March 2019 marks the centenary of the foundation of the Third, Communist International, one of the high points of the international revolutionary wave which swept the globe at the end of the First World War. We will be producing a new article to celebrate and analyse this historic event, but in the meantime we are drawing readers' attention to what we wrote in 1989, 70 years after the formation of the CI; this is an article which retains its relevance today.

 

Amongst the many anniversaries that will be celebrated in 1989, there is one that the media and historians will not talk about other than briefly and then only with the conscious aim of distorting its significance. In March 1919 the founding Congress of the Communist International was held. As they did with the bicentenary of the foundation of the United States, the bourgeoisie's well-paid historians will celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789 by trumpeting the values of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy and the nation as the absolute and definitive principles that had at last been discovered to lead human­ity to ‘happiness'. Two centuries of exploita­tion, class struggle, misery and imperialist war, have revealed the capitalist reality behind these fine words. For the bourgeoisie, the purpose of these celebrations is to make people forget that "capitalism was born in blood and filth" (Marx), that it was born of the class struggle, and above all, that it is a transitory social form, which will disappear as all the previous modes of production have done before it.

The anniversary of the foundation of the Communist International is there to remind the bourgeoisie of 1989 that the class struggle is a reality of today's crisis-ridden capitalism, that the proletariat exists as both an exploited and a revolutionary class; it heralds the end of the bourgeoisie itself.

The international revolutionary wave in 1919

The CI's foundation awakes unpleasant memo­ries for the whole capitalist class and its zeal­ous servants. In particular, it reminds them of their fright at the end of World War I, faced with the mounting and apparently unavoidable tide of the international revolutionary wave: the victorious proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917; mutinies in the trenches; the ab­dication of Kaiser Wilhelm and the hurried sig­nature of an armistice in the face of mutinies and the revolt of the working masses in Germany; then the insurrection of German work­ers; the creation along Russian lines of re­publics of workers' councils in Bavaria and Hungary; the beginning of strikes among the working masses in Britain and Italy; mutinies in the fleet and army in France, as well as among some British military units refusing to intervene against Soviet Russia ....

Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the British Government at the time, best expressed the in­ternational bourgeoisie's alarm at the power of the Russian workers' soviets when he declared in January 1919 that if he were to try to send a thousand British troops to help occupy Russia, the troops would mutiny, and that if a military occupation were undertaken against the Bolsheviks, England would become Bolshevik and there would be a soviet in London:

"The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other" (quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol 3, p .13 5 ).

We know today that the CI's foundation was the high point of the revolutionary wave which extended from 1917 until at least 1923, through­out the world, from Europe to Asia (China), and to the ‘new' world from Canada (Winnipeg) and the USA (Seattle) to Latin America. This revo­lutionary wave was the international prole­tariat's answer to World War I, to 4 years of imperialist war amongst the capitalist states to divide the world up between them. The attitude towards the imperialist war of the different parties and individual militants of the social ­democracy, the 2nd International swallowed up by the war in 1914, was to determine what at­titude they would adopt faced with the revolu­tion and the Communist International.

"The Communist International was formed af­ter the conclusion of the imperialist war of 1914-18 in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the different countries sacrificed 20 million men.

"‘Remember the imperialist war!' These are the first words addressed by the Communist International to every working man and woman; wherever they live and whatever language they speak. Remember that because of the existence of capitalist society a handful of imperialists were able to force the workers of the different countries for four long years to cut each other's throats. Remember that the war of the bourgeoisie conjured up in Europe and through­out the world the most frightful famine and the most appalling misery. Remember that without the overthrow of capitalism the repetition of such robber wars is not only possible but in­evitable" (Statutes of the Communist International, adopted at the 2nd Congress, in Degras, The Communist International, Documents)

Part I: The continuity from the 2nd International to the CI

The 2nd International and the question of the imperialist war

In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx set out one of the essential principles of the proletariat's struggle against capitalism: "The workers have no country". This principle did not mean that workers should take no interest in the national question, but on the contrary that they should define their positions and attitudes on the subject, and on the question of national wars, as a function of their own historical struggle. The question of war and the attitude of the proletariat were always at the centre of the debates of the 1st International (1864-73), as it was in those of the 2nd (1889-1914). During most of the 19th century, the ­proletariat could not remain indifferent to the wars of national emancipation against feudal and monarchic reaction, and especially against Russian tsarism.

Within the 2nd International the marxists, with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in the forefront, were able to recognize the change in the period of capitalism's life that occurred at the dawn of the 20th century. The capitalist mode of production had reached its apogee, and reigned over the entire planet. Here began the period of "imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", as Lenin put it. In this period the coming European war would be an imperialist and world war between capitalist nations over the distribution of colonies and spheres of influence. It was essentially the left wing of the2nd International which led the combat to arm the International and the proletariat in this new situation, against the opportunist wing, which was abandoning day by day the principles of the proletarian struggle. A vital moment in this struggle was the 1907 Congress of the International in Stuttgart, where Rosa Luxemburg, drawing the lessons of the experience of the 1905 mass strike in Russia, linked the question of imperialist war to those of the mass strike and the proletarian revolution:   

"I have asked to speak in the name of the Russian and Polish delegations to remind you that on this point [the mass strike in Russia and the war, ed.) we must draw the lesson of the great Russian revolution [ie of 1905, ed.] ... The Russian revolution did not only arise as a result of the war; it also put an end to the war; without it, Tsarism would undoubtedly have continued the war" (Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in BD Wolfe, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin).

The left carried the adoption of the vitally important amendment to the Congress resolution, presented by Luxemburg and Lenin:

"Should a war break out nonetheless, the so­cialists have the duty to work to bring it to an end as rapidly as possible, and to use by every means the economic and political crisis provoked by the war to awaken the people and so to hasten the downfall of capitalist domina­tion" (quoted in the Resolution on the Socialist currents and the Berne conference, at the First Congress of the CI).

In 1912, the 2nd International's Basel Congress reaffirmed this position against the growing menace of imperialist war in Europe:

"Let the bourgeois governments not forget that the Franco-Prussian war gave birth to the revolutionary insurrection of the Commune, and that the Russo-Japanese war set in motion the revolutionary forces in Russia. In the eyes of the proletarians, it is criminal to massacre them­selves for the benefit of capitalist profit, dy­nastic rivalry, and the flourishing of diplomatic treaties" (ibid).

The betrayal and death of the 2nd International

The 4th August 1914 marked the outbreak of the First World War. Riddled with opportunism, swept away in the flood of chauvinism and war fever, the 2nd International broke up and died in shame: its principal parties (above all the French and German social-democratic parties and the British Labor party, in the hands of the opportunists), voted for war credits, called for the ‘defense of the fatherland', and a ‘holy alliance' with the bourgeoisie against ‘foreign invasion'; in France, they were even rewarded with ministerial positions for having given up the class struggle. They received a theoretical support from the ‘centre' (ie between the International's left and right wings), when Kautsky, who had been called the ‘pope of marxism', distinguished between war and the class struggle, declaring the latter possible only ‘in peacetime' .... and so of course impossible ‘for the duration'.

"For the class-conscious workers ( ... ) by the collapse of the [2nd] International they understand the glaring disloyalty of the majority of the official Social-Democratic parties to their convictions, to the most solemn declarations made in speeches at the Stuttgart and Basel International Congresses, in the resolutions of these congresses, etc" (Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International)

Only a few parties stood up to the storm: es­sentially the Italian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Russian parties. Elsewhere, isolated militants or groups, usually from the Left, such as Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch ‘Tribunists' around Gorter and Pannekoek, remained faithful to proletarian internationalism and the class struggle and tried to regroup.

The death of the 2nd International was a heavy defeat for the proletariat, which it paid for in blood in the trenches. Many revolution­ary workers were to die in the slaughter. For the ‘revolutionary social-democrats', it meant the loss of their international organization, which would have to be rebuilt:

"The 2nd International is dead, defeated by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the 3rd International, rid not only of de­serters ( ... ) but also of opportunism!" (Lenin, Situation and Tasks of the Socialist International)

The conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal: Steps towards the construction of the Communist International

In September 1915, the ‘International Socialist Conference of Zimmerwald' was held. It was to be followed in April 1916 by a second confer­ence at Kienthal, also in Switzerland. Despite the difficult conditions of war and repression, delegates from 11 countries took part, including Germany, Italy, Russia and France.

Zimmerwald recognised the war as imperialist. The majority of the conference refused to de­nounce the opportunist right of the social-demo­cratic parties which had gone over to the camp of the ‘holy alliance', or to envisage splitting with them. This centrist majority was pacifist, defending the slogan of ‘peace'.

United behind the representatives of the Bolshevik fraction, Lenin and Zinoviev, the ‘Zimmerwald Left', defended the necessity of a split, and the construction of the 3rd International. Against pacifism, they declared that "the struggle for peace without revolution­ary action is a hollow and deceitful phrase" (Lenin), and opposed centrism with the slogan of "transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. This slogan, precisely, is indicated in the resolutions of Stuttgart and Basel" (Lenin).

Although the Left gained in strength from one Conference to the next, it was unable to convince the other delegates, and remained in the minority. Nonetheless, its evaluation was positive:

"The second Zimmerwald Conference (Kienthal) is undoubtedly a step forward. ( ... ) What then should we do tomorrow? Tomorrow, we must continue the struggle for our solution, for the revolutionary social-democracy, for the 3rd International! Zimmerweld and Kienthal have shown that our road is the right one" (Zinoviev, 10/6/1916).

The meeting between the lefts of different countries, and their common combat, made possi­ble the constitution of the "first nucleus of the 3rd International in formation", as Zinoviev recognized in March 1918.

The proletariat carries out the resolutions of the Stuttgart and Basel Congresses

The 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia opened a revolutionary wave throughout Europe. The proletarian threat decided the international bourgeoisie to bring the imperialist carnage to an end. Lenin's slogan became a reality: the Russian, then the international proletariat transformed the imperialist war into a civil war. Thus the proletariat honored the Left of the 2nd International, by applying the famous Stuttgart resolution.

The war had definitively thrust the oppor­tunist right of the social-democratic parties into the camp of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary wave put the pacifists of the centre up against the wall, and was to thrust many of them in their turn, especially the leaders such as Kautsky into the bourgeois camp. The International no longer existed. The new par­ties formed by splits from the social-democracy began to adopt the name of ‘Communist Party'.

The revolutionary wave encouraged and de­manded the constitution of the world party of the proletariat: the 3rd International.

The formation of the CI: Its continuity in politics and principles with the 2nd International

The new International, which adopted the name of the Communist International, was thus formed in March 1919 on the basis of an organic split with the right wing of the parties of the defunct 2nd International. It did not, however, reject its principles or its contributions.

"Sweeping aside the half-heartedness, lies and corruption of the outlived official Socialist parties, we Communists, united in the 3rd International, consider ourselves the direct con­tinuators of the heroic endeavors and martyr­dom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

If the 1st International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the 2nd International gathered and organized millions of workers; then the 3rd International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realization, the International of the deed" (Manifesto of the CI, in The Five Years of the CI, ed. New Park)

The currents, the fractions, the traditions and the positions which formed the basis of the CI, were developed and defended by the Left within the 2nd International.

"Experience proves that only in a regroup­ment selected from the historical milieu - the 2nd International - in which the pre-war prole­tariat developed could the proletarian struggle against the imperialist war be pushed to its ex­treme conclusion, for only this group was able to formulate and advanced program for the proletarian revolution, and so to lay the foundations for a new proletarian movement" (Bilan, theoretical bulletin of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left), no. 34, August 1936, p.1128).

Over and above individuals such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, or even groups and fractions of the social-democratic parties like the Bolsheviks, the German, Dutch, and Italian lefts etc, there is a political and or­ganic continuity between the left of the 2nd International and of Zimmerwald, and the 3rd International. The first Congress of the new International was called on the initiative of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (previously the Workers' Social Democratic Party of Russia (Bolsheviks), which was part of the 2nd International) and the German Communist Party (ex-Spartacus League). The Bolsheviks were the driving force behind the Zimmerwald Left. The latter, a true organic and political link between the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, drew up a balance-sheet of its past combats as the left wing of the 2nd International, and set out the needs of the day:

"The conferences of Zimmerweld and Kienthal were important at a time when it was necessary to unite all those proletarian elements deter­mined in one way or another to protest against the imperialist butchery. ( ... ) The Zimmerwald group has had its day. All that was truly revolutionary in the Zimmerwald goes over to and joins the Communist International" (Declaration of the Participants at Zimmerwald, quoted in Broue, op. cit.).

We insist strongly on the continuity between the two Internationals. As we have seen on the organic level, the CI did not appear out of the blue. The same is true of its program and its political principles. Not to recognize the historical link between the two means succumb­ing to an anarchist inability to understand how history works, or to a mechanistic spontaneism which sees the CI as solely the product of the revolutionary movement of the working masses.

Without recognizing this continuity, it is im­possible to understand why and how the CI breaks with the 2nd International. For although there is a continuity between the two, expressed amongst other things in the Stuttgart resolu­tion, there is also a rupture. A rupture concretized in the CI's political program, in its political positions and in its organizational and militant practice as the ‘world communist party'. A rupture in facts, by the use of armed and bloody repression: against the proletariat and the Bolsheviks in Russia by the Kerensky gov­ernment, with the participation of the Mensheviks and the SRs, both members of the 2nd International; against the proletariat and the KPD in Germany by the Social-Democratic government of Noske-Scheidemann.

Without recognizing this ‘break within a con­tinuity', it is also impossible to understand the degeneration of the CI during the 1920s and the combat conducted within it, then outside it during the 30s following their exclusion, by the fractions of the ‘Italian', ‘German' and ‘Dutch' Communist Lefts, to name only the most impor­tant. Today's communist groups and the posi­tions they defend are the product of these left fractions, of their defense of communist princi­ples and their work in carrying out a critical reappraisal of the CI and the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. Without recognizing the heritage of the 2nd International, which is the political heritage of the proletariat, it is impossible to understand the foundations of the CI's posi­tions, nor the validity of some of the most im­portant of them today, nor the contributions of the fractions during the 1930s. In other words, it means being incapable of defending revolutionary positions today, consistently and with assurance and determination.

Part 2: The CI's break with the 2nd International

The CI's political program

At the end of January 1919, Trotsky drew up the ‘Letter of invitation' to the CI's founding Congress, which determined the political princi­ples that the new organization aimed to adopt. In fact, this letter is the proposed ‘Platform of the Communist International', and sums it up well. It is based on the programs of the two main communist parties:

"In our opinion the new international should be based on the recognition of the following propositions, put forward here as a platform and worked out on the basis of the program of the Spartakusbund in Germany and of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in Russia" (Degras, opcit.)

In fact, the Spartakusbund no longer existed since the foundation of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) on 29th December 1918. The KPD had just lost its two principal leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, assassinated by the social-democ­racy during the terrible repression of the Berlin proletariat in January. Thus at the very moment of its foundation, the CI suffered, along with the international proletariat, its first de­feat. Two months before it was constituted, the CI lost two leaders whose prestige, strength, and theoretical abilities were comparable to those of Lenin and Trotsky. It was Rosa Luxemburg who had the most developed, in her writings at the end of the previous century, the point that was to become the keystone of the 3rd International's political program.

Capitalism's irreversible historical decline

For Rosa Luxemburg, it was clear that the war of 1914 had opened up the capitalist mode of production's period of decadence. After the im­perialist slaughter, this position could no longer be contested:

"Matters have reached such a pitch that to­day mankind is faced with two alternatives: it may perish amid chaos; or it may find salvation in socialism" (Speech on the Program, Merlin Press).

This position was reaffirmed vigorously by the International:

"1. The present epoch is the epoch of the collapse and disintegration of the entire capi­talist world system, which will drag the whole of European civilization down with it if capitalism with its insoluble contradictions is not de­stroyed" (Letter of Invitation, in Degras, opcit).

"A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat" (Platform of the CI, ibid).

The political implications of the epoch of capitalist decadence

For all those who stand on the terrain of the Communist International, the decline of capital­ism has consequences for the living conditions and struggle of the proletariat. Contrary to the ideas of the pacifist centre, those of Kautsky for example, the end of the war could not mean a return to the life and program of the pre­war period. This was one point of rupture be­tween the dead 2nd and the 3rd International:

"One thing is certain, the World War is a turning point for the world. ( ... ) The conditions of our struggle, and we ourselves, have been radically altered by the World War" (Luxemburg, The Crisis in the Social Democracy, 1915).

The opening of the period of capitalist soci­ety's decline marked by the imperialist war, meant new conditions of life and struggle for the international proletariat. It was heralded by the 1905 mass strike in Russia, and the emergence for the first time of a new form of unitary organization of the working masses, the soviets. Luxemburg (in Mass Strike, Party, and Unions, 1906) and Trotsky (in 1905) drew the essential lessons of these mass movements. With Luxemburg, the whole of the left led the debate within the 2nd International on the mass strike, and the political battle against the opportunism of the trade union and Social-Democratic party leaderships, against their vision of a peaceful and gradual evolution towards socialism. Breaking with social-democratic practice, the CI declared:

"The basic methods of struggle are mass ac­tions of the proletariat right up to open armed conflict with the political power of capital" (Letter of Invitation in Degras, opcit).

The revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat

The action of the working masses leads to con­frontation with the bourgeois state. The CI's most precious contribution is on the revolution­ary proletariat's attitude to the state. Breaking with the social-democracy's ‘reformism', renew­ing the marxist method and the lessons of the historical experiences of the Paris Commune, Russia 1905, and above all the insurrection of October 1917 with the destruction of the capi­talist state in Russia and the exercise of power by the workers' councils, the CI declared itself clearly and without any ambiguity for the de­struction of the bourgeois state and the dicta­torship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the working masses organized in the workers' councils.

"2. The task of the proletariat is now to seize power immediately. The seizure of state power means the destruction of the state appa­ratus of the bourgeoisie and the organization of a new proletarian apparatus of power.

3. This new apparatus of power should em­body the dictatorship of the working class, and in some places also of the rural semi-proletariat, the village poor ( ... ) Its concrete form is given in the regime of the Soviets or of similar or­gans.

4. The dictatorship of the proletariat must be the lever for the immediate expropriation of capital and for the abolition of private property in the means of production and their transfor­mation into national property" (ibid).

This question was an essential one for the Congress, which was to adopt the ‘Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictator­ship' presented by Lenin.

The theses on bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat

The Theses begin by denouncing the false oppo­sition between democracy and dictatorship. "For in no civilized capitalist country is there ‘democracy in the abstract', there is only bour­geois democracy" (ibid). The Paris Commune had demonstrated the dictatorial character of bourgeois democracy. In capitalism, defending ‘pure' democracy in fact means defending bour­geois democracy, which is the form par excellence of the dictatorship of capital. What free­dom of meeting or of the press is there for workers?

"‘Freedom of the press' is another leading watchword of ‘pure democracy'. But the workers know..., that this freedom is deceptive so long as the best printing works and the biggest pa­per supplies are in capitalist hands, and so long as capital retains its power over the press, a power which throughout the world is expressed more clearly, sharply, and cynically, the more developed the democracy and the republican regime, as for example in America. To win real equality and real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, the cap­italists must first be deprived of the possibility of getting writers in their service, of buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And for that it is necessary to throw off the yoke of capital, to overthrow the exploiters and to crush their resistance" (Theses, ibid).

After the experience of the war and the rev­olution, to demand and defend pure democracy, as do the Kautskyists, is a crime against the proletariat, the Theses continue. In the inter­ests of the different imperialisms, of a minority of capitalists, millions of men were massacred in the trenches, and the ‘military dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' has been set up in every country, democratic or not. Bourgeois democ­racy assassinated Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg once they had been arrested and imprisoned by a social-democratic government.

"In such a state of affairs the dictatorship of the proletariat is not merely wholly justified as a means of overwhelming the exploiters and overcoming their resistance, but quite essential for the mass of workers as their only protection against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is getting ready for new wars. ( ... ) The fundamental difference between the prole­tarian dictatorship and the dictatorship of other classes ( ... ) consists in this, that ( ... ) the dic­tatorship of the proletariat is the forcible sup­pression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is of the minority of the population, the large landowners and capitalists. ( ... )

And in fact the forms taken by the dictator­ship of the proletariat, which have already been worked out, that is, the Soviet power in Russia, the workers' councils in Germany, the shop stewards' committees, and other analogues of Soviet institutions in other countries, all these make a reality of democratic rights and privi­leges for the working classes, that is for the overwhelming majority of the population; they mean that it becomes really possible to use these rights and privileges in a way and on a scale that was never even approximately possi­ble in the best democratic bourgeois republic" (ibid).

Only the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale can destroy capitalism, abolish classes, and ensure the passage to communism.

"The abolition of state power is the goal of all socialists, including and above all Marx. Unless this goal is reached, true democracy, that is, equality and freedom, is not attainable. But only Soviet and proletarian democracy leads in fact to this goal, for it begins at once to prepare for the complete withering away of any kind of state by drawing the mass organizations of the working people into constant and unre­stricted participation in state administration" (ibid).

The question of the state was a crucial one, at a moment when the revolutionary wave was unfurling in Europe and the bourgeoisie in all countries was waging civil war against the pro­letariat in Russia, when the antagonism between capital and labor, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, had reached its most extreme and most dramatic point. The need to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia and the extension of the revolution, ie the power of the Soviets, internationally to Europe was posed concretely for revolutionaries. For or against the state of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia and the revolutionary wave. ‘For' meant joining the Communist International, and breaking organically and politically with the social-democracy. ‘Against' meant defending the bour­geois state, and choosing definitively the camp of the counter-revolution. For the centrist currents that hesitated between the two, it meant break-up and disappearance. Revolutionary periods do not leave any room for the timid policies of the ‘middle ground'.

Part 3: Today and tomorrow: Continuing the work of the CI

The change in period revealed definitively by the 1914-18 war determines the break between the political positions of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. We have seen this on the ques­tion of the state. Capitalism's decline and its consequences for the proletariat's conditions of life and struggle posed a whole series of new problems: was it still possible to take part in elections and make use of parliament? With the appearance of the workers' councils, were the trade unions that had taken part in the ‘holy alliance' with the capitalists still working class organizations? What attitude should be adopted towards national liberation struggles in the epoch of imperialist wars?

The CI was unable to answer these new questions? It was formed more than a year af­ter October 1917, two months after the prole­tariat's first defeat in Berlin. The years that followed were marked by the defeat and ebb of the international revolutionary wave, and so by the growing isolation of the proletariat in Russia. This isolation was the determining rea­son behind the degeneration of the state of the proletarian dictatorship. These events left the CI incapable of resisting the development of op­portunism. In its turn, it died.

To draw up a balance sheet of the CI, obvi­ously we must recognize it as the International Communist Party that it was. For those who see it only as a bourgeois organization, because of its eventual degeneration, it is impossible to draw up a balance sheet, or to extract any lessons from its experience. Trotskyism lays claim uncritically to the first 4 Congresses. It never saw that where the 1st Congress broke with the 2nd International, the following con­gresses marked a retreat: in opposition to the split with the social-democracy accomplished by the 1st Congress, the 3rd proposed to make an alliance with it in the ‘United Front'. After having recognized its definitive passage into the bourgeois camp, the CI rehabilitated social-democracy at the 3rd Congress. This policy of alliance with the social-democratic parties was to lead Trotskyism in the 1930s to adopt the pol­icy of ‘entrism', ie entering these same parties in direct defiance of the very principles of the 1st Congress. This policy of alliance, or of capitulation as Lenin would have said, was to precipitate the Trotskyist current into the counter-revolution, with its support for the bourgeois republican government in the Spanish civil war and then its participation in the impe­rialist Second World War, in betrayal of Zimmerwald and the International.

Already in the 1920s, a new left was created within the CI to try to struggle against this degeneration: in particular, the Italian, Dutch, and German Lefts. These left fractions, which were excluded during the 1920s, continued their political combat to ensure the continuity be­tween the dying CI and the ‘party of tomorrow', by subjecting the CI and the revolutionary wave to a critical reappraisal. It is not for nothing that the review of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left during the 1930s was called Bilan (‘the balance sheet').

In continuity with the International's princi­ples, these groups criticized the weaknesses in its break with the 2nd International. Their un­sung efforts, in the deepest night of the counter-revolution during the 1930s and the second imperialist war, have made possible the resurgence and existence of communist groups today which, while they have no organic conti­nuity with the CI, ensure its political continuity. The positions worked out and defended by these groups answer the problems raised within the CI by the new period of capitalist decadence.

It is therefore on the basis of the critical reappraisal carried out by the ‘Fractions of the Communist Left' that the CI lives today, and will live in the World Communist Party of tomorrow.

Today, in the face of growing exploitation and poverty, the proletariat must adopt the same position as the Zimmerwald Left: No to the holy alliance with the bourgeoisie in the eco­nomic war! No to sacrifices to save the national economy! Long live the class struggle! Transform the economic war into a civil war!

In the face of economic catastrophe, in the face of social decomposition, in the face of the perspective of a Third imperialist World War, the historic alternative is the same today as it was in 1919: the destruction of capitalism and the installation of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, or the destruction of humanity. Socialism or barbarism.

The future belongs to communism.

RL

Preliminary Introduction:

Of the various proletarian groups which the GPI has made contact and initiated an exchange of publications with, the IBRP (particularly the PCInt) has been one of those making a large and direct critique of our positions as ex­pressed in Revolucion Mundial. We salute this attitude of the IBRP. There are various ques­tions that we have taken up with these com­rades, but all of them are centered around one main preoccupation; in the IBRP's judgment, the GPI has "adopted very quickly, and without hardly a critique, the positions of the ICC, which they characterize as being within the proletarian political camp." According to the IBRP, this is to be explained by the "direct and exclusive" contact with the ICC which marked the origins of the GPI, and "since we are convinced that the ICC (without denying it the merit of being an organization of sincere mili­tants, loyal to the proletarian class) does not represent a valid pole of regroupment for the constitution of the international revolutionary party, we think that the comrades of the GPI must take further steps towards a real process of clarification, decantation and selection useful to the constitution of a revolutionary pole in Mexico ... a series of political discussions, the out­come of which will demonstrate that we were right."[1]

That the GPI has been fashioned under the influence of the ICC, taking up its positions from the beginning (or if you want to pose it from another perspective; that we are the result of the militant labor of the ICC), is something we've always pointed out. We have already said that presently, in front of the weakness of the international revolutionary milieu, before the creation of a unique pole of reference and re­groupment of the revolutionary forces, new mil­itants are emerging under the determined influ­ence of this or that group, inheriting as many of their merits as deficiencies, are being imme­diately faced with the necessity of taking "a side" faced with the existing divergences in the milieu.

But it is not correct to say that the GPI has adopted the ICC's positions without being criti­cal. From the beginning we have recognized the existence of a camp of proletarian political groups, in fact we want to say we do not con­sider the ICC as the possessor of "all that is true", and we have already had occasions to develop our divergences with them. Although, truth be told, from the understanding we have of the positions of the other regroupments, we have developed the conviction that the ICC is, at least, the one that has maintained the great­est political coherence.

We insist once more that the GPI considers that its consolidation will only be able to occur through the deepening of the political positions we have taken up, especially by confronting them with those maintained by the different groups of the international communist milieu. By being willing to discuss and to collaborate with other groups, as far as maintaining proletarian principles will permit, we situate ourselves as a small part of the process towards the confirmation of the world communist party.

In this spirit, we publish the position we have taken concerning the conception of the IBRP on class consciousness and the role of the party.

We understand that the conditions for the regroupmerrt of revolutionaries in a new inter­national party are still far away and that much remains to be done; probably only some very important confrontations in the class struggle will permit a clear and effective polarization of revolutionary forces. We don't pretend to know the concrete form of this process of polarization. However it is certain that the necessity of a world communist party on a world scale will be posed each time with more urgency by the proletariat, and its present revolutionary minorities must make every effort to clear the way that leads to its constitution, laying the foun­dations so that the different existing groups will be able to regroup with the maximum politi­cal clarity possible. Beginning by clarifying the points of accord and divergences that exist on the role of the communist party in the working class.

Clearly, the GPI has no other choice than to "meddle" in the fundamental debates that have occupied revolutionaries for many years (and which recently have found expression in two important moments; firstly the conferences called by the PCInt and secondly the responses to the ‘International Proposal' of 1986 by Emancipacion Obrera. And if we have entered into debate with the comrades of the PCInt, it is because all of the points raised in the discussions by them refer to the question of class consciousness and the party. So, it is not for us to pretend to give right now a solution to the question. But if we can at least make clear what for us are the weaknesses of the IBRP (and of those who share its positions), we will consider the object of our article to have been fulfilled.

We criticize basically the PCInt's article ‘Class Consciousness in the Marxist Perspective', the Platform of the IBRP and their correspon­dence with us.

I. Posing the problem

In the article ‘Class Consciousness in the Marxist Perspective', the IBRP develop their conception of this question, endeavoring at the same time to demonstrate that in the polemic that took place between Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg concerning the formation of class consciousness and the role of the party, that the former was right and the latter (together with her present-day ‘inheritors'), were wrong.

There is in effect in the revolutionary milieu a tendency to present divergences on the party (and on all questions) as a reproduction or continuation of all the old debates that have al­ways animated revolutionaries. This is the result not of an academic excess, but of a real effort of the proletarian political regroupments to take hold of the historical traditions of revolutionary positions.

But without doubt, it is obvious that the present debates cannot be exactly the same as those which took place almost a century ago: ‘much water has passed under the bridge' since then the proletariat has not only lived through the revolutionary wave, the largest ever known, but also the longest period of counter-revolution. For the present revolutionary minorities, there is an immense accumulation of experience that provides the basis for the clarification of problems that will be posed to the proletariat in its struggle, but at the same time they have greater difficulty obtaining this clarification due to their precarious existence.

And this, the present debate between revo­lutionaries concerning the relationship between class consciousness and the party, that appar­ently reproduces the same divergences between the tendencies represented by Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg, hides a much more profound diver­gence, more serious than the differences of these leaders of the proletariat.

In effect, whereas at the beginning of the century the preoccupation of those revolution­aries was to set out the process through which the proletarian masses arrive at class con­sciousness, that is to say, the understanding of the irreconcilable antagonism between the bour­geoisie and the proletariat, as well as the ne­cessity and possibility of the communist revolu­tion, now this preoccupation, although still pre­sent, is intersected by another more general and elemental, if you want, more ‘primitive' ­whether in general the proletarian masses can or cannot arrive - in some way - at class con­sciousness.

Whereas one part of the present revolution­ary milieu, including the IBRP, consider that "the communist party is the only or principal depository of class consciousness," until the de­struction of the bourgeois state and the estab­lishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and only after then will the masses become class conscious.

The other part, in which the GPI includes it­self, considers that the fundamental prerequisite for the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the arrival of the proletariat, the determined mass of the class (at least the ma­jority of the proletariat of the biggest cities) to class consciousness.

With the result that there exists a veritable abyss between the conceptions that are held on the role of the party (more specifically on the present role that the organized revolutionary minorities must fulfill). In the end, the debate does not consist of the more or less decisive role that the party will play in the process of the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself; the major problem is not to define whether the party ‘orients' or ‘leads', but a more basic question: what is meant by a class for itself?

Thus for example, perhaps we would be able to agree that the function of the party is ‘to lead' the proletariat. But this agreement would only be more apparent than real: since at pre­sent others (like the IBRP) consider ‘idealistic' the notion that the proletarian masses develop revolutionary consciousness as a condition for the taking of power, it's evident that because of this they have to see their relationship as es­sentially identical to that which, for example, exists between officers and soldiers in modern armies, or between the boss and the workers in the factory: that is to say, a relationship in which only the leader knows the real aims to follow, whereas for the led, these aims appear behind ideological clouds and, therefore, they have to be pushed along an imposed direction (in a patriarchal and authoritarian way), a rela­tionship of the dominating to the dominated.

For us, on the contrary, the direction given by the communist party is nothing other than the comprehension, the profound conviction that develops in the whole of the working class, of the correctness of the party's programmatic po­sitions and of its slogans, which are the expres­sion of the class' own movement. A conviction at which the masses will arrive through learning the historical lessons that they extract from their struggle, in which the party participates taking a vanguard role. Between the party and the proletariat there is a relationship of a new type, the sole property of the working class.

So then, for some, the constitution of the proletariat into a class means that the party, unique bearer of the proletarian/revolutionary consciousness, comes to the head of the masses, who - despite all their experience of struggle ­are permanently dominated by bourgeois ideol­ogy. For others, on the contrary, the constitu­tion of the proletariat as a class means that the masses, through their experience, and the inter­vention of the party, advance towards revolu­tionary proletarian consciousness. The IBRP hold the first position, we the second; perhaps the GPI will be submerged in idealism?

II. The IBRP intend to deepen Lenin

One of the first questions that arises from the article cited by the IBRP, is the new formulation that they make of the thesis that Lenin ex­pressed in his work, What is to be done? But the changes the comrades introduce into the terminology employed by Lenin, do not signify so much a ‘precision' of his thought, but a travesty of it, behind which is found the dis­placement of the debate on the question con­cerning how the masses arrive at class con­sciousness, to whether in general it is possible for them to arrive at this. Therefore, though we do not share the thinking of Lenin according to which consciousness is introduced from outside the working class, before ‘criticizing' Lenin we must ‘defend' him, trying to restore his think­ing, showing clearly what his preoccupations were and their role in the combat against the economists. (In order that there is no misunder­standing, we want to make it clear that when we refer to ‘Lenin', or to any other revolutionary, we do not look to see if they were ‘mistaken' or ‘infalable' as individuals, but we take them as representatives of a particular political current, and it is because in this or that work that this current which we want to take as our ‘example' is expressed more clearly).

OK. Lenin called trade union consciousness "the conviction that it is necessary to regroup in trade unions, to struggle against the bosses, to demand of the government the promulgation of this or that law necessary for the workers ..."[2] and social democratic consciousness (we to­day would call it communist consciousness) "the consciousness of the irreconcilable antagonisms between its interests (of the workers) and all contemporary political and social regimes"[3]. According to Lenin, the working class, despite its spontaneous struggles of resistance, is only capable of reaching a trade unionist conscious­ness, whereas communist consciousness has to be introduced from outside by the party.

The IBRP modify the formulation of Lenin, posing that "the immediate experience of the working class allows it to develop consciousness of its class identity and of the necessity of collective struggle ( ... )," that "the conditions of existence of the proletariat, its struggles and reflections on that struggle, raise its under­standing to a level where it can see itself as a separate class, and define itself as by the need for struggle against the bourgeoisie. But class identity is not consciousness"[4]. And a little further on they say: "for class identity to be transformed into class consciousness, the organization of the proletariat into a class, hence into a political party is necessary." From this, we can see more clearly what the IBRP comrades mean when they talk of "transformation". Firstly it is necessary to note that what the comrades call "consciousness of class identity", Lenin called "trade union consciousness."

Moreover, Lenin made clear that the sponta­neous element is the embryonic form of con­sciousness, "since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the course of their move­ment, the only choice is either socialist or bourgeois ideology... the spontaneous develop­ment of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology... Therefore our task consists in combating spontaneity, it consists in separating the workers movement from this spontaneous tendency to trade union­ism sheltering under the wing of the bour­geoisie and pulling towards the wing of revolu­tionary social democracy" (the then proletarian party)[5].

Now, it would be possible to ask on what side does the IBRP place this "consciousness of class identity" that the workers will develop? And they would answer: "For the most part, the experiences gained by the working class in its conflict with the bourgeoisie are structured by the world outlook of the bourgeoisie and give rise only to a sense of class identity which re­mains a type of bourgeois consciousness"[6].

So then, in a roundabout way, (changing ‘consciousness' for ‘sense'), the IBRP say that consciousness of  working class identity is a form of bourgeois consciousness. We regret that this, straight away, is no more than the intro­duction of an enormous confusion of terms in marxism. But we have hardly begun; now the IBRP has to explain how class identity, that is to say this form of bourgeois consciousness, "is transformed into communist consciousness.":

"a section of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists who have raised them­selves to comprehending theoretically the his­torical movement as a whole (Communist Manifesto). Here, in a nutshell, is the materialist conception of class consciousness. The spontaneous struggle of the working class can raised the consciousness of that class to the level of class identity, the realization that it is not part of the ‘people', but is a class-in-itself. This is a necessary prelude to its qualitative leap to class consciousness (or, the emergence of the class for itself), but the latter can only come about if ‘philosophy' or a theoretical understanding of the historical movement as a whole is provided and grips the working class: ie if the class can become aware that it must be furnished with a party possessing a scientific world view. This world view is of necessity formulated outside of (though its material is partly furnished by) the class struggle and outside the existence of the whole proletariat, though individual proletarians participate in its creation" [P16, RP21][7]

There are expressed in this paragraph of the IBRP such a quantity of confusions that it is very difficult for us to know where to begin. We are trying to disentangle their reasoning. The IBRP offer us here three ‘levels' of consciousness.

The first level: consciousness of class iden­tity which already is not considered as an identity of a class in opposition to the bosses, but only "that it is not part of the people." With this, the IBRP reduce this "embryonic con­sciousness," the product of the struggle about which Lenin talks, to the level of vulgar "knowledge", on the same level of understanding as a child which can make a verbal distinction between workers, peasants, etc. But the IBRP also denotes this identity as an indispensable premise in order that the leap towards class consciousness can occur. Without a doubt, the IBRP would say to us that this "class identity" is nothing other than a form of bourgeois con­sciousness - with the result that bourgeois con­sciousness is an indispensable premise for ... proletarian consciousness. In other words, in order for the proletariat to become a "class for itself", it must be a class "in itself", or, in order for the proletariat to become class con­scious, it must go through an indispensable process which it does not have.

The second level: class consciousness. By means of a qualitative leap, the proletariat con­firms itself as a class for itself. What does this leap consist of? In the conviction of the masses of the need of a party bearing - in itself - ­communist consciousness. But this conviction, does it imply that the proletarian masses break, in the end, with bourgeois ideology? According to the reasoning of the IBRP, no. The masses are not able to arrive at communist conscious­ness before the taking of power, and as there is no "middle way", then in reality there is no such qualitative leap.

The proletariat, according to the IBRP, con­firms itself as a class for itself, but the prole­tariat remains dominated by bourgeois ideology. It would be fruitful to ask, what is the basis for the masses to become "convinced" of the ne­cessity for the communist party, since nothing exists, apart from bourgeois ideology? How do the masses recognize the "correct" party, given that they are permanently dominated by bour­geois ideology and, therefore, they cannot un­derstand the party's revolutionary positions? Such a "conviction" becomes a mere causality, something that depends, not on the correctness of the party's positions, but on its skillful maneuvers in relation to the other parties (bourgeois and petty bourgeois) who also try and "convince" the masses. The IBRP reduce the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for it­self, to this.

The third level: communist consciousness, the theoretical understanding of the movement, the global, scientific understanding held by the party. Where does it come from? According to Marx: "The theoretical conclusions of the com­munists are in no way based on ideas or princi­ples that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual rela­tions springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our eyes," (Communist Manifesto). But now the IBRP, "deepening" Lenin, have discovered that the theoretical thesis of communists are found in analyses elaborated outside of the class struggle (though this is part of its. material) by this or that bourgeois ideologist or this or that isolated ­proletarian that has risen to the level of ideologist. Very good, but the class struggle is the real form of the class existence, its prowess, its form of movement: the class does not exist but in its struggle. To affirm therefore, as the IBRP does, that communist consciousness is developed outside of the class struggle is the equivalent of saying that it is elaborated outside of classes, independently outside of these, and particularly outside of the proletariat. And, the effect of this reasoning is that the IBRP tend to differentiate between what will be the class consciousness of the proletariat (the consciousness of the necessity for the party) and what will be communist consciousness, making of the latter some sort of... "philosophy", inaccessible to the profane.

Certainly, we can find in the article of the IBRP paragraphs which contradict this, as when they say "to provide such a world view is the task of the communist party. It does this through a profound study of social reality, its conflicting processes and its historical trajectory coupled with political intervention in the class struggle. It thus aims to fuse all the sparks of communist consciousness generated in the class struggle into a coherent world view and to regroup all those who accept this world view into a force capable of intervention, capable of structuring the experience of the working class within the communist framework" [pI6, RP21][8]. Formulating the question like this, there nothing to suggest or support the conception of ideologists outside of the class struggle forging communist consciousness. But it is not us, but the IBRP that has to choose between the two contradictory positions.              

What then does the deepening of Lenin by the IBRP consist of?                             

According to Lenin, the proletarian masses cannot by themselves - despite all their sponta­neous struggle rise up to communist con­sciousness. Therefore, the party must infuse this consciousness, bring it to them, while he maintained that "the socialist consciousness of the worker masses is the only basis that can assure our triumph". "The party must always have the possibility to reveal to the working class the hostile antagonisms between its inter­ests and those of the bourgeoisie." The con­sciousness attained by the party "must be in­fused into the working masses with an increas­ing fervor". If there are workers involved in the elaboration of socialist theory, "they only participate to the degree that they have at­tained, with greater or lesser perfection, a grasp of the science of their century, to ad­vance this science. And in order that the work­ers attain this more frequently, it is necessary to concern oneself as much as possible with the development of the consciousness of the workers in general" [The IBRP who cite this first idea of Lenin have forgotten to cite the second].

The task of the party is to "use the sparks of political consciousness that the economic struggle generates in the spirit of the workers to raise them to the level of social democratic consciousness" (that is to say, communist). That the "the political consciousness of the class cannot be brought to the workers from outside of the sphere of the relationship between the workers and bosses. The only sphere in which it is possible to find the knowledge of the relations between all classes." That the communist militant will participate in the "integral development of the political consciousness of the proletariat." That "social democracy is always in the front line ... bringing abundant material for the development of political consciousness and the political activity of the proletariat." In the end the party must always concern itself with "general and multiple agitations and in general uniting all the labors that bring together as one the spontaneous destructive force of the multitude and the conscious destructive force of revolutionaries."

Whereas on the contrary, the IBRP consider that "to admit that the whole class or the majority of the working class, taking account of the domination of capital, can attain communist consciousness before the taking of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is purely and simply idealism".

Sooner or later the comrades will have to extend their critique beyond Rosa Luxemburg and her "heirs." Extend it to Engels who, when he attacks the "social democratic cretinism", states:

"The time of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses is past. Where it is a question of the complete social order, the masses themselves must also be in it, must have grasped what is at stake, what they are going for body and soul," (Introduction to the Class Struggle in France, 1895). Formulations of this type imply - accord­ing to the IBRP - "an over-estimation of how extensively true consciousness, not a product of the direct class experience, could eventually permeate the proletariat, via the party" [p 17, RP21][9].

But then the IBRP will have to extend its critique, we would say, to Lenin, and to see him as "over-estimating" the level of communist con­sciousness that the proletariat can develop, "over-estimating" the importance of the party's work in raising this consciousness as its funda­mental and basic task, and for believing that the communist consciousness of the masses will be the only guarantee of the triumph of the revolution.

The whole of Lenin's combat in What is To Be Done? was directed against the economists, against those who objectively kept the workers at the level of trade unionism, in a spontaneity that pushed towards maintaining the workers under the domination of bourgeois ide­ology. And here is the IBRP, supposedly com­bating the "spontaneists", but instead of analysing how the masses develop consciousness, on the contrary establishing in theory the maintenance of the masses under the domination of bourgeois ideology. The comrades haven't deepened Lenin when they say that until the taking of power, the proletariat has no alterna­tive but to convince themselves of the necessity for the party - which itself - bares communist consciousness. On the contrary, this is more like the thesis of the "economists": "that the work­ers are trapped in the trade unionist struggle and that leaves to the marxist intellectuals the political struggle."

For Lenin, the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself was signified by the raising of the masses to communist consciousness, uniting thus the whole spontaneous movement with scientific socialism. For the IBRP, on the con­trary, the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself is signified by the maintenance of the masses under the domination of bourgeois ideology, the fusion of all bourgeois ideology with communist consciousness. This is what they reduce their "dialectic" to.

In the next Revolucion Mondial, we will con­tinue this work dealing with the fundamentals of marxism concerning class consciousness and the role of the party.

October 1988

Ldo

---

[1] Letter of IBRP to the GPI, 19.3.88.

[2] What is To Be Done. Ed Anteo, p. 69.

[3] Opcit, p. 68

[4] ‘Class Consciousness In the Marxist Perspective', Communist Review No 2.

[5] What is To Be Done p81

[6] ‘Class Consciousness...' p10

[7] idem

[8] idem

[9] ‘Class Consciousness..." p15.

Capitalism is in a dead-end; each day that passes presents us with a picture of a society heading for destruction. Since the holocaust of World War II, wars and massacres have contin­ued non-stop on the capitalist periphery; the barbarity of this decadent system, whose pro­longed death-agony can only provoke one end­less round of destruction, is being laid bare day by day. The recent series of ‘natural' catastrophes and accidents, the increase in gangsterism, terrorism, drug-taking and drug­ smuggling are so many signs of the generalized gangrene that is eating away at the capitalist body politic all over the world.

Although capitalism's entry into its decadent period was the precondition for its overthrow by the proletarian revolution, the perpetuation of this decadence is not without danger for the working class. The spread of capitalism's pu­trefaction to every layer of society threatens to contaminate the only class that bears within it a future for humanity. This is why, as capitalism rots where it stands, it is up to revolutionaries not to console the working class with its misery and suffering by hiding the horror of this world in decomposition, but on the contrary to emphasize its full extent and to warn workers against this daily threat of contamination.

The announcement of catastrophes provoked by ‘natural' phenomena or by accidents, killing or mutilating a multitude of human beings, has be­come part of everyday life. In recent months, hardly a week has passed without the media displaying apocalyptic images of catastrophes that strike one day the under-developed countries, the next the great industrial metropoles of the Western world. Such events are becoming banal; they affect the entire planet. Not only do they increase the general insecurity of exis­tence for the working class, as for the popula­tion in general; they are more and more felt as a menace threatening to engulf the entire human race in much the same way as a nuclear war.

As it plunges into decadence, capitalism can only create more destruction

Torrential rain in Bangladesh, hitting more than 30 million people in September 1988; the recent years' drought in the Sahel which has caused famines such as humanity has never seen be­fore; hurricanes in the Carribean or over the island of Reunion, flattening the houses of the local population; earthquake in Armenia, de­stroying whole towns in a matter of minutes and burying tens of thousands of human beings in the ruins.... All these gigantic catastrophes which have ravaged under-developed countries in recent months are not restricted to the 3rd World or the Eastern bloc. They are tending to spread to the most industrialized regions of the world, as we can see from the appalling succes­sion of air and rail accidents which have claimed hundreds of victims at the heart of the great urban concentrations of Western Europe.

Contrary to what the bourgeoisie would like to make us believe, none of this destruction, this loss of human life, is due to some kind of ‘law of series', or to the ‘uncontrollable forces of nature'. The only aim of these ‘explanations', which the ruling class finds so convenient, is to relieve its system of any responsibility, to hide all its rottenness and barbarity. For the real cause behind all these tragedies, this incalcula­ble human suffering is capitalism itself, and this appalling succession of ‘natural', ‘accidental' tragedies is nothing other than the most spec­tacular expression of a moribund society, a soci­ety that is falling apart at the seams.

These tragedies reveal in the full light of day the total bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, which since World War I has en­tered into its period of decadence. Following a period of prosperity where capital was able to develop the productive forces and social wealth to an immense degree by creating and unifying the world market, by extending its mode of pro­duction throughout the planet, this decadence means that since the beginning of the century capitalism has reached its own historic limits. Capitalism's decline today is expressed by the fact that it can no longer produce anything to­day but destruction and barbarity, famines and massacres, on a planetary scale.

This decadence explains in particular why the countries of the ‘Third World' have been unable to develop: they arrived too late on a world market that was already constituted, shared out and saturated (see our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism). This is what condemns these countries, despite all the hypocriti­cal talk about their ‘development', to being the first victims of dying capitalism's utter barbar­ity.

The longer its death-agony lasts, the more horribly do capitalism's principal characteristics appear, as the system's insoluble internal con­tradictions burst into the open.

Obviously, we cannot accuse capitalism of causing earthquakes or hurricanes. It is re­sponsible, however, for the fact that such natu­ral phenomena are transformed into immense so­cial disasters.

Capitalism possesses the technical ability to send men to the moon, to produce monstrous weapons capable of destroying the planet a dozen times over; at the same time it is inca­pable of protecting the population from natural disasters by building dams against the effects of hurricanes, or by building earthquake-resis­tant housing.

Worse still, not only can capitalism do noth­ing to forestall these catastrophes, it is equally incapable of alleviating their devastating effects. What the ruling class calls ‘international aid' to the affected populations is a disgusting lie. Every state and government of the ruling class is directly responsible for the suffering of hundreds of millions of human beings who die like flies every day, victims of cholera, dysentery and hunger.

While millions of children are threatened with death from starvation, in capitalism's great in­dustrial centers millions of tons of milk are de­stroyed every year to prevent a collapse in the market price. In countries ravaged by mon­soons or hurricanes, the population is reduced to fighting over a meager ration of grain, while the governments of the EEC plan to leave fallow 20% of farming land, in order to combat.... over-production!

Decadent capitalism's appalling barbarity is not only expressed in its impotence to relieve the suffering of the victims of natural disasters. The permanent and insoluble crisis of the sys­tern is itself an immense catastrophe for the whole of humanity, as we can see from the in­creasing pauperization of millions of human be­ings reduced to a state of desperate wretched­ness. Capitalism's inability to integrate the im­mense masses of unemployed into the productive process is not a problem limited to the ‘Third World'. In the very heart of the most industrialized nations, millions of proletarians are being reduced to a state of abject poverty. In the richest state of the world, this transformation of immense masses of workers into down-and-outs is particularly clear: in the United States, mil­lions of workers, mostly full-time wage earners (representing 15% of the population living below the poverty line), are being made homeless and forced to sleep in the streets, in pornographic cinemas (the only ones to remain open all night) or in cars, because they cannot afford a place to live.

The more capitalism is stifled by its generalized crisis of over-production, the less is it able to overcome the famines in countries like Ethiopia or the Sudan which today are turning into veritable genocides. The more it masters technology, the less it uses it for the good of the population.

In the face of this appalling reality, what use are all these ‘humanitarian' campaigns for ‘aid to the victims and/or the starving', all the appeals for ‘solidarity' launched by 57 varieties of media stars? How ‘effective' are all these charitable organizations, which in the advanced countries run soup kitchens or overnight hos­tels for the homeless? What is the meaning of all these wretched subsidies that some states distribute to those who are destitute? At best, all such ‘aid' put together is only a drop in an ocean of poverty and famine. In the Third World, they only put off the tragic deadline for a few weeks; they just manage to prevent the advanced countries from looking too much like the Third World. In fact, all this ‘aid', these ‘solidarity campaigns' are nothing but sinister masquerades, a sordid and cynical racket, whose real ‘effectiveness' is measured in their ability to buy consciences and hide the barbarism and absurdity of the world in which we live.

The better feelings of bourgeois humanism have their limits. Despite the crocodile tears of clergymen and other ‘charitable souls', despite the ‘willingness' of governments to help, these limits are dictated by the fact that the bour­geoisie cannot escape the laws of its own sys­tem. This is even more evident today when, after three quarters of a century of decadence, these laws are getting completely out of control, as can be seen in the series of catastrophic accidents in the industrialized countries.

In recent months, the proliferation of railway accidents, especially in the urban networks of advanced countries like France or Britain, has demonstrated that insecurity does not only threaten the populations of under-developed countries, but hangs over the entire world, in every aspect of daily life.

And, contrary to the lies peddled by the bourgeoisie, railways accidents like those at the Gare de Lyon in Paris (June 88), or Clapham Junction in south London (December 88) are not caused by human error, any more than mere bad economic management lies at the root of the present dilapidated state of the productive ap­paratus, or of the decaying public transporta­tion which daily kill or mutilate hundreds of human beings in the most industrialized coun­tries.

This series of accidents is nothing other than the disastrous result of every bourgeois state's policy of ‘rationalizing' production; in their insatiable quest for profit and competitiv­ity in the face of a worsening world economic crisis, no saving that can be made by eroding the security of workers and of the population in general is too small to be worthwhile, whatever the cost in human lives. This ‘rationalization', which in the name of productivity is engaged in a more and more widespread destruction of pro­ductive forces, is in fact completely irrational. Labor power is being destroyed, not only through unemployment but in the deaths and injuries provoked by the catastrophes and acci­dents at work caused by this same ‘rationalization'. Technical resources are being destroyed as factories are closed, but also by the material damage caused by all these ‘accidents'.

Similarly, all the disasters that the ecologists blame on ‘technical progress' the growing pollution of air and water, ‘accidents' in chemi­cal plants such as Seveso in Italy or Bhopal in India which caused more than 2,500 deaths, nu­clear catastrophes as at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, the oil slicks that regularly destroy coastal plant and animal life thus endangering the ocean's food chain for decades to come (as we have seen lately in the Antarctic), the de­struction by CFC's of the ozone layer that pro­tects every living thing from ultra-violet radiation, the rapid disappearance of the Amazon rain-forest, the planet's main source of oxygen - are nothing other than signs of decadent capitalism's irrational, suicidal logic, of its total inability to master the productive forces that it has set in motion, and which now threaten to upset for centuries to come, if not definitively, the planetary equilibrium necessary to the sur­vival of the human species.

And this suicidal logic, the infernal machine of decadent capitalism, takes on still more ter­rifying proportions with the massive production of ever more sophisticated engines of death. All today's most advanced technology is today ori­ented towards arms production, in the perspec­tive of massacres infinitely more murderous than those unleashed today (in ‘peace' time) in the countries of capitalism's periphery. There is no limit to the horror of this bloody monster that is decadent capitalism.

But all this destruction is only the tip of the iceberg, the visible signs of a more general phenomenon affecting every aspect of capitalist society. It is the reality of a world that is falling apart.

The ideological decomposition of capitalist society

This decomposition is not limited solely to the fact that despite all the development of its technology, capitalism is still subject to the laws of nature, or to its inability to master the means that it has set in motion for its own development. It affects not only the system's economic foundations, but every aspect of social life through the ideological decomposition of the ruling class' values which, as they collapse, drag with them every value that makes life in society possible, and in particular through an increasing atomization of the individual.

This decomposition of bourgeois values is not a new phenomenon. It was already marked during the 1960s by the emergence of marginal ideologies, which at the time could still offer an illusory hope of creating islands of a different society, based on other social relationships, within capitalism.

This decomposition of ruling class values was expressed in the appearance of the ‘community' type ideologies - the fruit of the revolt of petty bourgeois strata already hit by the crisis, and especially by the decomposition of society - and of the hippy movement of the 60s and early 70s, as well as by a whole series of currents advocating a ‘return to the earth', the ‘natural life', etc. Basing their existence on a supposedly ‘radical', contestationist critique of wage labor, commodities, money, private property, the family, ‘consumer society', etc, all these communities set themselves up as ‘alternative' or ‘revolutionary' solutions to the collapse of bourgeois values and the atomization of the individual. All justified themselves on the grounds that a better world could be built simply by ‘changing mentalities' and proliferating community experiments. However, all these minority ideologies (built on sand, since they were born of social strata which, unlike the proletariat, have no historical future), did not just peddle what their subse­quent collapse has since proved to be mere illu­sion. In reality, their project was nothing other than a grotesque parody of primitive communism. This nostalgia for the past was merely an expression of a perfectly reactionary ideology, whose essentially religious basis is moreover revealed by the fact that all these ‘purifying' themes were taken up almost to the letter by mystic sects such as the ‘Moonies', Hare Krishna, ‘Children of God' and the like, which have arisen since from the ruins of these communities.

Today, the communities of the 60s and 70s have given way either to religious sects (for the most part exploited if not directly manipu­lated by the capitalist state and the great pow­ers' secret police), or to still more ephemeral phenomena such as the huge gatherings at rock concerts organized by bourgeois institutions like ‘SOS Racisme' in France, ‘Band Aid' or Amnesty International; in the name of great humanitarian causes (the struggle against apartheid or world hunger), such gatherings have nothing better to offer the new generations than an ersatz of community and human solidarity.

But for several years now, capitalist society's ideological decomposition has been expressed above all by the development in the very heart of the great capitalist industrial metropoles, of nihilist ideologies of the ‘punk' variety, which express the void into which all society is in­creasingly thrust.

Today, such is the misery and barbarism en­gendered by the complete dead-end of the cap­italist economy that the whole of society is more and more being stamped in the image of a world without any future, on the brink of an abyss. It is the realization of this dead-end since the beginning of the 80s that has wiped out all the ‘alternative solutions' of the communities of the previous two decades. The hippy communities' utopia of ‘peace and love' has been succeeded by the ‘no future' of the punk and skinhead gangs that terrorize the inner cities. The love, pacifism, and beatific non-violence of the previ­ous years' marginal communities has been followed by the violence, the hatred, and the urge to destroy that animates a marginalized youth, left to itself in a world without hope, a world which has nothing to offer but unemployment and misery.

The whole of social life is being stifled today by the nauseating odors of this decomposition of dominant values. Society is ruled by violence, ‘every man for himself'; the gangrene affects the whole of society, but especially the most deprived classes with its daily round of despair and destruction: the unemployed who commit suicide to flee their wretchedness, children murdered and raped, old people tortured and assassinated for a few pennies.... The advanced state of decomposition of capitalist society that infects the great industrial concentrations is expressed in the development of insecurity, the law of the jungle.

As for the media, they both reflect and propagate this decomposition. Violence is ev­erywhere on television and in the cinema; blood and horror splatter the screens daily, even in films aimed at children. Systematically, obsessively, all the means of communication take part in a gigantic campaign of brutalization, espe­cially of the workers. No means are neglected: the screens are filled with confrontations be­tween sporting ‘heroes' swollen with anabolic steroids, with calls to participate in all kinds of lotteries and games of chance which day after day sell the illusory hope of a better life to those who suffocate in their own misery. In fact, the whole of cultural production today ex­presses society's rottenness. Not only cinema and television, but also literature, music, paint­ing, and architecture are increasingly unable to express anything but anguish, desperation, the void.

One of today's most flagrant signs of all this decomposition is the increasingly massive use of drugs. This has taken on a different meaning from the 60s; drugs are no longer used to flee into illusion, but to take frantic refuge in mad­ness and suicide. Young drug users are no longer ‘getting high' collectively by passing round a ‘joint' of marijuana; they are ‘getting smashed' on alcohol, crack and heroin.

The whole of society, not just the users, is now infected by this cancer. The bourgeois state itself is being eaten away from the inside. This is true not only of Third World countries like Bolivia, Columbia, or Peru where drug ex­ports are all that keeps the economy afloat, but also of the USA which is one of the world's major producers of cannabis, whose value makes it the third national crop after corn and soya.

Here again, capitalism comes up against an insurmountable contradiction. On the one hand, the system cannot tolerate the massive use of drugs (the US annual consumption amounts to about $250 million, the equivalent of the entire defense budget) which encourages the spread of crime, mental illness and epidemics like AIDS, and is a calamity from the purely economic standpoint; on the other, drugs trafficking is now one of the pillars of the state not only in under-developed countries like Paraguay or Surinam, but in the heart of the world's most powerful ‘democracy', the USA.

The American secret service is largely fi­nanced by cannabis exports, to the point where George Bush, who today champions the struggle against drug abuse, was directly involved in it as head of the CIA. The corruption tied to the drug trade that feeds today's capitalist state is not confined to the drug producing countries. Every state is directly contaminated, as can be seen in the recent scandal over the laundering of ‘narco-dollars' which involved the husband of an ex-minister of Justice in a country as ‘clean' as Switzerland.

Nor is the traffic in drugs the only domain in which corruption is rotting away the bour­geoisie's political apparatus. All over the world, hardly a month passes without a new scandal sullying the highest dignitaries of the state (and as always, these scandals only reveal a tiny part of the real picture). For example, as we write, virtually every member of the Japanese government up to and including the Prime Minister is caught up in a gigantic web of corruption. The rottenness has reached such a point that the bourgeoisie has the greatest difficulty in finding ‘presentable' politicians to re­place those that resign, and when they finally think they have discovered that rare bird, the ‘incorruptible politician', it is only to discover a few days later that he was one of the first to get his head in the trough. Needless to say, Japan is not the only advanced country where such events take place. In France, it is the Socialist Party, which in elections regularly de­nounces the ‘moneyed powers' which is now in the forefront of an ‘insider trading' scandal (use of secret information obtained from government contacts to get rich in a matter of hours), and an intimate friend of a President renowned for his denunciation of the ‘corrupting power of money' who has been stuffing his pockets. Indeed the means used to get rich quick (stock market speculation) is it­self significant of the rottenness of capitalist society, where the bourgeoisie drains a major part of its capital, not into productive invest­ment but into ‘games of chance' designed to give a rapid and massive return. Increasingly, the Stock Exchange looks like the gaming rooms at Las Vegas.

Although up to now, capitalism has been able to push the most extreme effects of its own decadence out to the periphery (the under-de­veloped countries), today they are coming back like a boomerang to strike its very heart. And the decomposition which today is infecting the great industrial centers spares no social class and no age, not even children. Crime and delinquency among children are already well known in ‘Third World' countries, where for decades economic disaster has plunged the pop­ulation into atrocious misery and generalized chaos. Today, the prostitution of children in the streets of Manila, the gangsterism of the kids in Bogota is no longer an exotic and far­-off scourge. They have come to the heart of the world's greatest power, to the most devel­oped of the United States - California - right on the doorstep of Silicon Valley where the world's most advanced technology is concen­trated. No image could sum up better the in­soluble contradictions of decadent capitalism. On the one hand, a gigantic accumulation of wealth, on the other an appalling misery drag­ging gangs of children down into suicide and crime: young girls hardly out of puberty taking refuge in prostitution, or in search of a reason to live; children no more than ten years old taking refuge in the use and traffic of drugs, caught up in the infernal spiral of gangsterism and organized murder (in Los Angeles, no less than 100,000 children organized into gangs handle the retail drug market, and in 1987 were responsible for 387 murders).

Nor is it only in the USA that a rotting cap­italism sows desperation and death in the young generations. In the great industrial concentra­tions of Western Europe, quite apart from the incredible increase during the last ten years of delinquency and drug abuse among adolescents, the suicide rates are taking on disastrous pro­portions. France, along with Belgium and West Germany, is the country with the highest sui­cide rate in Western Europe for the 15-24 age group. With an official average of 1000 suicides per year, representing more than 13% of the death rate in this age group (as against a rate of 2.5% in the rest of the population), the fig­ures have tripled between 1960 and 1985.

A society that slaughters and corrupts its children like this is running headlong to its own destruction.

Only the proletariat can extricate society from this dead-end

This society's general decomposition is not a new phenomenon. The same has happened to every decadent society in the past. But com­pared to previous modes of production, the rottenness of capitalism is taking the form of a barbarity unprecedented in human history. Moreover, unlike past societies, where several modes of production could exist simultaneously in different parts of the world, capitalism has become a universal system which subjects the whole world to its own laws. As a result, the different disasters that affect a particular part of the planet in the context of society's general decomposition, inevitably spread to the other parts, as we can see for example in the exten­sion to every continent of diseases like AIDS. For the first time in history, it is thus the whole of human society which threatens to be swallowed up by this phenomenon of decomposi­tion. Whereas in the past, the social and pro­ductive relationships of a new society could emerge within the old as it collapsed (as capi­talism developed within declining feudalism), the same is no longer true today. Today, the only possible alternative is the construction of another society on the ruins of the capitalist system; this new, communist, society will bring about the full satisfaction of human needs thanks to a blossoming of the productive forces that the laws of capitalism make impossible. And the first stage of this regeneration of soci­ety can only be the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie by the only class which today is capable of offering humanity a future: the world proletariat.

"Since in the fully-formed proletariat the ab­straction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need - the practical expression of necessity - driven directly to revolt against this inhuman­ity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate it­self without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman con­ditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation" (Karl Marx, The Holy Family, in Collected Works Vol 4, p. 37).

What Marx wrote last century, when capital­ism was still a flourishing system is still more true today. Faced with this decomposition that is menacing the very survival of the human race, only the proletariat, because of the place it occupies within capitalist productive relations, is capable of bringing humanity out of its pre­history, of building a true human community.

Up to now, the class combats which have de­veloped in the four corners of the planet have been able to prevent decadent capitalism from providing its own answer to the dead end of its economy: the ultimate form of its barbarity, a new world war. However, the working class is not yet capable of affirming its own perspective through its own revolutionary struggles, nor even of setting before the rest of society the future that it holds within itself.

It is precisely this temporary stalemate, where for the moment neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian alternative can emerge openly, that lies at the origin of capitalism's putrefac­tion, and which explains the extreme degree of decadent capitalism's barbarity. And this rot­tenness will get still worse with the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis.

The more capitalism plunges into its own decadence, the more drawn out its death agony, the less the working class of the central coun­tries of capitalism will be spared the devastat­ing effects of its putrefaction.

In particular, it is the new generations of proletarians who are menaced by contamination from the gangrene eating away at society's other strata. Despair leading to suicide, atomization, drugs, delinquency and other aspects of marginalization (such as the lumpenisation of unemployed youth who have never been inte­grated into the productive process) are so many scourges which threaten to exercise a pressure towards the dissolution and decomposition of the proletariat and consequently weaken or even call into question its capacity to carry out its historic task of overthrowing capitalism.

All this decomposition which is more and more infesting the young generations could thus deal a mortal blow to the only force able to give humanity a future. Just as the outbreak of im­perialist war in the heart of the ‘civilized' world, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the Junius Pamphlet, decimated in a few weeks "the elite troops of the international proletariat, the fruit of decades of sacrifices, and the efforts of sev­eral generations", so decadent capitalism can mow down, in the years to come, this "fine flower" of the proletariat which is our great strength and hope.

Given the gravity of the present situation of capitalist decay, and the high stakes involved, revolutionaries must alert the proletariat today against the danger of annihilation that threatens it. In their intervention, they must call on the workers to transform this rottenness that they are subjected to daily into a greater determina­tion in developing their combat and forging the unity of their class. Just as they must under­stand that their struggles against misery and exploitation bear within them the abolition of warmongering barbarism, so they must become conscious that only the development, the unifi­cation, and the international generalization of these struggles will be able to rescue humanity from the hell of capitalism, from this collective suicide where the old world's decomposition is dragging the whole of society.

The only gleam of hope in this rotting world is the present struggle of the world proletariat for class solidarity, especially in the great in­dustrial concentrations of Western Europe. This alone can prefigure any kind of embryonic hu­man community. Only from the international generalization of these combats can a new world emerge, with new social values. And these val­ues will only spread to the whole of humanity when the proletariat builds a world rid of crises, wars, exploitation, and the results of all this decomposition. The despair that increas­ingly submerges all the non-exploiting strata of society will only be overcome when the working class heads consciously towards this objective.

And it is for the world's most concentrated and experienced proletariat, the workers in Western Europe, to take up the responsibility of standing in the vanguard of the world prole­tariat in its march towards this perspective.

Its combats alone can provide the spark that will light the flame of the proletarian revolution.

Avril 22.2.1989

 

Nearly 1,000 dead, according to sources in the hospitals (300 according to the government). 3,000 demonstrators gravely wounded, 10,000 ar­rested, a state of siege, suppression of all ‘freedoms', open season for 10,000 armed men to massacre without discrimination: the ‘left' gov­ernment of Carlos Alvares Perez, that partisan ‘humanistic socialism which accepts the norms of the capitalist system', has, with unprece­dented bloodshed and brutality, repressed the recent wave of hunger riots in Venezuela.. And it was Perez himself who provoked the riots through a series of measures which, overnight, have doubled the price of public transport and tripled that of certain basic goods. Such are the ‘norms of the capitalist system' in crisis. Such is the reality masked by the ‘humanistic' speeches of the ‘left' fractions of capital, which in this domain have nothing to envy in those of the right.

The events of the first week of March 1989 in Venezuela, just like those in Algeria last Oc­tober, are an illustration of the only future capitalism offers to the exploited classes: poverty and blood. They constitute a new warning to the workers who still have illusions in the so-called ‘Socialist' or ‘Communist' parties which claim to represent them while ‘accepting the norms of the capitalist system.'

At the time of writing, we don't have at our disposal all the necessary information about these events. But here and now it is essential to denounce this new massacre perpetrated by the bourgeoisie in defense of its class interests, and the lies it uses in order to cover up its crimes.

Hunger riots

The press, particularly of the ‘Socialist' left, of the European friends of President C.A. Perez, has tried to deny that these are revolts against hunger. Venezuela, one of the world's great oil producers, is supposed to be a ‘rich country'. The government's recent measures have simply aimed to make the population understand that the period of ‘oil manna' is over and that - for the ‘good of your family' - it's a question of adapting to the new conditions of the world economy. In sum, the ‘poor' in Venezuela have picked up bad habits from the rich. It's a question of making them accept reality. The cynicism of the bourgeoisie knows no limits.

Even at the times of the biggest rises in oil prices, in the middle and at the end of the 1970s, the wealth of the ‘petro-dollars' obviously remained essentially in the hands of the local ruling class. In fact, the latter couldn't move quick enough to place this money - as well as the largest slice of what it had received in in­ternational loans - into overseas investments, thus assuring itself of more reliable revenues, paid in US dollars. On the other hand, as soon as income from black gold began to decline, in particular after 1986, inflation (officially) went up to 40% in 1988 and is expected to rise to 100% in 1989. Meanwhile wages (for those who still get any - the official unemployment rate being 25% in 1988), have stayed far behind. The deterioration of workers' living conditions and those of the millions of marginal elements in the shanty towns has been quite staggering in the last few years. Never has there been such a crying contrast between the opulence of the rich and the growing deprivation of the poor.

This is why the recent government measures, which included a tripling of the price of pow­dered milk - basic nourishment for babies could only be felt as the most brutal provoca­tion. The riots which exploded in Caracas and its outskirts (4 million inhabitants), but also in the other main towns of the country, were not a reaction against a so-called ‘loss of standing' as the free-thinking dandies of the left have claimed. They were hunger riots: spontaneous reactions against a level of poverty that is be­coming unbearable. "We'd rather get killed than go on dying of hunger," as the demonstrators shouted to the troops.

The working class can impose a balance of forces on the bourgeoisie through strikes and through its political class combat. But the ‘workless' masses, the marginalized population of the underdeveloped countries, by themselves can only respond to the attacks of capital through desperate acts of looting and riots that lead nowhere. The fact that their first act was to loot the food shops (many of which were op­erating a policy of deliberate shortages to push up prices) and the supermarkets shows clearly that the issue here was hunger.

The riots of early March in Venezuela were above all this: the response of the marginalized masses to the increasingly barbaric attacks of world capitalism in crisis. They are part of the social tremors which more and more are shaking the very foundations of decomposing capitalist society.

The true face of bourgeois democracy

But the barbarism of decadent capitalism does not stop at the economic level. The repression meted out by the bourgeoisie in Venezuela is eloquent proof of this. The scale of the mas­sacre was matched by its savagery: wounded people finished off on the pavement, children murdered in front of their parents, a torture chamber installed in a disused family hotel.

Even though for decades it governed through military regimes, the Venezuelan bour­geoisie has never before unleashed such car­nage. In one week reality has shattered the much-vaunted myth of ‘democracy, a bulwark against military dictatorship'. This has been clearly shown by the way the Accion Democrat­ica government (AD being a member party of the Socialist International) and the army gorillas worked hand in hand to protect their property, their money, their laws, their system.

These who are now wailing about ‘the dan­gers these events pose for the fragile Venezue­lan democracy' are the same people who have prepared the repression by putting it around that voting in the recent elections, whether for C.A. Perez or anyone else, would ‘offer protec­tion from the military.'

It's the world bourgeoisie which has carried out this bloodshed in Venezuela

But President C.A. Perez isn't the only repre­sentative of the local bourgeoisie. His reaction in defense of the interests of his class is the same as any other bourgeois government facing a similar threat. A whole array of heads of state came to show him what was expected of him, a few weeks before the massacre, at the ceremony marking his inauguration. Fidel Castro even told him: "We need a leader in Latin America, and you're the man." A few months before that, at a conference of the Socialist International, he had met with Swedish and British Socialists, with Willy Brandt of Germany, Mitterand of France, Craxi of Italy, Kreysky of Austria, Gonzales of Spain, Soares of Portugal, Papandreou of Greece, etc. All these ‘humanist' and ‘socialist democrats' warmly recognized him as one of their own - ­the man who will always be remembered as the butcher of Caracas.

The ‘Democrats' the world over are trying to portray the Venezuelan government as a ‘victim of the IMF'. The latter is presented as a sort of ‘pitiless monster', coming from who knows where to force the bourgeoisie of the most indebted countries to pile on the exploitation, the misery, the oppression ... in short, to be the bourgeoisie. But in demanding the repayment of debts, in repressing those who attack the established or­der, the IMF and C.A. Perez are simply applying the ‘norms of the capitalist system', the norms of the bourgeoisie everywhere. It's their ‘order' which has been re-established in Venezuela, the same order that reigns in all countries, and to defend it they have never thought twice about using the most barbaric methods.

An ‘order' that is rotting on its feet, an or­der that only the world proletariat can destroy.

For the working class in Venezuela as in other countries - and in particular the most industrialized ones - these events are a further re­minder of its historic responsibilities.