The bombings in Madrid

Thursday, 11th March, 7 o'clock in the morning: bombs blast a train in a working-class district of Madrid. The bombs of capitalist war have once again struck a defenceless civilian population, just as blindly as they did when they dropped on Guernica, or during the bombardments of World War II. The bombs “dropped” indiscriminately against men, women, children, adolescents, and even against immigrants from “muslim” countries who in some cases - to render tragedy still more tragic - did not even dare to come forward to claim the bodies of their dead for fear of being arrested and expelled from the country as a result of their illegal status.

Just like the attack on the Twin Towers, this massacre is a real act of war. Nonetheless, there is a major difference between the two: whereas on 11th September, the target was a major symbol of the power of US capitalism - although there was an obvious intention to kill in order to reinforce the horror and the terror of the act - this time the act had no symbolic value: this strike against a civilian population was merely another killing in an ongoing war. The 11th September was an event of world importance, an unprecedented massacre on American soil whose main victims were the workers and office employees of New York. It gave a pretext to the American state - a pretext fabricated by those who deliberately allowed the preparations for the attack to go ahead, despite being informed about them in advance - to inaugurate a new period in the deployment and exercise of its imperialist power: henceforth, the US announced that, in the “war against terror” they would strike alone, anywhere in the world, to defend their interests. The 11th March does not open a new period, it makes a banality out of horror. It is no longer a matter of choosing targets for their symbolic propaganda value, but of direct strikes against the working population. While the rich and the powerful were killed in the Twin Towers, there were none in the 7:00 train in the suburb of Atocha.

It is of course the “done thing” today, to denounce the crimes of the Nazis and Stalinists. But during World War II, the democratic powers also bombarded the civilian population, and especially the working class, with the aim of spreading terror, reducing the enemy's ability to fight, and even, at the end of the war, deliberately devastating working-class districts in order to put an end to any possibility of a proletarian uprising. The increasingly massive bombardments, night and day, of German cities towards the end of the war, are in themselves a stinging condemnation of the nauseating hypocrisy of all those governments who denounce those acts on the part of others, which they themselves have never hesitated to undertake (Iraq, Chechnya, Kosovo, are only some of the most recent examples of occasions when the civilian population has been targeted as a result of the rivalries between great powers). The terrorists who struck in Madrid were well schooled indeed.[1]

Contrary to all prior predictions, the right-wing Aznar government was defeated in the elections that followed the Atocha bombing. According to the press, the socialist Zapatero's victory was made possible essentially by two factors: a much greater turn-out by workers and young people, and a profound anger against the maladroit attempts by the Aznar government to avoid the question of the war in Iraq and to put all the blame on the Basque terrorist organisation ETA.

We have already recounted how the attack on the Twin Towers was followed, in some cases, by spontaneous reactions of solidarity and the rejection of warmongering propaganda in the working class districts of New York,[2] but also how these reactions of solidarity, unable to express themselves independently, proved inadequate to provoke a class reaction and were turned into support for the pacifist movement against the intervention in Iraq. Similarly, many of those who voted against Aznar did so to condemn the government's shameless attempts at manipulation - when the very fact of voting represents a victory for the bourgeoisie which in this case used it to give credence to the idea that it is possible to “vote against war”.

Why this crime?

For the revolutionary working class, it is vital to understand reality in order to change it. Communists therefore have a great responsibility to analyse the event, to take part as much as they are able in the effort of understanding that the whole proletariat must engage in, if it is to oppose an adequate resistance to the danger that the decomposition of capitalist society represents.

The terror attack on Madrid was an act of war. But it is war of a new kind. The bombs no longer carry the label of their country of origin, or of any particular imperialist interest. The first question we must ask is therefore: who could profit from the crime of Atocha?

We can say from the outset - just for once - that the American bourgeoisie had nothing to do with it. True, the very fact of the attack gives credence to the central idea of US propaganda that all are involved in the same “war on terror”. However, it totally discredits any suggestion by the US that the situation in Iraq is improving to the point where they will soon be able to give up power to a duly constituted Iraqi government. More important still, the arrival in power of the Spanish bourgeoisie’s socialist fraction is a threat to the United States’ strategic interests. In the first place, if Spain withdraws its troops from Iraq, then this will be a bad blow to the US: it will be a blow not, of course, at the military but at the political level against their claims to be leading a “coalition of the willing” against terrorism.

The Spanish socialists represent a wing of the bourgeoisie which has always been turned more towards France and Germany, and which intends to play the card of European integration. Their arrival in power immediately opened up a period of discreet negotiations, whose conclusions it would be difficult to predict at the time of writing. After his post-election declaration that Spanish troops would be withdrawn from Iraq Zapatero almost immediately back-peddled and announced that they would remain, on condition that the United Nations should take over responsibility for the occupation. This hedging by the Spanish, not only calls into question Spain’s participation in the US coalition in Iraq, but also its role as America’s Trojan Horse in Europe, as well as the whole deck of alliances within the European Union. Up to now, Spain, Poland, and Britain – each for its own reasons – have formed a “pro-US” coalition against the ambitions of France and Germany to rally the rest of Europe to their policy of opposition to Uncle Sam. For Poland, the despatch of troops to Iraq was essentially designed to buy America’s good graces, and thereby a powerful support against German pressure, at the critical moment of Poland’s entry into the European Union. If Spain really does leave the US coalition and returns to a pro-German orientation in Europe, which seems more than likely, then it remains to be seen whether Poland has the bottle to oppose France and Germany without the support of its Spanish ally. The latest “private” – and of course immediately denied – declarations by the Polish PM, complaining that the US had “taken him for a fool” certainly cast a certain doubt over such a possibility.

The USA has thus suffered a serious blow, and is likely to lose not just an ally – or even two – in Iraq, but above all a foothold in Europe.[3] The defection of Spain and Poland is likely seriously to weaken the American bourgeoisie’s ability to play world cop.

The United States and the Aznar fraction of the Spanish bourgeoisie are the main losers from the attack. Who then are the winners? France and Germany, obviously, along with the “pro-socialist” fraction of the Spanish bourgeoisie. Could we then imagine a “dirty trick”, using Islamist salafists as pawns, by the French, German or Spanish secret services?

Let us begin by eliminating the argument that “such things aren’t done” in democratic states. We have already shown[4] how the secret services can be led to play a direct role in the internecine conflicts and settling of scores within the national ruling class. The example of the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in Italy is particularly edifying in this respect. Presented by the media as a crime committed by the leftist Red Brigades, the Aldo Moro assassination was in fact carried out by the Italian secret service that had infiltrated the group: Aldo Moro was killed by the dominant, pro-American fraction of the Italian bourgeoisie because he proposed to bring the Italian Communist Party (which at the time was wholly in the orbit of the USSR) into a coalition government.[5] However, to try to influence the results of an election – in other words the reactions of a large part of the population – by dynamiting a suburban train, is an operation of an altogether different dimension from the assassination of one man to eliminate an awkward element within the bourgeoisie. Too many uncertainties and imponderables affect the situation. The intended result (the defeat of the Aznar government and its replacement by a socialist one) depended in large part on the reaction of the Aznar government itself: all the electoral analysts agree that the result of the elections was in large part influenced by the incredible ineptitude of the government’s increasingly desperate attempts to pin responsibility on the ETA.[6] The result could well have been completely different had Aznar been able to profit from the event by trying to rally the electorate around a struggle for democracy and against terrorism. Moreover, the risks of the operation going wrong were far too great. When we consider the inability of the French DGSE[7] to carry out small-scale operations with any success (the mining of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, or the lamentable failure of the attempt to recover Ingrid Bettancourt from the Colombian FARC) and without being discovered, it is hard to imagine that the French government would allow it to undertake such an operation as the Atocha bombing on the territory of a European “friend”.

What war?

We have said that the attack in Atocha, like that on the Twin Towers, is an act of war. But what kind of war? During the first period of capitalism’s decadence, imperialist wars declared themselves openly as such: the great imperialist blood-letting of 1914 and 1939 called into play the Great Powers, with all the panoply of their national, military, diplomatic, and ideological arsenals. In the period of the great imperialist blocs (1945-1989), the rival blocs confronted each other via their proxy pawns: even then, it was more difficult to identify who was really behind the wars that were often presented as movements of “national liberation”. With capitalism’s entry into its phase of decomposition, we have already identified several tendencies which are to be found intertwined in today’s terrorist attacks:

-     “the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions…

-         the development of nihilism, despair, and suicide amongst young people…

-         the tidal waves of drug addiction, which has now become a mass phenomenon and a powerful element in the corruption of states and financial organisms…

-         the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced countries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought…” (“Theses on decomposition, 1990, reprinted in International Review no107).

These “Theses” were published in 1990, at a time when the use of terrorist attacks (for example the bombs in the streets of Paris during 1986-87) were essentially the responsibility of third- or fourth-rate states such as Syria, Libya, or Iran: terrorism was, as one might say, the “poor man’s atom bomb”. Fifteen years later, the rise of so-called “islamist” terrorism presents us with a new phenomenon: the disintegration of the states themselves, and the appearance of warlords using young kamikazes, whose only perspective in life is death, to advance their interests on the international chessboard.

Whatever the details – which still remain obscure – of the attack in Madrid, it is obviously linked to the American occupation in Iraq. Presumably, those who ordered the attack intended to “punish” the Spanish “crusaders” for their participation in the occupation of Iraq. However, the war in Iraq today is far from being a simple movement of resistance to the occupation conducted by a few irreconcilable supporters of Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, this war is entering a new phase, that of a kind of international civil war which is spreading throughout the Middle East. In Iraq itself, there are increasingly frequent confrontations not only between the “resistance” and US forces, but also between the “Saddamites”, Wahhabite Sunnis (the sect which gave birth to Bin Laden), Shiites, Kurds, and even Turkmen. In Pakistan, a discreet civil war is in progress, with the bomb attack against a Shiite procession (40 dead), and a large-scale military operation in progress as we write in Waziristan. In Afghanistan, all the reassuring declarations about the consolidation of the Kabul government cannot hide the fact that the latter’s writ runs no farther than Kabul itself, and that only with difficulty, while civil war continues to rage throughout the southern part of the country. In Israel and Palestine, the situation is going from bad to worse, as Hamas has started to use young children to carry its bombs. In Europe itself, the resurgence of violence between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo is a sign that the wars in ex-Yugoslavia have not come to an end, but have merely been smothered temporarily by the massive presence of occupying troops.

We are no longer faced here with an imperialist war of the “classic” sort, but with a general disintegration of society into warring bands. We might draw an analogy with the situation in China at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The phase of capitalism's decomposition is characterised by a blockage in the balance of forces between the reactionary bourgeois class and the revolutionary proletariat; the situation of the Middle Empire was characterised by a blockage between on the one hand the old feudal-absolutist class and its caste of mandarin bureaucrats, and on the other a rising bourgeoisie which nonetheless remained too weak, due to the specificities of its evolution, to overthrow the imperial regime. As a result, the empire disintegrated into a multitude of fiefdoms, each one dominated by its warlord, and whose incessant conflicts were bereft of any rationality on the level of historical development.

This tendency towards the disintegration of capitalist society will in no way hinder the strengthening of state capitalism, still less will it transform the imperialist states into society's protectors. Contrary to what the ruling class in the developed countries would like to make us believe – for example by calling the Spanish population to vote “against terrorism” or “against war” – the great powers are in no way “ramparts” against terrorism and social decomposition. On the contrary, they are the prime culprits. Let us not forget that today’s “Axis of Evil” (Bin Laden and his kind) are yesterday’s “freedom fighters” against the “Evil Empire” of the USSR, armed and financed by the Western bloc. And this is not finished, far from it: in Afghanistan, the United States used the unsavoury warlords of the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban, and in Iraq the Kurdish peshmergas. Contrary to what they would like us to think, the capitalist state will be increasingly armoured against external military threats and internal centrifugal tendencies, and the imperialist powers – whether they be first- , fourth-, or nth-rate – will never hesitate to use warlords and terrorist gangs to their own advantage.

The decomposition of capitalist society, precisely because of capitalism’s worldwide domination and its vastly superior dynamism in transforming society compared to all previous social forms, takes on more terrible forms than ever in the past. We will highlight just one of them here: the terrible obsession with death weighing on the young generations. Le Monde of 26th March quotes a Gaza psychologist: “a quarter of young boys over 12 have only one dream – to die as a martyr”. The article continues: “The kamikaze has become a respected figure in the streets of Gaza, and young children dress up in play explosive waistcoats in imitation of their elders”.

As we wrote in 1990 (“Theses on decomposition”): “It is vital that the proletariat, and the revolutionaries within it, grasp the full extent of the deadly threat that decomposition represents for society as a whole. At a moment when pacifist illusions are likely to develop, as the possibility of world war recedes, we must fight with the utmost energy any tendency within the working class to seek for consolation and to hide from the extreme gravity of the world situation”. Since then, sad to say, this call has gone largely unheeded – or even treated with contempt – by the meagre forces of the communist left. Consequently, we are beginning in this issue of the Review a series on the marxist basis of our analysis of capitalism’s phase of decomposition.

A class of vultures

The Spanish bourgeoisie was not directly responsible for the bombing at Atocha. This did not stop it from seizing on the workers corpses like a flock of vultures. Even in death, the workers served the ruling class to feed its machine of propaganda for the nation and for democracy. To cries of “Spain united will never be defeated”, the whole bourgeois class – left and right together – used the emotion provoked by the bombing to push the workers into the voting booths that many would otherwise have deserted. Whatever the electoral outcome, the particularly high rate of participation is already a victory for the bourgeoisie because it means – temporarily at least – that a large part of the Spanish working class believed that they could rely on the bourgeois state to protect them from terrorism, and that for it to do so, they should defend the democratic unity of the Spanish nation.

Worse still, and quite apart from the national unity around the defence of democracy, the aim of the different fractions of the Spanish bourgeoisie has been to use the bombings to win the support of the population, and of the working class, for their opposing strategic and imperialist choices. By designating Basque separatism as the guilty party – despite all proof to the contrary – the Aznar government wanted to associate the proletariat to the strengthening of the Spanish state police. By denouncing the responsibility of Aznar’s support for Bush and the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq, the socialists aim to make the workers’ endorse another strategic choice – the alliance with the Franco-German tandem.

An understanding of the situation created by capitalism’s decomposition is thus more necessary than ever for the proletariat, if it is to recover and defend its class independence against the bourgeois propaganda which aims to transform the workers into mere “citizens”, dependent on the democratic state.

Elections come and go, the crisis remains

The bourgeoisie may have won a victory during the elections in Spain. It remains totally incapable of putting a break on the economic crisis in which its system is plunged. Today, the attacks on the working class are no longer at the level of this or that company, or even this or that industry, but of the working class as a whole. In this sense, the attacks on pensions and social security in all the European countries (and in a different form in the United States, through the disappearance of pension schemes in stock-exchange disasters such as Enron), are creating a new situation to which the working class must respond. Our understanding of this situation, which provides the global framework for our analysis of the class struggle today, is presented in the report on the class struggle published in this issue.

Faced with the barbarity of war and the decomposition of capitalist society, the working class can and must rise to meet the danger that threatens it, not just at the level of an immediate resistance to economic attacks, but above all at the level of a general political understanding of the mortal danger threatening the human species with capitalism’s continued survival. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1915: “World peace cannot be maintained by utopian or frankly reactionary plans, such as international tribunals of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic conventions on ‘disarmament’ (…) etc. It will never be possible to eliminate, or even to hold back, imperialism, militarism, and war as long as the capitalist classes continue to exercise their uncontested class domination. The only way to resist them successfully and to preserve world peace, is the international proletariat’s capacity for political action, and its revolutionary determination to throw its weight into the balance”.

Jens, 28/03/04

The massive eruption of workers’ struggles May 1968 in France, followed by the movements in Italy, Britain, Spain, Poland and elsewhere signified the end of the period of counter-revolution that had weighed so heavily on the international working class since the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. The proletarian giant stood once again on the stage of history, and not just in Europe. These struggles had a powerful echo in Latin America, beginning with the “Cordobaza” in Argentina in 1969. Throughout the region, between 1969 and 1975, from Chile in the South to Mexico on the US border, workers put up an intransigent fight against the bourgeoisie’s efforts to make them pay for the unfolding economic crisis. In the waves of struggle that followed, that of 1977-80 culminating in the mass strike in Poland, that of 1983-89 marked by massive struggles in Denmark and Belgium, and by large-scale struggles in many other countries, the proletariat of Latin America continued to struggle, albeit not in such a spectacular manner. In doing so, it demonstrated that whatever its different conditions, the working class is one and the same international class in one and the same fight against capitalism.

Today, these struggles appear like a distant dream. The present social situation in the region is not marked by massive strikes, demonstrations and armed confrontations between the proletariat and the forces of repression, but by widespread social instability. The  “uprising” in Bolivia in October 2003, the massive street demonstrations that swept five presidents from power in a matter of days in Argentina in December 2001, the Chavez “popular revolution” in Venezuela, the ultra-mediatised struggle of the Zapatistas in Mexico – these and similar events are what predominate. In this maelstrom of social discontent the working class appears to be just another discontented stratum of society, one which if it wants to have any chance of defending itself needs to merge with the other non-exploiting strata. Revolutionaries cannot simply resign themselves to these difficulties in the class struggle, their responsibility is to defend unbendingly the proletariat’s class independence.

“The autonomy of the proletariat in the face of all the other classes of society is the first precondition for the extension of its struggle towards the revolution. All alliances with other classes or strata and especially those with fractions of the bourgeoisie can only lead to the disarming of the class in the face of its enemy, because these alliances make the working class abandon the only terrain on which it can temper its strength: its own class terrain” (Point 9, Platform of the ICC).

The working class is the only revolutionary class. It alone bears a perspective for humanity as a whole. Today, when the proletariat is surrounded on every side by the increasing decomposition of a moribund capitalism, when it has great difficulty in imposing its own autonomous class struggle with its own interests to defend, it is more than ever necessary to remember the words of Marx in The Holy Family: “The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, or even by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature”.

Class struggle in Latin America from 1969-1989

The history of the class struggle in Latin America over the last 35 years, along with that of the rest of the international working class, has been one of hard struggles, violent confrontations with the state, temporary victories and bitter defeats. The spectacular movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s have given way to more difficult and tortuous struggles, where the central question of how to defend and develop class autonomy is posed more sharply than ever.

Of particular importance was the struggle by the workers of the industrial city of Cordoba in 1969. This struggle witnessed a week of armed confrontation between the proletariat and the Argentinean army and gave a formidable stimulus to struggles throughout Argentina, Latin America and the world. It was the beginning of a wave of struggles that culminated in Argentina in 1975, with the struggle of the steelworkers in the town of Villa Constitución, the most important steel-producing centre in the country. The workers of Villa Constitución faced the full force of the state. The ruling class wanted to use the crushing of their militancy as an example. The town was put “under a military occupation of 4,000 men ...The systematic combing of each neighborhood and the imprisonment of workers (....) simply provoked the anger of the workers: 20, 000 workers in the region came out on strike and occupied the factories. Despite assassinations and bomb attacks against workers' houses, a Committee of Struggle was immediately created outside the union. Four times the leadership of the struggle was arrested; but each time the committee re-emerged stronger than before. As in Cordoba in 1969, groups of armed workers took charge of the defence of working class neighbourhoods and put an end to the activities of the paramilitary bands. The action of the iron and steel workers who demanded a wage increase of 70% quickly gained the solidarity of the workers in other factories in the country, in Rosario, Cordoba, and Buenos Aires. In the latter city, for example, the workers of Propulsora, who went on solidarity strike and won all the wage increases they demanded (130.000 pesos a month), decided to donate half their wages to the workers in Villa Constitución” (“Argentina six years after Cordoba”, World Revolution n°1 1975, page 15-16).

In Chile likewise, in the early 1970’s, the workers fought to defend their own class interests, and refused to sacrifice their interests in the name of the Allende’s Popular Unity government: “Working class resistance to Allende began in 1970. In December 1970, 4,000 Chuquicamata miners struck, demanding higher wages. In July 1971, 10,000 coal miners struck at the Lota Schwager mine. New strikes at the mines of El Salvador, El Teniente, Chuquicamata, La Exotica and Rio Blanco spread at around the same time, demanding higher wages... In May-June 1973, the miners began to move again. 10,000 struck at the El Teniente and Chuquicamata mines. The El Teniente miners asked for a 40% wage rise. Allende put the O'Higgins and Santiago provinces under military rule, because the paralysis at El Teniente seriously threatened the economy" (“The irresistible fall of Allende”, World Revolution n°268).

Major struggles also took place in other important proletarian concentrations in Latin America. In Peru in 1976, semi-insurrectional struggles in Lima were bloodily suppressed. A few months later, the Centramin miners were on strike. In Ecuador, a general strike broke out in Riobamba. Mexico was hit by a wave of strikes in January of the same year, then in 1978 a new wave of general strikes swept Peru. In Brazil, ten years of relative social calm was broken when 200,000 steelworkers took the lead in a wave of strikes that lasted between May and October. In Chile in 1976, strikes broke out among the metro workers in Santiago, and in the mines. In Argentina, strikes broke out again in 1976, despite repression by the ruling military junta, in the electricity industry, and in the car industry in Cordoba, which witnessed violent confrontations between the workers and the army. The 1970s were also marked by important episodes of struggle in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Uruguay.

During the 1980’s the proletariat was fully involved in the international wave of struggles that began in Belgium in 1983. The most developed of these struggles were marked by determined efforts by workers to spread their movement. In 1988, for example, education workers in Mexico fought for an increase in wages: “The demand of the education workers from the beginning posed the question of the extension of the struggles, because there was a general discontent against the austerity plans. 30,000 public employees were holding strikes and demonstrations outside of union control, though the movement was dying down by the beginning of the movement in the education sector. The education workers themselves showed a recognition of the need for extension and unity: at the beginning of the movement, those in the south of Mexico City sent delegations to other education workers, calling on them to join the struggle, and they also took to the streets in demonstrations. Similarly they refused to restrict the fight to teachers alone, regrouping all education workers (teachers, manual and administrative workers) in mass assemblies to control the struggle” (“Mexico worker’s struggle and revolutionary intervention” World Revolution n°124, May 1989).

The same tendencies appeared in other parts of Latin America: “Even the bourgeois media has been talking about a ‘strike wave’ in Latin America, with workers’ struggles breaking out in Chile, Peru, Mexico (…) and Brazil; in the later case there have been simultaneous strikes and demonstrations against a wage freeze by bank, dock, care and education workers” (“The difficult path to unification of class struggle”, World Revolution n°124, May 1989).

Between 1969 and 1989, the working class in Latin America took its place fully within the historic renewal of the working class’ international struggle, with its advances and retreats, its difficulties and its weaknesses.

The collapse of the Berlin wall, and the subsequent tidal wave of bourgeois propaganda about the “death of communism”, caused a profound ebb in workers’ struggles internationally, characterised essentially by the proletariat’s loss of its own class identity. The effects of this ebb were all the more damaging for the proletariat in the peripheral countries, such as in Latin America, inasmuch as the development of the crisis and social decomposition thrust the wretched, oppressed and pauperised masses into inter-classist revolts, making it even more difficult for the workers to assert their own class autonomy and to keep their distance from “people power” and popular revolts.

The noxious effects of capitalist decomposition and inter-classist revolts

The collapse of the Eastern bloc was both a product and an accelerating factor of capitalism’s decomposition, against a background of deepening economic crisis. Latin America was hit hard. Tens of millions were forced from the countryside into the shantytowns of the major cities in a desperate search for non-existent jobs, whilst at the same time millions of young workers were being excluded from the process of wage labour. Over the course of 35 years, with a particularly brutal acceleration during the last ten years, this has led to a massive growth in those strata of society who, whilst not exploiting others' labour power, have been left to starve and eke out a hand-to-mouth existence on the edges of society.

In Latin America as a whole, 221 million (44% of the population) live in poverty. This represents a 7 million increase over last year (of these, 6 million live in extreme poverty) and a 21 million increase since 1990. This means that 20% of the population of Latin America now live in extreme poverty (according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean – ECLAC).

The impact of this social decay can be seen in the growth of the informal, self-employed economy of street-selling. The pressure of this sector varies according to the economic strength of the country. In Bolivia, in 2000, the self-employed outnumbered wage earners (47.8% of the working population were self-employed compared to 44.5% wage earners); in Mexico the ratio was 21.0% compared to 74.4% (ECLA).

In the continent as a whole 128 million people live in slums; that is, 33% of the urban population (“UN: Slums increase a 'time bomb'", October 6 2003. ONE news[1]). These millions are faced with little or no sanitation or electricity and their lives are plagued by crime, drugs and gangs. The slums of Rio have been the battleground for rival gangs for years, a situation graphically portrayed in the film City of God. Workers in Latin America, especially in the slums, are also faced with the highest murder and crime rates in the world. The ripping apart of family relations has also led to a massive growth in the number of abandoned street children throughout the region.

Tens of millions of peasants are finding it increasingly difficult to scrape a miserable living from the soil. In some tropical areas, this has served to accelerate the process of environmental destruction spearheaded by the logging companies and others, as land-hungry peasants are forced to encroach on the soil of the rainforest. This in turn offers only a temporary respite since its thin soil is quickly exhausted, resulting in a spiral of deforestation.

The increase in the numbers of the pauperised masses has had a serious impact on the proletariat’s ability to defend its class autonomy. This appeared clearly at the end of the 1980’s when hunger revolts broke out in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. In response to the revolt in Venezuela, which left over one thousand dead and as many injured, we warned of the danger to the proletariat of such revolts. “The vital factor for nourishing this social tumult was blind rage, without any perspective, accumulated over long years of systematic attacks against wage levels and living conditions of those still at work; it expressed the frustration of millions of unemployed, of youths who have never worked and are being pitilessly driven into the swamp of lumpenisation by a society which, in the countries of capitalism's periphery, is incapable of offering these elements any prospect for their lives...

“The lack of proletarian political orientation, opening up a revolutionary perspective, meant that it was this rage and frustration which was the motor force behind the street riots with their burning of vehicles, impotent confrontations with the police and, later on, the pillaging of food and electrical goods shops. The movement which began as a protest against the 'package' of economic measures thus rapidly disintegrated into looting and destruction without any perspective” (“Venezuela: communiqué to the whole working class”, from Internacionalismo, ICC publication in Venezuela, reproduced in World Revolution no124 May 1989).

In the 1990’s the desperation of the non-exploiting strata has been increasingly utilised by parts of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. In Mexico, the Zapatistas initially proved particularly adept at this, with their ideas about “popular power” and representing the oppressed. Whilst in Venezuela, Chavez has mobilised the non-exploiting strata, especially the slum dwellers, with the idea of a “popular revolution” against the former corrupt regime.

These popular movements have had a real impact on the proletariat, especially in Venezuela where there is a real danger of the working class being dragged into a bloody civil war behind different fractions of the ruling class.

The dawning of the 21st century has not seen a lessening of the destructive impact of the escalating desperation of the non-exploiting strata. In December 2001 the proletariat of Argentina – one of the oldest and most experienced in the region – was swept up in a popular revolt which despatched five successive presidents from power in the space of 15 days. In October 2003, the main sector of the proletariat in Bolivia, the miners, were sucked into a bloody “popular revolt” led by the petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, which left many dead and wounded, all in the name of defending Bolivian gas reserves and the legalisation of coca production!

The fact that significant parts of the proletariat have been sucked into these revolts is of the greatest importance, because it marks a profound loss of class autonomy. Instead of seeing themselves as proletarians with their own interests, workers in Bolivia and Argentina saw themselves as citizens sharing common interests with the petty-bourgeois and non-exploiting strata.

The absolute necessity for revolutionary clarity

With the deepening world economic crisis and advancing social decay, there will be other such revolts, or as in the case of Venezuela, possibly bloody civil wars – massacres that could physically and ideologically crush important parts of the international proletariat. Faced with this grim prospect it is the duty of revolutionaries to insist on the need for the proletariat to struggle to defend its own specific class interests. Unfortunately, not all revolutionary organisations have lived up to their responsibilities at this level. Thus the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, faced with the explosion of “popular” violence and demonstrations in Argentina, completely lost its political bearings and turned reality on its head. “Spontaneously proletarians went out onto the streets, drawing with them young people, students and substantial sections of the proletarianised petty-bourgeoisie who are pauperised like themselves. Together they directed their anger against capitalist sanctuaries: banks, offices, but above all the supermarkets and shops in general, which were attacked like the bakeries in medieval bread riots. The government, hoping to intimidate the rebels, couldn’t find a better response than to instigate a savage repression resulting in dozens of deaths and thousands wounded. The revolt wasn’t extinguished but instead spread to the rest of the country and increasingly began to assume a class character. Even the government buildings, symbolic monuments to exploitation and financial robbery, were attacked. (“Lessons from Argentina, Statement of the IBRP: Either the revolutionary party and socialism or generalised poverty and war”, Internationalist Communist n°21, Autumn/Winter 2002).

More recently, faced with the growing social turmoil in Bolivia that culminated with the bloody events of October 2003,  Battaglia Comunista published an article praising the Bolivian Indians’ ayllu (communal councils) “The ayllu could only have played a role in the revolutionary strategy if they had counter-posed to the present institutions the proletarian content of the movement and overcame their archaic and local aspects, that is, only if they had operated as an effective mechanism for unity between the Indian, mixed and white proletariat in a front against the bourgeoisie, overcoming all racial rivalry (…) The ayllu could have been the point of departure for the unification and mobilisation of the Indian proletariat, but this in itself is insufficient and too precarious for providing the foundation for a new society emancipated from capitalism”. This article was published in November 2003 (Battaglia Comunista n°11, also available on their web site), after the bloody events of October when it was precisely the Indian petty-bourgeoisie that had led the proletariat, particularly the miners, into a desperate confrontation with the armed forces. A massacre where proletarians were sacrificed to allow the Indian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to grab a bigger “slice of the cake” in the redistribution of power and profits on the basis of the redistribution of power and profits gained from the exploitation of the miners and the rural workers. As one of their leaders, Alvero Garcia clearly admitted, the Indians as such have no misty dreams about the ayllu being a starting point for a better society.

The IBRP’s enthusiasm for the events in Argentina is merely the logical conclusion of their analysis of the “radicalisation of consciousness” of the non-proletarian masses in the periphery: “The diversity of social structures, the fact that the imposition of the capitalist mode of production upsets the old equilibrium and that its continued existence is based on and translated into increasing misery for the growing mass of proletarianised and disinherited, the political oppression and repression which are therefore necessary to subjugate the masses, all this leads to a potential for a greater radicalisation of consciousness in the peripheral countries than in the societies of the metropoles (…) In many of these [peripheral] countries the ideological and political integration of the individual into capitalist society is not yet the mass phenomenon it is in the metropolitan countries” (“Theses on communist tactics for the periphery of capitalism”, available on the IBRP web site www.ibrp.org [5]).[2] Thus, the violent, massive demonstrations by the masses have to be seen as something positive, and in the IBRP’s imagination the proletariat’s submerging under a tide of inter-classism was not the expression of a sterile and futureless revolt, but the concretisation of “a potential for a greater radicalisation of consciousness”. And as a result the IBRP has shown itself utterly incapable of drawing the real lessons from events such as those of December 2001 in Argentina.

Both in its “Theses”, and in its analyses of concrete situations, the IBRP makes two major mistakes which mirror the commonplaces of the leftist and anti-globalisation movement. The first, is a theoretical vision according to which bourgeois or petty-bourgeois movements for the defence of national interests directly antagonistic to those of the proletariat (like the recent events in Bolivia or the Argentine uprisings of December 2001), can somehow be transformed into proletarian struggles. And the second – merely empirical – mistake, is to think that such miraculous transformations have actually taken place in real life, and to imagine that movements dominated by the petty bourgeoisie and nationalist slogans are somehow real proletarian struggles.

We have already undertaken polemics with the IBRP over their political disorientation faced with the events in Argentina in an article in International Review n°109 (“Argentina: Only the proletariat fighting on its own class terrain can push back the bourgeoisie”). At the end of this article we summed up our position as follows: “Our analysis absolutely does not mean that we despise or under-estimate the struggles of the proletariat in Argentina, or in other zones where capitalism is weaker. It simply means that revolutionaries, as the advance guard of the proletariat, with a clear vision of the line of march of the proletarian movement taken as a whole, have the responsibility to contribute to the clearest and most exact vision of the strengths and limitations of the working class struggle, of who are its allies, and of the direction its struggle should take. To do so, revolutionaries must resist with all their strength the opportunist temptation – as a result of impatience, immediatism, or a historical lack of confidence in the proletariat – to mistake an inter-classist revolt (as we have seen in Argentina) for a class movement”.

The IBRP has answered this critique (see Internationalist Communist n°21 Autumn/Winter 2002) by restating their position that the proletariat led this movement and condemning the ICC’s position “The ICC emphasises the weaknesses in the struggle and points to its inter-classist and heterogeneous nature and its bourgeois leftist leadership. They complain about the intra-class violence and the domination of bourgeois ideology such as nationalism. For them this lack of communist consciousness makes the movement a ‘sterile and futureless revolt’” (“Workers’ struggles in Argentina: polemic with the ICC”). Clearly the comrades have not understood our analysis, or rather they prefer to see in it what they want to see. We can only encourage readers to read our article.

Against this standpoint, the Nucleo Comunista Internacional – a group formed in Argentina in late 2003[3] – draws wholly different lessons from these events, on the basis of a very different analysis. In the second issue of their bulletin the comrades conduct a polemic with the IBRP over the nature of the events in Argentina: “...the IBRP wrongly says that the proletariat pulled the students and other social layers behind it; this is a really gross error and one which they share with the comrades of the GCI. The fact is that the workers’ struggles that took place throughout 2001 demonstrated the incapacity of the Argentine proletariat to assume the leadership not only of the whole of the working class, but also to put itself at the head, as the ‘leader’, of the social movement that went into the streets to protest, pulling along with it the whole of the non-exploiting social strata. On the contrary what happened was that the non-proletarian layers led the events of the 19th and 20th of December; therefore we can say that the development of these movements had no historical future as has been demonstrated in the year that followed” (“Two years since the 19-20th December 2001”, Revolucion Comunista n°2).

Speaking of the proletarians' involvement in the looting the GCI[4] says: “while there was a search for money and above all trying to take as much as possible from businesses, banks…, there was more to it than that: it was a generalised attack against the world of money, private property, banks and the state, against this world that is an insult to human life. It is not only a question of expropriation but of affirming the revolutionary potential, that is the potential for the destruction of a society that destroys human beings” (“Concerning the proletarian struggle in Argentina” Comunismo 49).

To this vision, the NCI oppose a very different analysis of the relationship between these events and the development of the class struggle:

“The struggles in Argentina in the period 2001/2002 were not a one-off event, they were the product of a development which we can divide into three moments:

a) The first was in 2001; as we said above, this was marked by a series of struggles for typical workers’ demands, their common denominator being their isolation from other proletarian detachments, and the imprint of the counter-revolution: mediation produced by the hegemony of the political leadership of the union bureaucracy.

However, despite this limitation, important expressions of workers’ self-organisation took place, such as the miners of Rio Turbio, in the south of the country, Zanon, in Neuquen, Norte de Salta with the unity of the construction workers and the unemployed former oil workers. These small workers' detachments were the vanguard putting forwards the necessity for the ‘UNITY’ of the working class and the unemployed proletarians (…)

b) Secondly, there were the specific days of 10th and 20th of December 2001, which, we repeat, were not a revolt led either by sections of the working class, or by the unemployed workers, but an inter-classist revolt; the petty-bourgeoisie was the element that held it together, since the economic blow by the De La Rua government was aimed directly against their interests, and against their electoral base and political support, through the December 2001 decree freezing bank accounts (…)

c) In the third moment, we must be very careful not to make a fetish out of the so-called popular assemblies, which took the lead in the petty-bourgeois neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires City far from the workers’ centres and neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, at this moment there was a very modest development of struggles on the workers’ terrain, and these continued to grow: municipal workers and teachers demonstrated, demanding to be paid their wages, industrial workers struggled against lay-offs by the employers’ organisations (for example lorry drivers).

It was at this moment that the employed and unemployed workers were faced with the possibility not only of a real unity, but also of sowing the seeds for an autonomous organisation of the working class. Against this the bourgeoisie tried to divide and divert the proletariat and this was done with the complicity of the new piquetera bureaucracy, throwing to the ground the experiment that had been a great weapon in the hand of the proletariat, as was the case with the so-called National Assembly of employed and unemployed workers.

For these reasons we think that it is an error to identify the struggles that developed throughout 2001/2202 with the events of the 19 and 20th December 2001, since they are different from each other, and one is not the consequence of the other.

The events of the 19th and 20th December had absolutely no working class character, since they were not led by the proletariat nor by the unemployed workers; rather the latter rode shotgun for the slogans and interests of the petty bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires City, which differ radically from the goals and aims of the proletariat (…)

It is fundamental to say this, because in this period of capitalism’s decadence, the proletariat runs the risk of losing its class identity and its confidence as the subject of history and the decisive force of social transformation. This is due to the downturn of proletarian consciousness as a consequence of the explosion of the Stalinist bloc and the impression on workers’ thinking of capitalist propaganda about the failure of the class struggle.  In addition to this the bourgeoisie has been inculcating the idea that class antagonisms no longer exist, rather people are united or divided according to whether they have been inserted into the market or excluded from it. It thus tries to erase the river of blood that separates the proletariat from the bourgeoisie.

This danger has been seen in Argentina during the events of 19th and 20th December 2001, where the class was incapable of transforming itself into an autonomous force struggling for its own class aims, but rather was sucked into the whirlpool of inter-classist revolt under the leadership of non-proletarian social layers (…)” (op. cit.).

The NCI places the events in Bolivia squarely within the same framework: “Starting from the premise of saluting and completely supporting the Bolivian workers in struggle, it is necessary to make clear that the combativeness of the class is not the only criterion for determining the balance of the forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, since the Bolivian working class has not been able to develop a massive and unified movement that could draw behind it the rest of the non-exploiting sectors in this struggle. The opposite in fact has happened: it was the peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie that have led this revolt.

This means that the Bolivian working class has been diluted in an inter-classist ‘popular movement’, and we affirm this for the following reasons:

a) because it was the peasantry that directed this revolt with two clear objectives: the legalisation of coca-production and preventing the sale of natural gas to the USA;

b) because of the use of the demand for a constituent assembly as the means for getting out of the crisis and as the means for ‘the reconstruction of the nation’;

c) and because nowhere did the movement put forward the struggle against capitalism.

The events in Bolivia have a great similarity to those in Argentina in 2001, where the proletariat was also submerged under the slogans of the petty-bourgeoisie. These ‘popular movements’ have in fact had a quite reactionary aspect, raising the slogan of reconstructing the nation, or expelling the ‘gringos’ and returning  natural resources to the Bolivian state (…)

Revolutionaries must speak clearly and base themselves on the concrete facts of the class struggle, without deluding or deceiving themselves. It is necessary to adopt a revolutionary proletarian position, and therefore it would be a serious error to confuse what is a social revolt with narrow political horizons, with an anti-capitalist proletarian fight”. (“The Bolivian Revolt” Revolucion Comunista. n°1).

The NCI’s analysis is based on real events; it demonstrates clearly that the IBRP’s idea of the “radicalisation of consciousness” among the non-exploiting strata is idealist wishful thinking. The concrete reality of the situation in the periphery is the growing destruction of social relations, the spread of nationalism, populism and similar reactionary ideologies, all of which are having a very serious impact on the proletariat’s ability to defend its class interests.

Fortunately, this reality appears not to have gone completely unnoticed by the IBRP, or at least by parts of it. In Revolutionary Perspectives n°30, the Communist Workers’ Organisation comes a good deal closer to reality in its analysis of events in Argentina and Bolivia: “As in the case of Argentina, these protests were inter-classist and without a clear social objective and will be contained by capital. We have seen this in the case of Argentina, where the violent upheavals of two years ago have given way to austerity and pauperisation(…). Whilst the explosion of revolt shows the anger and desperation of the population in many of the peripheral countries, such explosions cannot find a way out of the cataclysmic social situation which exists. The only way forwards is to return to the struggle of class against class and link it with the struggles of the metropolitan workers” (“Imperialist tensions intensify – class struggle needs to intensify”).

That said the article does not denounce the role either of nationalism or of the Indian petty-bourgeoisie in Bolivia. So “officially” the IBRP still defends a position that the Indian “ayllu could be the starting point for the uniting and mobilisation of the Indian proletariat”. The reality was that the ayllu was the departure point for the mobilisation of the proletarians of Indian origin behind the Indian petty-bourgeoisie, peasants and coca growers in their struggle against the bourgeois fraction in power.

This aberrant position of Battaglia Comunista, attributing a possible role in the development of the class struggle to “communal Indian councils” has not gone unnoticed by the NCI, who considered it necessary to write to Battaglia (in a letter dated 14th November 2003) in order to raise precisely this point. After pointing out that the ayullu are part of “a caste system dedicated to maintaining the social differences between the bourgeoisie – whether it be white, coloured, or indigenous – and the proletariat”, the NCI goes on to criticise Battaglia Comunista as follows:

“In our opinion, this position is a serious mistake, inasmuch as it tends to attribute to this traditional indigenous institution the ability to provide a starting point for the workers’ struggles in Bolivia, even if afterwards it was to determine their limits. We consider that these appeals by the leaders of the popular revolt for the reconstitution of the mythical ayullu amount to nothing less than the creation of artificial differences between white and indigenous sectors of the working class, as do the fact of demanding from the ruling class a bigger share of the cake produced from the surplus-value extorted from the Bolivian proletariat no matter what its ethnic make-up.

Contrary to your declaration, we are firmly convinced that the ‘ayullu’ could never act as an ‘accelerator and integrator into one and the same struggle’, given both its own reactionary nature, and the fact that the ‘indigenous’ approach is itself based on an idealisation (a falsification) of the history of those same communities: as Osvaldo Coggiola (in Indigenismo Boliviano) says ‘in the Inca system, the ayullu’s communal elements were integrated into an oppressive caste system in the service of the upper stratum, the Incas’. This is why it is a serious mistake to think that the ayullu could act to accelerate or integrate the struggle.

It is true that the Bolivian revolt was led by the indigenous peasant communities and the coca-leaf farmers, but there lies precisely its extreme fragility and not its strength, since it was purely and simply a popular revolt where the proletarian sectors played a secondary role, and consequently the inter-classist Bolivian revolt suffered from the absence of any revolutionary or even working class perspective. Contrary to what some currents of the so-called Trotskyist or Guevarist camp think, we can in no way characterise this revolt as a ‘revolution’, at no time did the indigenous and peasant masses adopt the objective of overthrowing the system of Bolivian capitalism. On the contrary, as we have already said, the events in Bolivia were strongly marked by chauvinism: the defence of national dignity, the refusal to sell gas to Chile, opposition to attempts at eradicating coca cultivation”.

The role played by the ayullu is strikingly similar to the way the ZNLA (Zapatista National Liberation Army) has used the indigenous “communal organisations” to mobilise the Indian petty-bourgeoisie, peasants and proletarians in Chiapas and other areas of Mexico, in its struggle with the main fraction of the Mexican bourgeoisie (a struggle which is also integrated into the inter-imperialist conflict between the US and the European powers).

Those sectors of the Indian populations in Latin America who have not been integrated into the proletariat or bourgeoisie have been cast into extreme poverty and marginalisation. This situation “has led intellectuals and petty-bourgeois and bourgeois political currents to try to develop arguments to explain why the ’Indians’ are a social body that offers a historical alternative and to involve them, as canon fodder, in the so-called struggles for ethnic defence. In reality these struggles hide the interests of bourgeois forces, as we have seen not only in Chiapas, but also in ex-Yugoslavia, where ethnic questions have been manipulated by the bourgeoisie to provide the formal pretext for the struggle of imperialist forces” (“Only the proletarian revolution will emancipate the Indians”, in Revolucion Mundial, the ICC publication in Mexico, n°64, Sept-Oct 2001).

The vital role of the working class in the capitalist heartlands

The proletariat is faced with a very serious deterioration of the social environment in which it has to live and fight. Its ability to develop its confidence in itself is threatened by the growing weight of the desperation of non-exploiting strata and the use of this by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces for their own ends. It would be a terrible dereliction of our revolutionary duty to underestimate this danger in any way whatever.

Only by developing its independence as a class, by asserting its class identity, by strengthening its confidence in its ability to defend its own interests will the proletariat be able to transform itself into a force capable of rallying behind it the other non-exploiting social strata.

The history of the proletarian struggle in Latin America demonstrates that the class has a long and rich experience to draw on. The efforts of the Argentine workers to return to the path of independent class struggle (described in the quotations above from the NCI)[5] demonstrate that the proletariat’s militancy remains intact. Nevertheless, enormous difficulties remain, testimony both to the long-standing weaknesses of the proletariat in the peripheries of capitalism, and to the tremendous material and ideological force of the process of decomposition in these regions. It is no accident that the most important expressions of class autonomy in Latin America take us back to the 1960s and 70s, in other words before the process of decomposition had made such profound inroads into the proletariat’s sense of class identity. This only underlines that the key to the global balance of class forces remains with the proletariat of the most powerful capitalist economies, where its most advanced detachments are better able to resist the damaging effects of decomposition. The signal for the end of fifty years of counter-revolution in the late sixties was rung in Europe and was then answered in Latin America; by the same token, the reconstitution of the proletariat as a historical antidote to capitalist putrefaction will necessarily radiate out from the most concentrated and politically experienced battalions of the working class, in the first place those of western Europe. But there is no question that the workers of Latin America will have a vital role to play in the future generalisation and internationalisation of struggles. Of all the sectors of the working class in the peripheries of the system, they are certainly the most advanced politically, as witness the existence of revolutionary traditions within it in the past, and the appearance of new groups searching for revolutionary clarity today. These minorities are the tip of a proletarian iceberg which promises to sink the unsinkable Titanic of capital.

Phil 

In 1904, the Russian empire was on the verge of revolution. The lumbering Czarist war machine was experiencing a humiliating defeat at the hands of a far more dynamic Japanese imperialism. The military debacle was fuelling the discontent of all strata of the population. In her pamphlet The Mass Strike, The Party and the Trade Unions, Rosa Luxemburg recounts how, already in the summer of 1903, at the very time that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was holding its s famous Second Congress, southern Russia had been shaken by “a colossal general strike”. The war brought a temporary halt in the class movement, and for a while the liberal bourgeoisie took centre stage with its “protest banquets” against the autocracy; but by the end of the 1904 the Caucasus was again aflame with massive workers’ strikes around the issue of unemployment. Russia was a tinder box, and the spark that set it aflame was soon to be lit: the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1905, when workers humbly petitioning the Czar to alleviate their appalling conditions were slaughtered in their hundreds by the Little Father’s Cossacks.

As we recounted in the first part of this article, the party of the proletariat, the RSDLP, was to confront this situation in the aftermath of a momentous split that had separated it into the Bolshevik and Menshevik fractions.

In his pamphlet Our Political Tasks, his overview of the Second Congress of the RSDLP where the split had taken place, Trotsky described the “nightmare” of the split, which had seen former comrades driven into hostile camps, and which now, as the working class faced the issue of war, of mass strikes and street demonstrations, left the marxist revolutionaries arguing bitterly about the internal organisation of the party, about rules of functioning and the composition of central organs. He laid the blame for this situation squarely on the shoulders of the man with whom he had worked closely in the exiled Iskra group, but who he now identified as the “head of the reactionary wing of our party” and as the arch disorganiser of the RSDLP – Lenin.

With many workers in Russia complaining that the party seemed to have lost itself in internal wrangling and was incapable of responding to the most pressing needs of the hour, Trotsky’s view seemed to have the backing of immediate reality. But with the hindsight of history, we can see that, although he made a number of important errors, it was Lenin who at that moment was the incarnation of the party’s most forward looking, revolutionary tendency, and Trotsky who had, along with other distinguished militants, fallen into a backward-looking position. The organisational questions posed by this split were in reality no abstraction divorced from the needs of the working class; they shared a common root with the issues posed by the growing social and political upheaval in Russia. The mass strikes and workers’ uprisings which swept Russia in 1905 were harbingers of a new epoch in the history of capitalism and the proletarian struggle: the end of the period of capitalist ascendancy and the opening of its period of decadence (see our article “1905: the mass strike opens the way to proletarian revolution.” in International Review 90), which would require the working class to go beyond its traditional forms of organisation, suited to the struggle for reforms within the capitalist system, and discover new forms of organisation capable of unifying the entire class and preparing it for the revolutionary overthrow of this system. In a nutshell, at the level of the mass organisations of the class, this transition was expressed in the passage from the trade union form of organisation to the soviet form, which made its first appearance in 1905.

But this profound change in the forms and methods of class organisation necessarily had its implications for the political organisations of the proletariat as well. As we tried to show in the first part of this article, the fundamental question posed at the Second Congress was the necessity to prepare for the coming revolutionary period by breaking from the old social democratic model of the party  - a broad party, with the emphasis on “democracy” and the fight for improving the conditions of the working class within capitalist society – and constructing what Lenin called a revolutionary party of a new type, a narrower, more disciplined, centralised party, armed with a socialist programme for the overthrow of capitalism, and composed of committed revolutionaries.    

In the next two articles, we are going to substantiate this view by examining the polemics that raged though 1904 between Lenin on the one hand and Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg on the other. In that period, as for most of his political career, Lenin was obliged to face criticisms from the entire spectrum of the workers’ movement. Not only from the Menshevik leaders like Martov, Axelrod and later Plekhanov, who accused him of acting like Robespierre at best and Napoleon at worst; not only from the acknowledged international leaders of social democracy like Kautsky and Bebel, who instinctively sided with the Mensheviks against this relatively unknown upstart, but also from those who were clearly on the left of the international movement – Trotsky and Luxemburg, both of whom were deeply influenced by the groundswell of revolution in Russia, both of whom were to make indispensable contributions to an understanding of the methods and forms of organisation appropriate to the new period, and both of whom signally failed to understand what Lenin’s organisational combat really meant.

In contrast to many of today’s revolutionaries, both Trotsky and Luxemburg did grasp one vital point about the organisation question: that it was a political question in its own right and a worthy subject for debate between revolutionaries.  In publishing their criticisms of Lenin, they were consciously taking part in a profoundly significant international confrontation of ideas. Their contributions to this debate, furthermore, have left us with many brilliant flashes of insight. And yet for all these flashes, the arguments of both these militants remain fundamentally flawed.

Trotsky sides with the Mensheviks

In his autobiography My Life Trotsky recounts the arrival to his place of exile in Siberia in 1902 of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and news of the Iskra paper “which had as its object the creation of a centralised organisation of revolutionaries who would be bound together by the iron discipline of action” (chap 9, “My First Exile”, p136, Penguin Books,1975) It was this perspective above all which convinced him of the necessity to escape and seek out the group of exiles which was publishing it. A weighty decision indeed, because it meant leaving his wife and two young daughters behind (even though his wife was a party comrade and had insisted that it was his duty to go) and undertaking an extremely hazardous journey across the wastes of Russia in order to reach western Europe.

Trotsky also tells us that upon arriving in London, where Lenin, Martov and Zasulitch were then living, he “fell in love with Iskra” and immediately threw himself into its work. The Iskra editorial board was made up of six members: Lenin, Martov, Zasulitch, Plekhanov, Axelrod and Potresov. Lenin soon proposed Trotsky as a seventh member, partly because six was an unworkable number when it came to making decisions, but perhaps more importantly because he knew that the older generation, in particular Zasulitch and Axelrod, were becoming an obstacle to the progress of the party, and wanted to inject into it some of the revolutionary fire of the new generation. This proposal was stymied by the opposition of Plekhanov, largely for personal reasons.

 At the Second Congress, Trotsky had been one of the most consistent supporters of the Iskra line, vigorously defending it - and in particular Lenin’s positions - against the nit-picking or outright opposition of the Bundists, Economists and semi-Economists. And yet by the end of the Congress, Trotsky had thrown in his lot with the massed ranks of the “anti-Leninists”; in 1904 he produced two of the most vituperative polemics against Lenin, Report of the Siberian Delegation and Our Political Tasks, and had joined the “new Iskra”, reclaimed by the Mensheviks after Plekhanov had turned his coat and Lenin had resigned from it.  We turn to Trotsky’s own reflections to gain some understanding of this extraordinary transformation.

It will be recalled that the actual split had not taken place over the famous differences about the party statutes, but over Lenin’s proposal to change the composition of Iskra’s editorial board. In My Life (chapter 12, “The Party Congress and the Split”, p166-8) Trotsky confirms that this was the decisive issue:

“How did I come to be with the “softs” at the congress? Of the Iskra editors, my closest connections were with Martov, Zasulitch and Axelrod. Their influence over me was unquestionable. Before the congress there were various shades of opinion on the editorial board, but no sharp differences. I stood furthest from Plekhanov, who, after the first really trivial encounters, had taken an intense dislike to me. Lenin’s attitude towards me was unexceptionally kind. But now it was he who, in my eyes, was attacking the editorial board, a body which was, in my opinion, a single unit, and which bore the exciting name of Iskra. The idea of a split within the board seemed nothing short of sacrilegious to me.

Revolutionary centralism is a harsh, imperative and exacting principle. It often takes the guise of absolute ruthlessness in its relation to individual members, to whole groups of former associates. It is not without significance that the words ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘relentless’ are among Lenin’s favourites. It is only the most impassioned, revolutionary striving for a definite end – a striving that is utterly free from anything base or personal – that can justify such personal ruthlessness. In 1903 the whole point at issue was nothing more than Lenin’s desire to get Axelrod and Zasulitch off the editorial board. My attitude to them was full of respect, and there was an element of personal affection as well. Lenin also thought highly of them for what they had done in the past. But he believed that they were becoming an impediment for the future. This led him to conclude that they must be removed from their position of leadership. I could not agree. My whole being seemed to protest against this merciless cutting off of the older ones when they were at last on the threshold of an organised party. It was my indignation at his attitude that really led to my parting with him at the Second Congress. His behaviour seemed unpardonable to me, both horrible and outrageous. And yet, politically it was right and necessary, from the point of view of organisation. The break with the older ones, who remained in the preparatory stages, was inevitable in any case. Lenin understood this before anyone else did. He made an attempt to keep Plekhanov by separating him from Zasulitch and Axelrod. But this, too, was equally futile, as subsequent events soon proved.

My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered ‘moral’ or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organisation methods. I thought of myself as a centralist. But there is no doubt that at that time I did not fully realise what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order. …At the time of the London Congress in 1903, revolution was still largely a theoretical abstraction to me. Independently, I still could not see Lenin’s centralism as the logical conclusion of a clear revolutionary concept…..”

Weight of the circle spirit

In One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back, in a passage we cited in the previous article about the difference between the party spirit and the circle spirit, Lenin characterises Iskra too as a circle; and while it is perfectly true that within this circle there was a clear tendency which consistently argued in favour of proletarian centralism, the weight of personal differences, of the exile mentality, and so on, was still very strong. Lenin was aware of Martov’s “softness”, his tendency to vacillate and conciliate, and Martov was equally aware of Lenin’s intransigence and was not always comfortable with it. Not being posed politically, this resulted in much unspoken tension. Plekhanov the father of Russian Marxism, and close to Lenin on many key issues right up until after the Second Congress, was deeply attached to his reputation and at the same time aware that he was being by-passed by a new generation (which included Lenin). He responded to Trotsky’s “invasion” of the Iskra circle with such hostility that all the other members found it deeply unworthy of him. And Trotsky? Again, despite his respect for Lenin, Trotsky had lived in the same house as Martov and Zasulitch; he developed an even closer friendship with Axelrod in Zurich and indeed dedicated Our Political Tasks to “my dear teacher, Pavel Bortsovich Axelrod”.   To this extent “my break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered ‘moral’ or even personal grounds”.  He sided with Martov and co. because they were more his friends than Lenin; he could not bear to be in the same camp as Plekhanov because of the latter’s personal slights against him; perhaps even more important, he displayed a truly conservative sentimentality towards the “old guard” which had served the revolutionary movement in Russia for so long. Indeed his personal reaction to Lenin at that time was so strong that many were shocked by the sharpness and uncomradely tone of his polemics against him (in his biography of Trotsky, Deutscher mentions that Iskra readers in Russia, in the period when the paper had fallen into Menshevik hands, had strongly objected to the tone of Trotsky’s diatribes against Lenin. See The Prophet Armed p 86, OUP edition).

But at the same time, “at bottom the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organisation methods”.

This formulation leaves room for ambiguity, for the idea that “organisation methods” is a secondary and non-political question, whereas the preponderance of personal ties and antagonisms in the old circles was precisely the political problem that Lenin was posing in his defence of the party spirit. In fact, all of Trotsky’s 1904 polemics have the same character: they reveal some very general political divergences, but again and again they come back to the question of organisational methods, or of the relationship between the revolutionary organisation and the working class as a whole.

Trotsky’s Report of the Siberian Delegation poses the main organisational issue straight away, and straight away reveals Trotsky’s failure to understand what was at stake in the Congress, since it insists that “The Congress is a register, a controller, but not a creator”. Which means – despite Trotsky’s qualification that “the party is not the arithmetical sum of local committees. The party is an organic totality” (ibid) – that the Congress is no longer the highest and most concrete expression of party unity. As Lenin put it in One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back: “At the time when we are re-establishing the real unity of our Party, and dissolving in this unity the circles which have outlived their usefulness, this summit is necessarily the Congress of the Party, which is its supreme organism”. Or again: “The controversy thus boils down to the dilemma: circle spirit or party spirit. Limitation of the rights of the delegates to the Congress, in the name of the imaginary rights or rules of all sorts of colleges or circles, or the complete, effective, and not merely verbal dissolution of all inferior instances, of all the little groups, before the Congress”.

Despite all the accusations made against Lenin’s conception of centralism, against his alleged desire to concentrate all power in the hands of an unaccountable central committee, or simply in his own hands as the Robespierre of the coming revolution, Lenin was absolutely clear that the supreme instance of a revolutionary proletarian party could only be its congress; this was the true centre to which all other parts of the organisation, whether central committee or local section, were subordinate; and this is what Lenin defended against the “democratist” view that the congress is simply a gathering place of representatives of the local sections, charged with a binding mandate which means they can do no more than act as the mouthpieces of those sections. This is what he defended against the anarchist revolt of the Mensheviks who refused to abide by its decisions.

Trotsky is right to say that at the time of the congress he had not yet fully grasped the question of centralism. This is also evident in another theme of the polemics – the old battle between Iskra and the Economists. In Report of the Siberian Delegation, Trotsky uses the argument that many of the Bolsheviks were former Economists who had simply flipped over towards hyper-centralism and the parroting of Lenin’s organisational “plans” (it was axiomatic for Trotsky at this stage that Lenin was the only real mind in the majority, the rest simply followed him like sheep, while the minority which he had joined was for real critical thinking). And yet this accusation turned reality on its head: having been united with Lenin against the Economists at the beginning of the Congress, the Mensheviks took up the bulk of the criticisms of Lenin initially raised by the likes of Akimov and Martynov, including the view that Lenin’s view of the party was preparing the ground for a dictatorship over the proletariat (indeed, Martynov himself even returned to the fold once Lenin had resigned from Iskra). By the same token, it had been the Economists who had advocated that the bourgeoisie had the task of carrying out the political revolution against Czarism, while social democrats should focus on the bread and butter of the daily class struggle. By 1904, Mensheviks like Zasulitch and Dan were talking more and more openly of the need for an alliance with the bourgeoisie in the coming revolution. And even Trotsky – who soon broke from the Mensheviks on the latter question above all, since it was not long before he began formulating his theory of permanent revolution, according to which the proletariat would necessarily take the leading role even in the approaching Russian revolution – by siding with the Mensheviks in 1903-4, also took on board their apology for the Economists’ positions.

This comes across very strongly in both texts: Trotsky spends a great deal of time in both waxing ironic about the time being wasted on discussing the minutiae of organisational detail while the masses in Russia are posing burning issues like mass strikes and demonstrations; like Axelrod, he also ridicules Lenin’s thesis that there can be opportunism on organisational questions: “Our intrepid polemicist (Lenin in One Step Forwards) still does not decide to put Axelrod and Martov in the category of opportunists in general (such an attractive idea from the standpoint of clarity and simplicity!), he creates for them the rubric ‘opportunist on organisational questions’. The concept of opportunism is then emptied of all political content. It becomes a ‘bogeyman’ for frightening little children….Opportunism in organisational questions! Girondism on the question of co-option by two-thirds in the absence of a motivated vote! Jauresism on the right of the Central Committee to fix where the administration of the League is to be!” (Our Political Tasks, part III). Behind the sarcasms, this argument actually represents a slide towards Economism because it downplays the distinct position and needs of the political organisation, whose mode of functioning is indeed a political question which cannot be simply side-stepped and drowned in talk about the class struggle in general. The question of functioning involves issues of principle which can indeed, under the pressure of bourgeois ideology, be subjected to opportunist interpretations.

Sliding back towards Economism

Trotsky’s texts, in fact, completely call into question the work of Iskra to which he had formerly been so attracted – its call for a centralised party with formal rules of functioning, its vital effort to pull the revolutionary movement away from the mire of terrorism, populism, Economism and other forms of opportunism. The Economists, Trotsky now implies, had their faults, but at least they had a real practise within the class, whereas Iskra’s main focus had been to win over the intelligentsia to marxism while issuing vague “proclamations” or focusing almost exclusively on distributing its press.

In the period before the Congress, Trotsky argues, “the organisation oscillated between two types: it was either conceived of as a technical apparatus for massive diffusion of published literature, be it within the country or abroad; or as a revolutionary ‘lever’ to involve the masses in an intended movement, that is, to develop in them pre-existing capacities for autonomous activity. The ‘craft’ organisation of the Economists was particularly close to the second type. Good or bad, this type of organisation was adapted to given forms of ‘practical resistance to capitalists by the workers’. Good or bad, it directly contributed to uniting and disciplining the workers in the ‘economic struggle’, that is, essentially, strike movements”.  (Our Political Tasks, part II).

Here Trotsky completely passes by the central problem with this conception: that it reduces the revolutionary organisation to the level of a trade union type body. It’s not a question of good or bad, because there is obviously a need for the class to develop general organisations for the defensive struggle against capital. The problem is that the revolutionary minority cannot, by its very nature, play this role, and in attempting to do so, will forget its central role of political leadership within the movement. 

But Iskra, Trotsky insists in this text, unlike the Economists, was not in the movement at all. “It is true that the party is now at least drawing closer to the proletariat for the first time. In the time of ‘Economism’ the work was entirely directed towards the proletariat, but in the first place it was not yet Social Democratic political work. During the period of Iskra, the work took on a Social Democratic character, but it was not directed straight towards the proletariat” (ibid, part I). In other words, Iskra’s main focus was not intervention in the immediate movement of the class, but conducting polemics within the intelligentsia. Trotsky thus counsels his readers to recognise the historical limitations of Iskra: “It is not enough to recognise the historical merits of Iskra, still less to enumerate all its unfortunate or ambiguous statements. We have to go further still: to understand the historically limited character of the role played by Iskra. It has contributed a lot to the process of differentiating the revolutionary intelligentsia; but it has also hampered its free development. The salon debates, the literary polemics, the intellectual disputes over a cup of tea, were all translated by it into the language of political programmes. In a materialist sense, it gave form to the multitude of theoretical and philosophical support for given class interests; and it was in using this ‘sectarian’ method of differentiation that it won to the cause of the proletariat a good part of the intelligentsia; finally it consolidated its ‘booty’ with the various resolutions of the Second Congress on the questions of programme, tactics and organisation” (ibid).

Trotsky’s references to “salon debates” and “intellectual disputes over a cup of tea” betray his temporary conversion to an immediatist, activist, and workerist suspicion for the tasks of the political organisation. By defining Economism and Iskra as equally valid and equally limited moments in the history of the party, he downplays the decisive role of the latter in the struggle for an organisation of revolutionaries capable of playing a leading role in the massive struggles of the class - a leading role, and not one of merely “assisting” strike movements.

 This is more than an observation about Iskra’s sociological make-up, more than a mere flirtation with ouvrierism. It is connected to a theory that was to have a long history: the notion that the political vanguard is essentially the representative of an intelligentsia that seeks to impose itself on the working class. Of course this theory had its highest incarnation in the councilist critique of Bolshevism after the defeat of the Russian revolution, but it was certainly anticipated by Trotsky’s “dear teacher” Axelrod who argued that Lenin’s demand for ultra-centralism demonstrated that the Bolshevik current was actually an expression of the Russian bourgeoisie, since the latter also needed centralism to carry out its political tasks.

Trotsky and substitutionism

 Trotsky’s re-interpretation of the contribution of Iskra is also linked to his criticisms of substitutionism and Jacobinism, which make up a large part of Our Political Tasks. In Trotsky’s view at this point, Iskra’s whole political conception, with its emphasis on political polemics against false revolutionary trends, was founded on a notion of acting on behalf of the proletariat:

“But how is it to be explained that the ‘substitutionist’ method of thought – substituting for the proletariat – practised in the most varied forms…throughout the whole period of Iskra, did not arouse self-criticism in the ranks of the Iskraists themselves? The reader has already found the explanation in the preceding pages. Hanging over all Iskra’s work was the task of fighting for the proletariat, for its principles, for its final goal – in the milieu of the revolutionary intelligentsia” (Part III). 

It is in Our Political Tasks that Trotsky made his famously “prophetic” passage about substitutionism: “Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organisation at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes itself for the central committee” (part II). Here, as Deutscher notes in The Prophet Armed, Trotsky seemed to intuit the future degeneration of the Bolshevik party. Trotsky is equally perceptive when he outlines the danger of substitutionism with regard to the class as whole in the future revolution (dangers which he himself was to fall into more thoroughly than Lenin at certain moments): “The tasks of the new regime will be so complex that they cannot be solved otherwise than by way of a competition between various methods of economic and political construction, by way of long ‘disputes’, by way of a systematic struggle not only between many trends inside socialism, trends which will inevitably emerge as soon as the proletarian dictatorship poses tens and hundreds of new problems. No strong ‘domineering’ organisation will be able to suppress these tends and controversies…A proletariat capable of exercising its dictatorship over society will not tolerate any dictatorship over itself” (part III).

Trotsky also makes valid criticisms of Lenin’s analogy, made in What Is To be Done, between proletarian revolutionaries and Jacobins, showing the essential differences between the bourgeois and the proletarian revolutions. Moreover, he notes that in polemicising against the Economists who saw class consciousness as the simple reflection or product of the immediate struggle, Lenin made the error of resorting to Kautsky’s “absurd idea” of socialist consciousness originating in the bourgeois intelligentsia. Given that on many of these questions, Lenin admitted to “bending the stick” in his assault on Economism and organisational localism, it is not surprising that some of Trotsky’s polemics do contain real insights, theoretical contributions which can still be used today.

But it would be a real error, as the councilists do, to take these insights out of their overall context. They remain part of an essentially flawed argument which expressed Trotsky’s failure, at that moment, to understand the real stakes in the debate.

With regard to Trotsky’s intuitions about substitutionism in particular, we have to bear in mind, first and foremost, that their point of departure is to confuse Lenin’s principled fight for centralism with a Machiavellian “will to power” on his part, and thus to interpret all his actions and proposals at the Congress as part of a grand manoeuvre to ensure that he ended up as the single dictator over the party and perhaps over the class as a whole.

The second weakness of Trotsky’s critique of substitutionism is that it does not trace its roots in the general pressure of bourgeois ideology, which can affect the proletariat no less than the petty bourgeois intellectuals. Rather it puts forward a workerist, sociological analysis, according to which Iskra’s key failing was that it was constituted mainly by intellectuals and directed the bulk of its political activity towards the intellectuals. And last but not least: although substitutionism was to become a real danger, both in theory and practise, with the isolation and decline of the revolution in Russia, it was not the principal danger on the eve of 1905, when the tide of the class struggle was on the rise. The real danger which had been exposed at the Second Congress, the principal obstacle to the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia, was not that the party would act in the place of the masses; it was that the underestimation of the distinctive role of the party, so intrinsic to both Economism and Menshevism, would prevent the very formation of a party capable of playing its proper role in the forthcoming social and political upheavals. In this sense, Trotsky’s dire warnings about substitutionism were a false alarm. To a certain degree, the situation can be compared to the phase of the class struggle which opened up in 1968: throughout this period, characterised by an ascending curve of the class struggle and by the extreme weakness of the revolutionary minority, by far the greater danger to the class movement is not that the organised revolutionaries will somehow violate the virginity of the class, but that the proletariat will be hurled into massive confrontations with the bourgeois state in a context where the revolutionary organisation is too small and isolated to influence the course of events. This is why the ICC has argued since the mid-80s that the main danger today is not substitutionism but councilism, not the exaggeration of the role and capacities of the party but its underestimation or neglect.

Trotsky’s flirtation with the Mensheviks in 1903 was a serious mistake, and would result in a rupture between him and Lenin that lasted until the eve of the October revolution. But it was to prove temporary nonetheless. By the end of 1904 Trotsky had fallen out with the Mensheviks – mainly over their vision of the impending revolution: he could never stomach their view that the Russian working class would be obliged to subordinate its struggle to the demands of the bourgeois liberals. Trotsky’s fundamentally proletarian responses were to be demonstrated in the key events of 1905, in which he played an absolutely crucial role as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. But perhaps even more important were the theoretical conclusions he drew from this experience, in particular the theory of permanent revolution, and the elucidation of the historic role of the soviet form of class organisation. 

Trotsky rejoined Lenin and the Bolshevik party in 1917 and recognised, as we have seen, that in 1903 Lenin had been right on the organisational question. However, he never returned to the question in any depth, in particular to his mistakes in the two major contributions which we have just examined (Report of the Siberian delegation and Our political tasks).

Despite the importance he accorded to these problems of organisation, he continued to underestimate them throughout his later political life, unlike other opposition currents to Stalinism such as the Italian left. With hindsight, an examination of these disagreements still has much to teach us, not only on the questions themselves, but also on the way in which the polemic between true representatives of marxist thinking can give birth to a clarity that goes beyond the individual contributions of the thinkers themselves. As we will see in the next article, this was equally true of the debate on organisational questions between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

Amos

As we saw at the end of the previous article in this series (see International Review n°115), by the end of World War I the development of Zionist nationalism, and its manipulation by the British in their struggle against their imperialist rivals for domination in the Middle East, had introduced a new and growing factor of instability to the region.

In this article, we intend to examine how Zionist and Arab nationalism came to play an increasingly important role in the Middle East, both as pawns in the complex balance of forces between the great imperialist powers, and as weapons against the threat posed by the working class in the period following the Russian revolution.

Zionism used to sow divisions in the working class

The capitalist class has always sought to use and even to exaggerate ethnic, cultural, and religious difference within the working class in order to "divide and rule".

It is nonetheless true that in most countries, capitalism in its ascendant phase was able to integrate different ethnic and religious groups into society by proletarianising most of their members, thus substantially reducing racial, ethnic and religious divisions within the population. Modern Zionism however is profoundly marked by its emergence at the end of the ascendant phase of capitalism, once the formation of nation states had come to an end, and when no more “Lebensraum”[1] [15] was available for the formation of new nations, when the survival of capitalism was only possible through war and destruction.

In 1897, when the first Zionist congress in Basel put forward the claim to a Jewish national territory, the Left wing in the Second International had already begun to reject the formation of new separate territorial entities.

In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) rejected  the existence of an  independent, separate Jewish organisation within its ranks, demanding that the existing Jewish organisation - the Bund - should merge with the territorial Russian party. The second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 not only put the question of the Bund as the first point on the agenda, even before the debate on the statutes, but it “rejected as absolutely inadmissible in principle any possibility of federal relations between the RSDLP and the Bund”. The Bund itself, at the time also rejected the formation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.

The left wing of the Second International before World War I thus clearly rejected the formation of a national Jewish entity in Palestine.

 The birth of political Zionism was contemporaneous with an increase in Jewish immigration to the Middle East, and especially to Palestine. The first big wave of Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine after the pogroms and repression in Tsarist Russia in 1882; the second wave of refugees from Eastern Europe arrived following the defeat of the revolutionary struggles in Russia in 1905. In 1850 there were 12,000 Jews in Palestine, in 1882 their number rose to 35,000, while in 1914 their number stood at 90,000.

Britain was now planning to use the Zionists as a reliable ally in the region against its European rivals, most notably France, and against the Arab bourgeoisie. Britain was in the position to make promises to both the Zionists and the Pan-Arab bourgeoisie, playing to the hilt the card of “divide and rule”, a policy which Britain managed to practice successfully in the region until the period before World War II. During World War I both the Zionists and the incipient Pan-Arabists were promised they would gain Palestine in return for supporting Britain in the war. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised this to the Zionists at precisely the same time as T.S. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") of the British Foreign Office was promising it to the Arab tribal leaders in return for staging the Arab revolt against the collapsing Ottoman empire.

In 1922, when Britain took over the "Palestine Mandate" from the League of Nations, some 650,000 inhabitants were registered in Palestine, of which 560,000 were Muslims or Christians, while some 85,000 were Jewish. The Zionists now tried to increase the number of Jewish settlers as quickly as possible, regulating their influx for their imperialist purpose. A "colonial bureau" was established, which was to foster the Jewish colonisation of land in Palestine.

Zionism however was not merely a tool of British interests in the Middle East: it also pursued its own capitalist project of expansion, the establishment of its own Jewish state – a project which in decadent capitalism can only be implemented at the expense of its local rivals and which is inevitably linked to war and destruction.

The appearance of modern Zionism is thus a typical expression of the decadence of this system. It is an ideology which cannot be implemented without military methods, in other words Zionism without war, without total militarisation, without exclusion and “containment” is impossible.

Thus by supporting the establishment of a Jewish home, the British “protectors” gave the go-ahead for nothing else but ethnic cleansing, the violent displacement of the local inhabitants. This policy has become a permanent and widely applied practice in all war-torn countries. It has become a classical feature of decadence.[2] [16]

While the policy of ethnic cleansing and segregation was not limited to the territories of the former Ottoman empire, this region has become a centre for these bloody practices. Throughout the 20th century the Balkans have suffered a series of ethnic cleansings and massacres – all of them supported or manipulated by the European powers and the US. In Turkey the ruling class launched a terrible genocide against the Armenians – the bloodbath began in 1915 when Turkish troops slaughtered some 1.5 million Armenians, and continued after World War I. In the war between Greece and Turkey between March 1921 and October 1922 some 1.3 million Greeks were displaced from Turkey, and some 450,000 Turks were displaced from Greece.

The Zionist project of setting up its own territorial unit was necessarily based on segregation, division, discord, displacement, in short on military terror and annihilation – all this long before a Zionist state was proclaimed in 1948.

In fact Zionism is a particular form of settler colonialism, which is based not on the exploitation of local labour power, but on its exclusion, its displacement. Arab workers were not to be part of the "Jewish community", but were rigorously excluded on the basis of the slogan "Jewish soil, Jewish work, Jewish goods!".

The rules laid down by the British "protectorate" required that the Jewish settlers buy their land from the Arab landowners. Property rights were above all in the hands of rich Arabic landowners, for whom land was mainly an object of speculation. Moreover, they were willing to evict the Palestinian day labourers and tenant farmers if the new landlords wished it. This is how many Arab peasants and agricultural workers lost both their jobs and their land: the creation of a Jewish settlement not only meant being driven off the land, it meant being thrust into even greater misery.

Once the land was sold to Jewish settlers, the Zionists prohibited the resale of land to non-Jews. It was no longer just a piece of Jewish private property, a commodity, it had become a part of Zionist territory, which had to be defended militarily as a conquest.

In the economy, Arab workers were being expelled from their jobs. The Zionist trade union Histadrut, in close co-operation with other Zionist organisations, did everything to prevent Arab workers from selling their labour power to Jewish capitalists. The Palestinian workers were thus pushed into conflicts with the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants, who were also looking for jobs.

The establishment of a Jewish national home, as promised by the British "protectorate", meant nothing else but constant military confrontations between the Zionists and the Arab bourgeoisie – with the working class and peasants pulled onto this bloody terrain.

What was the position of the Communist International towards the imperialist situation in the Middle East and the formation of a "Jewish home"?

The policy of the Comintern - a disastrous dead-end

As Rosa Luxemburg had concluded during World War I: “In the era of raging imperialism there can no longer be an national wars. National interests only serve to fool the working masses, in order to push them into the arms of their deadly enemy- imperialism”. (Draft for the Junius pamphlet, adopted by the Spartacusbund on 1st January 1916).

When the Russian workers seized power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks tried to ease the pressure of the bourgeoisie and its White Armies on the working class, and win the support of the "toiling masses" in neighbouring countries, by spreading the slogan of "national self-determination", a position of the RSDLP which had already been criticised by the current around Rosa Luxemburg before World War I (see our the articles in the International Review n°34, 37, 42).  But instead of succeeding in weakening the pressure of the bourgeoisie and pulling the "toiling masses" over to their side, the policy of the Bolsheviks had the opposite, disastrous effect. Again, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution: “while Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself... Instead of warning the proletariat in the border countries against all forms of separatism as mere bourgeois traps, and instead of squashing the separatist movements in their germ with an iron hand, the use of which in THIS case truly corresponded to the sense and spirit of the proletarian dictatorship,  they did nothing but confuse the masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution” (The Russian revolution, Pathfinder Press).

As the revolutionary wave started to recede, in July 1920 the 2nd Congress of the Communist International began to develop an opportunist position on the national question in the hope of winning the support of the workers and peasants in the colonial countries. At this point, the support for allegedly "revolutionary" movements was not yet "unconditional" but remained dependent on certain criteria Point 11 of the Theses stresses: “A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements that are not really communist in the backward countries. The Communist International has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies only for the purpose of gathering the components of the future proletarian parties (...) and training them to be conscious of their special tasks (...) of fighting against the bourgeois democratic tendencies within their own nation. The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way, should even make an alliance with it, it may not, however, fuse with it, but must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo” (“Theses on the National Colonial Question adopted by the 2nd Congress of the Communist International, July 1920).

 Point 12 of the Theses went on: “It is necessary to unmask the continuous manipulation of the broad masses of all the workers and in particular of those of the backward countries and nations, which the imperialist powers commit with the help of the privileged classes by proclaiming the existence of states under the mask of politically independent states, which, however, are totally dependent on them economically, financially and militarily. A crass example of the manipulation of the working class of an oppressed nation, that the imperialism of the Entente and the bourgeoisie of the nations concerned are trying to achieve together, is the Palestine-affair of the Zionists (...) In today’s international situation there is no other salvation for the dependent and weak nations than an alliance with the Soviet republics.”

But as the isolation of the revolution in Russia grew and the Comintern[3] [17] and the Bolshevik party became more and more opportunist, the initial criteria for supporting certain ‘revolutionary movements’ were dropped. At its 4th Congress in November 1922, the International adopted the disastrous policy of the "united front", insisting that:

“The main task that all national-revolutionary movements have to fulfil, is the realisation of national unity and the establishment of independence as a state...”.

While the Communist Left around Bordiga in particular waged a bitter struggle against the policy of the "united front", the Comintern declared that “the refusal of the communists of the colonies to participate in the struggle against imperialist violation by claiming to ‘defend’ autonomous class interests, is opportunism of the worst kind, which can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the East” (the two thesis are from the Thesis  (?) on the Orient question – 4th Congress, Nov. 1922 – check for original translation).

But it was the International that was falling into opportunism. This opportunist course had already become visible at the Congress of the Peoples of the East, held at Baku in September 1920 shortly after the 2nd Congress of the Comintern. The Baku Congress addressed itself particularly to national minorities in countries adjacent to the besieged Soviet Republic, where British imperialism was threatening to strengthen its influence and thus create new springboards for armed intervention against Russia.

"As a result of colossal, barbarous slaughter, imperialist Britain has emerged as the sole and omnipotent master of Europe and Asia" ("Manifesto of the Congress to the Peoples of the East").  Starting from the mistaken assumption that "imperialist Britain has beaten and rendered powerless all its rivals, it has become the omnipotent master of Europe and Asia", the Comintern fatally underestimated the new level of imperialist rivalries, which the onset of capitalism's decadence had unleashed.

Had World War I not shown that all countries, whether large or small, had become imperialist? Instead, the Baku Congress focussed the perspective on a struggle against British imperialism. "Britain, the last powerful imperialist predator left in Europe, has spread its dark wings over the Eastern Moslem countries, and is trying to turn the peoples of the East into its slaves, into its booty. Slavery! Frightful slavery, ruin, oppression and exploitation is being brought by Britain to the peoples of the East. Save yourselves, peoples of the East! (...) Stand up and fight against the common enemy, imperialist Britain!" (idem). 

Concretely, the policy of support for the "national-revolutionary" movements and the call for an "anti-imperialist front" meant that Russia and the Bolshevik party, which was increasingly being absorbed into the Russian state, entered into an alliance with nationalist movements.

Already in April 1920 Kemal Ataturk[4] [18] had urged Russia to form an anti-imperialist alliance with Turkey. Shortly after the crushing of the workers’ rising of Kronstadt in March 1921, and the outbreak of war between Greece and Turkey, Moscow signed a treaty of friendship between Russia and Turkey. After repeated wars, for the first time a Russian government supported the existence of Turkey as a nation state.

The workers and peasants of Palestine were also pushed into a nationalist dead-end: “we consider the Arab national movement one of the essential forces which fight British colonialism. It is our duty to do all we can to help this movement in its struggle against colonialism.”

The Communist Party of Palestine, which was founded in 1922, appealed for support for the Mufti Hafti Amin Hussein. In 1922 the latter had become mufti of Jerusalem and Chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council; he was one of the most vocal in claiming an independent Palestinian state.

As in Turkey in 1922, in Persia, and 1927 in China, this policy of the Comintern turned out to be a disaster for the working class – because by supporting the local bourgeoisie, the Comintern drove the workers into the bloody arms of a bourgeoisie praised as “progressive”. The scope of the rejection of proletarian internationalism can be seen in an appeal of 1931 by the Comintern, which had by then become a mere tool of Stalinism in Russia: “We appeal to all communists to wage a struggle for national independence and for national unity, not only within the narrow boundaries which imperialism and the interests of the ruling family clans of each Arab country artificially created, but to wage this struggle on a broad pan-Arab front for the unity of the entire orient”.

The struggle within the Comintern, between opportunist concessions to movements of "national liberation" on the one hand, and the defence of proletarian internationalism on the other, can be seen in the opposition of different Jewish delegations to the Baku Congress

 A “delegation of Mountain Jews” could still give voice to a veritable contradiction in terms, declaring that “Only the victory of the oppressed over the oppressors will bring us to our sacred goal – the creation of a Jewish communist society in Palestine”. The Jewish Communist Party delegation (Poale Zion, previously linked to the Jewish Bund) put forward the call to “settle and colonise Palestine on communist principles”.

The Central Bureau of the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party of Russia vigorously opposed the dangerous illusions of setting up a Jewish communist community in Palestine and the way the Zionists used the Jewish project for their own imperialist purposes. Against the division between Jewish and Arab workers, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party of Russia underlined: “With the assistance of imperialism’s Zionists servants, Britain’s policy aims at drawing away from communism a portion of the Jewish proletariat by arousing in it national feelings and sympathies for Zionism (...) We also sharply condemn the attempts by certain Jewish left Socialist groups to combine communism with adherence to Zionist ideology. This is what we see in the program of the so-called Jewish Communist Party (Poale Zion). We believe that in the ranks of fighters for the rights and interests of the working people there is no place for groups that have in one form or another maintained Zionist ideology, concealing behind the mask of communism the nationalist appetites of the Jewish bourgeoisie. They are using communist slogans to exert bourgeois influence on the proletariat. We note that during all the time that the mass Jewish workers’ movement has existed, the Zionist ideology has been foreign to the Jewish proletariat (...) We declare that the Jewish masses envisage the possibility of their social-economic and cultural development not in the creation of a ‘national centre’ in Palestine, but in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the creation of socialist Soviet republics in the countries where they live.” (Baku Congress, September 1920).

But as tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinian workers and peasants grew, the degeneration of the Comintern as it slid into subservience to the Russian state led to a split between the increasingly stalinised Comintern and the communist left, on the Palestine question as on others. While the Comintern pushed the Palestinian workers to support "their own" national bourgeoisie against imperialism – the Left Communists recognised the effects of the British policy of divide and rule and the disastrous consequences of the Comintern position, which led the workers into a blind alley: “ British capital has managed to hide class antagonisms. The Arabs only see the yellow and white race and the Jewish as the protégés of the latter” (Proletarier, May 1925, paper of the German Communist Workers’ Party, KAPD).

“For a true revolutionary there is of course no ‘Palestine question’, there can only be a struggle of all the exploited of the Middle East, Arabs and Jewish workers included, and this struggle is part of  the general struggle of all the exploited of the whole world for communist revolution” (Bilan, no 32, 1936, Bulletin of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left; see the International Review n°110 for a reprint of two articles by Bilan on the Palestine question).

DE

The evolution of the class struggle, widespread attacks on the working class, and the advanced state of capitalism's decomposition

We are publishing below the report on the class struggle presented and ratified at the autumn 2003 meeting of the ICC’s Central Organ.[1] [24] This report confirms the organisation’s analysis of the persistence of the course towards class confrontations (a course opened by the international recovery in the class struggle in 1968), despite the serious setback to the proletariat’s consciousness since the collapse of the Eastern bloc; its task in particular was to evaluate the impact of the present and long-term aggravation of the economic crisis and of capitalism’s attacks on the working class. It analyses “The large scale mobilisations of spring 2003 in France and Austria [as] a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968”.

We are still a long way from an international wave of massive struggles, since on the international level the degree of workers’ militancy remains embryonic and very uneven. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasise that the obviously serious aggravation in the perspectives for capitalism’s evolution, in terms of the dismantling of the Welfare State, the increase in exploitation in all its forms, and the growth of unemployment, cannot help but encourage the development of working class consciousness. The report particularly insists on both the depth, and the slow rhythm of this recovery in the class struggle.

Since this report was written, the evolution of events has not invalidated its characterisation of the changing dynamic within the working class. Indeed, they have revealed a tendency, outlined in the report, for isolated expressions of the class struggle to break out of the limits imposed by the trades unions. The ICC’s territorial press has published accounts of such struggles towards the end of 2003, in Italian public transport and in the Post Office in Britain, which obliged the rank-and-file unionists to act to sabotage the struggle. There has also been a continued tendency – which the ICC had already identified prior to this report – towards the emergence of minorities in search of a revolutionary coherence.

The working class still has a long road ahead of it. Nevertheless, the struggles it will have to undertake will also be the crucible for a process of reflection, spurred on by the deepening crisis and encouraged by the intervention of revolutionaries, which will allow the proletariat to recover its class identity and self-confidence, develop its class solidarity and renew the ties with its historical experience.

The report on the class struggle to the 15th congress of the ICC[[2]] [25] underlined the quasi inevitability of a still undefeated generation of the proletariat, in response to the qualitative development of the crisis and attacks, responding with a slow but significant recovery of its militancy. It identified an embryonic, but tangible, broadening and deepening of the torturous and heterogeneous process of subterranean maturation of its consciousness. It insisted on the importance of the tendency towards more massive combats for the recuperation of class identity and self confidence. And it highlighted the fact that, with the evolution of the objective contradictions of the system, the crystallisation of a sufficient class consciousness within the proletariat – in particular concerning the re-conquest of a communist perspective - becomes more and more the decisive question for the future of humanity. It pointed out the historic importance and responsibility of the emergence of a new revolutionary generation, reaffirming that this process had already begun after 1989, despite the reflux in militancy and consciousness of the class as a whole. The report thus showed up the limits of this reflux, affirming the maintenance of an historic course towards massive class confrontations, and the capacity of the working class to overcome the set backs it has suffered. At the same time, the report placed this evolution in the context of our understanding of the ability of the ruling class to understand and respond to this perspective, as well as the terrible – and growing – negative effects of worsening capitalist decomposition. It thus concluded on the enormous responsibility of revolutionary organisations, both towards the effort of the working class to move forward and towards the new emerging generation of workers and revolutionaries.

Almost immediately after the 15th congress, and in the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the workers’ mobilisations in France (among the largest in that country since 1968) and in Austria (the most massive since World War II) rapidly confirmed these perspectives. In drawing a first balance sheet of these struggles, International Review no114 notes that these struggles have refuted the alleged disappearance of the working class. It asserts that the present attacks “constitute the yeast for a slow rising of the conditions for the massive struggles which will be necessary for the working class to recover its identity. Little by little, they will tear down the illusions in the possibility of reforming the system. It is the action of the masses themselves which will make possible the re-emergence of the consciousness of being an exploited class that bears within it a different historical perspective for society. This being said, the road the working class must travel in order to assert its own revolutionary perspective is no motorway: it will be terribly long and difficult, strewn with pitfalls that its enemy will innevitably put in its path.”. The perspectives drawn up by the report on class struggle to the 15th ICC Congress are confirmed not only by the international evolution of a new, searching revolutionary generation, but also by these workers’ struggles.

This report on the class struggle will essentially be an update of its predecessor, together with a closer examination of the long term significance of certain aspects of the recent proletarian combats.

2003: A turning point

The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968. Of course the 1990s had already seen sporadic but important manifestations of this militancy. However, the simultaneity of the movements in France and Austria, and the fact that in their aftermath the German trade unions organised the defeat of the metal workers in the east[3] [26] as a pre-emptive deterrent to proletarian resistance, show the evolution of the situation since the beginning of the new millennium. In reality, these events bring to light the growing impossibility for the class – despite its continuing lack of self confidence – to avoid the necessity of struggle faced with the dramatic worsening of the crisis and the increasingly massive and generalised character of the attacks.

But this change affects not only the militancy of the class, but also the mood within its ranks, the perspective within which its actions are placed. We are witnessing signs of loss of illusions not only concerning the typical mystifications of the 1990s (new technological revolution, individual enrichment via the stock exchange, the profitability of “wars for oil”), but also regarding the hopes of the post World War II generation about a better life for the coming generation and a decent pension for those who survive the horrors of wage labour.

As International Review n°114 recalls, the massive return of the proletariat in 1968 to the stage of history, and the reappearance of a revolutionary perspective, was in response, not only to the immediate level of attacks, but above all to the crumbling of the illusions in a better future which post war capitalism had appeared to offer. As opposed to what the vulgarised, mechanistic deformation of historical materialism would have us believe, such turning points in the class struggle – even if they are triggered off by an immediate worsening of material conditions, are always the result of underlying alterations in outlook towards the future. The bourgeois revolution in France exploded not with the emergence of the crisis of feudalism (which was already long standing) but when it became clear that the system of absolutism could no longer cope with that crisis. Similarly, momentum towards the first proletarian revolutionary wave began, not in August 1914, but when the illusions in a rapid military solution to the world war were dissipated.

This is why the understanding of their long term, historical significance is the main task posed by the recent struggles.

A slowly evolving social situation

Not every turning point in the class struggle is as significant, or as dramatic, as that of 1917 or 1968. These dates stand for alterations in the historic course, whereas 2003 merely marks the beginning of the end of a phase of reflux within the continuity of a course towards massive class confrontations. Between 1968 and 1989, the class struggle had already been marked by several ebbs and recoveries. In particular, the dynamic that began at the end of the 1970s rapidly culminated in the mass strike of the summer of 1980 in Poland. This altered the situation to such an extent that the bourgeoisie found itself forced into an abrupt change in its political orientation, putting the left into power the better to sabotage the class struggle from within.[4] [27] It is also necessary to distinguish the present recovery in working-class militancy from the recovery during 1970-80.

More generally, we must be able to distinguish between situations where, so to speak, the world wakes up the next morning and it is no longer the same world, and changes that take place at first almost unnoticed by the world at large, like the almost invisible alteration between the ebb and flow of the tide. The present evolution is undoubtedly of the latter kind. In this sense, the recent mobilisations by no means signify a spectacular immediate alteration of the situation, which would require a sudden and fundamental deployment of the political forces of the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, we are still far from the presence of an international wave of massive struggles. In France, the massive nature of the spring mobilisation was essentially restricted to one sector, that of education. In Austria the mobilisations were more widespread, but basically limited to a couple of days of action mainly in the public sector. The metal workers strike in eastern Germany was not at all an expression of immediate workers militancy, but a trap laid for one of the least combative sections of the class (still traumatised by the almost overnight mass unemployment that followed German “reunification”) in order to reinforce the general message that struggle doesn’t pay. Moreover, in Germany news of the movements in France and Austria were only partly blacked out, and in the end were used to enforce this deterrent message. In other central countries of the class struggle such as Italy, Britain, Spain or the Benelux countries there have as yet been no recent, more massive mobilisations. Outbreaks of militancy, such as that of British Airways staff at Heathrow, or of the Alcatel workers in Toulouse or of the workers in Puertollano (see World Revolution n°269), remain very sporadic and isolated.

In France itself, the insufficient development, and above all the absence of a more widespread militancy meant that the extension of the movement in the education section was not immediately on the agenda.

Therefore, both internationally and within each country, the level of militancy is still embryonic and very heterogeneous. Its most important manifestation to date – that of the teachers in France – was first and foremost the result of a provocation by the bourgeoisie, which consisted of a violent attack on one sector, in order that the workers’ response to the pensions’ “reforms”, which concerned all workers, should be limited to that one sector.[5] [28]

It is important to note that the class as a whole (including the searching groups, much of the proletarian milieu – essentially the groups of the communist left – and even many of our sympathisers) has proven enormously gullible in face of the large scale manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie. For the moment, the ruling class is not only well able to contain and isolate the first manifestations of workers unrest, it can also, with more or less success (more in Germany, less in France) use this still relatively weak will to struggle against the long term development of general militancy.

Most significant of all, however, is the fact that the bourgeoisie is not yet obliged to revert to the strategy of the left in opposition. In Germany, the country where the bourgeoisie has the most freedom of choice between a right or a left administration, on the occasion of the “Agenda 2010” offensive against the workers, 95% of the delegates of both SPD and the Greens came out in favour of maintaining the left government. Britain which, with Germany, was in the forefront of the world bourgeoisie during the 1970-80’s in putting the left into opposition in order to confront the struggle, is today perfectly capable of covering the social front with a left government.

In particular, as opposed to the situation around 1998, we can no longer speak of the deployment of left governments as a dominant orientation of the European bourgeoisie. Today this is not only due to decomposition, and in fact in countries like France and Austria the bourgeoisie has been able to momentarily respond to the problem of political populism. Whereas five years ago, the wave of left electoral victories was also connected to illusions about the economic situation, in the face of the present gravity of the crisis the bourgeoisie must be concerned about maintaining a certain governmental alternation, and thus playing out the card of electoral democracy. We should recall in this context that, already last year, the German bourgeoisie, while welcoming the re-election of Schröder, showed that it would also have been happy with a conservative Stoiber government.[6] [29]

The Bankruptcy of the System

The fact that the first skirmishes in a long and difficult process towards more massive struggles took place in France and Austria may not be as fortuitous as it might appear. If the French proletariat is known for its tempestuousness, which may partly explain it having taken the lead in 1968, the same can hardly be said for the post-war Austrian working class. What these two countries have in common, however, is that the recent massive attacks were centred on the question of pensions. It is also noteworthy that the German government, which presently is probably launching the most generalised attack in Western Europe, is still preceding extremely prudently on the pensions question. As opposed to this, France and Austria are among the countries where – due to a large extent to the political weakness of the bourgeoisie, particularly the right – the most concessions to the class on the pensions question were made, so that the raising of the pension entry age and the slashing of benefits now must be felt all the more bitterly.

The aggravation of the crisis has forced the bourgeoisie to raise the retirement age. In doing so, it has sacrificed a social shock-absorber, which played a large part in making the working class accept the increasingly intolerable levels of exploitation imposed in recent decades, and in hiding the full extent of unemployment.

The bourgeoisie responded to the return of mass unemployment in the 1970s with a series of state capitalist welfare measures, which made absolutely no sense from an economic standpoint and which are today one of the main factors underlying the enormous rise in state debt. The current dismantling of the Welfare State can only provoke a profound questioning of the real perspective that capitalism offers society.

Not all capitalist attacks provoke the same defensive reactions from the working class. It is easier to struggle against wage cuts or the lengthening of the working day, than against the reduction in the relative wage as a result of the growth in labour productivity (thanks to technical improvements), which is part of the process of capital accumulation.  As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “A wage cut, leading to the reduction of the real living standard of the workers, is a visible assault of the capitalists against the workers and as a rule (...) it will be replied to as such with immediate struggle, and in the best of cases be beaten back. As opposed to this, the lowering of the relative wage apparently takes place without the least personal involvement of the capitalists, and against this the workers, within the wage system, i.e. on the terrain of commodity production, have not the slightest possibility of struggle and resistance” (Introduction to national  economy).

The rise in unemployment poses the same difficulties for the working class as the intensification of exploitation (the attack on the relative wage). When unemployment affects young people who have never worked, it does not have the same explosive effect as do redundancies. The existence of mass unemployment tends, indeed, to inhibit the immediate struggles of the working class not only because it is a constant threat for a growing number of those still in work, but also because it tends to pose questions which cannot be answered without raising the issue of radically changing society. Concerning the struggle against the relative decline in wages, Luxemburg added: “The struggle against the lowering of the relative wage therefore also signifies the struggle against the commodity character of the labour force, in other words against the capitalist production as a whole. The struggle against the fall of the relative wage is thus no longer a struggle on the terrain of commodity production, but a revolutionary, insurrectional movement against the existence of this economy, it is the socialist movement of the proletariat” (idem).

The 1930s revealed how, with mass unemployment, absolute pauperisation explodes. Without the prior defeat of the proletariat, the “general, absolute law of capitalist accumulation” risked becoming its opposite, the law of the revolution. With the re-emergence of mass unemployment from the 1970s on, the bourgeoisie responded with measures of state capitalist welfarism; measures which economically make no sense, and which today are one of the main causes of the unfathomable public debt. The working class has an historical memory. Despite the loss of class identity, with the deepening crisis, this memory slowly begins to be activated. Mass unemployment and the slashing of the social wage today conjure up memories of the 1930s, visions of generalised insecurity and pauperisation. The demolition of the “Welfare State” will confirm the marxists’ predictions.

When Luxemburg writes that the workers, on the terrain of commodity production, have not the slightest possibility of resistance against the lowering of the relative wage, this is neither resigned fatalism, nor “the revolution or nothing” pseudo radicalism of the later Essen tendency of the KAPD, but the recognition that this struggle cannot remain within the boundaries of the “minimum programme” (immediate economic demands) and must be entered into with the greatest possible political clarity. In the 1980s the questions of unemployment and the increase in exploitation were already posed, but often in a narrow and local manner: “saving British miners’ jobs”, for example. Today the qualitative advance of the crisis can permit questions like unemployment, poverty, exploitation, to be posed more globally and politically, as are the questions of pensions, health, the maintenance of the unemployed, working conditions, the length of a working life and the generational link. This, in a very embryonic form, is the potential revealed by the recent movements in response to the pension attacks. This long term lesson is by far the most important one, of greater significance than questions such as the pace with which the immediate militancy of the class is likely to recover. In fact, as Luxemburg explains, being directly confronted with the devastating effects of the objective mechanisms of capitalism (mass unemployment, the intensification of relative exploitation) makes it more difficult to enter the struggle. For this reason, even if the development of struggles becomes slower and more torturous, the struggles themselves become politically more significant.

Going beyond the schemas of the past

Because of the deepening crisis, capitalism can no longer rely on its ability to make major material concessions in order to improve the image of the unions, as it did in France in 1995.[7] [30] Despite the present illusions of the workers, there are limits to the bourgeoisie’s ability to utilise nascent militancy for large scale manoeuvres: these limits are revealed by the fact that the unions are gradually being obliged to resume their role of sabotaging the struggle: “We thus find ourselves today in a classic schema of the class struggle: first the government attacks, and the trade unions preach union unity in order to start the massive movement of the workers behind the unions and under their control. Then the government opens negotiations where the unions divide amongst themselves in order to spread division and disorientation in the workers' ranks. This method, which plays on the trade unions’ division in the face of rising class struggle, has been thoroughly proven by the bourgeoisie as a means to preserve union control overall by concentrating as far as possible the loss in credibility on one or other trade union apparatus appointed in advance. This also means that the unions are once again put to the test, and that the inevitable development of the struggles to come once again poses the problem for the working class of the confrontation with its enemies in order to assert its class interests and the needs of its struggle” (International Review n°114, op. cit.).

Although today, the bourgeoisie has virtually no difficulty in the execution of its large-scale manoeuvres against the working class, the deteriorating economic situation will tend to cause increasingly frequent, though sporadic, spontaneous and isolated, confrontations between the workers and the unions.

The return to a classic schema of confrontation with union sabotage is henceforth on the agenda, and will make it easier for workers to refer to the lessons of the past.

But this should not lead us to a schematic application of the framework of the 1980s to the struggles and our intervention today. The present combats are those of a class which has still to recover even a rudimentary class identity. The other side of the coin of being unaware of belonging to a social class is not recognising the confrontation with the class enemy. And although these workers still have an elementary sense of the need for solidarity (since this is basic to the condition of the proletariat), they have still to regain a vision of what class solidarity really is.

To put through its pension “reforms” in France, the bourgeoisie had no need for the unions to sabotage the extension of the struggle. The core of its strategy was to make the teachers adopt their own specific demands at the centre of the struggle. In order to put this strategy into operation, the teachers – who had already been seriously hit by previous attacks – were subjected to another, specific attack: the proposed decentralisation of the employment of the non-teaching personnel, around which the whole mobilisation in effect polarised. The adoption of core demands which in fact ensure the struggle’s defeat is always a sign of weakness in the working class, which it must overcome if it is to take any significant steps forward. We can see an example a contrario of this necessity in the struggles in Poland in 1980, where the illusions in Western-style democracy made it possible to introduce the demand for “free trade unions” at the heart of the movement, and so open the door to its defeat and repression.

During the struggles of spring 2003 in France, it was the loss of acquisitions about the existence of the class and the nature of its solidarity which led the teachers to accept that their specific demands should come before the general question of the attack on pensions. Revolutionaries must not be afraid to recognise this weakness of the class, and adjust their intervention accordingly.

The report on the class struggle to the 15th Congress strongly insisted on the importance of the resurgence of militancy for the advance of the proletariat. But this has nothing in common with a workerist cult of militancy in itself. In the 1930s the bourgeoisie was able to divert workers’ militancy down the path of imperialist war. The importance of struggles today is that they can be the scene for the development of class consciousness. The basic issue at stake – the recovery of class identity – is an extremely modest one. But behind class identity, there is the question of class solidarity – the only alternative to the mad competitive bourgeois logic of each for himself. Behind class identity there is the possibility of reappropriating the lessons of past struggles, and reactivating the collective memory of the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie, for its part, does not allow itself to be lulled by the “modesty” of this issue. Until now, through a “left” and democratic avoidance of provocations, it has done what it can to avoid triggering off the kind of movements which would remind workers that they belong together. The lesson of 2003 is that, with the acceleration of the crisis, workers combat will nonetheless inevitably develop. It is not this militancy as such which worries the ruling class, but the risk that these conflicts generate class consciousness. The bourgeoisie is not less but more worried about this than in the past – precisely because the crisis is graver and more global. Its main concern is that, whenever struggles cannot be avoided, that they should not contribute to, but damage the development of the self confidence, solidarity and reflection of the class. During the 1980s, in face of workers’ combats, the ICC learnt to identify, in each particular case, the brake on the advancement of the movement, around which the confrontation with the left and the unions could take place. Often this was the question of extension. Concrete motions, presented to general assemblies, to go towards the other workers – this was the dynamite with which we attempted to clear the way for the advancement of the cause. The central questions of today – what is the workers’ struggle, what are its goals and methods, who are its opponents, what are the obstacles it must overcome? – appear to be the antithesis of the 1980s: more “abstract” and “backward”, less immediately realisable, a return even to the point of departure for the whole workers’ movement. It demands of our intervention more patience, a longer term vision, more profound political and theoretical capacities. In reality, the central questions of today are not more abstract, they are more global. There is nothing abstract or backward in intervening, at a workers assembly, on the question of the demands of the movement, or unmasking the way the unions prevent a real perspective of extension. The global character of these questions shows the way forward. Before 1989, the proletariat failed to sufficiently advance precisely because it posed the issues of class struggle too narrowly. And it is because it began to feel, from the mid-1990s onwards, that the proletariat – through the minorities within it – had begun to feel the need for this more global vision, that the bourgeoisie, aware of the danger that this could represent, developed the anti-globalisation movement to provide a false answer to these questions.

Moreover, the left of capital, especially the leftists, have become masters of the art of employing the effects of decomposition against workers struggles. If the economic crisis favours the posing of questions as globally as possible, decomposition has the opposite effect. During the spring 2003 movement in France, and the steel workers’ strike in Germany, we saw how the union activists, in the name of “extension” or “solidarity” cultivated the mentality of minorities of workers attempting to impose the struggle on other workers, and blaming them for the defeat of the movement when they refuse to be dragged into action.

In 1921, during the March Action in Germany, the tragic scenes of the unemployed trying to prevent workers from entering the factories was an expression of desperation in face of the retreat of the revolutionary wave. The recent calls of French leftists to block the public transport taking employees to work, or to prevent pupils from going to their exams; the spectacle of west German unionists wanting to prevent east German steel workers – who no longer wanted a long strike for a 35 hour week – going back to work, are dangerous attacks against the very idea of the working class and its solidarity. They are all the more dangerous because they feed on the impatience, immediatism and mindless activism which decomposition breeds. We are warned: if the coming struggles are a potential crucible of consciousness, the bourgeoisie is out to convert them into graveyards of proletarian reflection.

Here we see tasks worthy of communist intervention: To “patiently explain” (Lenin) why solidarity cannot be imposed, but requires mutual confidence between the different parts of the class. To explain why the left, in the name of workers’ unity, are out to destroy workers’ unity.

The basis of our confidence in the proletariat

All the components of the proletarian political milieu agree on the importance of the crisis for the development of workers militancy. But the ICC is the only current presently existing that understands how the crisis stimulates the class consciousness of the broad masses. The other groups restrict the role of the crisis to the purely physical compulsion to struggle which it exercises. For the councilists, the crisis more or less forces the class to make the revolution. For the Bordigists the awakening of class instinct carries the party as the bearer of class consciousness to power. For the IBRP, revolutionary consciousness is introduced from outside by the party. Along the searching groups, the autonomists (who take from Marxism the idea that the proletariat must be autonomous from other classes) and the operaists believe that the revolution is the product of a workers’ revolt, and of the individual desire for a better life.

These incorrect approaches have been reinforced by the incapacity of these currents to understanding that the failure of the proletariat to respond to the 1929 crisis was due to the prior defeat of the revolutionary wave begun in Russia in 1917. One of the consequences of this inability is the continuing theorisation of imperialist war rather than the crisis as creating the most favourable conditions for revolution (see our article on the alternative of “War or Revolution” in International Review n°30).

As opposed to these visions, Marxism poses the question as follows: “It is an acknowledged fact that the scientific explanation of socialism bases itself on three results of capitalist development: above all on the growing anarchy of the capitalist economy, making its demise an unavoidable consequence, secondly on the progressive socialisation of the process of production, creating the positive germs of the future social order, and thirdly on the growing power and class knowledge of the proletariat, constituting the active factor of the upcoming upheaval”.[8] [31]

Underlying the link between these three aspects, and the role of the crisis therein, Luxemburg writes: “Social Democracy deducts its final goal neither from the victorious violence of a minority, nor from the numerical superiority of the majority, but from economic necessity and from the understanding of this necessity, leading to the overthrowing of capitalism by the popular masses, and which expresses itself above all in capitalist anarchy”.[9] [32]

Whereas reformism (and nowadays the left of capital) promises improvements through the intervention of the state, through laws protecting the workers, the crisis helps to reveal that “the wage system is not a legal relationship, but a purely economic one” (idem).

It is through the attacks it suffers that the class as a whole begins to understand the real nature of capitalism. This, Marxist point of view, does not at all deny the role of revolutionaries and of theory in this process. In Marxist theory the workers will find the confirmation and explanation of what they are themselves experiencing.

In the “Theses on Decomposition” (published for the first time in International Review no 62 and republished in International Review no107) as well as in the article “The decomposition of capitalism” (published in the International Review no57) we argued that capitalism had entered into a new and final stage of its decadence, that of its decomposition, a phase characterised by the aggravation and culmination of all the contradictions of the system.

Unfortunately, the effort by our organisation to analyse this important evolution in the life of capitalism either aroused the indifference of certain groups of the Communist Left, or met with complete incomprehension, or accusations of abandoning Marxism and the like.

The most caricatural attitude was probably that of the Parti Communiste International (PCI, which publishes Le Proletaire and Il Comunista). Thus, in a recently published pamphlet, “The International Communist Current: against the current of Marxism and the class struggle”, this organisation described our analysis of decomposition in these terms: “Neither will we make a definitive critique here of this hazy theory, content to note that this brainwave has nothing to do with Marxism and materialism”

And this is all that the PCI finds to say on our analysis even when it consecrates 70 pages to polemicising with our organisation.

It is however a primary responsibility for an organisation that pretends to defend the historic interests of the working class to undertake a theoretical reflection on the conditions of the class’ combat and to criticise those analyses of society that it judges erroneous, particularly when the latter are defended by other revolutionary organisations.[1] [43]

The proletariat and its vanguard minorities need a global framework to understand the situation. Without it they are condemned to only give blow-by-blow and empirical responses to events, and to be buffeted by the consequences of them.

For its part, the Communist Workers' Organisation (CWO), the British branch of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), has taken up our analysis of the decomposition of capitalism in three articles in its publications.[2] [44] We will return later to the precise arguments put forward by the CWO. We note for the moment that the principle critique which is made of our analysis of decomposition is quite simply that it is situated outside of Marxism.

Faced with this type of judgement (which the CWO is not alone in making) we consider it necessary to argue for the Marxist roots of the theory of the decomposition of capitalism, to make it precise and to develop different aspects and implications. That is why we are undertaking a series of articles entitled “Understanding Decomposition” that is in continuity with those we produced some years ago entitled “Understanding the decadence of capitalism”[3] [45]. In the last analysis decomposition is a phenomenon of decadence and cannot be understood outside of it.

Decomposition, phenomenon of capitalist decadence

The Marxist method provides both a materialist and historical framework to characterise the different moments in the life of capitalism, whether in its phase of ascendance or of decadence.

“In fact, just as capitalism itself traverses different historic periods - birth, ascendancy, decadence - so each of these periods itself consists of several distinct phases. For example, capitalism's ascendant period can be divided into the successive phases of the free market, shareholding, monopoly, financial capital, colonial conquest, and the establishment of the world market. In the same way, the decadent period also has its history: imperialism, world wars, state capitalism, permanent crisis, and today, decomposition. These are different and successive aspects of the life of capitalism, each one characteristic of a specific phase, although they may have pre-dated it, and/or continued to exist after it.”[4] [46] The best known illustration of this phenomenon undoubtedly concerns imperialism which “properly speaking begins after 1870, when world capitalism configures itself in a significantly new way: the period of the constitution of national states in Europe and North America is completed and in place of Britain as the world factory, we have several national capitalist factories developing in competition with it for the domination of the world market - in competition not only for the internal markets of others but also for the colonial market”. (“On imperialism”, International Review no19). However, “it is only in the decadent period that imperialism became predominant within society and in international relations, to the point where revolutionaries of the period identified it with the decadence of capitalism itself”.[5] [47]

Moreover, the period of capitalist decadence has contained since its origin elements of decomposition characterised by the dislocation of the social body and the putrefaction of economic, political and ideological structures. Nevertheless, it is only at a certain stage of this decadence and in well-determined circumstances that decomposition becomes a factor, if not the decisive factor, in the evolution of society, opening up a specific phase, that of the decomposition of society. This phase is the completion of the phases that have preceded it ititduring decadence attested by the history of this period.

The first congress of the Communist International (March 1919) argued that capitalism had entered into a new epoch, that of it's historic decline. It identified in the latter the germs of the internal decomposition of the system: “A new epoch is born: the epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat” (Platform of the CI). Humanity as a whole is faced with the threat of destruction if capitalism survives the proletarian revolution:

“Humanity, whose whole culture has been devastated, is threatened with destruction (...) The old capitalist 'order' is no more. It can no longer exist. The final result of the capitalist process of production is chaos”. (ibid) “Now its not only social pauperisation, but a physiological, biological impoverishment that is presented to us in all its hideous reality” (Manifesto of the CI to the proletariat of the entire world).

This new epoch carries the stigmata of the historical event which opened it, the First World War: “If free competition, as regulator of production and distribution, was replaced in the principle areas of the economy by the system of trusts and monopolies several dozen years before the war, the very course of the war has transferred the role of regulating and directing the economy to the military and governmental powers.” (ibid). What is described here is not a conjunctural phenomenon linked to the supposed exceptional character of the war situation, but a permanent and irreversible tendency: “If the absolute subjection of political power to financial capital has driven humanity into the imperialist butchery, this butchery has allowed financial capital not only to militarise the state, but to militarise itself, in a way that it can no longer fulfil its essential economic functions except by blood and iron (...) The statisation of economic life, against which liberal capitalism protests so much, is an accomplished fact. It is no longer possible to return to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other capitalist octopuses, let alone to return to free competition. The question to know is uniquely what form statised production will take: the imperialist state or the state of the victorious proletariat”. (ibid)

The following eight decades have only confirmed this decisive turning point in the life of society. They have seen: the massive development of state capitalism and the war economy after the crisis of 1929; the Second World War; the reconstruction and beginning of an insane nuclear arms race; the “cold” war which left as many dead as in the two world wars combined; and, from 1967, which marked the end of the post-war reconstruction, the progressive collapse of the world economy into a crisis which has so far lasted more than 30 years and been accompanied by an endless spiral of military convulsions. A world, in sum, which offers no other perspective than an interminable agony created by destruction, poverty and barbarism.

Such an historical evolution can only favourise the decomposition of the capitalist mode of production at all levels of social life: the economy, political life, morality, culture, etc. This is what is illustrated on the one hand by the irrational savagery of Nazism with its extermination camps and of Stalinism with its gulags; and on the other by the cynicism and moral hypocrisy of their democratic adversaries with their murderous bombardments responsible for hundreds of thousands of victims amongst the German population (in the town of Dresden particularly) and in Japan (particularly the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) even though these two countries had already been defeated. In 1947 the Communist Left of France argued that the tendencies toward decomposition within capitalism were the product of its insurmountable contradictions: “The bourgeoisie is faced with its own decomposition (...) it always looks for the lesser evil, it patches up here, and stops a leak there, all the while knowing that the storm is gaining more force”. (Internationalisme no23, “Instability and capitalist decadence”).

Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism

The contradictions and manifestations of decadent capitalism, which successively mark its different phases, don't disappear with time, but continue. The phase of decomposition which opened up in the 80s appeared “as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it.”[6] [48]

Thus the opening of the phase of decomposition (Decomposition[7] [49]) doesn't appear like a bolt from the blue, but is the crystallisation of a slow process at work in the preceding stages of capitalist decadence, which becomes, at a given moment, the central factor of the situation. Thus the elements of decomposition which, as we have seen, accompany the whole of capitalist decadence, cannot be put on the same level, quantitatively and qualitatively, as those that appeared after the 1980s. Decomposition is not simply a “new phase” succeeding the others within the period of decadence (imperialism, world wars, state capitalism) but is the final phase of the system.

This phenomenon of generalised decomposition, of the putrefaction of society is caused by the fact that the contradictions of capitalism can only worsen, the bourgeoisie being incapable of offering the least perspective to the whole of society and the proletariat unable to affirm its own perspective in an immediate way.

In class societies, individuals act and work without really consciously controlling their own lives. But that doesn't at all mean that society can function in a totally blind way, without orientation or perspective. “In fact, no mode of production can live, develop, maintain itself on a viable basis and ensure social cohesion, if it’s unable to present a perspective for the whole of the society which it dominates. And this is especially true of capitalism, which is the most dynamic mode of production in history.” [8] [50]

This growing loss of compass to guide the fate of society is an important difference between the present phase of decomposition of capitalism and the period of the Second World War. The second great war was a terrifying manifestation of the barbarism of the capitalist system. But barbarism is not synonymous with decomposition. At the heart of the barbarism of the Second World War society was not lacking an “orientation” since the capitalist states were able to hold the whole of society in an iron grip and mobilise it for war. At this level, the cold war had similar characteristics: the whole of social life was contained by the states engaged in a bloody struggle between the two blocs. The whole of society was enveloped by an “organised” barbarism. By contrast, what has changed since the opening of the phase of decomposition, is that “organised” barbarism is replaced by an anarchic and chaotic barbarism, dominated by each for himself, the instability of alliances, the gangsterisation of international relations...

Decomposition and class struggle

For Marxism “the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations, each of which at the same time denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind” (Marx, Wage Labour and Capital in Collected Works Vol 9, p.212). But equally these relations of production constitute the framework within which the class struggle acts as a motor force of their evolution and that of humanity: “…economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development….” (F. Engels, Preface to the 1883 German edition of the Communist Manifesto in Collected Works Vol 26, p.118).

The links between, on the one hand, the relations of production and the development of the productive forces and, on the other hand, the class struggle has never been understood by Marxism in a simple, mechanical way: the first being determinant and the second determined. On this question in response to the Left Opposition, Bilan warned against the vulgar materialist interpretation of the fact that “the whole evolution of history can be reduced to the law of the evolution of the economic and productive forces”, the new element of Marxism in relation to all the historical theories which preceded it and fully confirmed by the evolution of capitalist society. For such a vulgar materialist interpretation, “the productive mechanism represents not only the source of the formation of classes but it automatically determines the action and policy of classes and the men that constitute it; thus the problem of social struggles would be singularly simplified: men and classes would only be puppets operated by economic forces.” (“Principles, weapons of the revolution”, Bilan no5)

Social classes don't act according to a scenario fixed in advance by economic evolution. Bilan adds that “the action of classes is only possible as a result of a historic intelligence of the role and means appropriate to their triumph. Classes, their birth and disappearance are due to an economic mechanism, but to triumph (...) [they] must be able to give themselves a political and organic configuration, without which, even though they are selected by the evolution of the productive forces, they risk remaining prisoners of the old class which, in its turn - to resist - imprisons the course of economic evolution” ibid. [9] [51]

At this stage, two very important conclusions must be drawn.

Firstly, while being determinant, the economic mechanism is also determined because the resistance of the old class - condemned by history - imprisons the course of its evolution. Humanity today has behind it nearly a century of the decadence of capitalism which illustrates this reality. In order to avoid brutal collapses and to assume the constraints of the war economy, state capitalism has cheated the law of value in a permanent way[10] [52] while locking the economy into more and more insurmountable contradictions. Far from being able to resolve the contradictions of the capitalist system, such escapism has had no other consequence than to aggravate these contradictions considerably. According to Bilan, it has imprisoned the course of historical evolution in a Gordian knot of insurmountable contradictions.

In the second place, the revolutionary class, while being invested by history with the mission of overthrowing capitalism, has not, until now, been able to accomplish this historic mission. The long period of the past thirty years is a luminous confirmation of this analysis of Bilan which is situated along the same line as all the positions of Marxism. If the historical resurgence of the proletariat in 1968 has prevented the bourgeoisie from dragging society toward generalised war, it has not however been able to orientate its defensive struggles toward an offensive combat for the destruction of capitalism.

This setback, which is the result of a series of general and historic factors that we cannot analyse here,[11] [53] has been determinant in the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition.

Moreover, if Decomposition is the result of the difficulties of the proletariat, it also contributes actively to their aggravation: “the effects of decomposition…have a profoundly negative effect on the proletariat’s consciosuness, on its sense of itself as a class, since in all their different aspects - the gang mentality, racism, criminality, drug addiction, etc - they serve to atomise the class, increase the divisions within its ranks, and dissolve it into the general social rat race”.[12] [54] In fact:

- intermediate classes like the petit bourgeoisie, or even the lumpens, tend, under Decomposition to have a behaviour that is more and more linked to the worst aberrations of capitalism or even of systems that preceded it. Their revolts without hope or future may contaminate the proletariat or drag some sectors of the latter with them;

- the general atmosphere of moral and ideological decomposition affects the capacities of the proletariat to become conscious, to unify, to solidarise and generate confidence: “a Chinese wall does not separate the working class from the old bourgeois society. When the revolution breaks out it's not like taking away a dead man and burying him. At the moment when the old society perishes, one cannot gather its remains and put them in a coffin. It decomposes among us, it rots, and its putrefaction surrounds us. No great revolution in the world has been accomplished otherwise and never can be. That is why we must fight to safeguard the germs of the new [world] within this stinking, poisonous atmosphere of a body in decomposition”. [13] [55]

- the bourgeoisie may utilise the effects of decomposition against the proletariat. That has been particularly the case at the time of the collapse, without war or revolution, of the old soviet bloc, a major and typical manifestation of Decomposition. This event allowed the bourgeoisie to unleash an enormous anti-communist campaign resulting in an important reflux in consciousness and combativity in the proletarian ranks. All the effects of this campaign are still far from having been overcome.

Marxism against fatalism

The passage from one mode of production to a superior mode of production is not the fatal product of the evolution of the productive forces. This passage can only be effected through a revolution by which the new dominant class overthrows the old and constructs new relations of production.

Marxism defends historical determinism but that doesn't mean that communism will be the inevitable result of the evolution of capitalism. Such a vision is a vulgar materialist deformation of Marxism. In fact, for Marxism historical determinism signifies that:

a) A revolution is only possible when the preceding mode of production has exhausted all its capacities to develop the productive forces: “A social order never perishes before all the productive forces for which it is broadly sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the womb of the old society.” (Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy. Peking 1976)

b) Capitalism cannot return to the past (toward feudalism or other pre-capitalist modes of production): either it is replaced by the proletarian revolution, or it drags humanity to destruction.

c) Capitalism is the last class society. The “theory” defended by the group “Socialism or Barbarism” or by certain splits from Trotskyism[14] [56] announcing the rise of a neither capitalist nor communist “third society” is an aberration from the point of view of Marxism. The latter strongly underlines the fact that The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production…The prehistory of human society therefore closes with this social formation”. (ibid).

Marxism has always posed in alternate terms the denouement of historical evolution: either the revolutionary class imposes itself and opens the way to the new mode of production, or society falls into anarchy and barbarism. The Communist Manifesto shows how the class struggle manifests itself through “an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (Collected Works, vol.6, p.482)

Against all the idealist errors which try to separate the proletariat from communism, Marx defines the latter as its “real movement” and insists on the fact that the workers “have no ideals to realise, but to set free elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.” (The Civil War in France in Collected Works, vol.22, p.335)”[15] [57]. The class struggle of the proletariat is not the “instrument” of an “historical destiny” (the realisation of communism). In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels strongly criticise such a vision: “History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution.” (Collected Works, vol. 5, p.50).

Thus, applied to the analysis of the actual phase of capitalism's evolution, the Marxist method permits us to understand that, despite its real existence, Decomposition is not a “rational” phenomenon in historical evolution. Decomposition is not a necessary link in the chain leading to communism. On the contrary, it contains the danger of a progressive erosion of the material bases of the latter. Firstly because Decomposition signifies a slow process of destruction of the productive forces up to the point at which communism would no longer be possible: “Thus we cannot say, as the anarchists do for example, that a socialist perspective would still be open if the productive forces were in regression. We cannot ignore the level of their development. Capitalism has been a necessary, indispensable stage towards the establishment of socialism to the extent that it has sufficiently developed the objective conditions for it. But, as this text will attempt to show, just as in its present phase capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, so the prolongation of capitalism in this phase will lead to the disappearance of the conditions for socialism”[16] [58]

Consequently, because it erodes the bases of the unity and identity of the proletarian class: “The process of disintegration created by massive and prolonged unemployment particularly among the young, by the break up of the traditional combative concentrations of the working class in the industrial heartlands, all that reinforces the atomisation and the competition among the workers (...) The fragmentation of the identity of the class during the last decade in particular is in no way an advance but a clear manifestation of the decomposition which carries profound dangers for the working class”.[17] [59]

The class struggle, motor of history

The historical stage of Decomposition carries within it the threat of the obliteration of the conditions for the communist revolution. In this sense it is no different from the other stages of the decadence of capitalism that also contained such a threat as put forward by revolutionaries at the time. In relation to the latter, there are however a certain number of differences:

a) the war led to a reconstruction, while the process of the destruction of humanity, under the effects of Decomposition, even though long and disguised, is irreversible;[18] [60]

b) the threat of destruction was linked to the outbreak of a third world war, while today, in Decomposition, different causes (local wars, destruction of ecological equilibrium, slow erosion of the productive forces, progressive collapse of the productive infrastructure, the gradual destruction of social relationships) act in a more or less simultaneous way as factors of the destruction of humanity;

c) the threat of destruction presented itself in the brutal form of a new world war, while today, it is cloaked in a less visible costume, more insidious, much more difficult to appreciate, and even less easy to combat. [See note * at the end of the article].

d) the fact that decomposition is the central factor of the evolution of the whole of society signifies, as we have already argued, that it has a permanent and direct impact on the proletariat at all levels: consciousness, unity, solidarity, etc.

However, “understanding the serious threat that the historical phenomenon of decomposition poses for the working class and for the whole of humanity should not lead the class, and especially its revolutionary minorities, to adopt a fatalist attitude.”[19] [61] In fact:

- the proletariat has not suffered important defeats and its combativity remains intact;

- the same factor which is the fundamental cause of decomposition - the inexorable aggravation of the crisis - is also “the essential stimulant for the class' struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot”. [20] [62]

But, to the extent that only the communist revolution can definitively overcome the threat of decomposition weighing on humanity, the workers struggles of resistance to the effects of the crisis are not sufficient. In fact, the consciousness of the crisis, in itself, cannot resolve the problems and difficulties that the proletariat confronts and must confront more and more. That's why it must develop:

- “an awareness of what is at stake in the present historical situation, and in particular of the mortal danger that social decomposition holds over humanity;

- its determination to continue, develop and unite its class combat;

- its ability to spring the many traps that the bourgeoisie, however decomposed itself, will not fail to set in its path. “[21] [63]

Decomposition obliges the proletariat to develop its weapons of consciousness, unity, self-confidence, its solidarity, its will and its heroism, the subjective factors which Trotsky, in the History of the Russian Revolution considered were enormously important in the victory of the latter. On all the fronts of the class struggle of the proletariat (Engels spoke of three fronts: economic, political, and theoretical), revolutionaries and the most advanced minorities of the proletariat must cultivate and develop these qualities in a profound and extensive way.

The phase of decomposition reveals that, of the two factors which direct historical evolution - the economic mechanism and the class struggle - the first is more than mature and contains the danger of the destruction of humanity. As a result the second factor becomes decisive. More than ever, the class struggle of the proletariat is the motor of history. Consciousness, unity, confidence, solidarity, will and heroism, qualities that the proletariat is capable of raising through its class struggle to a completely different and superior level to other classes in history, are the forces which, developed to the highest degree, will allow it to overcome the dangers contained in Decomposition and to open the way to the Communist liberation of humanity.

C.Mir

Footnote

* In a leaflet entitled “Questions to the militants and sympathisers of the ICC today” and distributed at the door of our public meetings as well as in the pacifist demonstration of 20th March in Paris, the parasitic self-styled “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (composed of some ex-members of our organisation) commented on extracts from the resolution on the International Situation adopted by our 15th International Congress.

First extract:

“Although capitalism's decomposition results from this historic ‘stand-off’ between the classes, this situation cannot be a static one. The economic crisis, which is at the root both of the drive towards war and of the proletariat's response, continues to deepen; but in contrast to the 1968-89 period, when the outcome of these class contradictions could only be world war or world revolution, the new period opens up a third alternative: the destruction of humanity not through an apocalyptic war, but through the gradual advance of decomposition, which could over a period of time undermine the proletariat's capacity to respond as a class, and could equally make the planet uninhabitable through a spiral of regional wars and ecological catastrophes. To wage a world war, the bourgeoisie would first have to directly confront and defeat the major battalions of the working class, and then mobilise them to march with enthusiasm behind the banners and ideology of new imperialist blocs; in the new scenario, the working class could be defeated in a less overt and direct manner, simply by failing to respond to the crisis of the system and allowing itself to be dragged further and further into the cesspool of decay.” (emphasis by the FICCI)

Commentary of the FICCI: “This clearly opportunist introduction of a 'third way', is opposed to the classical thesis of Marxism of an historic alternative. As with Bernstein, Kautsky, and their epigones, the very idea of a third way is opposed to the historic alternative, to the 'simplism' according to opportunism of 'war or revolution'. Here there is an explicit, open, revision of the a classical thesis of the workers' movement...”.

Second extract:

“What has changed with decomposition is the possible nature of a historic defeat, which may not come through a frontal clash between the major classes so much as a slow ebbing away of the proletariat's ability to constitute itself as a class, in which case the point of no return will be harder to discern, coming as it would be before any final catastrophe. This is the deadly danger faced by the class today.”

Commentary of the FICCI: “Here the opportunist, revisionist tendency 'liquidates' the class struggle. “

In fact, what is expressed in these lines of the FICCI is the deliberate intention of this regroupment to harm our organisation (for want of destroying it) by any means. Effectively the members of the FICCI, who after several decades as militants within our organisation have lost their communist convictions and in blaming the loss on the ICC for this loss are ready to stoop to the lowest acts to achieve their ends: theft, police informing (see our article on this subject “The police methods of the FICCI” on our Internet site and in our territorial press) and obviously the most shameful lies. The ICC has in no way “revised” its positions since the white knights of the FICCI are no long there to prevent it “degenerating”.

Thus the 13th Congress of the ICC adopted, with the full support of the militants who would later form the FICCI, a report on the class struggle where one can read:

“The dangers of the new period for the working class and the future of its struggle cannot be underestimated. While the class struggle was definitely a barrier to war in 70s and 80s, the day to day struggle does not halt or slow down the process of decomposition. To launch a world war, the bourgeoisie would have had to have inflicted a series of major defeats on the central battalions of the working class; today the proletariat faces the more long term, but in the end no less dangerous threat of a 'death by a thousand cuts', in which the working class is increasingly ground down by the whole process to the point where it has lost the ability to affirm itself as a class, while capitalism plunges from catastrophe to catastrophe (local wars, ecological breakdown, famine, disease, etc.).” (International Review no99)

Moreover, in the report on the class struggle adopted by the 14th Congress of the ICC in the spring of 2001 (with the support of the same future members of the FICCI) one can read:

“...this evolution has created a situation in which the bases of the new society may be sapped without world war or thus without the necessity to mobilise the proletariat for war. In the preceding scenario, it was a nuclear world war which would have definitively compromised the possibility of communism (...) The new scenario envisages the possibility of a slower but no less deadly slide into the situation where the proletariat would be fragmented beyond all possible repair and where the natural and economic bases for the social transformation would be equally ruined through a growth of local and regional military conflicts, ecological catastrophes and social collapse” (International Review no107).

As for the resolution adopted by this congress, it evoked in point 3 “the danger that the most insidious process of decomposition may bury the class without capitalism inflicting a frontal defeat upon it.” (International Review no106).

Were the glorious defenders of the “true ICC” (as they define themselves) asleep when these documents were adopted or did they raise their arms mechanically to give it their support? If the former then they must have been asleep for more than 11 years since in a report adopted in January 1990 by the central organ of the ICC (and which these elements supported without the least reserve) one can read: “Even if world war is no longer a threat to humanity at present, and perhaps for good, it may be replaced by the decomposition of society. This is all the more true in that, while the outbreak of world war requires the proletariat's adherence to the bourgeoisie's ideals (...) decomposition has no need at all of this adherence to destroy society”. (International Review no61).