, and sovereign states in charge of the general interest. It substitutes instead the strictly speculative logic that expresses the sole interests of transnational companies and financial markets".[5] [5]

What, according to ATTAC, caused this economic evolution? We find the following answers: "One of the most striking facts of the late 20th century was the rising power of finance in the world economy: this is the process of financial globalisation, the result of the political choice imposed by the governments of the G7 countries". The explanation for this change at the end of the 20th century comes later: "In the framework of the 'Fordist' compromise[6] [6], which worked until the 1970s, the leaders came to an agreement with the wage-earners, organising a share-out of the increase in productivity within the company, which made it possible to preserve the share-out of added value. The appearance of shareholder capitalism meant the end of this regime. The traditional model, known as the 'stakeholder model', considered as a community of interest within the company between three partners, has given way to a new 'shareholder model', which gives absolute priority to the interests of the holders of stock capital, in other words to the funds of the company itself".[7] [7] Moreover: "The primary objective of companies quoted on the stock exchange is to 'create shareholder value', in other words to increase the value of shares in order to generate surplus value and so increase the wealth of the shareholders".[8] [8]

Still according to the anti-globalists, the new choice of the G7 governments caused a transformation in business. The multi-nationals and great financial institutions no longer made a profit from the production of commodities, and therefore "put pressure on companies so that they distribute the greatest possible dividend at the expense of productive investment with a return in the longer term".

There is no need to go on with more quotations from the anti-globalist movement. Those we have just given demonstrate three things clearly enough:

• that this movement has invented nothing new,
• that its ideology is perfectly bourgeois in nature,
• and that the ideas being peddled by the anti-globalist are a danger for the working class.

The "transnationals" of today, which are supposedly breaking free of the authority of the state, are remarkably like the "multi-nationals" that the left-wing parties attacked for the same sins in the 1970s. in reality, whether they be called "multi-nationals" or "transnationals", these companies have a nationality: that of their majority shareholders. In fact, the multi-nationals are generally the great companies of the most powerful states - first and foremost the United States - and they are the instruments of these states' imperialist policies, along with their military and diplomatic arms. And when this or that national state (like those of the "banana republics" is subjected to the dictates of this or that great multi-national, this is fundamentally nothing but the expression of that state's domination by the great power where that multi-national is based.

Already during the 1970s, the Left was demanding "more state" in order to limit the power of these "modern monsters" and guarantee a "fairer" share-out of the wealth they produced. ATTAC and Co have invented absolutely nothing at this level. Above all, we should underline the profoundly deceitful nature of the idea that the state has ever been an instrument for the defence of the interests of the exploited. Quite the reverse: it is fundamentally an instrument for the defence of the existing order, and therefore of the interests of the ruling and exploiting class. In some circumstances, and the better to assume its role, the state may oppose this or that section of the ruling class. This is what happened at the dawn of capitalism, when the British government passed laws to limit the exploitation of the workforce, and of children in particular. Although some capitalists considered this detrimental to their interests, the measure ensured that the labour power which is the source of all capitalist wealth was not destroyed en masse before reaching adulthood. Similarly, when the Nazi state persecuted certain sections of the ruling class (notably the Jewish bourgeoisie), this was obviously not in defence of the interests of the exploited.

The Welfare State is basically a myth aimed at making the exploited accept the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation and the rule of the bourgeoisie. When capitalism's economic health declines, the state - whether "right" or "left" - shows its true face, freezing wages, slashing "social budgets", health spending, unemployment benefit and pensions. And when the workers refuse to accept such sacrifices, it is also the state which reasons with them in the language of the truncheon, teargas, arrests, and if all else fails, bullets.

The anti-globalists, in the best tradition of the classical Left, are in fact trying to spread the idea that the state could protect the interests of the oppressed from the multi-nationals, and that therefore there could exist such a thing as a "good" capitalism as opposed to a "bad capitalism".

ATTAC's "discovery" - with all their talk about "shareholders" and "stakeholders" - that the capitalists' main aim is to make a profit, is the most ludicrous caricature of such an idea. Capitalists have been investing to make a profit for a long time - ever since capitalism came into existence in fact.

As for the &quotstrictly speculative logic" supposedly caused by "financial globalisation", this was hardly brought into being by some G7 meeting or by the arrival in power of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Speculation is as old as capitalism itself. Marx had already pointed out in the 19th century that when a new crisis of overproduction approaches, the capitalists have a tendency to prefer speculation to productive investment. The bourgeois understand pragmatically that if the markets are saturated, then the commodities that they produce with the machines they have bought are likely to remain unsold, thus preventing both the realisation of the surplus-value that they contain (thanks to the exploitation of the workers who have set the machines in motion) and even the value of the initial capital. This is why, as Marx noted, commercial crises seemed to be a result of speculation, when in reality speculation is nothing but an early warning of the crisis. In the same way, the speculative movements that we witness today are not the result of this or that group of capitalists' lack of civic feeling, but an expression of the general crisis of capitalism.

Behind the ludicrous stupidity of the anti-globalist "experts'" "scientific analyses", there is an idea that capitalism's defenders have used for a long time to prevent the working class from turning towards its revolutionary perspective. In the middle of the 19th century, the petty bourgeois socialist Proudhon tried to make a distinction between the "good" and "bad" sides of capitalism, in order to promote a sort of "fair trade" and industrial self-management (the co-operatives).

Later, the reformist current in the workers' movement, like its main theoretician Bernstein, tried to to suggest that capitalism could increasingly satisfy the interests of the exploited, as long as it was forced to do so by the pressure of the working class in the framework of bourgeois institutions like parliament. The aim of the working class' struggle should therefore be to ensure the triumph of the "good" capitalists over the "bad" capitalists who whether by egoism or by short-sightedness opposed the &quotpositive" evolution of the capitalist economy.

Today, ATTAC and its friends propose to return to the "Fordist compromise" that supposedly existed before the arrival of the brutes of "financialisation", and which "preserved the share-out of added value" between workers and capitalists. The "alternative worldist" current thus makes a choice contribution to the bourgeoisie's apparatus of mystification:

• by giving credence to the idea that capitalism could go back on its attacks against the working class, when in reality these spring from a crisis which the system is incapable of overcoming;
• by implying that a possible ground for "compromise" exists between labour and capital.

In short, the workers are being called not to fight the capitalist mode of production which is responsible for their worsening exploitation, their misery, and the barbarity unleashed on the world today, but to mobilise to defend a fantastic chimerical version of the same system. In other words, to give up the defence of their own interests in favour of defending the interests of their mortal enemy, the bourgeoisie.

The unbending denunciation of the anti-globalist movement, and the widest possible intervention in order to fight its dangerous ideas, are now priorities for all those proletarian elements who have realised that the only alternative world that is possible today is communism, and that communism can only be built through the most steadfast opposition to the bourgeoisie and all its ideologies, of which "alternative worldism" is only the latest avatar. It has to be fought as energetically as Social-Democracy and Stalinism.

Günter

---

 

One hundred years ago, in July/August 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party held its Second Congress - not in Russia, since the scale of repression under the Czarist regime would have made this virtually impossible - but in Belgium and in Britain. Even then the need to shift the venue in the middle of the Congress was necessitated by the close surveillance of the "democratic" Belgian police. This congress has gone down in history as the one which saw the party split into its Bolshevik and Menshevik wings.

The historians of the ruling class have interpreted this split in various ways. For one school of thought - what we might call the Orlando Figes school of history, for whom the October revolution of 1917 was an unmitigated disaster - the emergence of Bolshevism was of course a Very Bad Thing.[1] If Lenin and his band of fanatics, whose political influences had more to do with Nechayev and native Russian terrorism than international socialism, had not removed the democracy from social democracy, if Menshevism rather than Bolshevism had triumphed in 1917, then we might have been spared not only the awful civil war of 1918-21, not only the Stalinist terror of the 30s and 40s, which were the inevitable consequences of Bolshevik ruthlessness, but in all probability Hitler, World War Two, the Cold War and no doubt Saddam Hussein and the Gulf Wars as well.

Such passionate anti-Bolshevism is normally only found in one other quarter: that of the anarchists. For them, Bolshevism hijacked the true revolution in 1917; if it had not been for Lenin, with his authoritarian vision inherited from the hardly less authoritarian Marx, if it had not been for the Bolshevik party, which like all parties strives only for its own monopoly of power, why, we might be free today, living in a world wide federation of communes?. Anti-Bolshevism is the one true distinguishing feature of all varieties of anarchism, whether the crude version somewhat caricatured in this paragraph, or the infinitely more sophisticated brands which today call themselves anti-Leninist communists, autonomists, etc etc - all of them agree that the last thing the working class needs is a centralised political party on the Bolshevik model.

When bourgeois ideology and its petty bourgeois anarchist shadow is not seeing communist organisations as malign all-powerful conspiracies that have done huge harm to the interests of mankind, it is dismissing them as risible, impotent, deranged, semi-religious cults that no one listens to anyway; as utopians, armchair theoreticians cut off from reality, incurable sectarians ready to split with each other and stab each other in the back at the drop of a hat. For this line of argument, the 1903 congress provides endless amounts of fuel: didn't Bolshevism originate in an obscure debate about a simple phrase in the party rules, about who is and who isn't a party member; still worse, didn't the final rupture between Menshevism and Bolshevism take the form of a quarrel about which personalities should or shouldn't be on the editorial board of Iskra? Surely that is proof enough of the futility, the impossibility of building a revolutionary party which is not like the faction-ridden sewers, the battle grounds of egoistic ambition, which we know all bourgeois parties to be?

And yet we persist, along with Lenin, in seeing the 1903 Congress as a profoundly important moment in the history of our class, and in seeing the split between Bolshevism and Menshevism as an expression of deep underlying social tendencies in the workers' movement, not only in Russia, but across the globe.

The international workers' movement in 1903

As we have argued elsewhere in the International Review (see the article on the 1905 mass strike in International Review n°90), the early 1900s were a transitional phase in the life of world capitalism. On the one hand, the bourgeois mode of production had reached unprecedented heights: it had unified the globe to a degree never before seen in human history; it had achieved levels of productivity and technological sophistication that could hardly have been dreamed about in past epochs; and at the turn of the century it seemed to be reaching new peaks with the generalisation of electrical power, of telegraphic, radio, and telephone communication, with the development of the automobile and the aeroplane. These dizzying technical advances were also accompanied by tremendous achievements at the intellectual level - for example, Freud published his Interpretation of dreams in 1900, Einstein his General theory of relativity in 1905.

On the other hand, however, dark clouds were gathering just when what the British call the "Edwardian summer" seemed to be at its sunniest. The world had been unified, it is true, but only in the interests of competing imperialist powers, and it was becoming increasingly evident that the world had grown too narrow for these empires to go on expanding without ultimately coming up against each other in violent confrontations. Britain and Germany had already embarked upon the arms race which presaged the world war of 1914; the USA, hitherto content to expand into its own western territories, had already entered the imperialist Olympics with the war against Spain over Cuba in 1898; and in 1904, the Czarist empire went to war with the rising power of Japan. Meanwhile, the spectre of the class war began to rattle its chains: increasingly dissatisfied with the good old methods of trade unionism and parliamentary reform, feeling in their bones the growing inability of capitalism to concede to their economic and political demands, workers in numerous countries were engaging in massive strike movements which often surprised and worried the now respectable captains of Organised Labour. This movement touched many countries in the late 1890s and early 1900s, as Rosa Luxemburg chronicled in her groundbreaking work The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions; but it reached a high point in Russia in 1905, which gave birth to the first soviets and rocked the Czarist regime to its foundations. In sum, capitalism may have reached its zenith, but the indications of its irreversible historical descent were now becoming clearer and clearer.

Luxemburg's text was also a polemic directed against those in the party who were unable to see the signs of a new epoch, wanted the party to put all its weight on the trade union struggle, and saw politics as essentially restricted to the parliamentary sphere. In the 1890s she had already led the combat against the "revisionists" in the party - typified by Eduard Bernstein and his book Evolutionary Socialism - who had taken capitalism's long period of growth and relatively peaceful development as a refutation of Marx's predictions of a catastrophic crisis. They thus "revised" Marx's insistence on the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of the system. They concluded that social democracy should recognise itself to be what, in any case, it had increasingly become: a party of radical social reform, which could obtain an uninterrupted improvement of working class living standards, even a peaceful and harmonious growing over into a socialist order. At that time Luxemburg had been more or less supported against this overtly opportunist challenge to marxism by the centre of the party around Karl Kautsky, who stuck to the "orthodox" view that the capitalist system was doomed to experience increasingly powerful economic crises and that the working class would have to prepare itself to take power into its own hands. But this centre, which saw "revolution" as an essentially peaceful and even legal process, soon revealed itself to be incapable of understanding the importance of the mass strike and the insurrection in Russia in 1905, which heralded the new epoch of social revolution, where the old structures and methods of the ascendant period would not only be insufficient, but would become positive obstacles to the struggle against capitalism.

Luxemburg's analyses showed that in this new epoch, the principal task of the party would not be to organise the majority of the class in its ranks or win a democratic majority on the parliamentary terrain, but to assume the role of political leadership in the largely spontaneous mass strike movements. Anton Pannekoek took these views one step further to show that the ultimate logic of the mass strike was the destruction of the existing state apparatus. The reaction of the union and party bureaucracies to this radial new vision - a reaction based on a profound conservatism, a fear of the open class struggle, and a growing accommodation to bourgeois society - presaged the irreversible split that was take place in the workers' movement during the events of 1914 and 1917, when first the right, then the centre of the party ended up joining the forces of imperialist war and counter-revolution against the internationalist interests of the working class.

The Russian workers' movement in 1903

In Russia, the workers' movement, though much younger and less "developed" than the movement in the west, also felt the same pressures and contradictions. Like the revisionists in the SPD, a "harmless" version of marxism was propagated by Struve, Tugan-Baranowski and others - a "Legal" Marxism which emptied the proletarian world-view of its revolutionary content and reduced it to a system of economic analyses. In essence, Legal Marxism argued in favour of the development of capitalism in Russia. This form of opportunism, acceptable to the Czarist regime, did not have a great appeal to the Russian workers, who were faced with conditions of appalling poverty and repression and could hardly postpone the immediate defence of their living standards while an extremely brutal form of capitalist industrialisation imposed itself on them. In these conditions, a more subtle form of opportunism began to take root - the trend which became known as "Economism". Like the Bernsteinians, for whom "the movement is everything, the goal nothing", the Economists, such as those grouped around the paper Rabochaya Mysl, also worshipped the immediate movement of the class; but as there was no parliamentary arena to speak of, this immediacy was largely restricted to the day-to-day struggle in the factories. For the Economists, the workers were mainly interested in bread and butter issues. Politics for this current was largely reduced to seeking to achieve a bourgeois parliamentary regime, and was mainly seen as the task of the liberal opposition. As the Economist Credo, written by YD Kuskova, put it: "For the Russian Marxist there is only one course: participation in, i.e. assistance to, the economic struggle of the proletariat; and participation in liberal opposition activity". In this extremely narrow and mechanical vision of the proletarian movement, class consciousness, if it was going to develop on a wide scale, would in any case emerge more or less from an accretion of economic struggles. And since the factory or the locality was the principal terrain of these immediate skirmishes, the best form of organisation for intervening within them was the local circle. This too was a way of bowing down before the immediate fact, since the Russian socialist movement had for the first decades of its existence been dispersed in a plethora of loose, amateurish and often transient local circles with only the vaguest connections to each other.

Opposing the Economist trend was the main aim of Lenin's book What is to be done?, published in 1902. Here Lenin had argued against the idea that socialist consciousness would arise simply out of the day-to-day struggle; it required the working class to intervene on the political terrain. It could not be engendered merely from the immediate relationship between employer and worker, but only from the global struggle between the classes - and thus from the more general relationship between the working class as a whole and the ruling class as a whole, as well as the relationship between the working class and all other classes oppressed by the autocracy.[2]

In particular, the development of revolutionary class consciousness required the building of a unified, centralised, and avowedly revolutionary party; a party which had gone beyond the stage of circles and the shortsighted, personalised circle spirit that went with it. Against the Economist view which reduced the party to a mere accessory or "tail" of the economic struggle, hardly distinct from other more immediate or general forms of workers' organisations such as trade unions, a proletarian party existed above all to lead the proletariat from the economic to the political terrain. To be equipped for this task, the party had to be an "organisation of revolutionaries" rather than an "organisation of workers". Whereas in the latter, being a worker seeking to defend immediate class interests was the sole criterion for participation, the former had to be comprised of "professional revolutionaries",[3] revolutionary militants who worked in strict unison regardless of their sociological origins.

Of course What is to be done? is famous, indeed notorious, for Lenin's formulations about consciousness - in particular his borrowing of Kautsky's notion that socialist "ideology" is the product of the middle class intelligentsia, leading to the view that working class consciousness is "spontaneously" bourgeois. Much has been made of his errors here, which (somewhat mirroring Economism) do indeed represent a concession to a purely immediatist view, in which the working class is seen as no more than the class as it is "now", in the workplaces, rather than as a historic class whose struggle also contains the elaboration of revolutionary theory. Lenin soon corrected most of these errors - indeed had already begun to do so at the 2nd Congress. It was here that he first admitted to "bending the stick too far" in his argument against the Economists, affirming that workers could indeed take part in the elaboration of socialist thought, and pointing out that, without the intervention of revolutionaries, spontaneously emerging class consciousness was in fact constantly being "diverted" towards bourgeois ideology by the active interference of the bourgeoisie. Lenin was to take these clarifications much further after the experience of the 1905 revolution. But in any case, the essential point of his critique of Economism remains valid: class consciousness can only be an understanding by the proletariat of its global and historic position, and cannot reach fruition without the organised work of revolutionaries.

It is also important to understand that Lenin did not write What is to be done? merely as an individual but as a representative of the current around the newspaper Iskra, which stood for terminating the phase of circles and for the formation of a centralised party with a definite political programme, organised in particular around a militant newspaper. The Iskra-ists went into the Second Congress as a unified trend, and delegates supporting this line were a clear majority, opposed mainly by a right wing made up of the Rabocheye Dyelo group around Martynov and Akimov, which was strongly influenced by Economism, and by the representatives of a form of Jewish "separatism" - the Bund. It is true, as Deutscher relates for example in the first volume of his biography of Trotsky, that there were already a number of tensions and differences within Iskra's leading group, but there was, or seemed to be, broad agreement on the approach contained in Lenin's book. This agreement continued for a large part of the Congress And yet by the end of the congress, not only had the Iskra group split, but the entire party was shaken by the historic break between Bolshevism and Menshevism, which, despite various attempts over the next ten years, was never to be healed.

In One step forward, two steps back (published in 1904), Lenin offers us a very precise analysis of the various currents within the Party Congress. It had begun as three-way split between the Iskra group, the right wing anti-Iskra-ists, and "the unstable vacillating elements", for whom Lenin used the term "the Marsh". By the end of the Congress, a section of the former Iskra-ists had itself sunk deep into the Marsh and - in the classic manner of centrism throughout the history of the workers' movement - ended up providing a new wrapping for the arguments of the openly opportunist right.[4] Furthermore, in Lenin's view, the characteristics of the Marsh coincided to a large extent to the undue influence of the intellectuals in the period of the circles - of a petty bourgeois stratum organically disposed towards individualism and the "aristocratic anarchism" which disdains the collective discipline of a proletarian organisation.

The divergences at the Second Congress

This split was later to harden into deep programmatic divergences about the nature of the coming revolution in Russia; in 1917 they were to constitute a class frontier. And yet they began not on the more general programmatic level but essentially around the question of organisation.

The main points on the agenda of the Congress were the following:

• adoption of a programme
• adoption of statutes
• confirmation of Iskra as the "central organ" (literally this meant the leading publication of the party, although it was generally accepted that Iskra's editorial board would also be the Party's central body in the political sense, since the Central Committee established by the Congress was to have a mainly organisational role within Russia).

The discussion on the programme has been somewhat ignored by history, undeservedly so in fact. Certainly the 1903 programme itself strongly reflected the transitional phase in capitalism's life - the twilight phase between ascendancy and decadence, and in particular the expectation of some kind of bourgeois revolution in Russia (even if the bourgeoisie was not expected to be the leading force within it). But there is more to the 1903 programme than that: it was actually the first marxist programme to use the term dictatorship of the proletariat - an issue of some significance in that an explicit theme of the Congress was to be the combat against "democratism" in the party as well as in the revolutionary process as a whole (Plekhanov, for example, argued that should it come to that point, a revolutionary government should have no hesitation in dispersing a constituent assembly which had a counter-revolutionary majority within it, just as the Bolsheviks were to advocate in 1918 - though by this time Plekhanov had become a rabid defender of democracy against the proletarian dictatorship). The question of the "dictatorship" was also linked to the debate on class consciousness; like the councilists in a later period, Akimov saw the danger of a party dictatorship over the workers precisely in Lenin's formulations about consciousness in What is to be done?. We have already dealt briefly with this debate above; but the discussion at the Congress - particularly Martynov's criticisms of Lenin's views - will have to be taken further in another article, because, surprising as it may seem, Martynov's intervention is actually one of the most theoretical of the entire Congress and makes many correct criticisms of Lenin's formulations, without ever seizing the central point they were addressing. But this was not the issue which led to the split within the Iskra current. On the contrary: at this stage in the proceedings, the Iskra-ists were united in defending the programme, as well as the necessity for a unified party, from the criticisms of the right wing, avowedly democratist elements who distrusted the very term "dictatorship of the proletariat" and who in organisational matters favoured local autonomy against centralised decision-making.

Another important issue broached early on in the Congress also saw a unified response from the Iskra-ists: the position of the Bund in the party. The Bund demanded "exclusive rights" to the task of intervening in the Jewish proletariat in Russia; while the whole thrust of the Congress was towards the formation of an all-Russia party, the Bund's demands amounted to a project for a separate party for the Jewish workers. This was rebutted by Martov, Trotsky and others, the majority of whom themselves came from a Jewish background. They plainly showed the danger of the Bund's conceptions. If it were to be taken up by every national or ethnic group in Russia, the end result would be a worse state of dispersal than the extant fragmentation into local circles, and the proletariat would be entirely split along national lines. Of course, what was offered to the Bund still goes well beyond what would be acceptable today ("autonomy" for the Bund within the party). But autonomy was clearly distinguished from federalism: the latter meant a "party within the party", the former a body entrusted with a particular sphere of intervention but entirely subordinate to the overall authority of the party. This was therefore already a clear defence of organisational principles.

The split began - though it was not concluded - around the debate on the statutes. The actual point of contention - the difference between Martov's definition of party member, and Lenin's - was around a point of formulation that may seem extremely subtle (and indeed neither Martov nor Lenin were prepared to split over the issue). But behind it were two entirely different conceptions of the party, showing that there had not been a real agreement with What is to be done? within the Iskra group.

Let us recall the formulations: Martov's read "A member of the Russian Social-democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations".

Lenin's read: "A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations".

The debate on these formulations showed the real depth of the differences on the organisation question - and the essential unity between the openly opportunist right and the centrist "Marsh". It centred around the distinction between "rendering assistance" to the party and "personally participating in it" - the distinction between those who merely support and sympathise with the Party and those who have become committed militants of the Party.

Thus, following Akimov's intervention about the hypothetical professor who supports the Party and should be given the right to call himself a Social Democrat, Martov asserted that "The more widespread the title of Party member the better. We could only rejoice if every striker, every demonstrator, answering for his actions, could proclaim himself a Party member" (1903, Minutes of the Second Congress of the RSDLP, New Park, 1978, p312, twenty second session, 2 August). Both these approaches betrayed a desire to build a "broad" party on the German model; implicitly, a party that could become a serious political force inside, rather than against, bourgeois society.

Lenin's reply to Akimov, to Martov - and to Trotsky, who had already veered towards the Marsh at this point - restated the essential arguments of What Is T o Be Done:

"Does my formulation narrow or enlarge the concept of a Party member? (...) My formulation narrows this concept, whereas Martov's enlarges it, for what distinguishes his concept is (to use his own, correct expression) its 'elasticity'. And in the period of the Party's life which we are now passing through it is just this 'elasticity' that most certainly opens the door to all the elements of confusion, vacillation and opportunism (...) safeguarding the firmness of the Party's line and the purity of its principles has now become all the more urgent because, with the restoration of its unity, the Party will recruit many unstable elements, whose numbers will increase as the Party grows. Comrade Trotsky understood very incorrectly the fundamental ideas of my book What is to be done?, when he spoke about the Party not being a conspiratorial organisation (...) he forgot that in my book I advocate a whole series of organisations of different types, from the most secret and exclusive to comparatively broad and 'loose' organisations. He forgot that the Party must be only the vanguard, the leader of the vast mass of the working class, the whole of which (or nearly the whole of which) works 'under the control and direction' of the Party organisations, but the whole of which does not and should not belong to the Party" (ibid, p 327, twenty third session, August 2). The experience of 1905 - and above all of 1917 - would thoroughly vindicate Lenin on this point. The working class of Russia would create its own general fighting organisations in the heat of the revolution - the factory committees, soviets, workers' militias etc - and it is these bodies which would regroup the entire class. But precisely because of this, the level of consciousness within these organs would be extremely heterogeneous, and they would inevitably be influenced and infiltrated by the ideologies and agents of the ruling class. Hence the necessity for the minority of conscious revolutionaries to be organised in a distinct party within these mass organs, a party which was not subject to the temporary confusions and vacillations within the class, but was armed with a coherent vision of the proletariat's historic goals and methods. The "elastic" concepts of the Mensheviks, by contrast, would make them so lacking in any firmness that they would become at best a factor of confusion, at worst a vehicle for the schemes of the counter-revolution.

It has been argued that Lenin's "narrow" conception of the party, his rejection of the broad model favoured by European social democracy at the time, was the product of specific Russian traditions and conditions: the conspiratorial heritage of the People's Will terrorist group (Lenin's brother had belonged to this tradition and had been hanged for his part in an attempt to assassinate the Czar); the conditions of intense repression which made it impossible for any legal workers' organisations to exist. But it is far more true to say that Lenin's view of the party as a politically clear and determined revolutionary vanguard corresponded to conditions that were more and more to become international - the conditions of capitalist decadence, in which the system would more and more assume a totalitarian form, outlawing any permanent mass organisations and further highlighting the minority character of the communist organisations. In particular, the new epoch was one in which the role of the party - as Luxemburg had made plain - was not to encompass and directly organise the entire class, but to carry out the role of political leadership in the explosive class movements unleashed by the crisis of capitalism. In another article, we will see that Rosa Luxemburg seriously misread the significance of the 1903 split and supported the Menshevik line against Lenin. But beyond these differences there was a deep convergence which was to become evident in the heat of the revolution itself.

Party spirit versus circle spirit

To return to the debate on the statutes. At this stage of the Congress, before the exit of the Bund and the Economists, there was a narrow majority in favour of Martov's formulation. The actual split was around a seemingly far more trivial question - who was to be on the editorial board of Iskra. The almost hysterical reaction to Lenin's proposal to replace the old team of six (Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Potresov and Zasulich) with a team of three (Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov) was a real measure of the weight of the circle spirit within the Party, of the failure to grasp what the party spirit really meant, not in general, but in the most concrete sense.

In One step forward, two steps back, Lenin made a masterly summary of the difference between the circle spirit and the party spirit: "The editors of the new Iskra try to trump Alexandrov with the didactic remark that 'confidence is a delicate thing and cannot be hammered into people's hearts and minds' (...) The editors do not realise that by this talk about confidence, naked confidence, they are once more betraying their aristocratic anarchism and organisational tail-ism. When I was a member of a circle only - whether it was the circle of the six editors or the circle of the Iskra organisation - I was entitled to justify my refusal, say, to work with X merely on the grounds of lack of confidence, without stating reason or motive. But now I have become a member of a Party, I have no right to plead lack of confidence in general. For that would throw open the doors to all the freaks and whims of the old circles. I am obliged to give formal reasons for my 'confidence' or 'lack of confidence'. That is, to cite a formally established principle of our programme, tactic or Rules; I must not just declare my 'confidence' or 'lack of confidence' without giving reasons, but must acknowledge that my decisions - and generally all decisions of any section of the Party - have to be accounted for to the whole Party; I am obliged to adhere to a formally prescribed procedure when giving expression to my 'lack of confidence' or trying to secure the acceptance of the views and wishes that follow from this lack of confidence. From the circle view that confidence does not have to be accounted for, we have already risen to the Party view which demands adherence to a formally prescribed procedure of expressing, accounting for, and testing our confidence?" (p 189).

A key issue in the controversy over the composition of the editorial board was the sentimental attachment of Martov to his friends and comrades in the old Iskra, and his growing, but unfounded suspicion of Lenin's real motives in arguing that they should no longer be in the new team. The whole episode demonstrated a shocking inability of experienced revolutionaries like Martov and Trotsky to go beyond feelings of hurt pride or a purely personal sympathy and put the political interests of the movement above all ties of affinity. Plekhanov was to show the same difficulty later on: although at the Congress he had sided with Lenin, afterwards he found Lenin's denunciation of the attitude of Martov and Co. too intransigent, too harsh, and changed horses in mid-stream; and having obliged Lenin to resign from the Iskra team which had been elected by the Congress, he handed the Party organ over to the Mensheviks. All of the former Iskra-ites, who had previously defended Lenin against the charges of the right about his desire to set up a dictatorship, a "state of siege" to use Martov's term, in the Party, now could not find enough words to denounce Lenin's policies: Robespierre, Bonaparte, autocrat, absolute monarch, etc etc.

Again in One step forwards (p 201), Lenin defined this kind of reaction very eloquently, talking about the "incessant, nagging note of injury which is to be detected in all writings of all opportunists today in general, and of our minority in particular. They are being persecuted, hounded, ejected, besieged and bullied (...) you only have to take the minutes of our Party Congress to see that the minority are all those who suffer from a sense of injury, all those who at one time or another and for one reason or another were offended by the revolutionary Social Democrats". Lenin also shows the "close psychological connection" between these responses, all the grandiose denunciations of autocracy and dictatorship within the party, and the opportunist mind-set in general, including its approach to more general programmatic questions: "The predominant item consists of innocent passionate declamations against autocracy and bureaucracy, against blind obedience and cogs in wheels - declamations so innocent that it is still very difficult to discern in them what is really concerned with principle and what is really concerned with co-optation. But as it goes on, the thing gets worse: attempts to analyse and precisely define this detestable 'bureaucracy' inevitably lead to autonomism; attempts to 'lend profundity' to their stand and vindicate it inevitably lead to justifying backwardness, to tail-ism, to Girondist phrase mongering. At last there emerges the principle of anarchism as the sole really definite principle, which for that reason stands out in practice in particular relief (practice is always in advance of theory). Sneering at discipline - autonomism - anarchism - there you have the ladder which our opportunism in matters of organisation now climbs and now descends, skipping from rung to rung and skilfully dodging any definite statement of its principles. Exactly the same stages are displayed by opportunism in matters of programme and tactics: sneering at 'orthodoxy', narrowness and immobility - revisionist 'criticism' and ministerialism - bourgeois democracy" ( p200-1).

The behaviour of the Mensheviks raised the question of party discipline in another way. Although (following the departure of semi-Economists and the Bund) they had been a minority (hence the name) at the end of the Congress, they completely flouted the decisions it had made about the composition of Iskra's editorial board. Martov, in solidarity with his "ousted" friends, refused to serve on the new board, and later on his faction conducted a boycott of all the central organs as long as it was in a minority. The Mensheviks and all those who supported them internationally conducted a campaign of personal vilification against Lenin, accusing him in particular of trying to substitute an all-powerful central organ for the democratic life of the Party. Reality was very different: in fact Lenin clearly stood for the authority of the real centre of the Party, the Congress, which the Mensheviks had totally ignored. This is how Lenin defines the real issue behind the Mensheviks' cry of "democracy against bureaucracy": "Bureaucracy versus democracy is in fact centralism versus autonomism; it is the organisational principle of revolutionary Social Democracy as opposed to the organisational principle of opportunist Social Democracy. The latter strives to proceed from the bottom upward, and therefore, wherever possible, upholds autonomism and 'democracy' carried (by the overzealous) to the point of anarchism; the former strives to proceed from the top downward, and upholds an extension of the rights and powers of the centre in relation to the parts. In the period of disunity and separate circles, this top from which revolutionary Social Democracy strove to proceed organisationally was inevitably one of the circles, the one enjoying most influence by virtue of its activity and its revolutionary consistency (in our case, the Iskra organisation). In the period of the restoration of actual Party unity and dissolution of the obsolete circles in this unity, this top is inevitably the Party Congress, as the supreme organ of the Party; the Congress as far as possible includes representatives if all the active organisations, and, by appointing the central institutions?makes them the top until the next Congress" (One step forwards... p192-3).

Thus behind the "trivial" differences were in fact major questions of principle - Lenin talks about opportunism in matters of organisation, and opportunism only exists in relation to principles. The principle is centralism; as Bordiga put it in his 1922 text "The Democratic Principle": "Democracy cannot be a principle for us. Centralism is indisputably one, since the essential characteristics of party organisation must be unity of structure and action". Centralism expresses the unity of the proletariat, whereas democracy is a "simple mechanism of organisation" (ibid). For the proletarian political organisation, centralism can never mean rule by bureaucratic fatwa, since it can only live if there is an authentic, conscious participation by the entire membership in the defence and elaboration of the party's programme and analyses; at the same time it must be based on a profound confidence in the central organs elected by the highest expression of the organisation's unity - the congress - to carry out the orientations of the organisation in between congresses. "Democratic" procedures such as votes and majority decisions are of course used throughout this process, but they are only a means to an end, which is the homogenisation of consciousness, and the forging of a real unity in action within the organisation.[5]

The political character of the organisation question: ignore it at your peril

Contrary to many in the proletarian milieu today, the issue of centralised functioning, of organisation, is by no means a secondary issue, a cover for deeper programmatic questions; it is a programmatic question in itself. The IBRP for example insists that recent splits in the ICC are not really about questions of organisation at all. They categorically refuse to address the issue of functioning, of clans, of centralisation, and look for "the real programmatic weaknesses of the ICC" which has led to the splits (for example, our alleged misreading of the class struggle or our theory of capitalist decomposition). This is an error of method, alien to Lenin's approach. Indeed it calls to mind the comments made by Axelrod after the Second Congress: "With my poor intelligence, I am unable to understand what may be meant by 'opportunism on organisational problems' posed as something autonomous, bereft of any organic tie to programmatic and tactical ideas" ("On the origins and meaning of our organisational differences", letter to Kautsky, 1904). But the struggle against organisational opportunism had already been amply demonstrated by Marx's practice in the 1st International, in particular against Bakunin's attempts to subvert centralisation by building up an array of secret organisations accountable to none but himself. At the 1872 Hague Congress, this issue was seen by Marx and Engels to be even more important to place on the agenda than the lessons of the Paris Commune - which were certainly among the most vital in the entire history of revolutionary proletarian movements.

In the same way, the Bolshevik/Menshevik split has left us with vital lessons concerning the problem of constructing an organisation of revolutionaries. Despite all the differences between the conditions faced by revolutionaries in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, and those which have confronted the re-emerging proletarian political camp since the historic revival of class struggle at the end of the 60s, there are nonetheless many points in common. In particular, the newly emerging groups in the last part of the 20th century have been particularly encumbered by the circle spirit. The rupture between them and the previous generation of revolutionaries, with all their experience of what it is to work in a real proletarian party; the traumatic effects of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which have instilled in the working class a deep mistrust of the very notion of a centralised political party; the powerful influences of the petty bourgeoisie and the intellectual strata after 1968, echoing the disproportionate weight of the intelligentsia in the early revolutionary movement in Russia; the incessant campaigns of the ruling class against the very idea of communism and in favour of an unquestioning acceptance of democratic ideology - all these factors have made the task of constructing proletarian organisations harder than ever today.

The ICC has written about these problems many times - the most recent example in this Review being our article on the 15th Congress of the ICC (International Review n°114), which also showed how all these difficulties are exacerbated by the putrid atmosphere of capitalist decomposition. In particular, the pressures of decomposition, which tends to gangsterise the whole of society, constantly tend to turn any remnants of the circle spirit into a more pernicious and destructive phenomenon - into clans, informal, parallel internal groupings with their own destructive agendas based on personal loyalties and hostilities.

We have also noted the striking parallels between splits in our own ranks, expressions of these difficulties, and the Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. When the elements who formed the "External Fraction of the ICC" deserted our ranks in 1985, we published an article in International Review n°45 which drew out the historical parallels between the EFICC and the Mensheviks. In particular, the article showed that the "Tendency" which went on to form the EFICC had been a grouping based more on personal loyalties, hurt pride, and a misplaced feeling of persecution than on real political differences.[6]

In the same way, the so-called Internal Fraction of the ICC, formed in 2001, also exhibited many of the features of Menshevism in 1903. The IFICC had its origins in a clan which was quite comfortable with the progress of the ICC as long as it was ensconced in our international central organ. Indeed, it responded with a campaign of slander and denigration to a minority of comrades who had begun to look deeper into the real situation of the organisation. And yet as soon as this clan lost what it saw as a "position of power", it immediately began posing as the hounded and persecuted defender of democracy against the usurping bureaucracy. Having previously claimed to be the most vigorous defender of our statutes, it now began shamelessly flouting all the rules of the organisation, perhaps most notably the decision of the ICC's 14th Congress which had elaborated a coherent method for dealing with the divergences and tensions which had appeared in the central organ. This was a real echo of the behaviour of the Mensheviks towards the 1903 Congress.

Like the Mensheviks, both these splits felt compelled to "lend profundity to their stand and vindicate it", rapidly discovering that they had developed important programmatic differences with the ICC - even though they had originally posed as the true guardians of the ICC's platform and fundamental analyses. Thus the EFICC ditched the heavy burden of our framework of decadence; the IFICC immediately got rid of our concept of decomposition, which is somewhat "unpopular" in the proletarian milieu that this gang is trying to infiltrate. In this context, the inability of the proletarian milieu to treat the organisation question as a political question in its own right has made it quite incapable of responding adequately to the organisational problems faced by the ICC (not to mention their own problems), and all the more vulnerable to the seductive campaigns of a group like the IFICC, which has a purely parasitic role in the milieu.

We mention these experiences not because we want to put them at the same level as the events of the 1903 Congress - for one thing, we certainly do not delude ourselves into thinking that we are already the class party. It remains the case that those who do not grasp the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat it. Without assimilating the full significance of the split between Bolshevism and Menshevism, it will be impossible to progress towards the formation of the proletarian party of the next revolution. No more than the Bolsheviks - whether in 1903, 1914, 1917, or other key historical moments - can any of the proletarian organisations of today and tomorrow avoid organisational crises and splits. But if we are armed with the lessons of the past, such moments of crisis will, as happened again and again in the history of the Bolsheviks, enable proletarian political organisations to emerge politically strengthened and invigorated, and thus more capable of facing up to the imperious demands of history.

In a second article, we will look in more detail at the debate about class consciousness at the Second Congress, and at the controversy between Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg over the split in Russian Social Democracy.

Amos

---

[1] A humoristic reference to 1066 and all that, a caricature of history text books used in English schools.

[2] Some of what Lenin says in What is to be done? about revolutionaries acting as "tribunes of the people" has to be seen in light of the way that the Russian social democrats understood the coming revolution, which was seen to be not the direct struggle for socialism but one aimed initially at the overthrow of the autocracy and the inauguration of a phase of "democracy". The Bolsheviks, unlike the Economists and the Mensheviks later on, were convinced that this task was beyond the capacities of the Russian bourgeoisie, and would have to be carried out by the working class. In any case, the more substantive point remained: socialist consciousness cannot arise without the working class becoming aware of its general position in capitalist society, and this necessarily involves looking beyond the confines of the factory to the entirety of class relations within society.

[3] Lenin made clear at the Congress that he didn't mean by this term "professional revolutionaries" only full time, paid Party agents; in essence, the term "professional" was used in contrast to the "amateur" approach of the circle phase where groups had no clear form, no firm plan of activities, and on average only lasted a few months before being broken up by the police.

[4] This analysis of the three main currents within the workers' political organisations - openly opportunist right, revolutionary left, and hesitant, vacillating centre - retains all its validity today, as does the term marsh or swamp which Lenin applies to the centrist trend. It is worth adding the footnote on this term from Lenin's own text, because it is so redolent of what frequently happens today when the ICC uses the term marsh or swamp to characterise the shifting zone of transition between the politics of the proletariat and the politics of the bourgeoisie: "There are people in the our Party today who are horrified when they hear this word and raise an outcry about uncomradely methods of controversy. A strange perversion of sensibility due to (...) a misapplied sense of official form! There is scarcely a political party acquainted with internal struggles that has managed to do without this term, by which the unstable elements who vacillate between the contending sides have always been designated. Even the Germans, who know how to keep their internal struggles within very definite bounds indeed, are not offended by the words versumpft ('sunk in the marsh'), are not horrified, and do not display ridiculous official prudery" (One step forwards, p 23-4)

Of course, when we use this term today, we are normally talking about an area between proletarian and bourgeois organisations, whereas Lenin is talking about the marsh inside the existing proletarian party. These differences reflect real historical changes which we can't go into here, but this should not obscure what is common between the two applications of the term.

[5] Later on Lenin used the term "democratic centralism" to describe the method of organisation he was advocating, just as later on he was to use the term "workers' democracy" to describe the mode of operation of the soviets. In our view, neither of these terms are very useful, above all because the term democracy ("rule by the people") implies a non-class standpoint. We will have to return to this question at a later date. What is interesting however is that Lenin did not use this term in 1903, and indeed his principal target was precisely the ideology of "democratism" within the workers' movement.

[6] Our 1993 orientation text on organisational functioning, published in International Review n°109 (a text which also develops an important analysis of the 1903 Congress) makes it more explicit that the EFICC was indeed a clan rather than a real tendency or fraction, while our "Theses on Parasitism" (International Review n°94) show the organic link between clans and parasitism: the clans or cliques which have been involved in splits with the ICC invariably evolve into parasitic groups which can only play a negative and destructive role within the proletarian milieu as a whole. This has been confirmed in spades by the trajectory of the IFICC.

 

In our article, "The proletariat confronts a dramatic deepening of all capitalism's contradictions" published in the International Review n°115, an error was made in stating that Sharon, described as the "butcher of Sabra and Shatila" "was responsible for a particularly barbaric Israeli punitive operation in two refugee camps in west Beirut, in September 1982, when thousands men, women and children were massacred." In fact, contrary to what we wrote, Sharon, who was the Israeli minister of defence at the time, did not take part in the bloody incursion in the Palestinian camps, nor did he lead them directly. It was the militias of the "Lebanese forces", with the authorisation of the Israeli troops, who did the dirty work.

This correction is clearly not intended to rehabilitate in the slightest the bloodstained Sharon, who is the direct architect and implementer of Israel's current policy "(?) based exclusively on trying to escalate the confrontation with the Palestinians in order to chase them out of the occupied territories" (ibid). Apart from our general concern to illustrate our analyses by reporting the facts as accurately as possible, it aims to remove any imprecision in our article which may have given the impression that Israel has always been the independent author of its terror policy in the Middle East, during the 1980s in particular.

The present policy of Sharon, as we show in our article in the International Review n°115, is increasingly escaping the control of the United States, often at the expense of US interests in the region; this demonstrates how difficult the foremost world power is finding it to make its turbulent ally toe the line. This was not the case prior to the dissolution of the Western bloc at the beginning of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Berlin wall. In this context, the orders for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila were not given by Sharon or by any other part of the Israeli state; they were part of the United States' plan of action, defined and directed by the US with the aim of taking a dominant position in Lebanon.

In fact, the situation up until 1958, in which Lebanon was controlled by pro-Western governments, was altered by the development of the Russian imperialist bloc's influence in the region, through the mediation of Nasser's Egypt in particular. Lebanon began to distance itself from the United States even before it was torn apart by the civil war that erupted in 1969, between pro-western and pro-Russian factions and groups, the latter being composed in large part of Palestinian and Syrian forces. Using the excuse of the attack against one of its London-based diplomats (for which the PLO has always denied responsibility), Israel invaded Lebanon on 5th June 1982 in order to eliminate the Palestinian and Syrian military presence. The military forces of the UNIFL (United Nations Interim Force for Lebanon, created after the Israeli invasion of 1978), which were present in Lebanon unconcernedly allowed Israeli troops to pass through their positions. Syria and the Palestinian resistance suffered a serious military defeat, leading to the conclusion of an agreement that forced the Syrian forces out of Beirut and back to the Bekaa valley, and the complete evacuation from Lebanon of the Palestinian fighters (towards the other Arab countries) under the "protection" of a multinational intervention force (composed of French, American and Italian units) sent there specifically for this mission. The evacuation was finished on 2nd September.

The original plan was for the multinational intervention force to remain until 21st September but the Americans gave the signal to leave on 11th September. From that moment on events escalated: the assassination on 14th September, before he could take up office, of the recently elected Lebanese President Bachir Gemayal (head of the Lebanese forces - the United Christian Militias), gave Israeli troops the excuse to enter west Beirut in order to "cleanse" that part of the city of the two thousand Palestinians who were staying there. The massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps, carried out by the Christian phalangists under the benevolent eye of the Israeli army, was part of this cleaning-up operation. The stir caused at an international level by this barbaric act served as a pretext for the multinational force's return to Lebanon, on 24th September, clearly in the service of Western interests. The subsequent deployment of American troops to the region (in particular the battleship "New Jersey" firing the largest cannon in the world) "to support the mission" of the multinational force, enabled them to inflict a serious reversal on Syria, which was obliged to retreat behind its own frontier. At this point the Western bloc's control of Lebanon was complete.

Editorial board

Footnote

We are publishing below a reply to one of our contacts, who wrote to defend what the comrade called "the councilist balance-sheet of the Russian revolution". There no longer exists - since the disappearance of the Dutch group Daad en Gedachte - any organised expression of the councilist current within the proletarian movement. The councilist position nonetheless continues to enjoy a strong influence within the present revolutionary movement.

councilism tries to reject on the one hand, the Liberal, anarchist and Social Democratic positions, and on the other the "Leninist", Stalinist and Trotskyist positions. At a first glance this looks enormously attractive.

At the heart of the councilist position lies what has been called the "Russian enigma" this question is of the greatest importance for the present and future workers' movement. It poses the question of understanding whether the Russian revolution forms an experience that, considered in a critical manner - as is always the case with marxism - will serve as the basis for the next revolutionary attempt or rather - as the bourgeoisie say, backed up by anarchism and indirectly by councilism - it is something that has to be absolutely rejected because the monster of Stalinism had its origins in "Leninism"[1] [25]

In our view, it is important to reply to this letter since this debate allows us to refute the councilist position, and so to contribute to the clarification of the revolutionary movement.

Dear Comrade

Your text begins by posing a question that we fully share: "The understanding of the defeat of the Russian revolution is a fundamental question for the working class, because we still live under the weight of the consequences of the failure of the revolutionary cycle begun by the Russian revolution: above all, because the counter-revolution did not take the classic form of a military restoration of the former power, but of Stalinism, which called itself ?Communist?. This struck a terrible blow against the world working class. The bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of this in order to create confusion and demoralisation amongst workers and to deny communism as the historical perspective of humanity. Therefore we have to draw up a historical balance sheet based on the historical experience of the working class and the scientific method of marxism: as the fractions of the Communist Left did during 50 years of counter-revolution. A balance sheet that we can retransmit to new generations of proletarians".

Exactly! The counter-revolution was not made in the name of the "restoration of capitalism" but under the banner of "Communism". It was not the White army that imposed capitalist order in Russia but the same party that had been the vanguard of the revolution.

This outcome has traumatized the present generations of proletarians and revolutionaries leading to doubts about the capacity of their class and the validity of its revolutionary traditions. Did Lenin and Marx not contribute, even inadvertently, to Stalinist barbarity? Was there an authentic revolution in Russia? Is there a danger that "political thinking" will destroy what the workers build?

The bourgeoisie has fed these fears with its permanent campaign of denigration of the Russian revolution, Bolshevism and Lenin, all of which has been reinforced by the Stalinists' lies. The democratic ideology that the bourgeoisie has propagated to incredible levels throughout the 20th century has reinforced these feelings with its insistence on the sovereignty of the individual, "respect for every opinion" and the rejection of "dogmatism" and "bureaucracy".

The notions of centralisation, the class party and the dictatorship of the proletariat that are the fruits of bloody struggles, enormous efforts of political and theoretical clarification, are besmirched by the shameful stigma of suspicion. Not to mention Lenin who is utterly rejected and whose contribution is subjected to the most tenacious ostracism, by the use that is made of phrases torn out of context, amongst which is the famous phrase about "consciousness being imported from the outside"![2] [26]

The combination of these fears and doubts on the one hand and the pressure of bourgeois ideology on the other, contains the danger that we lose the link with the historical continuity of our class, with its programme and its scientific method without which a new revolution is impossible.

councilism is the expression of this ideological weight which concretises itself through grasping onto the immediate, the local, the economic, considering them as "the closest and most controllable" and the visceral rejection of anything that smells of politics or centralisation, which are always seen as abstractions, distant and hostile.

You talk about appropriating "the contributions of the fractions of the Communist Left who went against the current during 50 years of counter-revolution". We totally agree! However, councilism does not belong among these contributions, rather it is situated outside of them. It is necessary to differentiate council communism from councilism.[3] [27] councilism is the extreme expression and degeneration of the errors that began to be theorized in the 1930s within the living movement that was council communism. councilism is an openly opportunist attempt to give a "marxist" form to positions put forwards by the bourgeoisie thousands of times - and repeated by anarchism - about the Russian Revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Party, centralisation etc.

Basing ourselves concretely on the Russian experience, we can see that councilism attacks two basic pillars of marxism: the international and fundamentally political character of the proletarian revolution.

We are going to concentrate solely on these two questions. There are many more that could be developed. How is class-consciousness formed? What is the role of the party and its links with the class etc.? However, we do not think there is enough room to deal with these and, above all, these two questions  - about which you are especially insistent - appear to us to be crucial to solving the "Russian enigma".

World revolution or "socialism in one country"?

In various passages of your text you insist on the danger of taking the "world revolution" as an excuse for putting off indefintely the struggle for communism and justifying the dictatorship of the party. "There are those who attribute all the bureaucratic deformations of the revolution to the civil war and its devastation, its isolation due to the lack of a world revolution and the backward character of the Russian economy, but this does not explain the internal degeneration of the revolution, why it was not defeated on the field of battle but from the inside. The only explanation that this gives us is that we formulate wishes about the next revolution having to take place in the developed countries and not remaining isolated". A few pages later on you remark that: "the revolution cannot limit itself to the management of capitalism until the triumph of the world revolution, it has to abolish capitalist relations of production (wage labour, commodities)".

The bourgeois revolutions were national revolutions. Capitalism first developed in cities and for a long time lived together with an agrarian world dominated by feudalism; its social relations could be developed within one country, isolated form others. Thus, in England the bourgeois revolution triumphed in 1640 whilst on the rest of the continent the feudal regime dominated.

Can the proletariat follow the same road? Can the proletariat begin to "abolish capitalist relations of production" in one country without having to wait for the "far off world revolution"?

We are certain that you are against the Stalinist position of "socialism in one country", however, when you accept that the proletariat can "begin to abolish wage labour and commodities without waiting for a world revolution" this lets back in through the window a position that has already been thrown out the door. There is no middle way between the worldwide construction of communism and the building of socialism in one country.

There is a fundamental difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The former are national in their means and aims, on the other hand, the proletarian revolution is the first world wide revolution in history both in its aim (communism) and in its means (the international character both of the revolution and the construction of the new society).

In the first place, because "big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead" (German Ideology, page 78, English students edition), proletarians have no fatherland and have nothing to lose because they possess nothing. In the second place, because this same large-scale industry "by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another. Further, in all civilized countries large-scale industry has so leveled social development that in all these countries the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes of society and the struggle between them the main struggle of the day. The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all civilised counties, that is, at least in England, America, France and Germany" ("The principles of communism". Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 6, p. 351-2. Our emphasis).

Against this internationalist way of thinking, Stalinism in 1926-27 put forward the thesis of "socialism in one country". Trotsky and all the tendencies of the Communist Left (including the German-Dutch communists) considered this position as treason and the Italian Left group Bilan saw it as the death of the Communist International.

For its part, anarchism?s reasoning is basically the same as Stalinism. Its anti-centralisation makes it loath the formulation "socialism in one country", but, on the base of "autonomy" and "self-management" it proposes, "socialism in one village", or in "one factory". These formulations have a more "democratic" appearance and are more "respectful of the initiative of the masses" but they lead to the same things as Stalinism: the defence of capitalist exploitation and the bourgeois state.[4] [28] The road is different of course: in the case of Stalinism it is the brutal method of an openly bureaucratic hierarchy, whereas anarchism exploits and develops democratic prejudices about "sovereignty" and the "autonomy" of the "free" individual and calls on workers to manage their own misery through local and sectoral organs.

What is the position of councilism? As we said at the beginning there has been an evolution of the different components of this current. The "Theses on Bolshevism"[5] [29] adopted by the GIK opened the doors to the worst confusions. However, the GIK never put the nature of the world wide proletarian revolution openly in question. Nevertheless, its insistence on its "fundamentally economic" character and its rejection of the party leads it implicitly into this swamp. The later councilist groups ? particularly those in the 1970's ? openly theorized the thesis about the construction of "local and national" socialism. We have combated this in different polemical articles in our International Review, against the Third Worldism and self-management visions of various councilist groups.[6] [30]

Contrary to what you give us to understand, proletarian internationalism is not a pious wish or one option amongst others, it is the concrete response to the historical evolution of capitalism. From 1914, all revolutionaries understood that the only revolution that was posed was the socialist, international and proletarian one: "It was not our impatience, nor our wishes, but the objective conditions created by the imperialist war that brought the whole of humanity to an impasse, that placed it in a dilemma: either allow the destruction of more millions of lives and utterly ruin European civilisation, or hand over power in all the civilised countries to the revolutionary proletariat, carry through the socialist revolution." ("Letter of farewell to the Swiss Workers", April 1917, Lenin's emphasis, www.marxists.org [31]).

It is not only the maturation of the historic situation that poses the world revolution. It is also the analysis of the balance of class forces at a worldwide level. The formation, as early as possible, of the International Party of the proletariat is also a crucial element for pushing the balance of forces with the enemy in the proletariat's favour. The rapid formation of an International will make it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to isolate the revolutionary focal points. Lenin was already struggling in 1917, before taking power, for the Zimmerwald Left to immediately constitute a new International: "It is we who must found, and right now, without delay, a new, revolutionary, proletarian International, or rather, we must not fear to acknowledge publicly that this new International is already established and operating" ("The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", 1917. Collected Works Volume 24).

In September 1917, Lenin posed the necessity of taking power, basing himself on an analysis of the international situation of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; in a letter to the Bolshevik Congress of the Northern region (October 8th 1917) "Our revolution is passing through a highly critical period. This crisis coincides with the great crisis ? the growth of the world socialist revolution and the struggle against world imperialism (?) [the taking of power] will save the world revolution as much as the Russian Revolution". The revolution in Russia - after the aborted Kornilov revolt - was at a delicate moment: if the Soviets did not go onto the offensive (take power) Kerensky and his friends would make new efforts to paralyze them and later to liquidate them, so destroying the revolution. This took on even greater importance in Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain etc: where workers? discontent would receive a powerful impulse with the Russian example or on the contrary, run the risk of diluting itself in a series of dispersed struggles.

The taking of power in Russia was always seen as a contribution to the world revolution and not as a task of national economic management. Several months after October, Lenin spoke to the Conference of Factory Committees in the Moscow region in these terms "The Russian revolution is only one of the contingents of the international socialist army, on the action of which the success and triumph of our revolution depends. This is a fact which none of us loses sight of (?) Aware of the isolation of its revolution, the Russian proletariat clearly realises that an essential condition and prime requisite for its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world" (www.marxists.org [31]).

Economic revolution or political revolution?

Basing yourself on the councilist position, you consider that the driving force from the first day of the proletarian revolution is the adoption of communist economic measures. You develop this in numerous passages in your text "in April 1918 Lenin published ?The immediate tasks of Soviet power? in which he explored the idea of the construction of a state capitalism under the control of the party, developing productivity, accountability and discipline at work, putting an end to the petty-bourgeois mentality and anarchist influence, and without a doubt propagating bourgeois methods: such as the use of bourgeois specialists, piece work, the adoption of Taylorism, one man management[7] [32]... As if the methods of capitalist production are neutral and their use by a 'workers' party will guarantee their socialist character. The ends of socialist construction justify the means" (page 9). As an alternative you propose that "the revolution cannot limit itself to the management of capitalism until some remote world wide triumph of the revolution, it must abolish capitalist relations of production (wage labour, commodities)", developing "the communisation of the relations of production, with the calculation of the necessary social labour for the production of goods" (page 15).

Capitalism has completed the formation of the world market since the beginning of the 20th century. This means that the law of value operates on the whole international economy and no country or group of countries can escape it. The proletarian bastion (the country or group of countries where the revolution has triumphed) is no exception. The seizure of power in the proletarian bastion does not mean creating a "liberated territory". On the contrary, this territory will still belong to the enemy since it will continue to be entirely submitted to the law of value of the capitalist world.[8] [33] The power of the proletariat is essentially political and the essential role of territory that has been won is to act as the bridgehead of the world revolution.

Capitalism's two principle legacies to the history of humanity have been the formation of the proletariat and the objectively international character that it has given to the forces of production. These two legacies are fundamentally attacked by the theory of the "immediate communisation of the relations of production": the supposed "abolition" of wage labour and the market at the level of each factory, locality or country. On the one hand, this turns production in to a mixture of small autonomous pieces, thus making it prisoner to the tendency towards explosion and fragmentation that capitalism contains in its historical period of decadence and which has been concretised in a dramatic form in its terminal phase of decomposition.[9] [34] On the other hand, it leads to the dividing of the proletariat through binding it to the interests and needs of each of the local, sectoral or national units of production in which the capitalist relations of production have been "liberated".

You say that "Russia in 1917 opened up a revolutionary cycle that closed in 1937. The Russian workers were capable of taking power, but not of using it for a communist transformation. Backwardness, war, economic collapse and international isolation in themselves do not explain the regression. This explanation is a political one that fetishises power and separates it from the economic transformations carried out by the class organs: assemblies and councils where the division between political and union functions is overcome. The Leninist conception gives the question of political power a privileged position in determining the socialization of the economy and the transformation of the relations of production: Leninism is the bureaucratic illness of communism. If the revolution is primarily political, it limits itself to managing capitalism in the hope of the world revolution, it creates a power that has no other function than repression and the struggle against the bourgeoisie which ends up perpetuating itself at all costs, first in the perspective of the world revolution and then for itself".

The reason why you desperately make "Communist economic measures" central is the fear that the proletarian revolution "will remain blocked at the political level" turning it into an empty shell which will not bring about any significant change in the conditions of the working class.

The bourgeois revolution was primarily economic and finished off the task of uprooting the political power of the old feudal class or arriving at an accommodation with it. "Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune; here independent urban republic (...), there taxable 'third estate' of the monarchy (...), afterward, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway" ("Communist Manifesto", Marx: the revolutions of 1848. Penguin Books, 1973, p69). The bourgeoisie, over the course of three centuries, gained an unrivaled position on the economic level (trade, lending, manufacture, large scale industry), which enabled it to conquer political power through revolutions whose paradigm, was France 1789.

This outline of its historical evolution corresponds to its nature as an exploiting class (aspiring to install a new form of exploitation, "free" wage labour as opposed to feudal serfdom) and to the characteristics of its mode of production: private and national appropriation of surplus-value.

Should the proletariat follow the same trajectory in its struggle for communism? Its aim is not to create a new form of exploitation, rather the abolition of all exploitation. This means that it cannot aspire to raise up within the old society an economic power base from which to launch its conquest of political power rather it has to follow exactly the opposite trajectory: taking political power at the world level and from here building the new society.

The economy means the submission of human beings to objective laws independent of their will. The economy means exploitation and alienation. Marx does not talk about a "communist economy" but about the critique of political economy. Communism means the reign of freedom rather than the reign of necessity that has dominated the history of humanity under exploitation and poverty. The principle error of The principles of communist production and distribution[10] [35] a central text for the councilist current which tried to establish labour time as a neutral and impersonal economic automatism that will regulate production. Marx criticized this vision in the Critique of the Gotha Programme where he showed that the proposal of "equal work equal pay" still moves within the parameters of bourgeois rights. Long before this, in The poverty of philosophy, he had already emphasised that "In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of social utility (Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 6, p 134) "Competition implements the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the labour time needed to produce it. Labour time serving as the measure of marketable value becomes in this way the law of the continual depreciation of labour" (idem. p 135).[11] [36]

In your text you present "Leninism" as creating a "fetishisation" of the political. In reality, all of the workers' movement beginning with Marx himself would be guilty of such a "failure". It was Marx in his polemic with Proudhon (the above cited book) who showed that: "the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the oppression of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?".

Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement, which is not at the same time social.

It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be "Combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably put" (George Sand) (idem. p 212).

Councilism bases its defence of the economic character of the proletarian revolution on the following syllogism: since the basis of the exploitation of the proletariat is economic it is necessary to take communist economic measures. in order to abolish it

In order to reply to this sophism we have to abandon the slippery ground of formal logic and situate ourselves on the solid ground of historical evolution. In the historical evolution of humanity two intimately related but independent factors intervene: on the one hand, the development of the productive forces and the configuration of the relations of production (the economic factor); and on the other, the class struggle (the political factor). The actions of the classes are certainly based on the evolution of the economic factor but they do not merely reflect this, they are not just a simple response to economic impulses like Pavlov's dog. In the historic evolution of humanity we have seen a tendency towards an increasing weight of the political factor (the class struggle): the disintegration of the old primitive communism and its replacement by slave society was an essentially violent objective process, the product of many centuries of evolution. The passage from slavery to feudalism arose from the gradual process of the crumbling of the old order and the re-composition of a new one, where the conscious factor had a limited weight. On the other hand, in the bourgeois revolutions the actions of the classes had a greater weight although "the movement of the immense majority was carried out in the interest of a minority". Nevertheless, as we have demonstrated, the bourgeoisie rode on the overwhelming strength of the enormous economic transformations that in great part were the product of an objective and ineluctable process. The weight of the economic factor was still overwhelming.

On the other hand, the proletarian revolution is the end result of the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie which requires a high level of consciousness and active participation from the beginning. This fundamental and principle dimension of the subjective factor (the consciousness, unity, solidarity, confidence, of the proletarian masses) signifies the primacy of the political character of the proletarian revolution that is the first massive and conscious revolution in history.

You are in favour of a proletarian revolution carried out by the active and conscious participation of the great majority of the workers, where the maximum unity, solidarity, consciousness, heroism, creative will, is expressed. Well, in this resides the political character of the proletarian revolution.

Councilism's "economic revolution" in practice.

Your bilan of the Russian revolution can be reduced to this: if instead of the fetishisation of politics and the hope of "far off world revolution" they had adopted the immediate measures of workers' control of the factories, the abolition of wage labour and of the exchange of commodities, then they would not have produced "bureaucratism" and the revolution would have gone forwards. It is a lesson that tempted council communism and which councilism has vulgarised in our day.

When councilism draws this lesson it is breaking with the tradition of marxism and links itself to another: anarchism and Economism. This formulation of councilism is nothing original: Proudhon defended it - and this was taken apart by Marx in his critique; it was later taken up by cooperative theories; then by anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism and in Russia by Economism. In 1917-23 it re-emerged with Austro-marxism[12] [37] Gramsci and his "theory" of the Factory Councils;[13] [38] Otto Ruhle and certain theoreticians of the AUUD followed the same road. In Russia, in spite of the development of correct arguments, such as those by the Democratic Centrism group, Kollontai?s Workers' Opposition fell into the same ideas. In 1936, anarchism made the Spanish "collectives" the great alternative to the Bolshevik's[14] [39] "bureaucratic and state communism".

What is common to all these visions - and which is the root of councilism - is a conception of the working class as a mere economic and sociological category. It does not see the working class as an historic class, denoted by the continuity of its struggle and its consciousness, but rather as a sum of individuals who are motivated by the most narrow economic interests.[15] [40]

The calculation of the councilists is the following; in order for the workers to defend the revolution they have "to check" that it gives immediate results, that they take into their own hands the fruits of the revolution. This is seen as them taking "control" of the factories, allowing them to manage them themselves.[16] [41]

"Factory control"? What control can there be when production is submitted to the costs and rate of profit brought about by competition on the world market? This means one of two things: either declare autarchy and with this bring about a regression of incalculable proportions that will annihilate the whole revolution; or work within the world market subjugated to its laws.

The councilists propose the "abolition of wage labour", through the elimination of wages and their substitution by "labour-time vouchers". This avoids the problems with fine-sounding words: it is necessary to work a determined number of hours and however correct the voucher there will always be some hours that are paid and others that are not: in other words surplus-value. The slogan "a fair days work for a fair days pay" forms part of bourgeois law and encompasses the worst of injustices, as Marx demonstrated.

Councilism proclaims the "abolition of commodities" and their replacement by "bookkeeping between factories". But we are in the same situation: what is produced will have to adjust itself to the value of exchange imposed by competition within the world market.

Councilism tries to resolve the problem of the revolutionary transformation of society with "forms and names" avoiding the root of the problem. "Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as this shadow takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society" ("The Poverty of philosophy", Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 6  p.144).

Anarchism and councilism's proposals about the "economic revolution" go in the same direction as Mr. Bray: when this shadow takes on substance it is nothing but the actual body of existing society. In 1936 anarchism with its collectives did nothing but implement a regimen of extreme exploitation, at the service of the war economy, embellishing the whole thing with ideas about "self-management", the "abolition of money" and other rubbish.

However, there are very serious consequences to these councilist proposals: they lead the working class to renounce its historical mission for a mess of pottage from the "immediate seizure of the factories".

In your text you underlined that "class and party do not have identical intentions. The workers' aspirations go in the direction of seizing the leadership of the factories and directing production themselves". "Seizing the leadership of the factories" means that each sector of the working class takes its share of the plunder recently grabbed from capitalism and manages it for its own benefit, while "coordinating" with workers in other factories. That is to say we will pass from the property of the capitalists to the property of individual workers. We have not left capitalism!

But worse still, it means that the generation of workers who make the revolution will have to consume the riches recently taken from capitalism for their own benefit without a thought for the future. This leads to the working class renouncing its historical mission to build communism on a world level and falling for the illusion of "having it all straight away".

This temptation to fall into the "sharing out of the factories" constitutes a real danger for the next revolutionary attempt, because today capitalism has entered its terminal phase: decomposition.[17] [42] Decomposition means chaos, disintegration, implosion of the economic and social structures into a mosaic of disarticulated fragments and at the ideological level a loss of the historical, global and unitary vision that democratic ideology seeks to systematically demonize as "totalitarian" and "bureaucratic". The forces of the bourgeoisie do this in the name of "democratic control", "self-management" and other similar phrases. The danger is that the class will be defeated due to the total loss of historical perspective and be imprisoned in each factory and locality. This will not only be an almost definitive defeat but will mean that the working class has allowed itself to be dragged down by the lack of historical perspective, by egotism, immediatism and the absolute absence of aims that is propagated by the whole of bourgeois ideology in this present situation of decomposition.

The real lessons of the Russian Revolution

The proletarian bastion is born within a brutal and agonising contradiction: on the one hand, capitalism wages a struggle to the death against it through its economic, military and imperialist laws (military invasion, blockade, the need to trade goods under unfavorable conditions in order to survive etc); on the other, it has to break the noose around its neck with the only weapons that it possesses: the unity and consciousness of the whole proletarian class and the international extension of the revolution.

This forces it to carry out a complex, and on occasions, contradictory policy, in order to keep a society threatened by disintegration afloat (supplies, the minimal functioning of the productive apparatus, military defence etc) and, simultaneously, to dedicate the bulk of its forces to the extension of the revolution, the explosion of new proletarian insurrectionary movements.

In the first years of soviet power, the Bolsheviks firmly followed this policy. In her critical study of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg made it very clear that: "The fate of the revolution in Russia depends fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principles." (The Russian Revolution.) As the Resolution of the Moscow Territorial Bureau of the Bolshevik party adopted in February 1918 in relation to the Brest-Litovsk debate states: "In the interests of the international revolution we accept the risk of the soviets losing their power, that it is turned in to something purely formal; today, as yesterday, the principle task that we have is the extension of the revolution to all countries.[18] [43]

Within this policy, the Bolsheviks committed a whole series of errors. Nevertheless, these errors could be corrected whilst the force of the world revolution continued to live. It was only from 1923, when the revolution suffered a mortal blow in Germany, that the tendency of the Bolsheviks to make themselves prisoners of the Russian territorial state and of the state to come into an increasingly irreconcilable contradiction with the interests of the world proletariat, became definitive. The Bolshevik party began to be transformed into a mere manager of capital.

A marxist critique of these errors has nothing to do with the critique made by councilism. The councilist critique pushes towards anarchism and the bourgeoisie, whereas the marxist critique enables the strengthening of proletarian positions. Many of the errors committed by the Bolsheviks were shared by the rest of the international workers' movement (Rosa Luxemburg, Bordiga, Pannekoek). Our aim here is not to "wash away the sins" of the Bolsheviks but simply to show that it is a question of a problem for the whole of the international working class and not the product of "evil", "Machiavellianism" and the "hidden bourgeois character" of the Bolsheviks as the councilist think.

We do not have time to expound on the marxist critique of the Bolshevik's errors, however we have carried out a developed work within the Current around this question. We particularly want to highlight the following texts:

-         the series on Communism in International Review n°s99 and 100

-         the pamphlet (in English) on the Period of Transition

-         the pamphlet (in English) on the Russian Revolution.

These documents can serve as the basis for the continuation of the discussion.

We hope that we have contributed to a clear and fraternal debate. Please accept our communist greetings:

Accion Proletaria/ International Communist Current.

Footnote

In spite of the media hype about the arrest of the "bloody tyrant" Saddam Hussein with a scenario appropriate to a B-series western, the weakening of the foremost imperialist power in the world can be seen by the fact that the US is obviously bogged down in Iraq and is unable to impose its "road map" on the Middle East.

The principle intention of the American government in their intervention in Iraq was to continue and develop the strategic encirclement of Europe in order to counteract any attempt of their main imperialist rivals, Germany particularly, to advance towards the East and the Mediterranean. The aim of the crusade waged in the name of anti-terrorism, the defence of democracy and the struggle against the state presumed to be in possession of mass weapons of destruction was to provide an ideological cover for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the threat of intervention against Iran. Before intervening on Iraqi territory, the American bourgeoisie hesitated for a long time, not on the decision as such to go to war, but on the way to wage it: did the United States have to accept the dynamic that was pushing them to act in a more and more isolated way or should they try to keep and control a certain number of allies around them, even if such alliances have no stability today? In the end, the Bush team's strategy was adopted: intervene more or less alone and against all the USA's rivals.

In spite of the United States' demonstration of power, which crushed Iraq in the space of three weeks, America's world leadership has never been in such a parlous situation. Six months after the official "victory" of the intervention, this strategy has been shown to be a complete failure. The Americans are obviously incapable of securing the region. Since then the whole world has witnessed the American occupation army getting more and more bogged down in the Iraqi mire. Not a day has passed without the coalition army being the target of terrorist commandos. Increasingly murderous attacks are a regular occurrence even outside Iraq, and have gradually taken hold of the whole region (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc), targeting Iraqis as well as the "international community". The present occupation has already caused more deaths on the American side than the first year of the Vietnam War (225 "boys" killed in comparison with 147 in 1964). The climate of permanent insecurity among the troops and the "body bags" returning home have significantly cooled the population's patriotic ardour - which was anyway very relative - even in the heart of "Middle America".

Getting bogged down in Iraq has obliged the United States to change political orientation

At the time of the Vietnam War, the American bourgeoisie ended up deliberately abandoning the country but had succeeded in bringing China into the western bloc. In Iraq, nothing would compensate for an American retreat. Moreover, such a retreat would increase the ambitions of all the rivals and adversaries of the United States, big and small. In addition, the chaos which the Americans would leave behind them in Iraq, could spread throughout the region and would certainly discredit the USA definitively them in its role as world policeman. The stakes are that high. A pure and simple American retreat would mean a bitter and humiliating defeat.

The American bourgeoisie is therefore obliged to remain in Iraq militarily, while adjusting the conditions of its presence. Firstly, the White House has announced a partial and progressive withdrawal while bringing forward the proposal to set up an "autonomous" and "democratic" Iraqi government from 2007 to the spring of 2004. In the same way, it is pushing for the active participation of other Western countries in operations to maintain order and "security" in the region, whereas it had previously imposed a categorical veto on any interference in Iraqi affairs by those governments who had opposed the American intervention. The United States is now trying to force its main imperialist rivals to pay a price in human and financial terms for the Iraq war; but in order to do so, they have no choice but to reintroduce the wolves into the sheepfold, that is, to let into Iraq through the window French and German businesses and armies, which they had previously chased out the door. This is clearly a serious indication of US weakness.

In parallel with this re-orientation, the United States has attempted to take the initiative again: they have sent 3,000 men into Afghanistan to conduct a huge operation against the rebels; in Georgia they have replaced President Shevardnadze with a pro-American (a lawyer who has practised in the United States for a long period of time). This is the context in which the massively publicised arrest of Saddam Hussein was meticulously prepared and organised.

With the arrest, which is a boon for America, Bush can enjoy an immediate revenge. The "hard" line in the Bush administration, represented by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz can save face. It also enables them to take the initiative diplomatically. For the time being the Bush administration is in a more favourable position to force states like France to accept a suspension or a moratorium on Iraqi debts. It is freer to impose conditions on an eventual participation of German and French businesses in the reconstruction of Iraq. Even the interim council of the Iraqi government, largely controlled by the Americans, has gained status in the eyes of international public opinion.

The arrest of Saddam Hussein took place in the wake of a weekend marked by disagreements between European nations. During the discussions on the constitution of the enlarged European Union, France and Germany had to confront Spain and Poland, both allies of the United States in Iraq, who have benefited to some extent from the notoriety attached to the capture of Saddam Hussein. These two countries profited from the weight that their support for the United States has given them to affirm their own interests in Europe and to put a spoke in the wheel of the Franco-German alliance.

There was another small victory for American propaganda. Five days after the announcement that Saddam Hussein had been captured, and after lengthy bargaining, Ghadhafi's Libya said that it was willing to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and to put a stop to any research in this direction.  So the United States was able to show the whole world that its perseverance, pressure and determination paid off.

The arrest of Saddam Hussein has definitely allowed the United States to gain points by lending a certain degree of legitimacy to its intervention in Iraq, However all the positive effects of these small victories can only be short term.

The American victory is relative and ephemeral

The images of the capture of the Rais[1] [66] are double edged. Although it was a demonstration of American strength, the humiliation inflicted on the dictator excited indignation and anger among the Arab populations. Moreover, the pictures show that Saddam Hussein was not secretly controlling the Iraqi resistance. On the contrary he was buried in a hole underground, with no real means of communication and supported by a few faithful followers from his own village. His arrest changes nothing as far as the security situation of Iraqis concerned. The fifty deaths in the following days are a clear confirmation of this fact.

France and Germany counter-attacked immediately. After they congratulated the White House for its success in the most hypocritical way possible, the media in these two countries did all they could to tarnish the American image. A lot of publicity was given to the attacks the day after. The humiliating images of the Rais were accompanied by harsh, more or less underhand, criticisms implying that it was a provocation for all the Arab nations. The incapacity of Hussein to lead a guerrilla war from his hole was emphasised as frequently as possible. France and Germany did not hesitate to condemn the Bush administration's pressure on the future Iraqi tribunal, demanding the death penalty for the old dictator, as an illegal process, outside the rules of international law, while at the same time spreading massively the images of the prison camp victims in Guantanaomo in order to show the barbarism and iniquity of American justice.

So the arrest of Saddam Hussein changes nothing. The attacks will continue. Anti-Americanism will develop.

The current strengthening of the American position may turn into its contrary at short notice. In fact the chaos that the United-States is unable to control cannot be attributed to the actions of Saddam Hussein agitating in the shadows. The danger for the US is that it will become increasingly obvious that it is the consequence of American intervention, a fact which the bourgeois rivals of the United-States will not hesitate to exploit. Whatever form the American presence in Iraq will be obliged to take, whatever the military involvement the European powers may eventually have in a "peace-keeping" force, the stakes and the tensions towards war between the United-States and their European rivals can only increase dramatically in the region. The Iraqi population cannot expect to benefit from the eventual effects of reconstruction, which will certainly be limited to the state infrastructure and the roads and to putting the oil fields in order. In Iraq the war will continue and extend, the attacks will multiply. 

In spite of its immediate successes, the American bourgeoisie cannot reverse the historical exhaustion of its leadership. The contesting of American authority will not stop. On the contrary, every advance on the part of the Americans encourages a strengthening of anti-Americanism. As we wrote in our previous issue: "In fact the American bourgeoisie is in an impasse, itself an expression of the impasse in the world situation which, in the present historic situation, cannot be resolved by marching into a third world war. In the absence of this radical bourgeois solution to the world crisis, which would almost certainly result in the destruction of humanity, the planet is sinking into the chaos and barbarism which characterises the present phase of capitalist decomposition." (International Review n°115, "The proletariat confronts a dramatic deepening of all of capitalism's contradictions").

In Iraq as elsewhere, capitalism can only drag humanity into increasing chaos and barbarism.

Stability and peace are impossible in this society. The bourgeoisie wants to convince us to the contrary. This is the purpose of the huge ideological campaigns like the one launched in Geneva on the Middle East on the 1st December 2003. This "initiative" proposing a total solution to the problems of the Middle East, in contrast to the method of "small steps" and the "road map", was set up, even if not officially, by prominent personalities on the Palestinian side as well as that of the Israelis. It received the enthusiastic support of several Nobel Peace prize-winners, in particular ex-American president Carter and the ex-Polish president and old trades unionist, Lech Walesa. Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and even Colin Powell, albeit rather timidly in the case of the latter, have also welcomed this initiative.

The message that has been hammered into the heads of proletarians at a time when imperialist wars have never been so numerous and so violent at an international level, is clear: "peace is obtainable in capitalist society. It's enough to regroup all people of good will and to put pressure on capitalist states and international organisms".

What the bourgeoisie wants to hide at all costs from the workers is that capitalist wars are imperialist wars that are as unavoidable for dying capitalism as for its dominant class. Left to its own logic, decomposing capitalism will inevitably drag the whole of humanity into generalised barbarity and war.

W.

 

Between 12th and 15th November, the "European Social Forum" was held in Paris, a kind of European subsidiary of the World Social Forum which has taken place several years running in Porto Alegre, Brazil (in 2002 the ESF was held in Florence, Italy, while the 2004 event is planned in London). The ESF has attained considerable proportions: according to the organisers, there were some 40,000 participants from countries ranging from Portugal to Eastern Europe, a programme of 600 seminars and workshops in the most varied venues (theatres, town halls, prestigious state buildings) distributed across four sites around Paris, and to conclude a big demonstration of between 60 and 100,000 people in the streets of Paris, with the unrepentant Italian Stalinists of Rifondazione Comunista at the front, and the anarchists of the CNT at the rear. Though they received less media attention, two other "European forums" took place at the same time as the ESF, one for members of the European parliament, the other for trades unionists. And as if three "forums" were not enough, the anarchists organised a "Libertarian Social Forum" in the Paris suburbs, at the same time as the ESF and deliberately presented as an "alternative" to it.

"Another world is possible!". This was one of the great slogans of the ESF. And there is no doubt that for many of the demonstrators on 15th November, perhaps above all for the young people just entering political activity, there is a real and pressing need to struggle against capitalism and for "another world" to the one where we live today, with its endless poverty and its interminable and hideous warfare. Doubtless some of them drew an inspiration from this great united gathering. The problem though, is not just to know that "another world is possible" - and necessary - but also and above all to what kind of world it could be and how to build it.

It is hard to see how the ESF could offer an answer to this question. Given the number and variety of participating organisations (ranging from organisations of "young managers" and "young entrepreneurs", to Christian unions, Trotskyists like the LCR or the SWP, the Stalinists of the PCF and Rifondazione, and even anarchists like Alternative Libertaire), it is hard to see how a coherent answer, or even any kind of answer at all, could emerge from the ESF. Everybody had their own ideas to put forward, whence an enormous variety of themes expressed in leaflets, debates, and slogans. By contrast, when we look more closely at the ideas that came out of the ESF, we find first, that there is nothing new in them, and second, that there is absolutely nothing "anti-capitalist" about them either.

The extensive mobilisation around the ESF, plus the publicity given to a multitude of themes from the "anti-globalisation" tendency by so many groups of the left or far left, decided the ICC to intervene in the event with all the determination that our strength allowed. Since we suspected that the ESF's "debates" were sown up in advance (a suspicion which several participants in these debates confirmed to us), our militants from all over Europe concentrated on selling our press (in several European languages) and on taking part in informal discussions around the ESF and during the final demonstration. Similarly, we were present at the LSF in order to intervene in the debates and to put forward the perspective of communism against anarchism.

A world free from trade and trafficking?

"The world is not for sale" is a fashionable slogan, with various different versions when a "realistic" slogan is called for: "culture is not for sale" for the artists and theatre workers,[1] "health is not for sale" for nurses and health workers, or again "education is not for sale" for the teachers.

Who would not be touched by such slogans? Who would want to sell his health, or his children's education?

However, when we look at the reality behind these slogans, we begin to smell a swindle. In fact, what is proposed is not to put an end to "selling the world", but just to limit it: "Free social services from the logic of the market". What does this mean, concretely? We all know that, as long as capitalism exists, everything has to be paid for, even services like health and education. All those aspects of social life that the "anti-globalists" claim to want to "free from the logic of the market" are in fact a part of the workers' overall wages, a part which is usually managed by the state. Far from being "freed from the logic of the market", the level of workers' wages, the proportion of production which returns to the working class, lies at the very heart of the problem of the market and capitalist exploitation. Capital always pays its labour power as little as possible: in other words, the minimum necessary to reproduce the next generation of workers. Today, as the world plunges into an ever deeper crisis, each national capital needs fewer hands, and must pay those hands it needs less if it is not to be eliminated by its competitors on the world market. In this situation, the working class can only resist reductions in its wages - however "social" these may be - through its own struggle, and not by calling on the capitalist state to "free" its wages from the laws of the market, something the state would be perfectly incapable of doing even if it wanted to.

In capitalist society, the proletariat can, at best, impose a more favorable division of the social product through the power of its own struggle: it can reduce the level of surplus-value extorted by the capitalist class in favour of variable capital - ie its wages. But to do this in today's context firstly demands a high level of struggle (as we saw after the defeat of the struggles in France in May 2003, which was followed by a storm of attacks on the social wage), and secondly can only be temporary (as we saw after the movement of 1968 in France).

No, this idea that "the world" is not for sale is nothing but a wretched fraud. The very nature of capitalism is precisely that everything is for sale, and the workers' movement has known this since 1848: capitalism "has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom ? Free Trade (...)The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers". This is how Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto: it just goes to show how valid their principles remain today!

Fair trade, not free trade?

"Fair trade, not free trade!" was another major theme at the ESF, given a great boost by the presence of French smallholders with their "biological" cheese and other products. Who indeed could not be touched by the hope of seeing the peasants and small craftsmen of the Third World live decently from the fruit of their labour? Who would not want to stop the steamroller of agribusiness from throwing the peasants off their land and heaping them up by millions in the slums of Mexico and Calcutta?

But here again, just as for the question of the market, fine sentiments are a poor guide.

First of all, there is absolutely nothing new about the "free trade" movement. The charity business (with companies like Oxfam, present of course at the ESF) has been practising "free trade" for handicrafts sold in its shops for more than forty years, without this in the least preventing millions of human beings from being plunged into poverty in Africa, Asia, or Latin America...

Moreover, in the mouths of the "anti-capitalists", this slogan is doubly hypocritical. Someone like José Bové, president of the French Confédération Paysanne, can play the anti-capitalist super-star all he likes with his denunciation of the food industry and the evil McDonalds: this does not prevent the militants of the same Confédération Paysanne from demonstrating to demand the maintenance of subsidies they get from the European CAP.[2] By artificially lowering the price of French products, the CAP is precisely one of the main instruments for maintaining unfair trade to the advantage of some and, inevitably, to the disadvantage of others. Similarly, "fair trade" for the American steel industry unionists who demonstrated at Seattle and who have been lionised for it ever since, means imposing tariffs on the import of "foreign" steel produced more cheaply by workers in other countries. In the end, "fair trade" is just another name for trade wars.

In capitalism, the notion of "fairness" is anyway an illusion. As Engels put it already in 1881, in an article where he criticised the notion of the "fair wage": "The fairness of political economy, such as it truly lays down the laws which rule actual society, that fairness is always on one side... that of capital".[3]

The most outrageous swindle in all this business of "fair trade" is the idea that the presence of "anti-globalist" demonstrators at Seattle or Cancun "encouraged" the negociators from the Third World countries to stand up to the demands of the "rich countries". We will not here go into detail as to the fact that the Cancun summit ended as a bitter defeat for the weaker countries, since the Europeans will not dismantle the CAP and the Americans will continue with their massive farm subsidies against the penetration of their market by cheaper countries from the poor countries. No, what is really disgusting is to credit the idea that the members of government and besuited bureaucrats of the Third World countries were present at these negotiations to defend the peasants and the poor. Quite the contrary! To take just one example, when Brazil's Lula denounces the tariffs imposed on imported orange juice to protect the American orange industry, he is thinking not of the poor peasants but of Brazil's enormous capitalist orange plantations, where the workers slave just as they do in the orange plantations of Florida.

No support for the bourgeois state!

The common thread that runs through all these themes is the following: against the "neo-liberals" and the "transnational" companies (those same evil "multi-nationals" that the anti-globalists' predecessors denounced back in the 1970s), we are supposed to place our confidence in the state, or better still to strengthen the state. The "anti-globalists" claim that business has "confiscated" power from the "democratic" state in order to impose its own "commercial" laws, and that therefore a "citizen's resistance" is necessary in order to recover the power of the state and revive "public services".

What a scam! For one thing, the state has never been more present in the economy than it is today, including in the United States. It is the state that regulates world trade by fixing interest rates, customs tariffs, etc. The state is itself the major actor in the national economy, with public spending running at between 30% and 50% of GDP depending on the country, and with ever-increasing budget deficits. More important than this, whenever the workers get it into their heads to defend their living conditions against the attacks of the capitalists, who do they find in their path right from the outset if not the police forces of the state? Demanding - as the "anti-globalists" do - that the state be strengthened to defend us from the capitalists, is really a gigantic fraud: the bourgeois state is there to protect the bourgeoisie from the workers, not the other way around.[4]

It is not for nothing that the ESF produced this call to support the state, and especially to support its left fractions presented as the best defenders of "civil society", against "neo-liberalism". As the saying goes: "He who pays the piper calls the tune", and it is wholly instructive to look at who financed the ESF's 3.7 million euro costs:

• First of all, the local authorities of Seine-St-Denis, Val de Marne, and Essonne contributed more than 600,000 euros, while the town of St Denis alone forked out 570,000 euros.[5] In fact, this is the French "Communist" Party - that bunch of old Stalinist scoundrels - which is trying to buy its political virginity after years of complicity in the crimes committed by the Stalinist state in Russia, and decades of sabotaging the workers' struggles.

• The French Socialist Party has been much discredited by the attacks it made against the workers during its time in government, and it is true that the audience at the ESF did not miss the chance to make fun of Laurent Fabius (a well-known Socialist leader) when he dared to turn up in the debates. One might have thought that the PS might not be too keen on the ESF, but in fact, quite the reverse! The city of Paris (controlled by the PS) contributed 1 million euros to the costs of the ESF.

• And what about the French government? A right-wing, thoroughly neo-liberal French government, denounced in articles, leaflets, and posters by the whole left from the anarchists to the Stalinists - surely it would be uneasy, at the very least, to see the Forum attracting so many people? But no, not at all! It was by personal order of the president, Jacques Chirac, that the Foreign Ministry contributed 500,000 euros to the ESF.

He who pays certainly intends to profit! The ESF was liberally financed and housed by the whole French bourgeoisie, from right to left. And the whole French bourgeoisie, from left to right, intends to benefit from the undoubted success of the ESF, on two levels in particular:

• First of all, the ESF is a means for the left wing of the state apparatus to renew itself (after being discredited by years spent in government dealing blow after blow to the workers' living conditions and assuming the responsibility for the imperialist policy of French capitalism). Since political parties are no longer in fashion, they are disguised as "associations" in order to give themselves a more "citizen", "democratic", "network" look: the PCF appeared in the form of its "Espace Karl Marx", the PS with its "Fondation Léo Lagrange" and "Jean Jaurès".[6] We should insist here that it is not just the left which has an interest in making us forget its past misdeeds - something which is clear enough to anybody. The whole ruling class has an interest in covering the social front, in making sure that the workers' struggles - and even more generally the disgust and questioning provoked by capitalist society - should be derailed towards the old reformist recipes, and prevented from finding the consciousness necessary to overthrow the capitalist order and put an end to all its ills.

• Secondly, the whole French bourgeoisie has an interest in the extension and strengthening of the ESF's clearly anti-American atmosphere. The enormous destruction and terrible loss of life in the two world wars, then above all the renewal of the class struggle and the end of the counter-revolution in 1968, have all contributed to discrediting the nationalism which the bourgeoisie used to send the populations to the slaughter in 1914, and then again in 1939. Consequently, even though there is no such thing as a "European bloc", much less a "European nation", the bourgeoisies of the different European countries, especially in France and Germany, all have an interest in encouraging the rise of anti-American and more vaguely "pro-European" feeling with the aim of presenting of presenting the defence of their own imperialist interests against US imperialism as the defence of a "different", or even an "anti-capitalist" world view. For example, the "anti-globalist" support for a ban on the import of American GMO's into France, in the name of "ecology" and the "defence of public health", is in reality nothing but an episode in an economic war, designed to give French research time to catch up with its American rivals in this respect.[7]

Modern marketing techniques no longer sell products directly, they use a system which is both more subtle and more effective: they sell a "world view", a "style" to which they attach the products supposed to express that style. The ESF's organisers use exactly the same method: they offer us an unreal "world view", where capitalism is no longer capitalist, nations are no longer imperialist, and "another world" is possible without going through a communist revolution. Then in the name of this "vision", they propose to dump on us old products, long past their sell-by date: the so-called "communist" and "socialist" parties, disguised for the occasion as "citizen networks".

Since the French bourgeoisie coughed up the funds on this occasion, it is normal enough that its political parties should be the first to profit from the ESF. However, we should not imagine that the business was established by the French ruling class alone, far from it. The campaign to renew the credibility of the left wing of the bourgeoisie, undertaken in the various European and world "social forums" benefits the whole capitalist class world wide.

Another libertarian world?

The "Libertarian Social Forum" was deliberately announced as an alternative to the more "official" forum organised by the big bourgeois parties. One might ask just how much of an alternative it really was: one of the LSF's main organisers (Alternative Libertaire) also took an active part in the ESF, while the LSF's demonstration joined the big ESF one after a brief "independent" stroll.

We do not intend here to report exhaustively on what was said at the LSF. We will simply mention some of the main themes.

Let us start with the "debate" on "self-managed spaces" (ie squats, communes, service exchange networks, "alternative cafés", etc.). If we put the word "debate" in quotes, it is because the chair did everything possible to limit any discussion to descriptions of the participants' respective "spaces", and to avoid any kind of critical evaluation even from within the anarchist camp. It very quickly appeared that "self-management" is something very relative: a participant from Britain explained that they had bought their "space" for the tidy sum of £350,000 (500,000 euros); another recounted the creation of a "space"... on the Internet, the creation, as everybody knows, of the US DARPA.[8]

Still more revealing was the action proposed by these various "spaces": free and "alternative" pharmacy (ie amateur herbal remedies), legal advice services, cafés, exchange of services, etc. In other words, a mixture of the small shopkeeper and social services abandoned by state cutbacks. In other words, the ultimate in anarchist radicalism is to underwrite the state by doing its work for free.

Another debate on "free public services" fully revealed the vacuity of "official" right-thinking anarchism. It was claimed here that "public services" could somehow involve an opposition to the market economy by satisfying the needs of the population for free - and "self-managed" of course, with consumers' committees, producers' committees, and community committees. All this as as alike as peas in a pod to the "local committees" being set up today by the French state for the inhabitants of the Paris suburbs. The question is posed as if it were possible to introduce an institutional opposition to capitalism from inside capitalist society itself, for example by establishing free public transport.

Another characteristic of anarchism which made a strong appearance at the LSF, is its profoundly elitist and educationist nature. Anarchism has no idea that "another world" could emerge from the very heart of the present world's own contradictions. As a result, it can only imagine the passage from the present to the future world by means of the "example" given by its "self-managed spaces", through an educative action on the ills of today's prevalent "productivism". But, as Marx already put it more than a century ago, if a new society is to appear thanks to the education of the people, who is to educate the educators? For those who plan to be the educators are themselves formed by the society within which we live, and their ideas of "another world" remain in reality solidly anchored in the world of today.

In effect, the two "social forums" served up, under the disguise of new and revolutionary ideas, nothing other than a bunch of old ideas which have long since revealed themselves inadequate if not downright counter-revolutionary.

The "self-managed spaces" recall the co-operative companies of the 19th century, not to mention all the "workers' collectives" of our own time (from Lip in France to Triumph in Britain) which either went bankrupt or remained ordinary capitalist companies, precisely because they were forced to produce and sell within the capitalist market economy; they also recall those "community" enterprises of the 1970s (squats, community committees, "free schools" etc.) which ended up integrated into the bourgeois state as social services.

All the ideas about carrying out a radical transformation thanks to free public services recall the gradualist reformism which was already an illusion in the workers' movement of 1900 and which fell into definitive bankruptcy in 1914 when it took the side of "its own" state to defend its "gains" against the "aggressor" imperialism. These ideas recall the creation of the "Welfare State" by the ruling class at the end of World War II, in order to rationalise the management and the mystification of the workforce (in particular by "proving" that the millions of casualties had not died in vain).

Our world bears a new world in its flanks

In capitalism as in any class society, it is absolutely inevitable that the dominant ideas should be the ideas of the dominant class. It is only possible to understand the necessity, and the material possibility, of a communist revolution because there exists within capitalist society a social class that embodies this revolutionary future: the working class. By contrast, if we simply try to "imagine" what a "better" society would be like, on the basis of our desires and imaginations as they are formed today by capitalist society (and following the model of our anarchist "educators"), we can do nothing other than "reinvent" the present capitalist world, by falling into either the reactionary dream of the small producer who can see no further than the end of his "self-managed space", or the megalo-monstrous delirium of a benevolent world state, à la George Monbiot.[9]

Marxism, on the contrary, aims to discover within the capitalist world today the premises of the new world which the communist revolution must bring into being if humanity is to escape its doom. As the Communist Manifesto put it in 1848, "The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes".[10]

We can distinguish three distinct, but closely interwoven major elements in this " movement going on under our very eyes".

The first, is the transformation that capitalism has already carried out in the productive process of the entire human species. The least object in daily use is today the work, not of a self-sufficient artisan or local fabrication, but of the common labour of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of men and women participating in a network that covers the entire planet. Freed by the world communist revolution of the constraints imposed on it by the capitalist market relations of production and the private appropriation of its fruits, this destruction of all local, regional, and national particularities will be the basis for the constitution of a single human community on a planetary scale. The progress of social transformation, and the affirmation of every aspect of social life in this world wide community, will lead to the disappearance of all distinctions (which the bourgeoisie encourages today in order to divide the working class) between ethnic groups, peoples, and nations. We can envisage that populations and languages will be mixed until the day when there no longer exist Europeans, Africans, or Asians (and still less Catalans, Bretons, and Basques!), but one united human species whose intellectual and artistic production will find expression in a single language understood by all, and infinitely richer, more precise, and more harmonious than those in which the limited and decomposing culture of today finds expression.[11]

The second major element, intimately linked to the first, is the existence within capitalist society of a class which embodies, and which expresses at its highest point, this reality of an international and unified productive process. This class is the international proletariat. Whether they be American steelworker, British unemployed, French office worker, German mechanic, Indian programmer, or Chinese construction worker, all are workers with this in common: that they are more and more unbearably exploited by the world capitalist class, and that they can only throw off their exploitation by overthrowing the capitalist order itself.

We should emphasise particularly here two aspects of the working class' very nature:

• First of all, unlike the peasants or small artisans, the proletariat is the creation of capitalism, which cannot live without it. Capitalism grinds down the peasants and the artisans, reducing them to the status of proletarian - or rather to unemployment in the present decadent economy. But capitalism cannot exist without the proletariat. As long as capitalism exists, the proletariat will exist. And as long as the proletariat exists, it will bear within it the revolutionary communist project for the overthrow of the capitalist order and the construction of another world.

• Another fundamental characteristic of the working class lies in the movement and mixing of populations to answer the needs of capitalist production. "The workers have no country" as the Manifesto said, not only because they possess no property but because they are always at the mercy of capital and its demands for labour power. The working class is, by nature, a class of immigrants. To see this, we only look at the population in any major industrialised town: the streets are full of men and women from every corner of the globe. But the same is true even in the under-developed countries: in the Ivory Coast, many of the agricultural workers are Burkinabé, South African miners come from all over the country but also from Zimbabwe and Botswana, workers in the Persian Gulf come from India, Palestine, or the Philippines, in Indonesia there are millions of foreign workers in the factories. This reality of working class existence - which prefigures the mixing of populations that we spoke of earlier - demonstrates the futility of the ideal dear to anarchists and democrats of the defence of a local or regional "community". To take just one example: what can Scottish nationalism possibly have to offer to the working class in Scotland, composed in part of Asian immigrants? Nothing, obviously. The only real community that the workers who have been ripped from their roots can find, is the planetary community that they will build after the revolution.

• The third major element that we intend to emphasise here can be summarised in a single statistic: in all the class societies that preceded capitalism, 95% of the population (more or less) worked the land, and the surplus that they produced was just enough to support the other 5% (landlords and the church, but also merchants, artisans, etc). Today, this ratio has been reversed, while in the most developed countries even the production of material commodities occupies less and less of the working population. In other words, at the level of the physical capacity of the productive apparatus, humanity has achieved a level of abundance which is to all intents and purposes unlimited.

Already under capitalism, the human species' productive capacity has created a qualitatively new situation relative to the whole of previous history: whereas beforehand, scarcity, or at times outright famine, was the lot of the vast mass of the population above all because of the natural limits of production (low productivity of the land, poor harvests, etc.), under capitalism the one and only cause of scarcity is capitalist production relations themselves. The crisis that throws workers onto the street is not caused by an inadequate level of production: on the contrary, it is the direct result of the impossibility of selling everything that has been produced.[12] Moreover, in the so-called "advanced" countries, an ever-increasing part of economic activity has absolutely no utility outside the capitalist system itself: financial and stock-market speculation of all kinds, astronomical military budgets, fashion items, "planned obsolescence" designed to force the renewal of a product, advertising, etc. If we look further, it is obvious that the use of the earth's resources is also dominated by the increasingly irrational - except from the standpoint of capitalist profitability - functioning of the economy: hours spent by millions of human beings in the daily migration to and from work, or the transport of freight by road rather than by rail to respond to the unforeseen demands of an anarchic production process, for example. In short, the ratio between the quantity of time spent in producing to satisfy minimum needs (food, clothing, shelter), and that spent in producing "beyond the minimum" (if we can put it like that), has been completely overturned.[13]

The birth of a planetary community

When we sell our press, in demonstrations or at the factory gates, we are often confronted with the same question: "well, what is communism then, if you say it has never existed?". In such situations, we try to give an answer that is both global and brief, and we often answer: "communism is a world without classes, without nations, and without money". While this definition is very basic (even negative, since it defines communism as being "without"), it nonetheless contains the fundamental characteristics of communist society:

• It will be without classes, because the proletariat cannot free itself by becoming a new exploiting class: the reappearance of an exploiting class after the revolution would in reality mean the defeat of the revolution and the survival of exploitation.[14] The disappearance of classes flows naturally from the interest of a victorious working class in its own emancipation. One of the class' first objectives will be to reduce the working day by integrating into the productive process the unemployed and the masses without work in the Third World, but also the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants, and even the members of the overthrown bourgeoisie.

• It will be without nations, because the productive process has already gone well beyond the framework of the nation, and in doing so has rendered the nation obsolete as an organisational framework for human society. By creating the first planetary human society, capitalism has already gone beyond the national framework within which it was itself born. Just as the bourgeois revolution destroyed all the old feudal particularities and frontiers (taxes on the movement of goods within national frontiers, laws, or weights and measures, specific to this or that town or region), so the proletarian revolution will put an end to the last division of humanity into nations.

• It will be without money, because the notion of exchange will no longer have any meaning in communism, whose abundance will allow the satisfaction of the needs of every member of society. Capitalism has created the first society where commodity exchange has been extended to the whole of production (contrary to previous societies, where commodity exchange was limited essentially to luxury goods, or certain articles which could not be produced locally such as salt). Today, capitalism is being strangled by its inability to sell on the market everything that it is capable of producing. The very fact of buying and selling has become a barrier to production. Exchange will therefore disappear. With it will disappear the very idea of the commodity, including the first commodity of all: wage labour.

These three principles are directly opposed to the commonplaces of bourgeois ideology, according to which there exists a greedy and violent "human nature" which will determine for ever the divisions between exploiters and exploited, of between nations. Obviously, this idea of "human nature" suits the ruling class down to the ground, justifying its class domination and preventing the working class from identifying clearly what is really responsible for the misery and the massacres that overwhelm humanity today. But it has nothing whatever to do with reality: whereas the "nature" (ie the behaviour) of other animal species is determined by their natural environment, the more humanity's domination over nature advances, the more "human nature" is determined by our social, not by our natural environment.

The transformed relations between man and nature

The three points we have outlined above are no more than the briefest of sketches. Nonetheless, they have profound implications for the communist society of the future.

It is true that marxists have always avoided drawing up "blueprints", first because communism will be built by the real movement of the great masses of humanity, and second because we can imagine what communism will be like even less than a peasant of the 11th century could imagine modern capitalism. This does not, however, prevent us from indicating some of the most general characteristics that follow from what we have just said (very briefly, of course, for lack of space).

Probably the most radical change will spring from the disappearance of the contradiction between the human being and his labour. Capitalist society has raised to its highest point the contradiction - which has always existed in class society - between labour, in other words the activity we only undertake because we are forced to do so, and leisure, in other words the time when we are free (in a very limited sense) to choose our activity.[15] The constraint that forces us to work is due on the one hand to the scarcity imposed by the limits of labour productivity, and on the other by the fact that a part of the fruit of labour is seized by the exploiting class. In communism, these constraints no longer exist: for the first time in history, the human species will produce freely, and production will be directed entirely towards the satisfaction of human need. We can even suppose that the words "labour" and "leisure" will disappear from the language, since no activity will be undertaken constrained by necessity. The decision to produce or not to produce, will depend not only on the utility of the thing produced, but also on the pleasure or interest of the productive process itself.

The very idea of the "satisfaction of needs" will change its nature. Basic needs (food, clothing, shelter), will occupy a proportionally less and less important place, while the needs determined by the social evolution of the species will come more and more to the fore. There will no longer be any distinction between "artistic" work and that which is not. Capitalism is a society which has exacerbated to the extreme the contradiction between "art" and "non-art". Whereas the great majority of artists in history never signed their work, it is only with the rise of capitalism that the artist begins to sign his work and that art becomes to be a specific activity separated from day-to-day production. Today, this tendency has reached its paroxysm, with an almost total separation between the "fine arts" on the one hand (incomprehensible for the great majority of the population and reserved for a tiny intellectual minority), and the industrialised artistic production of advertising and "pop culture", both of them being reserved for "leisure activity". All this is nothing but the fruit of the contradiction between the human being and his labour. With the disappearance of this contradiction, the contradiction between "useful" and "artistic" production will also disappear. Beauty, the satisfaction of the senses and the mind, will also be fundamental human needs that the productive process will have to satisfy.[16]

Education will also change its whole nature. In any society, the purpose of educating children is to allow them to take their place in adult society. Under capitalism "taking their place in adult society", means taking their place in a system of brutal exploitation, where those who are not profitable do not, in fact, have any place. The purpose of education (which the "alternative worlders" tell us should not be "for sale") is therefore above all to equip the new generation with abilities which can be sold on the market, and in this age of state capitalism to ensure that the new generation has the abilities necessary to strengthen the national capital against its competitors on the world market. It is also obvious that capitalism has absolutely no interest in encouraging a critical attitude towards its own social organisation. In short, the purpose of education is nothing other than to subdue young minds and to mould them to capitalist society and the demands of its productive process; small wonder then, that schools are more and more like factories, and teachers like workers on the line.

Under communism, on the contrary, the integration of the young into the adult world will demand the greatest possible awakening of all their physical and intellectual senses. In a system of production that has been completely freed from the demands of profit, the adult world will open to the child gradually, as his capacities develop, and the young adult will no longer be exposed to the harrowing experience of leaving school to be thrown into the ferocious competition of the labour market. Just as their will no longer be any contradiction between "labour" and "leisure" or between "production" and "art", so there will no longer be any contradiction between school and the "world of work". The very words "school", "factory", "office", "art gallery", "museum" will disappear[17] or change completely their meaning, since the whole of human activity will combine in one harmonious effort to develop and satisfy the physical, intellectual, and sensual needs of the species.

The proletariat's responsibility

Communists are not utopians. We have tried here to give the briefest, and inevitably most limited of sketches of what must be the nature of the new human society that will be born from present-day capitalism. In this sense, the "alternative worlders'" slogan, that "another world is possible" (or even "other worlds are possible") is a pure mystification. Only one other world is possible: communism.

But there is nothing inevitable about this new world's birth. In this respect, there is no difference between capitalism and the other class societies which preceded it, where "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes".[18] In other words, no matter how necessary the communist revolution is not inevitable. The passage from capitalism to the new world will not be possible without the violence of the proletarian revolution as its inevitable midwife.[19] But the alternative, in the conditions of advanced decomposition of today's society, is the destruction not just of the two "contending classes", but of the whole human species. Whence the gigantic responsibility that weighs on the shoulders of the world revolutionary class.

Seen from the situation today, the development of the proletariat's revolutionary capacity might seem such an impossibly far-off dream that there is a great temptation to "do something" now, even if it means rubbing shoulders with those old villains of the Stalinist and Socialist parties, in other words with the left wing of the bourgeoisie's state apparatus. But for the revolutionary minorities, reformism is not a stop-gap that we do "for want of anything better", on the contrary it is a lethal compromise with the class enemy. The road towards the revolution which alone can create "another world" will be long and difficult, but it is the only road that exists.

Jens

 

There has been a lot of hype in the mass media about the so-called 'Greatest Generation' -- the generation that fought in World War II. First there was "Saving Private Ryan," the Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks, which glorified the sacrifices of those who fought in the war. More recently, there has been a media campaign to erect a monument to the soldiers and sailors who "made the world safe for the American way of life." Tom Brokaw, one of the most prominent television news reporters/broadcasters in the United States, has published two books on this generation, both those who fought in the war. The television news has been inundated with "heart-warming" stories about "long overdue" medals and citations being awarded to aging veterans. Various tributes have been made to the factory workers who worked long and hard to produce the weapons and materials needed to prosecute the war. A strong dose of gratitude is handed to those men and women who were not sent into combat but who worked under often dangerous and difficult conditions to keep production for war going at a fierce pace. There has been homage to all the women who worked as nurses or factory workers or truck drivers to keep war production going.

At the start of the 21st century, more than fifty-five years after the days of the Second Imperialist World War, which pitted the newer, major industrial powers such as Germany and Italy, against the more mature, dominant capitalist powers, such as the USA, Britain, and France - the media has been intent on demonstrating that wars can be good, wars can be popular, and that war is heroic. They are trying to take advantage of the aging veterans who are reportedly dying at the rate of several thousand a day - the fathers and grandfathers of the current generations of the working class, which has not been ideologically defeated by the ruling class and convinced to sacrifice itself for imperialism -- to glorify the "honor" of imperialist slaughter.

The intervening years-between the end of the Second World War and today- has seen disaffection among the population in America, and in other major powers, with the notion of major war. For years now, the US as the strongest military power and the dominant imperialist power on the planet, has been doing battle in small theaters- like the infamous war in Vietnam and as well as in the former component parts of Yugoslavia. Recently, the US has striven to 'ideally' win quickly through the use of incredibly overwhelming power. This follows the 'Powell Doctrine' that was used in the Gulf War. A televised war, which is over very quickly, is thought to be more palatable to the general population. We cannot help but note, that the former general is serving as Secretary of State for the new Bush administration.

Imperialist war is never, in the current period of capitalist decadence and social decomposition, in the interests of the working class. While certain 'generations' of the proletariat have been enlisted by the capitalist state to fight wars for capitalism during the twentieth century, it has not been in interests of the working class. Historically, the working class has recognized that the matters of imperialist conquest and war entail the destruction of millions of lives and of many of the accomplishments of humanity made over many centuries. Rather than celebrate the imperialist butchery as the bourgeois ideological campaign tries to do, to genuinely honor the suffering and hardships of our fathers and grandfathers requires that the working class today guarantee that capitalism will never again lead humanity into another orgy of destruction and murder, that the working class today destroy the capitalist system.

This generation, and the generations to come have challenges awaiting. There is a real need to fight the most important war, the war against the decadent capitalist system. Such a revolutionary struggle, on an international scale, can develop the basis for a new society freed from the rule of capital and controlled by the vast majority of the population - the proletariat.

Eric Fischer

The end of the year 2003 saw world capitalism take a new step towards the abyss - a step represented by the second Gulf war and the creation of a military quagmire in a strategically vital area of the globe. This war has been crucial in determining the new imperialist equilibrium, with the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq and the opposition to this move from various imperialist powers who are more and more adopting positions antagonistic to those of the USA. In the face of this new butchery, the main revolutionary groups who make up the international communist left have once again shown that they are capable of responding to the propaganda of the bourgeoisie by taking up resolutely internationalist positions. Against the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie, which are aimed at disorienting the proletariat, these groups defended the ABC of marxism. This does not of course mean that these organisations all defend the same positions. Indeed, from our point of view, the intervention of most of them has shown important weaknesses, in particular concerning the understanding of the phase of imperialist conflicts opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc and the resulting dissolution of its western rival, and also when it comes to discerning what is at stake in these conflicts. These differences must be understood as the expression of the heterogeneous and difficult process through which consciousness ripens within the working class - a process which also affects the groups of the political vanguard. In this sense, as long as class principles are not abandoned, these differences should not constitute an element of frontal opposition between the components of the same revolutionary camp; rather they prove the need for a permanent debate between them. A public debate is not only the precondition for clarification within the revolutionary camp, but is also a factor of clarification which makes it possible to draw the line between revolutionaries and the groups of the extreme left wing of capital (Trotskyism, official anarchism, etc). It can thus help the new elements searching for class positions to orient themselves vis-a-vis the different elements of the proletarian camp. 

It is in this spirit that our organisation launched an appeal to other revolutionary organisations when the second Gulf war began, the aim being to promote a joint initiative (documents, public meetings) which would make it possible "for internationalist positions to be heard as widely as possible&quot:[1] [75] "the existing groups of the communist left all share these fundamental positions, whatever the divergences that may exist among them. The ICC is well aware of these divergences and has never tried to hide them. On the contrary, it has always tried in its press to point out these disagreements with the other groups and combat the analyses that we consider incorrect. This being said, and in line with the attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1915 at Zimmerwald and of the Italian Fraction during the 1930s, the ICC considers that real communists today have the responsibility of presenting as widely as possible to the class as a whole, in the face of imperialist war and the bourgeoisie?s campaigns, the fundamental positions of internationalism. From our point of view, this presupposes that these groups of the communist left do not restrict themselves to their own intervention, but that they join together in order to express in common their common positions. For the ICC a common intervention of the communist left would have a political impact which would go well beyond the sum of their respective forces which, as we all know, are only too weak at the present time. This is why the ICC is proposing to the following groups to meet in order to discuss what means could permit the communist left to speak with once voice in defence of proletarian internationalism, without hindering or calling into question the specific intervention of any group" (ibid).

This appeal was sent to:

-         the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP);

-         the International Communist Party (Il Comunista, Le Proletaire);

-         the International Communist party (Il Partito, so-called &quotFlorence" party);

-         the International Communist party (Il Programma Comunista).

Unfortunately, the appeal was rejected either through written replies (ICP/Le Proletaire and the IBRP) or was simply ignored. In International Review n°113 we already noted the replies and took position on them or on the silence of other groups.

In the present article, we have two objectives. On the one hand, to show through an analysis of the positions taken up by the main proletarian groups towards the war that there really is such a thing as a proletarian political milieu, whatever the level of understanding reached by the groups who comprise it. This is a milieu which because of its loyalty to proletarian internationalism is clearly distinct from the various leftist formations and their revolutionary verbiage and from all the more openly bourgeois or inter-classist organisations. On the other hand, we will focus on certain divergences we have with these groups, showing that they correspond to erroneous views on their part while also arguing that they are not an obstacle to a certain unity of action against the world bourgeoisie. In particular, we will try to show that however sincerely these different views may be held, they are being used as a pretext for rejecting any such unity of action.

Whatever its different elements may think, the proletarian political milieu does exist

In the letter of appeal to revolutionary groups, we put forward the criteria which, in our opinion, represented a minimal basis which, notwithstanding the divergences that may exist on other points, were enough to distinguish the revolutionary camp from the camp of the counter-revolution:

 "a) Imperialist war is not the result of a ?bad? or ?criminal? policy of this or that government, or of this or that sector of the ruling class; capitalism as a whole is responsible for imperialist war.

b) In this sense, the position of the proletariat and communists against imperialist war can in no way line up, even ?critically? behind one or other of the warring camps; concretely, denouncing the American offensive against Iraq in no way means offering the slightest support to this country or its bourgeoisie.

  c) The only position in conformity with the interests of the proletariat is the struggle against capitalism as a whole, and therefore against all the sectors of the world bourgeoisie, with a perspective not of a ?peaceful capitalism? but of overthrowing the capitalist system and setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat.

 d) Pacifism is at best a petty bourgeois illusion which tends to turn the proletariat away from its strict class terrain; more often it is nothing but a ploy cynically used by the bourgeoisie in order to drag the proletariat into the imperialist war in defence of the ?pacifist? and ?democratic? sectors of the ruling class. In this sense, the defence of the internationalist proletarian position is inseparable from the unsparing denunciation of pacifism" (ibid).

All the groups to whom this appeal was addressed have, as we will now show, satisfied these minimum criteria in the positions they have taken up:

The ICP (Programma) gives a very correct framework for the current phase when it says that "the agony of a mode of production based on class divisions is much more ferocious than we could imagine. History teaches us that when the social foundations are shaken by incessant tensions and contradictions, the energies of the ruling classes are mobilised towards survival at any cost ? and thus antagonisms grow sharper, the tendency towards destruction increases, confrontations multiply at the commercial, political and military level. At every level, in all classes, society is gripped by a fever which devours it and spreads to all its organs&quot.[2] [76]

Il Partito and Le Proletaire also contribute towards developing a framework which shows that the war is not the fault of this or that &quotbad" side, but results from imperialist conflict on a global scale:

-         "The Euro front, to the extent that it resists, is not a force for peace, opposed to the war-like dollar front; it is one of the camps in the general inter-imperialist confrontation which the regime of capital is rushing towards"[3] [77]

-         "the war against Iraq, in spite of the disparity of forces, cannot be considered as a colonial war; it is from every point of view an imperialist war on both sides, even if the state being fought is a far less developed one, it is nevertheless bourgeois and the expression of a capitalist society"[4] [78]

-         "the so-called ?peace camp?, ie the imperialist states who judge the American attack on Iraq to be prejudicial to their interests, are concerned that, emboldened by its rapid victory, the US will make them pay dearly for their opposition, if only by beginning to evict them from the region. The sordid imperialist rivalries which are the cause of the opposition between states are coming out into broad daylight. The Americans declare that France and Russia must generously renounce the gigantic credits they have bestowed on Iraq, while the other side is indignant that the contracts for the ?reconstruction? of the country are being handed out to the big US companies and that oil sales will be in the same hands?As for this famous ?reconstruction? and the prosperity promised to the Iraqi people, it suffices to look at the ?reconstruction? of Afghanistan and the situation in ex-Yugoslavia ? two regions where western troops are still present ? to understand that for the bourgeoisie on both sides of the Atlantic, it?s merely a question of reconstructing the installations needed to make production profitable and ensure the prosperity of capitalist enterprises&quot.[5] [79]

These positions thus leave no place for the defence, even critical, of either camp. They constitute, in fact, the granite foundation for a denunciation of all the countries and political forces which hypocritically camouflage the defence of their own imperialist designs behind the defence of peace.

Thus for Il Partito "the common and united condemnation of the war [on the part of the western countries, editor?s note] is based on an undeniable equivocation since this aspiration has an origin and a significance which is different, if not frankly opposed, for the antagonistic classes.

 The ?European party? represents big capital and big finance as established on this side of the Atlantic ? today more and more in competition with the Americans and opposed to this war. The finance magnates may not personally wave banners in the street but they have a solid control of the apparatus of the media, parties and unions which are loyal to the regime and which are used to orient fragile Public Opinion on the right and the left. For Capital, in fact, even if the wars are often ?unjust?, they are sometimes ?necessary?. It?s extremely easy to distinguish one from the other: those which are ?necessary? are the ones which your side wins, those which are ?unjust? are those which the other side wins. For example: for the European capitalisms which were involved in the horrible carve-up in Yugoslavia, the bombing of Belgrade (which was almost worse than the current bombing of Iraq) was ?necessary?; the bombing of Iraq, by contrast, where these powers are seeing rich oil contracts annulled by the ?democratic administration? imposed by Iraq?s ?liberators?, is ?unjust?&quot.[6] [80]

For Programma Comunista "Not a man not a penny for imperialist wars: open struggle against our own national bourgeoisie, whether it be Italian or American, German or French, Serbian or Iraqi" .[7] [81]

For Il Partito Comunista, "The governments of France and Germany, supported by Russia and China, are against this war today but only in order to defend their own imperialist interests, threatened by the US offensive in Iraq and the region&quot.[8] [82]

For the IBRP: "the real enemy of the USA is the Euro, which is beginning to be a dangerous threat to the absolute hegemony of the dollar&quot.[9] [83]

The only attitude consistent with these principles is a struggle to the death against capital, whatever garb it wears, and an unconditional denunciation of pacifism. This is what these groups have done, the IBRP in particular:

-         "Europe ? the Franco-German axis in particular ? is trying to counter the USA?s military plans by playing the pacifist card and has thus set an ideological trap which many have fallen for. We know quite well, and the facts are there to prove it, that whenever it has felt the need to do so, no European state has hesitated to defend its economic interests by force of arms. What we are seeing today is the formation of a new nationalism ? a European supranationalism. This is already at the heart of many declarations by the ?dissident? camp. The very reference to a Europe of human rights and social values, opposed to the exacerbated individualism of the Americans, is the basis for a future alignment around the objectives of the European bourgeoisie in its final confrontation with the American bourgeoisie"[10] [84]

-         "in wide sections of the parliamentary ?left? and their appendices in the ?movement? (a large part of the ?anti-globalisation? movement), reference is made to the Europe of human rights and social values, opposed to the exacerbated individualism of the Americans. They try to make us forget that this Europe is the same which ? when we?re talking about ?social values? ? has already made, and demands with ever greater insistence, new cuts in pensions (the so-called reforms); it?s the same Europe which has already laid off millions of workers and which is now pressing to more than ever reduce labour power to a disposable commodity, via the devastating and increasing precariousness of employment&quot.[11] [85]

All this testifies to the existence of a camp which has remained faithful to the principles of the proletariat and of the communist left, regardless of how far the various groups within it are aware of this.

As we have said, this does not mean that there are no important divergences between the ICC and these groups. The problem is not the existence of these divergences in themselves but the fact that these groups use them as a justification for rejecting a common response to a particularly grave historical situation. Moreover, using these divergences in this way prevents them from being clarified through a serious public debate.

How to misuse Lenin to justify joint inaction

In International Review n°113, we replied to Le Proletaire?s charge of frontism and the IBRP?s accusation of idealism, which is supposed to explain the alleged errors in many of the ICC?s analyses. We have not received any response to our arguments with the exception of an article published in Le Proletaire n°466. For this latter organisation, our differences on the question of revolutionary defeatism - and the fact that we do not consider these a barrier to working together - fully justify the criticism of frontism levelled at our appeal for joint action.

In the light of this article in Le Proletaire, we have to come back to this question of revolutionary defeatism. The article contains a new element which we will concentrate on here:

"It is not true that the organisations ranged in this category are basically in agreement on the essentials, that they share a common position, even on the one question of war and internationalism. On the contrary they are opposed on programmatic and political positions which tomorrow will be vital for the proletarian struggle and for the revolution, just as today they are opposed on the orientations and directives for action that need to be given to the rare elements searching for class positions. On the question of war in particular, we have stressed the notion of revolutionary defeatism because since Lenin this is what has characterised the communist position in imperialist wars. Now the ICC is precisely opposed to revolutionary defeatism. How then would it be possible to express a common position which, when you rub it a bit, when you look beyond the grand and beautiful phrases about overthrowing capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, you find that it doesn?t exist. Common action would only be possible in such circumstances by agreeing to paste over or attenuate irreconcilable differences, ie, by hiding them from the workers we want to address, by presenting a false image of a ?communist left? united on the essential to militants in other countries we are trying to reach, ie by deceiving them. Camouflaging one?s positions ? that?s what it amounts to whether you will or no ? making unitary proposals with the aim of finding some immediate or contingent success: isn?t that the classic definition of opportunism?"[12] [86]  (their emphases).

The ICP persists in ignoring our argument that "To talk of ?frontism? and a ?lowest common denominator? not only does nothing to clarify the disagreements among the internationalists, it is a factor of confusion inasmuch as it places the real divergences, the class frontier that separates the internationalists from the whole bourgeoisie, from far right to extreme left, at the same level as the disagreements among the internationalists" (International Review n°113). At the same time, out of ignorance (that is by refusing to acquaint itself with the critique of political positions, which is no minor fault for a revolutionary organisation) or simply for reasons of easy polemic, it does not report the ICC?s position on the question of revolutionary defeatism. It simply states that "the ICC is precisely opposed to revolutionary defeatism", leaving the door open to all kinds of interpretations, including, why not, the idea that the ICC is for the defence of the fatherland in case of attack by another power. Thus we need to recall our position on this question, which we developed at the time of the first Gulf war. In the article &quotThe proletarian political milieu faced with the Gulf war in 1991"[13] [87] we said the following:

"This slogan was put forward by Lenin during the first world war. It was designed to respond to the sophistries of the ?centrists?, who while being ?in principle? against any participation in imperialist war, advised that you should wait until the workers in the ?enemy? countries were ready to enter the struggle against the war before calling on workers in ?your? country to do the same. In support of this position, they put forward the argument that if workers of one country rose up before those in the opposing countries, they would facilitate the imperialist victory of the latter.

Against this conditional ?internationalism?, Lenin replied very correctly that the working class of any given country had no common interests with ?its? bourgeoisie. In particular, he pointed out that the latter?s defeat could only facilitate the workers? struggle, as had been the case with the Paris Commune (following France?s defeat by Prussia) and the 1905 revolution in Russia (which was beaten in the war with Japan). From this observation he concluded that each proletariat should ?wish for? the defeat of ?its? bourgeoisie.

This last position was already wrong at the time, since it led the revolutionaries of each country to demand for ?their? proletariat the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution, whereas the revolution had to take place on a world-wide level, and above all in the big advanced countries, which were all involved in the war. However, with Lenin, the weakness of this position never put his intransigent internationalism in question (we can even say that it was precisely his intransigence which led to the error). In particular, Lenin never had the idea of supporting the bourgeoisie of an ?enemy? country ? even if this might be the logical conclusion of his ?wishes?.

But the incoherence of the position was used later on a number of occasions by bourgeois parties draped in ?Communist? colours, in order to justify their participation in imperialist war. Thus, for example, after the signing of the Russo-German pact in 1939, the French Stalinists suddenly discovered the virtues of ?proletarian internationalism? and ?revolutionary defeatism?, virtues which they had long ago forgotten and which they repudiated no less rapidly as soon as Germany launched its attack on the USSR in 1941. The Italian Stalinists also used the term ?revolutionary defeatism? after 1941 to justify their policy of heading the resistance against Mussolini. Today, the Trotskyists in the numerous countries allied against Saddam Hussein use the same term to justify their support for the latter&quot.

Thus it is not the ICC?s approach which is in question here but that of our critics, who have not assimilated in any real depths of the slogans of the workers? movement during the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

Once we have made this clarification on the question of revolutionary defeatism, are we to continue thinking that the divergences we have pointed to do not constitute an obstacle to a common response to the war by the different groups? We do not think that the mistakes of the groups to whom we addressed our appeal, put their internationalism into question. The groups who defend revolutionary defeatism are not like the Stalinist and Trotskyist traitors who use the ambiguity of Lenin?s slogans to legitimise war. They are simply proletarian political formations who for different reasons have not all put their clocks right on a certain number of questions facing the workers? movement.

Sectarianism towards the communist left and opportunism towards leftism

The IBRP, let us recall, thinks that its differences with the ICC are too important for a common response on the question of war.

However, the following passage from a leaflet by Bataglia Comunista, one of the groups of the IBRP, expresses a profound convergence on the way to analyse the dynamic of the balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie - a question on which, the IBRP insists, our differences are particularly wide:

"In some ways, there is no longer a need in war to mobilise the working class at the front: it is enough for it to remain at home, in the factories and the offices, working for the war. The problem is posed when this class refuses to work for the war and thus becomes a serious obstacle to the development of the war itself. It is this ? and not demonstrations, however large, of pacifist citizens, and still less vigils blessed by the Pope ? which is an obstacle to war: that really could stop the war"[14] [88] (emphasis in the original).

 This passage expresses the perfectly correct idea that war and the class struggle are not two independent variables but are antithetical, in the sense that the more the proletariat is enlisted the more the bourgeoisie has a free hand to make war. In the same way, the more "the working class refuses to work for the war", the more "it becomes a serious obstacle to the development of the war itself&quot. This idea as formulated by Battaglia Comunista[15] [89] is very similar to what underlies our notion of the historic course, the historic result of the two dynamics mentioned above: the permanent tendency of capitalism to go to war and the historic tendency of an undefeated working class towards a decisive confrontation with its class enemy. However, Battaglia has always contested the validity of this position and accused it of being idealist. As with other points on which Battaglia has raised this charge of idealism and of failing to grasp the current situation, we have responded in detail with many articles and directly in a number of polemics.[16] [90]

We might expect that an organisation which is such a stickler for detail when it comes to examining its divergences with the ICC would have a similar attitude towards other groups. This is not the case.

We refer here to the attitude of the IBRP via its sympathising group and political representative in North America, the Internationalist Workers Group (IWG) which publishes Internationalist Notes. This group intervened alongside anarchists and held a joint public meeting with Red and Black Notes, some councilists and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCP), which seems to be a typically leftist and activist group. Recently the IWG published a statement of solidarity with &quotcomrades" of the OCP arrested and jailed for vandalism during the last demonstrations against the war in Toronto. It also held a joint public meeting with &quotanarcho-communist comrades" in Quebec.

While we ourselves fully recognise the need to be present in the debates between the political groups of the swamp, those who oscillate between revolutionary and bourgeois positions, in order to promote the influence of the communist left within these debates, we were to say the least disconcerted by the &quotmethod" employed here. It seems to display a &quotbroadmindedness" quite at odds with the policy of rigour which the European IBRP claims to adopt. Given the difference in method here, and thus in principle, we thought it necessary to address the appeal for a joint initiative to the IWG through a letter which, among other things, said:  

"If we understand correctly, the IBRP?s refusal is based essentially on the fact that the differences the IBRP has with our positions are too great. To cite the letter we received from the IBRP: ? a united action against the war or on any other problem could only be envisaged between partners that are well defined and politically identified in an unequivocal manner, and who share positions which all consider essential?. However, we have learned through the IBRP?s website (the last issue of Internationalist Notes and leaflets by Black and Red) that Internationalist Notes in Canada has held a joint meeting against the war with anarcho-communists in Quebec and with some libertarian/councilist and anti-poverty activists in Toronto. It seems evident to us that while there are substantial differences between the ICC and the IBRP on a certain number of questions, these become insignificant compared to the differences between the communist left and anarchists (even when they stick the word ?communist? to their name), and anti-poverty activists who on their website don?t even appear to take an ?anti-capitalist? position. On this basis, we can only conclude that the IBRP has two different strategies towards its intervention on the war: one on the North American continent and one in Europe. It would appear that the reasons the Bureau gives for rejecting common action with the ICC in Europe are not applicable in Canada and America. We are thus addressing this letter specifically to Internationalist Notes as the representative of the IBRP in North America in order to reiterate the proposal we have already made to the IBRP as a whole&quot.[17] [91]

We never received any reply to this letter ? which already expresses an approach alien to revolutionary communist politics, an approach in which you only take political positions according to one?s mood and according to what troubles one the least.[18] [92] If there was no reply to this letter, this is no accident: it?s because there could not be a coherent response without some kind of self-critique. Furthermore, the policy carried out by the IWG in North America is certainly not a specificity of the American comrades but bears the typical mark of the IBRP which is well-versed in reconciling sectarianism with opportunism: sectarianism in its relations with the communist left, opportunism towards everyone else.[19] [93]

More generally, the rejection of our appeal is not based on the existence of real divergences between our organisations, but rather on a concern which is both sectarian and opportunist: to remain separate from others in order to carry out one?s own activity in a nice quiet corner without worrying about facing any criticisms or having to deal with the incurable trouble-makers of the ICC.

Such an attitude is neither fortuitous nor unprecedented. It cannot help but remind us of the attitude of the degenerating Third International which closed itself off from the communist left ? ie the current which was clearest and most determined in the definition of revolutionary positions ? while opening itself out to the right, with its policy of fusion with the centrist currents (the &quotTerzini" in Italy, the USPD in Germany) and of the &quotUnited Front" with social democracy, which had shown itself to be the butcher of the revolution. In the 1940s, Internationalisme, the organ of the Communist Left of France, the ancestor of the ICC, referred to this opportunist approach of the CI when it was criticising, the foundation of Internationalist Communist Party of Italy (Int CP), the common ancestor of all the Bordigist ICPs and of Battaglia: "It is no less astonishing that today, 23 years after the discussion between Bordiga and Lenin around the formation of the Communist Party of Italy, we are seeing the same error repeating itself. The CI?s method, which was so violently combated by the Left Fraction, and which had such disastrous consequences for the proletariat, is today being adopted by the Fraction itself through the construction of the PC in Italy&quot.[20] [94]

In the 1930s, we saw the same opportunist approach from the Trotskyists, not least in its relations towards the Italian left.[21] [95] And when there was a split in the latter at the time of the foundation of the ICP, the attitude of the new party towards the GCF could only recall to mind the attitude of Trotskyism towards the Italian left. Even at the time it would not have been correct to have talked about the degeneration of the newly-created Int CP, contrary to Trotskysim and the CI before that; and today we can?t talk about the degeneration of the IBRP or the ICPs. But it still remains the case that the foundation of the Int CP was a step backwards compared to the activity and clarity of the Italian Left Fraction in the days of Bilan, in the 1930s. This opportunism was criticised by Internationalisme as follows:

-         "There are, comrades, two methods of regroupment: there is the one used at the first congress of the CI, which invited all the groups and parties that claimed to be communist to take part in a confrontation of positions. And there is the method of Trotsky who, in 1931, and without any explanation, ?reorganised? the International Opposition and its Secretariat by carefully eliminating the Italian Fraction and other groups who had previously belonged to it (older comrades will remember a letter of protest sent by the Italian Fraction to all sections of the International Opposition, attacking this arbitrary and bureaucratic action by Trotsky)"[22] [96]

-         "The PCInt was created during the feverish weeks of 1943 (?) Not only did it set aside the positive work that the Italian Fraction had done during the long period between 1927 and 1944, but on a number of points, the position of the new party was well behind that of Bordiga?s abstentionist fraction in 1921. Notably on the political United Front, where certain proposals for a United Front were made locally towards the Stalinist Party, on the participation in municipal and parliamentary elections, abandoning the old abstentionist position; on antifascism where the doors of the party were opened wide to elements from the Resistance; not to mention on the union question where the party went all the way back to the old position of the CI ? trade union fractions whose task was to struggle for the conquest of the unions, and, going even further, the policy of forming minority unions (the position of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition). In a word, in the name of a party of the International Communist Left, we have an Italian formation of a classic Trotskyist type, minus the defence of the USSR. The same proclamation of a party in a reactionary period, the same opportunist political practise, the same sterile activism, the same contempt for theoretical discussion and confrontation of ideas, both within the party and with other revolutionary groups&quot.[23] [97]

Thus, to this day Battaglia Comunista and the ICPs bear the marks of this original opportunism. Nevertheless, as we have already said, we still believe in the possibility and the necessity for a debate between the different components of the revolutionary camp, and we will certainly not abandon this conviction because of yet another refusal, no matter how irresponsible it may be.

Ezechiele, December 2003.