This is the first issue of the International Review of the International Communist Current. The necessity for such a publication has been seen clearly by all the groups which make up our current during the course of long discussions which preceded and prepared the ground for the International Conference at the beginning of this year. By taking the decision to publish the Review in English, French and Spanish, the conference not only took a decisive step in the process of unifying our current, but has also blazed a trail for the regroupment of revolutionaries in general.

In this period of general crisis, pregnant with convulsions and social upheavals, one of the most urgent and arduous tasks facing revolutionaries is that of welding together the meagre revolutionary forces that are currently dispersed throughout the world. This task can only be undertaken by beginning straight away on an international level. This has always been a central pre-occupation of our current. Our Review is designed to help fulfill this need; by embarking upon its publication we intend to make it an instrument, a pole of attraction, for the international regroupment of revolutionaries.

The Review will be above all the expression of the theoretical endeavours of our current, since only this theoretical endeavour, based on a coherence of political positions and orientation, can serve as the basis for the regroupment and real intervention of revolutionaries.

While the Review will function as an organ of research and discussion indispensable for the clarification of the problems which face the workers' movement, we do not intend to make it into a review of marxology so dear to academics and professors. Rather the Review will be first and foremost a fighting weapon anchored solidly on the fundamental class frontiers, the revolutionary marxist positions, acquired through the historic struggle of the proletariat against all the species of leftism, confusionism, and 'modernism' (from Marcuse to Invariance and its heirs); tendencies which are so widespread today and which serve to seriously encumber the development of the class struggle and to obstruct the movement towards the reconstitution of the proletarian revolutionary party.

We do not claim to be the bearers of a Programme complete in all its details. We are perfectly well aware of our inadequacies which can only be overcome by the unceasing effort of revolutionaries to obtain greater coherence and a higher understanding within the development of the class struggle.

We also extend an invitation to all revolutionary groups who are not organizationally part of our current, but who display the same pre-occupations as us, to associate themselves with these efforts, by multiplying and strengthening contacts and correspondence, and by sending us critiques, texts, and discussion articles which the Review will publish to the best of its abilities.

Some people will consider that the publication of the Review is a precipitous action. It is nothing of the kind. We have nothing in common with those noisy activists whose activity is based on a voluntarism as frenzied as it is ephemeral. But it is no less important to vigorously reject any tendency towards the formation of petty study groups which content themselves with publishing from time to time little essays which have the purpose of satisfying their authors' egos rather than expressing a will to participate and intervene in the political struggle of the working class. An implacable struggle must be waged against this narrow localist spirit of family sects. Only those groups who understand and effectively assume the role of militant activity within the class can be considered revolutionary.

As for those who can do nothing but denigrate the notion of a militant, from the Situationists of yesterday to all today's varieties of Invariance, we can only oppose them with disdain and indifference. Everyone to their posts; some of us will enter the class struggle, the rest can remain on the outside. It is much better that way.

We will leave the disillusioned contestants of the decomposing petty-bourgeoisie to contemplate their navels. For we proletarian militants, the Review is an arm of criticism which will serve to prepare the passage to criticism by arms.

This first issue is entirely dedicated to the main discussion documents submitted to the International Conference. We have not been able to include all the texts in this issue, which even so is too voluminous. The discussions raised are far from being closed; they will be taken up again in future issues, which will appear every three months. For the moment it is impossible to ensure a more frequent publication. This will be partly compensated for by the pamphlets in various languages which we intend to publish.

A great step forward has been made.

We ask all revolutionaries to give us their active support.

The Editors,

International Communist Current

April, 1975

 

For several years, Revolution Internationale (France), Internationalism (USA), and World Revolution (UK) have organized international meetings and conferences in order to develop political discussion on the perspectives for the class-struggle, and to encourage a greater understanding of class positions today. This year, in addition to the groups already cited, two groups new to our current attended the international conference: Accion Proletaria (Spain) and Rivoluzione Internazionale (Italy) and we also welcomed a delegate from Internacionalismo, the group in our current in Venezuela. This conference was mainly oriented toward the necessity of organizing the intervention and will to act of revolutionaries into an international framework.

Evan though our current consisted only of one or two groups in different countries (at the end of the period of reaction and at the beginning of the new period which opened up in 1968), the nature of the proletarian struggle and the class positions that we defend forced us to an international political coherence. Today, confronted with the worsening crisis and the heightening of struggles, this fundamentally unified political orientation and the years of common work have enabled us to create an international organizational framework for our current, so that we can concentrate our efforts in several countries.
In the context of political confusions prevalent at this time, and in view of the weakness of revolutionary forces, we consider that it is very important to insist on the necessity, as in any period of heightening class struggle, to work towards a regrouprment of revolutionaries. For this reason, we invited groups whose political positions are moving towards those of the current: Pour Une Intervention Communiste (France), Revolutionary Workers Group (USA), Revolutionary Perspectives(UK), to participate at our conference. The confrontation of ideas between our current and these groups has helped to develop the analyses and orientations which the different groups defend faced with the political tasks of today.

The situation today

During the long years of the post-war reconstruction period, revolutionary marxists have said over and over again that the capitalist system, (having entered into its period of decadence since World War I), only 'prospered' provisionally thanks to the many palliatives of reconstruction: statist measures, arms economies etc; and that eventually the inherent contradictions of the system are going to clearly explode into an open crisis still deeper than that of 1929. Today the crisis is no longer a secret to anybody and the reality of the system's basic sickness has swept away the exalting bourgeoisie and the erudite ‘marxologues' such as Socialism ou Barbarie who believed we had seen ‘the end of crises', the ‘superseding’ of marxism, or as Marcuse thought, the ‘embourgeoicisement’ of the proletariat. Our current has for seven years been analysing all the characteristics of the crisis which is now accelerating so rapidly; in its general trend 1974 mark a qualitative and quantitative decline in the economic situation of capitalism (in the East and in the West) and has demonstrated the ephemeral and mistaken nature of the ‘mini-boom' of 1972. Inflation, unemployment, monetary crises and trade wars, the fall of stock market values as well as the rates of growth of the advanced economies, are signs of the general crisis of over-production and of the saturation of markets which undermine the world capitalist system at its roots.

Contrary to 1929 capitalism today has tried as much as possible to alleviate the effects of the crisis by means of statist structures. In spite of the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries (as in the continual war in Indo¬china, the confrontations in the Middle East and Cyprus) and the reinforcing of the imperialist blocs, which lead towarls war (a coarse inherent in the economic crises of decadent capitalism), generalized war will not occur as long as the combativity of the working class continues to develop. At the conference the groups in our current elaborated the perspective, defended in our writings, recognizing that the struggle of the working class will intensify as it resists the crisis and that the class struggle will again pose the historic alternative, socialism or barbarism after fifty years of reflux.

The bourgeoisie has seen a period of upheaval and deep political crises. In such a situation its aim is to adopt a 'left' mask the better to mobilize the working class behind the national interest: in Great :Britain the bourgeoisie chooses the Labour Party and 'social contract' for this task; in Germany this lot falls to the social democratic parties, and in other places the Socialist Party (SP) and Communist Party (CP) make efforts to do the same thing, as is the case now in Portugal and France and shortly will be so in Italy and Spain. One of the most dangerous weapons the capitalist class has in this crisis is its capacity to disarm the working class by means of rekindling mystifications in the ‘left’ factions of the bourgeoisie. Economically every faction of the bourgeoisie will be led to advocate statification measures, in one way or another, in order to reinforce its national capital. But politically, especially in the area where the crisis has already struck hard, it is the ‘left’ parties which the bourgeoisie needs in order to be able to appeal to 'national unity’ and for unpaid labour on Sunday. These parties have their place in the capitalist sun (whether in the government or as a loyal opposition) owing to the fact that they still can, just as the unions do, claim to be able to contain the working class and its struggle.

Faced with this analysis, the PIC seems to us to under-estimate the weight of mystifications on the working class from the left when they put forward the motion that these mystifications no longer have any effect. On the contrary we believe that a more objective understanding of the situation will show that appeals for 'anti-fascism' and 'national unity' are still far from being exhausted at this time. Although the class manifests a growing combativity, one must not under-estimate the margin of maneuver for the enemy classy In countries like Spain and Portugal, where repression by the right has been so severe, the bourgeoisie can only hold on by running to the left, which will prove the more able mystifiers and executioners of workers in these countries and elsewhere.

Intervention of revolutionaries

The class struggle today arose as a resistance to deteriorating living standards produced by the crisis and imposed on the workers. That is why our current has rejected RWG’s analysis which states that ‘revendicative' struggles are totally dead end for the class. Nothing could be less true. In a period of crisis and mounting class struggle, the so-called 'revendicative’ struggles are an integral part of the whole process towards the maturation of consciousness in the working class, of its combativity and capacity for organization. Revolutionaries must analyze the development of these struggles and contribute to their generalization and to the development of a conscious¬ness that is more aware of the historic goals of the class. While rejecting Trotskyist manoeuvres, which trap the class in partial demand struggles and mystifications about decadent capitalism, revolutionaries must not at the same time reject the potential for going beyond the immediate demands which is implicit in working class struggles today.

The analysis of the crisis and its evolution determine to a large extent the perspectives which revolutionaries see for the class struggle. At the international conference, our current defended the thesis that the present deep crisis of the system will develop relatively slowly, although with sharp spasms, a jagged development in an ever deepening process. The class struggle manifests itself in a sporadic and episodic way revealing a period of maturation of consciousness through the major confrontations between the working class and the capitalist class. This analysis was not entirely shared by the other groups present at the conference. RP, basing their analysis on other economic explanations (rejecting the Luxemburgist theory), see the crisis as long and rather far away; for them, the class struggle is strictly determined by the given economic situation and as long as the catastrophic crisis is for tomorrow, an appeal for the generalization of struggles today is just voluntaristic. The PIC on the other hand, believes that we are already seeing the economic crisis reach its finale in the immediate danger of world war, (throwing out a ‘cry of alarm’ about the recent diplomatic events in the Middle East) or in class confrontations which could even today resolve the evolution of history. We have criticized these two cases of exaggeration while putting the accent on the fact that revolutionaries must be able to analyse a contingent situation within a general period without falling into an under or over-estimation which leads to agitating in a void, or remaining on the margin of reality at a time of crisis and of class struggle.

The time has not yet come for us to throw ourselves into the work of agitation and the attempts of the PIC who propose campaigns way beyond any practical capacity have not found a great echo. On the other hand, after giving the reports on activities of the different sections of our current and of other groups, the comrades of the current stated the necessity of enlarging our intervention and publication work in all countries in a more organized and systematic way. In particular by assuming collectively the responsibility for political intervention in countries where the current has not as yet an organized group and orienting itself towards the publication of newspapers in countries where it would be possible to do so.
It is useless for us to pose the question of intervention as an abstract concept: ‘for’ or ‘against’. The will to act is the basis of all revolu¬tionary groupings. The question is not one of fine words and of crying intervention at the top of one’s voice with no concern as to the actual objective situation, and neglecting the necessity even of providing the means to intervene through a revolutionary organization on an international scale. We must rather see that the scale of intervention by revolutionaries can vary according to the situation but all the cries for intervention cannot fill the void: the absence of a revolutionary organization. The question of the level of intervention is a problem of analysis and of appreciation of the moment while the question of organization is a principle of the workers' movement, the foundation stone without which any taking up of revolutionary positions remains pure verbiage. It is for this reason that we rejected the proposal by Accion Proletaria that we pose the question of intervention as a preliminary question to the necessity of organizing.
Revolutionary organization

Militant work is by definition collective work; it is not individuals who assume a personal responsibility within the class but rather groups based on a body of ideas who are called to take on the tasks of revolutionaries: to help clarify and generalize the consciousness of the class. At the international conference, as in our .magazines, we have insisted on the necessity of really understanding the reasons for the throwing up of groups from within the class and the responsibilities which follow from this. After fifty years of counter-revolution and the complete break with any organic continuity in the workers’ movement, the question of organization remains one of the most difficult for new elements to assimilate.
A revolutionary group is based fundamentally on class positions and the only justification for groups working separately would be through a divergence of principles, Far from idealizing or wanting to perpetuate the present dispersion of efforts, revolutionaries in our period of rising class struggle must be able to distinguish secondary questions of interpretation from an analysis of questions of principle - and try with all their strength make an effort to regroup around positions of principle while surmounting any tendencies which defend ‘their own little boutique of ideas’ and 'freedom' to remain isolated.
Since the debates in the First International, it has been understood in the marxist movement that revolutionary organizations must tend towards a centralization of efforts. Faced with the Bakuninists and with the false theories of petit-bourgeois federalism, marxists have defended the necessity of the international centralization of militant work. All we have done so far today is to have re-opened the debate while breaking from deviations about centralization such as those of Leninism (democratic centralism) and Bordigism (organic centralism). We insist on the necessity for a coherent organizational framework for revolutionary work against the diverse theories about ‘anti-group’ groups, against ‘libertarian’ and other anarchist formulations in vogue at the moment. RWG was rather sceptical about the effort to organize an international current; this group, aside from the secondary divergences which separate us, seems to be traumatised by the aberrations of the counter-revolution (especially Trotskyism) on the question of organization. While wanting to set up a counter weight against the counter-revolution some militants risk falling into an idealization of the present fragmentation and confusion in the revolutionary milieu and are never able to overcome the errors and the organizational fetishism of the past in a positive way.

If we look at the development of the proletarian movement in history, it can be said that the formation of the working class party follows periods of rising class struggle. Today in our epoch when the class struggle is developing through resistance to the economic crisis, the formation of the nuclei of the future party follows a path of slow maturation. The effort of our current to constitute itself as a pole of regroupment around class positions is a part of that process towards the formation of the party at a time of intense and generalized struggles. We do not claim to be a ‘party’, and we guard against over-estimating the weight of our efforts at organization at the present time. However, the party of tomorrow will not arise one beautiful day from nothing; on the contrary, experience shows us that political coherence serves as a pole of regroupment essential for the revolutionary elements of the proletariat in a time of decisive uprisings.

The regroupment of revolutionaries takes place around class lines and basic revolutionary perspectives; secondary political questions should not hamper a general process towards a concentration of forces faced with the demands of the situation at this time and in time to come. Those who are for regroupment ‘in theory’ and in words but leave its practical realization for some time in the future - (while raising secondary questions to the same level as class lines in order to justify their reticence and confusions) - only retard this process and put obstacles in the way of the development of consciousness. We think it is essential that today we take the first steps towards a larger international organization of revolutionaries, to translate our internationalism into organizational terms in order to strengthen our work. This is what the conference made its principal task. The international conference this year distinguishes itself from the others to the extent that we wanted to make ourselves more conscious of the necessary means to assure the continuity of work. The preceding conferences served as a base for the discussion on organization and the situation at the present time while strengthening political ties and the fundamental theories of our current.

We were not able to tackle the question of the period of transition, which is now being discussed in the current, through lack of time. But we thought it important to publish here the documents prepared for the conference on this subject. The reader can take it that this theoretical question is far from being settled either in the current or in the workers' movement in general. However, this debate, though incomplete, is of great interest for revolution¬aries who are trying to work out the basic lines for the orientation of the movement of tomorrow.

The conference ended its work with the formation of the International Communist Current (which comprises to Revolution Internationale, World Revolution, Internationalism, Internacionalismo, Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internazionale); and through the decision to publish an international magazine in English, French and Spanish the positions of our current will be better diffused and developed.

J.A.
for the International Communist Current

*****

The texts we have published here are some of the documents presented at the international conference. The first three are reports prepared for the con¬ference, the others are contributions written for discussion. We did not have time to present the report, nor even to discuss the period of transition at the conference but we decided to publish these texts immediately in order to con¬tinue the open debate on this subject. Our current has not reached a homogene¬ous position on this complex question, and, in any case, we believe, contrary to other groups(such as Revolutionary Perspectives), that it is not up to revolutionaries to create class lines when the experience of the class itself has not yet settled them.

Even though certain revolutionary elements reveal themselves as being incapable of taking up their tasks at this time, they already are on the way to rushing into making absolute pronouncements on a question as complex as that of the period of transition. We think it is preferable to publish these texts so as to contribute to clarification, without claiming to resolve all the problems. We have also published a contribution from Revolutionary Perspectives on the period of transition - extracts chosen by them from a longer text - which shows their divergences with some of our comrades on this subject.

One of the aims of the January Conference will be to give ourselves the means to organize and centralize the activity of the different groups of the current at an international level.

This act is a conscious step towards the formation of a fully international organization.

In order to understand the significance of this, we must deal with three main questions:

I. Why an international political organization?

II. Why engage in such a process now?

III. What is the role of the ICC in the process which leads to the forma­tion of the world party of the proletariat?

I. Why an international political organization?

1. The political organization is an organ of the class, engendered by the class in order for it to fulfill a specific function: to help develop the consciousness of the class. The political organization does not bring this consciousness from ‘outside’; neither does it create the process of this appropriation of consciousness. It is on the contrary a product of this pro­cess just as it is an indispensable instrument of its development. From a certain standpoint one could say that the political organization is as neces­sary for the collective elaboration of the consciousness of the class, as written and oral expression is for the development of individual thought.

In the general functioning of the political organization of the proletariat, two main tasks can be distinguished:

a. Permanent analysis of social reality, aimed at making more precise the historic interests of the proletariat.(the appropriation of the lessons of the historic experience of the class and the defining of the proletarian position vis-a-vis each concrete situation). This is the task of constant elaboration of the communist programme, that is to say, the definition of the goals and the methods of the historic struggle of the working class.

b. Intervention within the class in order to aid in the conscious carrying out of its historic programme and so that it can appropriate for itself the means for its revolutionary task.

2. The working class is not the only class to exist internationally. The bourgeoisie and the various peasant strata are to be found in all countries. But the proletariat is the only class that can organize itself and act collectively at an international level because it is the only class which has no national interests. Its emancipation is only possible on a world scale.

That is why its political organization inevitably tends to be centralized and international. The proletariat creates its political organization in its own image.

Whether it is a question of political analysis or of intervention, the prole­tarian political organization is dealing with a world-wide reality. Its centralized and international character is not the result of any moral or ethical demand, but a necessary condition for its effectiveness and therefore for its very existence.

3. The international character of the proletarian political organization has been affirmed throughout the history of the workers' movement. Already in 1847, the Communist League, through its watchword, "Workers of the world, unite, the workers have no fatherland," proclaimed its international charac­ter. After 1864, political, organizations took the form of ‘Internationals’. Up until the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution and of ‘socialism in one country’ only the failure of the IInd International really broke this internationalist continuity.

The internationalism of the IInd International, which existed in the period of stability of the major industrial powers, inevitably suffered from the confinement of proletarian struggles to the framework of reforms: the horizon of the proletarian struggle objectively submitted to nationalist restric­tions. Thus the treason of the IInd International was not an isolated, unex­pected phenomenon. It was the worst outcome of thirty years of confinement of workers' struggles within national frameworks. In fact, right from its inception, the IInd International represented a regression in relation to the International Workingmen’s Association. Parliamentarism, trade unionism, the establishment of mass parties, in sum, the orientation of the workers' move­ment towards the reformist struggle, contributed to the fragmentation of the world workers' movement along national lines. The revolutionary task of the proletariat can only be conceived and realised on an international scale. Otherwise it is nothing but utopia. But from the very fact that capital is divided into nations, the .struggles for the acquisition of reforms (when they were possible) did not require an international arena to be successful. It was not world capital which decided to concede this or that amelioration to the proletariat of this or that nation. It was in each country and in a struggle against their own national bourgeoisie that the workers pressed home their demands.

Proletarian internationalism is not a pious hope, nor an abstract ideal, but a necessity imposed by the nature of the proletariat’s historic task.

That is why the first world war, by decisively demonstrating the historic unviability of the national framework and by putting the proletarian revolu­tion as the order of the day, had to .lead, after the collapse of the IInd International, to the most energetic re-affirmation of proletarian internatio­nalism within the workers’ movement. This was the task imposed on Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and which then demanded the constitution of a new International, the Communist International.

The IIIrd International was founded at the very beginning of the ‘era of the socialist revolution’ and its most important characteristic inevitably had to be its intransigent internationalism. Its demise came when it became unable to maintain this internationalism. This was the theory of socialism in one country.

Since then it has not been by chance that the word internationalist has been part of the name of many of the main organized reactions against the Stalinist counter-revolution. Capitalist decadence is synonymous with the necessity of the proletarian revolution and proletarian revolution is synonymous with internationalism.

4. If at all times proletarian political organizations have affirmed their international character, today this affirmation is more than ever the indis­pensable precondition for a proletarian organization.

It is because of this that we must understand the importance, the profound significance, of the internationalist effort of our current.

II. Why engage in such a process now?

1. When one looks at the development of our international current one can’t but be struck by the weakness of its numerical weight. In the past, even in particularly unfavourable circumstances, international organizations were in one way or another the end product, the crowning of various national activi­ties. With our current the process has been quite the opposite: international existence appeared much more as a point of departure for national activities than as a result of the latter. All the groups in the current were conceived as an integral part of the international current even before they published the first issue of their national journal.

One could pick out two main reasons for this state of affairs:

a. The organic rupture resulting from fifty years of counter-revolution which, because of the weakness it has caused in the revolutionary movement, has for­ced revolutionaries, right from the beginning of the resurgence of class struggles, to concentrate their weak forces in order to carry out their tasks.

b. The definite disappearance, after fifty years of capitalist decadence, of all illusions about the possibility of any real action on a national scale.

If the point of departure for our current was international activity it is thus because above all it is the concrete expression of a particular historic situation.

2. In fact with the creation of an international bureau we are not suddenly embarking upon the process of formation of the international organization. This process has existed since the beginning of the different groups of the current. All we are really doing is consciously recognizing this process by going beyond the stage of a certain passive, anarchic spontaneity with regard to the objective conditions for revolutionary work, to a stage of conscious organization which creates, by its own volition, the best conditions for the development of this process.

There is at the basis of all collective activity a degree of spontaneity (action which is unpremeditated as regards objective conditions). The develop­ment towards organization is itself a spontaneous product of this activity. But organization is nevertheless a supercession (not a negation) of spontan­eity. Just as in the collective activity of the whole class, so in the acti­vity of revolutionaries, organization creates the conditions for:

a. consciousness to arise out of the conditions which have been engendered by spontaneity.

b. the means to be provided for acting consciously and willingly upon the development of this process.

This is what we are doing in creating this international bureau and orienta­ting ourselves towards the creation of a full international organization.

3. The organic rupture which the revolutionary movement has suffered since the revolutionary wave of the twenties weighs heavily on revolutionaries today, not only because of the difficulties which they encounter in trying to reappro­priate the gains of past struggles but also because of the undue influence of petty-bourgeois student ideology within their ranks. The student movement, which was such a spectacular sign that capitalism was once again entering into crisis and into a new phase of proletarian struggle, inevitably served to infect the young revolutionary groups with its world-view. (It could hardly have been otherwise.)

One of the main manifestations of this weakness was concretized in the problems of organization. All the habits of the university milieu constituted an enor­mous burden which the revolutionary movement had to carry on its shoulders: the difficulty of conceiving theoretical work as a reflection of the real world divided into antagonistic classes, (which took the form of a jealous protection of ‘one’s own' little thoughts ‘in themselves’, in the same way as academics sit on their own college theses), a difficulty in grasping theoretical activity as a moment of general activity and an instrument of the latter, a difficulty in understanding the importance of practical will, of consciously organized activity, in sum, the inability to carry out, in all its depth and with all its implications, the old marxist motto “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.”

It is this incomprehension which expressed itself in the criticisms of our current made by elements such as the ‘Ex-Lutte Ouvriere Tendance’ in Revolution Internationale,

For these elements, our international current would be an artificial invention and the organizational effort to create it would be pure voluntarism. Arguments of this sort are based on two main ideas:

a. It would be ‘voluntarism’ because there exists a volition to ‘build’ an organization, whereas the latter can only be a natural product of an objective process independent of the will of the few individuals of the current.

b. It would be ‘artificial’ because the class struggle has not yet made that “qualitative leap” which will transform economic struggles into “revolutionary”, “communist” struggles.

Behind these pseudo-marxist ideas there lurks a total inability to grasp the essential foundation-stone of marxism: the will to act consciously for the revolutionary transformation of the world.

Against all idealist tendencies, marxism affirms the insufficiency of human will: man does not transform the world when he wants and how he wants. The concretization of all subjective volition depends on the existence of favour­able objective conditions, effectively independent of this volition. But nothing could be more alien to Marxism than to transform the insufficiency of will into a complete negation of will. That would be to confuse marxism with its principal philosophic antagonist - empiricist, fatalistic positivism. Marxism makes a critique of voluntarism in order to affirm all the more strongly the importance of will. In affirming the necessity of objective conditions for the concretization of human will, marxism underlines above all the necessary character of this will.

The idea that revolutionary organization builds itself voluntarily, consciously, with premeditation far from being a voluntarist idea is on the contrary one of the concrete results of all Marxist praxis.

Understanding the necessity of objective conditions for beginning the cons­truction of the revolutionary party does not mean that this organization is an automatic product of these conditions. This means in reality that it is necessary to understand' the importance of subjective will at the moment when these conditions are historically present.

Let us now examine this accusation of artificiality.

According to the anti-organizationists, the objective conditions which must subsist at the beginning of a process of building the party are none other than the openly revolutionary struggle of the proletariat - the destruction of the capitalist state, and even the installation of communist relations of production.

The revolutionary party is not a decorative organ whose task is to embellish the dish served up by the spontaneous outburst of revolutionary struggle. It is on the contrary a vital, powerful element of this struggle, an indispensable instrument of the class. If the Russian Revolution is the proof positive of the indispensable character of this instrument, the German Revolution is the negative proof of this. The inability of Luxemburg’s tendency to under­stand the necessity for beginning the construction of the party before the first outbreak of revolutionary struggle was to weigh heavily on the course of events in Germany.

To understand the party as an indispensable instrument for the revolutionary struggle is to understand the necessity to actively aid its construction as soon as the conditions for a revolutionary confrontation have ripened.

In fact, a failure to grasp the importance of the construction of the world political organization of the proletariat when the conditions for a revolu­tionary confrontation are ripening means an inability to understand the importance of the role of this organization.

There is no infallible index for measuring the rising wave of class struggle. In certain circumstances even a dimunition of hours lost through strikes can hide a maturation of revolutionary consciousness. Today, however, we do possess two indices which enable us to be certain that since 1968 we have been moving in a revolutionary direction:

a. The deepening and increasing acceleration of the crisis.

b. The existence of a level of combativity in the world working class which demonstrates the fact that just as the bourgeoisie can “less and less conti­nue to govern as before”, the proletariat “can and will less and less put up with lining as before”. That is to say that the conditions of a revolu­tionary situation are ripening irreversibly.

In these conditions, the work of building the political organization is not an artificial wish but an imperious necessity.

4. For revolutionaries today the danger is not to be in advance of the revolu­tionary process but to be caught up behind it.

III. What is the role of the International Current in the process which leads to the formation of the world party of the proletariat?

1. In order to understand the importance and the significance of what we are doing in setting up an international bureau, we must pose the problem of the relationship between our international current and any group which may arise defending class positions.

We have often asserted that it was the task of revolutionaries to constitute a pole of regroupment of the proletarian vanguard. Today we must understand that we must constitute the pivot, the ‘skeleton’ of the future world party of the proletariat.

2. From the theoretical point of view, the current’s platform, because it gathers together the essence of the historic experience of the proletariat, constitutes the rallying point in any group which situates itself on the terrain of the historic struggle of the proletariat.

Contrary to what the EX-L.O. Tendance asserted in one of its texts, there are not “several possible coherences” which can encompass class positions. In the last instance, theoretical coherence is not a question of syllogisms, or of pure logical reasoning. It is the expression of an objective, material coherence which is unique: that of the practice of the class.

It is because it synthesises this practical experience that our platform is the only possible framework for the activity of a revolutionary organization.

3. From the organizational point of view, could there exist a group which had the same positions as the international current but which did not integrate itself organizationally? Bordiga emphasized - quite rightly - that the party, far from being simply one programme was also one will. This will does not consist of pious vows or ‘sincere’ wishes. It’s persevering determination for revolutionary intervention. And as we have seen, this intervention is synony­mous with organization and thus with organizational experience.

There exist organizational gains just as there are theoretical gains, and the one conditions the other in a permanent way. Organized activity is not an immediate phenomenon, given right from the start, spontaneously. It is the result of an experience and a consciousness which is not to be confused with that of one or several ‘individuals’. It results uniquely from a collective praxis all the more rich because it is collective.

That is why at times when a great revolutionary organization was in existence a split was something which one hesitated about for a long time. The orga­nic continuity which links revolutionary organizations since 1847 is not a mere ‘tradition’ or a product of luck. It expresses, as a reflection of the continuity of the proletarian struggle, the necessity to conserve the organizational gains which the proletarian political organizations have bequeathed.

That is why the international organizations of the proletariat have always been constituted around a pivot, around a current which not only defended in a more coherent fashion the theoretical gains of the proletariat, but which also possessed a practical organizational experience which was ade­quate to the task of acting as a pillar of the new organization.

This role was played by the current of Marx and Engels for the Ist International, by Social Democracy for the IInd, and by the Bolshevik Party for the IIIrd.

If the workers movement had not gone through the 50 yr. break which separates the Communist International from today, it is without doubt the ‘left’ of the latter (German left, Italian left) which would have assumed the task this time. From the standpoint of political positions there is no doubt that the
next international will be a continuity of the ‘left’; but from the organizational point of view this pivot has still to be built.

Since the recent resurgence of the class struggle, our international current has taken on an organizational practice based on the proletariat’s class posi­tions. That is to say that its praxis has become, with all its weaknesses and errors, the heritage of the proletarian struggle. The current has thus recreated a new source of organic continuity, by being the only organization to have assured a continuity in its practice within the framework of class positions.

4. The international current which today is taking a step towards centrali­zation must therefore, and can effectively consider that its essential task is to constitute itself as this pivot, which is indispensable to the constitution of the next international, the world party of the proletariat.

Those who see in this affirmation pure megalomania are not being modest but irresponsible. The international current would commit suicide if it was incapable of fully taking responsibility for what it objectively is.

R. Victor

Revolution Internationale

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

(Platform of the Communist International, March, 1919)

Nearly fifty years after their being uttered, these ringing words have again gained the power to haunt world capitalism. Decadent capitalism, sweating muck and gore from every pore stands once again on the dock of humanity. The accusers? Mil­lions of proletarians slaughtered by capital over the last two generations, plus all those who perished from capitalism's in­ception; they all stand, stern and silent, behind the executioner - the international working class. The sentence? It has been passed since the first proletarians rose up against capitalist exploitation, it has existed in the attempts of Babeuf, Kangui and the Communist League to harangue the pro­letariat to a final onslaught, it existed in the work of the First, Second, and Third Internationals and in the heritage of the ultra-left. The accused has indeed been sentenced - its death penalty has been merely postponed; humanity itself can no longer tolerate any further delays!

The Crisis

The last few years have seen a vindication of the analysis our tendency began to make in 1967/68, both as to basis of the historic-crisis and to the present unfolding crisis. But, almost uncannily, the last twelve months have seen an irrefutable vindication of the perspectives presented by our American comrades at this conference a year ago. The perspectives outlined for our tendency by Internationalism included three basic alternatives open to capitalism in crisis, all of which were likely to be tried to a greater or lesser extent simultaneously. These were: the attempt to deflect the crisis onto another capitalist state, onto weaker sections of capital (including the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry) and onto the proletariat.

We shall not go here into great detail about the specific manifestations of the crisis (which would demand a systematic nation­-by-nation account; the brilliant set of articles appearing in the last issue of Revolution Internationale are an example of how these questions should be dealt with by us). We wish here to pick out the main aspects of the present conjunctural crisis in a historical perspective integrally connected to the level of international class struggle.

With the saturation of markets which condemns world capitalism to cycles of ever-increasing barbarism, the perspective of the communist revolution is open to humanity in a material and objective way. But this has been so since the last sixty years, and the failure of the past communist attempts to overthrow capital has meant that capitalism's continuation has been pos­sible only through the cycles of crises, wars and reconstruction.

The greatest ‘boom' of capitalism, the reconstruction which re­sulted from the depths of destruction and self-cannibalization achieved by capitalism during 1939-45, lasted for more than twenty years. But the 'boom' in decadence is really the bloating of a corpse. Between 1948 and 1973, world industrial production increased by 3-1/2 times; the average annual rate of G.N.P. growth amounted to 5% (some, like Japan, doubled it). World inflation, however, was never checked and the UK prices are now roughly 7-1/2 times higher than in 1945. Moreover, the third world countries saw only an aggravation of their economic condition and this huge sector of world capital sunk every year into a worst state of debt, unemployment, militarism, despotism and poverty.

But since the late sixties, the crisis has beer manifesting itself through monetary dislocations, and the recent appearance galloping inflation (two digit figures for almost all industrialized countries). The monetary system developed after the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which was based on fixed exchange rates to the dollar linked to the gold standard, is now in shambles. The main druids of the IMF gather together today only to make sure that no epidemics follow from the inevitable deaths of the coming period. A hopeless task! No such net would ever resist the weight of a collapsing capitalist colossus. Inevitably leads to recession, to close downs, bankruptcies, lay-offs and profit squeezes. Both are inevitable aspects of the capitalist system of production today, and both are simply moments in the permanent onslaught which decadent capitalism unleashes against the working class. But the continuation of the inflationary spiral can only end the paralysis of the entire world market, an international slump which would have frightening consequences for the bourgeoisie.

Though 1972/73 seemed to mark a period of relative adjustment in the world economy, that period was merely a short lull achieved by the strongest capitalist powers (the US, Germany, Japan) at the expense of their weaker competitors. The intensification of covert trade wars, currency devaluation and the slow disintegration of customs unions in this period to be attempts, within the advanced capitalist sectors, to achieve some degree of equilibrium to a further international deterioration. 1974 and now 1975 are harbingers of a worsening, and more catastrophic relapse, announcing that the breathing spell achieved by some national capitals in the previous two years is over.

Nowadays, the world economy is in a deep recession. In 1974 there was hardly any growth and world trade has been slackening. The US G.N.P. is down on 1973 and is still falling; Britain is stagnant and Japan has had a 3% G.N.P. fall. In many countries there's a growing panic arising from the collapse of many small and medium size firms. In Britain, this is a chronic occurrence, hitting large companies as well, even multinationals (travel firms, shipbuilding companies, auto, etc). Key industries such as building and construction, cars and aircraft, electronics, textiles, machine tools and steel are facing increasing difficulties in the coming period. The rise in the oil price has added to the insoluble problems faced by recession-ridden capi­talism, adding a global $60 billion a year balance of payments deficit. Through the tottering mechanisms of the IMF, the druids of capital are madly attempting to ‘recycle' some of these profits accruing to the. oil-producing countries, as if these and similar ‘reflatioary' .measures would do anything except add a twist to the inflationary spiral. The debts of industrial companies have doubled since 1965, and since 1970 the rates of growth of all capitalist countries have steadily declined or shown glaringly to be nothing but artificial creations of deficit spending. The 1975 forecasts do not go beyond a paltry annual growth rate of 1,9% for the OECD countries including the US.

Though the situation is critical for world capitalism, various mechanisms of state intervention have helped alleviate the crisis by spreading out the worst immediate consequences (such as massive lay-offs); this is done by selective, sometimes massive, subsidies and deficit financing channeled through the banking system. These mechanisms are entirely unable to help realize the surplus value global-capital needs for its accumulation. The real source for such revenues originates from vicious austerity programmes (wage controls, reduction of social services, taxation, etc). All these procedures, which are but stop-gap measures, actually accelerate the crisis either by erupting onto the political arena (ie, class struggle) or by inevitably adding to inflationary surge which is nowadays irresistible. All the mec­hanisms of capitalism uses to ‘phase out' the crisis constitute the logical extension of the desperate struggle capitalism in decay has waged throughout this century against its own decomposition. As we .have said before, "... the underlying causes of the present crisis reside in the historical impasse in which the capitalist mode of production has found itself since the first world war: the great capitalist powers have completely divided up the world and there are no longer enough markets to allow the expansion of capital: henceforth in the absence of a victorious proletar­ian revolution, the system has only been able to survive thanks to the mechanism crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis, etc." (‘Overproduction and Inflation', in RI 6, new series and WR 2).

When the present American Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, recently described the crisis of American agriculture, he admitted: "The only way we can have a fully producing agriculture in this country is to have a vigorous healthy export market. We simply can't consume at home all that American agriculture can produce." This faithful watch-dog was, in this case, barking honestly, and in unison with all his German, Japanese, British, Russian and French colleagues. Every national capital in the world is going all-out to penetrate each other's markets. Like Midas, saturated with gold but unable to devour even a bread crumb, the insatiable thirst for the realization of surplus value just cannot be quenched. So, for example, the Russian rulers have sought most-favored nation status to penetrate the US markets and to gain much needed US capital (technology, cre­dits, etc) so as to expand their own productive capacity and competitiveness on the world market. Equally those circles in American capital which most understand the plight of US capital seek desperately to penetrate the Russian markets. These attempts occur all the time, from all quarters, with an impressive cast of insatiable Midases - nay, that poor wretch was merely greedy slaveholder these capitalists are truly vampires! Having drained the blood of their victims to the marrow of the bone, they pounce on each other's victims just to discover that somebody else got there first!

The present conjunctural crisis partakes from an important factor inherent in decadent capitalism: the tendency towards state capitalism. The stock exchange crash/crisis of 1929 was sudden catastrophic collapse arising after years of stagnation and unsuccessful attempts by the advanced capitalisms at catching up even with the pre-1914 growth figures. The trend to­wards state capitalism, already present in 1929, was nonetheless still insufficiently attuned to serve as a temporary cushion for world crises.

After the second imperialist war, the tendency towards state capitalism received conscious and deliberate sanction by many capitalist governments and unofficial recognition by all. A perma­nent waste economy (armaments, etc), financed largely through inflationary spending, was seen and felt to be an answer to many of the problems of stagnation and over-production. The structur­al production of waste, or more precisely, the burning-up of surplus value, became an undeniable economic factor since 1945, and it is this factor which fundamentally accounts for the so-called ‘prosperity' of the postwar period. Those countries which were demolished by the war achieved ‘miraculous' recoveries (Germany, Italy, Japan), a fact that enabled the victors to re-divide and reconstruct a war-torn and pulverized world market. World capital was thus given a lease of life - at the cost of 55 million victims. Another, not so vital, loss was the complete debase­ment of the ‘marxism' of many Cardans who, believing in miracles proclaimed the ‘end' of economic crises. In fact, such a ‘loss' was a gain for bourgeois sociology, so all is well that ends well. But very few miracles seem to be surviving the first ripples of the impending crisis.

The tempo and scale of the present crisis confirms the analysis our tendency began to make nine years ago; the ‘boom' of the postwar years had ended, we said, and the world capitalist sys­tem had entered a long, drawn-out conjunctural crisis which still has some unfolding to do. The inter-related indicators we have been using to appraise the tempo of the crisis will be showing themselves up with increasing intensity and simultaneity:

1. Massive fall-off of international trade.

2. Trade wars (‘dumpings', etc) between national capitals

3. Adoption of protectionist measures and collapse of customs unions

4. Return to autarky

5. Decline of production

6. Massive growth in unemployment

7. Drop in workers' real wages and living standards

At given moments, the confluence of some of these indicators could trigger a massive slump in a given national capital such as Britain, Italy, Portugal, or Spain. This is a possibility that we don't dismiss. However, although such a collapse would give an irreparable blow to the world economy (British assets and investments abroad alone amount to £20 billion), the world capitalist system could still drag on as long as a modicum of production were maintained in some advanced countries such as the US, Germany, Japan and the Eastern European countries. All such events of course tend to engulf the whole system, and cri­ses are inevitably world crises today. But for the reasons we have sketched above, we have reason to believe that the crisis will be drawn-out - extremely convulsive and with jagged curves, but more like a snowballing effect than a steep sudden fall. Even the disintegration of national economy will not necessarily send all the bankrupt capitalist to hang themselves, as Rosa Luxemburg remarked in n slightly different context. For this to happen, the personification of national capital, the state, must he strangled by none other than the revolutionary proletariat.

Class Struggle

On the political level, the consequences of the crisis are far-reaching and explosive. As the crisis deepens, the world capitalist class will begin to fan the flames of war. The unending, virulent ‘small' wars of the last 25 years will continue and worsen (Vietnam, Cambodia, Cyprus, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, etc). In periods of crisis, however, when the chronic decomposition of the third world advances towards the centres of capitalism, the cry for war fuses with the two other battle cries of the bourgeoisie: austerity and export! This three-prong attack on the working class means that the bourgeoisie is trying to force the proletariat to pay for the crisis totally, in sweat and blood. Under such conditions, the standards of living of the working class, already brutally reduced by inflation, will plummet even further in the austerity and export drives of the bourgeoisie. The psychologically demoralizing prospect of .war also helps to fragment sections of the proletariat, and prepare them to accept a war economy, with all the consequences that carries for the future proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie senses that the only real solution to its crisis is a defeated proletariat, a proletariat unable to resist the infernal cycles of decayed capitalism. Thus the systematic increa­se in the rate of exploitation, the huge escalation of unemploy­ment in the US, Britain, Germany, etc. Other ruthless measures are being tried, such as ‘voluntary' wage reductions, three-day weeks, whole weeks of layoffs, expulsion .of ‘foreign' workers, speed-ups, cuts in social services. Needless to say, all these measures find daily sanctification in the cesspools of the bourgeois media (press, TV, magazines, etc).

But in spite of their severity, these attacks are nothing com­pared to what the bourgeoisie can really dish out. There is no crime, no monstrosity, no lie and deceit the capitalists will shrink from in their campaign against their mortal enemy, the proletariat. If the bourgeoisie doesn't dare to massacre the world proletariat at this stage, it is because it is frightened and hesitant. The proletariat, that awakening giant, emerges from the reconstruction period an undefeated warrior, a class with nothing to lose and a world to win. It will take a lot of beating on a worldwide scale before the bourgeoisie can impose capitalism's ultimate solution to the crisis: a new world war.

This accounts for the hesitancy displayed by sections of the bourgeoisie in their dealings with the working class. Some, worried by the dangers of massive unemployment resulting from the growing recession, are attempting to ‘boost' consumer demand by reducing personal taxation (Ford's proposed $16 billion tax ­cut) or by trimming obsolete war production. But all these ‘reflationary' tricks end up aggravating inflationary pressures and thus in the end only accelerate the tendency towards slump. Faced with the decline in production which accompanies galloping inflation, and unable to reduce its falling rate of profit because of the non-existence of markets, the bourgeoisie will have to finally confront the proletariat in a death-struggle.

But the bourgeoisie also developed confidence in itself during the postwar ‘boom'. The self-satisfied platitudes of the Daniel Bells, Marcuses, Bookchins and Cardans about a ‘modern' crises-free capitalism have their roots in the material soil of the past period of growth and. reconstruction. Rallying around the state, the apparatus which directly supervised the reconstruction period and whose techniques of intervention have matured over sixty years of capitalist decay, the bourgeoisie may be losing the complacency of the reconstruction period, may sometim­es veer towards panic and despair, but it is not yet finally defeated. As long as the bourgeoisie can count on the mystifications of ‘national unity', its self-confidence can remain unbroken. The relations between classes in periods of crises tend to sharpen and assume an irreconcilable character. In such conditions, the actions of the state must appear to be ‘impartial' so as to better mystify the working class. State interventions during such moments, therefore, tend to alleviate the insoluble political and social contradictions confronted by the bourgeoisie. The state must give the impression that it is acting in the name of ‘everyone', bosses, petty-bourgeois and workers alike. It must appear to possess the noble attributes of an arbiter, and as such, obtain the legitimacy needed to crush the working class in order to maintain the existing relations of production.

The leftist factions of the capitalist class (Stalinists, Social Democrats, trade union and their Trotskyist/Maoist/anarchist ‘critical' pimps) are raising themselves to this task, that is, of custodians of the state. Only they can attempt to pose as representatives of the working class, of ‘the little guy', of ‘the poor'. Because an undefeated working class has to be cajoled into accepting wage-gouging and other such measures, the leftists alone can now appear as the most effective channel for the introduction of further state centralization, nationalizations and despotism, as the examples of Chile under Allende and Portugal today, show.

The tendency of capitalism in decay is towards crisis and war, and no force society except the proletariat can put an end to this murderous cycle of barbarism. At first sight, it would seem that the road to war is the only one .open in the immedi­ate sense to the bourgeoisie. The fact that the proletariat has no permanent mass organizations could imply that it is defenceless against the chauvinist storm preceding a new world war. But the bourgeoisie knows better. Through the medium of its trade unions, capitalism knows that the proletariat remains a revolutionary class in spite of the absence of mass prole­tarian organization. The trade unions have recognized this elementary fact long since and their whole function revolves around the need to destroy from within any autonomous workers' movement. In every self-mobilization of the proletariat lurks the hydra of revolution. Therein lies the chief obstacle to the bourgeoisie's criminal designs! Before the bourgeoisie can successfully mobilize for war, it needs a globally defeated working class. Until then it must tread carefully. In fact, the bourgeoisie is finding it very difficult now to mobilize the proletariat under the rantings of ‘austerity' and ‘let's all pull together'. Politically, the fascist anti-fascists haven't fared any better than the economic policemen of capital. Every new filthy ideology capitalism excretes on the working class immediately seems to find a stable repository in the atomized and frenetic hordes of the petty-bourgeoisie, not in the working class. It is not accidental that all the reactionary ideologies of zero-growth, xenophobia, sexual libbings and their counterparts (such as advocates of stronger marriages and ‘less sex'), plus the usual idiots spouting the Second Coming, are to be confined mainly to petty-bourgeois sects. Today, there's simply no way of rationally justifying to the proletariat the continuance of capitalist social relations.

The fact that the working class today has no permanent mass organizations has many .implications. Firstly, the working class is not encumbered by huge reformist organizations from its immediate past, as it was in1914-23. The lessons of today's period can thus be absorbed faster than they were during and immediately after the first world war. The consciousness that only .communist solutions can give any meaning to the struggles for wages and conditions can unfold sharply and clearly, since any economic ‘victory' is immediately eroded by the crisis. As Marx said, humanity doesn't pose itself tasks which it cannot solve. If the proletariat faces the crisis this century without permanent reformist organizations, this has inevitable positive corollaries.

As long as the crisis doesn't deepen in a way that would irresis­tibly provoke the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, as long as the proletariat as a whole doesn't pose its revolution on the immediate agenda, then all the temporary institutions thrown up by class struggle (strike committees, mass assemblies, etc) are inevitably integrated or recaptured by capital if they attempt to remain permanent. This is an inevitable objective process, and one of the features of capitalist decadence. If every strike committee, if every ‘workers' commission' and such like like tend to become capitalist organs today, the working class will sooner or later confront this fact. Already the workers in Barcelona and the north of Spain seem to be becoming deeply aware of this. In England, thousands of workers almost instinctively distrust any shop-steward dominated strike committee. In the US, the workers tolerate leftist and ‘radical' trade union leaders, but only imbeciles would call this toleration a permanent loyalty to trade-unionism, or a ‘consequence' of wages struggles. The workers struggle every day, and even more so in moments of cris­is, because as class the proletariat can never be integrated by capitalism, This is so because the global proletariat is an exploited class, the only productive class in capitalist society. As a result, the proletariat can only fight to assert itself against the intolerable conditions capital forces it to endure. It doesn't matter in the short term what the proletariat thinks of itself, what matters is what it is. And it is this latter objective being precedes the communist consciousness of the working class. Let the ex-leftist modernist scoff at this. For its part the proletariat has no other path to travel, no other way of learning, than that provided by the Golgotha of bourgeois society.

The proletariat needs the time offered by the protracted nature of the crisis to be able to struggle and understand its position in world society. This understanding cannot come suddenly for the class as a whole. The working class comes against the wall many times in the next period, and many times too it will recede, seemingly defeated. But in the end no wall can stand the continuous battering of the proletarian waves, even less when the wall is disintegrating its own accord. But just as the proletariat will make use of the protracted nature of the crisis, so will the bourgeoisie use all its cards to deflect, confuse and defeat the efforts of the working class. The destiny of humanity depends on the outcome of this final confrontation. But as the bourgeoisie will do everything under the sun (and the moon!) to weaken the proletariat's tendency towards world regroupment, so will the proletariat be able to establish direct continuity in its struggle, in spite of all the divisions and mystifications of the leftists, trade unions, governments, etc. No capitalist organization can withstand an almost continuous wave of strikes and proletarian self-activity without becoming demoralized. Thus the class as a whole will begin to re-appropriate the communist struggle and deepen its global consciousness in real confrontations. The time lags be­tween mass class actions will shorten, and growing memory and lessons will be placed at the disposal of the working class. This could not be otherwise since the only weapons in the prole­tariat's arsenal are its consciousness and its ability to org­anize itself autonomously.

The Task Facing our Tendency

The deepening of the crisis can only be welcomed by communists. On the conjunctural level, the possibility of the communist revolution appears once again as an expression of the historical decay of bourgeois society. Our tasks will of necessity, become enlarged .and more complex, and the process towards the formation of the party will be accelerated directly by our present activities. The essentially gradual development of the crisis in this period will also allow us time to regroup better, to temper and galvanize our forces internationally. The unmis­takable trend in communist groups today is to first and fore­most seek international regroupment of forces; ‘national' regroupments are not a formal ‘stage' prior to the international one. To formalize the sequence of regroupment into such a sterile and localistic scheme would mean to revert to old Social Democratic conceptions about ‘national sections' and similar leftist gradualism. Only globally can we carry out our pre­paratory work, deepen our overall theoretical understanding and defend our platform within the struggles of the working class.

Our tendency will begin to confront in a more systematic way an immense amount of actual organizational work, such as the contribution to the formation and strengthening of future communist groups. Integrally connected to this, our tendency will be able to intervene on a more cohesive and international plane in the many events which will erupt in the coming period. But our specific function is not to ‘technically organize' strikes or any similar actions of sectors of the class, but to patien­tly and vehemently point out in the clearest possible way the implications of autonomous class activities and the needs of the communist revolution. We exist to defend the programmatic acquisitions of the whole working class movement, and this task can only be deepened through a militant and committed activity whenever and whenever the working class mobilizes itself for its own interests, or when such interests are directly threatened by capitalist attacks.

The perspectives for our tendency presented by Revolution Internationale at the January 1974 conference are flawed in this main respect, in that the author was unable to stress our organizational needs and actually minimized their impor­tance. This can be attributed to our tendency's relative im­maturity at the time concerning the very concrete implications our activities carried, for the class as a whole and for us. Today we can see the question of regroupment and the party on much firmer grounds. To us a programmatic agreement means also an organizational commitment, a tendency towards action within the framework of world regroupment. Woe to those activists who want to ‘intervene' without a clear understanding of what global regroupment means! The building of an international communist tendency is the acid test for any such activists. This commitment must be proven in deeds and attitude, not in words alone. Our tendency has already encountered many such sectarians who, like the centrists of yesterday, are always ‘in principle' for communist regroupment (a nice sentiment indeed, just like being ‘in principle' for the Brotherhood of Man or for eternal justice!). But in practice such sectarians sabotage any principled and significant move towards regroupment, alluding to trivialities or secondary points of ‘difference'. Just as our tendency has no need for modernists who ascribe to the working class their own integration into capitalism, we have no need for confusionists who in practice advocate demoralization and parochialism. It is a measure of our development that this conference did not attract such people. The process of regroupment began in the early 70's by our tendency has already polarized many tendencies and groups which in their majority have decomposed organizationally and theoretically. Among these are included the rump groups coming from Socialism ou Barbarie, including dilettantes like Barrot and similar luminaries of modernism. Our tendency today has a long road to travel, and we can be sure that the road will become in many respects more arduous and difficult. But concerning the past period of essentially basic theoretical clarification, we can safely conclude that it is a period drawing to an end.

World Revolution,

For the International Communist Current

January, 1975.

The Specific Nature of the Proletarian Revolution

The urgent necessity for communists to fight for maximum clarity and coherence concerning the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat derives from the unique nature of the proletarian revolution. Whereas the bourgeois revolution (England, France etc.) was fundamentally a political confirmation of the bourgeoisie's economic domination of society, which grew steadily and progressively out of declining feudal society, the proletariat has no economic power under capitalism, and in the period of capitalist decadence has no permanent organisations of its own. The only weapons available to the proletariat are its class consciousness and its ability to organise its own revolutionary activity; having wrested power from the bourgeoisie it has the immense task of consciously constructing a new social order.

Capitalist society, as all class societies, grew up independent of men's wills, as a long drawn out unconscious process, regulated by laws and forces not subject to human control. The bourgeois revolution merely swept away the feudal superstructure which prevented those laws from generalising themselves in an unfettered way. Today it is the very nature of those laws, their blind, anarchic, commodity character, which is threatening to lead human civilisation to ruin. But despite the apparently immutable character of these laws, they are, in the end, only the expression of a social relationship which men themselves have created. The proletarian revolution is a systematic onslaught against the social relationships which give rise to the remorseless laws of capital. It can only be a conscious onslaught, because it is precisely the unconscious and uncontrolled character of capital which the revolution is attempting to destroy; and the social system which the proletariat will construct on the ruins of capitalism is the first society in which mankind exerts a rational and conscious control over the productive forces, of the whole of human life-activity.

What forces the proletariat to confront and destroy the social relations of capital: wage-labour, generalized commodity production - is the fact that the latter have entered into violent conflict with the productive forces, both with the material needs of the proletariat and the productive forces of human society as a whole. The decadence of the social relations which dominate the proletariat implies that the primary task of the proletariat in this epoch is to destroy them and initiate new ones. Its task then is not to govern, reform or organize capital but to liquidate it forever. Decadence means that the productive forces simply cannot be developed in the interests of humanity as long as they remain under the dominion of capital, that real development can now only take place under communist relations of production. Historical materialism leaves no room for a transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism.

"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges". (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

Here we have a transition period in which communism emerges with violent birth pangs out of capitalist society, a communism in constant struggle against the remnants of the old society and continually striving to "develop on its own foundations" towards the reign of freedom, the classless society.

The Revolutionary Civil War

But the movement towards the abolition of classes is a consciously directed one, and the consciousness which guides the movement towards its final goal is that of the only communist class, the proletariat. Communism is not simply an unconscious urge to negate commodity relations, which discovers as if by accident that these relations, are guarded by the capitalist state and that to realize communism the state must be smashed. Communism is a movement of the proletariat which throws up a political programme, a programme which clearly recognizes in advance that capitalist social relations are defended by the bourgeois state and which systematically advocates the destruction of bourgeois political power as a precondition for the communist transformation. Thus the proletarian revolution is opposite in pattern to the bourgeois revolution in that the social revolution undertaken by the proletariat can only take flight after the political conquest of power by the working class. Because capital is a world-wide relation, the communist revolution can only unfold on a world scale. The global nature of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat implies that the seizure of power by the workers in one country initiates a world civil war against the bourgeoisie. Until this world civil war has been won, until the proletariat has conquered power on a world scale, we cannot really speak of a period of transition or a communist transformation. In the period of the world civil war, production, even when directed by the proletariat, is not primarily production for human needs (which is the hallmark of communist production). In this period, production, as every-thing else, is subordinated to the demands of the civil war, to the iron necessity to extend and deepen the international revolution. Even though the proletariat may dispense with many of the formal characteristics of capitalist relations while it is arming itself and feeding itself for the civil war, one cannot call an economy which is orientated towards war a communist mode of production pure and simple. As long as capitalism exists anywhere in the world its laws will continue to determine the real content of productive relations everywhere. Thus if the proletariat of one country rid themselves of the form of wage labour and begin to ration all they produce without any kind of monetary intermediary, the rhythm of production and distribution in that proletarian bastion still remains under the merciless domination of global capital, of the global law of value. At the least reflux of the revolutionary tide these formal measures would quickly be undermined and begin to revert back to capitalist wage relations in all their naked brutality, without at any time the workers having ceased being part of an exploited class. To pretend that it is possible to establish islands of communism while the bourgeoisie still holds power on a world scale, is to try to mystify the working class and to divert it from its fundamental task - the total elimination of bourgeois power.

This does not mean that in its struggle for political power the proletariat abstains from taking economic measures aimed at undermining the power of capital; still less does it mean that the proletariat can simply take hold of the capitalist economy and wield it for its own purposes. Just as the Paris Commune showed that the proletariat cannot take hold of the capitalist state machine and use it for its own ends, the Russian Revolution revealed the impossibility of the working class indefinitely maintaining power on top of a capitalist economy. In the final analysis this means that the working class must engage in a process of destroying global capital if it is to retain power anywhere, but this process begins straight away: the working class has to be aware that the struggle against capital takes place at all levels (even though not uniformly) because capital is a total social relation.

As soon as the proletariat takes power in one area it will be forced to begin the attack on capitalist relations of production, firstly to strike a blow at the global organisation of capital, secondly to facilitate its political direction of the area it controls, and thirdly, to lay the basis for the far more developed social transformation which will follow the civil war. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie in one area will have a profoundly disintegratory effect on the organisation of world capital if it takes place in an important centre of capitalism, and will therefore deepen the world-wide class struggle; the proletariat will have to make use of all the economic weapons it has at its disposal. With regard to the second reason (which is of no lesser importance), it is impossible to imagine the political unification and, hegemony of the proletariat if it does not begin a radical assault on all the divisions and complexities imposed by the capitalist division of labour. The political power of the workers will depend to no mean degree on their ability to simplify and rationalise the process of production and distribution, and this rationalisation is impossible in an economy totally dominated by commodity relations. One of the main impulses pushing the proletariat towards the production of use, values is that such a method of production is far more suited to the tasks facing the proletariat in a revolutionary crisis - tasks such as the general arming of the workers, the emergency rationing of supplies the central direction of the productive apparatus, and. so on. Finally, provided the revolution is victorious on a world scale, these crude measures of socialisation could, under certain specific conditions, establish a continuity with the real, positive reorganisation of production which takes place after that victory, in so far as they help to neutralize and undermine the domination of commodity relations, thus lessening the 'negative' tasks of the proletariat in the period of transition.

The depth and extent of these measures will depend on the balance of forces in any given situation, but we can foresee that they will go the furthest where capitalism has already advanced, in its brutal, decadent and blind way, the process of material socialisation. Thus the collectivisation of the means of production will surely be effected the quickest in those sectors where the proletariat is most concentrated - in the big factories, mines, docks, etc. The socialisation of consumption will likewise proceed most easily in those areas which are already partly socialised: transport, housing, gas, electricity and other services, could be supplied free of charge almost immediately, subject only to the total reserves controlled by the workers. The collectivisation of these services would make deep inroads on the wage system. As for the direct distribution of individual articles of consumption, the total suppression of monetary forms, it is difficult to say how far this process could proceed as long as the revolution remains in one region. But we can say that we are for the maximum possible assault on the wage form, and no doubt the revolutionary workers will not be well disposed towards paying themselves wages once they have seized power. To be more concrete, we are in favour of measures which tend to regulate labour and distribution in social, collective terms (measures such as rationing combined with a universal obligation to work subject to the demands of the workers' councils) - rather than measures which involve a calculation of each individual contribution to social labour. The system of labour-time vouchers, advocated by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme and by communists after Marx, by which individuals are given goods in return for a definite amount of labour performed, has a number of disadvantages and dangers, precisely because it does not really go beyond the capitalist notion of labour as an 'exchange' between the individual, atomised worker and 'society'. The system of labour-time vouchers would tend to divide those proletarians who are able to work from those who are not (a situation which may well be intensified in a period of international revolutionary crisis), and would furthermore drive a wedge between proletarians and other strata, inhibiting the process of social integration. Such a system would demand an immense bureaucratic supervision of each workers' labour, and would most easily degenerate into a form of money-wages at a downturn of the revolution (these drawbacks apply both to the period of the civil war and to the transition period itself).

A system of rationing under the control of the workers' councils would more easily lend itself to democratic regulation of the total resources of a proletarian bastion and to the encouragement of feelings of solidarity among all members of the class. But we have no illusions that this or any other system will represent a 'guarantee' against the return of wage slavery in its, most naked form. At root, the subjection to time and scarcity and to the pressure of global commodity relations still exists - it is simply borne by the whole proletarian bastion, as a kind of collective wage. Any temporary system of distribution is open to the dangers of bureaucratisation and degeneration as long as commodity relations exist - and commodity relations (including labour power as a commodity) cannot entirely disappear until classes have ceased to exist, because the perpetuation of classes means the perpetuation of exchange. There can be no pretence that any such method of distribution, either in the early stages of the revolution or the period of transition itself, represents "to each according to his needs", which can only be achieved in the higher stage of communism.

The assault on the wage form goes hand in hand with the assault on the capitalist division of labour. First and foremost the divisions imposed by capital within the ranks of the proletariat itself must be ruthlessly criticized and opposed. Divisions between skilled and unskilled, men and women, between proletarian sectors, employed and unemployed, must be confronted within the mass organs of the class as the only way of cementing the fighting unity of the workers.

Similarly, the proletariat, right from the beginning, embarks upon a process of integrating other social strata into its ranks, beginning with those semi-proletarian strata who will have demonstrated their capacity to support the revolutionary movement of the workers: one can envisage a rapid integration of certain layers who have already shown an ability to fight collectively against their exploitation, for example, large sectors of nurses and of white collar employees.

But it must be re-emphasised that all these inroads on commodity relations and the capitalist division of labour are in fact only a means to an end, to which they must be strictly subordinated: to the extension of the world revolution. While it does not shirk from attacking commodity relations from the start, the proletariat must regard as a snare and a delusion the idea of creating exemplary models of communism this or that region. While beginning the integration of non-exploiting classes into its ranks, the proletariat must constantly be on its guard against diluting itself with strata who cannot as a whole share the communist goals of the working class and who, after having been ostensibly integrated into the proletariat, would constitute a dangerous fifth column in its ranks at the first signs of a recession in the world revolutionary wave. The unification of all the workers of the world must take precedence over all attempts to begin the creation of the human community. All these advances towards socialisation are really stop-gap measures, emergency contingencies. They may be part of an attack on commodity relations but they in no way represent the abolition of fundamental capitalist laws. The real, positive supercession of commodity relations can only be achieved after the world-wide destruction of the bourgeoisie, after the construction of the international proletarian dictatorship. Here the period of transition proper begins.

The Period of transition

We cannot discuss here at great length the tasks of the proletariat during this period. We can only outline them briefly in order to emphasise the immensity of the proletariat's project. While liberating the productive forces from the fetters of capital, while liquidating the system of wage labour, national frontiers and the world market, the proletariat will have to establish a world-wide system of production and distribution geared solely to the satisfaction of human needs; it will have to direct the new productive system towards the restoration and revival of a world ravaged by decades of capitalist decadence and also the revolutionary civil war. The feeding and clothing of the poverty-stricken, the elimination of pollution and waste production together with the wholesale reorganisation of the global industrial infrastructure, the battle against the innumerable psychological alienations left-over from capitalism in work and social life as a whole - these are merely the preliminary tasks. They are simply the preconditions for the construction of a new civilisation, a new culture, a new humanity, the marvels of which can scarcely be imagined this side of capitalism, and which can mainly be grappled with in negative terms: the elimination of the antimony between economy and society, between work and leisure, between individual and society man and nature, and so on. And all the while the proletariat is laying the foundations of this new way of life it must be progressively integrating the whole of humanity into the ranks of associated labour and so creating the classless human community - but not without guarding against abolishing itself too rapidly, without ensuring, that there is not the slightest possibility of a return, to generalised commodity relations and thus to capitalism. The transition period will be the background of a gigantic struggle to maintain an irreversible movement towards the human community and against all the vestiges of the old society.

Those who portray this period as presenting no problems to the proletariat, as a stage which can quickly be superseded, are deceiving both themselves and the working class as a whole. We do not know how long this period will last but we do know that it will pose problems of a kind and magnitude unknown in the whole of human history, that the proletariat's task has no precedent in any other epoch, and that to think that this task can be carried out overnight is at best utopian and at worst a reactionary mystification. All we can be sure of is that the period of transition will not allow the proletariat or the social transformation to stand still. Any let up in the constant revolutionising of the social fabric will signify an immediate danger of a return to capitalism, and thus ultimately to barbarism. At no time will the proletariat be able to rest on its laurels and wait for communism to arrive on its own; either the proletariat struggles towards the higher stage of communism in a constant state of movement which is it self based on a conscious generalisation of communist relations, or it will find itself once again an exploited class being mobilised for some final catastrophe. There is no third way.

The Form of the Proletarian Dictatorship

It is a truism that the precise organisational forms through which the proletariat will carry out the communist transformation cannot be spelled out in advance by revolutionaries. It is impossible to foresee all the various organisational arid practical problems which will confront the working class all over the world, problems which will only finally be resolved by the class itself in its revolutionary struggle. The creativity of the class will almost certainly go beyond its own past achievements and. supersede many of the speculative formulations which revolutionaries can put forward at the present time.

Nevertheless, revolutionaries can in no way avoid discussing the question of the form and structure of the proletarian dictatorship. To do so would be to deny the whole experience of the revolutionary working class in this epoch, experience which has given rise to certain lessons which the proletariat simply cannot afford to ignore. To dismiss these lessons, especially those of Russia, is to leave the way open for a repetition of past defeats. It is no accident that the capitalist 'left' (Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc), is incapable of either appraising the past mistakes of the workers' movement or of clearly spelling out its own 'programme' for what they call the revolution. Behind this ambivalence, this reluctance to 'draw up blueprints', there lurks a class standpoint utterly opposed to the revolutionary self-activity of the working class.

These 'practical', 'realistic' leftists often hide behind Marx's own reluctance to speculate on the organisational form of the proletarian dictatorship. But the reluctance evinced by Marx was a necessary reflection of his own epoch, a period in which the material preconditions for the communist revolution did not yet exist. Any statements made by Marx and Engels on the form of the dictatorship were determined by the maturity of the class, by the degree to which it could present itself as a force capable of taking the leadership of society. But in the ascendant period of capitalism, with the proletariat still small and unformed, the possibility of its seizing power was extremely limited, and. in any case it could not have maintaineed power in that epoch at all.

Nevertheless, there were enough experiences of proletarian uprisings in that era to allow Marx and Engels to make certain vital statements about the nature of the proletarian power. Because they based their analysis on the methods of historical materialism, they were able to learn from the living experiences of the class and were thus able to revise some fundamental conceptions they had formulated with regard to the seizure of power by the working class. Thus the experience of the 1848 insurrection in Paris, and even more the Paris Commune of 1871, led them to abandon the perspective elaborated in The Communist Manifesto that the proletariat should organise to take over the bourgeois state machine. Henceforth it was clear that the proletariat could only smash this machine and set up its own organs of power, which could alone serve its communist aims. In learning this lesson Marx and Engels were carrying out the fundamental communist task of basing a proletarian political programme solely on the historical lessons discovered by the working class, and this is til1 the only way of developing the communist programme today. But today we are living in the epoch of capitalist decadence and thus of the proletarian social revolution, and we can and must apply the experience of the class in this epoch, and particularly of its great revolutionary wave of 1917-1923, to the task of elaborating the organisational elements of that programme in a way that was impossible for Marx and Engels to do.

For while Engels described the Commune itself as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat; while Marx called it the political form for the social emancipation of labour; while certain fundamental lessons were laid down for all time by the Commune (the need to smash the bourgeois state, to arm the workers, to ensure direct control over workers delegates, etc); the Commune cannot stand by itself as the model for the proletarian dictatorship today. The Commune was the expression of a young working class which was not only not fully a world class but which even in the urban centres of capitalism was still fragmented and not yet fully distinct from other urban classes such as the petit bourgeoisie. This fact was reflected clearly in the Commune. Despite its desire for the universal social republic, the Commune could not extend itself on a world scale. The membership of the Commune's central organs was made up of Jacobins and Proudhonists as well as Communists, and its electoral bases were the geographical wards of Paris and universal suffrage, not a distinctly proletarian or industrial system of election. Above all the Commune could not have initiated a socialist transformation because the productive forces had not developed to the point at which communism was both possible and immediately necessary. As the ascendant period of capitalism cane to a close, the global extension and concentration of industrial capitalism had already rendered many features of the Commune obsolete, but none of the revolutionaries of the 1890s and early 1900s were clear as to what would supersede the Commune as the model for the dictatorship and their utterances on this question were necessarily vague.

Once again, however, it was the concrete experience of the class itself which provided an answer to this problem. Thus in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917, and throughout the whole revolutionary wave which followed in other countries, the Soviet or Workers' Council appeared as fighting organs of the revolutionary class struggle. The councils, assemblies of elected and revocable delegates from industrial units, were first and foremost expressions of the collective organisation of the proletariat united on its own class terrain and thus were a higher form of proletarian power than the Commune had been. As soon as the world union of workers' councils presented itself as the immediate goal of the proletarian revolution the slogan all power to the Soviets marked a class line between revolutionary and bourgeois organisations. No revolutionary organisation could reject the Soviet power as the form of the proletarian dictatorship. Since then every insurrectionary movement of the class from China in 1927 to Hungary in 1956 and so on has exhibited a tendency to express itself through the council form of organisation, and despite all the weaknesses of these movements nothing has fundamentally altered. in the nature of the class ,to justify the conclusion that in the next revolutionary wave the councils will not arise again as the concrete form of the proletarian dictatorship.

Today we are assailed by a host of modernists and innovators (e.g. Invariance, Negation, Kommunismen), who argue that workers' councils simply reproduce the capitalist division of labour and are therefore unsuitable instruments of a communist revolution, which they define as ±he immediate overthrow of all the categories of capitalist society. The class standpoint of these tendencies betrays the undialectical and unmarxist nature of their conception of revolution. For them the working class is no more than a faction of capitalism which can only become part of the 'revolutionary subject' or the 'communist movement' by immediately negating itself into a universal 'humanity'; whereas the marxist vision of revolution can only be that the proletariat must assert itself as the only communist class prior to integrating the whole of humanity into associated labour and so ending its own separate existence as a class. The workers councils are adequate instruments for the self-assertion of the proletariat against the rest of society, as well as for the process of integrating other social strata into the ranks of the proletariat, for the creation of the human community. Only when that community has been definitively realized will the, workers councils finally disappear. Linked city by city and across the world, the workers' councils will be responsible for the military, economic, and ideological tasks of the civil war and for the direction of the communist transformation in the transition period. In this period the councils will be under-going a continual expansion of their social base as they integrate more and more of humanity into communist relations of production.

But the affirmation of the council form by revolutionaries today in no way precludes a thorough-going critique of previous council movements and of the proletarian political tendencies which were thrown up by, or drew their inspiration from these movements. This critique is absolutely indispensable if the working class is to avoid making the same mistakes that it made in the past; and it can only base itself on the bitter lessons which the proletariat has learned through its most militant struggles in this epoch.

The most important lessons can be summarised as follows:

1. Political power is exercised through the councils themselves and not through a party. In Russia and elsewhere in the past it was assumed that the proletarian dictatorship was exercised through the communist party, the latter constituting the 'government' when it had a majority in the soviets, just as in bourgeois parliaments. Furthermore delegates to the soviets were elected on party slates rather than operating as mandated delegates to carry out the decisions of workers assemblies (often delegates did not come from factories at all, but were representatives of parties, unions, etc). This in itself was an immediate concession to bourgeois forms of representation and parliamentarianism, tending to leave power in the hands of political experts rather than in the mass of workers themselves; but more important, the idea that the party exercised power rather than the class as a whole (an idea endemic to the workers' movement at the tine) became a direct vehicle of the counter-revolution and was used by the Bolshevik Party in decay to justify their attacks on the class after the failure of the revolutionary tide. By identifying the power of the party with the dictatorship of the proletariat the Bolsheviks were provided with an ideological mantle for what quickly became the dictatorship of capital in a new guise. The old Social Democratic idea of the party which represented and organised the class was decisively refuted by the Russian experience.

In the soviets of the future, the most important decisions, those concerned with the overall direction of the revolution, must be fully discussed and arrived ,at in the general assemblies of the class at the base, in the factories and. other workplaces, so that delegates to the soviets serve primarily to centralize and carry out the decisions of those assemblies. These delegates will often be members of the party or other fractions but they are elected as workers and not as representatives of any party. It may even be that at any given time the majority of delegates are members of the communist party but this in itself is not a danger providing the proletariat as a whole is actively participating in its class wide organs and retains an overall control of them. In the last analysis this can only be safeguarded by the radicalisation and energy of the workers themselves, by the success of the revolutionary transformation which is in their hands; but certain formal measures will have to be taken to inhibit the formation of a bureaucratic elite around the party or any other body. These, will include the constant revocability of delegates, maximum rotation of administrative tasks, equal access of delegates to use values as for all other workers, and in particular the complete separation of the party from the state functions of the councils. Thus, for example, it is the workers' councils which control the arms and which supervise repression against counter-revolutionary elements, and not some military wing or special commission of the party.

The communist party of the future will have no other weapons than its theoretical clarity and its active commitment to the communist programme. It cannot seek power for itself, but must fight within the general organs of the class for the implementation of the communist programme. It can in no way force the class as a whole to put this programme into action, or implement it itself, because communism can only be created by the conscious activity of the entire working class. The party can only seek to convince the class as a whole of the correctness of its analysis through the process of discussion and active education which will go on within the assemblies and councils of the class, and it will pitilessly denounce any self-professed revolutionary tendency which abrogates gates to itself the task of organising the class and of substituting itself as the revolutionary subject.

2. The councils are not organs of self-management. In any future revolutionary situation the demand to subordinate the councils to an omnipotent party-state which will lead and educate an amorphous mass of workers and centralise capital in its own hands will come from all the various heirs of the counter-revolution in Russia: Trotskyists, Stalinists, and others. Communists will have to stand by the rest of their class and fight these conceptions tooth and nail. But the proletariat's bitter experience of state capitalism in Russia and elsewhere, and of the reactionary nature of nationalise in general, may make the class as a whole less sympathetic to calls for nationalisation than in previous revolutionary moments. But the bourgeoisie will no doubt find other rallying cries to try to tie the workers to the bourgeois state and to capitalist relations of production; one of the most pernicious of these could be the slogan of workers' self management, which could find an echo in the various corporatist, localist, and syndicalist mystifications which exist in the class. The experience of the past has given many examples of this. In Italy and Germany during the first great revolutionary wave, there was a strong tendency for the workers to simply lock themselves up in the factories and to try to manage their own enterprises on a corporate basis, to restrict the council organisation to the level of each factory rather than creating organs specifically aimed at regrouping and centralising the revolutionary efforts of all workers. Today the idea of self-management is already presenting itself as a final resort of capitalism in crisis and emasculated workers' councils are being advocated by numerous left factions of capital from the social democrats to Trotskyists and sundry libertarians. The advantage of this slogan to the bourgeoisie is that it serves to induce the proletariat to participate actively in its own exploitation and slaughter without calling into question the power of the capitalist state or capitalist commodity relations. Thus the bourgeois Republic in Spain was able to co-opt a certain amount of self-management into the war-effort against France's rival capitalist faction. (Footnote 1 [7])

The isolation of the workers into councils composed of individual, productive units simply maintains the divisions imposed by the capitalist system and leads to certain defeat for the class. (See Cardan's Sur le Contenu du Socialisme, published by Solidarity as Workers' Councils and the Economics of a Self Managed Society for a perfect model of defeat.) Such methods of organisation divert the workers from attacking the primary target - the capitalist state - and allows the state to launch its offensive against a fragmented working class. They also serve to perpetuate the idea of autonomous enterprises and of socialism as free exchange between free collectives of workers whereas the. Real socialisation of production implies the world suppression of autonomous enterprises as such, and the subordination of the whole productive apparatus to the conscious direction of society, without the medium of exchange. (Footnote 2 [7])

But the mystification of self management need not end with the idea of self managing productive units. It can also be extended to a national model, in which workers councils come together to plan a democratic accumulation of national capital; and it can even be accommodated to the ideal of a self sufficient communist bastion which attempts to formally abolish wage labour and trade in one country - an illusion held by many council communists in the twenties and thirties, which is appearing again in a different form in the ideas of the innovators of marxism, who demand the immediate creation of the human community. All these ideologies are linked by a common rejection of the need for the proletariat to destroy the bourgeois state on a world scale before actual permanent socialisation can begin. Thus, against all these confusions it must be asserted that the workers' councils are first and foremost organs of political power, which must serve to unite the workers not simply to administer the economy but to conquer power on a world scale.

3. The workers' councils are not ends in themselves. The international conquest of power by the working class is simply the beginning of the social revolution. In. the period of transition the workers councils are the means through which the proletariat implements the communist transformation of society. If the councils become ends in themselves this can only signify a halt in the process of social revolution and the beginnings of a return to capitalism. Unless the councils serve as instruments for the positive abolition of wage slavery and commodity production they will become hollow shells through which a new bourgeoisie will exploit the working class.

Neither in the transition period nor in the revolutionary uprising itself can there be any guarantee that the working class will engage in a continuous process of revolution until the final triumph of communism. The mere will or foresight of revolutionary minorities is not enough to prevent the degeneration of the revolution which itself reflects a material change in the balance of class forces. Between the period in which the councils are revolutionary and the period in. which they have become appendages of capital there is a delicate balance in which it remains possible to reform the councils from within: but this is only a relatively brief possibility. If that possibility is lost then revolutionaries must leave the councils and advocate the formation of new councils directly opposed to the old - in other words a second revolution. In this respect we already have before us the example of the small communist fractions in Russia who refused to collaborate in the dead soviets of the early twenties and. who advocated the overthrow of the Bolshevik state (e.g. Miasnikov's Workers Group in 1923); or the German left communists who left the reformist factory organisation to the putrid machinations of the KPD and the Social Democratic Parties.

The Question of the State

The problem of the state in the period of transition and its relationship to, the proletariat is so complex that we must deal with the question separately, even though it is closely connected to the -lessons gained from previous revolutions about the form of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of the workers councils.

As long as classes exist, we cannot speak of the abolition of the state. The state continues to exist during the period of transition because there remain classes whose direct interests cannot be reconciled: on the one hand the communist proletariat and on the other hand other classes left over from capitalism who can have no material interests in the communisation of society, (peasants, urban petit bourgeoisie and professionals, etc). As Engels wrote in The Origins of the Family Private Property and the State:

"The state is therefore by no means a power forced on society from without...it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to expel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society becomes necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of order; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state."

It is important not to reduce the phenomenon of the state to a simple conspiracy of the ruling class to perpetuate its power. The state did not arise out of the mere will of any ruling class but was an emanation of class society in general and due to this it becomes an instrument of the ruling class.

"As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but as it arose at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class and thus acquires new, means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class" (ibid).

In the period of transition to communism the, state will, inevitably arise, in order to prevent the class antagonisms of this hybrid society from pulling it apart; class struggle will not end with the destruction of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, as the strongest, the dominant class, will use the state to maintain its power and to defend the gains of the communist transformation which it is putting into effect. To be sure this state will be unlike any other state in history. For the first time the newly dominant class will not inherit the old state machine and take it over for its own purposes, but will smash, destroy, and annihilate the bourgeois state, and set about systematically constructing its own organs of power; and this is because the proletariat is the first exploited class in history to be a revolutionary class, and it can never be an exploiting class. Consequently, it uses the state not to exploit other classes but to defend a social transformation that will end exploitation for ever, which will abolish all social antagonisms, and so lead to the disappearance of the state. The proletariat cannot be an economically dominant class. Its domination is political only.

In the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and many others, the idea is often put forward that in the period of transition the "state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat", that the state is simply the armed proletariat "organized as the ruling class", and that this 'proletarian' state is therefore no longer a state in the old sense of the word. But a deeper study of the nature of the state, itself based on the most profound critiques of the state elaborated by Marx and Engels, and on the historical experience of the class, leads us to the conclusion that the state in the revolution as a whole is something other than just the armed proletariat, that the proletariat and the state are not identical.

Let us summarize our main reasons for making this assertion.

1. In the period of the insurrection itself, of the revolutionary civil war, the scenarios envisaged by Marx, Engels and Lenin, can be seen to have a certain validity. At this point the main task of the working class, of the proletarian dictatorship expressed through the workers councils, is indeed a statist one: the violent suppression of the enemy class, the bourgeoisie. At the beginning of the insurrection, when the mass of workers are sweeping forward, arms in hand, and at all times when the revolutionary onslaught against the bourgeoisie is on the upsurge, delegates to the workers councils and congresses of councils will function as simple instruments of the will of the class and there will be little or no conflict between the base assemblies of the workers and the central organs they elect. Here it will be very easy to identify the armed proletariat with the state. But even at this time it is dangerous to make this identification. The moment the revolutionary tide meets with serious obstacles or set-backs the workers delegates who have been mandated to deal with the outside world (whether peasants supplying food, or even capitalist states who are prepared to barter with the workers power) (Footnote 3 [8]) would be forced to advocate certain compromises, to ask the workers to work harder, or to reduce their rations - and so these delegates would begin to appear as agents external to the workers, as functionaries of a state in the old sense of something standing above and against the workers.

There is a delicate balance reached at this point, where the workers delegates and central organs stand half way between being negotiators between the workers and world capital - and becoming definite agents of world capital and thus of capitalist counter-revolution inside the proletarian bastion, as did the Bolsheviks in Russia. This balance can only be decided in favour of the workers by a further extension of the world revolution allowing a new breathing space to the beleaguered workers and to the partially socialized sector they have created.

The existence of formal measures alone cannot prevent this degeneration from taking place, because it is a direct result of the pressures of the world market; but it is still vital that the workers are prepared for such an eventuality so that they can do all they can to fight it. That is why it is important that the proletariat is not identified with the state, either with the apparatus it sets up to mediate with non-exploiting classes within the proletarian bastion, or with the central organs which are charged with relating to the world outside that bastion, or indeed with any institution, because while any institution thrown up by the working class can become integrated into capitalism, the working class can never be integrated, can never become counter-revolutionary.

To identify the proletariat with the state, as the Bolsheviks did, leads to the monstrous situation- at a moment of reflux or defeat in which the state as the incarnation of the class is permitted to do anything to maintain its power while the class as a whole remains defenceless. Thus Trotsky argued that the workers had no right to strike against their own state, and the massacre of the Kronstadt insurgents was justified on the grounds that any rebellion against the Workers State could only be counter-revolutionary. Clearly these developments in Russia did not take place simply because the workers were identified with the state, but flowed from a material retrogression in the world revolution. Nevertheless, that ideological identification served to disarm the workers in the fare of the degeneration of the revolution. In future the autonomy and initiative of the rank and file workers vis-a-vis any central organs must be defended and backed up by positive measures, such as the renunciation of all violent methods within the proletariat, the right of all workers to strike, the possession by the base assemblies of their own means of communication and propaganda (press, etc), and above all the retention of arms by the workers in their factories and neighbourhoods, so that they will be able to resist the incursions of any emergent bureaucracy should this become necessary.

We do not advocate these precautionary measures out of any lack of conviction in the proletariat's ability to spread the revolution and to socialize production, which are the only final guarantees against degeneration, but because the proletariat must be prepared for any eventuality and not deceived by false promises that all will be well. The proletarian revolution will have far less chance of surviving temporary set-backs if the workers are not prepared in advance to deal with them.

2. Contrary to some of the expectations of Marx, the socialist revolution will not unfold in a world in which the vast majority of the population are proletarians; if that were the case one could perhaps imagine the disappearance of the state almost immediately following the destruction of the bourgeoisie. But one of the main consequences of capitalist decadence is that capital has not been able to integrate the majority of mankind directly into capitalist social relations even though it has subjected all to the tyranny of capitalist laws. The proletariat is a minority of the population on a world scale. The enormous problems posed to the proletarian revolution by this fact cannot be charmed away by the invocations of situationists and other modernists by including in the ranks of the proletariat all those who feel themselves alienated or as having no control over their lives. There are material reasons why the working class alone is the communist class: its world-wide, associative nature, its location at the heart of capitalist value production, the historical consciousness deriving from its class struggle. It is the lack of these characteristics among other classes and strata which necessitates the dictatorship of the proletariat, the assertion by the proletariat of its communist goals in distinction from all other strata of society.

In the process of conquering power itself, the proletariat will be faced with a huge mass of non-proletarian, non-bourgeois strata, who may have a part to play in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, who may even support the proletariat, but who cannot by themselves, as classes, have any interest in communism and who might equally veer towards the counter-revolution, particularly at any sign of a set-back in the proletariat's march to power. The problem of dealing with these classes will be crucial to the success of the struggle against the capitalist class; but after the defeat of the bourgeoisie it is perhaps the most central of all the proletariats tasks; indeed it is the existence of these classes which provides the necessity for a period of transition between capitalism and communism.

The idea of dispensing with the transition period by immediately integrating all other strata into the proletariat is either a hopeless fantasy or a conscious attempt to undermine the autonomy of the working, class. The task is so huge that it simply could not be done in one fell swoop; any attempt to do so would not be the diso1ution of other classes into the proletariat, but the dissolution of the proletariat into the mythical 'people' of bourgeois radicalism. Such attempts would dilute the strength of the proletariat, to the extent that any autonomy of action would become impossible. The precondition for this autonomy is that the integration of other strata takes place on the proletariat's terms and subject to the material developments of the world revolution.

Similarly, the attempt to give these strata equal representation in the workers councils, without having first destroyed them as separate strata, in other words without having made them into workers, would completely undermine the political autonomy o1 the working class. Still less can the proletariat allow these strata and classes to set up parallel organs of power equal to the workers' councils.

At the same time the working class cannot simply repress these classes and deprive them of all means of social expression. The experience of Russia, in which the proletariat during the period of War Communism was forced into a virtual civil war against the peasantry, is eloquent testimony of the impossibility of the proletariat simply imposing its will by force of arms on the rest of society. Such a project would be a terrible waste of life and revolutionary energy, and would in all probability directly help to destroy the revolution. The only civil war that cannot be avoided is the one against the bourgeoisie. Violence against other classes should be resorted to only in the most extreme circumstances. Besides, while it is re-organizing production and distribution along communist lines, the proletariat must cater for the needs not only of itself but of society as a whole, which means that there will have to be suitable social institutions for expressing everyone's needs.

The proletariat, therefore, will have to allow the rest of the population (excluding the bourgeoisie) to organize themselves and to form bodies which can represent their needs in front of the workers' councils. However, the working class will not allow these other strata to organize specifically as classes with particular economic interests. Just as these other strata are integrated into associated labour as individuals, so the proletariat only permits them to express themselves as individuals in civil society. This implies that the representative organs through which they express themselves, unlike the workers' councils, are based on territorial units and forms of organisation. Thus, for example, in the countryside, village assemblies might send delegates to rural-district and. regional councils, and in the cities neighbourhood assemblies might send representatives to urban communal councils; and these organs will, at various local and regional levels, discuss the needs of the general population with the workers' councils' delegates. It is important to note that workers (as representatives of proletarian neighbourhoods) will be present in these bodies, and indeed measures should be taken to ensure that even within these bodies a working class domination is achieved. Thus the workers' councils may insist that working class delegates have preponderant voting rights, and that working class neighbourhoods have their own militia units as well as stressing that it is the working class communal delegates who do most of the liaison and discussion with the workers' councils.

The existence of these organs in regular relation to the workers' councils constantly creates statist forms in the sense given by Engels above, whatever we call this new apparatus. For this reason, the state in the transition period is linked to, but not identical with, the workers councils and the armed proletariat as a whole. For, as Engels shows, the state is not only an instrument of violence and repression (functions which will hopefully be minimal after the defeat of the bourgeoisie), it is also an instrument of mediation between classes, an instrument which serves to keep the class struggle within the bounds of the existing society. This in no way implies that the state can ever be 'neutral' or 'above classes' (though it may often appear to be). The mediation and conciliation that is effected through the state is always in the interest of the dominant class, it always serves to perpetuate that domination. The state in the period of transition must be used as an instrument of the working class. The proletariat does not share power with any other class or strata. It will have to appropriate for itself a monopoly of political-military power, which in concrete terms will necessitate a monopoly of arms by the workers, the workers' councils' power of decision over all recommendations of any joint negotiating bodies, maximal representation of workers' delegates on all state bodies, etc. The proletariat will have to be continually vigilant so as to ensure that this state, this organ which arises to keep the transitional society together, remains an instrument of the working class and does not become the representative of alien class interests, does not become an instrument of the other classes against the proletariat. For as long as classes exist, as long as there is exchange and a social division of labour, this state will not only remain, but like all other states will, constantly threaten to, in Engels words, "increasingly alienate itself" from society, to become a power standing above society, and thus above, the proletariat.

The only way the proletariat can really prevent this from happening is for it to engage in a continuing process of social transformation, to push forward more and more measures which tend to undermine the material roots of other classes and to integrate them into communist relations of production. But until such time as there are no longer any classes the proletariat can only dominate the organisms which arise in the transition period by clearly understanding their nature and function. We use the term 'state' to describe that apparatus which serves, during the transition period, to mediate between classes in a framework of political domination by the working class. The word itself is of lesser importance; what is important is not to confuse this apparatus with the workers' councils, with the autonomous organs of the class whose function and essence is not compromise or mediation but permanent social revolution.

This brings us to our final point. By its very nature the state is a conservative force, an inheritance, from the pre-history of class society. Its very function is to preserve social relations, to maintain the balance of forces between classes - in other words to stand still. But as we have said, the proletariat in the transition period cannot afford to stand still; whatever is not part of a movement towards communism is a step backwards towards capitalism. Left to itself the state will not 'wither away' but will attempt to preserve itself, indeed to increase its domination of social life. The state only withers away to the extent that the proletariat is able to carry forward the social transformation towards the integration of all classes into the human community. The positive creation of this community undermines the social basis of the state: the "irreconcilability of class antagonisms", a social illness which has its cure only in the abolition of classes.

The proletariat alone contains within itself the seeds of communist social relations; the proletariat alone is capable of undertaking the communist transformation. The state at best helps to guard the gains of this transformation (and at worst becomes an obstacle to it) but it cannot, as a state, undertake that transformation. It is the social movement of the whole proletariat in creative self activity which actually ends the domination of commodity fetishism and builds up a new social relationship between human beings.

The workers' movement from Marx and Engels to Lenin and even the left communists has been plagued with the confusion that the taking over of the means of production by the state has something to do with communism, that statification equals socialisation. As Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring:

"The proletariat seizes the, state power and transforms the means of production in the first instance into state property. But in doing this it puts an end to itself as proletariat, it puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms; it puts an end also to the state as state".

Despite other conflicting (and more profound) insights into the inability of the proletariat to use the state in the interests of freedom, both Marx and Engels could make such statements as the one above in the ascendant epoch of capitalism because at that time, in that era of 'private' capitalism's anarchic sway, of crises of overproduction within national boundaries, the organisation of production by the state, even a national state, could appear as an infinitely superior mode of economic organisation. The founders of scientific socialism never wholly escaped the idea that the socialist transformation could take place within a national economy or that statification was a bridge to socialism, or even equivalent to socialisation itself; these illusions and confusions permeated both the Social Democracy and the communist tendencies which broke away from it after 1914, and were only finally laid to rest within the communist movement by the experience of Russia, of the global overproduction crisis of capital, of the general tendency towards state capitalism in the era of decadence. But the confusions about statification being somehow 'socialist' still remains as a dead weight of mystification within the working class as a whole and has to be rigorously combated by communists.

Today, revo1utiona±ies can affirm that state property remains private property as far as the producers are concerned, that statification of the means of production puts an end neither to the proletariat, nor to class antagonisms, nor to the state, (Engels' statement notwithstanding). Neither nationalisation nor statification by the world-wide state of the transition period would be a step towards social property which in a sense is the abolition of property itself. In expropriating the bourgeoisie the proletariat does not institute private property of any kind, not even 'proletarian' property. There is no such thing as 'workers' ownership of the means of production or a 'proletarian economy'. The proletariat on seizing power socialises production: this means that the means of production and distribution tend to become the property of society as a whole. The proletariat guards this 'property' in the transition period in the interests of the human community of the future, whose foundations the proletariat is laying. It is not 'its own' property because by definition, the proletariat is a propertyless class. The process of socialisation of property realises itself to the extent that the proletariat is integrating the rest of society into its ranks and so becoming one with the communist human community, with a social humanity which will come into existence for the first tine. Once again the proletariat will use the state to regulate the achievements of this process, but the process itself occurs not only independently of the state hut actively leads to the disappearance of the state.

We communists do not 'advocate' the state, nor do we hold it up as the incarnation of all evil as the anarchists do. In analyzing the historical origins of the state we simply recognise the inevitability of statist forms arising in the transition period, and in recognizing this we help to prepare our class for its historic mission the construction of a society without classes and thus free forever from the scourge of the state.

CDW, World Revolution, (April 1975). Supplementary note on the question of the state

This text expresses the views of World Revolution as a whole, but it is not meant as a final statement or a solution to the problems of the transition period. Within the framework of certain class lines, the question of the state and the transition period must remain open for discussion between revolutionaries and can only be concretely solved by the revolutionary activity of the working class as a whole. It follows that within this framework different conceptions and definitions of the state can be accommodated inside a coherent revolutionary tendency.

The class lines concerning the question of the state are as follows:

• The necessity to completely destroy the bourgeois state on a world scale.
• The necessity of the proletarian dictatorship:
  • the proletariat is the only revolutionary class;
  • proletarian autonomy is a precondition of the communist revolution;
  • the proletariat ,does not share power with any, other class; it has a monopoly of political-military power.
• Power is exercised by the proletariat as a whole organised in councils; not by a party.
• All relations of force and all violence within the ranks of the proletariat must be rejected; the whole class must have the right to strike, to carry arms, to full freedom of expression, etc.
• The world dictatorship of the proletariat must put into effect the social content of the communist revolution: the abolition of wage labour, commodity production, nations, and classes, and the construction of the world human community.

Footnotes

• 
  
1We should not however forget the bureaucratic and statist nature of most of the so-called collectivisation carried out under the auspices of the anarchist CNT, and the CNT's hostility to any independent movement of the class, as witnessed in the CNT's collaboration in the Republic's armed reclaiming of the Barcelona telephone exchange from the workers in 1937. In fact all attempts of the workers to 'manage' capital must end in the normal despotism of capitalist production at the level of the whole society and of each plant. So-called 'workers' capitalism' is impossible. Back [9]
• 2This does not mean that the revolutionary workers will tolerate foremen and despotic regimes within the factory. During the revolutionary process factory committees elected by and responsible to the general assembly of the factory will take charge of the day-to-day running of the factory. Moreover, the overall production plans adhered to by the factory committees are decided by workers' councils composed of delegates from factory assemblies, and thus are decided upon by the class as a whole. As soon as the working class begins to take over the productive apparatus (and the seizure of the factories must be seen as a moment in the insurrection) it begins the struggle to subordinate the production process to human needs. This implies profound changes in the organisation of work, so that productive activity itself tends to become a part of consumption in the broadest sense. Certain measures in this direction will have to be taken almost immediately, such as the shortening of the working day (subject to the demands of the revolution), the rotation of tasks, and the elimination of hierarohica1 relations inside the factory through the equal participation of all workers, skilled and unskilled, manual and technical, men and women, in the factory assemblies and committees. Back [10]
• 3We do not formalistically oppose any trade or compromises between the proletariat and other non-exploiting classes in the civil war, or even between the proletarian bastion and sections of the world bourgeoisie should this become unavoidable. But we must make the following points clear:
  • a. The proletariat must be able to distinguish between compromises imposed by a difficult situation, and, open capitulations amounting to class betrayals; and it must be aware of the extreme dangers inherent in all compromises, and take measures to counteract them. Any attempt to institutionalise or make permanent any deals with the bourgeoisie is a crossing of class lines, a betrayal of the civil war.
  • b. In an area controlled by the workers' councils a state will arise which has the task of mediating between the proletariat and other non-exploiting classes (of the All-Russian Congresses of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasant Soviets after 1917). But the proletariat cannot use this state to mediate with its irreconcilable class enemy, the bourgeoisie. Any tactical negotiations with sectors of the world bourgeoisie outside the proletarian bastion are directly and solely the task of the workers' councils, and must be strictly supervised by the whole working class through their general assemblies.
  Back [11]

 

Part I Political

 

The State

First, a few qualifying remarks. Historically speaking the State has appeared as an organ of class rule though, as Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow, 1968, p.65), it often appeared as standing above society, as a mediator between classes:

"The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering together of it into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it vas the State of that class which itself represented for the time being, society as a whole."

Thus, as soon as the State becomes "the real representative of the whole of society" (our emphasis), as soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, then the State "renders itself unne­cessary".

However, it is an anarchist fallacy to suggest that out of the destruc­tion of the bourgeois State can communism appear automatically. The proletariat must first destroy the bourgeois State apparatus and set up its own form of class rule. In this respect alone the proletarian State will be no different from any other state in history. In other respects the dictatorship of the proletariat will be markedly different from other forms of State. Quantitatively speaking it will be the first State in his­tory to express the historical interests of a majority over a minority and qualitatively speaking the proletariat will as a class has no speci­fic form of property which they wish to defend. It is this last differ­ence which explains why the proletarian State is "no longer a State in the proper sense of the word". (Marxism and the State, Lenin, page 29). The proletarian State remains to oppress all elements who wish to res­urrect bourgeois property relations. At the moment of their dissolution and final defeat the dictatorship of the proletariat will have ceased to exist.

Thus, only the proletariat and its democratic organs, the soviets, can superintend this transformation. Nowhere, to our knowledge, in the writ­ings of Marx, Engels or Lenin, do they conceive of any other possibility. Indeed in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, and in State and Revolution they effectively deny that any alternative such as a "free people's State" or popular front is conceivable. True, Lenin (quite understandably though erroneously in the terms of' 1917) calls for an alliance between proletariat and peasantry (State and Revolution, pp. 46-47) but still concludes that the State must remain "the proletariat organized as the ruling class" (quoting the Communist Manifesto, p. 48). Nor has the experience of the proletariat in the last sixty years provided us with any reason to doubt this idea. Indeed, if anything, we have seen development which have thrown the balance even more in favour of the proletariat. Here one thinks of the peasantry, an analysis of which is wade in the next section.

The Peasantry

The question of the proletariat's relationship to the vital area of rural production has always been a particularly vexing one. The Russian Revolution (1917-21) is an example of the problem though its lessons must be placed in true historical perspective. Lenin was always looking over his shoulder at the huge masses of the Russian peasantry. In The State and Revolution, he suggests that an alliance of the peasants and workers will form the basis of the new society though under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in fact Lenin and the Bolsheviks could not have established communist relations of production in Russia alone. The Russian workers, like any other sector of the world proletariat, needed the world revolution if they were to achieve their goal. Thus, the Land Decree of November 1917 was not a step towards communism but an attempt to capture the support of the muzhiks to aid the struggle for survival of the soviet regime. Only a perspective of world revolution could prevent this from being considered completely counter-revolutionary and with the failure of the world revolution this was fully revealed. Let us be clear on the lesson. If the same situation of any proletariat surrounded by huge mass of peasantry were to recur today the proletariat in that area would still be doomed without a world revolution. However, this need be no cause for despondency amongst revolutionaries.

With the modern techniques of capitalist food production, with the increased concentration of the bulk of the world's food production in the highly developed capitalist agriculture - with the consequent existence of a proletariat as in any other industry - in a global revolutionary situation there will be no strategic need to satisfy the land hunger of the peasant for the expropriation of the capitalist agricultural units will secure the basis of existence for the world proletariat. The rural proletariat of these areas will thus be simply part of the soviet structure like any other former wage workers under capitalism.

The question of an isolated proletarian revolution in a ‘lesser developed economy' in advance of the world revolution remains for us an unlikely ­occurrence. Our view sees the development of the crisis amongst several ‘advance' capitalist countries at approximately the same time. The proletariat in these areas will then able to assist the various proletarian salients in the lesser capitalist countries. Should one of these salients find itself in an isolated position, then we must be realistic and realize the possibilities. If the larger imperialist powers are not already experiencing a profound crisis then it will be crushed militarily. Further, in many areas the local peasantry (even if negotiations were successful) cannot produce enough of the basic food requirements of the urban areas; and we must recognize that the proletariat here will not be taking over an economy representing a significant power in the capitalist world market. Hence the further escalation of the world crisis as a result of their activity would be very remote. Thus, the world proletarian revolution may not arrive in time to save an isolated proletarian outbreak in such a country. If this means that we must conclude that the revolution can only be successful through the early collapse of the capitalist heartlands (USA, USSR, Europe) into the dictatorship of the proletariat then unfortunately we cannot shrink from it. The alternative of advocating ideological concessions to other strata in any country would lead to confusion for the world proletariat and ultimately to counter-revolution.

In the advanced capitalist countries the question of the peasantry scarcely exists for each capitalist farmer employs rural proletarians. In Britain, for example, there are 329,000 rural proletarians. With help from the soviets to which they would be affiliated they would carry out the expropriation of farmlands and begin the integration of agriculture into the socialist economy.

When a significant peasantry did exist the proletariat would obviously establish with them levels and goals of production within a framework laid down by the proletariat. But no concessions can be made to petty bourgeois forms of property. The proletariat on the other hand, would actively encourage the peasants to form their own organizations which would eventually become the basis for the collectivization of agricultural production. Here we must recognize that certain tasks of the per­iod of transition mat take longer than others and this could be one issue which ensures the maintenance of the vigilance of the dictatorship of the proletariat for at least a generation.

Part II (Economic)

The first part article on the period of transition has already dealt with the questions of the State and the political forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat; in that article only incidental comments were on the economic formulations of these forms. Now in this article we deal with their content, and only incidentally with the concrete political issues. This form of presentation is not because we feel they are two separated issues; on the contrary, as was made clear in part I, we are speaking about equally vital, interrelated aspects of a total transformation.

Economically, as well as politically, the so-called transition period is opened for the working class when one or more capitalist states are overthrown by the revolution, and is not closed until the inauguration of a global communist system of production and distribution according to needs; but as it nears communism it shares less and less residues of capitalism, but its duration is obviously no short period, but of at least a generation. Neither is it a static system, and its "defects inevitable in the first phase of communist society" (Marx) are generally overcome.

The idea that production in the proletarian bastion should be directed towards a communist ‘war economy' is confusionist. Although there is certainly armed struggle and even pitched battles during communist revolution, there is no possibility of the workers engaging and defeating capital in a global civil war; on this terrain the defeat of the proletariat would be short and the curtain-raiser for barbarism. This emphasizes all the more that the communist revolution must storm more or less simultaneously several capitalist states, including the militarily dominant imperialist powers, or else go down in defeat. Certainly workers in any one area must intervene to help adjacent communist uprisings, but the creation of the first steps of a communist economy are a more potent weapon and help than any amount of military support given by one group of workers to another.

Here the relationship of any one proletarian power to the still existent world market must be investigated, and the inseparability of the politics and economics of the transition period re-iterated. Communists must press in the mass organs of the class for the ending of all economic relationships between the isolated areas where the workers have taken power, and the bourgeois world market. Firstly this is because at a time of world crisis this move will deepen such a crisis by withdrawing markets and raw materials from still existing sections of the world bourgeoisie. The impact of the cessation of oil exports by a revolutionary Russia, or food exports by a Soviet America would be powerful impulses to the spread of the communist revolution, and help force the issue to the point of resolution on a world scale. Here economic tactics hasten the political progress of the revolution.

On the other hand only dreamers would imagine that the capitalists would accept to trade with a proletarian dictatorship without thus capitulating politically to world capital. For example, in return for trade would be demanded compensation for expropriations in the workers' bastions, taming of branches of the communist movement outside the revolutionary areas, diplomatic recognition and exchanges etc, in fact all that was seen in Russia in 1920 onwards when NEP and foreign trade went hand in glove with frontism, return to legality of the Communist Parties, suppression of the Russian proletariat as an element in the labour power of the world market, etc. the lesson of the Russian revolution is that the communist movement is a struggle for all or nothing, communism cannot be introduced by stealth or defended by compromises, or maneuvers to ‘gain time'. On this question the advocation of any other policy than that we have outlined is a class line which divides communists from those who today apologize for counter-revolution in the past, and its re-enactment in the future.

So far we have treated the question of the period of transition ‘internally' with regard to the areas where the bulk of the proletariat are concentrated and which constitute perhaps 30% of the world's population. During the course of revolutionary upheaval itself, any outbreaks which occur in the less developed areas of world capitalism must receive all material and political support from the rest of the proletariat, since the working class is an international class, and has the same interests and tasks world-wide. But we have no faith in the ‘communist' aspirations of the peasantry of these areas, in fact even where we see state capitalist agriculture in the third world, there will in all probability be a parcellation of land among the aspirant peasantry, with a return to subsistence or small commodity agriculture. And there are the additional dangers of deproletarianization of semi-proletarianized groups of workers (eg. in Africa). Any enclaves of power within these areas, created by industrial or plantation workers, must be integrated into the political and economic framework of communism, and serve as the toehold of communism within the areas of the small commodity producers.

In contradistinction to the situation in Russia in 1917-21, this sea of small producers poses no great danger to the efforts to socialize the economy; the working class will not be dependent on these areas for food production, in fact quite the reverse is the case. And these producers are in no wise able to organize themselves politically and militarily to the proletarian power, a fact resulting from their atomized class nature, and one which communists should accept gladly, not try to overcome by urging that they be ‘represented' in the State of the period of transition. But the workers must have a policy towards these sections, since they just abandoning them (apart from humanitarian consideration), would mean that a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation would start in these areas, and then within a period of time they would pose a militancy and political threat to the building of communism. These strata must be involved in the communist economy, without forcing them to collectivize, which is impossible given their huge numbers. Apart from the ideological weapon of propaganda for communism, and humanitarian aid to these areas, the main tactic which impels them into communism is economic, and another reason why the accounting of the social product must be in labour-time.

The Councils must insist that exchange, economic relations between the communized sector and the small commodity producers be taken out with the monetary framework and based on equivalent hours of labour; on this there can be no compromise. To example, if a tractor taken 100 hours of labour to produce, and a ton of jute 10 hours, then 10 tons of the latter are exchanged, or more strictly bartered for a tractor. This form of exchange will need peasant cooperative on the level of distribution, but these are not political organs. Given differences in productivity of labour such an exchange is actually very favourable to the peasants, and the form of exchange is flexible in that it allows the proletariat to further favour those peasant sectors who wish to collectivize, by for example exchanging the hypothetical tractor for only 7 tons of jute. This in turn helps these groups to raise their agricultural output and productivity, and is a clear validation of the superiority of communist agriculture. On these bases the integration of the small producers, politically and economically, into the proletariat and humanity, can take place.

Revolutionary Perspectives

January, 1975

In issue no 13 of Workers Voice a Statement was printed ‘severing relations’, as they put it, with our International Communist Current (ICC). This may seem odd to our readers and to revolutionary militants who share our political orientation, both because Workers Voice (WV) has evolved quite closely in discussion with our tendency over the past two years and also because the idea of ‘severing (diplomatic) relations’ among revolutionary groups is indeed bizarre.

The WV Statement reaffirms the essential class positions which are the basis for both our Current and WV. However, because of disagreement on l) the regroupment of revolutionaries today and 2) the question of the state in the future period of transition after the proletarian revolution, WV announces that they are breaking all ties with us.

Before going into their assertions in any detail, it must be said from the outset that WV has to take the full responsibility for deciding to ‘sever’ all contact discussion and even minimal communication with our groups. Our Current does not abandon discussion with groups in evolution - particularly if their basic political orientation follows along the same class lines we consider so important to defend and disseminate in the class. Ceasing all communication and ending discussion must be motivated by profound political and class lines. We do not discuss organisationally with Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists etc, because tahere is no sense in ‘discussing’ with the counter-revolution. But although our Current and WV have important political differences, it has never been our will or desire to cease discussion. We consider this a desertion of the duty of revolu­tionaries to clarify positions through the confrontation of ideas whenever possible.

How does WV motivate this step? On the question of regroupment of revolutionaries, WV agrees that “the issues/class lines for an international regroupment already exist”. Furthermore these class lines for regroupment are fundamentally those at the basis of our Current and WV. The problem for WV is that 1) the time isn’t right and our Current is hurrying regroupment (“.... the conditions do not yet exist in which any real meaningful regroupment on an international scale can take place”) and 2) our Current supposedly feels “that regroupment takes place only by others joining them on their terms.”

WV are rather timid defenders of regroupment - all they can offer on the positive side is the rather pale statement that they “are not against it in, principle”. But why be for it? Why not have each small revolutionary group (or at the extreme, each individual) doing its ‘own’ work in its ‘own’ corner of the globe, each one master in his own house, protecting his group from the “imperialist aggressions” of other groups? Why not have relations among comrades consist of flamboyant insults and petulant exclusions, as the situationists unfortunately popularized so well? Why has our Current consistently encouraged comrades to realize the importance of the problem of consolidating and concentrating revolutionary forces on the basis of clear programmatic agreement?

In a world where the crisis of capitalism is continuing its path towards economic chaos and deprivation for the working class; where the bourgeoisie is facing repeated and profound political crises in so many countries, using their ‘left’ mask of mystification and repression more and more; where working class resistance has expressed itself in powerful, if sporadic form all over the world; where class struggle is facing important battles in the future - revolutionary forces are extremely limited. Counter-revolution and the confusion of fifty years of darkness are taking and will take their toll on the workers’ movement. But WV seemingly thinks it has plenty of time to think about all this while essentially continuing to be what it always was, a local group, concerned with collecting international ‘contacts’ (but not with us) as long as nothing more substantial is implied. How can we avoid drawing this conclusion?

As for having to join “our” current “on our terms”, the only valid political reason to refuse to join with others is that the class positions defended are not the same (including positions on the need for organization of revolutionaries and the means to carry it out). This is the only possible interpretation for “on our own terms”. Our only “terms” in fact are solid and profound political and theoretical agreement. WV is afraid of “artificial coming together that signifies nothing” and admonishes us not to think of our limited efforts towards international unity as a party. We can only thank them for advice on something we have been defending for years. We do not consider our international current as a party even though we hope to be making a necessary contribution to the future formation of the party which will emerge as a process in our general period of the growth of class struggle and confrontation. The party or parties of the proletariat of today will be formed only when class struggle has generalized and intensified on an extensive scale. But this must not be interpreted to mean that prior to this period revolutionaries should remain isolated, in their own corner, inactive or unorganized and that what we do today has no influence on the organization and activity of tomorrow.

Without encouraging international discussion and joining our forces, if political agreement is reached, all the revolutionary programmes on paper would be just words in the air. The real issue may be that WV and our Current have quite profound differences on the necessity and means of organization of revolutionary groups today. These differ­ences could only be clarified (if not overcome) by discussion. In any case, disagreements on the pace or timeliness of putting internationalism into organizational practice do not constitute a principal reason for an end to all contact between revolutionary groups. But escaping the issues is always easier than sticking it out.

As for the second point - the question of the period of transition - the WV Statement reads, “Revolution Internationale (RI) believes that in the period of transition a state would exist independently of the class”. Embroidering a bit on this theme, they then say that this assertion warrants a total break with us because we have become blatantly counter-revolutionary.

This point must be cleared up straight away. Neither RI nor any of the groups in our International Communist Current nor anyone in our groups has ever said or printed such a statement. Saying that the state would exist independently of the class (the workers’ councils) would be destroying the entire meaning of the proletarian dictatorship and is therefore a non-marxist and unacceptable orientation. Anyone reading the first issue of our Current’s International Review (April, 1975) where we print several articles on the period of transition, will be able to see that our theoretical analyses have never defended this position. Fear of ridicule obviously does not hinder WV and others from making unfounded accusations.

The question of the unfolding of the period of transition is under discussion in all our groups and as our Review shows, we have by no means reached unanimity on this point. We do not feel that all these questions can be settled immediately and for all time by us or anyone, else before the full experience of the class has come into play. That WV could take such a drastic step as breaking all contact with us and denouncing us as counter-revolutionary on the basis of their garbled heresay version of what the blind man read and told the deaf man, is a measure of the weakness and lack of seriousness of revolutionary elements today facing such a difficult and complex problem as the period of transition.

If we are to deal with the question of the state in the period of transition, we must separate the marxist conception from that of anarchism. Contrary to anarchism’s ignorance of the economic laws of capitalism, and the evolution of history, marxists have affirmed that between capitalist society and full communism a period of transition will exist during which the struggle of the proletariat continues, against the vestiges of the law of value, to insure the definitive suppression of the bourgeoisie and to integrate the remaining non-exploitative strata and classes into new relation of production to carry forward the process of social transformation through the political domination of the proletariat. This process will end with the realization of a classless society but during the period of transition (that is, until this point is reached,) society will still be divided into classes. Out of this still divided society a state will inevitably appear. Unlike the anarchist idea that the state is the embodiment of all evil in itself and that it can be done away with by willing it to disappear, marxists assert that the state is an expression of social relations and can only be eliminated through the conscious transformation of the material basis of these social relations and divisions - through the realization of the working class programme.

Once the inevitability of the state in the period of transition is recognized, the question then becomes: how to deal with the state of the transitional period in the context of the proletarian dictatorship? Within the marxist current, the Bolsheviks offered a ‘solution’ to this question - the complete identification of the proletariat with the state; the creation of a ‘workers’ state, and the identification of the class with the party, the creation of a party bureaucracy to whom the state is ‘entrusted’. The historical experience of the Russian Revolution must lead us to reject this ‘solution’ to the problem of the state after the revolution.

Drawing on the lessons of the historical experience of the proletariat we hold that first of all, the state cannot be turned over to a party; the role of the party is not to take power in the name of the class; to substitute itself for the whole class. Secondly, it is the existence of classes in the transition period which defines the necessity of a state and not any needs of the workers to create a state. If the world were to be composed only of the proletariat after the revolution, there would be no state; there would be the “administration of things” but not the “government of men”. The question is therefore: if the state arises out of the existence of a society still divided into classes, does the proletariat identify its historical class goals of social transformation with the state apparatus?

The proletariat must not let the state exist independently of itself -­in fact, the state must be dominated by the interests of the proletariat, as far as possible. But the state is not the instrument of social transformation - the communist programme can only be preserved and carried forward by the specific international organs of the proletariat alone. In other terms: must the workers recognize an authority of the state over their decisions if they consider that it is not in their class interests? If the answer is yes, because the state is a ‘workers’ state, then Trotsky was correct to militarize labour and forbid strikes against the ‘workers’ government because they would be reactionary and unacceptable. If the state is the full and complete instrument for the realization of the communist programme, why were the Bolsheviks wrong to want to control and dominate the state against the workers if necessary?

For many of our comrades it seems important to stress the fact that the working class must maintain its own class organizations - regardless of what state forms may or may not be necessary; it is important that the workers guard against being blurred by non-integrated strata and resist any efforts to have them recognize any superior state authority over their decisions. Unlike WV we do not say, the state is the class and the class is the state, but rather that this semi-state, the scourge inherited from class society must be used by the proletariat but never identified with it nor allowed to dominate it.

For many of our comrades, completely identifying the state with the class is paving the way to Kronstadt. This question seems to escape WV completely and they end up in a false debate. We do not hold that the state must be independent from the working class but rather that the workers, while exercising their domination through the state, must maintain their international organization. The working class is the only class in the post-revolutionary society to organize itself as a class: the proletarian dictatorship. Individuals from other social strata will be represented in the state individually through a form of territorial soviets. The state must not have ultimate authority over the class no matter what the contingent situation (even though the state has final authority over all other sectors of the population) nor should the state be mystified into a ‘workers’ state’.

We do not pretend to have solved all the problems nor found the answer to these difficult questions but we reject the idea of prematurely cutting off debate with the absurd accusation of being counter­revolutionary - the judgment of history handed down by WV.

What is the class to conclude from the spectacle of two groups who share class positions - our Current and WV – ‘severing relations’ on issues which at best do not warrant an end to all contact and discu­ssion and at worst are a hodge-podge of suppositions and false accusations?

The last thing the workers’ movement needs is confusionism and these kinds of tactics. We hope WV will reconsider their hasty and unfounded decision. The positions and work of WV have been a positive contribution to the movement but if WV is to be the carrier of confusion and unfounded hostility, it is better for the workers’ struggle that they disappear as quickly as possible. If WV can no longer bear to discuss the issues in a principled manner or open their minds, if their hostility continues to serve as a smokescreen to hide their localism and small group patriotism, it would be better for the group to disappear and make way for expressions of the working class who are capable of evolving.

J.A.

For the International Communist Current

* For a further treatment of this question, see ‘Sectarianism Unlimited’ in World Revolution No 3.

Lessons of the German Revolution

1. The formation of the German Communist Party (Spartakusbund)

When the German Communist Party was founded between 30 December, 19181. and 1 January, 1919, the revolutionary opposition to Social Democracy seemed to have found an autonomous, organized expression. But the German Party (appearing at the very moment when the proletariat was engaging in armed struggle in the streets and, for a short time, actu­ally taking power in some industrial centres), was to immediately reveal both the heterogeneous character of its origins as well as its inability to attain a global and complete understanding of the tasks which it was formed to accomplish.

Which were the forces which came together to form the Party? And what were the problems which immediately presented a stumbling block in the way of these forces?

We will examine the most interesting of these factors here because they will enable us to understand the errors of the Party and because they were to weigh so heavily on future developments.

The trajectory of events after 4 August, 1914 encompassed many diffi­culties and confusions. The history of the Spartakus group is clear proof of this. Its role as a brake on theoretical clarification and dev­elopment is very obvious.

At the time of the Spartakus League (Spartakusbund) all important deci­sions were characteristic of the positions of Rosa Luxemburg. (The group took the name Spartakus League in 1916; throughout 1915 the group had been called Internationale after its review which first appeared in April 1915.)

At Zimmerwald (5-8 September, 1915), the Germans were represented by the Internationale group; by Borchardt from Berlin who represented the small group around the review Lichtsrahlen (Shafts of Light) and by the centrist wing close to Kautsky. Only Borchardt supported the internationalist positions of Lenin, while the other Germans supported a motion couched in the following terms:

"Under no circumstances should the impression be given that this con­ference wants to provoke a split and to found a new International."

At Kienthal (24-30 April, 1916), the German opposition was represented by the Internationale group (Bertha Thalheimer and Ernst Meyer), by the Opposition in the Organization (the centrists around Hoffman), and by the Bremer Linksradikalen (Bremen left radicals) through Paul Frolich.

The hesitations of the Spartakists (Internationale) were not immediately overcome; once again, they were nearer to the positions of the centrists than to those of the left (Lenin-Frolich). E. Meyer stated: "We want to create the ideological base........of the new International, but we don't want to commit ourselves on the organizational level because everything is still in a state of flux."

This was the classical position of Luxemburg for whom the party was more necessary at the end of the revolution than during its initial prepara­tory stages. ("In a word, historically, the moment when we will have to take the lead is not at the beginning but at the end of the revolution.")

The most important factor on the international level was the appearance of the Bremer Linksradikalen.1 As early as 1910 the Social Democratic newspaper of Bremen, the Bremer BurEerzeit, was publishing weekly articles by Pannekoek and Radek, and it was under the influence of the Dutch Left that the Bremen Group formed itself around Knief, Paul Fro­lich, and others. At the end of 1915, the ISD (International Socialists of Germany) was formed, born from the union of the Bremen communists with the Berlin revolutionaries who published the review Lichtsrahlen. The Bremerlinke became independent from Social Democracy, in formal termo, in December 1916, but already in June of the same year it had begun the publication of Arbeiterpolitik2 which was the most impor­tant legal organ of the Left. Apart from the articles of Pannekoek and Radek, there appeared in it contributions from Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Trotsky and Lenin. Arbeiterpolitik immediately displayed a more mature consciousness of the break with reformism. In their first issue they wrote that August 4th was "the natural end of a political movement whose decline had been underway for some time".

From Arbeiterpolitik there arose the tendencies who were to take the lead in raising the question of the party. The discussion between the Bremen Group and the Spartakists was difficult, because of the persistence of the latter to remain within Social Democracy.

On 1 January, 1916 at the national conference of the Internationale group, Knief criticized the absence of a clear perspective calling for a total break with the Social Democratic party and the formation of a revolutionary party on a radically new foundation.

While the Spartakist group Internationale adhered to the Socialdemocra­tische Arbeiter-gemeinschaft (Social Democratic Work Collective) in the Reichstag and was producing declarations such as:

"A struggle for the party but not against the party ..... a struggle for democracy in the party, for the rights of the rank and file, for the comrades of the party against the leaders who have forgotten their duties ..... Our watchword is neither split nor unity, new nor old party, but the reconquest of the party at the base by the rebellion of the rank and file ...... The decisive struggle for the party has begun." (Spartakus-Briefe, 30 March, 1916)

At the same time, in Arbeiterpolitik one could read:

"We consider that a split, both on the national and international lev­el, is not only inevitable but an indispensable precondition for the real reconstitution of the International, for the reawakening of the proletarian movement. We consider that it is inadmissible and dangerous to hold back from expressing this profound conviction in front of the labouring masses." (Arbeiterpolitik, no.4)

And Lenin in On The Junius Pamphlet (July 1 91 6 ) wrote:

"The greatest weakness in German revolutionary marxism is the absence of a tightly knit illegal organization ..... such an organization would be forced to define clearly its attitude towards opportunisms such as that of Kautsky. Only the International Socialists of Germany (ISD) have expressed a clear, unambiguous position on this question."

The Spartakists also continued to adhere to the USPD (Independent Democra­tic Party of Germany founded 6-8 April, 1917; a centrist party not sub­stantially different except in size from the Social Democracy itself but linked to the growing radicalization of the masses) the party of Haase, Ledebour, Kautsky, Hilferding and Bernstein. This adherence made the relationship between the Bremen Communists and the Sparta­kists even more difficult. In March 1917 one could still read in Arbeiterpolitik:

"The left radicals are facing a momentous decision. The greatest responsibility lies with the Internationale group, which despite the criticisms we have made of it we recognize as the most active and largest group to be the kernel of the future radical left party. Without them, we must say frankly, we - ourselves and the ISD - would be unable to construct a party capable of acting in the foreseeable future. It depends on the Internationale Group whether the struggle of the left radicals will be led in an orderly fashion under one flag, or whether the oppositions within the workers' movement which have appeared in the past and whose competition is a factor of clarification will waste great deal of time and energy only to end up in canfusion." (Our emphasis)

In the face of the adhesion of the Spartakus group to the USPD, the same paper said:

"The Internationale group is dead ..... a group of comrades have formed thrmselves into an action committee for the construction of a new party."

Indeed, in August 1917, a meeting of delegates from Bremen, Berlin, Frankfurt and other German towns was held in Berlin with the object of establishing the basis for a new party. Otto Ruhle with the Dresden group took part in this meeting.

In the Spartakus group itself there were a number of elements whose positions were very close to those of the Linksradikalen and who did not accept the organizational compromise of the ‘Zentrale' around Rosa Luxemburg. At first this was manifested in the opposition of the Spartakus groups in Duisburg, Frankfurt and Dresden, to the partici­pation in the Arbeiter-gemeinschaft. (The organ of the Duisburg group, Kampf, engaged in an animated debate against this participation.) Subse­quently, other groups, for example the important Chemnitz group around Heckert, voiced their opposition to adhesion to the USPD. These groups in practice shared the position expressed by Radek in Arbeiterpolitik:

"The idea of building a party with the centrists is a dangerous utopia. The left radicals, whether the circumstances have prepared them for it or not, must, if they want to fulfill their historic task, build their own party."

Liebknecht himself, more closely linked to the ferment within the class, expressed his own position in a prison text (1917) in which, seeking to grasp the living pulse of the revolution, he distinguished three social strata within the German Social Democracy. The first was composed of stipendary officials, the social base of the politics of the majority of the Social Democratic Party. The second was composed of:

"The most well-to-do and educated workers. For them the imminence of a serious conflict with the ruling class is not clear. They want to react and to struggle. They are the base of the Socialdemocratische Arbeiter-gemeinschaft."

Finally, the third category was composed of:

"The proletarian masses, the uneducated workers. The proletariat in the strict sense of the word. Only this stratum, because of its real condition, has nothing to lose. We support these masses: the proletariat."

All this shows two things:

1. That an important fraction of the Spartakus group was oriented in the same direction as the left radicals, and was coming into conflict with the minority centre represented by Luxemburg, Jogisches and Paul Levi.

2. The federalist, non-centralized character of the Spartakus group.

The Russian Revolution

The disagreements which arose between the Spartakists and the USPD majo­rity concerning this revolution, led Arbeiterpolitik to take up the dis­cussion with the Spartakists once again.3 The Bremen Communists never separated solidarity with the Russian Revolution from the need to form a communist party in Germany. Why, asked the Bremen Communists, had the revolution triumphed in Russia?

"Uniquely and solely because in Russia there is an autonomous party of left radicals which from the beginning has raised the flag of socialism and fought under the banner of social revolution."

"If at Gotha one could out of good will still find reasons for the attitude of the Internationale group, today all semblance of justi­fication for association with the Independents has vanished."

"Today the international situation makes the foundation of a radical left party an even more urgent necessity."

"For our part we are firmly committed to dedicating all our strength to creating in Germany no conditions for a Linksradikalen Partei. We therefore invite our friends of the Internationale group, in view of the weakness of the Independents over the last nine months and in view of the corrosive repercussions of the Gotha compromise (which can only prejudice the future of the radical movement in Germany)4, to break unambiguously and openly with the pseudo-socialist Independents and to found an autonomous radical left party." (Arbeiter­politik, 15 December, 1917) (Our emphasis)

In spite of everything, another year was to pass before the foundation of the party in Germany, and that a year in which social tensions were steadily growing: from the Berlin strikes of 17 April to the navy mutiny of the summer and the strike wave of January 1918 (Berlin, Ruhr, Kiel, Bremen, Hamburg, Dresden) which lasted for the whole summer and autumn.

Let us know examine some other minor groups characteristics of the German situation. We mentioned above that the ISD also regrouped the Berlin group around the review Lichstrahlen. The most important representative of this group was Borchardt. The ideas which he developed in the review were violently anti-Social Democratic, but already, because of their semi-anarchist orientation, represented a break with the Bremen Commu­nists. As Arbeiterpolitik observed: "In place of the party, be (Borchardt) poses a propagandist sect of an anarchist nature." Later on, the left communists were to consider him as a renegade and baptised him ‘Julien the Apostate'.

In Berlin, Werner Moller (already a participant in Lichstrahlen became the keenest collaborator with Arbeiterpolitik and later its representative. (He was brutally murdered in cold blood by Noske's men in January 1919).

In Berlin, the left current was very strong, with, among others, the Spartakists Karl Shroder and Friedrich Wendel, (later of the KAPD).

The Hamburg group occupies a particular place in the revolutionary oppo­sition to Social Democracy. It only joined the ISD in November 1918 when, at Knief''s proposal, the latter changed its name to the IKD (Internationale Kommunisten Deutschland) on 23 December 1918. The leaders in Hamburg were Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim. What distinguished them from the Bremen Communists was a sharper polemic of a syndicalist and anarchist tone directed against leaders. Arbeiterpolitik on the other hand maintained a correct position when it wrote on 28 July 1918:

"The cause of the Linksradikalen, the cause of the future communist party of Germany into which will flow sooner or later all those who have remained faithful to the old ideals, does not hinge on great names. On the contrary, what is and must be the truly new factor if we are ever to attain socialism is that the anonymous mass takes its destiny into its own hands; that each comrade taken individually makes his own contribution without concerning himself about the ‘great names' that are alongside him." (Our emphasis)

The overtly syndicalist character of the Hamburg group's political orien­tation was derived in part from the activity undertaken by Wolffheim when he had been involved with the International Workers of the World in America.

But undoubtedly, the best expression of class struggle in Germany at this time was to be found among the Bremen Communists. In saying this one exposes all the question begging and errors of the Spartakus group (including its best theoretician, Rosa Luxemburg) on the problems of organiza­tion, the conception of the revolutionary process, and the role of the party. However, to point out the mistakes of Rosa Luxemburg in no way signifies a rejection of her heroic struggle; it does allow for an under­standing that in conjunction with the far-reaching insights she developed in her theoretical fight against Bernstein and Kautsky, she also defended positions which we cannot accept.

We have no gods to worship; on the contrary we must face up to the neces­sity of understanding the errors of the past in order to be able to avoid them ourselves; to know how to draw the useful but incomplete lessons (in this case, on the function and organizational tasks of revolu­tionaries) from the historical proletarian movement.

In order to be able to carry out our own tasks, we must also be able to understand the indissoluble link which exists between the activity of small groups when the counter-revolution has the upper hand and the example of the work of Bilan and Internationalisme is an eloquent testimony to this) and the action of the political group when the insurmount­able contradictions of capitalism push the class towards the revolutio­nary struggle. It is no longer a question of simply defending the positions, but (on the basis of a constant elaboration of these positions, on the basis of the programme of the class) of being capable of cementing the spontaneity of the class, of being an expression of the consciousness of the class, of helping to unify its forces for the decisive offensive, in other words, of building the party, an essential moment in the victory of the proletariat.

But parties, no less than revolutions, do not spring, fully formed, from nowhere. Let us explain. Organizational artificialities do not just serve any old cause; rather, more often, they have served the counter­revolution. To proclaim a ‘party', to build up one's organization as a party in a period of counter-revolution is an absurdity, a very grave error which signifies an inability to understand the essence of the prob­lem when there is no immediate revolutionary perspective. But it is no less grave an error to put this task aside or to put it off until it is too late. In the context of this study, it is this second error which is most interesting.

Those who say that all problems will be solved spontaneously are, in the final analysis, eulogizing unconscious spontaneity and not the passage from spontaneity to consciousness; they fail to understand, or are unwil­ling to understand, that this attainment of consciousness by the class in its struggle must also lead it to recognize the necessity of an ade­quate instrument for carrying out the assault on the state, the fortress of capital.

If the spontaneity of the class is a moment which we advocate, spontaneism - that is, the theorization of spontaneity - actually kills spontaneity, expresses itself in a series of stale formulae: a feverish attempt to ‘be where the workers are', an inability to judge when to be ‘against the cur­rent' in moments of relapse and reflux in order to be ‘with the current' in decisive moments later on. The deviations of Luxemburg on organizational questions also manifested themselves in her conception of the con­quest of power - and we would add that this was inevitable given the inti­mate connection between these two questions:

"For us the conquest of power will not be effected at one blow. It will be a progressive act, for we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state, defending tooth and nail each one that we seize." (From ‘The Speech to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party', in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press)

But, unfortunately, this was not the end of it. While Paul Frolich (representing the Bremen group) was issuing the following appeal from Hamburg in November I918: "It is the beginning of the German revolution, of the world revolution: long live the greatest action of the world revo­lution! Long live the German workers republic! Long live world-wide Bolshevism!" Rosa Luxemburg, a little over a month later, instead of ask­ing why such a massive attack by the proletariat had come to be defeated, was saying: "On November 9th, the workers and soldiers destroyed the old regime in Germany .,... On November 9th, the proletariat arose and threw off its shameful yoke. The Hohenzollerns were chased away by the workers and soldiers organized in councils." So she interpreted the passing of power from the gang of William II to that of Ebert-Scheidemann-Haase as a revolution, and not as a changing of the old guard against the revolu­tion.5

This inability to understand the historic role of Social Democracy was to cost Luxemburg her life, as it also did Liebknecht and thousands of prole­tarians. The KAPD (Communists Workers Party of Germany ), as did the Italian Left, saw clearly how to draw the lessons of this experience. (One of the KAPD's most fundamental points of opposition to the C.I. (Communisst International) and the KPD (German Communist Party) was its refusal to have any contact with the USPD. We will return to this later.) Bor­diga wrote on 6 February 1921 in Il Communista an article entitled ‘The Historic Function of Social Democracy' from which we will quote a few passages:

"Social Democracy has an historic function in the sense that there will probably be a period in the western countries in which the Social Democratic parties will be in the government, either on their own or in collaboration with the bourgeois parties. But, while the proletariat may not have the capacity to prevent this, such an intermediary stage does not represent a positive and neces­sary condition for the development of revolutionary forms and insti­tutions; instead of being a useful preparation for the latter, it will constitute a desperate attempt of the bourgeoisie to diminish and divert the offensive of the proletariat, in order to be able to ruthlessly massacre the workers under the banners of the white re­action later on, if the workers still have enough strength to dare to revolt against the legitimate, humanitarian, decent government of Social Demooracy."

"For us there can be no other revolutionary transfer of power than that from the ruling bourgeoisie to the proletariat, just as there can be no other form of proletarian power except the dictatorship of the Workers' Councils."

II. The faltering steps of the German Communist Party (Spartakusbund)

We began this study at the Founding Congress of the German Communist Party (30 December 1918/1 January) and then made a detour to examine its ori­gins. We will now continue from the initial point of departure.

At the Founding Congress two diametrically opposed positions became crys­tallized. On the one hand there were the minority around Luxemburg, Jogisches and Prefi Levi, which regrouped the most important personalities of the new party, and who, despite being in the minority, assumed the leadership of it, (The minority's scoffing attitude and its semi-refusal to allow expression to the preponderant positions of the Left - only Fro­lich was admitted to the Zentrale - were to lead, a few months later, to the farce of the Heidelberg Congress). On the other hand, were the great majority of the party: the passion and revolutionary potential which was expressed by the IKD and a good part of the Spartakists. The positions of the Left, with Liebknecht at their head, triumphed with an overwhelming majority: against participation in elections, for leaving the unions, for the insurrection,

But the majority, faced with the immediate tasks of preparing for an insurrectional offensive lacked a clear perspective and the military pro­blem also called for the centralized and leading role of the Party. A sort of federalism and regionalist independence dominated the scene. In Berlin, hardly anyone knew what was happening in the Ruhr, or in the centre or south of the country ann. vice versa. Rote Fahne, itself, recognized on 8 January 1919, that: "the non-existence of a centre charged with orga­nizing the working class cannot last ...... It is vital that the revolutionary workers set up directing organisms capable of guiding and utili­zing the combative energy of the masses." And note that this report speaks only about the situation in Berlin.

This disorganization was to increase and reached the level of paroxysm after the death of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The Party, at the moment when it was forced into clandestinity and subjected to counter-revolutio­nary terror, found itself beheaded. The Soviet Republics which arose al­most everywhere in Germany: Bremen, Munich, Bavaria etc were defeated one by one, the proletarian fighters annihilated. The proletarian wave, the immense potentiality within the class, suffered a reflux. We can hardly refrain from citing the whole of the letter Lenin wrote in April 1919 to the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Needless to say the vast majority of the ‘concrete measures' recommended by Lenin were never taken.

Greetings to the Bavarian Soviet Republic

"We thank you for your message of greeting and in turn we heartily salute the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. We would immediately like you to inform us more often and more concretely about the measures you have taken in your struggle against the bourgeois executioners, Scheidemann and Co; if you have created soviets of workers and house­hold servants in the districts of the town; if you have armed the workers and disarmed the bourgeoisie; if you have made use of the warehouses of clothes and ether articles as widely and as immediately as possible, to help the workers and above all the day-labourers and small peasants; if you have expropriated the factories and goods of the Munich capitalists as well as the capitalist agricultural enter­prises in the surrounding area; if you have abolished the mortgages and rent of small peasants; if you have tripled the wages of day-labourers and workmen; if you have confiscated all the paper and printworks in order to publish leaflets and newspapers for the masses; if you have instituted the six-hour day with two or three hours dedicated to the study of the art of state administration; if you have crowded the bourgeoisie together in order to immediately install workers in the rich apartments; if you have taken over all the banks; if you have chosen hostages from among the bourgeoisie; if you have established a food ration which gives more to workers than to members of the bourgeoisie; if you have mobilized all the workers at once for defence and for ideological propaganda in the surrounding villages. The most rapid and widespread application of these measures as well as other similar measures, carried out on the initiative of the soviets of workers and day-labourers and, sepa­rately, of small peasants, must reinforce your position. It is vital to hit the bourgeoisie with an extortionary tax and to amelio­rate practically, immediately, and at all costs the situation of the workers, day-labourers and small peasants. Best wishes and hopes for your success," Lenin.

This lack of theoretical preparedness, this inability to rise to the situation, was to provoke a split in the German movement at the first sign of a reflux. On the other hand, there were those who began to look more towards Bolshevism, towards victorious Russia, in order to take up its propaganda, its strategic and tactical methods in an absurd attempt to apply them to Germany. The case of Radek is a typical example of this: formerly the spokesman for the Bremen Communists, the most intransigent wing of the movement, he was to become after the reflux of the struggle in the summer of 1919, one of the architects, along with Paul Levi of the Heidelberg Congress (October, 1919) where the gains of the Founding Congress of the Party were repudiated and replaced with the ‘tactical' use of elections, of work in the ultra-reformist unions and, in the end, of ‘open letters' and the united front.

Thus, the call for centralization made by this tendency is of doubtful value since they were taking an opposite course to that of the develop­ment of the spontaneous movement. On the other hand, the revolutionary wing which refused to make this artificial choice and whose methods and prognostications were far more fruitful were, once they constituted them­selves into an organized tendency, to confront a solid wall of growing difficulties.

Did the World Revolution Fail because of the Inadequacies of the Russian Revolution Or did the Russian Revolution Fail because of the Inadequacies of the World Revolution?

The answer to this problem is not a simple task and requires an under­standing of the social dynamic of these years. The Russian Revolution was a magnificent example for the western proletariat. The Third International founded in March 19196 is an example of the revolutionary will of the Bolsheviks and represented a real effort on their part to gain the support of the European communists. But the internal diffi­culties of the Russian Revolution, which skyrocketed at the end of the civil war, and which could have no solution within the Russian frame­work; the defeat of the first phase of the German revolution (January-March, 1919) and of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, convinced the Russian communists that the revolution in Europe was a long term perspective. According to them, it was now primarily a question of regaining the majority of workers for the coming period, of convincing the Social Democratic masses of the correctness of communist positions, etc. There was a tendency to recuperate the USPD, to regard them as the right wing of the workers' movement and not as a faction of the bourgeoisie - and a steady abandonment of the struggle against Social Democracy, of the attempt to relate to the most advanced layers of the class by insis­ting on the necessity of attacking and exposing Social Democracy on the basis of the combativity of these workers.

We could thus say that if the hesitations of the western communists were deadly throughout the first phase (1918-19), it was the Communist Inter­national itself which was to become an obstacle to the flowering - how­ever late - of an authentic proletarian vanguard in Europe when the sit­uation there was still revolutionary (and we are only speaking of the years 1920-21, after which one could speak for two more years of a prole­tarian reaction against the assaults of the bourgeoisie (cf Hamburg ‘23) and only then of the final defeat and massacre of the working class). If the passage from one situation to another took place gradually, we can still point to decisive moments of the decline: to the dissolution of the Amsterdam bureau by the Communist International and Lenin's text, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.

Let us return to the vicissitudes of the German Communist Party. On 17 August, 1919, a National Conference was held at Frankfurt. Levi's attack on the Left was a failure; but in October of the same year, it had more success. In a clandestine Congress which had only a sparse repre­sentation from the district sections, and against the wishes of many, a split was decided in practice by the change of the programmatic positions arrived at in January. Point 5 of the new programme of the Party read:

"The revolution, which wall not happen all at once but will be a long and persevering struggle of a class oppressed for centuries and thus not fully conscious of its mission and its strength, is subject to flux and reflux." (our emphasis)

And Levi, shortly afterwards, supported the view that the new revolutio­nary wave would come in .......1926! But the decision to expel the ‘leftists', the ‘adventurists', was not taken officially and was not re­solved until the Third Congress of the KPD in 1920. After Heidelberg, the Left attempted to form itself into a KPD(O) (the ‘O' stood for Oppo­sition), effectively ensuring that after the first few months of 1920 there were almost two KPD organizations: the KPD(S) (KPD-Spartakusbund) and the KPD(O). All this took place in a completely chaotic situation. The news which managed to get through to Moscow was infrequent and fragmentary. In Greetings to the Italian, French and German Communists dated 10 October, 1919, Lenin wrote:

"Of the German Communists we know fully that there is a communist press in many towns. It is inevitable that, in a movement which is' rapidly extending itself, which is subjected to vigorous perse­cution, dissension will arise. That is a growing pain. The diver­gences within the German Communists, as far as I can judge, can be reduced to the problem of ‘using legal channels', of using bour­geois parliaments, reactionary unions, the legal councils which have been perverted by the Scheidemannites and Kautskyists - to the prob­lem of participating in these institutions or boycotting them."

Lenin came down on the side of participation and gave his seal of appro­val to Levi's policies.

But the central problem, which was to manifest itself a few months later, was either to adopt illegal revolutionary struggle and military prepara­tion or legal activity in the unions and parliament. This was the basis of the confrontation between the two ‘lines' of the KPD. The centre of the Opposition was based for a while in Hamburg. But Laufenberg and Wolffheim quickly began to be discredited. It was they who began to ela­borate the theory of National Bolshevism, according to which the defence of Germany against the Entente was a revolutionary duty, even at the price of an alliance with the German bourgeoisie.7 From then on Bremen, which was already functioning as an ‘information centre', was to become the point of reference for Left Communism. The Bremen ‘informa­tion centre' struggled on two fronts up to the beginning of 1920: against the Party Zentrale and against Hamburg. Bremen did not try to split but tried to hold the results of the Heidelberg Congress up for discussion; but the Zentrale backed by Levi was opposed to all discus­sion and was aided in this by the struggle against the ‘National Bolshevism' of Hamburg. The attempted Kapp Putsch, by giving these divergences a ‘practical' content, put an end to all discussion.

Let us examine the proletarian response to this attempted putsch and the behaviour of the various organizations.

In the Ruhr the Reichswehr did not immediately clarify its posi­tion towards Kapp and given that all, from the ADGB (the German union, Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerschafs Bund)8 and Social Demo­crats to the centrists and the KPD(S) called for a general strike, (although the KPD centre was somewhat hesitant in the first days), the situation would have had revolutionary possibilities, if the leadership of the unions and the parliamentary parties could have been broken; indeed, a number of zones like the Ruhr and central Germany had not undergone the massive proletarian defeats of the pre­ceding years, as had Berlin, Munich, Bremen, Hamburg etc.

In the Ruhr there was considerable tension between the Reichswehr and the workers, and such was the situation provoked by the Kapp Putsch, that it immediately led to the arming of the workers on strike. (The fact that many combative workers had managed to escape the domi­nation of the ADGB by joining the FAUD(S)9 was also important.) Because of the democratic, constitutionalist character of the general strike, the Independents and the innumerable Social Democrats were able only, in the first few days, to attempt to moderate the aggressiveness of the workers, although without success in the first high points of the struggle. The situation developed as follows: locally, in each town, independently of the unions, there were formed proletarian units who, took up arms against the soldiers of the Reichswehr. The insurgent towns united their forces and marched against the towns still in the hands of the army, in order to give support to the local workers.

While one part of the ‘Red Amy' of the Ruhr, (as it was called), pushed the Reichswehr out of the Ruhr by forming a front parallel to Lippe, other workers' units took over, one by one, the towns of Remscheid, Essen, Dusseldorf, Mulheim, Duisburg, Hamborn and Dinkslaken, and pushed the Reichswehr back along the Rhine as far as Wesell in a short period between 18 and 21 March.

On the 20 March, the ADGB, after the failure of the putsch, declared the general strike to be over and on 22 March the SDP and the USPD did the same.

On 24 March, representatives of the Social Democratic government, the SDP, the USPD, and part of the KPD came to an agreement at Biele­feld; proclaimed a cease-fire, the disarming of the workers and free­dom for workers who had committed ‘illegal' acts. A large part of the ‘Red Army' did not accept the agreement and carried on with the struggle.

On 30 March, the Social Democratic government and the Reichswehr issued an ultimatum to the workers: to either accept the agree­ment immediately, or else the Reichswehr (whose strength had at least quadrupled thanks to the arrival of the Freikorps from Bavaria, Berlin, Northern Germany and the Baltic) would begin a new offensive. Co-ordination between the various workers' units was from now on at a minimum because of the treachery of the Independents, the centrism of the KPD(S) and the syndicalists, and the rivalry between the three military centres of the ‘Red Army'. The Reichswehr and the numerous White troops opened a huge offen­sive on all fronts: on 4 April, Duisburg and Mulheim fell, followed by Dortmund on the 5th and Gelsenkirchen on the 6th.

A brutal White Terror then began; it took its victims not only from among the armed workers, but also from among their families who were massacred, and among the young workers who had helped the wounded fighters get away from the front.

The ‘Red Army' of the Ruhr was composed of between 80,000 and 120,000 workers; it managed to organize artillery and a small air-force. The development of the struggles had caused the formation of its three military centres:

Hagen: led by the USPD accepted the Bielefeld agreement without hesita­tion.

Essen: led by the KPD and the Left Independents was recognized as the Supreme Centre of the army of March 25th. When the Social Democratic government issued its ultimatum to the workers on 30 March, this centre took up the very ambiguous call for a return to the general strike (when the workers were already armed and fighting!).

Mulheim: led by the Left Communists and the revolutionary syndicalists followed completely the military ‘Centre' at Essen, but when the latter reacted in a centrist fashion to the Bielefeld agreement, the Mulheim Centre took up the slogan "struggle on till the end". The three leaderships of the USPD, KPD(S) and the FAUD(S) all took up the same ignoble position, and let it be known that they considered these strug­gles to be ‘adventurist'.

No national Zentrale took over the leadership of the struggles: the local proletarian movement displayed all its will towards centraliza­tion within the limits of its strength at the local level. Even in Central Germany the workers armed themselves and, under the leader­ship of the communist, M. Hoelz, a number of towns around Halle staged uprisings, but the movement was unable to go further, because the KPD(S), very strong at Chemnitz where it was the largest party, contented itself with arming the workers in agreement with the Social Democrats and the Independents, and with waiting for......... the return of Ebert to the Government.

Brandler, who led the workers' council of Chemnitz, saw his role as a local communist leader as consisting of preventing the outbreak of struggles between the Communists under Hoelz, who wanted to arm them­selves with the numerous weapons abandoned by the Reichswehr in Chemnitz and in the surrounding area, and the Social Democrats who were always at the ready for an attack against the revolutionaries - making several attempts to launch the Heimwehr (armed White groups of the local bourgeoisie) against them.

The centrism of the KPD(S) was fully revealed by the fact that, while the workers were in struggle, the Levi Zentrale issued on 26 March the slogan of ‘loyal opposition' in case of a ‘workers' government' composed of the Social Democrats and the Independents. Die Rote Fahne, the central organ of the KPD(S) (number 32, 1920) wrote:

"We understand loyal opposition in the following way: no preparation for the armed seizure of power, full freedom for the Party's agitation for its goal and its solutions."

The KPD thus officially abdicated its revolutionary goals, making the need for a revolutionary communist party in the German proletariat more urgent than ever.

It was thus as a natural historic result that the Left Communists, faced with the treason of the official section of the IIIrd Interna­tional, formed in the following month (April 1920) the KAPD, the Communist workers Party of Germany.

This long extract from The German Left and the Union Question in the Third International (a work through which an important part of the Bordiguist PCI (Parti Communiste Internationale) split in 1972) needs no comment.

In the course of these months, another important event occurred: the abandonment of the KPD(O) by the Bremerlinke and its return to the KPD(S) where it was to play an internal opposition role under Frolich and Karl Becker (we will see later the development of his position in the course of the following years and in particular in the Spring of 1921). We do not possess all the material to understand and to pass judgment on what was a very serious blow to Left Communism and a great success for the Levi leadership. What undoubtedly influenced the decision of the Bremen group was its feeling of loyalty to the CI (which gave its support to the KPD(S) while expressing strong reservations) and its clear opposition to the Hamburg group of Laufenberg and Wolffheim.

Up to now we have not spoken about the trade unions, councils, and ‘Workers' Associations' (Arbeiterunionen) which were central points of debate and of the divergences within the German movement. The comple­xity of the question forced us to deal with other problems before being able to approach the ‘union question' in the clearest possible way.This is what we shall attempt to do in our next text.

S.

 

1 Historians and historigraphy have used the term ‘linksradikalen' to describe groups like the Bremen and Hamburg groups, then subsequently the KAPD and the Unions (Workers' Associations). The term ‘ultralinke' was on the other hand used to describe the left opposition (Friesland-­Fischer-Maslow) within the KPD in the years that followed.

2 There was even a subscription for this publication among the naval shipyard workers in Bremen.

3 All sorts of divergences existed on the interpretation of the Russian events between the Bremen Communists and the Spartakists. We will mention only the question of the use of ‘revolutionary terror'. For the Bremen group, Knief criticized Luxemburg's position of refusing to utilize class terror in the revolutionary struggle.

 

4 The Spartakists joined the USPD at Gotha.

 

5 At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (November 1920), Radek took up this position again, saying that it was necessary to thank Social Democracy for having "done us the favour of overthrowing the Kaiser".

 

6 It should be remembered that at the First Congress of the Communist International the representative of the KPD was mandated to vote against the foundation of the International. It was only the insistence of and pressure exerted by delegates which led Eberlein to abstain instead.

 

7 The position of ‘National-Bolshevism' was taken up again without raising any scandal by the KPD in 1923. Brandler and Thalheimer made declarations such as:

"In so far as it is engaging in a defensive struggle against imperia­lism, the German bourgeoisie plays, in the situation which is created by this, an objectively revolutionary role - but as a reactionary class, it cannot have recourse to the only methods which would allow it to resolve the problem.

In these circumstances, the precondition for the victory of the prole­tariat is the struggle against the French bourgeoisie and its capa­city to support the German bourgeoisie in this struggle, by taking over the organization and leadership of the defensive struggle sabo­taged by the bourgeoisie."

And in Imprekor, June 1923, the reader would find the following statement:

"National-Bolshevism in 1920 could only have been an alliance to save the generals who immediately after their victory would have crushed the Communist Party. Today, it signifies the fact that everyone is convinced that the only solution lies with the communists. Today we are the only possible solution. The rigorous insistence on the natio­nal element in Germany is a revolutionary act just as it is in the colonies." (our emphasis)

8 Prior to 19 June it was called Freien Gewerkshaften.

9 Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands Syndicalist - an anarcho­-syndicalist union organization founded on December 1919.

There is a whole theory which, beginning from a national framework, attempts to study modern Italy with reference to the imbalance, the uneven development between the industrial north and the Mezzogiorno, an area characterized by agricultural production based on a system of great landed estates and tenure, a region which at the beginning of the century produced an income less than a half of that of the northern provinces. This is the thesis of that notable pupil of B. Croce; that pro-interventionist of 1914; that revisionist who decreed that October had invalidated the analysis of Marx; in other words, A. Gramsci, now the darling of the ‘New Left'. Their hagiography tries to present him as the most powerful and original marxist thinker outside Russia.1

On this question, marxism is quite clear: if the southern land system, trapped in a semi-feudal straight jacket, constituted one of the main sources for emigration, while the reservoir of wealth in the alluvial plain of the Po was the object of particular care and attention on the part of capitalism this is fundamentally a result of conditions on the world market, and of the international division of labour which derives from it. To illustrate this we can say that the depopulation which resulted from emigration from the southern provinces corresponded to the world crisis and the agricultural depression at the end of the last century. The adoption of protectionism was one of the first acts of Italian capitalism, favouring the landowners of the plain of the Po and supplying the absentee proprietors with an assured income. The discovery of large numbers of sulphur beds in Louisiana led to the ruin of Sicily, which had for a long while been the sole producer of sulphur extracted from its sub-soil.2

Italian capitalism emerged at a time when the division of the world had already been practically completed. All that fell to this latecomer, deprived of a capitalist birthright, were the scraps which the major powers didn't want to be encumbered with - not because they were philanthropically inclined, but because they had to take into consideration a colonial budget which inevitably weighed heavily on the metropolitan centres of capital. But still Italy continued tirelessly to demand new sphere's of expansion in order to elevate herself/ to their level. In a conjunctural situation unfavourable to Italian imperialism were nurtured the seeds of nationalism which defined Italy as "the proletarian among nations". In this, Mao found his predecessors in the persons of Crispi, Corradini or Mussolini, another helmsman, who using the language of Dante, called himself ‘Duce'.

At a time of growing imperialist rivalry, Italy got down to building a war economy with the hope of using it for policies of territorial conquest. In this way Italy prepared for the conquest of a part of those zones rich in the main sources of raw materials so cruelly absent in the metropolitan economy itself. This also meant that the Italian workers, unlike their English, Belgian, French or Dutch class brothers, did not partici­pate in any way in the sharing out of imperialist booty.

The development of certain industries, in particular metallurgical, chemical, aeronautical, and naval construction industries, progressed successfully enough to impress even, the most blase experts of the older imperialist bastions. The Italian war effort, which also led to an extension of the railway from 8,200 kilometres in 1881 to 17,038 in 1905, won the unanimous acclaim of all the engineers, financiers, scribes and politicians who visited the peninsula at that time.

Owing much of its development to the influx of French capital invested in massive quantities in the Italian economy after 1902, and to aid supplied by Swiss and German banks, Italy built powerful hydro-electric centres in the north of the country. This enabled the state to make up for the insignificant extraction of coal in the Aosta Valley and to electrify the railway lines, which in turn allowed for the transporta­tion of cannon-fodder to the arena of military operations later on ... but in doing so, the state had to reckon with some formidable uprisings of soldiers and railwaymen's strikes, which were declared illegal. During the course of this brief period of economic recovery, the seat of political power passed out of the possession of the Sardinian and Genoan ship-owners and merchants - Commerce between Italy and the Ottoman Empire grew by 150% between 1896 and 1906 - into the hands of the industrialists of Lombardy and Piedmont.

The difficulty of finding unoccupied extra-capitalist territories thus led to the development of a vast war economy. In the first years of the century, military expenses continued to devour over a quarter of the budget. From May 1915 to October 1917, the monthly production of machine-guns rose from. 25 to 800, that of cannons from 80 to 500, that of shells from 10,000 to 85,000 per day. Although in May 1915, Italy had almost no trench-mortars, she was in possession of 2,400 on the eve of Caporetto. At the end of December 1914, Italy was able to line up one and half million men.

However, while Parliament was voting for orders of material from heavy industry and for defence credits, in the majority of industrial centres the mass of workers, either in blue-collars or in uniform, were taking to the streets to demand bread and work. Not one town escaped from being paralysed by the general strike; not one industrial centre escaped invasion by the mounting revolutionary wave. In Naples, the year 1914 began with a riot against rent increases; in March the cigar makers of state tobacco factories began a long strike which lasted two months. As brave as ever, the proletariat of Italy reacted with class violence to the murder of its fighters. On 7June, during the ‘Red Week', it seized control of Ancona where it immediately abolished taxation; it did not protest platonically against the disciplinary squads in the army by signing some kind of ‘Appeal of One Hundred', but by taking power for itself. In Bologna, in Ravenna, the ‘Red Republic' was proclaimed; the general strike spread to the whole peninsula,, irremediably dividing Italy into two camps. Salandra, called to power to mop up the colonial war in Libya, had to use 100,000 troops to restore order.

Let us pay.homage to the anarchist militants who gave their lives in this struggle, thus "rightly mocking the bourgeois pedants who calcu­lated the cost of this civil war in dead, wounded and money". (Marx)

The struggle against the war

Monarchical and democratic Italy had entered the war to reconquer the African countries lost after the total military disaster of Adowa against the Abyssinian armies in March 1896. She tried to establish her rights over Libya, rights which had been encroached upon by a series of Franco-English treaties, and also to gain sole posses­sions in the Red Sea area. The outbreak of World War I - fought to divide the world between the imperialist powers, - and not as a struggle for ‘liberty' as the social democratic lie would have it -appeared to the Italian ruling class as a means to annex for itself the irredentist regions under Austrian control: Trentino, the outlet of Trieste, Istia and Dalmatia - and, under French administration, Corsica and Tunisia. More than a million Italian-speaking residents were to re-discover the hospitality of the mother country.

The workers and peasants of Italy were only spared for one year the desolation and suffering of this conflagration, which Italy had to enter in order to avoid being forever relegated to second rank, a fate she had been trying to escape since her formation as a nation. The late entry of Italy into the world war expressed not only the difficulties the bourgeoisie found in getting the workers and peasants to swallow the interventionist bait, but also its own hesitation in choosing between the offers made by Austro-Germany and those made by the Allies, That is why Rome's diplomacy con­sisted of playing a double game of parallel underhand deals. To the Austrians, Italy laid claim not only to Trentino but also to the right to extend her frontiers to the western shores of the Isonzo, the power to take over Trieste and Carso, the Curzola islands at the centre of the Dalmatian coast, and finally, the establishment of Italian preponderance over Albania. The Entente was to be more generous: on entering the war on their side after a delay of one month, Italy was to receive the Upper Adige, Trentino, the Julian Alps, Trieste and Albania, plus assurances about the Turkish zone of Adalia, (Antalya) and the confirmation of her ccupation of the Dodecanese. England also consented to give Italy a loan of 50 million pounds (1.25 billion lira).

Thus Italy sold herself to the highest bidder - it was irrelevant whether this happened to be the Entente or Germany to which Italy had maintained links since 1882. As the game got serious, the Germans sent the Reichstag Social Democratic Deputy, Sudekum, - according to Lenin a social chauvinist entirely devoid of scruples - to persuade Italy to respect her political and economic commitments to the signatories of the Triple Alliance. For its part the French government gave the Socialist Deputy, Cochin, the job of buying through the good offices of Mussolini, Italy's military cooperation. .But Austria found Italy's demands excessive and hence unacceptable, which only illustrates that the Central Empires saw Italy as being only ‘relatively valuable'. Austria refused to cede any of the Habsburg territories, refused to allow Italy to occupy them, or to extend them beyond the southern part of Trentino. Thus, on 26 April 1915, Sonnino, signed the Pact of London, and 4 May, Italy denounced the Triple Alliance.

The trip made by Cachin and Jouhaux to ensure Italy's entrance into the fray was to prove profitable to French imperialism. French money was added to the subsidies which the pro-interventionist industrialists of FIAT, ANSALDO, and EDISON doled out to the newspaper, Popolo d'Italia. In the columns of this publication, Mussolini exalted "the war of liberation", which "must above all efface the ignoble myth that Italians do not fight; it must wipe out the shame of Lissa and Custozza, it must show the world that Italy is capable able of waging a war, a great war. We say it again, a great war." (Popolo d' Italia, 14 January 1915)3

Those who, in the interests of the bourgeoisie, wrote about the scenes of enthusiasm, ‘the glorious May days' among the Italian masses, were lying. At the same time such scribblers obscured the role of Social Democracy in a war fought for the economic and political domination of spheres of• investment for finance capital. In reality, there was no working class marching willingly to the slaughter with flowers in their rifles and the national anthem on their lips. Neither the proletarians nor the peasants, to whom the war had been sold as their own private affair, believed in the patriotic harangues directed at them by the offices of the state, or in the promises of a better future once the enemy had been vanquished.

At first contact with the rather less glorious realities of the war, defeatist sentiments revived, and young socialists and anarchists became devoted, body and soul, to the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. The only difference between the two was that the former knew that such a transformation was conditioned by the fact that capitalism had arrived at the final phase of its contradictions as a system of production, while the latter thought that they could accomplish this task by the strength of their will alone. But both of them carried out the elementary duties of socialism during the war - propaganda for the class struggle.

The years of hostilities were characterized by a ground-swell made up of strikes against the disastrous consequences of the war economy, of demonstrations of soldiers in garrison towns, and of uprisings of agricultural workers. Throughout the duration of the imperialist conflict, there was a ceaseless outbreak of serious social disturbances. The workers demanded an immediate peace and general demobilization so that they could go home. The army hesitated, and the soldiers deserted their posts in thousands. Towards the end of October 1917 the dawn of the civil war rose over the carnage of the Isonzo; the front disinte­grated in a battle zone of prime importance, The conclusive display of lack of ardour for the war on the part of the Italian soldiers was the collapse of the front at Caporetto. In successive waves, 350,000 men threw down their arms and backpacks, abandoning the battlefield in the face of the Austro-German advance, whose front line was making use of poison gas. The Italian reservists sent to stop the offensive and arrest deserters refused, in turn, to hold the line.

This defeat for the reactionary Italian bourgeoisie opened up wide perspectives for the eventual progress of the revolution. The Caporetto debacle shook the whole Italian governmental machine: the road to revolution had definitely been cleared. From the murdered breasts of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the charnel-houses of Galicia, through rivers of blood to the trenches of the Isonzo, the cry of revolutionary defeatism was at last triumphant. Thousands of miles away, revolutionary workers, soldiers and sailors were seizing control of the Winter palace in Petrograd.

The break-down of the Italian army, the total disorder undergone by the organs of the state, opened up a profound political crisis, from which there could be no recovery. Italian dependence on the Entente grew more acute as Generalissimo Foch and the Supreme English General, Robertson, imposed profound changes on the Italian High Command.

After the disintegration of the Second Army, which left the enemy one day's march from Venice, the bourgeoisie combined exaltation of patriotic zeal win the King's solemn appeals to all men of law and order. At all costs the bourgeoisie had to form a united front against ‘Bolshevik subversion', because they understood that if the war machine stopped, "the mass of workers in the arms factories would be unemployed: hunger and cold would make them unite with the masses deserting from the army. There would be a revolt, then the revolution."4 For the central trade union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, Rigola declared, "When the enemy is trampling on our soil, we have but one duty - to resist!" They were indeed the allies of the whole bourgeois bloc and the bookkeepers of imperialism.

Up and down the peninsula, government propagandists poured out revenge­ful discourses in an attempt to stir up vindictiveness against the ‘Caporettist Poison', to revive the morale of the population, and to stimulate the sectional consciousness of the working class. The patriotic slogan, "Resist, Resist, Resist" cost the state more than 6 billion lira to disseminate. How to swell the morale of an army which was demonstrating its refusal to be butchered? Simple: reorganize the army with a pinch of democratization, regular leave and higher pay. Nitti, the Finance Minister at that time, set up the National Society of Servicemen with the aim of facilitating the acquisition of land by the peasants after their demobilization.

The internationalist militants convicted of high treason were subjected to ferocious reprisals, dragged in front of court-martials.-and sent to the front line. They had not just hoped for the defeat of their government, but had also prepared themselves for the new tasks of the hour: the reconstruction of an International. At that time the anarchists with Malatesta at their head knew that war was permanently gestating in the capitalist social organism; that it was the consequence of a regime based on the exploitation of labour power, that all wars from that point on would only be imperialist wars. And so both socialists and libertarians had to taste the chastisements of democracy. While they were being hunted down and martyred, several deputies of the Socialist Party had already begun to participate in the work of certain parliamentary commissions, making great strides towards their complete fusion with the kingdom, which they hoped to see climb to the highest rungs of the imperialist ladder.

Gorter quite rightly expressed the idea that the bourgeoisie, thanks to its own decomposition, was able to identify similar putrefaction, and could immediately grasp the profound corruption of Social Democracy. From the beginning of hostilities, the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party), had, above all else, tried to avoid anything which might turn Italy away from neutrality. If necessary, they were prepared to use the general strike to ensure it! The Italian socialists' love of neutrality led them to meet the Swiss socialist delegation at Lugano in October 1914. That particular mountain gave birth to a mouse: a message of peace and concord was launched to the world; attempts were made to renew contacts with the neutralist minor­ities of the Socialist Parties; a fraternal caution (sic) was addressed to the comrades in the countries at war, to encourage the struggle for an armistice; it was decided to apply pressure to the belligerent governments to make them act peaceably. The whole of Italian maximalism, which held in its hands the destiny of the PSI was there. The neutralist position adopted by the PSI (which could not have been more ambiguous) it should be remembered, was shared by the industrial and commercial milieu led by Giolitti and the Vatican, as protector of the Austrian Catholic Empire.

The tactic of the PSI consisted solely in holding back the class struggle throughout the duration of the war under the cover of the hypocritical slogan, "Neither sabotage nor participation!", which in fact meant trampling upon the most fundamental principles of international class struggle. Just like the socialists of neutrality, Benedict XV issued his famous circular inviting the Powers to negotiate an honourable peace without annexations or indemnities. In a word, understanding with a justified fear that the war would give rise to the proletarian revolution, the PSI in its ambiguous struggle against the war was, quite simply, struggling against the revolution.

In spite of its efforts build the Sacred Union, the Italian bourgeoisie had not managed to smother the class struggle. During the summer of 1917, in the second year of total war, Turin was covered with barricades. On 21 August, because of the lack bread and pro­visions, (although the prefect had decided to distribute flour to the bakers), the workers of several factories stopped work to form a procession to the Labour Ministry; but they came up against the forces of order who had arms at the ready. From this moment on, pushed on by its own dynamic, the strike demonstrated that it was not just a ferment for the amelioration of living conditions. It quickly trans­formed itself into a frontal struggle, since, after fraternizing with the soldiers of the Alpine regiment, the poorly armed workers fought for five days against crack troops, withstanding machine gun batteries and tanks. So great was the Turin uprising that-calm - and a precarious one at that - was not restored until after a wave of repression which left fifty dead and 200 wounded.

Towards the end of 1916 in order to prevent the outbreak of wildcat strikes at a moment when war production had to function at its full output, the bourgeoisie had instituted Committees of Industrial Mobilization. Without any hesitation, the unions had agreed to collaborate in the construction of this state capitalist bulwark; municipalities with a ‘red' reputation, notably Bologna, Reggio D'Emilia, and Milan, undertook to humanize the war, and in a fine display of charity began to dress the wounds of war: aid and supplies were given to the families of soldiers, etc. The Internal Commissions, composed exclusively of workers under the supervision of their union branch, had the task of defusing tension on the shop floor. They became permanent institutions which, among other things, were granted the right to deal with problems of no less importance than those concerning the relationship between wages and output or the firing of workers. It was these openly collaborationist structures, set up in every factory after February 1919, which the Ordinorists (the milieu around Gramsci's New Order review), were to regard as a basis for ‘revolu­tionary praxis', the ‘embryonic soviets' of the proletarian dictator­ship, the means par excellence of the autonomous organization of the class at the point of production. As for the class, it had to fight and fight again this organ far the self-regulation of capital.

The majority socialists were not alone in following the nationalist policies of their bourgeoisie. The Sorelians and anarcho-syndicalists (or at least an important contingent) did the same; the militants (once so combative) who rallied round their bourgeoisie, could no longer be counted on. Didn't the veteran, A. Cipriani, declare that if it weren't for his seventy-five years, he would be in the trenches of ‘democracy' fighting ‘German militarist reaction'? It was the same scenario as that surrounding the capitulation of Social Democracy at the moment of its great historical test, the outbreak of the war; but repeated almost simultaneously on the other side of the Alps. Such a general collapse of the International led its defenders to say to Rosa Luxemburg that Social Democracy had put itself at the service of the bourgeoisie because from 4 August 1914 to the signing of the peace, "the class struggle could only profit the enemy". In Italy as well, these organizations were to ask the workers to refrain free striking, to put off the class struggle so as not to undermine the strength of the democratic state and in so doing compromise the chances for a quick peace. While such deceitful propositions were being made, the profits of Italian heavy industry were growing like mushrooms after the rain and the piles of corpses were forming mountains. Meanwhile, anarchist and Sorelian groups were raising the fasci for "the European Revolution against barbarism, against German militarism and treacherous Roman Catholic Austria".

Example after example could be given. The rallying of whole sections of Social Democracy around the bourgeoisie at the outbreak of war, and the ultra-chauvinist attitude of these organizations was a world­wide phenomenon with its roots found in the definite change in the period of capitalism and not, as the subjective explanation would have it, in the personal treachery of the leadership. Decades of development undergone by the PSI had not left the original programme undamaged. On a material level that organization had become all-powerful, with its control of 223 of 280.cmmunes in Emilia, its hundreds of trade unions, peasant leagues, co-operatives and labour exchanges. But this ‘earthly' power was to act as a dead weight on the proletariat: the extremely important historical mission of reformism had come to an end.

Obviously, the passing of Italian Social Democracy into the bourgeois camp did not suddenly happen from one day to the next. Already in 1912, when as a counter-part for abandoning designs on Morocco and Egypt, Italian imperialism was authorized by the Anglo-French to set its sights on Tripoli and prepare the conquest of the Dodocanese and of Rhodes, the Party, then twelve years old had been split over the colonial question. Considering that the establishment of 2 million Italians from the mainland in the desert zones of Tripoli and Cyrenaiea would provide an exceptional opportunity to release an important number of the unemployed, and also to regain hold of this ancient colony of Rome, the Socialist Deputies, Bissolati, Proceda and Bonomi - whom we shall meet again later on - declared themselves to be convinced partisans of Italian expansionism. In the Near East, the Balkans, and the Seychelles, Italy had to take charge of the relief of that ‘Sick Man of Europe' - Ottoman Turkey. This splendid bunch of politicians proclaimed from the heights of the parliamentary tribune and from the platforms of public meetings that the socialists could not simply abandon the monopoly on patriotism to the enemies of the Right, And with all the irony of history it was the future ‘Duce' who forced the expulsion from the Party of the war-mongering elements, the Freemasons, as "class enemies" for their immoderate attachment to the cause of reformist democracy and their sympathy for class collaboration.

Thus the Party had to amputate these gangrenous limbs and set up a new leadership capable of defending class positions on the colonial question. Against the partisans of colonial conquest, the Left insisted, "Not a man, not a penny, for the African adventures!". Alas, the expansionist tendencies within the workers' movement had deeper roots than could be appreciated by those who had brandished the hot knife in the hope of a quick recovery. When in July 1900 at Monza, the anarchist worker, Bresci, arose gun in hand to revenge the proletarian fighters of Milan of 1898, the socialist journals appeared with the usual ostentatious signs of mourning. But the socialists were weeping for Umberto Ist, the butcher king. Thus we could say that during World War I, the Italian Party signed a new truce with the House of Savoy, and by tacit agreement placed its cause, to put it bluntly, in the lap of the state. Thus, instead of calling for class struggle against militarism, for international solidarity, it maintained that in the wake of the necessary sacrifices imposed by the national cause, a long period of capitalist prosperity would open up allowing for an accompanying retinue of social reforms to be instituted. All that was required was a government based on the popular will the masses in order to leave all the vulgar tumult in the streets well behind, and proceed towards vast, very vast reforms.

More than ever before the state would subsidize insurance funds for industrial accidents, regulate conditions of employment for women and children, extend the weekly day rest to new strata of the working class, facilitate the participation of wage-earners in the profits of their enterprises. In this way, the measures of social legislation taken during 1905-1906, at the time of a brief economic stability in Italy, would be fortified and enlarged. The kingpin of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, Giolitti, lent his support to the soporific speeches of the Parliamentary Socialists, and affirmed the necessity to move "to the left, always further to the left".

However, at the end of the war, the Italian social situation hardly measured up to the idyllic picture painted by the bourgeoisie and its Social Democratic lackeys.

A Catastrophic Situation

The ending of hostilities on 4 November 1918 did not confer great new conquests on the imperialist powers. Once the war had finished, the Entente showed itself to be very stingy in doling out the compensations it had promised. Taking maximum advantage of the imprecision of Article 13 of the Fact of London, France refused to cede the whole of Dalmatia to Italy, preferring instead that Fiume, following the example of Danzig, be made a ‘free city' under the tutelage of the League of Nations. Moreover, England and France authorized the Greek troops of Venizelos to occupy Smyrna instead of the Italians and the possibility of Italy obtaining a mandate over ex-German Togoland was completely ruled out. Despite the acquisition of new frontiers to the north and east, the conquest of the Adriatic side of Istria and the port of Zadar along with a narrow hinterland around the town, plus a few small islands, the protectorate over Albania and Italian sovereignty over the Dodocanese, none of this solved the problem of outlets for the Italian economy.

The disappearance of her powerful Austrian rival - which had to cede to Italy practically the whole of its merchant fleet - and her replacement by a handful of buffer states, did not spare Italy from having to face up to the greatest historic crisis since the attainment of national unity.

For big capital, heavy industry had constituted an ever-growing sphere of accumulation: not only could Italy guarantee its production of weapons and projectiles, but also exported vehicles and aeroplanes to her allies. On the way it had encountered the ‘pacifist' hostility of the traditional industries which had preceded it in the genesis of Italian capitalism. It had to reconvert to peace time production when the hour of reconciliation dawned, when commercial competition replaced the open brutality of war. The solution which presented itself to the magnates of trusts, such as ANSALDO, BREDA, MONTECATINI, etc. was to pack up and go elsewhere, because it had become too difficult to valorize the enormous amounts of capital invested to the point of hypertrophy in the industries of ‘national defence'. The production of cast iron fell from 471,188 tons in 1917 to 61,381 in 1921 and during the same period steel production fell from 1,333,641 tons to 700,433. FIAT which had assembled 14,835 vehicles in 1920, only put together 10,321 one year later. In addition, the trade deficit increased by nearly 5% in relation to 1914; America reduced immigration from 800,000 in 1913 to less than 300,000 in 1921-1922; England cut its coal exports by one third.

As the vice of the crisis began to tighten visibly, the new government presided over by Nitti arose; its task was, above all else, to rebuild the ruins of war. The whole of Italian foreign trade had to be rebegun - a job beyond the real capacities of the country, since at that point the public debt had run to some 63 billion lira, two thirds of which was derived from war costs.

Through fiscal pressures, the creation of extra taxes and above all through wage-gouging, the state had made the labouring classes bear the weight of the war; the Italian taxation apparatus had become one of the most onerous in the world. Nitti's cabinet, which combined the same policies, took the following fiscal measures on 24 November 1919:

- an 18% tax on capital revenues

- a 15% tax on mixed capital and labour revenues

- taxes on wages staggered frem 9-12%

At the same time, he introduced new taxes aimed at curbing consump­tion. What made the situation worse for Italian capital was its lack of raw materials, and fuel. The rhythm of production broke down, the number of unemployed grew; the possibilities of emigration, through which 900,000 workers and peasants had been siphoned off in 1913, began to evaporate. The Italian bourgeoisie was unable to readapt the national economy to the new needs of the world market because their rivals were in a better position to impose rule over it. The public debt grew by one thousand million lira every month; as Nitti wrote in a letter to his electors in October 1919, it was one of the seven plagues of the country. Italy owed 14.5 thousand million lira to her allies.

The ‘mutilated victory' made it impossible to implement the policies of national reconciliation which the social-patriot Cachin had carried out with the subsidies of the French government. At the beginning of 1920, 320 people died in the aftermath of the strikes.

The struggle preceding the occupation

It is not really possible to understand the mass strikes which swept over Italy without locating them within the framework of the general crisis of capitalism which began in 1914, and also within the prole­tarian eruption which was the response to this crisis throughout most of Europe. Like their counter-parts in Russia, the upheavals in Italy were simply a moment in the world revolution which was born out of the misery and unspeakable horrors spawned by militarism. Hungry, bloodstained Italian workers rose up like a volcano for bread and for the chance to go home. Since 1913, their real wages had fallen by 27% and the war had cost the proletariat 651,000 dead and 500,000 mutilated.

First in Romany then in Luguria, in Tuscany and down to the toe of the Italian boot, the starving masses began to attack the food shops. At this point the trade unions clearly played out their role as the guard dogs of the system. Seized by panic, the shopkeepers, who had been hoping to be able raise prices by hoarding goods, entrusted the keys of their sacrosanct boutiques to the trade union bosses. In return, the latter assured them of a protection which the state was unable to provide, since at that moment it did not have at its disposal sufficient forces to intervene wherever the safeguarding of private property demanded it. The strikes became so powerful that the state was forced to import grain and to impose ‘political bread prices' supported by subsidies which cost it six thousand million a year. When in June 1920, Nitti's third ministry decided to get rid of these price restraints it immediately provoked so much trouble that he was forced to offer his resignation. The fear of a revolu­tionary upheaval was well-grounded that Parliament rejected proposals to increase the price of bread again and again. The bourgeoisie had to wait for the reflux of the revolutionary tide in 1921 before it could go on the offensive, and then it was the neutralist, the man of the ‘left', Giolotti, who tackled the job of getting rid of price restraints on bread.

In the countryside, occupations of landed estates began. These were essentially movements of demobilized soldiers, who had finally lost confidence in the state's promise to divide up the land.

In Italy, all the propositions about the agrarian question put forward by the reformers of the liberal era or by certain enlightened elements in the Catholic Church were really just frauds. The idea of creating agricultural associations to gather together all the little parcels of land into one communal co-operative -enterprise had sprung up among the philanthropists of the post-Risorgimento period. There had been a great deal of enthusiasm for this proposition, which aimed to tie the future of the peasants to a system of common cultivation, in which harvests would be shared out in proportion to the contribution of each peasant in land, cattle, and materials. The small farmers who suffered the most under the regime of landed property, put their hopes in the free associations pro posed in its turn by the Social Democracy.

In this way the cooperative associations got underway amid general enthusiasm, whether from the farmers who saw in them a remedy to their material poverty or from the socialists who saw them as transitional forms of production which had the potential of progres­sively leading towards the realization of socialism. They ought to have thought again when they saw the state itself setting up rural communes, and the Catholic clergy organizing agricultural co-operation in regional dioceses. But already the minimum programme of reforms to be obtained within capitalism had played out its role. By its own practice, limited to the particular national conditions of Italy, by its very manner of operating, Social Democracy became more and more the representative of capitalism. The solution to the agrarian problem was no longer seen to lie in the socialization of the land, ("the land belonging to no one, the fruits will go to everyone" (Babeuf)), but in the liberation of the sharecropper bent double working the parcel of land to which he dedicated all his energies. It could thus be resolved, according to Social Democracy, without the proletariat having triumphed in its historic struggle to organize the satisfaction of human needs on a basis free of commodity relations; there was for them, no need for the land and the instruments of labour to pass into the hands of society as a whole.

Under intensive cultivation, the plain of the Po yielded an output of grain of between 15 and 19 hundredweight per hectar of land, and sometimes even 27 to 30 hundredweight. Here the Socialist Party had organized the day-labourers into agricultural co-operatives. The watchword of the managers of these enterprises had been - increased productivity, in order to compete with the co-operatives of the Catholic Popular Party. In Bologna, Ravenna, and Reggio d' Emilia, where the co-operative movement began, the trade unions controlled the whole economic life of their provinces and - a great victory for the workers, this - decided the prices of the produce which they distributed through the medium of the co-operatives. In this fashion, the Italian working class was supposed to be able to peacefully expropriate the bourgeoisie by persuading it that its power was of no further use. This at least was the tactic of the Socialist leaders, who were proud of their ability to administer the concrete proof of the fact that their programme was no idle dream.

Referring to Owen and the Rochdale pioneers, Lenin said this about the co-operativa ideal: "They dreamed of realizing the socialist democratic control of the world without taking into account a vital factor: the class struggle, the conquest of political power by the working class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiters". This was exactly the case with the Italian leaders who proposed to move towards new social relations by making them immediately practicable.

Co-operatives could not solve anything because socialism cannot dig itself in amid the relations of production of the old society and so become a new economic force. Throughout the whole territory of Italy, where competition made itself felt very keenly especially in grain and maize production, the agrarian struggle grew very intense. But as this hopeless struggle could not hold back the decline of the small producer and also met with violent state repression, the only way out was through emigration to the American metropolis and the coffee-producing regions of Brazil.

The preparations of the bourgeoisie for civil war

Hardly three months had passed since the formation of Parliament (16 November, 1919) when the Nitti ministry, which had in another connection launched the slogan "Produce more, consume less!", decided to set up an auxiliary police force, the Royal Guard. This new armed detachment, tens of thousands strong, was to be equipped from head to foot in order to uphold bourgeois ‘order' which was itself becoming more and more shaky, Even before fascism let loose the brown terror, hundreds of workers were to fall beneath the bullets of the Royal Guard. Needless to say, this ‘democratic' reinforcement of the state apparatus gave a great deal of satisfaction to the bourgeoisie. On 20 April, troops fired on strikers at Decima, leaving nine workers dead in the streets; the commemoration of the 1st of May was marked by fifteen death; on 26 June, there were five killed in an uprising at Ancona directed against the deployment of Italian troops to occupy Albania. Under the leadership of the anarchists, the revolt extended to the Marches and Romany. In Mantua, workers and soldiers invaded the railway station, tore up the rails to block the trains of the Royal Guard and also those carrying arms and munitions for the war against the Soviets, manhandled all the officers and attacked the prison which they burned down after liberating the inmates. In one year, from April 1919 to April 1920 the machine guns of ‘democracy' made mincemeat of 145 workers and wounded another 444 in all regions of Italy. But each time the dead were strewn on to the streets, the workers continued the struggle by proclaiming the general strike: among postal workers, railway workers, in Milan. All of which, were doubly disavowed by the PSI and the CGIL, whose representatives, elected by universal suffrage, were more occupied in leaving the inaugural sitting of the new Parliament shouting "Long live the Republic!". In the Puglia region, the agricultural day-labourers fought to obtain payment for time they had worked; there were six dead on the side of the day-labeurers and three among the land owners.

The fall of the Hohenzollern, the consecutive collapse of the Austro-German Empire, the world revolution flaring up in eastern and Central, Europe, added to the ferment of a more and more feverish Italy. Not only did the Italian proletariat concretize its solidarity with the Russian and Hungarian Soviets through the general strike; it was the only working class to sabotage in its own country the armed intervention of the Allied powers in favour of Kolchak.

The more the movement of proletarian struggle developed, the more the ruling class felt the need to arm itself. In March 1920, the industrialists regrouped themselves into a General Confederation of Industry and signed in Milan an agreement wherein each contracting party would commit all its forces to the liquidation of ‘Italian Bolshevism' and in. particular the militants who had kept to the one and only class position during the imperialist war: revolutionary defeatism. Not without reason, the defenders of ‘order' saw in them the kernel of the revolutionary party which was calling the proletariat to struggle against His Majesty's Government, to regroup under the banner of the civil war for the overthrow of the bourgeois democratic dictatorship. On 18 August, the General Confederation of Agriculture was set up on the same model, attracting to its programme all forms of large, middle, and small-scale agricultural exploitation, all those interested in putting an end to the occupations of the land. All of them wanted the heads of the ‘Caporettists', the ‘reds', who were seen to be paid agents of the enemy. Every means of preventing communst propaganda from getting on the road was to be used shamelessly. We will see the role of these organizations in the coming to power of fascism later on.

The factory occupations

In August 1920, the harbinger of what was to become the movement of factory occupations was obstructionism. This was generally applied in response to any lock-out by the bosses, as a consistent tactic which, according to the strategy of the Federazione Italiana Operai Metacheccanici was to replace the strike which had been used to the point of obsolescence. One of the favourite propaganda arguments of the delegates was to say that the crisis was much less serious than the bosses pretended. Since the national economy could withstand an increase in wages - because commodities had an outlet in the reconstituted market.- the workers had to force open the gates of the factories in order to keep production going. Not less than 280 metallurgical enterprises in Milan were occupied and put under workers' management, which gave the trade unionists the hope that the Socialists would soon be participating in government.

In this situation, the trade unionists were the most adept propagandists for the ‘gradualist economy'. According this idea, the workers would prove through their own sense of responsibility that they scrupulously respected the now ‘communal' property, that out of proletarian discipline they would agree to tighten their belts and get down to work. In order to be able to produce more cheaply -than under the employers' control, the working class had to arm itself with technical and administrative know-how, thus replacing the technicians who had left their workplaces on the orders of the old administration. In a certain way, the working class was called to govern a state which had to closely reflect the real economic structure of the country.

Immediately the Left began to struggle against this ideology of self-management, which instead of posing the problem at a central political level was imprisoning and emasculating the movement within each separate factory:

"We want to prevent the absorption by the working class of the idea that it is enough to develop the Councils solely to take hold of the factories and eliminate the capitalists. This would be an extremely dangerous illusion .... If the conquest political power has not taken place, the Royal Guard and the carabinieri will see to the dissipation of all such illusions, with all the mechanisms of oppression, all the forces which the bourgeoisie wields through its apparatus of political power." (A. Bordiga)

This vigorous and prophetic warning against the illusions of self-management came up against the propaganda of Ordino Nuovo which put all its emphasis on workers' control and on the technological education of the proletariat as a means of allowing the proletariat to manage the factories. In the factory the worker could attain a communist conception of the world, and from there go on to overthrow the bourgeois economic-political system and replace it with the Workers' Councils state. The Council system was superior to the trade union and party form because it made every worker in the enterprise, from the technician to the lowest underling, an ... elector to the Workers' Commissions (Report to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, July 1920); and what is more, this elector expressed himself not through a show of hands but through the petit-bourgeois form of the secret ballot. Faced with the grandeur of their task, ought not the workers suppress their egoistic impulses and accept new productive innovations, since these could serve to augment their productive capacity, and thus their importance to the nation? The workers had to stop blundering about as they had been doing for the last few years. Now they could achieve something tangible, now they had to run the factories under the broadest workers' democracy uniting all from the reformists to the anarchists. There really was no break in continuity when, shortly afterwards this group as the standard-bearer of the Stalinist counter-revolution was called upon to apply the measures of Bolshevization within the young Communist Party.

Once again the Left had to reaffirm its total opposition to these educational exercises so dear to the old parties of the Second International as well as to the young Ordino Nuovo; as for the PSI, it was busy advertising a ‘menage a trois' through its flag which simultaneously displayed the hammer, the sickle, and the book. It was also firmly set on parliamentarism since in the middle of a revolu­tionary explosion, the Socialist Party decided to participate in Parliamentary elections and advised the workers to participate in them en masse (16 November, 1919), convinced that the recently adopted method of proportional representation would ensure it a comfortable majority. And indeed with 1,840,000 votes behind them the Socialists gained 156 representatives in Parliament, and a few months later won 2,800 communes. Lenin was well pleased with the ‘excellent work' this represented in relation to the international ­situation, hoping that it would also serve as an example to the German Communists (letter to Serrati, 29 November, 1919). The Communist International saluted the result as a great success. What did the socialist mayors and deputies do to justify all this acclaim? They did what they had been doing before the war they set about the construction of public works, the constitution of trade unions and co-operatives - in short, they administered the affairs of the city. Thus Italy was to complete the national revolution left unfinished by the Risorgimento, but under the guiding hand of the Socialists. They wanted to have their cake and eat it - the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the electoral struggle. As the Left said - at the hour of decision, the bourgeoisie was defending itself from the proletarian revolution by playing the card of democracy.

The very first factory occupation took place under the banner of the Italian tricolour. It happened in .the small town of Dalmine, at the initiative of a fascist-controlled union, the Italian Association of Labour, with the warm encouragement of Popolo d'Italia which wrote:

"The Dalmine experience has a very great value: it shows that the proletariat has the ability to directly manage the factory."

On reading these lines, followed by others no less revealing, political parties, trade unions, and leftists made use of similar phrases as those of their friendly enemy to salute workers' management. Mussolini visited the locality in person to encourage with his voice and gestures the workers' resistance to the ‘employers' abuses'. The workers at Gregorini-Franchi had continued for three days to ensure the proper functioning in all departments of the enterprise, as a response to the management's refusal to concede the five day week. For Mussolini, the working class was worthy of succeeding the bourgeoisie in the management of production since it had abandoned the traditional strike, which was so bad for the nation.

One year later, this first occupation was followed by more of a series of ephemeral attempts at workers' management: at Sestri-Ponente on the outskirts of Genoa on 18 February 1920; at the ANSALDO Shipyards in Viareggio the next day; at Ponte Canavese and Torre Pellice on 28 February; in the wood-processing factories of Asti on 2 March; in the Miani-Sivestri mechanics workshops in Naples on 24 March; in the Spadaccini enterprises in Sesto m 4 June; at the ILVA iron and steel trust in Naples, 10 June.

These regularly repeated occupation-strikes, brought with them an organizational form, the Workers' Council, which united the majority of the workers, independently of their political convictions, in the struggle against capitalism. However, because this movement never found enough strength to go beyond the confines of control of isolated factories towards a confrontation with the state, because its protagonists became intoxicated with ephemeral and artificial evidences of the immediacy of its success, it decayed on the spot. That is why the bourgeoisie was able to get its property back without firing a single shot. To get rid of the occupiers it used the FIOM which on several occasions had declared that its objective was simply workers' control over production, that it had no intention of going any further, that it would evacuate the factories once this right had been recognized by Parliament. The directors of the Banca Commerciale assured the FIOM of its benevolent neutrality; the prefect of Milan offered to smooth relations between industrialists and trade unionists; Mussolini visited the secretary of the FIOM, Buozzi, to tell him that the occupations had the full support of the fascists; the director of Corriere della Sera rushed to ‘comrade' Turatti to advise the Socialists to enter the government; the president of FIAT and AGNELLI expressed the desire to give the trade unions a greater role to play.

However, the numerous examples of feverish preparations in the use of arms, of the setting up of combat groups, shows that the most conscious fraction of the class had decided, not to go on running the factories as the CGIL was advising, but to fight with guns in their hands. At FIAT, Turin, the leaders stood in the way of the groups who had transformed lorries into armoured cars equipped with machine guns for a sortie into the town. Once the arms introduced into or built in the factories were discovered and seized by the police, the FIOM had a free hand to sign "its greatest concordat", the recognition of the Workers' Commissions. In the end, the time came to negotiate the defeat of the workers with the Confindustria. The CGIL accepted the reduction of working time for all categories of workers and employees. This was still presented as a great victory against ‘egoism', since poverty is nothing if it is shared out fairly among its victims, as a sign of solidarity among the workers! The result of the compromise was that all the workers found their wages considerably reduced.

Now that the fruit was ripe, the bourgeoisie was able to intervene with complete confidence. Instead of making the mistake of using open repression - which the Confindustria and the Confragricultura wanted - Giolitti acted as a man who knows what he is doing, as an adroit defender of the long term interests of capitalism. There were two choices in front of him: either to use the forces of repression to crack the whip over the metallurgical workers of Fiedmont, the typographical workers of Rome, the sailors and dockers of Trieste, up to and including the rather less stubborn school­teachers - or to wait for hunger to take its toll. And Giolitti kept his cool: ho counted on this, and on the work of the unions in undermining the struggle. Taking full advantage of his experience in the face of previous social disturbances, his tactic once again was to allow the movement to develop and then to recede on its own. Who could say that he would have had so much success if he'd had recourse t systematic repression?

The political balance sheet

The Factory Committees proved that the proletariat could neither assert itself on the economic terrain nor lay claim to society as a whole by beginning from the occupation of the factories, even though this might make some changes in property and administrative forms. The expropriation of the capitalists will only be accomplished by a proletarian revolution. Thus the proletariat must therefore constitute itself into a political party, not within the bourgeois horizon of the nation, but internationally. From the very beginning of its revolutionary activity, it must work towards the formation of the World Party, whose essential character is not measured by economic accomplishments, but by the proletariat's armed destruc­tion of the state*. When the problem is posed in this way, we are in a position to understand why the Paris Commune - which, due to the undeveloped level of the productive forces in capitalism's ascendancy, was able to decree very little in the way of social change - was a genuine proletarian revolution, 'the first in history.

Only the Left, which had begun its work as a fraction in the struggle against frontism (the policy of Socialists giving support to the Italian bourgeoisie), orientated itself towards the denunciation of the cult of electoralism - only the Left emerged from all this confusion with its head held high. Again and again it incited the Italian proletariat as a whole to go beyond the old leaders who were completely imbued with their dangerous methods of collaboration. Alone and against all the rest, it called upon the most conscious and combative elements of the proletariat to break out of the prison of the factory gates, to constitute themselves into a class-party, since it was precisely by para­lyzing itself on the fragmented terrain of the isolated factory that the Italian working class was digging its own grave. Against the numberous currents who held out the bright prospect of the class being able to seize control of the means of production and exchange without first destroying the bourgeois state apparatus, it insisted that:

"According to the genuinely communist conception, workers' control over production can only be realized after the smashing of bourgeois power if control of the functioning of each enterprise passes to the proletariat as a whole united in the Council-state. The communist management of production in all its branches and units of production will be carried out by the rational collective organs representing the interests of all the workers associated in the work of building Communism." (Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, May 1920)

The Left (and this was its most urgent revolutionary task) had the courage to confront the prevalent taboo of the expropriatory general strike, and to place its emphasis on the political priority: the constitution of the proletariat into a party. While the striking workers were being cajoled into bending diligently over their work-benches, into learning the value of capital used in production, into finding ways of raising their output, the Left was posing the only real problem, without detours or democratic quibbles: "Are we going to take power or take the factories?". The enunciation of this simple truth made Gramsci and his team froth at the mouth. Your party is a sectarian, hierarchical conception of the revolution, whereas ours is a unitary, generous, and libertarian vision - such was the reposte of the worshippers of unity whose one morbid fear was a split in the Socialist Party. And the unity they revered was unity with Seratti's unitary maximalist majority which wanted to make Parliament and the Communes into active bases for revolutionary propaganda; unity with the reformists around Turatti, the adversary of the Turin councils and the Communist International; unity with the trade unionists purified of their extreme-right elements. Thus the name of the party's daily - Unita. Reassuring overtures were even made to the Catholic intellectuals organized in the Popular Party:

"In Italy, in Rome, there is the Vatican, the Pope. The liberal state had to find a system of equilibrium with the spiritual power of the Church; the workers' state will also have to find one."

The efforts of the Left towards the constitution of a purely communist party, beginning from the renunciation of electoral participation, were in the eyes of Gramsci, nothing but a "hallucinated particularism"; what he wanted was the revival of the PSI, which "from being a petit-bourgeois parliamentary party must become the party of the revolutionary proletariat". The ‘Nine Points' published in Ordino Nuovo under the heading ‘For a renovation of the PSI' corresponded to the wishes of the leader­ship of the Communist International: progressive purge of the right wing, yes - a split, no. Before Livorno Lenin had declared:

"To lead the revolution and to defend it, the Italian party must still make a certain move to the left (without tying its hands) and without forgetting that later circumstances could easily demand a few steps to the right."

The move to the left having been made at Livorno, the circumstances of the struggle against the reactionary offensive demanded "a few steps to the right"; at the IVth Congress of the Communist International the fusion of the Italian Communist Party and the PSI was drawn up.

R.C.

Revolution Internationale

Note *

When the author refers to the proletariat "constituting itself into a party" he is using this phrase in the way Marx used it: to describe the general process whereby the proletariat organizes itself around its historic programme. This does not mean that the proletariat and the actual communist party can every be identical, since the latter is a conscious fraction of the class, and cannot substitute itself for the class as a whole.

The footnotes to this text will appear in the third issue of this review which will contain the second part of this article.

 

1 See the introduction written by the Trostkyist, P. Broue, to Leonetti's book, Notes Sur Gramsci, EDI, Paris, 1974, p.7.

2 E. Malatesta, the hero of Benevento adventure of 1877, was one of the revolutionary elements conscious of the gravity of the situation: "If we let the moment pass, we will pay in tears of blood for the fear we have put into the bourgeoisie."

 

3 Lissa and Custoza were battles lost against the Austrians in the first war for Italian independence of 1866, which also marked the return of Venice to the Kingdom of Italy.

 

4 Letter of Lieutenant-General Oscar Raffi, commander of the army corps, to Giolitti, the day after Caporetto, 5 November, 1917.

Part I Spartacusbond haunted by Bolshevik ghosts

The Spartacusbond, a Dutch group from the Council Communist tradition, has recently published two issues of a Bulletin of International Discussion in English. It is certainly encouraging that the Spartacusbond make its ideas more available for those who cannot read Dutch and that they should be actively concerned about participating in international discussion and debate.

Both issues of the Spartacusbond International Discussion Bulletin have been devoted to a critique of our International Communist Current (ICC): the first issue was in answer to an article on international regroupment which appeared in Internationalism (USA), No 5; the second issue applauded Workers Voice's evolution away from our Current and criticized an article on the KAPD which appeared in Revolution Internationale, No 6 and Internationalism No 5.

The article on our international conference in 1974 from Internationalism No 5 stressed the need for a regroupment of revolutionaries in the period of heightened class struggle today. In the past, fifty years of counter-revolution, the defeat of the working class's revolutionary efforts, the mobilization for world war, and the lethargy of the years of reconstruction, had their effects on the revolutionary groups which tried to keep the flame of revolutionary theory alive as contribution to future struggle. The inevitable consequence of this long period of defeat and chaos was the atomization and isolation of revolutionary groups. But a necessity is not a virtue. The fragmentation and isolation of revolutionaries on an international scale is inevitable in defeat but today when the promise of revolution is once again alive in the struggles of the working class all over the world, this isolation of revolutionaries is no longer inevitable. On the contrary, our new period of class struggle has brought - and will bring - a new birth of consciousness in the working class which is already being expressed in the appearance of revolutionary groups and circles all over the world.

The purpose of the Internationalism article was to put forward the idea that:

* revolutionary groups must make the effort to understand and defend the principles of a revolutionary orientation today: they must base their activity on clear class positions.

* that this can only be achieved by understanding the historic dynamic of class struggle today and the lessons of past workers' struggles through international discussion and confrontation of ideas.

* that international discussion must take place within the framework of eventually UNITING our efforts if a clear principled basis is achieved, so that we may contribute to the development of class consciousness in the proletariat through active participation in the struggles of the class.

But where we write "regroupment of revolutionaries" the Spartacusbond sees only the Bolshevik party looming its head once again. "We wonder if the groups at the international conference really want to form a Bolshevik party." (Spartacusbond Bulletin, No l, p 3). For the Spartacusbond, apparently, any international organization has to be a party and any party has to be a Bolshevik one. This self-contained syllogism is in fact a condemnation of any revolutionary work today.... for fear that the demons of the past have not been exorcized.

First of all, it is surprising that Spartacusbond thinks it necessary to ask us whether we are heading towards a Bolshevik party or not. Surely if they have read our publications they must realize that the political platforms on which our activity is based in several countries are clear and unequivocal on the rejection of the Bolshevik conception of the party, both in its relation to the class and its internal structure. One of the basic premises of any possible revolutionary work today is the rejection of the Bolshevik conception of the party; without this basis no further discussion is possible. From its very beginnings, our Current has defended the idea that:

1. The Leninist conception of class consciousness coming from outside the class, from ‘intellectual' elements, is completely false. There can be no separation between being and consciousness, between the proletariat as an economic class and its historic goal of socialism, between the class and its struggles. Political organizations of revolutionaries are a manifestation of the class consciousness developing in the class; they are an emanation of the working class.

Consciousness is not limited to the party; .it exists in the whole class, but not in a homogeneous or simultaneous way. The aim of those who have come to consciousness faster than others in the class is to organize a way to contribute to the heightening of consciousness in the whole class. The party is not the sole repository of conscious­ness as the Bordigist ultra-Leninist conception would have it; it is simply an organized intervention which tends towards the greatest clarity and coherence of class 'perspectives so as to actively contribute to the process of developing consciousness in the class. This is by no means an absolute for all time but a constant effort to strengthen proletarian consciousness.

2. The Leninist conception, shared to one degree or another by all revolutionaries at the beginning of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23, that the party has to take power ‘in the name of the class' must be rejected. The historical experience of the Russian Revolution shows that this conception leads only to state capitalism, not socialism.

The working class as a whole is the subject of revolution and no minority of the class or outside it can ‘bring' socialism to it, no matter how enlightened it may be or think it is. Socialism is only possible through organized, conscious self-activity of the working class, learning from its own practice and struggle.

The role of the party is not to ‘rule' over the workers in any way, shape or form; nor is it to assume state power. The party's role is to contribute to class consciousness; to the understanding of the general aims and historic purpose of the class struggle. The workers' councils are the instrument for the proletarian dictatorship and not the party.

3. Following Marx in rejecting the anarchist notion of ‘federalism' in revolutionary organization, our Current holds that the international centralization of revolutionary organizations does not mean any loss of democratic procedure within the framework of the political principles of the group. A political group is not a monolith on the Stalinist model and cannot possibly be if it is to express the real debates and discussions of the workers' movement. Comrades do not simply have the ‘right' but the duty to express and clarify all differences freely in the organization, within the framework of its political principles. The Bolsheviks built the party as a quasi-military apparatus because the goal was seen to be the taking of power by the party. This is NOT the goal of the proletarian party and therefore its internal structure must suit the needs of political clarification for which it was created.

These were and are, in short, the principles upon which all the groups in our Current are based. Wondering if we are not just going to become another Bolshevik party shows either that the Spartacusbond does not know our principles or that they feel that some ‘fatal destiny' will turn us into our opposite because despite everything we say or do the Spartacusbond sees the invisible stigmata of death upon us. We can only say that the Spartacusbond has no monopoly of sincere opposition to the Leninist conception of the party. Nor does everyone who rejects the Leninist conception of the party have to end up with the ideas of the Spartacusbond.

The real problem is that our Current is forming an international organi­zation. Not a party, because a party can only be formed in a period of intense and generalized class struggle. But we are building the political and organizational basis for an international regroupment. In rejecting the Leninist conception of organization, the Spartacusbond rejects ALL forms of international organization. "We dispute every idea of the necessity of a party in the workers' struggle" (Bulletin, No 2, p 3) and again: "their presentation (the ICC's) erodes the difference and opposition between party and class." (Bulletin, No 1, p 1) Leninists see the party as outside and above the class; the Spartacusbond accepts this definition as inevitable and true, and therefore rejects all parties. The reasoning is the same, only the conclusions are different.

Throughout the history of the working class movement political organi­zations have been formed, grouping those individuals who defend a given orientation in the class struggle. From Babeuf through the secret societies, the Communist League and the First International, the early years of the workers' movement were alive with political activity and debate. Gradually through the experience of struggle itself the perspective and role of these political organizations were tested against reality and many aspects were clarified or rejected. The conspiracies of sects, putschist notions were abandoned, and the role of the party as a contribution to the development of class consciousness became clearer with the positive and negative lessons of the Second and Third Internationals. Throughout this period, Marxists as well as Marx himself fought the Proudhonist refusal to organize politically as well as the anarchist resistance to centralization, stressing the need for revolutionaries to put forward a clear idea of the "final goals of the struggle and the means of attaining them."

It is fruitless to argue that growing consciousness in the working class did not express itself in the growth and unification of revolutionary groups. The Spartacusbond does not even attempt this. They simply state that TODAY these kinds of organizations have become not merely useless but a veritable hindrance to the working class movement.

Why? Has the development of class consciousness so essential to the proletarian struggle miraculously become a homogeneous and automatic process in the class? Is there no longer need for elements who see things more clearly at an earlier stage to join together to disseminate their analyses and perspectives? Clearly the answer to both these questions is NO. Even the Spartacusbond recognizes this. "There is no doubt that those who attain this insight (into the need for workers' councils) will feel the need to propagate their experiences in every field of the struggle. But as soon as they intend to start a party or an international which is considered to be the leader of the class, they will relapse into ideas and organizational patterns of the past." (Bulletin, No 2, p 3)

This is clearly a contradiction. If those who attain insights are inevitably going to want to organize to propagate their insights, are they making a positive contribution to the struggle or not? The answer seems to be that if they are simply a loose group of isolated individuals, they can say what they have to say without fear. But if they try to organize into an international organization and try to make their impact more widespread and effective, then according to the Spartacusbond, they are a hindrance to the class. As long as groups are inefficient, isolated and vague, the Spartacusbond is prepared to give them its seal of approval. But once they tend towards political and organizational coherence, groups supposedly become a positive evil. Why then does the Spartacusbond exist, we may ask? To organize themselves to tell others not to organize? An anti-group group? To the Spartacusbond once a group tries to exert any influence in favour of its ideas, it will inevitably become ‘leaders' (that is, on the Bolshevik model). If we follow this logic, our only hope is to condemn ourselves to self-imposed impotence.

The Spartacusbond claims to be part of the Dutch council communist tradition. Need we remind them that the council communists with Gorter tried to form a Fourth International in the early 20s? Does this mean that Gorter had become the Dutch disciple of Lenin? An unconscious Bolshevik? A similar effort was attempted by the Dutch council communist group (after the break with the Spartacusbond) in 1947. This group encouraged the initiative of the Belgian council communists who called for an international conference and the Dutch group actively participated in this conference of different groups of the left communist tradition in 1948. Is this not more in the real tradition of council communism than the Spartacusbond's non-participation then and condemnation of international regroupment today?

But the debate goes deeper. What is the role of revolutionaries? Is it simply to "propagate their experience" as individuals as the quote implies, or is it to distil the experience of all working class struggles in history, to enrich present-day struggles with the lessons of the past? But for the Spartacusbond, the past is wiped away in one anti-Leninist sweep. The Russian Revolution was merely a bourgeois revolution with the Bolsheviks as a state capitalist party "in its essence" from the beginning. The erroneous conceptions of the Bolsheviks were taken over from elements of the Social Democracy. Therefore the Second International must be wiped away as well. And we end up with a hodge-podge, incoherent, moralistic approach to history. Why even bother analyzing past struggles and defeats when it is so much more simple to read them out of existence?

The Russian Revolution, according to the Spartacusbond, was a bourgeois revolution. But in the "West" (Western Europe), revolution was on the agenda because of objective changes in the capitalist system (the period of decadence, the beginning of the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction); and this brought forth revolutionary upheavals in Germany and elsewhere. The Spartacusbond realizes that a new period of struggle, revolutionary struggle, had begun at that time because they correctly maintain that unions were no longer adequate as organizations of working class struggle. So we are left with the absurd contradiction that capitalism was ripe for proletarian revolution in "Western Europe" but not in Russia where the bourgeoisie as a historical class was still capable of pushing forward its bourgeois revolution. Capitalism ceases to be a system which dominates the world and becomes a question of geographical regions: in one area the proletarian revolution is on the agenda; in another area we have the bourgeoisie just beginning its task. In one area workers are attempting to take power while in another area their fellow workers are fighting Russian ‘feudalism'. And the workers of Western Europe who are pushing forward struggles against the bourgeois order are, at the same time, so non-conscious that they join the Third International and mistake the "bourgeois" revolution in Russia for the avant-garde of their own revolution! This is a thoroughly incoherent logic, an Alice in Wonderland view of history. Either the revolutionary socialist programme is a world possibility or it is simply a utopian adventure for "Western" Europe. How the Spartacusbond explains the existence of workers' councils, the organization of the working class for the revolutionary assault on the capitalist order, in the midst of a "bourgeois" revolution in Russia, we shall leave to the contortions of their illogical argument. But the Russian Revolution remains a closed book to those who are so obsessed by defeat that they must simply refuse any proletarian character to the Russian experience. This inevitably leads to a rejection of any proletarian roots in the Third International. History becomes an enigma of everyone running around doing incomprehensible things. For the Spartacusbond any lessons of the past are useless because the major workers' struggles are "bourgeois"; proletarian history becomes a huge blank.

It is understandable that the Spartacusbond sees the revolutionary's contribution as simply propagating ‘their experience' in an immediatist way without a full historical dimension. They have a regrettable difficulty in coming to grips with the past as it really was. In an article on the KAPD printed in Internationalism, No 5, Hembe quotes Jan Appel's (Hempel) speech at the 3rd Congress of the Third International, to show that the KAPD was not anti-party as were certain later council communists. The KAPD opposed the Bolshevik policies in the Communist International and contested the whole idea of a party taking state power ‘in the name of the class'. But they did not reject the party as a necessary contribution to class consciousness.

"The proletariat needs a strongly formed, hard-core party. Each communist must be unimpeachable ... and he must be a leader on the spot. In the struggles into which he is thrown, he must be consistent and what enables him to do this is his programme. He acts in accordance with decisions made by the communist group. Here the strictest discipline reigns. Here one can change nothing or be excluded or sanctioned,....." Jan Appel

The Spartacusbond "wants to express (their) indignation about the fact that Internationalism is abusing Jan Appel's name in trying to re-harness the working class." (Bulletin, No 2, p 5)

First of all the Spartacusbond feels it necessary to prove that the KAPD is in ‘their' tradition and that our Current has no business quoting the KAPD to support our ideas. They are reduced to "doubting the correctness of the quote" which is a puerile tactic since none from the KAPD or Appel himself, either at the time or later on, or today, ever protested that these speeches were a falsification or a lie, The reader can refer to La Gauche Allemande (Supplement to Invariance No 2, Paris 1974) to discover whether Internationalism has correctly transcribed this quote from the interventions of the KAPD.

But the Spartacusbond goes further. "The fact is that he (Appel) left the Communist International and after that as a member of the KAPD went through the theoretical and practical struggle of the German working class." (Ibid., p 5) This quote implies that after making his speech Appel realized his error and joined the KAPD. In fact, Appel was speaking as a delegate of the KAPD to the Communist International and expressed the ideas of his organization which never renounced his speeches. Appel didn't wait until 1921 to be part of the struggles of the German working class; he was part of it from World War I onward. And he is still active in the revolutionary movement, in particular as a close associate of our Current, and has made valuable contributions to our international conferences. We would hardly have brought up this issue if the Spartacusbond had not deemed it necessary to parade their "indignation" and publicly accuse us of falsifying. It is certainly an accusation which can be easily turned against the accusers. But leaving aside polemics, it is revealing that those whose view of history is limited to an obsession with the Leninist party have difficulty in understanding the content of past experiences.

But what gives the Spartacusbond the right to claim our Current wishes to "re-harness the working class"? Aside from statements already referred to, the Spartacusbond berates us for trying to understand the positive contributions of the Bolsheviks. Our Current has indeed claimed that the clear and unequivocal positions of the Bolsheviks against the first imperialist world war were a clarion call to the working class and a rallying point for the international left which continued to defend an internationalist position against the war. The positions of the Bolshevik Party on this question and on the need to break with the Second international greatly influenced the German left communist movement, among others. The Bolshevik position against any compromise with the bourgeois democratic government of Kerensky and the call for "all power to the Soviets" are extremely positive contributions to revolutionary practice. Although we cannot go any deeper into the Russian experience here, we simply want to point out that these positions warrant the attention and study of revolutionaries and cannot simply be eliminated by the Spartacusbond's idea of the "essence" of Bolshevism or by pretending that this was all a Machia­vellian plot to fool the workers! Dealing with the Bolsheviks' positive contribution on these questions cannot in any way be interpreted as an apology for the Bolshevik position on the party or on other aspects of the class struggle. If the Bordigists make an apology for every sentence and word of Lenin, the Spartacusbond simply throws the baby out with the bath water and rejects everything the Bolsheviks may have said. Unfortunately for the Spartacusbond, real proletarian history cannot be reduced to the ‘all bad or all good' simplifications which they put forward.

We entirely agree with the .Sparatacusbond that workers' councils are the essential instrument of proletarian power, the class-wide organs revolutionary struggle and the construction of socialism. We also agree that parties are left-overs of a bourgeois society, a society divided into classes. Unfortunately the fact that the proletariat is an exploited class means that the power of "dominant ideas", bourgeois ideology, will retard and delay the simultaneous and homogeneous development of class consciousness in the working class. Therefore it is inevitable and necessary that those who can see the roots of the struggle more clearly will organize and try to propagate their ideas in the class. This aim cannot be served by remaining isolated and ineffective individuals or local groups, nor can revolutionary activity be limited to telling workers to "form workers' councils", or reduced to the ridiculous idea of telling other revolutionaries - "do not organize".

The working class does not need revolutionaries to prod them into forming workers' councils. In revolutionary periods, workers have done this without any advice on the mechanics of this operation. In the past, where the working class was inexperienced, revolutionaries played a significant role in encouraging the formation of the organizations of economic struggle, the unions. Today, the period is different and the form of workers' councils is much less the result of revolutionaries' agitation than a relatively spontaneous movement of the class in response to objective conditions. The task of the revolutionary organization is much more a question of clarifying the perspectives for struggle, of defending goals and offering a clear denunciation of the dangers of capitalist recuperation and partial struggles.

There is no opposition between the workers' councils and the party, between the whole and one of its parts. Each has a role to play in the life of the class.

The Spartacusbond's rejection of any role for an international revolutionary organization, not to mention a party, is not a continuation of the central ideas of the KAPD; it reflects the ideas of the Ruhle faction which left the KAPD, and these ideas were further developed in the thirties, during the period of defeat and demoralization. Despite the many contributions of council communism to a fuller understanding of the importance of workers' councils, the theories of some of its tendencies, notably the Spartacusbond remains unfinished and partial; in fact it remains locked in the Leninist trap. The only difference is that for the Leninists the party is everything,for the Spartacusbond the party is nothing.

"Of course there is no objection to international study and co-operation of groups which aim to stimulate the independent workers' struggle. But these groups cannot create a new international working class movement." (ibid., p 4).

Quote implies that as long as revolutionary groups ‘study' and ‘co-operate' they are part of the class. But if they want to push ‘co-operation' of local and national groups to the international level of a principled international organization with an active function in the class, then the Spartacusbond dooms their efforts. Each country for itself, each group for itself, - and above all do not come together internationally because regroupment will make you "leaders" and "Leninists". Apparently not only power corrupts, but also organization.

The fundamental incoherence of all this is perfectly clear. But more important, the influence of this fear and resistance to regroupment debilitates the workers movement and slows down the efforts of the new generation of revolutionaries to organize themselves in response to the needs of the contemporary class struggle.

J.A.

Part II "Councilism" come to the aid of third-worldism

Present-day ‘councilists' like those around the Dutch groups, Spartacusbond and Daad en Gedachte are distinguished mainly by their Menshevik confusionism, which rises to the most pathetic heights when the question of the Russian Revolution is posed.

The council communists who in the 1930's struggled militantly for clarification against the counter-revolution, and who wrote for International Council Correspondence and other communist journals, were by no means Mensheviks. Their traditions were wholly proletarian. In the demoralization and confusion caused by the utter defeat of the world revolution, they tried to understand the reasons for the downturn within a proletarian framework even though they defended certain erroneous conceptions. But confronted with the decline of the proletarian revolution, they too began to decline. How different it had been when they were one with the proletarian revolution in the upsurge, when they enthusiastically swam with the seemingly irresistible tidal wave of class struggle marking the period 1917-23. Menshevism never stood that test of events: it attacked the proletarian revolution from start to finish.

A "bourgeois revolution": A case of sour grapes

Just like the fox in the fable who walked away from the unreachable grapes muttering that they must be sour anyway, the present-day ‘councilists' treat the October Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. As we have said, the German and Dutch Left Communists who began to espouse a theory of the ‘bourgeois revolution' in the1930s in order to explain the Russian counter-revolution, were an authentic communist current. This was so in spite of their tentative but erroneous assertions as to the reasons for the relapse of the Russian Revolution. Today's ‘councilists', however, do not constitute such a revolutionary current. They are but its pale and impoverished residue, sharing (and contributing more confusion) to all the later defects of the German and Dutch Left Communists. What is more telling is that they do not share any of the original ardour, creativity and coherence which distinguished the German and Dutch Left: in sum, none of their virtues. The revolutionaries of the KAPD, and of the other groups which identified with their positions began already as communist militants who unhesitantly supported the October Revolution, because they correctly saw it as a moment in the unfolding world revolution. What they said after, when the world revolutionary wave was receding, is another thing. In demoralization and retreat, communist minorities inevitably become confused and make mistakes, especially when the whole class has suffered epochal defeats. But let us be plain about this fact: Spartacusbond and Daad en Gedachte and Co. pick up from amongst the debris, all the confusion and demoralization of what once was an authentic evolutionary fraction. Therein lies the whole difference.

An examination of a few statements made by Spartacusbond glaringly demonstrates their complete regression from any revolutionary position:

"The Third International, being promoted by the economically and politically backward structure of the - in reality bourgeois - revolutionary Russia (sic), was such an organizational structure of the past, at least for Western Europe." (Spartacusbond Bulletin, No 2, p 3).

And:

The decline of the revolution "was the result of the structure of Russia and the state-socialist ideas which existed in Bolshevism from the start and which could only result in state-capitalism." (Ibid., p3)

Cajo Brendel, a ‘councilist' contributor to Daad en Gedachte also believes that the October Revolution was ‘bourgeois':

"For some time the Russian (bourgeois) revolution seemed to have great consequences for similar bourgeois developments in Asia and Africa." (Cajo Brendel, Theses on the Chinese Revolution, Solidarity pamphlet 46, London 1974, p 3)

Observing the increasingly repugnant debasement of marxism and the needs of the world revolution perpetrated by Moscow and the Comintern, the German and Dutch Left Communists of the early 20's reacted in many confused ways. Some like Gorter and Pannekoek, began to say that what had happened in Russia was somehow ‘inevitable' owing to Russia's economic backwardness; Otto Ruhle and many others openly stated that Russia had gone through a ‘bourgeois revolution'. Even Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism according to Pannekoek, philosophically expressed the economic level of arrested bourgeois development in Russia, and thus Bolshevism was more and more seen as a special ‘hybrid' type of bourgeois Jacobin movement, ‘forced' by history to establish state capitalism in Russia. Following this train of thought, but adding his own philistine garnishings, Brendel calls the Bolsheviks "political idealists" (Ibid., p 2) doomed to be "suddenly and horribly" awoken to the realities of state capitalism. Paul Mattick, who has become another ‘councilist' leftover, puts forward a similar idea: for the Bolsheviks to "remain in power under the actually ensuing conditions meant to accept the historical role of the bourgeoisie but with different social institutions and a different ideology." (Paul Mattick, ‘Workers Control' in The New Left, Boston, 1970, p 388). According to Mattick, the objective necessity of bourgeois revolution co-existed alongside a proletarian revolutionary wave (released by World War I) which he qualifies as "feeble". Thus everything that happened in Russia was inevitable because of the economic backwardness of Russia, Bolshevik state capitalist ideology and the feebleness of the world proletariat. The profundity lurking beneath the surface of these utterances could perhaps be summed up as: ‘All's bad that ends bad'.

Menshevism resurrected

Defending the Russian Revolution against the Menshevik and Kautskyite renegades, Luxemburg and the Western communists who supported the Bolshevik regime maintained that capitalism had in 1914 entered its long-awaited period of decline. Therefore the Russian Revolution was a link in the rising chain of proletarian communist revolutions. The imperialist war had given a mortal blow to the ascendant period of capitalist development. From then on the communist programme, the maximum programme, was on the immediate agenda of humanity. The working class was facing the alternative of socialism or barbarism in an ever-present epochal manner. The spiral of the war-reconstruction­crisis-war cycle had appeared in history with all its murderous effects, signifying that our epoch was also the epoch of the world proletarian revolution.

To speak of ‘bourgeois revolutions' under such conditions, or about ‘necessary capitalist stages' previous to the communist revolution when capitalism world-wide was showing the death agonies of decadence, was indeed the apex of Kautskyite cretinism. Kautsky and the Mensheviks opposed the October Revolution on the grounds that Russian economic development was too backward, allowing for only the creation of a bour geois republic. "Theoretically this doctrine ... follows from the ori­ginal ‘marxist' discovery that a socialist revolution is a national and, so to speak, a domestic affair in each modern country taken by itself", said Rosa Luxemburg (The Russian Revolution, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York, 1970, p0368). But marxists of her time understood that bour­geois development was impossible within the limits of bourgeois society. This applied to all countries, from Russia to Paraguay. The world­wide connections of capital, which make of all countries a single inte­grated organism, the world market allowed no room for the theories of ‘exceptionalism' so beloved by leftists of all hues and persuasions. Already in 1905-6, Parvus and Trotsky had begun to grasp this reality, after the experience of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Lenin and Luxem­burg went firmly over to this point of view in 1917, and realized that the Russian proletariat could only take power as a prelude to the world socialist revolution. It was not that the workers in Russia had to take power in order to ‘complete the bourgeois revolution' even in passing, but that the world-wide capitalist crisis permitted only an uninterrupted and immediate struggle towards socialism.

The arguments of Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Martov and of the various doctrinaires of national-capitalism, were completely refuted by the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The fact that this wave was finally crushed in no way alters this conclusion. If the proletarian revolu­tion's failures in the period of decadence are always due to ‘econo­mic backwardness' then there's no hope for communism. Capitalist decay moans precisely that the productive forces are increasingly constrained and dammed up by capitalist relations of production. In other words, capitalism in decline can only stagnate and check the development of the productive capacities of humanity; it can only maintain economic backwardness as a whole.

The reasons for the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave are too complex to discuss here. It is enough to note that the glib answers of the Mensheviks about the ‘backwardness' of Russia only confuse the issue. The roots of proletarian defeats during the epoch of the proletarian revolution are to be found mainly at the level of proletarian consciousness which in turn helps explain subjective factors such as the clinging to old traditions and insufficient clarity as to the communist programme, which are factors which might at given moments paralyse the class as a whole and allow capital to regain the upper hand. The subjective problems of the class thus assume a socio-­material aspect which can at times become an objective obstacle. But the mechanic determinism of the Kautskyites has nothing to say about this process, which is more akin to an ‘organic' process rather than a mathematical one.

It was therefore a theoretical regression for those Left Communists who were later called ‘council communists' to resurrect the Menshevik arguments about the inevitable ‘bourgeois nature' of the Russian Revolution. In so doing, these militants went against even their own pasts, and against one of the greatest of working class experiences. Yes, it was true that the Russian Revolution was drowned in blood by the world counter-revolution expressing itself through the ‘workers' state' in Russia. It was even more painful to see the Bolsheviks themselves assuming in the main, the task of foremen, in this degeneration. But this doesn't refute the proletarian nature of October, whose defeat meant a monstrous debacle for the world class.

Only stupidity can then haughtily raise its diminutive brow and find a ‘bourgeois revolution' amidst the carnage. If ‘bourgeois revolutions' emanate from the bones and blood of millions of defeated class conscious proletarians, or to put it differently, if ‘bourgeois revolutions' are what workers would simply call counter-revolutions then indeed the likes of Noske, Scheidemann, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Castro and countless others are ‘bourgeois revolutionaries'. But only impudence and obtuseness can honestly compare Cromwell, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Garibaldi, Marat, or William Blake to those bloody abortions of capitalist decay.

But scribblers like Brendel excel in impudence. Their profound decla­mations concerning the history of the proletarian revolution contrasts strikingly with the shallowness of such remarks as:

"The Chinese Revolution had essentially (not in details) the same character as that in Russia in 1917. There may indeed be diffe­rences between Moscow and Peking, but China just like Russia is on its way to state-capitalism. Just as Moscow does, Peking pursues a foreign policy that has little to do with revolution elsewhere in Asia (not even middle-class revolution)." (Brendel, op.cit.p.2)

Thus revolutions equal counter-revolutions; Lenin and Trotsky are the same as Mao and Chou-En-Lai. The most reactionary aspect of this ‘revolutionary' sauce is that it implicitly denigrates and shrouds in confusion extremely vital and complex moments of the workers' move­ment. Brendel, the barrister of eternal capitalist development, thinks himself capable of passing judgment on what he paternalistically calls ‘political idealists'. The Bolsheviks he-compares to Mao, the heir of Stalin and self-styled demigod to 800 million human beings. With a quick washing of hands, our Pontius Pilate denies any historical responsibility for the course of the Russian Revolution. All that was to be, was. But "It is not Russia's unripeness which has been proved by the events of the war and the Russian Revolution", asserted Luxem­burg, "but the unripeness of the German proletariat for the fulfill­ment of its historic tasks". Brendel, of course, will have none of this. In his meanderings, he too, like Kautsky or the Mensheviks, stumbles into the cesspit the workers' movement has set aside for those forever ‘unripe' to understand the communist revolution.

Roles in search of actors

Brendel speaks easily about the occurrence of all kinds of revolutions - middle class, state capitalist, bourgeois, and even peasant. Every­thing gets a mention except the proletarian revolution, which remains for him a closed book with seven seals attached. According to him, the bourgeois revolution is inevitable in backward areas and the drama ensues in desperately searching for actors to carry it through. Thus: "In neither Russia nor China could capitalism triumph except in its Bolshevik form." (Ibid., p.11) But nowhere does his Menshevik conception come out more openly than here:

"In both Russia and China the revolutions had to solve the same poli­tical and economic tasks. They had to destroy feudalism and to free the productive forces in agriculture from the fetters in which exist­ing relations bound them. They also had to prepare a basis for industrial development. They had to destroy absolutism and replace it by a form of government and by a state machine that would allow solutions to the existing economic problems. The economic and political problems were those of a bourgeois revolution; that is, of a revolution that was to make capitalism the dominant mode of production." (Ibid., p.10)

The message is clear: the proletariat ‘had' to be fragmented into different national units which in turn have exceptional paths of develop­ment which are separate from that of the world market and the world eco­nomy. Each national capital is autarkic and accumulation can proceed quite well within a purely capitalist confine. The only limits to healthy accumulation would be the sudden revolt o the ‘order-takers' (a la Cardan/Solidarity) or an eventual ‘fall in the rate of profit' (a 1a Grassman/Mattick). The important thing here is the conception that Brendel has of the proletarian revolution: a bourgeois, nationally frag­mented, localistic conception. But then how can the world proletariat, assert itself as a unified class? How will this be possible if each proletariat faces fundamentally different national conditions? What will materially unify the rising class struggle for world socialism? Brendel and the other journalists of ‘councilism' are silent on this point saving all their strength presumably, for spouting incantations about workers' councils, or ‘workers' self-management'.

Brendel, himself, is devoid of any awareness concerning these questions. For example, the Chinese workers' struggles according to him were doomed; not because those struggles found themselves at the mercy of the world counter-revolution (already triumphant in Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, etc) but because of the workers "insignificance" in numbers! But we must allow Brendel to delineate his own course of thought:

"It is claimed by some that these uprisings were attempts by the Chinese proletariat to influence events in a revolutionary direc­tion. This could not have been the case. Twenty-two years after the massacres in these two towns the Chinese Ministry of Social Affairs announced that in China there were fourteen industrial towns and just over a million industrial workers in a population of between four and five hundred millions - ie industrial workers comprised less than 0.25% of the population. In 1927 this figure must have been still lower.

"With the proletariat insignificant as a class in 1949, it seems unlikely (sic) that they could have engaged in revolutionary class activity twenty-two years earlier. The Shanghai uprising of March 1927 was a popular uprising whose aim was to support Chiang Kai­shek's Northern Expedition. The workers only played a significant role in it because Shanghai was China's most industrialized town, where one-third of the Chinese proletariat happened to live. The uprising was ‘radical-democratic' rather than proletarian in nature and was bloodily quelled by Chiang Kai-shek because he scorned Jacobinism not because he feared the proletariat. The so-called ‘Canton Commune' was no more than an adventure provoked by the Chi­nese Bolsheviks in an attempt to bring off what they had already failed to achieve in Wu Han.

"The Canton uprising of December 1927 had no political perspective and expressed proletarian resistance no more than the KTT (Chinese Communist Party) expressed proletarian aspirations. Borodin, the government's Russian adviser, said that he had come to China to fight for an idea; it was for similar political ideas that the KTT sacrificed the workers of Canton. These workers never seriously challenged Chiang Kai-shek and the right-wing of the KMT; the only serious, systematic and sustained challenge came from the peasantry." (ibid., p.15)

The charge that the Chinese workers never ‘seriously challenged' Chinese capital is a complete misconstruction. Any self-action of the prole­tariat challenges capitalism even if at the beginning stages the workers aren't aware of their own final goals and potential strength. But capital is, and that is why Chiang, Stalin, Bukharin and Borodin helped strangle the Chinese revolutionary movement. What criteria does Brendel use to make this nonsensical claim, this assertion of a "non-existing" proletarian challenge? Did the February 1917 Petrograd Soviet, control­led by Mensheviks and liberals "challenge" Russian capital? Brendel's answer would be ‘no'. In fact, for him, the workers should never think of challenging capitalism since all they are bound to get is state capitalism, ‘Jacobinism', etc. The Chinese workers in Shanghai, Hankow and Canton, indeed rose by the thousands and created strike committees and armed detachments which by their very nature would have had to con­front not only Chiang but the Chinese Communist Party if the class were to politically survive and connect up to the world class struggle. But because there was no world revolution to connect to anymore, no perspec­tives were open to the Chinese proletariat's rising. The proletarian movement was definitely strangled by world political reaction in 1927, not by its ‘numerical' lack of strength. The proletariat's weight in the economy, and its international class character, are, with its consciousness, the only real basis for its struggle. Brendel's slanders against the proletariat have, however, a more ominous ring. He is against ‘adventures' but only as long as they are proletarian. When he talks about the peasantry, his true colours show. Thus it was the pea­santry that presented ".... the only serious, systematic and sustained challenge...." to the KMT. No adventures here, please!

The logic of his position flows forth, almost majestically:

"After twenty years of tentative attempts, the peasant masses at last discovered how to unite a revolutionary force. It was not the working class, still very weak, which brought about the downfall of Chiang Kai-shek but the peasant masses, organized under primitive democracy into guerilla armies. This demonstrates another fundamen­tal difference between the .Chinese and Russian revolutions. In the latter the workers were at the head of events at Petrograd, Moscow and Kronstadt, and the revolution progressed outward from the towns into the countryside. In China the opposite was the case. The revolution moved from rural to urban areas." (Ibid, p.16)

It is no longer a question of the proletarian revolution struggling against capitalism; no, now it's a question of ‘revolutions' in the abstract, of plays in search of authors and actors. The idea that the peasants were organized under ‘primitive democracy' into guerilla armies is nothing but a cynical Maoist apology, typical of writers like Edgar Snow.

"In China, just as in Russia, it was not the party which showed the way to the peasants - the peasants showed the way to the party." (Ibid., p.17)

The logic of this position is clear, even if not spelled out by this half-wit: if the peasant masses show the way to the bureaucracy, then it follows that the bureaucracy can be controlled from below. Thus communists should support that bureaucracy against other capitalist factions which do not allow such control (ie Chiang's). The marxist movement of the nineteenth century in the ascendant period of capitalism didn't hesitate doing this when it supported genuine national libera­tion struggles; it supported the struggle of the petty-bourgeois democrats or advanced capitalist factions against reactionary or absolu­tist ones. The ethical cant of Brendel and Co., however, does not permit such honest admissions. The truth is that the Chinese peasants were mobilized by Mao's Chinese Communist Party during and after the anti-Japanese war as cannon-fodder for the imperialists' carve-up. During World War II Mao's CCP was simply allied to the democratic imper­ialist faction fighting the fascist imperialisms. Brendel is not the type who would have opposed such a war. In China he would have sided with ‘the peasants' democratic guerilla armies' (sic!), • In other words, he would have died with the Allies, like all liberals and Stalinists did. Our Pontius has shown, however, that he doesn't like things spelt out quite like this; straight in the face. But the traditions of the workers' movement demand it, because this is the only way the prole­tariat can affirm its revolutionary programme against all confusionists and openly reactionary scribes.

We thus have seen how Menshevism (old or new style) inevitably leads to a capitulation to different capitalist factions. There is nothing neutral in the class struggle, and those philistines who warn that ‘not everything is black or white, greys exist too' ignore the fact that in order to appreciate gradations in colour one mist first determine what is black and what is white. Another expression of this reactionary confusion appears in the following extract taken from a pamphlet pub­lished by Solidarity, a group which has been influenced by ‘councilism' in its degenerated form:

"Just because the communist front organization, for whatever tactical and sectional reasons, is at times forced to struggle, even if only to ‘represent' itself as the ‘leader' of that struggle, the revolutionary must not desert that struggle. To do so is to opt out of a struggle the terms of which have been determined by the class. To opt out is tantamount to asserting that the terms of the struggle have been decided by the ‘party' and not the ‘class'. Such a deci­sion in these circumstances would be totally reactionary." (Bob Potter, Vietnam: Whose Victory? Solidarity Pamphlet 43, London 1973, p.29)

So, for the sophist, Potter, the ‘class' ‘determines' the terms of the struggle. Thus the partisans of Tito, the British 8th Army, the American Rangers in D-Day, could all be called expressions of the ‘class' ‘determining' its ‘anti-fascist' struggle in 1939-45, just like the ‘class' in Vietnam supposedly ‘determined' the struggle against Thieu and US imperialism. The apology is again a cheap Stalinist trick. In fact, it signifies the complete degeneration of these ideas, which under the pretense of supporting the class ‘from below' in fact capitulates to capitalist factions which are portrayed as expressions, however dis­torted, of the class itself.

In their 1970 introduction to Brendel's Theses, the Cardanites of Aberdeen Solidarity nicely showed the utter subordination of latter-day ‘councilism' to the leftist ideology of third-worldism.

"However, the struggles of the colonial peoples made a contribution to the revolutionary movement. That poorly-armed peasant populations could withstand the enormous forces of modern imperialism, sha­ttered the myth of the invincible military-technological-scientific power of the West. The struggle also revealed to millions of people the brutality and racism of capitalism and drove many, especially youth and students, to come out in struggle against their own regimes. But the support of the colonial peoples against imperialism, does not, however, imply support for this or that organization engaged in the struggle." (Aberdeen Solidarity Pamphlet 2, p. iii)

The last sentence is a non-sequitor given what precedes it and in any case is merely thrown in to appease some bad consciences.

These conceptions are an inevitable result of the years of sterility and confusion which finally devoured the councilist movement. Menshe­vism was indeed resurrected by councilism (and the Bordigists who speak about the ‘colonial revolution' fervently join in this particular seance.

According to Biblical legend, Jesus resurrected Lazarus, and if all evi­dence is true, nobody seems to have opposed the deed. The case would have been different had Jesus chosen instead to resurrect Herod, Xerxes or any bloodthirsty Sumerian despot. This sort of "savior" would have rapidly earned the justifiable scorn of his contemporaries. The deed of Sparatacusbond, Daad en Gedachte, etc, in resurrecting Menshevism twice over is no less foul for the workers' movement.

Nodens

 

The Comintern organizes the defeat

A relapse was taking place within the Third International. There was an attempt to ressusitate the old Social Democracy, to restore it to what it had been before the crash of 1914 - complete with its revolutionary and opportunist wings. It was no longer a question of separating the new international from the social-chauvinists and parliamentary socialists of the Second International, who had proven themselves the implacable enemies of the proletariat in its civil war against its exploiters; instead the Comintern saw fit to discard the primary lesson of the imperialist war and the world revolution; "the absolute necessity for a split with the social-chauvinists."1

At the IVth World Congress of the Comintern in 1922, the Italian Communist Party (1CP) presented its Action Programme which vigorously rejected the proposed organizational fusion with the Italian Socialist Party (ISP), that the Comintern had peremptorily declared should take place on February 15, 1923. The ICP's refusal to go along with this directive was based on its demonstrably correct thesis that the role of the Socialist Party was to divert an important sector of the working class from its revolutionary struggle for political power by means of skilful electoral and trade union propaganda.

In fact, the projected fusion was providing the Socialist Party - whose ‘Third Internationalists' fraction had declared its willing­ness to accept the conditions for adhesion to the Third International drawn up at the Second Congress - with the possibility of camoufla­ging its real function within the class struggle and thus regain, in the eyes of the workers, the prestige it had forfeited forever through its actions in previous events.

Against this betrayal of the very principles acquired in the heat of struggle against Social Democracy (a betrayal initiated by the Comintern with the aim of attracting the ‘maximalist' turncoats), the delegation of the Italian Communist Party asserted that it was necessary to win over to communism those militants who were caught up in the Socialist Party's apparatus, through intervention at the fore of all struggles engendered by the economic situation. Simi­larly, it was necessary to wrest from the other so-called workers' parties their best militants, in other words those who fought for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This programme, correct in part, cancelled itself out in that it allowed for agitation within bourgeois organizations such as unions, co-operatives and friendly societies. The motions of the Communist Trade Union Committee, while denouncing the ‘Amsterdam betrayal' of the ‘Yellow International' could still remind the Italian General Federation of Labour of its ‘class duties'. None of this, however, prevented the latter from jumping on the capitalist bandwagon.

The fact that some communist militants did succeed in creating their own trade union cells closely linked to the life of the party, did not alter the harsh reality of the situation. They were not in a position to hold back the march of history, to prevent the trade unions from becoming encrusted in the very soil of capitalism, from wrapping themselves in the folds of the tri-colour.

As an experiment in the tactic of the Workers' United Front, which it had agreed to apply out of a sense of discipline and only on the level of immediate economic demands, the left participated in the national general strike on August 1922, in the belief that integrating the non-unionized workers the Labour Alliance would begin to take on the form of a workers' council. This served only to reinforce a number of prejudices already held by the workers of a country deeply affected by Sorelian illusions: trade union activity, the myth of the general strike, and democratic illusions. The call for a general strike issued by the Labour Alliance contained all the forms of bourgeois ideology. The Alliance invited the workers to struggle against the "dictatorial madmen" of fascism, all the while warning the workers of the danger entailed in using violence which would detract from the "solemnity of their demonstration"; it appealed for the reconquest of Liberty, "the most sacred possession of any civi­lized man".

It is useless to point out that for the Italian proletariat, already cruelly tried, this was an added defeat but unavoidable in such an unfavourable situation where in the class could only maintain itself in a defensive position with great difficulty. The number of strike days lost fell by 70 or 80% in relation to 1920.

In a series of incoherent turns, the Comintern one minute encouraged the ‘Third Internationalists' fraction of the old Socialist Party to split from the party and the next ordered them to stay in it and carry out fraction work. While the negotiations regarding fusion (which were to end in the creation of a party bearing the name Unified Communist Party of Italy) dragged on, the Comintern was pressing ahead with its indictment of ‘left-wing childishness'.

The opportunity for the manoeuvres for the Comintern to go unhindered arrived like manna from heaven in the form of fascism. In February 1923, after Mussolini had arrested Bordiga de Grieco and a number of other leaders who belonged to the left of the party, the Enlarged Executive of June 1923 was able to approve a provisional Executive Committee under Tasca and Graziadei: ‘trustworthy' men who would re­tain their functions in the Executive Committee after the freeing of the old leadership elected at Livorno and Rome.2

In Italy, as in France under Cachin, the International orientated itself towards the task of winning over the ‘masses' by supporting itself on the rotten edifice of Social Democracy. Obviously such tactics implied the removal of the communists who had founded its national sections by branding them as ‘left wing opportunists' because of their intransigent defence of principles.

What was being played out at this time was not a sordid game of power politics within the young communist parties, but a drama of colossal historic proportions: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat, fascism or communism. Alas, the final curtain was to fall on the historic scene to the disadvantage of the proletariat.

The new international line drawn up by Zinoviev characterizes the Social Democracy as the right wing of the workers' movement rather than as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. It scrubbed over the fact that Social Democracy at the head of the old organizations of the reformist period had, on 4 August 1914, gathered together all its forces into an anti-working class front committed to the salvation of bourgeois rule; that it had lent to the forces of reaction its Noskes, Scheidemans, Bohms and Peilds; that for the crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic it had provided Austria with a federal chancellor in the person of one K. Renner, who distinguished by rousing the peasantry against the workers. Thus, the Comintern ended up completely disorientating the working class, sowing the most terrible confusion in its ranks, with the tactic of the "Open Letter", of "forcing the reformists into a corner" of inviting them to form left wing electoral blocs, to fuse with the Communists, etc. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie, taking advantage of a major respite in the class struggle, was able to bind up the wounds in its political apparatus.

Gramsci and anti-fascism

Shortly after the Enlarged Exutive had removed Bordiga from his position of leadership, Gramsci became the official representative of the Comintern within the Italian Party. In conformity with the directives of the International, he set about preparing the young Communist party for ‘anti-fascist resistance'. Thus the practice began of distinguishing between the fascist and anti-fascist wings of the bourgeoisie: the latter it was asserted, could be integrated into an ‘historic bloc', since according to Gramsci-ite theory the Italian proletariat could not become the ‘hegemonic' class unless it managed to create an alliance with non-monopolistic strata. (Lyon Theses, IlIrd Congress of the Italian Communist Party)

Following the murder of the Socialist Deputy, Matteori, by fascist henchmen in June 1924, the Communist and Socialist Parties resolutely decided to "withdraw to the Aventinno (ie leave parliament). Gramcis's circle within the party developed an analysis of the situation in Italy wherein it stressed the need for the party to regroup the maximum number of anti-capitalist workers around its factory cells to fight for the immediate objective of regaining basic civil liberties. While it was correct to affirm that the dictatorship of the prole­tariat was not on the immediate agenda, it was a fatal falsehood to claim that the re-establishment of bourgeois democracy would be beneficial to the next revolutionary offensive.

By leaving parliament, the Socialist and Communist, especially the right wing Gramsci-ites, hoped to be able to provoke the dismissal of Mussolini. It was as if they saw the presence of a representative of a totalitarian party in the Chamber of Deputies as a stain on the purity of bourgeois government.

It was, quite simply, a question of suppressing any reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat and replacing it with the transitional demand for a Constituent Assembly. The ‘United Front' line elaborated by Zinoviev was to lead to a ‘workers' government' like the one set up in Saxe-Thuringia in 1923, or at least to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Gramsci-Togliatti duumvirate eagerly buckled down to the job. Their analysis was as follows: the ‘Aventino' where an embryonic democratic state had been set up within the fascist state, was destined to serve as the constituent body of a federal republic of soviets with the aim of carrying out a strictly national policy: the completion of Italian unity. This leit-motif had pride of in Gramsci's analysis: for him the Italian Communist Party had to show that it alone was capable of finally resolving the problem of national unity, a task which had been left dangling in the air by three generations of bourgeois liberalism.

This falsehood was the great contribution of the man whom the epigones of self-management unhesitatingly refer to as "the most radical of the Italian revolutionaries". From the very start Gramsci attempted to translate the lessons of the Russian October into a strictly Italian language. This provincialization of the universal experience of the international proletariat; this refusal to see that the questions confronting the class could only be solved by the sword of world revo­lution - all this was part of Gramsci's effort to align himself with the defence of ‘Socialism in One Country', that spicy dish concocted by the great chef, Stalin.

The central theses defended by Gramsci were that fascism derived from the peculiarities of Italian history and of the economic structure of Italy, rather than from the international situation. All this was necessary in order for Gramsci to justify the Constituent Assembly as an intermediary stage between Italian capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Didn't Gramsci declare that "a class with an international character must to some extent nationalize itself"?

For Gramsci, there had to be a national Constituent Assembly where all the deputies from "all democratic classes of the country", elected by the whole people, would draw up the future Italian constitution. A Constituent Assembly where, in the company of men like don Sturzo, Secretary of the Italian Popular Party; of liberal figures like Salvemini and Gobeti; and all the Turattis, a ‘progressive' regime could be set in motion.

Speaking at the Vth World Congress of the Comintern, Bordiga demo­lished Gramsci's position which saw fascism as a feudalist reaction of the landpwning interests. Bordiga addressed an International about to take up the theory of ‘building socialism in the USSR', in the following terms:

"We must reject the illusion that a transitional government would be naive enough to allow a situation to occur in which, through legal means, parliamentary manoeuvres and more or less skilful expediency, we could lay siege to the bourgeoisie, ie legally deprive them of their whole technical and military apparatus, and quietly distribute arms to the workers. This is a truly infantile conception! Making' a revolution is not that simple!"

But Gramsci, in the name of anti-fascism, had begun a rapprochement with the Party of Action (de Guista e Liberta), and with the Sardinian Party with which, as an islander himself, he had long established ties. These dated back to October 1913 when Gramsci supported an anti-protectionist manifesto for Sardinia. In order to avoid the "serious errors" of those whom they accused of "an abstract and verbal extrem­ism", Gramsci-Togliatti erased from communist propaganda the only phrase which could accurately describe the situation: fascism or communism.

The origins and nature of fascism

Heaps of pseudo-scientific rubbish litter the desks of the historians, all describing the origins and peculiarity of the fascist ‘phenomenon'. Actually, the coming to power of fascism some fifty years ago hardly merits the title of a coup die-tat, an idea widely tossed about by Stalinism and its leftist apologists.

The National Fascist Party entered the bourgeois parliament thanks to the elections of May 1921, in other words by the most ‘legal' channels possible. It had the support of the great democrat, Giolitti, who, on 7 April, had dissolved the previous parliament. On his orders, administrative interference with and judicial pursuit of people under his protection ceased to take effect; the fascists could now act openly, sure of immunity in high places. And so Mussolini, sitting on the extreme right with 34 other fascist Deputies, came to make use of the parliamentary tribune. On 26 June 1921, he announced his break with the man who had guided his foot into the electoral stirrup, Giolitti, who nevertheless remained in close contact with the parliamentary group of the Fascist Party via the prefect of Milan, Luisgnoli. Moreover, this connivance was two-faced: Nitti was quite happy to receive, in broad daylight, a visit from Baron Avezzana, whom Mussolini had sent to him in the hope of forming a grand coalition.

As Trotsky once said, "The programme with which National Socialism came to power reminds one, alas, of one of those big Jewish shops in out-of-the-way provinces. There is nothing you can't find in it."3 The same applies to Italian fascism. At that time, fascism was an incredible pot-pourri, borrowing from left and right ideas absolutely traditional to Italy. Its programme included:

• anti-clericalism, the demand for the confiscation of the goods of religious congregations. At the 1st Congress of the Fasci, in Florence on 9 October 1919, Marinetti had proposed the devatican­ization of the country in terms almost identical to those put forward by Cavour some 34 years before.

• syndicalism, inspired by the ideas of Sorel, full of unbridled enthusiasm in praise of the ‘morality of the producer'. In light of the experience of the occupations, the fascists understood that it was necessary at all costs to associate the workers' unions with the technical and administrative functioning of industry.

• the ideal of an enlightened Republic, its legitimacy based on universal suffrage, regional electoral lists and proportional representation. The fascists also stood for the right to vote and eligibility for women; and, true to fascism's cult of youth, it put forward the demand for the lowering of the voting age to 18, and of the age of eligibility of Deputies to 25.

• anti-plutocratism, the threat of hitting big capital with a pro­gressive income tax (what was called ‘authentic partial expro­priation'), of revising all the contracts for war supplies and of confiscating 85% of profits acquired during the war.

The more a social programme is eclectic and rich in promise, the more numerous are its supporters. All kinds of people began to be drawn to fascism: nostalgic war veterans (the ‘arditti'), freemasons, futurists, anarcho-syndicalists.....All of them found a common denominator in a reactionary rejection of capitalism and its deca­dent parliamentary institutions. The hall of the San Sepolero, put at the fascists disposal by the Circle of Industrial and Commer­cial Interests, resounded with Mussolini's famous maxim: "We fascists have no pre-established doctrine; our doctrine is the deed." (23 March, 1919)

In the electoral sphere, fascism adopted the most varied and flexible tactics. In Rome it presented a candidate on the list of the National Alliance; in Verona and Padua it was for abstention; in Ferrare and Rovigo it joined the National Bloc; in Treviso it allied itself with the war veterans; in Milan it afforded itself the luxury of denoun­cing the demand for legal recognition of the workers' organizations, a hobby-horse so dear to leftist factions. The fascists said legal­ization would lead to the ‘strangulation' of those organizations!

Such was the nature of fascism in the early days, when whatever it may have been, it could hardly claim to be an independent political force with its own objectives. In particular, the fascists had to face up to one demand: the need to get rid of all propaganda which was embarrassing to the industrialists and which the ruling class found somewhat out of place in the propaganda of a party pledged to the re-establishment of social order. The ruling class had every reason to distrust a movement which, in order to attract the mass of workers and peasants, had been forced to make a spectacular show of contempt for social conformism. Fascism had to mature before it could meet the requirements of capital.

And so, this crude anti-clericalism, once so virulent in its atheistic outbursts, had its banners blessed in the nave of Milan Cathedral by Cardinal Ritti, the future Pope Pius XI4. From then on, not one fascist memorial, not one fascist rally, failed to receive the sprinkle of holy water. In 1929 the Lateran Pact was signed through which the regime recognized the Holy See's legal right to private property and granted it an indemnity of 750 million lira, plus the right to exact rent at 5% interest on capital of 100,000 lira. This appeased the Catholics and made them grateful to fascism for having reintroduced religious instruction into the curriculum of state schools. Now that Mussolini had shelved his anti-clerical passions, the Catholics dubbed him "the man of divine destiny". In all the churches of Italy, Te Deums were said for the successful completion of the task of national salvation to be carried out by fascism.

Likewise, this great republican movement rallied to the crown and the monarchy; on 9 May 1936 it offered the king and his descendants the title of Emperor of Ethiopia; and it gave representatives of the ruling dynasty official posts in the diplomatic corps.

This anarchistic, anti-party became the National Fascist Party with its pyramid of quadrumvires, hierarchs and podestats; showered honours upon state dignitaries; swelled the state bureaucracy with new mercenaries and parasites.

This anti-statism which in the beginning had proclaimed that the state was incapable of managing national affairs and public services, shortly declared that everything was part of the state. The cele­brated words:

"We've had enough of the state as railwayman, the state as postman, the state as insurance broker. We've had enough of the state exercising its functions at the expense of the Italian taxpayer and aggravating the exhaustion of our finances." (Speech of Udine at The Congress of Fasci at Fioul, 20 September, 1922)

gave way to:

"For the fascist, everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual exists or has any value outside the state." (The Italian Encyclopedia)

This pseudo-enemy of the wealthy, of war profiteers and of the shady deals which flourished so much in the Giolitti period, was soon decked out from head to toe by the captains of industry and agricul­ture, and this was long before the famous ‘March on Rome'. From the very beginning the propaganda of Popolo d'Italia was regularly subsi­dized by the big firms of the armaments and war-provisions industry: FIAT, ANSALDO, EDISON, who were interested in seeing Italy follow an interventionist policy. The patriotic cheques provided by Minister Guesde's emissary, M. Cachin, also helped the first issues of that Francophile journal to come out.

It is true that within the National fascist Party conflicts arose which sometime led to the formation of dissident groupings, This was, for a time at least, the case with certain provincial fascist cells, notably the one led by the triumvirum made up by Grandi and Baldo and partly also by the Confederation of Agriculture. This sort of thing easily led to the idea of an ‘agrarian' fascism'.

But fascism appeared from the beginning in the big, highly indust­rialized urban centres; only afterwards was it able to make its entry into the countryside in the form of a rural syndicalism -with a kind of plebeian emphasis. Its punitive expeditions always went from the towns to the villages: and the ‘squadrisiti' only became the masters of the villages after often bloody struggles. Actually, the internal struggles among the fascists expressed the contradic­tions between those petit-bourgeois anarchistic elements of fascism who had been ruined by the war and the factions which arose to fulfill the general interests of the ruling class for economic concentration carried out by the state.

Thus, those old ‘comrades' who showed themselves good for nothing except wallowing in the old glories or wielding the cudgel against all comers, were to taste in turn the paternal rod. You have to be cruel to be kind. And, having put on a left face, fascism now began to move to the right over the heads of those who did not understand that the movement would squander all the fruits of its victories if it lost its sense of proportion. And the ‘right' proportion for fascism was anything which guaranteed the profits of capital.

Behind all the leftist mythology lies the indisputable fact that fascism was not a preventative counter-revolution carried out with the conscious aim of crushing a proletariat on the verge of des­troying the capitalist system. In Italy it was not the Blackshirts who put an end to the revolution; it was the failure of the inter­national working class which led to the victory of fascism, not only in Italy, but also in Germany and Hungary. It was only after the failure of the factory occupations movement, in the autumn of 1920, that repression came down on the heads of the Italian workers; this repression was carried out by two factions; the legally constituted forces of the democratic state, and the fascist squadristi.

Only after the defeat of the working class did the fascists really get going, thanks to the largesse doled out to them by the employers and the facilities granted them by the public authorities. At the end of 1919, the fascists had been on the verge of the void, with only 30 cells and rather less than 1,000 members; but in the last months of 1920 their numbers multiplied many times over to include 3,200 ‘fasci' containing 300,000 members.

It was Mussolini, of course, who became the ‘chosen one' for the Confederation of Industry and the Confederation of Agriculture, the Bankers' Association, government deputies and such glorious national figures as General Diaz and Admiral Thaon di Revel. It was Mussolini whom big capital put in the driver's seat and not someone like d'Annunzio whose nationalist adventures were unanimously repudiated by the bourgeoisie during the Christmas period, 1920. The poet of the ‘Naval Odes', (‘Arm the prows and set sail towards the world'), was allowed only to compose lyrical hymns to the medi­ocre Italian conquests in Africa; he was given the job of keeping the flag of nationalism burning, but not of finishing off the massacre of the workers. This role fell to Mussolini, ex-atheist, ex-libertarian, ex-left wing intransigent, ex-director of Avanti.

For marxism, there is no ‘mystery' in fascism which cannot be understood and denounced in front of the working class.

The trade unions during the fascist period

In the last weeks of 1920 the fascist offensive against the organi­zations and associations under the control of the Socialist Party, doubled in intensity. Once again the witch-hunting of the ‘Bolsheviks' got underway with a vengeance; Socialist leaders were molested, and, if they resisted, were cowardly assassinated; the headquarters of the Socialist papers, the Labour Ministry, the buildings of the co­operatives and Peasant Leagues were burned down and pillaged. And all this happened with the direct connivance of the democratic state which protected the fascist gangs with its own rifles and machine guns.

Confident of the bourgeois state's support, fascism quickly assumed control of the essential cogs of that state. It simply took over, by force if necessary, the state institutions which had previously so faithfully served the policies of the imperialist bourgeoisie of Italy.

Fascism made a big show of the very real interest it had in the trade unions by signing the Pacification Pact on 2 August, 1921. On that day, representatives of the National Council of Fasci, the Socialist Party, the Parliamentary Fascist and Socialist groups, and the Italian General Federation of Labour, together with the President of the Chamber, De Nicola, met in Rome and agreed not to surrender the streets to "outbursts of violence, nor to excite extremist partisan feelings" (Article Two). The two sides also agreed to "reciprocally respect each other's economic organizations" (Article Four). Each side recognized in their adversary a living force in national life, a force to be reckoned with. Everybody agreed to try to avoid con­frontation.

By endorsing the Pacification Pact, all the political forces of the bourgeoisie, both the right and the left, showed that they understood the need to bury the working class, once and for all, by means of this pact for civil peace. Still not completely crushed the working class had fallen back to a defensive position; but the workers' resistance grew more and more difficult as the days went by. Inspite of these unfavourable conditions, the Italian proletariat continued to struggle every inch of the way against both the ‘legal' and ‘illegal' faces of reaction.

Turatti, while still putting his hopes on the formation of a coali­tion government supported by the ‘reformists' arrived at the following self-justification: "It takes courage to be a coward!" On 10 August the Socialist Party leadership - the same people whom the Comintern would later approach in order to ‘strengthen' the revolutionary move­ment - officially approved the Pacification Pact, The readers of the ‘anti-clerical' Avanti were then treated to an original serial called ‘The Life of Jesus', which, according to Pappini, was designed to make the pill of ‘pacification' easier to swallow.

The scenario of this ‘comedia del'arte'was played out in the follow­ing manner: the first actors openly used military force against a proletariat which was weakened and in retreat; the next exhorted the class to do nothing that might provoke the enemy, to undertake no illicit actions which might serve as a pretext for new and more violent attacks by the fascists. How many strikes were suspended by the Italian General Federation of Labour in agreement with stipulations imposed by the Socialist Party? It is impossible to keep count of them. In the face of a military offensive and attacks by the bosses in the form of lay-offs and wage cuts, the bourgeois left continued its work of sabotaging the workers' struggle. For example, the Italian Federation of Metallurgical Workers (FIOM) deemed lay-offs and wage cuts to be part of the natural order of life and consequently tailored its demands to fit the objective financial situation of each enterprise. (This was called the articulation tactic.)

Even the Alliance of Labour in which the Communist Party had had such high hopes ascribed to this programme for the salvation of the capitalist economy. It derailed strikes and moderated its agitation. All of these moves were recognized and vigorously denounced by the Communist Left.

What then was the proletariat to do? The answer given by the Social Democratic organizations was simple and obvious: regroup for the nth time on the electoral terrain, defeat the fascists via the ballot-box, and so facilitate the formation of an anti­fascist government containing a few Socialist leaders. Assured of a convincing victory, Mussolini himself` was in favour of such a ‘peaceful' confrontation:

"The spectre of elections is more than enough to befuddle the old parliamentarians, who are already campaigning for an alliance with us. With this bait, we will be able to do what we like with them. We were born yesterday, but we are still more intelligent than them." (Journal)

 

The march on Rome

Towards the end of October 1922, everything had been carefully pre­pared for Mussolini to come quietly to power under royal auspices. During the epic March on Rome (in railway coaches), which had been announced as early as the beginning of September at Blackshirt meetings and processions, the squadristi were met by official repre­sentatives of the state at the stations of Cremona, Merano, and Trento. In Trieste, Padua and Venice the authorities marched shoulder­to-shoulder with the fascists; in Rome the military quartermaster fed and housed the Blackshirts in the barracks.

Once installed in power, fascism demanded the loyal collaboration of the Italian General Federation of Labour. The powerful rail­waymen's union was the first to accept the fascist's call for a truce; its lead was soon followed by other union federations. And so, without having to resort to an armed insurrection, fascism was able to take over the main positions of the state apparatus. Mussolini as President of the Council also kept for himself the portfolios of Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs; his close com­rades-in-arms were given the other important ministries - Justice, Finance, ‘Liberated' Territories.

Fascism was simply a change-over in the leadership of the bourgeois state. After the change-over, fascism was in a better position to make the workers taste the bile of intensified exploitation. In doing so, it used the whips and cudgels the Socialists had made with their own hands. The fascist state was therefore nothing but a form of organization resorted-to by the bourgeoisie in order to maintain capitalist accumulation in a situation in which parliamentary govern­ment was no longer feasible and had to give way to an overt dictator­ship.

The economy in the fascist period

All that fascism really did was to accelerate the objective process leading towards the fusion of the trade unions with the bourgeois state. For the trade unionists and social democrats no less than for the fascists, the class straggle was simply an obstacle in the way of those who wanted to find a solution to the problems of the national economy. Thus fascism put the trade unions at the service of the nation just as the latter had done on their own initiative during the post-war economic recession. The social gospel of solid­arity between the classes was preached by both the fascists and the trade unions.

Formally speaking, the economy during the fascist period was based on the corporate principle, according to which particular interests had to be subordinated to the general interest. In place of the class struggle, corporatism stood for the union of classes and a national bloc of all the sons of the fatherland. It tried to persuade the workers to exert themselves selflessly for the supreme interests of Italy. The Charter of Labour, adopted in 1921 recognized the state as the sole agency for the elaboration and application of labour policies; any factional struggle, any particularistic settlements outside the state were excluded. Henceforward, conditions of employment and payment were regulated through the collective contract established by the Charter.

 

Fascism stood for the construction of an Economic Parliament composed of members elected according to their trade. This is why it attracted into its ranks many of the leading Sorelian syndicalists. These people found in this ‘daring' project a vindication of their principles of apoliticism and of trade union independence from political parties.

 

Thus corporatism appeared at a time of world crisis as a form of direct state intervention in the economy, which at the same time sought to force the working class into submission and obedience. The non-­marxist, Gramsci, has to ask himself, "Is this the only way the pro­ductive forces of industry can be developed under the leadership of the traditional ruling classes?"5 It totally escaped the author of The (Russian) Revolution Against (Marx's) Capital, that capitalism was in decadence and that fascism was nothing but a mode of survival for capital.

 

The year 1926 marked the beginning of great economic battles which aimed at protecting the internal market of Italy through limiting the importation of food products and manufactured goods by developing industrial sectors which had previously proven unable to satisfy the needs of the internal market. The results of this reorganization were largely eclipsed by its negative side-effects; prices rose to a level above that of the world market. Thus, the mere resort to statist manipulations did not resolve any of the economic problems of a country poor in natural resources. In addition, the only rewards Italy had received from her participation in the imperialist war were a few territories which served neither as commercial outlets nor as a means of getting rid of her surplus work-force.

The strengthening of customs duties, draconian control over exchange rates, the granting of subsides, state orders, and, as a corollary, the freezing of wages - amounted to a continuation of policies which had grown up during the war. Under the pressure of economic necessity the state had to become a builder of factories, supplier of raw materials, planner of the market, sole buyer of production, sometimes even paying for it in advance, legislator, etc., etc. The state had become the centre of gravity of an enormous, impersonal productive apparatus, before which everyone, even those still attached to the principles of free enterprise, the creative spirit of the industri­alists, had to bow the knee. For these reasons the habits of ‘liberal' life, of ‘democratic' practice, were replaced by the activity of the state. This was the soil in which fascism could bloom.

If an enterprise fell under the dark shadow of bankruptcy, the state would step forward to buy back its assets. If one sector was to be developed more than another, the state would issue its imperious directives. If it was necessary to block the importation of grain, the state would oblige by making a unique kind of bread whose yeast content it would fix in advance. If the lira needed to be revalued, the state would give it parity with the franc despite the warnings of the financiers. The state stimulated the concentration of enterprises; it made concentration obligatory in the iron and steel industry; it was a landowner; it put blocks on immigration; it put colonists in places where it was trying "to create a new, organic, powerful system of demographic colonization which would bring with it all the benefits of civilization"6; finally, it monopolized foreign trade.

By the end of 1926, the most important part of the Italian economy was in the hands of state or quasi-state committees: Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, National Council of Research, Cotton Institute, National Cellolose Council, Italian General Oil Company. A number of these councils had the task of procuring substitute products for the Italian economy: synthetic wool, artificial silk and cotton.

This whole programme of economic autarky, which sent many intelligent men into ecstasy at the time, was in fact Italy's preparation for World War II.

Italian imperialism

The imperialist decadence of capitalism which ravages humanity is forced, by its own relentless logic, to give birth to crises and wars, explosions indicating the growing contradictions of the system. This situation necessitates a bourgeoisie armed to the teeth.

Fascist Italy could not abstain from arming herself without renoun­cing her imperialist ‘rights' on the world arena. And these ‘rights' added up to a thick catalogue of demands. So that Italy could enjoy her ancestral birthright, Mussolini wanted to transform her into a power to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean basin, a power stretching eastward to the Balkans and Anatolia.

The USA, Britain and France intensified their armaments programme while at the same time waving the olive branch. They looked for a redivision of the world at the same time as uttering unctuous phrases about the ‘security of nations' and ‘international arbitration' under the benign auspices of the League of Nations. But Fascist Italy did not hesitate to announce openly its intentions: the mobilization of "eight million bayonets" of "masses of planes and torpedos":

"The fundamental duty of Fascist Italy is precisely to prepare all her armed forces on land, sea, and air ... When, between 1935 and 1940, we will have reached a supreme moment in the history of Europe, we will be in a position to make our voice heard and to see our rights recognized at last." (Mussolini's Speech to the Chamber, 27 May 1927)

Imperialist herself, Italy knew the score when the other members of the League of Nations ‘solemnly' committed themselves to reducing their armaments under international control; when the American government tried to get all countries to condemn war as "... illegal and to commit themselves to the renunciation of war and the use of litigation in international affairs." (The Kellog Pact, 27 August 1927)

Fascism recognized perfectly well that the problems which most affect a nation's life are problems of power and not of justice; that they are settled through the clash of arms and not through some mythic grace, whatever the Wilsonian idealists might claim. The young fascist militia men could read in the first phrase of their ‘Ten Commandments': "A real fascist, in particular a militia man, must not believe in perpetual peace". In the newspapers, in the cinemas at university graduation ceremonies, at sports meetings, the same message was hammered home: after having won the battle of 1914-18, Italy must continue her forward march.

 

If the state was already at the centre of social life, this trend accelerated greatly with the development of the army, navy and airforce on the eve of World War II. Even if we take into account the devaluation of the lira, Italy was spending twice as much on war production than on the eve of the Ethiopian War.

 

The Duce had warned the whole nation of the inevitability of war, of the need for severe sacrifices by the proletariat. After Italy had transgressed the sacrosanct principles of the Geneva Convention by invading Abyssinia, the 51 ‘democratic' nations sanctioned a commercial embargo against Italy. This allowed Mussolini to intensify his own crusade against the nations who had taken the pledge of ‘security'. Since this hypocritical application of sanctions did not ban the sale of coal, steel, oil and iron (ie all the goods indispensable to the armaments economy), fascism was able to reply with the mobilization of the workers around its programme.7

(To be continued)

R.C.

Note: (Benjie)

I cannot find where to put the footnote number 11 (6). I cannot find any footnote 11 (6) above.

11. Military budget in millions of liras (same source as for note 10)

1933 ...... 4,822 1936 16,357

1934 ......5,590 1937 13,370

1935 ...... 12,624 1938 15,030

1 Lenin, ‘Imperialism and the Split in Socialism' in Against the Current, Bureau d'Editions, T 11, p,262.

2 The Trotsky who wrote "The Central Committees of the left of many parties were dethroned as abusively as they had been installed before the Vth Congress" in The Communist International After Lenin, should have paused to consider his role in the policies of this kind.

3 ‘What Is National Socialism?', Trotsky, 10 June, 1933. Supplements a la Quatrieme Internationale, T 111 of Ecrits.

4 Elected by the Conclave of 6 February, 1922, Pius XI soon got down to business. Apostolic Nonce in Poland during 1918-21, ie during the civil war and victorious offensive of the Red Army, he vowed his undying hatred for a proletariat which had laid sacriligious hands on the state created on 11 November, 1919 by Versailles, in order to drive a wedge between Soviet Russia and the German Revolution.

5 ‘Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di B. Croce'.

6 The plan of May 17, 1938. From the end of that year 20,000 peasants from Pouilles, Sicily and Sardinia were working in Lybia on 1,800 rural enterprises composing 54,000 hectares under cultivation. In Lybia, the total number of Italians reached 120,000; in Ethiopia, there were 93,550, and so on. ‘L'imperialisme colonial italien de 1870 a nos jours', JL Miege, SEDES, 1968, p.250.

 

7 "The Italian workers have thus been presented with a choice between Italian imperialism and English imperialism, which is trying to act under the cover of the League of Nations. It is not a class dilemma which confronts the Italian proletariat, a dilemma which it could surmount inspite of the terrible difficulties it faces today; rather, it is a dilemma between two imperialist powers, and it is in no way surprising that, prevented by the counter-revolutionary policies of the two parties (the ‘centrists' as the Italian left called the Stalinists at that time, and the Socialists) from finding its own path, the proletariat, forced to make a choice, should opt for Italian imperialism, because for them the defeat of Italy would mean that their own lives, and the lives of their families, would be in peril, and that they would face an even greater deterioration of their living standards." (‘One Month After the Application of Sanctions' in Bilan )

In the second issue of Forward (Spring 1974), the theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Workers' Group (RWG*), there appears an international exchange between the International. Communist Current (lnternacionalismo: ‘Defence of the Proletarian Character of the October Revolution' and the RWG (‘Where lnternacionalismo goes wrong on the Russian Revolution). In their criticism of our article, the RWG raises important questions without being able to offer a framework for an overall understanding of the Russian experience.

Revolutionaries do not analyse history for its own sake, nor to dis­cover ‘what they would have done had they been there', but to learn along with the rest of the working class, the lessons from the expe­rience of the workers' movement so as to better define the path for future struggle.

The article from our Current, ‘In Defence of the Proletarian Character of the October Revolution', without any pretensions to being an exhaustive analysis on the complex question of the Russian Revolution, sought to clarify one essential point: that the Russian revolution was an experience of the proletariat and not a bourgeois revolution, that it was an integral part of the revolutionary wave that shook capitalism all over the world from 1917 to the early twenties. The Russian Revo­lution is not a ‘bourgeois action' that we can smugly ignore or fail to analyse; it would be disastrous for revolutionaries today in rejecting Stalinism, to reject the tragic history of their own class. The fixation of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, the carriers of counter­revolutionary ideology, on the so-called "material gains" of October and the ‘Workers' State' in order to justify the defence of Russian state capitalism or the demoralized rejection of all proletarian roots of the October revolution which is often espoused by the followers of the councilist tradition, are both unacceptable mystifications of the reality of revolutionary efforts.

With the recognition of the proletarian character of the October Revo­lution must come the realization that the Bolshevik party, which was in the forefront of the international left defending revolutionary class positions during the First World War and in 1917, was a prole­tarian party of the revolutionary wave. With the defeat of the inter­national working class uprisings, the isolated Russian bastion suffered a counter-revolution from within and the Bolshevik party, the leaders of the international communist left in 1919, degenerated into a party of the bourgeois camp.

Despite the unfortunately, often unreadable, translation of the Interna­cionalismo article in Forward, these central ideas do stand out. But Forward really does not want to discuss the problem of the proletarian nature of October with which they agree, but rather the counter­revolutionary nature of later events. They have chosen the wrong article on which to hang their analyses because the Internacionalismo article deals only peripherally with that question. No one article in our publications is sufficient to deal with all the problems of history. But it is with genuine surprise that we read: "For the Internacionalismo comrades as for the Trotskyists and Bordigists there exists an insurmountable wall between the ‘days of Lenin' and the ‘days of Stalin'. For them, the proletariat could not have fallen until Lenin was safely in his tomb and Stalin was clearly head of the RCP." (Forward, no 2, p.42). Indeed, we recognize that this touching article of faith is to be found among the various Trotskyist groups from which the Forward comrades sprang out but it is no part of our Current:

"The Bolshevik party leaders' lack of understanding of the role of the soviets (workers' councils) and their erroneous conception of how class consciousness develops contributed to the process of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. This process eventu­ally transformed the Bolshevik party, which had been the authentic avant-garde of the Russian proletariat in 1917, into the active instrument of the counter-revolution ... From the very beginning of the revolution the Bolshevik party was oriented towards transforming the soviets into organs of the party-state." (Declaracion de Principios, Internacionalismo)

And elsewhere:

"The October Revolution fulfilled the first task of a proletarian revolution: the political objective. Because of the defeat of the international revolution and the impossibility of socialism in one country, it could not go on to a higher stage, that is, provoking process of economic transformation.....If the Bolshevik party played an active role in the revolutionary process leading to October, it also played an active role in the degeneration of the revolution and in the international defeats.....By identifying itself organically and ideologically with the state and by seeing its task as primarily the defence of the state, the Bolshevik party was to become - especially after the end of the civil war - increasingly the agent of the counter-revolution and state capitalism." (Plateforme, Revolution Internationale)

It should be clear, then, from these excerpts, that the path towards counter-revolution was process whose seeds were sown early on with the stifling of the power of the soviets, and with the suppression of the self-activity of the proletariat; a process which led to the massacre by the state of a section of the working class at Kronstadt - all during Lenin's lifetime.

Why then did this degeneration of the Russian Revolution take place? The answer cannot be found in the framework of one nation, in Russia alone. Just as the Russian Revolution was the first bastion of the international revolution in 1917, the first in a series of interna­tional proletarian uprisings, its degeneration into counter-revolution was also the expression of an international phenomenon - the activity of an international class, the proletariat.

In the past, bourgeois revolutions developed the nation-state as the logical framework for the development of capital, and bourgeois revo­lutions could occur with a hundred year or more interval between different countries. The proletarian revolution, on the contrary, is by its very essence an international revolution, which must go forward to incorporate the entire world or quickly perish.

The first imperialist world war, signaling the end of the period of capitalist ascendency, marked the absolute point of no return for the workers' movement of the nineteenth century and its immediate objectives. Popular discontent against the war became rapidly politicized into frontal attacks against the state in key countries in Europe. But the majority of the proletariat was unable to cast off the relics of the past (adherence to the policies of the Second International, which was now in the camp of its class enemy) and to fully understand the impli­cations of the new era. Neither the proletariat as whole nor its political organizations fully understood the needs of the proletarian struggle in the new age of "war and revolution", "socialism or barbarism". Despite the heroic struggles of the proletariat in this period, the tide of the revolution was drowned in the massacre of the working class in Europe. The fact that the Russian Revolution was the beacon for all the working class in that epoch did not alter the fact that its isolation was a serious danger. Even a temporary gap between revolutionary outbreaks can have its dangers, but by 1920 the gap was becoming
increasingly unbridgeable.

Within the all-important context of the international retreat and the isolation of the Russian Revolution the very grave errors of the Bolsheviks played their role. These errors must be related to the experience and struggle of the class itself. The error or positive features of a class organization do not fall from the sky or just happen to develop arbitrarily. In the broadest sense they are the reflection of the class consciousness of the proletariat as a whole. The Bolshevik party was forced to evolve both theoretically and politically by the upsurge of the Russian proletariat in 1917 and the promise of international events in Germany and elsewhere. The party also re­flected the isolation and decimation of the proletariat in the period of the growing victory of the counter-revolution. Whether we deal with the Bolsheviks or the Spartacists or any political organization as a whole, faced with the new tasks of the period of decadence following the First World War, their incomplete understanding provided the groundwork for grievous political errors.

But the party of the proletariat is not simply a passive reflection of consciousness; it is an active factor in the development and spreading of that consciousness, We can see for example that the clear expres­sion of class goals by the Bolsheviks in the period of the First World War ("turn the imperialist war into a civil war") and during the revo­lutionary period (opposition to the bourgeois democratic government, "all power to the Soviets", the formation of the Communist Internatio­nal on the basis of a revolutionary programme) contributed to the def­inition of the road to victory. However, in the context of the de­cline of the revolution wave, the positions the Bolsheviks took up (alliance with centrist factions internationally, unionism, parliamentarism, united front tactics, Kronstadt) contributed to the acceleration of the counter-revolutionary process on an internation1 level as well as specifically in Russia. Once the crucible of proletarian praxis was excluded by the victory of the counter-revolution in Europe, the errors of the Russian Revolution were cut off from any further evolution. The Bolshevik party became the very instrument of the counter-revolution.

Because there is no possibility of socialism in one country, the ques­tion of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution is above all a question of the international defeat of the working class. The counter-revolution triumphed in Europe before it fully penetrated the Russian context ‘from within'. This does not, let us repeat, ‘excuse' the errors of the Russian Revolution or the Bolshevik party: for that matter it does not ‘excuse' the failure of the German or Italian pro­letariat to make the revolution either. Marxists are not concernedwith ‘excusing' or not ‘excusing' history but with explaining why events happened and drawing the lessons for future proletarian struggle. This general international framework is missing from the analyses of the RWG pamphlet which discusses the Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia almost exclusively in Russian terms. Although this may seem to be a helpful way to theoretically isolate a particular problem, it offers no framework for understanding why things happened in Russia and leads to turning round in a vacuum about the purely Russian phenomena which emerged. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, "In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not he solved in Russia."

Specific aspects of the degeneration of the revolution

In the confines of this article we will necessarily have to limit our­selves to a general over-view of the process of degeneration, leaving aside the details of various episodes.

The Russian Revolution was first and foremost seen as the avant-garde victory of the international struggle of the working class. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks called the First Congress of a new Communist International to mark the break with the traitorous Social Democracy and to join together the forces of revolution for the coming struggle. Unfortunately the workers' revolt in Germany had already been massacred in January 1919 and the tide of revolution was ebbing. Still, despite the almost total blockade of Russia and the distorted news reaching the Russian proletariat from the West, the revolution put its faith to the only hope for survival - the international unity of revolutio­nary forces under a clear programme of class goals:

"The soviet system assures the possibility of genuine proletarian democracy, democracy for the proletariat and within the proletariat, directed against the bourgeoisie. In this system the dominant place is given to the industrial proletariat and it is to this class that the role of ruling class belongs, because of its organization and its political consciousness and because its political hegemony will allow the semi-proletariat and poor peasants to gradually raise their consciousness."

"The indispensable pre-conditions for victorious struggle are: the break not only with the direct lackeys of capital and the executio­ners of the communist revolution - the right-wing social democrats - but also the break with the "Center" (Kautsky's Group) which at the critical moment abandoned the proletariat and joined the class enemy." (Platform of the Communist International, 1919)

This was the position in 1919 before the later alliances with centrists, which opened the party and the International to them and finally ended in the ‘united front'.

"Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia: the day of the proletarian dictatorship in Europe will dawn for you as the day of your deli­verance." (Manifesto of the Communist International, 1919)

Not the other way round as the ‘leftists' would have it today, fol­lowing the counter-revolutionary formulations on national liberation of the degenerating International.

"We ask all the workers of the world to unite under the banner of communism which is already the banner of the first proletarian victories, for all countries!" (Ibid)

Not socialism in one country.

"Under the banner or workers' councils, of the revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International, workers of the world, unite!" (Ibid)

These positions reflected the tremendous step forward the proletariat had made in the previous years. The positions put forward and defend by the Bolsheviks were often a clear departure from their previous programmes and were a clarion call to the whole class to recognize the new political needs of the revolutionary situation.

But by 1920 at the Second Congress of this same International, the Bolshevik leaders had made an about-face back to the ‘tactics' of the past. The hope of revolution was rapidly weakening and the Bolshevik party now defended the 21 Conditions for membership in the International, including: the recognition of national liberation struggles, of electoral participation. of infiltration of the unions; in short, a refurbishing of the Social Democratic programme, which was entirely inadequate for the new situation. The Russian party became the over­riding force and focus of the International and the Amsterdam Bureau was closed down. Above all, the Bolshevik leadership succeeded in isolating the left communists: the Italian left faction under Bordiga, the English comrades around Pankhurst and Pannekoek, Gorter and the KAPD (which was excluded at the Third Congress). The Bolsheviks and the dominant forces of the International were in favour of joining with the ambivalent, traitorous centrists they had denounced only two years ago. With their manoeuvres and slanders of the left the Bol­sheviks effectively scuttled any attempt at creating a principled basis for communist parties in England. France, Germany and elsewhere. By these actions the road was opened to the ‘united front' of the Fourth Congress in 1922, and finally the defence of the Russian home­land and ‘socialism in one country'.

Another point in the process of counter-revolution was the signing of the secret Treaty of Rapallo with German militarism, Whatever the analysis of the positive and negative points of the Treaty of Brest-­Litovsk, it was made in full daylight after lengthy debates among the Bolsheviks and was immediately announced to the world proletariat as an unavoidable step imposed by critical circumstances. But only four years later, the Treaty of Rapallo, (a secret military treaty with the German state), betrayed all that Bolshevism had stood for. The seeds of counter-revolution were sown with the speed characteristic of a revolutionary period when great changes are compressed into a few years or even months. Finally, all life left the body of the Communist International when the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country' was declared the international (sic) programme of the once so coura­geously defended International.

The whole violent history of the Communist International cannot be re­duced to a saga of machiavellian Bolsheviks who deliberately schemed to betray the working class either in Russia or internationally. His­tory cannot be explained by these childish notions. The working class, although it gave life to many who fought clearly for the interests of their fellow worker, did and eventually could not rise up to purify its own organizations because of the very defeat that sparked the political debasement of revolutionary principles.

Marx and Engels realized that a party or an International cannot last as an instrument of the class when a period of reaction sets in. This instrument of the class cannot remain as an organizational unity when there is no praxis of the class - it becomes permeated with the re­treat or defeat and eventually serves confusion or the counter-revolu­tion. That is why Marx disbanded the Communist League after the revolutionary wave of 1848 subsided and scuttled the First Internatio­nal (by sending it off to New York) when the defeat of the Paris Com­mune in 1871 signaled the end of a period. The Second International, despite its genuine contribution to the workers' movement, suffered a long process of corruption within the period of capitalist ascendency as it became more and more tied to reformism and a national focus for each party. The definitive passage to the bourgeois camp came with the 1914 war and the International's collaboration with the imperia­list war effort. During these times of working class crisis, the continuous task of elaborating theory and developing class conscious­ness fell to revolutionary fractions of the class, coming from the old organization and preparing the groundwork for a new one. The Third International was built on the promise of the revolutionary wave of the years after the First World War but the defeat of revolutionary efforts and the victory of the counter-revolution spelled its doom as a class instrument. The process of counter-revolution was com­pleted (although it began earlier) with the declaration of ‘socialism in one country' - the definitive end of the objective possibility of revolutionary fractions being able to remain in the International and the death knell of an entire an entire period.

Bourgeois ideology can seep into the proletarian struggle because of the force of the ruling class' ideological domination in society. But once an organization has definitively passed into the bourgeois camp, the path is closed for any possible ‘regeneration'. Just as no living fractions expressing proletarian class consciousness can arise from a bourgeois organization - which today includes the Stalinists, Trot­skyist and Maoist parties (although individuals may be able to make the break) - so the Communist International and all the communist par­ties which remained in it were irrevocably lost to the proletariat,

This process is easier to see with hindsight than it unfortunately was at the time, either for the class as a whole, or for many of its more political elements. We cannot write history by hoping to read back into the past what fifty years of distance has taught. The process of counter-revolution which claimed the Communist International has produ­ced terrible confusion in the workers' movement for the last fifty years or more. Even those who carried on the work of theoretical ela­boration in the dark years of the thirties and forties, the remnants of the left communist movement, were slow to see the full implications of the period of defeat. Let the arrogant ‘modernists'1 who ‘figured it all out' in 1974 or 1975 teach the shadows what history should have been like.

The Russian context

The international programme of the Bolsheviks, their role in the coun­ter-revolutionary process internationally, is practically ignored in the RWG pamphlet Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia and is only fleetingly mentioned in the Forward text. For these comrades, the counter-revolution was essentially defined by the NEP (New Econo­mic Policy). The NEP was, for them, the "watershed in the history of the Soviet Union. It is the year that capitalism was restored, the political dictatorship defeated and the Soviet Union ceased to be a workers' state." (Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, p.7) First let it be said that whatever the events in the Russian context were, and whatever influence they may have had on proletarian consciousness elsewhere, an international revolution or an Interna­tional does not die because of a wrong economic policy in one coun­try. The reader of the RWG texts will look in vain for any coherent framework in which to analyse the NEP or the unfolding of events in Russia in general.

The degeneration of the revolution on Russian soil expressed itself in the gradual but deadly decline of the soviets and their reduction to a mere appendage of the Bolshevik state party. The self-activity of the proletariat, working class democracy within the soviet system, was the very basis of the victory of October. But as early as 1918 the signs were clear that the political power and expression of the workers' councils were being curtailed and eventually crushed by the state machine. This process of the decline of the soviets in Russia led to the massacre of a part of the working class at Kronstadt. Not so strangely, the RWG fixated on the NEP, does not even mention the Kronstadt slaughter in relation to the Russian state, There is no mention of Kronstadt in either of these two main texts on Russia just as there is not a word on Rapallo. It is perhaps understandable that the comrades of the RWG, fresh from Trotskyist dogma, did not, at the time that they wrote these articles, understand that Kronstadt was not the ‘counter-revolutionary mutiny' that Lenin and Trotsky said it was. It is less understandable, however, that they accuse our comrades in Internacionalismo of not being able to see "the dege­neration of the revolution in Lenin's lifetime!"

The fundamental error of the Bolshevih party in Russia was the concep­tion that power should be exercised by a minority of the class - the party. They believed that the party could bring socialism to the class and they did not see that the class as a whole, organized in worers' councils, is the subject of socialist transformation. This conception of the party taking state power was shared by the entire left, to one degree or another, including Rosa Luxemburg, up to the writings of the KAPD in 1921. The Russian experience of party-power, which the prole­tariat paid for in blood, marks the definitive class line on the ques­tion of a party or minority of the class taking power ‘in the name of the working class'. Henceforth it became the hallmark of revolutio­nary fractions of the class that the party and the state were not to be confused and, later on, that the role of political organizations of the class was to contribute to class consciousness and not to substi­tute themselves for the class as a whole.

The historical class interests of the working class as the destroyer of capitalism were not always absolutely clear from the outset, and could not have been, because proletarian political consciousness is constantly hindered by pressure from dominant bourgeois ideology, Thus Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto without seeing that the proletariat could not take over and use the bourgeois state machine. The living experience of the Paris Commune was needed to irrevocably prove that the proletariat must destroy the bourgeois state in order to exercise its dictatorship over society. In the same way, the question of the role of the party was debated in the workers' movement up to 1917 but the Russian experience marked the class line on this question. All those who today repeat or preach the repetition of Bolshevik errors are on the other side of the class line.

What the Russian state destroyed with the stifling of the soviets was no more or less than the very impetus of socialism itself. Without the organized, autonomous activity of the class as a whole, any hope of regeneration on the Russian scene was gradually eliminated. The economic policy of the Bolsheviks was debated, changed, modified but their political thrust in Russia, however, was unchanging, funda­mental process of digging the revolution's grave. The seriousness of this process can be seen by the fact that the Russian tragedy was played out within the context of international defeat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

One of The first and primary lessons to be drawn from the entire revo­lutionary experience of the post-World War I period is that the prole­tarian struggle is above all an international struggle and that the dictatorship of the proletariat (in one area or world-wide) is first and foremost a political question.

The proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie is an exploited, not an exploi­ting class and thus has no economic privileges upon which to base its class destiny. The bourgeois revolutions were essentially the political recognition of an economic fait accompli - that the capitalist class had become the economically dominant class in society over a period of years prior to the actual moment of revolution. The prole­tarian revolution undertakes an economic transformation of society from a political point of departure - the dictatorship of the proletariat, which has no economic privileges to defend, either in the old society or in the new and has only its organized force and class consciousness, its political power through the workers' councils with which to guide the transformation of society. The destruction of bourgeois power and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie must be a world-wide victory before genuine social transformation can he carried out under the aegis of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The fundamental economic law of capitalist society, the law of value, is a product of the entire capitalist world market and cannot, in any way, shape or form, be eliminated in one country (ever one of the highly developed countries) or in any group of countries - only on a world-wide basis. There is absolutely no getting away from this fact - not even by paying lip-service to it and then ignoring it to talk about the possibility of abolishing money or wage labour (the direct outgrowth of the law of value and the capitalist system as a whole), straight away in one country. The transformation of society follows and does not precede the taking of power by the workers' councils internationally, the only weapons the proletariat has to carry out that transformation are:

1. Its armed, organized strength to carry the revolution to victory all over the world.
2. The consciousness of its communist programme which is a political orientation for the economic transformation of society.

The victory of the proletariat does not rest on whether it can ‘manage' a factory or even all the factories in one country. Managing produc­tion while the capitalist system continues to exist dooms such ‘manage­ment' to the management of surplus value production and exchange. The first duty of any victorious proletariat in one country or area is not to figure out how to create a mythical ‘island of socialism', which is impossible, but to give all their aid to their only hope - the victory of the world revolution.

It is extremely important to get priorities straight here. The economic measures the proletariat will take in one country, in one area, are a secondary question. Even in the best of cases these measures are only stop-gaps tending in positive direction: any errors can be corrected if the revolution advances. But if the proletariat loses its political coherence, or its armed strength, or if the workers' coun­cils lose political control and their clear consciousness of where they are going, then there can be no hope of correcting any errors or of any socialist future.

There are many voices raised today to protest against this conception. Some of them claim that the political focus of proletarian struggle is jut old-hat reactionary nonsense. In fact, the conception of an objectively defined revolutionary class, the proletariat, is equally old-hat for them, and should give way to a new universal class of everyone who is ‘oppressed', psychologically tormented or philosophically inclined. ‘Communist relations', or according to one (now defunct) English group of the same name: ‘Communist practice' is immediately realizable as soon as ‘people' wish it. For them, the really important, thing is not of` course the proletariat taking power internationally and eliminating the capitalist class but the immediate institution of so-called ‘communist relations' through a spontaneous thrust of the ‘people'.

The purely abstract and mythical elements of this ‘theory' should not blind us to the fact that it can serve as the perfect cover for ‘self-management' ideology. As increasing working class discontent pro­duces mass movements as a reaction to the depths of capitalist crisis, one reaction of the bourgeoisie may be to tell the workers that their real interests are not to bother with ‘mere political matters' like destroying the bourgeois state but to take over their factories and run them ‘for themselves' in good order. The bourgeoisie will try to have the workers exhaust themselves in a futile effort to implement an economic programme of the self-management of exploitation while the capitalist class and its state will wait it out to pick up the pieces. This is what happened in Italy in 1920, when Ordino Nuovo and Gramsci exalted the economic possibilities of factory occupa­tions, while the left faction with Bordiga warned that although workers' councils have their roots in the factories, they must go forward to a frontal attack on the state and the entire system or die.

The comrades of the RWG do not reject political struggle. They limit themselves to saying that the political thrust and economic policy are equally important and crucial. In one sense they are simply repeating a marxist truism: that the proletariat does not fight for political power over the capitalist class just to assert some kind of power psychosis, but in order to lay the foundations for social transformation through class struggle and the organized self-activity of the only revolutionary class which can free itself and all humanity from exploitation forever. But the RWG comrades have no concrete idea of how the process of social transformation can take place. The revolution is a rapid assault on the capitalist state but the economic transformation of society is a world-wide process of great complexity. In order to successfully carry through this economic process, the political framework of the working class dictatorship must be clear. Furthermore, the taking of power by the proletariat is not tantamount to maintaining that socialism can be introduced by decree. Thus:

1. The economic transformation can only follow a proletarian revolu­tion and not precede it (there can be no ‘socialist construction' with the capitalist class in power), nor is it simultaneous with working class power over society.
2. The political power of the proletariat opens the road to socialist transformation but the primary bulwark of the forward march of the revolution is the unity and coherence of the class. Economically the class may make errors which must be corrected, but if they turn power over to another class or party, any economic transformation is by definition impossible.

From our affirmation that the political dictatorship of the proletariat is the framework and the pre-condition for social transformation, the simple-minded conclude: "It appears that Internacionalismo denies the necessity of an economic war on capitalism by the proletariat." (Forward, p.44).

Contrary to Forward's claim, everything is not immediately of equal importance and of equal gravity for the revolutionary struggle. In a country which has just had a victorious revolution, the workers' coun­cils may consider it necessary to work ten to twelve hours a day to produce arms and materials to send to their besieged brothers in ano­ther region. Is this socialism? Not to the extent that the basic tenets of socialism are production for human needs (not destruction) and the reduction of the work day. Is this therefore to be condemned as a counter-revolutionary proposition? Clearly not, as it is the wor­king class' primary duty and hope of salvation to aid the spread of the international revolution. Do not we have to admit that the econo­mic programme is subject to the conditions of the class struggle and that there is no way of creating a workers economic paradise in one country? Furthermore, we have to emphasize that a political weakening of the councils' power to decide policy and orient the struggle would be fatal.

Revolutionaries would be lying to their fellow workers if they held out rosy dreams of milk and honey and economic miracles instead of empha­sizing the deadly struggle and tremendous waste and destruction of civil war. They would be demoralizing the class by declaring that inevitable economic set-backs (in one country or even in several countries or sec­tors), means the end of the revolution. By immediately putting these questions on the same plane as the political solidarity, working class democracy and decision-making power of the proletariat, they would be of detracting from the central focus of class struggle and the only hope inaugurating a world-wide period of transition to socialism.

The RWG answers that after all, "everything can't be the same after the revolution as before," and points to the tragic conditions of workers in Russia in 1921. But they really don't tell us what conditions they are talking about. Is it that the mass working class organizations were excluded from effective participation in the ‘Workers' State'? That workers were repressed for striking in Petrograd? If so, that is the kernel of the degeneration of the revolution. Or is it simply that there was famine? Here again, it is futile for us to pretend that the dangers of famine and hardship simply won't exist after the revolution. Or is it that workers still had to work in factories and that wages were not abolished (in one country), or that exchange still existed? Although these practices are clearly not socialism they may indeed be unavoidable unless we pretend that eliminating the law of value is simply a question of snapping your fingers. As the RWG says, "a line has to be drawn somewhere." But where? By confusing the crucial importance of political coherence and the power of the class with economic set-backs, the problems of future struggle become simply a matter of wish-fulfillment.

Socialism or communist social relations (these terms are used interchangeably here), is essentially the complete elimination of all "blind economic laws", especially the law of value which rules capitalist production, in order to fulfill the needs of humanity. Socia­lism is the end of all classes (the integration of non-capitalist sectors into socialized production and the beginning of freely associated labour deciding its own needs), and an end to all exploitation, all need for a state (the expression of a class-divided society), and accumulation of capital with its concomitants of wage labour and the market economy. It is the end of the domination of dead labour over living labour. Thus socialism is not a question of creating new economic laws but of eliminating the roots of the old ones under the aegis of the proletarian communist programme. Capitalism is not merely the cigar-smoking villain but the entire present organi­zation of the world market, the present division of labour world-wide, production in private hands including the peasantry, under-development and misery, production for destruction, etc. All this is to be extir­pated and eliminated from human history forever. This requires a pro­cess of economic and social transformation of gigantic proportions taking at least a generation in world terms, if not more. And what is even more telling, no Marxist can foresee the details of the new situation which will face the proletariat after the world revolution. Marx always avoided ‘blueprints' for the future and the Russian experience can only indicate the broad general lines of an orientation for economic transformation. Revolutionaries will be deserting their task if their only contribution is to berate the Russian Revolution for not creating socialism in one country or to make up pipe dreams about how the political changes and the economic transformations are simul­taneous.

The real point about the economic programme of the revolution is that the broad outlines of where we are going must be clear, that the prole­tariat must know what measures tending towards the destruction of capitalist production relations (and thus the establishment of socialism) shou1d be implemented as soon as possible. It is one thing to say that in some conditions we may be forced to work long hours or not be able to abolish money right away in one area. It is another thing to state that socialism means working harder or even worse that natio­nalization and state capitalism are s step to socialism. Bolshe­viks are not so much to he condemned for going from the chaos of War Communism to the NEP (from one inadequate plan to another) but for the fact that they preached that nationalization and state capitalism were a help to the revolution or that ‘economic competition with the West' would prove the splendours of socialist productivity. A clear pro­gramme for economic transformation is an absolute necessity and we to­day with fifty years of hindsight can see more deeply into this ques­tion than the Bolsheviks or any political expression or any political expression of the proletariat at the time.

The working class needs a clear orientation for its political programme, the key to economic transformation, but it does not need false promises of an instant end to difficulties or mystification about how the law of value can be eliminated by decree.

The NEP

The RWG is not alone in placing the emphasis on the NEP. Many people just breaking from ‘leftism' and particularly its Trotsky­ist varieties, do the same. After all the meaningless garbage about a ‘Workers' State' today and collectivization in state hands ‘proving' that Russia is socialist today, they look "for the point between 1917 and today when a change must have taken place" in Russia. (Forward, p.44) It's the old "when did capitalism come back" query the Trot­skyists are always arrogantly throwing out.

The NEP was not an invention out of the heads of the Bolshevik leaders. On the contrary, the NEP, in large part, merely takes up the programme of the Kronstadt revolt. The Kronstadt revolt put forward a key political demand to save the life's blood of the revolution: the regeneration of the power of the workers' councils, working class democracy and an end to the Bolshevik dictatorship through the state. But economically, the Kronstadt workers, forced by famine into pil­fering tools to exchange individually with peasants for food, developed a ‘programme' of simply wanting to regularize exchange and putting it under workers' auspices - regularizing commerce so that starvation and economic stagnation would end. Trucks of food sent to the cities in Russia were stormed by the starving population and had to be accom­panied by armed guards. The situation was a catastrophe and Kronstadt, as well as the Bolsheviks, had nothing more to offer than a return to some sort of economic normalcy. That normalcy could only be capitalism.

The RWG attack on the NEP lacks the historical context in which the NEP was adopted. Furthermore, it confuses some essential points about the war on capitalism it claims to defend.

1. "If events dictated the restoration of capitalist property in Russia as they partially did ............ while the restoration of capitalism meant the restoration of the proleariat as a class-in-itself (?)" (Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, p.7 and p.17)

"One wonders what more would have to be conceded to capitalism in order to have the restoration of capitalism?" (Forward, no 2, p.46)

All this is striking proof that there is a fundamental confusion here. The NEP was not the "restoration of capitalism" because capitalism had never been eliminated in Russia. The RWG confuses the matter even fur­ther by adding elsewhere: "While the NEP was not the rebirth of capi­talist economic relations, it was the rebirth of normal, ie legal, capitalist economic relations." (Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, p.7) This is even more absurd. Whether capitalist relations are legal, ie recognized officially as existing, or not, is simply a juridical question. What ‘purity' can be gained by pretending reality doesn't exist? The NEP was not a watershed in the sense that it re­introduced (or recognized) the existence of capitalist economic forces - the fundamental laws of the capitalist economy dominated the system in Russia because they dominated the world market.2

This may lead some to say that they knew all along that Russia was capitalist and that there was thus no proletarian revolution. How­ever, we will never be able to identify a proletarian revolution if we insist on wanting to see it not as an initially political thrust eliminating the capitalist class but as a complete economic transformation overnight. One again, we return to the theme of ‘socialism in one country' which hang over the Russian experience like an ominous cloud. The NEP was a step towards state capitalism with the nationalization of the ‘commanding heights', but it was not a funda­mental reversal from ‘socialism' (or something other than capitalism) back to capitalism.

2. "It (the NEP) actually represented a principled retreat, a pro­grammatic crossing of class lines." (Ibid, p. 7)

This is the kernel of the argument although it naturally follows from the previous point. No one would be so foolish as to claim that the working class can never retreat. Although in an overall sense the revolution must advance or die, this can never be taken unilaterally to mean that we can advance in a straight line with no problems. The question is then: what is an unavoidable retreat and what is a compro­mise of principles? The Bolshevik programme, insofar as it embodied an apology and mystification of state capitalism, was an anti-proletarian programme; but the inability to abolish the law of value or exchange in one country is by no means "a crossing of class lines". Either these are clearly separated, or else one ends up defending the position that the proletariat could have gone on to integral socialism in Russia. This being impossible, revolutionaries would simply have to cover up the inability to forge ahead according to the programme by lying about what was actually happening.

Retreat on the economic level will certainly be unavoidable in many instances (despite the need for a clear orientation) but retreat in political terms is death for the proletariat. This is the fundamental difference between the NEP and the Kronstadt massacre, between the NEP and the Treaty of Rapallo, or the ‘united front' tactic.

"What would the comrades of Internacionalismo have done in the same situation? Would they have restored the market economy? Would they have decentralized industry in the hands of the managers? Would they have rehabilitated the ruble? In short, would they have carried out a ‘retreat' that was in fact a defeat? .... Would they have subordinated the interests of world proletarian revolution to the interests of Russian national capital?"(Forward,p.45)

The ‘what would you have done' approach to history is fruitless by definition since history cannot be changed or invested with our cons­ciousness (or lack of it) today. However, the RWG's naive questions show that they have not understood the difference between retreat and defeat.

The market economy? It was never destroyed internationally which is the only means of eliminating it, nor did anyone ‘restore' it in Russia - it always existed. The ruble? Again, this is an absurd question in terms of marxist writings on world capitalism and the role of money. Decentralization of industry? This political question pro­foundly compromised the power of the workers' councils and belongs to another domain entirely. Defending the interests of Russian capital? Clearly this was the death knell of the revolution itself.

The economic transformation "cannot be done by decree but the decree is the first step". If by decree the RWG means the programme of the working class then we have only to ‘decree' integral and immediate communism. And then what? How do we get there? Or do we say: a) let's throw in the towel completely or b) lie and pretend we can have socialism through little socialist republics?

The revolution in a country like Britain for example (by no means a backward, under-developed economy as Russia's in 1917) could last only a few weeks before being brought to death by slow starvation through blockade. What sense is there in talking about an ever-victorious economic war on capitalism in the midst of short-term starvation? The only policy to protect and defend a revolutionary bastion is an offen­sive struggle internationally and the only hope is the political solidarity of the class, its self-organization and the class struggle internationally.

Some measures for a transitional programme

The RWG with all their talk of the NEP does not offer any suggestions for a valid socialist orientation in the economy for tomorrow's struggle. In what direction should we head, as far as the circumstances of class struggle will allow?

1. Immediate socialization of large capital concentrations and the main centres of proletarian activity.
2. Planning of production and distribution by the workers' councils following the criterion of the maximum possible satisfaction of needs (of the workers and of the class struggle) and not for accumulation.
3. Tendency towards the reduction of the working day.
4. Substantial elevation of the workers' standard of living including the immediate organization of free transport, housing, medical ser­vices, all taken in charge by the workers' councils.
5. Attempts as far as possible to eliminate wages and the money form even if this may take the form of rationing goods in short supply through workers' councils to society at large. This will be easier in areas in which the proletariat is highly concentrated and has many resources at its command.
6. Organization of relations between socialized sectors and sectors where production remains individual (especially in the countryside) towards organized and collective exchange through co-operatives at first, (leading eventually to the elimination of all private produc­tion through the victory of the class struggle in the countryside), which would represent a step forward towards the decline of the market economy and individual exchanges.

These points should be taken merely as suggestions for an orientation for the future - a contribution to the debate within the class on these questions.

The Workers' Opposition

Because the RWG comrades do not understand the Russian situation, they are trapped within it. They try to offer an orientation for the fu­ture by choosing sides among the different factions that fought it out in Russia. Just as those who reject the past completely and pretend that revolutionary consciousness was born yesterday (with them of course), the RWG takes the seeming opposite side of the coin and answers his­tory in its own terms. This is not an enrichment of the lessons of the past, it is a desire to relive it and ‘make it better' rather than address themselves to what we can draw out today.

Thus the RWG writes: "It is our programme, the Workers' Opposition programme of the self-activity of the working class against bureau­cratism and capitalist restorationist tendencies." This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Workers' Opposition really meant in the context of the debates in Russia. The Workers' Opposition was one of the groups which fought against the evolution of events in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Far from rejecting their often courageous efforts, it is necessary to put their programme into perspective. The Workers' Opposition was not against ‘bureacratism' but against state bureaucracy and in favour of using the union bureaucracy. The unions were to manage capital in Russia and not the party-state machine. Although the Workers' Opposition may have wanted to defend proletarian class initiative, they could see it only in a trade union context. Genuine class life in the soviets in Russia was almost entirely eliminated by 1920-21 but this did not mean that unions and not workers' council were the instruments of working class dictatorship. This is the same kind of reasoning that led the Bolshe­viks to conclude that since the programme of the First Congress of the Third International could not easily be taken up because of the de­feats in Europe, it was therefore necessary to go back to aspects of the old Social Democratic programme (union infiltration, parliamentary participation, alliances with centrists, etc). Even if the soviets were crushed, independent class activity (not to mention revolutionary activity) in unions was over in the decadent period of capitalism. The entire trade union debate was based on a false premise on all sides: that unions could be substituted for class unity in workers' councils. In this sense the Kronstadt revolt in calling for the regeneration of soviets was much clearer on the question, even if equally doomed. The Workers' Opposition meanwhile agreed with and supported the mili­tary suppression of Kronstadt.

The fact that in Russia the debate revolved around how to ‘manage' the degeneration of a revolution has to be understood historically but it is the height of absurdity to adopt this programme as one's own today. Moreover, the RWG asserts:

"But we are sure of one thing: if the programme of the Workers' Opp­osition had been adapted, the programme of proletarian self-activity, the proletarian dictatorship in Russia would have gone down fighting capitalism rather than adapting to it (if it had gone down at all). And the chances are that it would have been saved by victory in the West. Had this programme of struggle been adopted there would have been no international retreat. The chances are, the International Left would have gained dominance in the Communist International." (Ibid, p.48-49)

This only proves that there is a residual conviction within the RWG that if Russia had done something better, all would have been diffe­rent. Russia is the pivot of everything. It also assumes, as we have seen, that if the economic measures were different, the political be­trayal would have been eliminated instead of vice-versa. But the his­torical absurdity of this hypothesis is most clearly expressed by this statement that "the chances are that the International Left would have gained dominance in the Communist International". The ‘Interna­tional Left' we presume they are talking about, did not understand the economic programme very well at the time; but the KAPD, for example, was based on the rejection of unionism and its bureaucracy. The Wor­kers' Opposition had little or nothing to say about Bolshevik strategy in the West and always rubber-stamped official Bolshevik policy on this question, including the 21 Conditions of the Second Congress of the Communist International (as did Ossinsky). The vision of the Workers' Opposition becoming the focal point of the International Left is a pure invention of the RWG because they do not know the history they talk about so glibly.

While the RWG condemns "crystial-ball gazing as not the task of revolu­tionaries". (Ibid, p.48) only a few lines previously they expound upon the infinite horizons the Workers' Opposition would have opened for the working class. One may say that in addition to avoiding crystal-ball gazing it would be better to know what one is talking about.

The lessons of October

Our purpose is not essentially a polemical one in this article al­though clearing away certain absurdities is undoubtedly helpful. Essentially the task of revolutionaries is to go forward from history to draw the points of orientation for tomorrow. The specific debate on when the Russian Revolution degenerated is much less important than: 1) seeing that this did occur; 2) identifying why it occurred; and 3) trying to contribute to class consciousness by synthesizing the nega­tive and positive lessons of this epoch.

In this sense we would like to contribute an over-view of the essential heritage of class positions that the experience o the post-war revo­lutionary wave has left us for today and tomorrow.

1. The proletarian revolution is an international revolution and the primary duty of the working class in any country is to further the -world revolution.
2. The proletariat is the only revolutionary class, the only subject of revolution and of social transformation. It is clear today that any ‘worker-peasant alliance' must be rejected.
3. The proletariat as a whole, organized in workers' councils, consti­tutes the dictatorship of the proletariat. The role of the political party of the class is not to take state power or to rule ‘in the name of' the class but to contribute to the heightening and generalization of class consciousness within the class. No minority of the class can exert political power in its place.
4. The proletariat must direct its armed power principally against the bourgeoisie. The policy of integrating non-proletarian, non-exploiting elements into socialized production must be the dominant mode of unifying society although proletarian violence against these sectors may sometimes be necessary; but violence must be excluded as a way of settling debate within the proletariat and its class orga­nizations. All efforts must be made, through proletarian democracy, to strengthen the solidarity and unity of the proletariat.
5. State capitalism is the dominant, universal trend of capitalist organization in the period of capitalist decadence. State capitalist measures, including nationalizations, are in no way a proletarian pro­gramme for socialism, nor a policy that can ‘aid' the way towards socialism, nor a ‘progressive step'.
6. The general lines of economic measures tending towards the elimina­tion of the law of value, socialization of industry and agriculture, and production for the needs of humanity, as mentioned above, represent a contribution to the elaboration of a new economic orientation for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

These points, sketchily outlined here, do not pretend to exhaust the complexity of revolutionary experience but can serve as general guide­lines for future elaboration.

There are many young groups, like RWG, developing today in our period of reawakening class struggle and it is important to be aware of the implications of their work and to encourage an exchange of ideas in the revolutionary milieu. But there is a danger that after so many years of counter-revolution these groups may be unable to deal with the heritage of the revolutionary past. As in the case of the RWG many groups think they are discovering history for the first time as though nothing else existed before them. This can lead to aberrations like fixating on the programme of the Workers' Opposition or other Russian left groups in a vacuum as though each day a new ‘piece of the puzzle' is discovered, without putting it in a broader context. Without being aware of (and critical of) the work of the left communist movement (KAPD, Dutch left, Pannekoek, Gorter, Workers' Dreadnought, the Italian left around Bordiga, the reviews, Bilan in the thirties and Internationalisme in the forties, Interna­tional Council Correspondence and Living Marxism as well as the Russian left communists, not just as individual pieces of a puzzle but in the overall terms of the development of revolutionary cons­ciousness in the class, our work today will be doomed to sterility and the arrogance of the dilettante. Those who are making the vital effort to break with ‘leftism' should be aware that the path is not unique to them and that they are not alone either in history or today.

Judith Allen

* Revolutionary Workers' Group, PO Box 60161, 172 W. Devon, Chicago, Illinois 60660, USA.

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1 See ‘Modernism: From Leftism to the Void' in World Revolution no. 3.

2 The policies of War Communism in the countryside during the Civil War, much vaunted in comparison by the RWG, were not more non-capitalist than NEP. Furthermore, the outright expropriation of peasant grain, although an absolute essential measure for the Russian proletarian offensive at the time, hardly constitute an economic programme (pillage?). it can easily be seen that these temporary measures of force against peasant production could not continue indefinitely. Before, during and after War Communism, the primary basis of production in the countryside was private property. Although the RWG is perfectly correct in stressing the importance of the class struggle of agricultural labourers in the countryside, this struggle does not automatically and immediately disintegrate the peasantry or its system of production.

Introduction

The article reproduced here was first published in November 1933 in issue number II of Masses, an eclectic monthly publication connected to the left of French Social Democracy. It was written by A. Lehmann, a member of the ‘communist workers' groups' in Germany, which had their origin in the KAPD. We are republishing it today so that our readers can gain some idea of the degree of clarification achieved by the communist left which split from the Third International, and of the considerable regression of those ‘councilist' and ‘Bordigist' tendencies which claim descent from the left communists today.

This article carries with it some of the weaknesses prevalent in the German left at that time in their understanding of fascism, weaknesses which led if to think that fascism was in the process of extending itself to all countries. Although the article defines the general conditions which gave rise to fascism (the period of capitalist decline, an acute economic crisis), it fails to grasp the particular conditions which made fascism appear in Italy and Germany and nowhere else (the brutal defeat of the working class after a powerful revolutionary movement, and a small share in the re-division of the imperialist cake). The Italian left in the same period, while less precise in its under­standing of the general conditions, was able to make a much clearer analysis of these particular conditions which allowed it to see ‘anti-fascism' as a major enemy of the proletariat (although after World War II it in turn took up the aberration of the ‘globalization of fascism'. In contrast, in this text there is no denunciation of anti-fascism.

Another weakness is in the analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and of the Third International. In this article these phenomena are presented essentially as consequences of the situation in Russia itself (backwardness, weight of the peasantry, etc), and not as a product of the retreat of the revolution on a world scale.

In spite of these weaknesses, the article contains a number of signifi­cant points which even today represent a much more valuable analysis than that of most of the groups who currently claim descent from the ‘ultra-left', points which can be summarized as follows:

* an understanding of the period opened up by World War 1 as that of the decline of the capitalist mode of production, which was linked to the disappearance of extra-capitalist markets;

* the impossibility of the bourgeoisie, in this period of decline, to grant any real reforms to the proletariat, leading to a considerable reinforcement of the state, to the integration of the trade unions, and to the end of all possibility of the proletariat making use of parliament in its struggle;

* transformation of the nature of crises: cyclical crises give way to the permanent crisis, the acute phases of which lead, in the absence of a proletarian response, to imperialist war;

* denunciation of all frontist and ‘anti-imperialist' policies;

* the proletarian character of the Russian Revolution and of the Third International - contrary to the ideas beginning to be developed at that time, particularly in the Dutch left;

* the capitalist nature of the regime then existing in Russia (even if the term is not explicitly used in the article) and the rejection of any policy of ‘defence of the USSR' by the proletariat;

* the necessarily world-wide character of the proletarian revolution;

* the necessity for the working class to equip itself with a party based on a clear and coherent programme, the most conscious fraction of the class, and by necessity a minority, which could not substitute itself for the class in the seizure of power, and which could only be created in a moment of rising revolutionary struggle and not in a period of defeat, as the voluntarists of Trotskyism and then of 'Bordigism' would have it.

These points form the axis around which the International Communist Current has constituted itself today. They demonstrate the continuity which exists between the revolutionary movement developing today and the movement in the past, marking the historic unity of the proletarian struggle throughout the terrible period of counter-revolution which we are now leaving behind.

A great number of ‘modernist' tendencies reject this continuity. These tendencies want to ‘innovate'. But today, in rejecting the past they also deprive themselves of any future - in the proletarian camp at least. For our part, we understand that we can only go beyond the gains of the communist left by beginning from these gains and not by rejecting them. That is why we resolutely claim a continuity with the communist left.

C.G.

 

Economic causes

In order to grasp the essential causes of fascism, it is necessary to consider the structural changes in capitalism which have taken place in recent decades. Up until the first years of the century capitalism was still developing in a progressive manner in which competition between private capitalists or shareholding companies acted as a motor force of economic progress. The more or less regular growth of productivity was fairly easily absorbed by the new markets opened up during the period of colonization by the imperialist powers. The form of political organization corresponding to this atomized structure of capitalism was bourgeois democracy which allowed the different capitalist strata to regulate their contradictory interests in the most appropriate way. The prosperous condition of capitalism allowed it to grant the workers certain political and material concessions, and created within the working class the preconditions for reformism and the illusion that parliament could serve as an instrument of progress for the working class.

The possibility of an ever-growing accumulation of capital, which had been manifested during this initial phase, came to an end as competition between national capitals became more and more intense due to the lack of new territories to be conquered for capitalist expansion. These rivalries caused by the restriction of markets led to the First World War. The same conditions also initiated the transformation of the structure of capitalism via the progressive concentration of capital under the domination of finance capital. The war and its consequences accelerated the process. Inflation in particular, by leading to the dispossession of the middle classes, allowed the development of monopoly capital on a huge scale: the organization of capital in vast trusts and cartels, horizontally and vertically, which began to go beyond even the national framework. The different strata of capitalism (financial, industrial, etc) lost their particular character and were absorbed into an increasingly uniform bloc of interests.

As the sphere of action of these trusts and cartels began to go beyond the framework of nation-states, capitalism was forced to influence the economic policies of the state in a more accelerated manner. The liaison between the organs of capitalist economic interest and the state apparatus thus grew closer, and the intermediary role of parlia­ment became superfluous.

In the context of this structure, capitalism no longer had any need for parliamentarism, which only survived at first as a facade for the dictatorship of monopoly capital. However, this parliamentarism was still useful to the bourgeoisie, since it gave the dictatorship of capital a political base from which it could keep alive reformist illusions in the proletarian masses. But the aggravation of the world crisis, the impossibility of obtaining new markets, gradually led the bourgeoisie to lose all interest in keeping up the parlia­mentary facade. The direct and open dictatorship of monopoly capital came to be a necessity for the bourgeoisie itself. The fascist system showed itself to be the form of government most suited to the needs of monopoly capital. Its economic organization is best able to offer a solution to the internal contradictions of the bourgeoisie, since its political content allows the bourgeoisie to find a new basis of support, replacing a reformism which has become less and less able to sustain the illusions of the masses.

Social causes

The inability of the bourgeoisie to maintain its political base in reformism derives from the intensification of class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Since the war reformism in Germany has been nothing but a sterile game. Everyday the German working class lost a little more of what remained of the ‘conquests' of reformism. The prestige of reformism in the eyes of the masses survived only because of its powerful bureaucratic organization. But the recent most violent attacks against the workers' living standards, which have plunged them into the most unbearable poverty, have rapidly undermined the influence of reformism in the working masses and laid bare the class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Parallel to this process within the working class there was a process of radicalization among the different strata of the petit-bourgeoisie. The peasants were plunged into debt, reduced to poverty, and in some places, resorted to terrorist actions. The shop keepers felt the twin blows of the impoverishment of the masses and of the competition from the big stores and co-operatives. Intellectuals disorientated by uncertainty about what tomorrow might bring, students without a future, declassed ex-officers, all began to turn to adventurist ideas. White-collar workers - proletarianized and struck down by unemployment, redundant functionaries - also showed themselves to be ready to be mobilized by radical demagogy. A vague and utopian anti-capitalism grew up among these heterogeneous strata dispossessed by the grande bourgeoisie. Their anti-capitalism was reactionary in that it aimed at a return to a bygone stage of capitalism. Thus despite their radicalism they became a conservative factor and easily became the instrument of monopoly capitalism. In reality, for this radicalized, unconscious petit-bourgeois mass, incapable of playing an independent role in the economy and faced with the growing antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it was a question of making a choice between one or the other. It had to choose between monopoly capital, which was responsible for its desperate situation, and the revolutionary subject of history, the proletariat. Hatred of the proletarian revolution which would put an end to classes, and the petite-bourgeoisie's attachment to its privileges (privileges which were now only a memory), threw the radicalized middle classes into the arms of monopoly capital, thus supplying the latter with a sufficiently large social base for it to dispense with reformism, now on the verge of collapse.

Political roots

The synthesis of these two contradictory aspects of fascism: dependence on monopoly capital and mobilization of the petit-bourgeois masses, expressed itself on the political plane in the development of the National Socialist Party. This party owed its development to a frenzied demagogy and to the subsidies of heavy industry. On the ideological level, this party gave vent to the despair of the petit-bourgeois masses via a radical and revolutionary phraseology, even going as far as to advocate certain forms of expropriation (eg banks, Jews, big stores); its liaison with monopoly capital was expressed, in its propaganda for class collaboration, for hierarchical corporative organization against the class struggle and Marxism.

The inconsistency of the ideological content of Nazi demagogy is shown clearly in its racist propaganda. The discontent of the masses was deflected against the Treaty of Versailles, capitalism's scapegoat, and against the Jews who were seen as the representatives of international capital AND promoters of the class struggle. This tissue of incoherent stupidities could only take root in the winds of the petite-bourgeoisie, whose secondary role in the economy makes it incapable of understanding anything about the economic facts and historical events into which it has been thrown.

The radicalized peasants and petite-bourgeoisie always formed the great mass of the National Socialist Party. It was only when its subordination to monopoly capital became clearer that the bourgeoisie itself came to reinforce the cadres of the Nazi Party and supplied it with officers and leaders. But until Hitler came to power, the Nazi Party found it impossible to make any serious encroachments into the working class, as witnessed in the elections to the works councils. The Nazis always had great difficulty in penetrating the unemployment registration bureaux (Stempelstelle); only a few hundred thousand mercenaries could be recruited for the S.A. and the S.S from among the unemployed white-collar workers and the lumpen-proletariat, even though there were millions of unemployed without any means of subsistence.

But if the working class did not allow itself to be significantly contaminated by fascist demagogy it was nonetheless incapable of preventing the development of the National Socialist Party. It did not manage to undo the formation of a bloc of reactionary classes. The big workers' parties tried without success to make use of this or that apparent divergence between monopoly capital and the National Socialists. Above all, the proletariat did not understand that the real contradiction was not between democracy and fascism, but between fascism and the proletarian revolution. It was thus the lack of the revolutionary capacity on the part of the proletariat which permitted the political development of fascism and the rise of Hitler.

To see how this was possible, we must examine in detail the ideological and tactical content of the main tendencies in the workers' movement.

The Tendencies and Organizations of the Working Class

 

Reformism

 

Reformism developed within the working class during the ascendant phase of capitalism. Its roots lay in the possibility for the bourgeoisie to rapidly develop the productive apparatus, a growth in production which in general found easy outlets in new markets. The result of this for the working class was a rapid development in its numbers and power. The bourgeoisie needed to assure the increased growth of a docile and satisfied working class and this could be easily obtained by ceding to the working class a small part of the ever-growing profits derived from imperialism. But even when the bourgeoisie was no longer able to accord any more concessions to the working class and actually had to deprive the working class of all the advantages it had won in a previous epoch, reformism still retained an important influence in the working class and was able to play the role of providing capitalism with a political base. This was the case for the trade union and political organs of reformism, which having developed during the years of prosperity continued to exist so long as they could fulfill the interests of capitalism. The principal method of the political organization (Social Democracy) was parliamentarism. Its activities had the aims of convincing the workers that they must wait peacefully for any improve­ment in their lot, which would be decided by parliament in the proper democratic way. Every time Social Democracy took the most active part in the massacre of the revolutionary workers it justified its betrayals by presenting itself as the defender of democracy. The trade union organization orientated itself towards discussing contract rates with the employers and in the last resort going to the state for arbitration. It prevented strikes whenever it could and, in the case of spontaneous strikes, tried to get the workers back to work by using all kinds of manoeuvres. The innumerable trade union bureaucrats, well paid and embourgeoisified, ruled over the workers through their control over various forms of assistance (sick pay, unemployment benefits, etc). Participation in these institutions and in the various trade union benefits maintained the docility of the workers and the power of the bureaucrats, despite their persistent and ever more cynical betrayals.

Parallel to development of the trade union bureaucracy, a special bureaucracy charged with the application of social legislation - assistance, unemployment, benefits, etc - grew up in the state apparatus. This kind of organism, and its functions should be seen as an auxiliary form of reformism, whose origin lay in the conjuction of parliamentary and trade union reformism - a state orientated reformism which contri­buted equally to maintaining order, obedience and illusions within the working class.

Thus reformism persisted in its organizational form even though it had lost its economic basis. Reformist ideology survived in the working class, but gradually it weakened under the pressure of the growing exploitation and poverty of the proletariat. When the proletariat was reduced to struggling for its most basic interests, it became clear to the bourgeoisie that it could no longer maintain a practical organi­zational form for class collaboration on the basis of reformist ideology. The practical organizational form had to be maintained at all cost, but the ideology had to be change; thus the bourgeoisie resolutely replaced reformism with fascism. First of all the trade unions were integrated purely and simply. There could be no question of resistance on the part of the bureaucrats because the organizational reality of class collaboration was kept up; the only thing that was thrown out, like a worn out glove, was the ideology of reformism. The replacement of reformism with fascism thus proceeded very smoothly, and if the bourgeoisie had no need of any new agents it was able to retain the services of the old clowns who asked for nothing more.

These developments proved that the trade unions were of no use to the working class, and that this was not the result of bad leadership but of the very structure and aims of the trade unions as representative organs of the corporative interests within capitalism; such organs have thus necessarily become part of the normal functioning of capitalism and cannot be used for revolutionary ends.

 

Bolshevism

 

The development of the Russian Revolution since October 1917 has been conditioned by contradiction between a very concentrated but numerically small proletariat and an immense backward peasantry. Russian industry was in general very modern technically, but its economic structure suffered from a number of weaknesses because it had been organized by foreign capital for the purposes of war or export. After the downfall of Tsarism the bourgeoisie was unable to hold onto the power which had fallen into its hands because it could find no support among the peasantry who wanted peace and land.

An audacious and conscious proletariat seized state power in October 1917, but it confronted enormous difficulties of organization in the face of a backward, already satisfied peasantry twenty times its size. The collectivization of enterprises was carried forward by the workers at great speed but attempts at a communist distribution of products came up against the passive and active resistance of the huge peasant mass. The NEP was a retreat by a proletariat forced to compromise by the peasantry; but the proletariat still remained master of the commanding heights of the economy. However, in this regime of compro­mise between collectivized industry and a fragmented agriculture, the hidden but real rivalry between the proletariat and the peasantry gave rise to an unheard of development of the state apparatus, to bureaucratic specialization and to the suppression of the power of the Soviets. The success of the planned economy accelerated this process of crystallization of a bureaucracy which gradually managed to rule without any controls over it, to impose coercive economic measures, both on the proletariat (re-establishment of piece work and the authority of management) and on the peasantry forced concentration of peasant enterprises), and also measures of political domination (replacement of popular tribunals with the decisions of the special political police, the GPU).

A parallel process took place within the Communist Party, the directing organ, which following a succession of crises, became the exclusive expression of the class interests of the bureaucracy. With the dis­appearance of the political power of the Workers' Soviets the dictatorship of the proletariat no longer existed, and had been replaced with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy as a class in formation.

The Third International and the Communist Parties in all countries suffered structurally from the repercussions of this transformation of the Russian regime; with the German party in particular, bureaucratization and the absence of internal democracy reached an extreme point. The influence of the working masses could not make itself felt in the policies of the K.P.D, Its strategy and tactics were imposed upon it according to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. Up until the NEP, Soviet foreign policy had been orientated towards the world revolution, despite errors which for example in the case of Radek, were to have disastrous consequences on the German Revolution. Today the theory of ‘Socialism in one country' puts all its weight on the construction of the industrial apparatus in Russia (this industrial construction having been baptized as ‘socialism'), and consequently accords the greatest importance to stabilization and policies of peace in foreign relations. With the disappearance of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia the world proletariat no longer had any interest in considering the developments of the situation in Russia as the axis of the world revolution.

The class interests of the bureaucracy engendered the theory of the ‘leadership party' which is the negation of the possibility of working class politics independent of other classes, in particular the middle classes, and it is therefore at the roots of opportunism. At the same time, the utilization of the world proletariat for the changing needs of Soviet diplomacy created a growing gulf between the masses and the K.P.D.

The essential consequence, which crystallizes the whole activity of the Soviet bureaucracy, has been the degeneration of the class character of the revolutionary movement. Instead of spreading class ideology, the K.P.D., for opportunistic and diplomatic reasons, promulgated a nationalist ideology (the slogan of social and national liberation, the theory that the German nation was oppressed by imperialism). The K.P.D. believed that by resorting to this manoeuvre it would cause disarray within the petit-bourgeois ranks of National Socialism. In reality it only caused confusion and disarray among the proletariat; it was able to do nothing to oppose the rise of fascism, while the coming to power of fascism won over to the ranks of National Socialism militants of the K.P.D. who had been deceived by its own nationalist slogans.

The incoherence of Bolshevik manoeuvres (united fronts now with the fascists, now with the Social Democrats), bureaucratic pretensions towards establishing a dictatorship over the masses, the absence of a proletarian ideology - all this condemned the K.P.D. to impotence. After having gone from ‘success' to ‘success' on the electoral arena, the K.P.D. found itself completely isolated from the masses when it did want to act (eg the Nazi demonstration in front of Liebknecht's house). However, it is not even possible to know whether it really wanted to act and to what purpose.

The roots of this incapacity are the same as with Social Democracy. In both cases they are a result of the penetration of bureaucratic ideology into the organization - the ideologies of parliamentarism (in the slogan ‘to stop Hitler, vote for Thaelmann'); trade unionism (attempts to conquer the unions) and opportunism which consisted of manoeuvres between classes and different strata of the working class.

Small Bolshevik groupings

The theory of the ‘leadership party' and the practice of parliamentary, trade unionist, and opportunist manoeuvres are also to be found in the various Bolshevik opposition groups. The K.P.O.1 (Brandler), the Trotskyists and the S.A.P.2 have the same basic ideology, differing only in subtle details which are in any case changing all the time. For all these groupings, the tactic to be used against fascism is unity in action between reformism and Bolshevism. This tactic has not been applied, but the working class can expect to gain nothing from the unity of treason and impotence.

Perspectives for the worker's movement The lessons of revolutionary experience

Perspectives can only be based on experience - revolutionary experience which is already rich in lessons. From the Paris Commune to the October Revolution passing through the Revolution of 1905, experience has contradicted the tactics and strategy of Bolshevism; it has shown that the working class, in a given objective situation, is capable of acting independently as a class, and that in these situations it spontaneously creates organs for the expression and exercise of its will as a class: workers' councils or soviets. It is necessary to see how these organs were born and developed in Germany. The first workers' actions, which arose in 1917 against the will of the trade union bureaucrats who had been integrated into the war regime, engendered the ‘Revolutionary Shopstewards' (Revolutionare Betriebsobleute).

The Workers' Councils of 1918 were the direct descendants of this movement. The military collapse of Germany prematurely gave rise to unheard-of possibilities for the development of these councils, but they lacked a sufficient political clarity. The clearest awareness of revolutionary needs, represented in the Spartacus group, was still not sufficiently developed for the council movement to rid itself of certain anarchist illusions and also from habits inherited from the long period of reformism. The failure of the council movement in 1919 was to a large extent a result of insufficient awareness of the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the unstable situation of capitalism which lasted until 1923, the necessity for the workers to have revolutionary organizations based on production became clear, and almost everywhere in Germany the factory organizations grew up, formed more or less spontaneously against the counter-revolutionary trade unions and forming at this point a very important political current. The revolutionary efforts of the workers were ended in 1923 by the brutal action of the Reichwehr, crushing workers already demoralized by the doubly absurd tactic of the Communist Party, which proposed a united front to the fascists at Reventlow against French imperialism, and, at the same time, was participating in the parliamentary government of Saxony with the Social Democrats.

After 1924, the temporary stabilization of capitalism and the absence of revolutionary perspectives led to the disappearance of radical currents, gave a new lease of life to reformism supported by the state apparatus and inaugurated the period of parliamentary ‘success' for Bolshevism. This apparent consolidation of reformism and the illusory success of Bolshevism did not prevent, with the development of the crisis after 1929, the growth of the fascist movement and the deterioration of the living standards of the working class, which was suffering increasingly the blows of an unemployment which seemed to have no solution. At the same time, the masses showed a certain distrust of the existing parties, a certain effervescence tending towards the united front of the class; but on the whole there was still an attitude of waiting for the big organizations to act effectively. The coming to power of fascism without any resistance shattered the illusions of the workers.

Towards the organization of the proletariat

Thus the pressure of economic conditions led the bourgeoisie to destroy organizations which had in fact been the only ones able to block and paralyze any revolutionary movement of the class. This dialectical aspect of the rise of fascism has led us to see beyond the unfolding of the terror and the dispersion of the old workers' movement to the possibilities of progress and the basis for a new movement. The destruc­tion of the old organizations opens up new perspectives for a new class movement. The proletariat finds itself unencumbered with the self-proclaimed proletarian parties which are effectively reactionary, with the paralyzing illusions of political and trade union reformism and of parliamentarism. The illusions of Bolshevism have also been shaken; the majority of revolutionary workers no longer believe that its every action has to be led by a party of professional revolutionaries standing above the working class; they no longer have any confidence in the Bolshevik methods of bluff and agitation which lead only to sterile actions.

The practice of illegal struggle has led the workers to develop new forms of political work. The revolutionary workers in the factories and among the unemployed are forming small groups which provocateurs are unable to penetrate, The distribution of leaflets full of agitational slogans and of bluff has been replaced by the elaboration of discussion material and by proletarian political education. The bureaucrats of the Communist Party are no longer able to impose their point of view without discussion.

However, this work of regroupment and self-education is still proceeding in a sporadic fashion and without enough political clarity. It is vital that the greatest possible programmatic clarity is the point of departure for all political work. The most conscious revolutionary elements, already grouped together in nuclei formed by tenacious preparatory work, will assist this process of clarification and regroupment among the groups which have been born out of the debris of the old organizations, but which are still looking for a new ideology. These communist workers' nuclei have developed during the period of deepening crisis. Through these nuclei the synthesis of the experience of the illegal struggle of the radical workers in the various revolution­ary attempts since 1917 has been realized; and it has been realized with all the revolutionary ardour of the young, for whom the development of events has illuminated the necessity to break with the methods of reformism and Bolshevism. In their ideological clarity they bear the lessons of the past, and in their will to struggle the hopes of the working class reside.

During the period preceding the fascist terror, dominated by reformist and Bolshevik illusions, these nuclei were numerically weak in relation to the big mass organizations, but they were steeled in illegal propa­gandist activity and they were solidly right across Germany. Free of the sectarianism into which the remains of the radical organi­zations fell after 1923, they carried on their activity of ideological propaganda among the most advanced elements of the working class. Thanks to their experience in illegal work they continued their activities without any interruptions in spite of the terror and suffered only a few losses. Under the regime of terror, they grew considerably, while the barely reconstituted mass organizations got nowhere. At this time, the quantity of material distributed in Germany by the communist workers' nuclei is comparable to that at any other organization.

These nuclei, which must be the ideological armament of the proletariat, will have to integrate new elements step by step while avoiding the dilution of the clarity of their principles. Every nucleus must be firm and clear within itself so that hidden contradictions do not surface later on.

In the present phase of capitalism, the tactics of communists are determined by whether the situation is pre-revolutionary or revolutionary. In the present pre-revolutionary situation, the task at hand is the creation of the foundations of a revolutionary communist party. The communist nuclei in formation must act on the working class to accelerate the development of conditions for revolutionary struggle: the struggle for the clarification of class consciousness, destruction of the old conservative reformist (or Bolshevik) ideology, comprehension of the necessity for the class to organize itself in councils and propaganda for revolutionary methods of struggle. This action within the class can only become effective through permanent participation in the practice of the proletariat's struggle to survive on all fronts, because the workers can only really learn through direct experience.

In a revolutionary situation the goal is the destruction of bourgeois power by class action, the conquest of the means of production, the building of the power of the workers' councils on the economic and political terrain, and the beginning of the socialist reconstruction of society in general. All these goals call only be realized during the revolution through the closest possible liaison between the proletarian class and the revolutionary party, which is only the clearest and most active part of the class.

The aim of the party's work cannot be to raise itself above the class like a Bolshevik Central Committee commanding the revolution from on high. The revolutionary party can only be a lever in the development of the proletariat's own activity.

The present forces of left communism must be conscious of the fact that they cannot constitute the revolutionary party just at any time, but that the basis of this party can only be formed through a new task of reconstruction within the revolutionary struggle of the masses; that while "the revolution cannot triumph without a great revolutionary party" the inverse is also true - in a situation which is merely ‘becoming revolutionary' this party cannot anchor itself and develop itself in the working class as a whole.

The fundamental question for the revolutionary tactic of a communist nucleus in the class is not how to gather together, as quickly as possible, the maximum strength behind the organization to defeat the enemy - all thanks to the superior intelligence of the organization's leadership. No, the fundamental question is: how, at each stage of the practical struggle, can the consciousness, organization and capacity for action of the proletarian class be pushed forward, in such a way that the class as a whole can, reciprocally with the revolutionary communist party, carry out its historic task.

The task of revolutionary communist nuclei is therefore a double one: on the one hand, ideological clarification as the foundation of the development of the revolutionary party; on the other hand, the prepa­ration of the bases of the factory organizations through the gathering together of the revolutionary workers with the most developed awareness. As capitalist exploitation grows more and more acute it will force the workers to defend their very existence and to enter into struggle even in the most difficult conditions. For lack of any other organization, the workers in struggle will create organs for the direction of the struggle like, for instance, the action committees. The role of the factory nuclei will be to participate in these movements, to clarify them by giving a political content and to work for their extension to the national and international arena.

To the extent that these struggles extend, the working class will enter into the struggle for political power. These organs of struggle, having become permanent, will take on a special character: they will become organs for the conquest of power by the proletariat and finally the sole organs of the proletarian dictatorship. These councils - organs emanating directly from the factories and the organization of the unemployed, revocable at all times - will have a double role: the political councils will have to complete the crushing of the bourgeoisie and the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the economic councils will take charge of the social transformation of production.

The perspectives of capitalism

These principles of organization and these perspectives for the develop­ment of the activity of the class are based not only on the historic experience of the working class, but also on the perspectives of capitalism.

The perspectives of capitalism are dominated by the deepening and broaden­ing out of the crisis throughout the world. It is now clear to everyone that the present crisis is something quite different from the cyclical crises which used to be part of the normal functioning of capitalism. It is clear that the current crisis is a crisis of the system itself, or rather a stage in the decay of capitalism. The attempts made to surmount the crisis were accompanied at the beginning by enthusiasm on the part of the bourgeoisie but they fell apart a few months later - as is the case now with the schemes of Roosevelt. Capitalism can no longer do anything but modify the existing division of markets, that is, replace the sector hardest hit by the crisis with one hitherto less affected; but it cannot create any new outlets. The attempt at a new division of markets in the end only results in the extension of the disasters of the crisis to all countries and all branches of the economy, in the subjection of the workers of the whole world to an equally aggravated exploitation, and in the extension of fascism to new countries.

The attempt at a new division of markets leads to violent international contradictions all over the world. National capitalisms clash against each other through frenzied customs and monetary policies. Antagonisms become more and more acute and the points of friction, the sources of conflict, become more and more widespread. This deterioration of international political relations reacts in its turn on the economic conditions which have engendered it in the first place and make these conditions even more insurmountable. The result is that fascism can find no stable economic base. That is why, to divert the attention of the masses away from their own growing misery, it stirs up new international difficulties.

Thus the impossibility of capitalism surmounting its economic diffi­culties and the sharpening of contradictions on an international level open the way to fascism in all countries and, at the same time, exclude the possibility of fascism stabilizing itself. The solution to this dialectical contradiction can only lie in the proletarian revolution. However, a solution may be sought by the bourgeoisie in a new world war if the proletariat does not take the initiative towards decisive action. But the world war itself is not a solution and the dilemma which will be remorselessly posed is the one foreseen by Marx: Communism or Barbarism.

Revolutionary perspectives must therefore be envisaged on a world scale. The cyclical fluctuations of the conjunctural crisis, taking place within the framework of the permanent crisis of degenerate capitalism, will lead in the years to come, to a more brutal and unbearable deterioration of living standards for the working class.

The necessity for the working class to defend its most basic interests will inevitably produce the conditions for a new epoch of struggles on a world scale.

Faced with a world-wide development of fascism, we must not consider the situation of the German workers as something special, demanding mainly solidarity actions of a more or less utopian nature. The fundamental question being posed for the international proletariat is the following, how best to use the political end organizational lessons of the German experience so that, in the next epoch of struggle, the class enemy will find itself confronted with a world proletariat armed ideologically and organizationally in the best possible way.

The response is clear and flows from what has been said concerning activity in Germany. The same ideological and organizational lessons must from now on be applied throughout the world by revolutionary communists who have understood the lessons of the recent experience of shameful betrayal by reformism and of the downfall of Bolshevism. Clear-sighted revolutionary nuclei must form themselves and resolutely address themselves to the task of ideological clarification and of the renewed organization of the working class.

These new organizations must establish international links in order to lay the basis for the formation of the Fourth International through the same process of the transformation of nuclei into the party which must take place in the revolutionary conjuncture.

To raise the slogan now for the constitution of the Fourth International is as inconsequential as demanding the immediate constitution of a new ‘real party of the working class'. In reality, this slogan of the S.A.P. and the Trotskyists can only end up in the provisional reconstitution of Bolshevism, in a ‘Three-and-a-half International' which will be a shameful appendage of the Third International and destined to end in the same fiasco.

The proletariat has other things to do than to set up historical caricatures. Its task is to defeat the bourgeoisie and realize communism. It is up to us to prepare the weapons which will allow it to triumph.

A. Lehmann

1 Kommunistiche Partei Opposition.

2 Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (Socialist Workers Party).

 

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1. Preface (1997) [25]

2. Preface (1975) [26]

3. Part 1: Understanding the Kronstadt Revolt [27]

4. Part 2: The Lessons of Kronstadt [28]

Preface (1997)

The press of the ICC has recently carried a large number of articles to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Russian revolution. The central theme running through these articles has been to defend the October revolution against the bourgeoisie's monstrous campaigns about the 'death of communism' following the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. We are reprinting this article on the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, first published in 1975, in International Review no. 3 , for the same fundamental reason. The ruling class has always tried to make maximum use out of the Kronstadt tragedy to support its 'argument' that the October insurrection was no more than a minority putsch by the Bolshevik party, and that Stalinism was its inevitable result. The Bolsheviks' suppression of the Kronstadt revolt is presented as definitive proof of this thesis.

In this argument, the bourgeoisie has always been echoed by the anarchists, who see the failure of the Russian revolution as confirmation of their 'principled' opposition to the idea both of the revolutionary party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and who set themselves up as the true heirs of the Kronstadt rebels. .And just as the bourgeoisie as a whole is anxious to equate Stalinism with marxism, so the libertarians are equally concerned to make it seem that the only alternative to their view of Kronstadt is the Stalinist/Trotskyist one - ie, the fake marxist version - which openly justifies the repression of the revolt, which is portrayed as the result of a White Guard plot.

The pamphlet 'Beyond Kronstadt' by the milieu around Radical Chains and Aufheben is a recent example of this mystification. As the comrades of the Communist Workers Organisation pointed out in Revolutionary Perspectives 8, this milieu tries to convey the impression that prior to the original genius of Radical Chains, the only possible interpretations of the degeneration of the Russian revolution have been provided by Trotskyism or anarchism, and thus completely obscures the immense contribution to understanding this process made by the international communist left. Particularly important in the effort to draw the real lessons of Kronstadt was the work of Italian Left around the review Bilan in the 1930s. While never losing sight of the fact that the fundamental cause of the degeneration of the Russian revolution was its international isolation, Bilan also recognised that the mistakes of the organised workers' movement were an important contributory factor in this degeneration. In particular, they pointed to the dangerous consequences of identifying the proletarian party with the transitional state, and the necessity for the class as a whole to maintain a strict independence from the state organs that inevitably arise after the workers' conquest of political power. Lacking the historical basis to draw these lessons itself, the Bolshevik party became entangled in a state machine that was the focal point of the capitalist counter-revolution.

The article that follows is part of the ICC's effort to assimilate and deepen the analyses of the communist left. Certain formulations and approaches contained within it - particularly concerning Trotsky and the early Left Opposition - reflect the immaturity that then existed within the ICC on such questions. But in the main it carried out the essential task: drawing the lessons of the Kronstadt events from a standpoint of resolute solidarity with the October revolution and the Bolshevik party that was at its head. In republishing it, we are not only highlighting the lessons themselves, but also reaffirming that the communist left is the only political tradition that has been capable of drawing them.

ICC, December 1997

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Preface (1975)

This article is an attempt to analyse the Kronstadt events and the lessons to be drawn from them by the workers' movement today and tomorrow, written by a comrade of the International Communist Current. The analysis is situated within the general orientation of our Current. The essential points for understanding what these events have bequeathed to us are contained in the article and can he briefly resumed here:

1. The proletarian revolution is, by its own historic nature, an international revolution. If it is limited to the context of one country or even several countries it comes up against absolutely insurmountable difficulties and is inevitably fated to perish after a more or less brief period.

2. Contrary to other revolutions in history, the proletarian revolution demands the direct, constant and active participation of the whole class. This means that at no time can the class, without immediately opening up a tendency towards degeneration, tolerate the 'delegation' of power to a party, nor the substitution of a specialised body or fraction of the class, no matter how revolutionary, for the class as a whole.

3. The working class is the only revolutionary class not only within capitalist society but also throughout the period of transition, as long as classes exist in society on a world scale. This is why the total autonomy of the proletariat in relation to other classes and social strata remains the fundamental precondition for the proletariat to exercise its hegemony and class dictatorship with the aim of creating a communist society.

4. The autonomy of the proletariat means that under no pretext can the unitary and political organs of the class be subordinated to statist institutions, since this can only lead to the dissolution of the proletariat's class organs and to the abdication of the communist programme, of which the proletariat is the unique subject.

5. The forward progression of the proletarian revolution is not guaranteed by this or that partial economic measure no matter how important it may be. Only the whole of its programme, the total political vision and action of the proletariat constitutes this guarantee, and included within this totality are the immediately possible economic measures which are part of the overall orientation of the communist programme.

6. Revolutionary violence is a weapon of the proletariat in the face of and against other classes. Under no circumstances can violence serve as a criterion or an instrument within the class because it is not a means for the development of consciousness. This development of consciousness can only he acquired by the proletariat through its own experience and through the constant critical examination of experience. This is why the use of violence within the class, whatever its motivation and immediate justification, can only obstruct the self-activity of the masses and end up as the most serious obstacle to the development of consciousness, which is an indispensable precondition for the triumph of communism.

The Kronstadt uprising of 1921 is an acid test that separates those whose class position enables them to grasp the processes and evolution of the proletarian revolution from those to whom the revolution remains a closed book. It crystallizes in a very dramatic way some of the most important lessons of the whole Russian Revolution, lessons that the proletariat cannot afford to ignore as it prepares for its next great revolutionary upsurge against capital.

The Editors,

International Communist Current

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Part 1: Understanding the Kronsdtadt Revolt

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

A marxist approach to the problem of Kronstadt can only depart from the affirmation that the October 1917 revolution in Russia was a proletarian revolution, a moment in the unfolding world proletarian revolution which was the response of the international working class to the imperialist war of 1914-18. This war in turn marked the definitive entry of world capitalism into its era of irreversible historical decline, thus making the proletarian revolution a material necessity in all countries. It must also be affirmed that the Bolshevik Party, which put itself at the head of the October insurrection, was a proletarian, communist party, a vital force in the international left after the betrayal of the Second International in 1914, which continued the defence of the class positions of the proletariat during the World War and the subsequent period.

Against those who describe the October insurrection as a mere 'coup d'état', a putsch carried out by a conspiratorial elite, we insist that the insurrection was the culmination of a long process of class struggle and of maturation in working class consciousness; that it represented a conscious seizure of political power by the working class organized in its soviets, factory committees, and Red Guards. The insurrection was part of a process of the liquidation of the bourgeois state and of the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship: and as the Bolsheviks passionately insisted, its main significance was that it was to mark the first decisive moment in the world proletarian revolution, the international civil war against the bourgeoisie. The idea that the insurrection was undertaken to build 'socialism' in Russia alone was far from the minds of the Bolsheviks at that time, despite a number of confusions and errors concerning the immediate economic programme of the revolution, errors which they held in conjunction with the entire workers' movement of the era.

THE DICTATORSHIP WEAKENS

It is only against this background that we can hope to understand the subsequent degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Since this problem is being dealt with in another text of our Current in this review ('The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution'), we shall restrict selves to a few general remarks here. The revolution initiated in October 1917 failed to extend itself internationally despite the many attempted uprisings of the class throughout Europe. Russia herself was torn by a long and bloody civil war that devastated the economy and fragmented the industrial working class, the backbone of the Soviet power. In this context of isolation and internal chaos, the ideological errors of the Bolsheviks, almost as soon as they had taken power, began to assume a material weight against the political hegemony of the working class. (This was however an uneven process. The Bolsheviks who were resorting to more and more bureaucratic measures inside Russia during 1918-20 could still help found the Communist International in 1919, with the sole and express purpose of accelerating the world proletarian revolution.)

The delegation of power to a party, the elimination of the factory committees, the gradual subordination of the soviets to the state apparatus, the disbanding of the workers' militias, the growth of a militaristic approach to difficulties as a result of the tensions of the civil war period, the creation of bureaucratic commissions, were all extremely significant manifestations of the process of the degeneration of the revolution in Russia.

These developments were not the only signs of a weakening of the political power of the working class in Russia prior to 1921, but they are certainly the most significant. Although some of them date back even before the period of War Communism began, it is the civil war period which sees the most unhindered evolution of this process. Since the Kronstadt rebellion was in many ways a reaction to the rigours of War Communism, it is necessary to be quite clear about what this period actually signified for the Russian proletariat.

THE NATURE OF WAR COMMUNISM

As pointed out in the text 'The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution', we can no longer harbour the illusions of the Left Communists of the period, for many of whom War Communism represented a 'trite' socialist policy as against the 'capitalist restoration' instituted by the NEP. The near-disappearance of money and wages and the requisitioning of grain from the peasants did not represent an abolition of capitalist social relations but were simply unavoidable emergency measures imposed by the capitalist blockade against the Soviet Republic and by the demands of the civil war. As far as the real political power of the working class was concerned, we have seen that this period was marked by a progressive weakening of the organs of proletarian dictatorship and by a steady growth in bureaucratic tendencies and institutions. Over and over again the leadership of the Party-State argued that working class self-organisation was fine in principle but that right now everything had to he subordinated to the military struggle. A doctrine of 'efficiency' began to undermine essential principles of proletarian democracy. Under the cover of this doctrine the state began to institute a militarisation of labour, which subjected the workers to extremely harsh methods of supervision and exploitation. "In January 1920 the Council of Peoples' Commissars, largely at Trotsky's instigation, decreed a general labour obligation for all able bodied adults and, at the same time, authorized the assignment of idle military personnel to civilian work." (Paul Averich, Kronstadt 1921, Princeton 1970, p.26-7). At the same time labour discipline in the factories was enforced by the presence of Red Army troops. Having emasculated the factory committees, the way was now clear for the state to introduce one-man management and the 'Taylor' system of exploitation at the point of production, the same system which Lenin himself had denounced as "the enslavement of man to the machine". For Trotsky "the militarisation of labour ... is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces", (Report to the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1920). The fact that the state was now a 'Workers' State' meant for him that the workers could have no objection to subordinating themselves to it completely.

The harsh conditions of work in the factories were not compensated for by high wages or easy access to 'use values'. On the contrary, the devastation of the economy by war and the blockade, brought the entire country to the verge of starvation, and the workers had to make do with the most meagre rations, often extremely irregularly given out. Vast sectors of industry ceased to function altogether and thousands of workers were forced to forage and fend for themselves in order to survive at all. The natural response of many was simply to leave the towns and eke out some kind of existence in the countryside; thousands attempted to survive by trading privately with the peasants, often swapping items stolen from the factories for food. Since the regime of War Communism forbade private trade, charging the state with requisitioning and distribution of essential goods, many people only survived through the black market which sprang up everywhere. To counter the black market, the government set up armed roadblocks to check all travellers to and from the towns, while the activities of the Cheka in enforcing the decrees of the government became more and more vigorous. This 'Extraordinary Commission' set up in 1918 to fight counter-revolution was behaving in a more or less unrestrained manner, using ruthless methods that won it widespread hatred among all sectors of the population.

Neither did the summary treatment handed out to the peasants gain the universal approval of the workers. The close familial and personal relations between many sectors of the Russian working class and the peasantry tended to make the workers sympathetic to the complaints of the peasants about the high-handed methods which were often used by the armed detachments sent to requisition grain, especially when the detachments took more than the surplus product of the peasant and left him without the means for his own subsistence. In response to these methods the peasants frequently hid or destroyed their crops, thus aggravating the poverty and scarcity of the whole country. The general unpopularity of these measures of economic coercion was to be clearly expressed in the programme of the Kronstadt rebels, as we shall see.

If revolutionaries like Trotsky tended to make a virtue out of the necessities imposed by this period and to glory in the militarisation of social and economic life, others, and Lenin himself was one, were more prudent. Lenin did not hide the fact that the Soviets were no longer functioning as organs of direct proletarian rule, and during the 1921 debate with Trotsky on the trade union question he supported the idea that the workers must defend themselves even against 'their' state, particularly since the Soviet Republic was for Lenin not simply a 'proletarian state' but a "workers' and peasants' state" with profound "bureaucratic deformations". The Workers' Opposition and other left groups, of course, went further in their denunciation of these bureaucratic deformations that the state had undergone in the 1918-21 period. But the majority of the Bolsheviks firmly and sincerely believed that as long as they, the party of the proletariat, controlled the state machine, the dictatorship of the proletariat still existed, even if the working masses themselves seemed to be temporarily absent from the political stage. From this fundamentally false position, disastrous consequences inevitably followed.

THE CRISIS OF 1921

While the civil war lasted, the Soviet state retained the support of the majority of the population since it was identified with the struggle against the old land-owning and capitalist classes. The extreme hardships of the civil war were shouldered with relative willingness by the workers and small peasants. But after the defeat of the imperialist armies, many began to hope that living conditions would be less harsh, that the regime would relax its tight grip on social and economic life.

The Bolshevik leadership, however, faced with the wholesale devastation left over by the war was reluctant to allow any let-up in centralized state control. Some left Bolsheviks, such as Ossinsky, insisted on the retention, indeed the reinforcement, of War Communism, especially in the countryside. He put forward a plan for "compulsory mass organisation of production", (N. Ossinsky. Goshdarstvennoe Regulirovanie Krestianskogo Khoziastva, Moscow 1920, p.8-9), under government direction, the formation of local 'sowing committees' to extend collectivised production, and of common seed banks into which the peasants would be required to pool their seed-grain, the government itself determining the overall distribution of this grain. All these measures, he foresaw, would lead to a genuinely 'socialist' economy in Russia.

Other Bolsheviks, such as Lenin, began to see the need for some relaxation, especially towards the peasants, but on the whole 'the party stood firm in defence of the methods of War Communism. As a result, the patience of the peasants at last began to wear out. During the winter of 1920-21, a whole series of peasant uprisings swept the country. In Tambov province, the middle Volga area, the Ukraine, western Siberia and many other regions, peasants formed themselves into crudely armed bands to fight against the food detachments and the Cheka. Often their ranks were swelled by recently demobilized Red Army men who brought a certain military know-how to their actions. In some regions, huge insurgent armies were formed, half guerrilla forces and half bandit-gangs. In Tambov, for example, the guerrilla army of A.S. Antonov numbered up to 50,000 men. These forces had little ideological motive save for the traditional peasant resentment against the city, against centralised government, in favour of the traditional dreams of the rural petit-bourgeoisie for independence and self-sufficiency. Having already confronted the peasant army of Makhno in the Ukraine, the Bolsheviks were haunted by the possibility of a generalized peasant Jacquerie against the Soviet power. It is not therefore altogether surprising that they should have assimilated the Kronstadt revolt with this threat from the peasantry. This is surely one of the reasons for the ruthlessness with which the Kronstadt uprising was suppressed.

But in between the wave of peasant rebellions and the uprising in Kronstadt, a series of events occurred which gives the action of the Kronstadt rebels a very different character from that ascribed to it by the Bolshevik leadership. In the middle of February 1921, spontaneous factory meetings, strikes and demonstrations took place in Moscow, demanding higher rations, an end to the methods of 'forced labour' instituted by War Communism, and a return to 'free trade' with the countryside. Troops and officer cadets had to be called in to restore order.

Almost immediately afterwards, a far bigger series of wildcat strikes swept through Petrograd. Beginning at the Trubochny metal factory, the strike rapidly spread out to include many of the largest industrial enterprises in the city. At factory meetings and demonstrations, resolutions were passed demanding increases in food and clothing rations, since most of the workers were both hungry and freezing. Alongside these economic demands, more political demands appeared also: the workers wanted an end to travel restrictions in and out of the city, release of working class prisoners, freedom of speech, etc. The Soviet authorities in the town, with Zinoviev at their head, responded by denouncing the strikes as playing into the hands of the counter-revolution, and they put the city under direct military rule, forbidding street meetings and imposing an 11pm. curfew. Undoubtedly some counter-revolutionary elements like the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries did intervene in these events with their own fraudulent schemes for 'salvation', but the Petrograd strike movement was essentially a spontaneous proletarian response to intolerable living conditions. The Bolshevik authorities, however, could not bear to admit that the workers could be striking against the 'Workers' State', and characterized the strikers as idlers, self-seekers, and provocateurs. They also sought to break the strike by means of lockouts, deprivation of rations, and the arrest of prominent speakers and 'ringleaders' by the local Cheka. These repressive measures were combined with concessions: Zinoviev announced the dismantling of the roadblocks around the city, the purchase of coal from abroad to ease the fuel shortage and plans to end grain-requisitions. This combination of repression and conciliation led most of the already weak and exhausted workers to abandon their struggle in the hope of better things to come.

But the most important outcome of the Petrograd strike movement was the effect it was to have on the nearby fortress-town of Kronstadt. The Kronstadt garrison, one of the main bastions of the October Revolution, had already been engaged in a fight against bureaucratisation before the Petrograd strikes. During 1920 and 1921 the rank and file of the Red Fleet in the Baltic had been fighting against the disciplinarian tendencies of the officers and the bureaucratic actions of the POUBALT (the Political Section of the Baltic Fleet, the party organ which dominated the soviet structure of the navy). Motions were passed at sailors' meetings in February 1921, declaring "P0UBALT has not only separated itself from the masses but also from the active functionaries. It has become transformed into a bureaucratic organ, enjoying no authority among the sailors". (Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune, Solidarity pamphlet, no.27, p.3)

Thus when news came of the Petrograd strikes and of the declaration of martial law by the Petrograd authorities, the sailors were already in a state of ferment. On 28 February they sent a delegation to the factories of Petrograd to discover what was going on. On the same day the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk met to discuss the situation and passed the following resolution:

"Having heard the report of the representatives sent by the general meeting of ships crews to Petrograd to investigate the situation there, we resolve:

1. In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret ballot, with freedom to carry on agitation beforehand for all workers and peasants;

2. To give freedom of speech and press to workers and peasants, to anarchists and left socialist parties;

3. To secure freedom of assembly for trade unions and peasant organizations;

4. To call a non-party conference of the workers, Red Army soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt, and Petrograd province, no later than 10 March 1921;

5. To liberate all political prisoners of socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labour and peasant movements;

6. To elect a commission to review the cases of those being held in prisons and concentration camps;

7. To abolish all political departments because no party should be given special privileges in the propagation of its ideas or receive the financial support of the state for such purposes. Instead, there should be established cultural and educational commissions, locally elected and financed by the state;

8. To remove immediately all roadblock detachments;

9. To equalise the rations of all working people, with the exception of those employed in trades detrimental to health;

10. To abolish Communist fighting detachments in all branches of the Army, as well as the Communist guards kept on duty in factories and mills. Should the guards be found necessary they are to be appointed in the Army from the ranks and in the factories and mills at the discretion of the workers;

11. To give the peasants full freedom of action in regard to the land, and also the right to keep cattle, on condition that the peasants manage with their own means, that is without employing hired labour;

12. To request all branches of the Army, as well as our comrades the military cadets (kursanty), to endorse our resolution;

13. To demand that the press give all our resolutions wide publicity;

14. To appoint an itinerant bureau of control;

15. To permit free handicrafts production by one's own labour.

Petrichenko, Chairman of the Squadron Meeting
Pererelkin, Secretary"

(Averich, op cit, p.73-4)

This resolution quickly became the programme of the Kronstadt revolt. On 1 March a mass assembly of 16,000 took place in the garrison, officially convened as a meeting of the First and Second Battleship Sections, and attended by Kalinin, President of the All-Russian Executive of Soviets, and Kouzmin, political commissar to the Baltic Fleet. Although Kalinin was welcomed to the assembly with music and flags, he and Kouzmin soon found themselves completely isolated at the meeting. The whole assembly adopted the Petropavlovsk resolution, with the exception of Kalinin and Kouzmin, who spoke against the initiatives of the Kronstadters in a most provocative tone and were met with jeers and catcalls.

The next day, 2 March, was the day the Kronstadt Soviet was due to he re-elected. The mass assembly of 1 March therefore called a meeting of delegates from ships, Red Army units, factories and elsewhere to discuss the reconstitution of the Soviet. 300 delegates therefore met on 2 March at the House of Culture. The Petropavlovsk resolution was again endorsed and plans for new Soviet elections set in motion, with a view towards "the peaceful reconstruction of the Soviet regime", (Mett, op cit, p.13). In the meantime the delegates set up a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (PRC) charged with the administration of the town and organising defence against any government intervention. This latter task was seen to be especially pressing because of rumours of immediate attack by Bolshevik detachments and because of the violent threats of Kalinin and Kouzmin. These two proved so intractable that they were arrested along with two other officials. This act marked a decisive step towards open mutiny, and was interpreted as such by the government.

The PRC quickly assumed its functions. It began to publish its own Izvestia, and the first issue declared:

"The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached itself from the masses. It has shown itself incapable of getting the country out of its mess. Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow that clearly show that the party has lost the confidence of the working masses. The party is ignoring working class demands, because it believes that these demands are the result of counter-revolutionary activity. In this the party is making a profound mistake." (Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, 3 March, 1921)

THE CLASS NATURE OF THE KRONSTADT REVOLT

The immediate response of the Bolshevik government to the rebellion was to denounce it as part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Soviet power. Moscow radio called it a "White Guard plot" and claimed to have evidence that the whole thing had been organized by émigré circles in Paris and by spies for the Entente. Although these fabrications are still repeated today, this interpretation of events has been discredited even by semi-Trotskyist historians like Deutscher, who admit that these accusations have no foundation in realty. Certainly, all the jackals of the counter-revolution from the White Guards to the Social Revolutionaries attempted to capitalise on the rebellion and offered it their support. But apart from accepting the offer of 'humanitarian' aid via the émigré-controlled Russian Red Cross, the PRC rejected the advances made to them by the forces of reaction. They affirmed that they were not fighting for the return of autocracy or of the Constituent Assembly, but for a regeneration of Soviet power free from bureaucratic domination. "The Soviets and not the Constituent Assembly are the bulwark of the toilers," declared the Izvestia of Kronstadt (Pravda o Kronshtadte, Prague 192l, p.32) "In Kronstadt power is in the hands of the sailors, the red soldiers, and the revolutionary workers. It is not in the hands a White Guards commanded by General Kozlovsky, as Moscow Radio lyingly asserts." (Appeal of the PRC, Mett op cit, p.22-3)

Since the idea of a pure White guard plot, has been revealed to be a fiction more sophisticated apologetics for the subsequent repression of Kronstadt have been put forward by those who uncritically identify with the degeneration of Bolshevism. Most of the arguments follow the justification given by Trotsky in later years. In 'Hue and Cry over Kronstadt', (New international, April 1938), Trotsky presented the following argument. True, Kronstadt in 1917 was one of the bastions of the proletarian revolution; but during the civil war the revolutionary proletarian elements of the garrison were dispersed and replaced by peasant elements dominated by reactionary petit-bourgeois ideology. These elements simply could not put up with the rigours of the proletarian dictatorship and the civil war, so they staged a revolt to undermine the dictatorship and secure for themselves privileged rations. "...the Kronstadt uprising was nothing but armed reaction of the petite-bourgeoisie against the hardships of social revolution and the severity of proletarian dictatorship." He goes on to say that the Petrograd workers, who in contrast to the dandies of Kronstadt bore these hardships without complaint, were "repelled" by the rebel lion, feeling that "the Kronstadt mutineers stood on the opposite side of the barricades" and do they 'supported the Soviet power."

We do not want to spend too much time examining these arguments; we have already cited enough facts to discredit them. The claim that the Kronstadt rebels demanded privileged rations for themselves can be dismissed simply by recalling point nine of the Petropavlovsk resolution, demanding equal rationing for all. Similarly the picture painted of the Petrograd workers tamely supporting the repression is rudely shattered by the reality of the wave of strikes which preceded the revolt. Although this is movement had largely subsided by the time the Kronstadt revolt broke out, important sections of the Petrograd proletariat continued to actively support the rebels. On 7 March, the day the government bombardment of Kronstadt began, workers at the arsenal factory held a mass meeting that elected a commission charged with agitating for a general strike in support of the rebellion. Strikes continued Pouhlov, Battisky, Oboukhov, and other major enterprises.

On the other hand we would not deny that there were petit-bourgeois elements in the ideology and programme of the rebels (free exchange, "freedom of action" for the peasants etc.) as well as in the personnel of the fleet army. But all proletarian uprisings are accompanied by a whole number of petit bourgeois and reactionary elements that do not change the fundamentally working class character of the movement. This was certainly the case with the October insurrectionary itself which had the support and active participation of peasant elements in the armed forces and in the countryside. The fact that the Kronstadt rebels still had a largely working class kernel can be gauged from the make-up of the delegate assembly of 2 March, which was strongly composed of proletarians from the factories and naval units of the garrison, and from the personnel of' the PRC elected by this assembly, which was made up of workers and long service sailors who had beer engaged in the revolutionary movement since at least l9l7. (See Mett, op cit, p.15 for a breakdown of the members of this committee.) But these facts are less important than the general context of the revolt: it occurred within a movement of working class struggle against the bureaucratisation of the regime, identified with that struggle, and saw itself as a moment in its generalisation. "Let the toilers of the whole world know that we the defenders of Soviet power are guarding the conquests of the Social Revolution. We shall win or perish beneath the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just cause of the proletarian masses." (Pravda o Kronshtadte, p.82)

Despite the fact that those ideologists of the petit bourgeoisie, the anarchists, claim Kronstadt as their revolt, and despite the fact that anarchist influences were undoubtedly present in the rebels' programme and phraseology, the demands of the rebels were not simply anarchist. They did not call for an abstract abolition of the state, but for the regeneration of Soviet power. Neither did they want to abolish 'parties' as such. Though many of the rebels left the Bolshevik party at that time, and although the rebels issued many confusing statements about 'Communist tyranny', they did not call for 'Soviets without Communists' as has often been asserted. Their slogans were freedom of agitation for different working class groups and "power to the Soviets, not the parties". Despite all the ambiguities inherent in these slogans, they express an instinctive rejection of the idea of the party substituting itself for the class, which was one of the main contributing factors in the degeneration of Bolshevism.

This is one of the main features of the rebellion. It did not present a clear, coherent political analysis of the degeneration of the revolution. Such coherent analyses should find expression in the communist minorities of the class, even though at specific junctures these minorities might lag behind the spontaneous consciousness of the class as a whole. In the case of the Russian Revolution, it was to take decades of painful reflection in the international left communist movement before a coherent understanding of the degeneration could be achieved. What the Kronstadt uprising did represent was an elemental proletarian response to the degeneration, one of the last mass expressions of the Russian working class in that period. In Moscow, Petrograd and Kronstadt the workers were sending out a desperate S.O.S. in defence of the declining Russian Revolution.

KRONSTADT AND THE NEP

A great deal of fruitless debate has taken place about the relationship between the demands of the rebels and the New Economic Policy (NEP). For the unrepentant Stalinists of the British and Irish Communist Organization (B & ICO) the rebellion had to he crushed because their economic programme of barter and free exchange was a petit-bourgeois reaction against the process of 'building Socialism' in the USSR - 'Socialism' of course meaning the fullest possible state capitalist centralisation. But at the same time, the B & ICO defends the NEP as a step on the road to socialism! (See Problems of Communism, no 3, the theoretical journal of the B & ICO.) At the opposite end of the spectrum of confusion, the anarchist Murray Bookchin in his introduction to the Canadian edition of The Kronstadt Commune (Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1971) paints a picture of the libertarian paradise that would have come to pass in Russia if only the economic programme of the rebels had been put into effect: "A victory by the Kronstadt sailors might have opened a new perspective for Russia - a hybrid social development comprising workers' control of the factories with an open market in agricultural goods, based on a small scale peasant economy arid voluntary agrarian communes."

Bookchin then adds, mysteriously, that such an extremely revolutionary society could only have survived together with a successful revolutionary movement in the West, though why such a shopkeepers' dream of self-management should have constituted a threat to world capital is anyone's guess.

In any case, all this debate is of little interest 'for communists.' Given the failure of the 19l7-23 revolutionary wave, no economic policy, whether War Communism, attempts at autarky, the NEP or the Kronstadt programme, could have saved the revolution. As it happened many of the purely economic demands put forward by the rebels were more or less included in the NEP. As economic programmes both are inadequate and it would he absurd for revolutionaries today to advocate free trade or barter as economic measures suitable for a proletarian bastion. even though at critical junctures it may be impossible to eliminate them. The essential difference between the Kronstadt programme and the NEP was this: that while the latter was to he introduced from above by the burgeoning state bureaucracy in cooperation with the remaining private managers and capitalists, and without any re-establishment of proletarian democracy, the Kronstadt insurgents put as a precondition for any further advance in the revolution the restoration of genuine Soviet power and an end to the Bolshevik party-dictatorship.

This is the nub of the problem. It is useless to discuss today which economic policies were 'more socialist' at that time. Socialism could not have been built in Russia alone. The Kronstadt rebels perhaps understood this less than the more clear-headed Bolsheviks. The insurgents, for example talked about the establishment of 'free socialism' in Russia, without emphasizing the necessity for a world extension of the revolution before socialism could be inaugurated. "Revolutionary Kronstadt is fighting for a different kind of socialism, for a Soviet Republic of the toilers, in which the producer himself will be the sole master and can dispose of his products as he sees fit." (Pravda o Kronshtadte, pp.92, 173-4)

Lenin's sober assessment of the possibilities for 'socialist' progress in Russia at that time, though leading him to reactionary conclusions, was in fact a closer approximation to reality than the Kronstadters' hopes for a self-managed commune in Russia.

But Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, imprisoned by the state apparatus, failed to see what the Kronstadt insurgents were saying despite all their confusions and badly formulated ideas: the revolution can go nowhere at all if the workers are not in command. The fundamental precondition for the defence and extension of the revolution in Russia was all power to the Soviets - in other words, the reconquest of political hegemony by the working masses themselves. As pointed out in the text 'The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution', this question of political power is by far the most important one. The proletariat in power may make economic advances and suffer economic retreats without the revolution being lost. But once the political power of the class is undermined, no number of economic measures can salvage the revolution. It is because the Kronstadt rebels were fighting for the reconquest of this indipensab1e proletarian political power that revolutionaries today must recognise in the Kronstadt struggle a defence of fundamental class positions.

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE REVOLT

The Bolshevik leadership reacted with extreme hostility to the Kronstadt rebellion. We have already mentioned the provocative behaviour of Kouzmin and Kalinin in the garrison itself, the lies spread by Moscow Radio that this was an attempted White Guard counter-revolution. The intransigent attitude taken up by the Bolshevik government quickly eliminated any possibility of compromise or discussion. The peremptory warning to the garrison issued by Trotsky demanded only unconditional surrender and made no offer of concessions to the rebels' demands. The call to Kronstadt issued by Zinoviev and the Petrograd Defence Committee (the organ which bad put the city under martial law after the strike wave) is well known for its crudity, threatening to "shoot you like partridges" if the rebels persisted. Zinoviev also organized the seizure of rebels' families as hostages, using as an excuse the arrest of Bolshevik officials by the PRC (none of whom were harmed). These actions were denounced as shameful by the rebels, who refused to descend to the same level.

During the actual military assault on the fortress, the Red Army units sent in to crush the rebellion were constantly on the verge of total demoralization. Some even began fraternizing with the rebels. To ensure the 'loyalty' of the army prominent Bolshevik leaders were dispatched from the Tenth Party Congress then in session to lead the assault, among them members of the Workers' Opposition, who were anxious to avoid being identified with the uprising; at the same time the guns of the Cheka were trained on the soldiers' backs to make doubly sure that disaffection did not spread.

When the fortress finally fell, hundreds of insurgents were massacred on the spot or quickly condemned to death by the Cheka. Others were sent to concentration camps. The repression was pitilessly systematic. In order to wipe out all trace of the uprising, the garrison was put under military control, the Soviet was dissolved, and a purge of all dissident elements began. Even the soldiers who had taken part in the suppression of the revolt were rapidly dispersed to various units to prevent the 'germs' of Kronstadt spreading. Similar measures were taken with 'unreliable' units in the navy.

The development of events in Russia after the revolt makes nonsense of the claims that the suppression of the rebellion was a 'tragic necessity' to defend the revolution. The Bolsheviks believed they were defending the revolution from the threat of White Guard reaction in this crucial frontier seaport. But whatever the Bolsheviks thought they were doing, in fact, by attacking the rebels they were attacking the only real defence the revolution can have: working class autonomy and direct proletarian power. In doing so they made themselves the very agents of the counter-revolution from within, and these acts served to pave the way for the final triumph of the bourgeois counter-revolution in the form of Stalinism.

The extreme ruthlessness with which the government suppressed the uprising has led some revolutionaries to conclude that the Bolshevik Party was clearly and openly capitalist in 1921, just like the Stalinists and Trotskyists today. We do not want to get involved in a long discussion about when the Party finally and irredeemably passed over to the bourgeoisie and in any case we reject the methodology which attempts to limit an understanding of historical processes into a rigid formula of fixed dates.

But to say that the Bolshevik Party was 'nothing but' capitalist in 1921 is to say, in effect, that we have nothing to learn about the Kronstadt events, except the date of the revolution's demise. Capitalists, after all, always crush workers' uprisings and we don't have to 'learn' this over and over again. Kronstadt can only teach us anything new if we recognise it as a chapter within proletarian history, as a tragedy within the proletarian camp. The real problem revolutionaries must face today is how did a proletarian party come to act as the Bolsheviks did at Kronstadt in 1921, and how can we ensure that such an event never occurs again? In sum, what are the lessons of Kronstadt?

Top [29]

Part 2: The Lessons of Kronstadt

The Kronstadt revolt highlights in a particularly dramatic way many of the fundamental lessons of the whole Russian Revolution, which for the working class are the only 'gains' that survive the October Revolution today.

1. THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION IS INTERNATIONAL OR NOTHING

The proletarian revolution can only be successful on a world scale. It is impossible to 'abolish capitalism' or 'to build socialism' in one country. The revolution cannot be saved be save by programmes of economic reorganisation, but only by the extension of proletarian political power across the globe. Without this extension, the degeneration of the revolution is inevitable, not matter how many changes in the economy are brought about. If the revolution remains isolated, proletarian political power will be crushed either by external invasion or by internal violence, as at Kronstadt.

2. THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT IS NOT THE DICTATORSHIP OF A PARTY

The tragedy of the Russian Revolution, and in particular of the Kronstadt massacre, was that the party of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks, saw its role as the taking of state power, and the defence of that power even against the working class as a whole. Thus while the state became independent from the class and stood against it at Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks saw their place as being in the state fighting against the class, and not in the class fighting against the bureaucratisation of the state.

Today revolutionaries must assert as a fundamental principle that the role of the party is not to take power in the name of the class. Only the working class as a whole, organised in its factory committees, militias and workers' councils, can take political power and undertake the communist transformation of society. The party is to be an active factor in the development of proletarian consciousness, but it cannot create communism 'on behalf' of the class. Such pretensions can only lead, as they did in Russia, to the dictatorship of the party over the class, to the suppression of proletarian self-activity under the excuse that 'the party knows best'.

At the same time, the identification of the party with the state, while a natural state of affairs for bourgeois parties, can only lead to the corruption and perversion of proletarian parties. A party of the proletariat has to constitute the most radical and forward-looking fraction of the class which is itself the most dynamic class in history; to burden the party with the administration of the affairs of state, which by definition can only have a conservative function, is to negate the whole function of the party and to hamstring its revolutionary creativity. The steady bureaucratisation of the Bolshevik Party, its growing inability to separate the interests of the revolutionary class from the interests of the Soviet state, its degeneration into a ruthless administrative machine - all this is the price paid by the party itself for its mistaken notions about the party exercising state power

3. NO RELATIONS OF FORCE WITHIN THE WORKING CLASS

Synonymous with the principle that no minority, however enlightened, can hold power over the working class, is the principle that there can be no relations of force or violence within the working class itself. Proletarian democracy is not a luxury that can be dispensed with in the name of 'efficiency' but is the only guarantee of the health of the revolution and of the possibility of the class learning through its own experience. Even if sections of the class are manifestly wrong, the 'correct line' cannot be forced onto them by another section, whether a majority or a minority. Only a total freedom of discussion in the autonomous organs of the class (assemblies, councils, party, etc) can resolve conflicts and problems in the class. This also implies that the whole class must have access to the means of communication (press, radio, T.V. etc) and that the whole class must retain the right to strike and to challenge directives issued by central organs.

Even if Kronstadt sailors had been in the wrong, the ruthless measures taken by the Bolshevik government would have been totally unjustifiable. Such actions can only destroy the solidarity and cohesion in the class and lead to demoralisation and despair. Revolutionary violence is a weapon that the proletariat is forced to use in its struggle against the capitalist class. Its use against other non-exploiting classes must be kept to a minimum as far as possible; but within the proletariat, it can have NO place

4. THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT IS NOT THE STATE.

At the time of the Russian Revolution there was a basic confusion in the workers' movement which identified the dictatorship of the proletariat with the actual state which emerged after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, the Russian Federal Soviet Republic, whose most important body was the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. The dictatorship of the proletariat, while functioning through specific working class organs such as the factory assemblies and workers' councils, is not an institution but a state of affairs, a real movement of the class as a whole. The goal of the proletarian dictatorship is not that of a state as understood in Marxist terms. The state is that superstructural organisation arising out of class society whose function is to preserve the dominant social relations, the status quo between classes. The proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, has the sole aim of transforming social relations and abolishing classes.

At the same time, Marxists have always affirmed the inevitability of the state in the period of transition to communism, after the destruction of bourgeois political power. Thus the Russian Soviet state, like the Paris Commune, was an inevitable product of class society that existed in Russia after 1917.

Some revolutionaries hold the view that the only state that can exist after the destruction of bourgeois power is the workers' councils themselves. It is true that the workers' councils have to assume a function that has always been one of the main characteristics of the state: the exercising of a monopoly of violence. But to call the workers' councils the state because of this is to reduce the role of the state to that of a simple organ of violence and nothing else. Thus the bourgeois state today would, according to such a conception, consist only of the police and army, and not of parliament, municipalities, trade unions, and innumerable other institutions that maintain capitalist order without immediate use of repressive force. These bodies are organs of state because they serve to hold together the existing social order, to maintain class antagonisms within an acceptable framework. The workers' councils, in contrast, are the active negation of this statist function, in that they are above all organs of radical social transformation, not organs of the status quo.

But more than this, it is wishful thinking to expect that the only social institutions that will exist in the transition period will be the workers' councils alone. A revolution does not follow the clockwork conceptions of many revolutionaries. The immense social upheaval of the revolution gives rise to all kinds of institutions, not only from the working class at the point of production, but from the entire population which has been oppressed by the capitalist class. In Russia, soviets and other popular organs sprang up not only from the factories but everywhere - in the army, the navy, in the villages, in the residential areas of towns. It was not simply that "the Bolsheviks began to construct a state that had a separate existence from the mass organisations of the class" (Workers' Voice no 14). It is true that the Bolsheviks did actively contribute to the bureaucratisation of the of this state, through departing form the elective principle and setting up innumerable commissions outside the soviets; but the Bolsheviks themselves did not create the 'Soviet State'. It was something that emerged out of the very soil of Russian society after the October; it arose because that society had to give birth to an institution capable of holding its profound class antagonisms in check. To say that only the workers' councils can exist after the revolution is to advocate a permanent civil war not only between the working class and the bourgeoisie (which is indeed inevitable), but also between the working class and all other classes and categories. In Russia this would have meant a war between the workers' Soviets and the popular organs of the soldiers and peasants. This would clearly have been a terrible waste of energy and a diversion from the primordial task of the revolution: the extension of the world revolution against the capitalist class (Note 1 [30]). But if this Soviet state was to some degree an inevitable product of the post-insurrectional society, we can point out a number of grave defects in its structure and functioning after the October insurrection, quite apart from the fact that it was controlled by a party.

a) In the actual functioning of the state, there was a continual departure from the basic principles established through the experience of the Commune in 1871 and reaffirmed by Lenin in his State and Revolution in 1917: all functionaries elected and revocable at any time, remuneration of state functionaries the same as that of a worker, permanent armament of the proletariat. More and more commissions and offices emerged, completely unaccountable to the working class as a whole (Economic Councils, Cheka etc). Elections were constantly being postponed, set aside, or rigged. Privileges for state officials gradually became commonplace. The workers' militias were dissolved into the Red Army, which was itself neither under the control of the workers' Soviets, nor of the rank and file soldiers.

b) The workers' councils, factory committees and other proletarian organs were made into one part of the state apparatus among other parts (although the workers were given preferential voting rights). Instead of being granted an autonomy from and hegemony over all other social institutions, these organs tended more and more to be not only incorporated into the general state apparatus, but subordinated to it. Proletarian power, instead of being expressed through the specific organs of the class, was identified with the state apparatus. Moreover, the glib assumption that this was a 'proletarian', a 'socialist' state led the Bolsheviks to assure that the workers could have no rights or interests separate from those of the state. Consequently, any resistance to the state on the part of workers could only be counter-revolutionary. This profoundly erroneous conception was the heart of the Bolsheviks' reaction to the Petrograd strikes ad the Kronstadt uprising.

In the future, the principles of the Commune, of working class autonomy, must not be asserted on paper only, but must be fought for and defended as a fundamental precondition for proletarian power over the state. At no time can the proletariat's vigilance over the state apparatus be relaxed, because the Russian experience and the Kronstadt events in particular have shown that the counter-revolution can indeed expresses itself through the post-insurrectional state, and not simply through 'external' bourgeois aggression.

As a consequence, in order to ensure that the Commune-state remains an instrument of proletarian rule, the working class cannot identify its dictatorship with this ambiguous and untrustworthy apparatus, but only in its own autonomous class organs. These organs must tirelessly supervise the working of the state at all levels, demanding a maximum representation of delegates from workers' councils in the general Soviet congresses; the permanent and independent unification of the working class through its councils, and the workers' councils power of decision over all recommendations of the state. Above all the workers must prevent the state from interfering politically or militarily in its own class organs; but on the other hand the working class must maintain the capacity to exert its dictatorship over and against the state, by violence if need be. This means that the working class must guarantee its class autonomy by the general arming of the proletariat. If, during the civil war period, its becomes necessary to create a 'red army' out of the general population this force must be completely subordinated politically to the workers' councils, and dissolved as soon as the bourgeoisie has been militarily defeated. And at no time can the proletarian militias in the factories be dissolved.

The identification of the party with the state, and the state with the class, found their logical outcome at Kronstadt, when the party took the side of the state against the class. By 1921 the isolation of the Russian Revolution had made the state, by definition the guardian of the status quo, the 'guardian' of the stabilisation of capital and the taming of the workers. Despite all the good intentions of the Bolshevik leadership, who continued to hope for the saving dawn of the world revolution for several years more, their entanglement with this state machine was forcing them to act as obstacles to the world revolution and dragging them towards the final triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Some of them actually began to see that it was not the party that controlled the state, but the state which controlled the party. As Lenin himself said:

"The machine is getting out of the hands of those who are wielding it: one could say that there is someone in the saddle guiding this machine, but that the latter is following a direction other than that which was wanted, is being guided by a hidden hand... God alone knows to whom it belongs, perhaps to a speculator or a private capitalist, or both together. The fact is that the machine is not going in the direction desired by those who are supposed to be running it, and sometimes it foes in the opposite direction altogether" (Political Report of the Central Committee to the Party, 1922)

The last years of Lenin's life saw him struggling hopelessly against the emergent bureaucracy with pathetic schemes like the one for a 'Workers' and Peasants' Inspection', through which the bureaucracy would be 'supervised' through a new bureaucratic commission! What he could not admit, what he could not see, was that this so-called proletarian state had become a bourgeois machine pure and simple, an apparatus for the regulation of capitalist social relations, and could therefore only be fundamentally impervious to working class needs or reforms. The triumph of Stalinism was simply the cynical recognition of this fact, the final and definitive adaptation of the party to its role as overseer of the capitalist state. This was the real meaning of the declaration of 'Socialism in One Country' in 1926.

The Kronstadt uprising had posed the party with a monumental historic choice: either continue to manage this bourgeois machine, and thus end up as a party of capital -or separate itself from the state and stand by the whole working class in its struggle against this machine, this personification of capital. By taking the former path, the Bolsheviks probably signed their death warrant as a party of the proletariat, and added impetus to the counter-revolutionary process that openly declared itself in 1926. After 1921, only those Bolsheviks fractions that began to understand the need to identify directly with the workers' struggle against the state could remain revolutionary, and were able to participate in the international struggle of the Left Communists against he degenerating Third International. Thus for example, the Workers' Group of Miasnikov played an active role in the wave of wildcat strikes that swept Russia in August and September of 1923. This was in profound contrast to the Left Opposition led by Trotsky, whose struggle against the Stalinist faction was always fought from within the bureaucracy, and did not attempt to relate to the workers' struggle against what the Trotskyists defined as a 'workers' state' and a workers' economy. Their initial inability to disengage themselves from the party-state machine prefigured the subsequent evolution of Trotskyism as a 'critical' appendage of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

But historical choices' are rarely clear-cut at the time they have to be made. Men make their history within the definite objective conditions and "the traditions of the past generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (Marx). This nightmarish weight of the past was shouldered by the Bolsheviks, and only the revolutionary triumph of the western proletariat could have made it possible for the weight to have been removed, for the Bolsheviks or at least substantial elements of the party to have realised their mistakes and to have been regenerated by the inexhaustible creativity of the international proletarian movement. The traditions of Social Democracy, the backwardness of Russia, and above all the burdens of state power in the context of a declining revolutionary wave - all these factors were to push the Bolsheviks towards taking up a position on the wrong side of the class line at Kronstadt.

But it was not only the Bolshevik leadership that was unable to understand what was happening at Kronstadt. As we have seen, the Workers' Opposition in the party rushed to disassociate themselves from the rising and lead the assault on the garrison. Even when the Russian ultra-left had gone beyond the timid protests of the Workers' Opposition and entered into clandestine activity, it failed to draw the lessons of the rising and made little reference to it in its criticisms of the regime. The KAPD (Communist Workers' Party of Germany) at the Third Congress of the Comintern did recognise the proletarian character of the uprising, though denied that it had declared itself on the side of the rebels; and before long even this partial understanding was lost as the German Left began to repudiate the proletarian character of the Russian Revolution. By 1924, Gorter was characterising the Kronstadt rising as a revolt of the peasantry that forced the Bolsheviks to scrap the communist programme and 'restore capitalism' via the NEP. (Gorter, in 'The World Revolution'. Workers' Dreadnought. 9 February to 10 May, 1924).

In sum, few communists then understood the profound significance of the rising or drew the essential lessons from it. All this is testimony to the fact that the proletariat does not learn the basic lessons of the class struggle in one fell swoop but only through a painful accumulation of experience, of bloody struggle and of intense theoretical reflection.

It is not the task of revolutionaries today to make abstract moral judgements on the past workers' movement, but to see themselves as a product of that movement - a product, to be sure, capable of making a ruthless critique of all the errors of the movement, but a product nonetheless. Otherwise the criticisms of the past by revolutionaries today can have no grounding in the real struggles of the working class. Only by seeing the protagonists who faced each other at Kronstadt as tragic actors in our own history can communists today claim the right to denounce the action of the Bolsheviks and declare our solidarity with the rebel's defence of class positions. Only by understanding the Kronstadt events as part of the historical movement of the class can we hope to appropriate the lessons of this experience and apply them to the present and future practice of the proletariat. Only thus can we hope to ensure that there will be no more Kronstadts

CDW,
August. 1975

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FOOTNOTES

1. This does not mean that we endorse the idea, held both by the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt rebels, of a 'workers' and peasants' power. The working class in the next revolutionary wave must affirm that it is the only revolutionary class. It must therefore ensure that it is the only class to organise as a class in the transition period, dissolving any institution that claims to defend the specific interests of any other class. The rest of the non-exploiting population will be permitted to organise itself within the limits of the proletarian dictatorship, and will be represented in the state only as 'citizens' through territorially elected soviets. The granting of civil rights and a franchise to these strata no more endows them with political power as a class than the bourgeoisie gives power to the working class by allowing it to vote in municipal and parliamentary elections. Back [31]

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