When the group Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) decided to translate and publish Anton Pannekoek's Lenin as Philosopher, it wasn't only the pseudonym J. Harper but the name Pannekoek itself that was practically unknown in France. And this was by no means a ‘French' phenomenon. Although France has never been noted for its eagerness to publish texts of the Marxist workers' movement, this is true for every country, and this ‘forgetfulness' isn't limited to Pannekoek. The entire comm­unist left, beginning with Rosa Luxemburg, its whole theoretical and political activity, all the passionate struggles of a current born in the thick of the revolutionary battles that followed World War 1 -- all this has been in such ‘forgetfulness'. It's hard to believe that it took only ten years of Stalinist counter-revolution to rub out the lessons of a revolutionary movement that was so rich, so fruitful, from the memories of the very generation that had lived through it. It's as if an epidemic of amnesia had suddenly descended on the millions of workers who had participated actively in these events, leaving them completely uninterested in any­thing to do with revolutionary thought. Only a few traces remained of a revolutionary wave that had shaken the world, represented by a few small groups, scattered over the world, isolated from each other, and thus incapable of ensuring the continuation of theoretical reflection, except in small reviews with a tiny circulation, often not even printed.

It's not surprising that Pannekoek's book, Lenin as Philosopher, which appeared in German in 1938, on the eve of the war, had no echo and passed unnoticed even in the extremely restricted revolutionary milieu. It was the undoubted merit of International­isme (publication of the GCF), once the storms of war had passed, to have been the first to translate it and publish it in serial form, in nos 18-29 (February to December 1947).

Greeting Harper's book as "a first rate contribution to the revolutionary movement and the cause of the emancipation of the proletariat," Internationalisme added in its introduction (no 18, Feb 1947) "that whether or not one agrees with all the conclusions he comes to, no one can deny the enormous value of this work, written in a simple, clear style, and one of the best theoretical writings in recent decades."

In the same introduction, Internationalisme expressed its main concern when it wrote:

"The degeneration of the Communist International has resulted in a disturbing lack of interest in theoretical and scientific research in the revolutionary milieu. Apart from the review Bi1an published before the war by the Italian Fraction of the Comm­unist Left, and the writings of the Council Communists which include Harper's book, the theoretical efforts of the European workers movement have been practically non-existent. And, to us, nothing seems more harmful to the prol­etarian movement than the theoretical sluggishness of its militants."

This is why Internationalisme, while having high regard for Pannekoek's book, didn't limit itself simply to publishing it, but subjected the book to discussion and criticism in a series of articles in nos. 30-33 (January - April 1948). ­Internationalisme fully accepted and agreed with Pannekoek's thesis that Lenin, in his polemic against the idealist tendencies of neo-Machists (Bogdanov etc), had fallen into arguments based on bourgeois material ism (ie a mechanistic, positivist standpoint. But Internationalisme completely rejected the political conclusions that Pannekoek drew from this -- viz, that the Bolshevik Party was a non-proletarian party, a party of the intelligentsia, and that the October revolution was a bourgeois revolution.

This argument was at the root of the councilist analysis of the Bolshevik Party and the October revolution; it clearly distinguished the councilist current from the Italian Left, but also from the KAPD, in its early days at least. Councilism was thus   a regression from the German Left whose heir it claimed to be. You can find this same analysis, with a few variations, in Socialisme ou Barbarie or Socialisme du Conseils, in Chaulieu, Mattick, Rubel, and Korsch. Common to all these elements, is the way they reduce the October revolution to a strictly Russian phenomenon, thus completely losing sight of its internation­al and historical significance.

Once they have reached this point, the only thing left to these elements is to point out the backward state of industrial devel­opment in Russia and conclude that the ob­jective conditions for a proletarian revol­ution were missing. Councilism's lack of a global view of capitalist development led it, through various detours, to the position of the Mensheviks: the immaturity of the objective conditions in Russia and the inevitably bourgeois character of the revolution there.

All the evidence indicates that what motiv­ated Pannekoek's work was not the desire to rectify Lenin's errors on the level of philosophy, but fundamentally the political need to combat the Bolshevik party, which he considered to be, a priori, by nature, a party marked by "the half-bourgeois, half-proletarian character of Bolshevism and of the Russian revolution itself." (P. Mattick, ‘Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960)' -- chapter 10 of the Merlin Press edition of Lenin as Philosopher.) "To show what the ‘Marxism' of Lenin really implied, Pannekoek under­took a critical examination of its philo­sophical basis, published under the title Lenin as Philosopher, in 1938." (Ibid)

One must question the validity of such an undertaking, and here Pannekoek's proofs are hardly convincing. To try to derive the nature of a historical event as import­ant as the October revolution, or the role of the Bolshevik party, from a philosophical polemic -- however important it may have been -- is a long way of establishing the proof of what one is saying. Neither Lenin's philosophical errors in 1908, nor the ultimate triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution, prove that the October revolution was not made by the proletariat but by a third class -- the intelligentsia (?). By artificially grafting false political conclusions onto correct theoretical premises, by establishing a crude link between causes and effects, Pannekoek slipped into the same un-Marxist methods which he rightly criticizes in Lenin.

With the resurgence of class struggle after 1968, the proletariat is now knitting together the threads broken by nearly half a century of triumphant counter-revolution, re-appropriating the work of the left which survived the shipwreck of the Communist International. Today, the writings and debates of the left, ignored for so long,  are reappearing and finding more and more readers. Pannekoek's Lenin as Philosopher -- like many other such works -- has been published and can be read by thousands of proletarian militants. But if these theoretical/political works are really to assist in the development of revolutionary thought and activity today, they must be studied in a critical spirit, one which stays well away from the academic mentality which, after discovering this or that author, immediately turns him into a new idol and unconditionally apologizes for everything he has written.

Against the "neo-anti-Bolshevism" which is fashionable today among certain groups and publications, such as Pour une Intervention Communiste and Spartacus (now defunct), and which ends up by erasing the whole socialist and communist movement, including the October revolution, from the history of the proletariat, we can only repeat what Inter­nationalisme in its introduction to Pannekoek's book:

"This deformation of Marxism which we owe to ‘marxists' who are as eager as they are ignorant, has its counter­weight, no less ignorant, among those whose specialty is ‘anti-marxism'. Anti-Marxism has now become the hallmark of déclassé, rootless, bitter, petty-bourgeois semi-intellectuals. Repelled by the monstrous Russian system that has come out of the October proletarian revolution, and repelled also by the hard, unrewarding work of scientific research, these people now go around the world in sackcloth and ashes, engaged in a ‘crusade with a cross', looking for new ideas -- not to understand, but to worship."

What was true yesterday for Marxism, is true today for Bolshevism and the October revolution.

MC

Politics and Philosophy from Lenin to Harper

I. How Harper poses the problem and what he leaves obscure

Reading Harper's book on Lenin, it is quite clear that we are dealing with a serious and profound study of Lenin's philosophical work, with a clear outline of the materialist dialectic which Harper matches against Lenin's philosophical conceptions.

For Harper, the problem is posed in the following manner: rather than separating Lenin's conceptions of the world from his political activity, the best way of seeing what this revolutionary was trying to do is to grasp the dialectical origins of his activity. For Harper, the work which best characterizes Lenin's thought is Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Here Lenin launches an attack on the clear idealism that was being adopted by a sector of the Russian intelligentsia influenced by the philosophical conceptions of Mach. His aim was to give new life to a Marxism that was suffering all kinds of revisions, not only by Bernstein, but also by Mach.

Harper introduces the problem with a profound and perceptive analysis of the dia­1ectic as it appears in Marx and Dietzgen. Even better, throughout his study Harper tries to make a thoroughgoing distinction between the Marx of his first philosophical studies and the Marx who had matured with the class struggle and detached himself from bourgeois ideology. This distinction allows him to point out the contradictions between the bourgeois materialism of cap­italism's prosperous epoch -- typified in the natural sciences -- and the revolution­ary .materialism concretized in the science of social development. Harper is at pains to refute certain conceptions put forward by Lenin, who in his opinion was less concerned with coming to terms with ‘Machist' ideas than with using them for polemical reasons, to cement the unity of the Russian social-democratic party.

But while Harper's work is interesting for its study of the dialectic, and for  its treatment of the way Lenin corrects Mach's ideas, the most interesting part - because it's the one which has the most important consequences -- is undoubtedly the analysis of the sources of Lenin's materialism and their influence on his activity in international socialist discussion and in the 1917 revolution in Russia.

The first part of the critique begins with a study of Lenin's philosophical ancestors, from Holbach, via certain French materialists such as Lametrie, up to Avenarius. The whole problem is centered round the theory of knowledge. Even Plekhanov didn't escape from the encroachments of bourgeois materialism. Marx was preceded by Feuerbach. All this was to be a powerful handicap for the social thought of the whole of Russian Marxism, with Lenin at its head.

Harper very correctly points to the characteristics of the theory of knowledge in bourgeois materialism with its static view of the world, and contrasts this with the very different nature and orientation of revolutionary materialism.

The bourgeoisie considers knowledge as a purely receptive phenomenon (according to Harper, Engels also shared this view). For them, knowledge simply means          perception and sensation of the external world -- as though we are no more than a mirror more or less faithfully reflect­ing the external world. We can see from this why the natural sciences were the war-horse of the bourgeois world. In their initial expressions, physics, chemistry and biology were based more on an attempt to codify the phenomena of the external world than on an effort to interpret and analyze reality, Nature seemed to be a huge book, and the aim was to transcribe natural manifestations into intelligible signs. Everything seemed to be ordered, rational, and no exceptions to this view could be tolerated unless explained as the imperfections of our means of perception. In sum, science became the photography of a world whose laws were always the same, independent of time and space, but dependent on each law taken separately.

The natural object of these first efforts of the sciences was that which was external to man: this choice expressed the fact that it was easier to grasp the sensuous external world than the more confused human world, whose laws escape the simple equations of the natural sciences. But we must also see here the need of the rising bourgeoisie rapidly and empirically to grasp hold of that which was external to itself and could be used for the development of the social forces of production. Rapidly, because the foundations of its socio­economic system were not yet very solid; empirically, because capitalism was more interested in results and conclusions than in the path one took to reach them.

The natural sciences that developed in the framework of bourgeois materialism were to influence the study of other phenomena and gave rise to human sciences such as history, psychology, and sociology, where the same methods of knowledge were applied.

The first object of human knowledge to occupy men's minds was religion, which for the first time was studied as a historical problem and not as a philosophical problem. This also expressed the need of a young bourgeoisie to rid itself of religious fixations which negated the natural rationality of the capitalist system. This was expressed in the blossoming-forth of a series of bourgeois thinkers like Renan, Strauss, Feuerbach, etc. But what was attempted was always a methodological dissection: you didn't have the attempt to criticize an ideological body like religion on a social basis, but rather the effort to discover its human foundations, by reducing its study to the level of the natural sciences, to make a photographic study of ancient documents and the alterations they had gone through over t the centuries. Finally, bourgeois materialism normalized an existing state of affairs, fixing everything in an eternal and immutable state. It saw nature as the indefinite repetition of rational causes. Bourgeois man thus reduced nature to a desire for a conservative, unchanging state. He felt that he dominated nature to a certain extent, but he couldn't see that the very instruments of this domination were in the process of freeing themselves from man and turning against him. Bourgeois materialism was a progressive step in the development of human knowledge. It became conservative -- to the point of being rejected by the bourgeoisie itself -- when the capitalist system, in reaching its apogee, already gave notice of its impending demise.

This mode of thinking still appears in Marx's early work, but Harper sees the road which led Marx towards revolution­ary materialism being opened up by the coming to consciousness of the working masses in response to the first major contradictions of the capitalist system.

Revolutionary materialism, Harper insists, is not a product of mere reason. Bourgeois materialism grew up in a specific socio-economic milieu, and revolutionary materialism also required a specific socio-economic milieu. Marx became aware that existence was a process of constant change. But where the bourgeoisie saw only rationalism, the repetition of cause and effect, Marx saw the evolving socio-economic milieu as a new element to be introduced into the sphere of knowledge. For him consciousness saw not a photograph of the external world. His materialism was animated by all the natural factors, and in the first place by man himself.

The bourgeoisie could neglect man's part in knowledge, because, at the beginning, its system seemed to function like the laws of astronomy, with a precise regularity. Its economic system had no place for man in it.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the system's negligence towards man began to make itself felt in social relationships. Revolutionary conscious­ness began to mature, and it became clear that knowledge wasn't a mirror of the external world, as bourgeois materialism claimed: man entered into knowledge of the world not only as a receptive factor, but also as an active and modifying factor.

For Marx, knowledge was thus the product of the sensation of the external world and of the ideas and actions of man, himself a factor and motor of knowledge.

The science of social development was born, eliminating the old human sciences and expressing a clearly-felt step forward. The natural sciences them­selves broke out of their narrow limitations. Nineteenth century bourgeois science collapsed because of its own blindness.

It is this failure to understand the role of praxis in knowledge that gives Lenin's philosophical work its ideolog­ical character. As we have said, Harper examines Lenin's philosophical sources and attributes them with having a decisive influence on Lenin's political activity.

Social existence determines conscious­ness. Lenin came out of a backward social milieu. Feudalism still reigned, and the bourgeoisie was weak, lacking in revolutionary capacity. Capitalism was developing in Russia at a time when the mature bourgeoisie of the west was already going into decline. Russia was becoming a capitalist country, not thanks to a national bourgeoisie oppos­ing itself to the feudal absolutism of the Tsar, but thanks to foreign capital, which dominated the whole capitalist structure in Russia. Because bourgeois materialism was becoming bogged down by the development of the capitalist economy and of its contradictions, the Russian intelligentsia had to turn to revolutionary materialism in its struggle against imperial absolutism. The object of the struggle set this revolutionary materialism against feud­alism, not against capitalism which didn't represent an effective force. Lenin was part of this intelligentsia which -- basing itself on the only revolutionary class, the proletariat -- aimed to carry out the belated capitalist transformation of feudal Russia.

This is how Harper interprets the facts.

Harper sees the Russian revolution as an expression of the objective maturity of the working class, but for him it had a bourgeois political content. For Harper, this bourgeois political content was expressed by Lenin, whose conscious­ness was molded by the immediate tasks in Russia, a country whose socio‑economic structure had the appearance of a colony with a non-existent national bourgeoisie. The only decisive forces were the working class and absolutism.

The proletariat thus had to express itself in the context of this backward­ness, and for Harper this situation was represented in the bourgeois materialist ideology of Lenin.

This is what Harper has to say about Lenin and the Russian revolution:

"This materialist philosophy was precisely the doctrine which best suited the new mass of Russian intellectuals, who saw in the physical sciences and in technology the possibility of managing product­ion as the new ruling class of an immense empire ... the only resist­ance to this coming from the old religious peasantry." (Lenin as Philosopher)

Harper's method in Lenin as Philosopher, as well as his way of interpreting the problem of knowledge, ranks among the best works of Marxism. His political conclusions, however, lead to such confusions that he forces us to examine them more closely in order to separate his formulation of the problem of know ledge from his political conclusions, which seem to us to be quite mistaken and well below the level of the rest of the work.

Harper writes that:

"...materialism could dominate the ideology of the bourgeois class only for a short time."

This leads him to say, after proving that Lenin's philosophy in Materialism and Empiriocriticism is essentially bourgeois materialism -- that the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 was:

"... a bourgeois revolution based on the proletariat."

Here Harper gets caught up in his own dialectic and he fails to answer a crucial question: how could there be a bourgeois revolution, producing its own ideology -- an ideology which as in the bourgeoisie's revolutionary period, was a materialist one -- at a time when capitalism was plunging into the most acute crisis in its history? The crisis of 1914-20 doesn't seem to trouble Harper at all.

Again how could there be, at that very moment, a bourgeois revolution that was propelled by the most advanced, conscious workers and soldiers in Russia, and which enjoyed the solidarity of the workers and soldiers of the whole world -- and above all of the country where capitalism was most highly developed, i.e. Germany? How could it be that, at that very moment, the Marxists, the most thorough dialecticians, the best theoreticians of socialism, defend­ed the materialist conception of history as well as, if not better than, Lenin himself? How could it be that it was precisely people like Plekhanov and Kautsky who found themselves on the side of the bourgeoisie against the revolut­ionary workers and soldiers of the whole world, and particularly against Lenin and the Bolsheviks?

Harper doesn't even pose these questions, so how could he respond to them? But what is so astonishing is precisely the fact that he doesn't pose these questions.

Moreover, Harper's survey of philosoph­ical development, though generally correct, contains certain assertions which put it in a different light. Harper tends to see that there have been, among Marxist theoreticians, two fundamentally different approaches to the problem of knowledge. This separat­ion -- which he sees in the life and work of Marx himself -- is somewhat simplistic and schematic. Harper sees two periods in the work of Marx:

1. Before 1848, Marx the progressive bourgeois materialist: "religion is the opium of the people", a phrase subsequently taken up by Lenin, and one which neither Stalin nor the Russian bourgeoisie have judged necessary to remove from official monuments of party propaganda.

2. Then, Marx the revolutionary materialist and dialectician: the attack on Feuerbach, the Communist Manifesto, etc. "Being determines consciousness."

For Harper, it's no accident that Lenin's work (Materialism and Empirio­criticism) is essentially an example of the first phase of Marxism. Starting from the idea that Lenin's ideology was determined by the historical movement in which he participated, Harper argues that the underlying nature of this move­ment is revealed by the fact that Lenin's ideology is a variety of bourge­ois materialism (Harper only takes Materialism and Empiriocriticism into account here).

This leads Harper to the conclusion that Materialism and Empiriocriticism is now the bible of the Russian intellectuals, technicians, etc -- the representatives of the new state capitalist class. In this view, the Russian revolution, and the Bolsheviks in particular, are a prefiguration of a more general revolution­ary development: the evolution of capit­alism into state capitalism, the revol­utionary mutation of the liberal bourge­oisie into the bureaucratic state bourgeoisie, of which Stalinism is the most complete expression.

Harper's idea is that this class, which everywhere sees Materialism and Empirio­criticism as its bible (Stalin and his friends continue to defend the book), uses the proletariat as the basis for its state capitalist revolution. This is why the new class has to rely on Marxist theory.

The aim of this explanation, therefore, is to prove that this first form of Marxism leads directly to Stalin by way of Lenin. We've already heard this sort of thing from certain anarchists, though they apply it to Marxism in general. Stalin is thus the logical outcome of Marxism -- for anarchist logic, that is!

This approach also attempts to demonstr­ate that a new revolutionary capitalist class, basing itself on the proletariat, has arisen in history at the very moment when capitalism itself has entered into its permanent crisis, owing to the hyperdevelopment of the productive forces in the framework of a society based on the exploitation of human labor (surplus value).

These two ideas, which Harper introduced in Lenin as Philosopher before the 1939-­45 war, have been put forward by others who have come from different social and political backgrounds. They became very fashionable after the war. The first idea is defended by a great many anarchists: the second by a great many reactionary bourgeois writers such as James Burnham.

It's not surprising that the anarchists should put forward such mechanistic and schematic conceptions, which claim that Marxism is the source of Stalinism and ‘state capitalist ideology', or of the new ‘managerial class'. They have never approached the problems of philosophy in the way that revolutionaries have: for them, Marx and Lenin descend from Auguste Comte, and all Marxist currents, without exception, are put in the same bag as ‘Bolshevist-Stalinist ideology'. Meanwhile the anarchists' version of philosophical thought is to take on the latest fashion in idealism, from Nietzschism to existentialism, from Tolstoy to Sartre.

Harper's thesis is that Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism, as a philosophical enquiry into the problem of knowledge, doesn't go any further than the methods of interpretation typical of mechanistic bourgeois materi­alism. But in going from here to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, and the Russian revolution couldn't go any further than the stage of the bourgeois revolution, Harper ends up with the same position held by the anarchists and by bourgeois like Burnham. Furthermore, this conclusion contradicts another of Harper's assert­ions, which is partially correct:

"Materialism could dominate the ideology of the bourgeois class only for a short time. Only so long as the bourgeoisie could believe that its society of private property, personal liberty, and free competition, through the development of industry, science and technique, could solve the life problems of all mankind -- only so long could the bourgeoisie assume that the theoretical problems could be solved by science without the need to assume supernatural and spiritual powers. As soon, however, as it became evident that capitalism could not solve the life problems of the masses, as was shown by the rise of the proletarian class struggle, the confident materialist philosophy disappeared. The world was seen again full of insoluble contra­dictions and uncertainties, full of sinister forces threatening civilization." (Lenin as Philosopher)

Later on we will return to these problems in more depth, but right now, without wishing to be drawn into a sterile polemic, we are forced to note the insoluble contradictions which Harper gets himself into -- on the one hand by attacking such a complex problem in so simplistic a manner, and on the other hand with regard to the conclus­ions he comes to about Bolshevism and Stalinism.

Once again we ask: how, following Harper's thesis that the bourgeoisie became idealist when the proletarian class struggle appeared on the scene, can you explain the fact that at the very moment that the class struggle was reaching unprecedented heights, a materialist current should be born within the bourgeoisie, giving rise to a new bourgeois capitalist class? Harper discerns in Lenin's philosophy the rise of a bourgeois materialist current at the very time that the bourgeoisie should have been turning absolutely idealist. And if, according to Harper, Lenin "was compelled to be materialist to rally the workers behind him", we can pose the following question: whether it was the workers who adopted the ideology of Lenin, or Lenin who adapted himself to the needs of the class struggle, Harper presents us with this astonishing contradiction: either the proletariat was following a bourgeois current, or a working class movement secreted a bourgeois ideology.

But in either case, the proletariat doesn't appear on the scene with its own view of the world. It's a strange version of Marxist materialism that can lead us to such a conclusion: the proletariat embarks on a course of independent action but produces a bourgeois ideology. But this is exactly where Harper's thesis leads us.

Furthermore, it's not entirely correct to say that at a certain stage the bourgeoisie was totally materialist and at another stage totally idealist. In the 1789 bourgeois revolution in France, the cult of Reason simply replaced the cult of God, and this was typical of the dual character -- i.e. both materialist and Idealist at the same time -- of the conceptions held by a bourgeoisie struggling against feudalism, religion, and the power of the Church (a struggle which took on extremely acute forms, such as the persecution of priests and the burning of churches). We will also return to this permanently dual aspect of bourgeois ideology, which even at the highest moments of the ‘Great Revolution', has never gone beyond the stage of "religion is the opium of the people".

However, we have not yet drawn all the conclusions to which Harper's work leads us. Here we need to make a few historical reminders for the benefit of all those who consign the October revolution the bourgeois camp. While this initial examination of Harper's philosophical conclusions and theories have led us to reflect on certain questions that we shall develop further later on, there are certain facts which Harper doesn't even want to skim over. For pages and pages, Harper talks about bourgeois philosophy and Lenin's philosophy, and arrives at conclusions which are to say the least daring and which demand a serious, detailed invest­igation. Now, what kind of Marxist materialist can accuse a man, a political group or a party, as Harper accuses Lenin and the Bolshevik party, of representing a bourgeois current and a bourgeois ideology " ... basing itself on the proletariat" (Harper), without having first examined -- at least for the record -- the historical movement of which they were a part?

This movement was international and Russian social-democracy; this was the movement which gave rise to the Bolshevik fraction and all the other left socialist fractions. How was this fraction formed? What ideological struggles did it wage, forcing it to form a separate group, then a party, then the vanguard of an inter­national movement?

The struggle against Menshevism; Lenin's Iskra and What is to be Done?, the rev­olution of 1905 and the role of Trotsky; Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution which lead him to fuse with the Bolsheviks between February and October 1917; the revolutionary process between February and October; the right-wing social dem­ocrats and Social Revolutionaries; Lenin's April Theses; the constitution of the soviets and of workers' power; Lenin's position on the imperialist war: Harper says not one word about any of this. This is by no means accidental.

(To be continued)

Mousso and Phillipe

Spain, Poland, E1 Salvador -- the most recent convulsions of society in its death crisis have taken place in three countries which are very different from each other. But although these countries in many ways belong to dissimilar worlds -- the first to the developed West, the second to the Eastern bloc the third to the third world -- and although the immediate circumstances of the events which have put them into the head­lines are very different, the same underlying logic runs through all these events, expressing the fundamental unity in the destiny of human society today.

The economic crisis of world capitalism

In El Salvador, massacres have become a daily commonplace and society is sinking into the abyss. This is a tragic illus­tration of what revolutionaries have been saying for decades: that the capitalist mode of production is completely reaction­ary, totally incapable of ensuring a real development of the productive forces in areas that had not been blessed with cap­italist development by the beginning of the twentieth century. El Salvador is a hideous reflection of the reality facing the whole world today. Famines, massacres, terror, the abuse of human dignity -- this is now the daily lot of the majority of people on the planet, and this is what lies in store for the whole of humanity as the crisis intensifies.

In Poland, it is the end of the myth of "socialism" in Eastern Europe -- the lie that these countries had put an end to the crisis of capitalism, the exploitation of man by man, and class antagonisms. The violent crisis which is now hitting Poland and its "fraternal" countries is a striking refutation of the absurd idea that these countries offer the workers any economic gains. The "workers' gains" touted by the Trotskyists -- eg planning and a state monopoly on foreign trade -- have shown themselves to be completely unable to hold off the crisis of capitalism, to counter the growing anarchy of production, the `shortage of the mast basic goods, and an astronomical foreign debt.

Thus, once again we have proof of the completely capitalist nature of the so-called "socialist" countries, and of the utter falsity of the idea that statifying the economy can eliminate the effects of the world crisis.

In Spain, another myth has collapsed in the last few years: the myth that Spain was a "European Japan". The crisis has, in the most spectacular manner, ended the econ­omic expansion of this European copy of the "Japanese model", so widely celebrated by the technocrats of the 1960s. The Spanish economy may have been able to use the last crumbs of the reconstruction period to drag itself out of its backwardness, but now the crisis is making Spain pay heavily for its past exploits: after setting the European record for growth, it now has the record for unemployment (officially 12.6% of the active population).

Whether it takes the form of a new aggravation of famine in the third world or of an unprecedented rise in unemployment in the West, or of the generalized scarcity in the Eastern bloc, the crisis is showing that the world is one, that the whole of human society is in the same boat.

This unity of the world does not only ex­press itself in the universal effects of the economic crisis. It also expresses itself in the kind of responses we are seeing from the ruling class in all cont­inents, faced with the threat of revolt by the exploited masses against the unbearable deterioration of their living conditions.

The response of the bourgeoisie in all countries to the economic crisis and the threat of class struggle

The response has three complementary aspects:

-- The setting up of "strong", overtly re­pressive governments which make free use of intimidation against the working class. These governments      made up of the right wing sectors of the bourgeois political apparatus.

-- The role carries out by the left-wing sectors of the apparatus, which are generally in opposition and not in government as they were a few years ago. This role consists of sabotaging the workers' struggle from the inside, in order to immobilize the class as it faces up to the attacks of capital.

-- The assumption, by the major imperialist powers, of the task of maintaining social order within their bloc; and close collab­oration between them, over and above their mutual antagonisms, with the aim of muzzling the working class.

These policies are to a large extent behind the recent events in El Salvador, in Spain with the ‘coup d'état' of February 1981, and in Poland with the workers' struggles of 1980-81.

**********

In El Salvador we are seeing the concrete realization of the "Reagan doctrine" of supporting hard-line governments committed to "the struggle against subversion." This was not the time for a re-run of Nicaragua, where, through the intermediary of international social democracy, the USA allowed the left parties to come to power. Now the USA no longer talks about "human rights", but is launching a crusade against "international terrorism fomented by the USSR." In fact, this policy is not so much aimed at the USSR which only has a limited influence in Latin America, even though it has no objection to taking advantage of instability in the USA's spheres of in­fluence. No -- the real subversion, the real "terrorism" this policy is aimed at is the class struggle in the American continent.

Reagan has made it quite clear that the aid he's giving to the bloody junta ruling El Salvador has a far greater significance that El Salvador itself, and the kind of confrontation going on there. The populist guerillas of El Salvador are no more dang­erous for American imperialism than those which have existed in other Latin American countries. Cuba remains an exception and the fact that it's in the Russian bloc is no danger to the USA. On the other hand, what really frightens the American bourg­eoisie is the development of the class struggle, as in Brazil in the last few years for example: this is not something which is a specialty of ‘exotic' countries and threatens to spread to the imperialist metropoles themselves.

By giving his active support to the massacres in E1 Salvador, Reagan is giving a clear warning to the workers of North and South America: "No ‘terrorism' - don't extend your struggles against the deterioration of living conditions, or else I won't hesitate to use repression". And to make sure that this message is well understood, that it won't be interpreted as an old cowboy shooting his mouth off, Reagan has taken care to get the support of Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, who was reticent at first. At the same time he has been calling on the European governments to follow the example­ of his Canadian lackey. The bourgeoisie is attempting to maintain social order at the level of the whole bloc.

Also at the level of the bloc, the left (with Willy Brandt's ‘Socialist International' to the fore) is ‘protesting' against Reagan's policy and giving its support to the ‘democratic' opposition in E1 Salvador. The left will use any occasion (especially when its declarations are bound to remain purely Platonic) to try to divert working class discontent into the dead-end of ‘defending democracy' or other bourgeois theme-tunes. This is one of the ways the bourgeois left ‘in opposition' is attempting to sabotage the proletarian struggle.

**********

In Spain, ‘defending democracy' is also a la mode following the aborted putsch of 23 February. However, this mystification isn't being used in an identical manner: here it's the central power itself which is presented as the best guarantee of democracy. This doesn't mean that the logic underlying the events in Spain is different from the logic of the events in E1 Salvador as far as the response of the bourgeoisie is con­cerned. On the contrary, the attempted putsch of 23 February has the following ‘merits' for the bourgeoisie:

-- strengthening the central power, notably in the person of the King (as was the case in Italy a few months ago with the President of the Republic Pertini);

-- strengthening the rightist orientation of the Spanish government. After the ‘failed' putsch Calvo Sotelo could count on the support of right-wing forces such as the Popular Alliance, a support which he lacked before. At the same time, the attempt by certain sectors of the Social­ist Party's centre to create a centre-left alliance has not come off;

-- strengthening the song and dance about military coups has been directed at the working class. New life has been given to the legend of a Francoist bugbear hiding in every barracks, in order to dissuade the workers from responding to increasing misery by returning to the kinds of struggles that blew up in 1975-6.

Clearly the putschists themselves -- Tejero, Milans del Bosch, Armada - didn't launch their adventure with this perspective in mind. But the advantages the bourgeoisie has drawn from the putsch and its failure (we're not in 1936: this isn't the time for military dictatorships in Western Europe) makes one think that these officers have allowed themselves to be manipulated by more lucid sectors of the ruling class. Is this too ‘Machiavellian' a vision? It's obviously difficult to make precise distinctions between what has been carefully prepared by the bourgeoisie and what can be put down to its capacity to adapt and improvise. However, it would be dangerous for the working class and for revolutionaries to underestimate the strength and intelligence of the class enemy. Let's simply recall the fact that, in the last seven months, this is the fifth time we've witnessed a scenario which had the ‘miraculous' effect of cementing ‘national solidarity' against a somewhat insubstantial ‘fascist menace': bombings in Bologna in August 1980, Munich in September 1980, Rue Copernic in Paris in October 1980, Antwerp in November 1980, and now the Madrid putsch. Is all this accidental?

**********

In Poland, the threat of tanks is also being used to persuade the workers to be reasonable, although in this case it's not so much the tanks of the national army, but those belonging to Poland's ‘big brother'. But the ideological mechanism is the same: in both cases, the government justifies its tough policies, its refusal to make concessions, at its appeals for calm, not so much by threatening to use repressions itself but by its supposed concern to spare the population and the working class from a ferocious repression which would be carried out against the government's will. Using repression to avoid an even greater repression: it's an old trick and would have little credibility if the left wasn't there to lend a hand:

-- in Spain, by associating itself with all the other bourgeois parties in brandishing the threat of a ‘return to fascism', and organizing huge demonstrations in support of democracy and the King;

-- in Poland, by protesting strongly against repression and against the government's refusal to keep its promises while at the same time calling on the workers to be ‘moderate' so that they don't put ‘Poland in danger' - which actually means passively accepting the bourgeois offensive against the working class.

Thus, political life in Poland is following an orientation which has already been used effectively in the western industrialized countries: the division of labor between, on the one hand, a right in power which make makes no attempt to win popularity among the workers and has the task of cynically strengthening exploitation and repression, and, on the other hand, a left in opposition whose task -- thanks to its radical language and the confidence it enjoys within the working class -- is to undermine any resistance to the offensive from the right.

Through an irony of history, it's a so-called ‘Communist' party which is playing the role of the ‘right' in Poland (but in unpopularity and cynicism, the ruling teams in eastern Europe break all world records), while a cardinal of one of the most reactionary Churches in the world takes the part of spokesman of the ‘left'.

But, despite these particularities, the political mechanisms are the same. The domination of Jaruzelski as Prime Minister in February was the first coher­ent initiative of the Polish bourgeoisie since August 1980 and shows that the ruling team is becoming aware of what needs to be done. The Polish bourgeoisie has got to restore ‘order'(as an army man, the new Prime Minister is ideal): it's had enough of a situation in which the state is again and again forced to retreat in the face of workers' demands, especially when each retreat only inspires workers to made new demands.

But the re-establishment of order can't be based on repression alone, as in the past. The collaboration of the Solidarity union is required, and Jaruzelski has a reputation for being in favor of negotiation. For the moment it's a question of neutralizing those elements in the political apparatus who can't accept the existence of an opposition force inside the country.

But the situation in Poland doesn't only illustrate the bourgeoisie's tactics at the internal level. It shows once again that the bourgeoisie is sharpening weapons against the workers' struggle at an international level.

In the first place, the situation in Poland is being taken charge of by the entire Russian bloc: through threats of an intervention by the Warsaw Pact (a threat that could become a reality if the Polish authorities lost control of the situation) and through the elaboration in Moscow of the policies to be followed at local level. These policies must not only take into account the particular interests of the national capital: they must fit in with the policies of the whole bloc. Even if the Polish authorities were tempted to loosen the reins at home, Moscow would so soon remind them that too much ‘looseness' runs the risk of giving workers in other countries in the bloc the idea that ‘struggle pays'. But the attempt to take charge of the Polish situation goes beyond the limits of the Russian bloc: it involves the whole world bourgeoisie, notably the major western powers who have tried to calm the Polish workers' discontent by giving economic aid that will allow the authorities to distribute a few crumbs. At the same time, along with Solidarity,           they've joined in the sing-song about Russian intervention. The western campaign about the threat of Russian intervention is, among other things, aimed at the eastern bloc workers: although these workers are little inclined to believe the propaganda put out by Tass, they're more likely to believe Radio Free Europe or the BBC when they say that this threat is a real one.

Thus, the bourgeoisie is preparing its off­ensive on a world-wide scale. The ruling class has learned the lessons of the past. It knows that, when faced with the proletar­ian danger, you've got to show unity, you've got to co-ordinate your activities, even if this means a division of labor between different factions of the political apparat­us. For the working class, the only way for forward is to refuse to be drawn into the traps laid for it by the ruling class, to launch its own class offensive against the offensive of the bourgeoisie:

-- against the division of labor between right and left, it must reject both these wings of capital;

-- against intimidation and the threat of repression, it must struggle as resol­utely and as broadly as possible. Only the threat of a massive response from the proletariat can stay the criminal hands of the bourgeoisie;

-- against the sabotage of the struggle by the left parties and unions, it must organize and extend its own struggles;

• - against the bourgeoisie's international anti-working class offensive, it must extend its struggles on an international scale. This is the only way to prevent the world proletariat being picked off in a series of isolated battles.

More than ever before, the old watchword the workers' movement is on the agenda:

"Workers of all countries, unite!"

FM March 1981

The 21 Theses of Council Communism Today written by a group of council communists in Denmark expresses the continuing res­urgence of revolutionary groups and ideas since 1968. It isn't accidental that these Theses appeared in the spring of 1980, at the wake of high levels of class struggle in France, Britain, Holland, etc and just a few weeks before the Swedish general strike. We cannot ignore in add­ition the splendid example provided rec­ently by the mass strike in Poland, con­firming that we live in a period of mounting class struggles leading to a series of proletarian insurrections. Indeed, the contributions of the Danish comrades can only be seen in this light as another welcome sign of our times. Their contributions will hopefully stim­ulate further discussion and help clarify the positions revolutionaries require for their intervention in this decisive period of history.

We don't believe that discussion amongst revolutionaries takes place to score points against other groups or to compare local notes in an academic fashion. We believe that revolutionary groups have the responsibility to discuss in order to clarify their ideas. This they do because it is crucial to have clear ideas when yon intervene in the class struggle. It is in the heat of the class struggle, in pract­ice, that the validity of revolutionary positions is tested in the end. Discuss­ions among revolutionary groups are there­fore a vital part of their action. With this in mind, we think that the most eff­ective way of intervening in the inter­national class struggle is for revolut­ionaries to regroup their forces on a clear basis, and also on an international scale. This is a process that can only take place through systematic and frat­ernal political clarification, allowing the open confrontation of ideas. It is this spirit, with this ultimate goal, that we contribute these critical remarks in response to the Theses of Council Communism.

1. Capitalism, Crisis, Revolution, Communism

This section of the Theses defends many class positions which are integral to the communist movement. The comrades assert, with Marx, that the only progressive solution to the capitalist crisis is the workers' revolution. They thus defend the dictatorship of the proletariat, without identifying it with any party rule, as the substitutionists of today do. The dictatorship of the proletariat is ident­ified instead with the rule of the workers' councils:

"The result of the revolution is the autonomous assumption of power and production for human needs. Thus the workers' council is the basic element of the anti-capitalist struggle, of the dictatorship of the working class and of the future communist society." (thesis no.4)

However, it is also asserted that:

"...capitalism will and must be over­thrown in the process of production ie in the workers' autonomous struggle for command of the single factory. The workers are the direct and practical masters of the machinery." (thesis no.2)

This conception seems to us misleading because it places the whole focus of the class struggle at the point of production or in the production process, as does the anarcho-syndicalist tradition. But this is a perspective proven wrong by history. Also, it is not true that the workers are the direct and practical masters of the machinery. Capitalism clearly owns and masters the machinery, and capitalism is not just fixed capital -- it is above all a social relationship based on the exploitation of wage labor. True, the workers can't liberate themselves without destroying the whole exploitative and hierarch­ical apparatus which rules in industry. But it is more than factory despotism which secures the conditions for the exploitation of the working class. The whole political apparatus of the state helps insure, indirectly and directly, with mystifications and with naked terror the total subordination of the proletariat to capitalism. The state, as we know, belongs to the superstructure of capitalism. But it isn't less decisive or imp­ortant because of this. On the contrary, as the general guardian of all capitalist interests, it plays a role far more pern­icious to the working class than managers or foremen in single factories.

The political rule of the state over soc­iety must therefore be defeated by the workers. This need begins to dawn on workers when they start seeing themselves as capable of transforming the whole of society -- not just a sum of single fact­ories -- through mass unitary action. Then the movement of the class struggle assumes truly insurrectionary proportions.

Clearly, workers can't learn to act coll­ectively at this scale by staying inside ‘their' single factories. They have to transcend the artificial separations imp­osed on them by capitalism, symbolized by the factory gates. Thus we also disagree with this conception:

"The basis of the revolution is the economic council-power organized on the basis of each factory -- but when the workers' action has become so powerful that the very organs of government have become paralyzed the councils must undertake political functions too."

Here we would like to remark that the ‘economic council-power' based on each factory is illusory as long as the capit­alist state still rules and defends the national economy. The pre-condition for any real and lasting economic and social transformation is the abolition of the capitalist state. The workers' councils, far from waiting to take political func­tions after a period of ‘economic power', must adopt immediate political functions if they are to survive against the maneuvers of the state.

The recent mass strike in Poland amply confirms this tendency which emerges clearly only in the decadent epoch of capitalism (see our editorial ‘The Inter­national Dimension of the Workers' Strugg­les in Poland' in the recent International Review no.24). There the workers' meas­ures of economic defense have intermingled with political thrusts which tend to con­front the state, expose its terrorist secret police, etc. To imagine that work­ers during a mass strike would limit their actions to occupations of factories as they unfortunately did in Italy in 1920, is to limit arbitrarily the revolutionary scope of their actions. The working class doesn't need a sort of high-school train­ing in ‘mastering production' in order to confront the state.

The state can't be isolated or paralyzed by workers' actions which are essentially defensive and isolated at the point of production. The only way through which the state is sapped is through a process of dual power, in which the organs of proletarian mass rule continuously extend the scope of their political impositions on the state. This cannot be a permanent process, and it most certainly cannot be a ‘training period' for acquiring ‘skills' in so-called economic mastery. The period of dual power, which combines from the start economic and political offensives, must sooner or later end in an insurrect­ionary attempt on the part of the workers' councils. This is the only way to over­throw the state. We should be under no illusions that the state, this cunning machine of terror, will simply accept defeat at the hands of factory occupations.

We agree that there will be a moment when the offensive of the workers' councils is so powerful that the state will recoil and even begin to disintegrate. But this will be only if from the start the workers' mass organs managed to combine economic and political methods of struggle. The mass strike process involves not only the control of the factories (as a whole, not ‘one by one') but the growing armament of the proletariat and the population which is passing to the side of the workers (Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of the mass strike in her The Mass Strike, the Polit­ical Party and the Trade Unions, appears to us extremely relevant for today's period. Especially the sections which deal with the relationships between the political and economic struggles of the proletariat).

The conceptions defended in the Theses on the workers' councils seem similar to us to those of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary who theorized his views in the newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo in the early 1920s. Gramsci claimed that his ideas arose as a result of the concrete exper­iences of the Russian proletariat. But in this he was wrong. The whole dynamic of the workers' soviets in Russia from Febru­ary to October 1917 was to oppose the cap­italist state of Kerensky. The movement of the factory committees and for ‘workers' control' was from the start part of this mass onslaught. This was a classical case of ‘dual power' as Trotsky describes it so well in his History. It twas easy for the workers in motion to understand that without kicking Kerensky out nothing could be done which was lasting in the factories. Only after the overthrow of Kerensky in October was it possible to re-organize the internal economic resour­ces of the Russian proletariat in order to place them at the disposal of the world revolution. That the October rev­olution was in the end isolated and that it degenerated further under the wrong policies of the Bolsheviks and the Comin­tern is not the issue here. What we are trying to explain is that Gramsci distort­ed the experience of the Russian workers' soviets. We will elaborate further.

Gramsci theorized a revolution in Italy based on a gradual taking over of society by the workers' soviets. In Gramsci's conceptions, the Russian factory committ­ees and the soviets had carried out this process of economic takeover in October. But this didn't happen during the Russian revolution. In Russia, the factory comm­ittees, and their attempts at ‘workers' control', were political weapons of the working class not only against employers but against the government. What the workers learnt in that process of dual power was politics, in other words, how to gain political hegemony in society against the capitalist state. But in Gramsci's views, the worker first had to see himself as a ‘producer' in a single factory. Only then would he escalate further the ladder of class consciousness:

"Starting off from his original all, the factory (sic!), seen as a unit, as an act that creates a particular product, the worker proceeds to the comp­rehension of ever vaster units, right to the level of the nation itself..."[1]

From this sublime peak, the nation, Gramsci elevated his single worker to the level of the world and then Communism:

"At this point he is aware of his class; he becomes a communist, because productivity does not require private property; he becomes a revolutionary because he sees the capitalist, the private property owner, as a dead hand, an encumbrance on the productive proc­ess, which must be done away with."[2]

From this ‘heightened consciousness' (which some may call a technocratic delirium) Gramsci makes his worker achieve the pinnacle of enlightenment: "the aware­ness of the State, that ‘gigantic appar­atus of product' that will develop the ‘communist economy' in a ‘harmonized and hierarchical' fashion."[3]

In Gramsci's schema, the workers achieve class consciousness not through the class struggle, as Marx described, but through a gradual pedagogic process of ‘economic mastery'. Gramsci viewed the workers as single ants, which achieved redemption from their base existence only through awareness of how they fitted in a grand economic plan, a statist anthill. Apart from the entomological aspect, this is an idealist view of the class struggle, and one that helped lead Gramsci to opportunism. The proletarian revolution is not determined by the previous edu­cational level of the workers, their culture or their technical skills. On the contrary, the proletarian revolution takes place precisely to obtain and generalize through humanity those cultural and technical advances already existing in society. The revolution is caused by the inner crisis of the capitalist system. This is correctly affirmed by you:

"The anti-capitalist actions rise in a spontaneous way. They are forced upon workers by capitalism. The action is not called forth by a conscious intention; it rises spontaneously and irresistibly." (thesis no.3)

This is why it is wrong to imagine that the proletarian revolution will develop gradually, from the cellular unit of the single factory to society as a whole, through the educational process envisaged by Gramsci. Historically, the great revol­utionary upsurges of the working class have not developed in this schematic manner. True, single incidents have trigg­ered mass actions, and will continue to do so. But this has nothing in common with the gradualist idea that class consciousness grows as the aggregate of all these little incidents, or as a result of ‘experiments' of ‘workers' control'. In any case, single incidents which may trigger a mass response aren't limited to single factories or even less to the shop floor. They could take place at a demonstration, a picket line, a bread queue, an unemployment centre, etc. Regarding workers' control, Paul Mattick is quite correct when he says that:

"Workers' control of production pre­supposes a social revolution. It cannot gradually be achieved through working class actions within the capitalist system."[4]

Gramsci's ideas had a fundamentally reformist substance, and allowed for the idea that workers can permanently learn to control capitalist production from within capitalism. This idea is doubly incorrect as the workers' revolution is not about controlling capitalist production, and neither is it about ‘self-manage­ment' nor ‘mastering production' within capitalism. All these are capitalist myths even if they are presented in their hoary, ‘violent' anarcho-syndicalist way.

As you remark, the workers' councils appear spontaneously and massively in society during a pre-revolutionary situation. They are not ‘technically' or ‘economically' prepared in advance. The crisis of capitalism finally pushes workers to unify themselves at all levels

-- economic, political, social -- in the factories, in the neighborhoods, in the docks and mines, in all places of work.

Their final aim can only be the destruct­ion of the capitalist state. Thus their ‘immediate' aim is to prepare themselves for political power. Whatever measures of ‘workers' control' take place within the places of work or society at large, they are strictly subordinated to this urgent and immediate aim: to disorganize and isolate the power of the capitalist state. Without this aim, the workers' autonomous actions will be dissipated and. fragmented, as they wouldn't have an axis or goal to pursue. The goal of ‘economic mastery' of each factory would provide a myriad of ‘single little aims', all dis­persing the unified forces of the workers. This goal would blunt the offensive of the workers' councils, reducing their task to that of feeble ‘factory committees' con­cerned only with the affairs of ‘their single factory'. But, just as socialism cannot be prepared or achieved in a single country, so it can't in one single factory.

The last ‘thesis' in this section (no.7) explains that the basis of communist soc­iety is the production of use values:

"Decisive for the political economy of communism is that the principle of abstract work has been abolished: the law of value does no longer rule the production of use value. The political economy of communism is utterly simple: the two basic elements are the concrete working time and statistics."

This is correct but incomplete as the international dimension of the proletarian revolution is not mentioned. In fact, this is the decisive element in the grad­ual elimination of the law of value: the world revolution which will permit the working class to have unlimited access to all the resources previously created by capitalism. We wouldn't call the commun­ist mode of production a ‘political econ­omy of communism', as that implies the survival of politics and economics, basic features of capitalism. We also note that the transition period from capitalism to communism is not mentioned. But the world revolution will not take place in one day. Thus we must expect a whole historic period, shorter or longer, during which the capit­alist state everywhere will be defeated, and the remnants of capitalism eliminated throughout the whole planet. Only then will the working class really be able to cast off the remnants of the law of value and transcend whatever temporary measures it had to take to deal with scarcity or technical difficulties. To pose the exist­ence of a ‘communist economy' in one single country would therefore be a basic error. This is one of the ambiguities that appear in the Basic Principles of Communist Prod­uction and Distribution written by the GIK-H (the group of International Commun­ists of Holland) and one that revolution­aries today must clarify.

Before discussing the second section of your Theses, we would like to point out that your admittedly brief analysis of the causes of the capitalist crisis doesn't mention a fundamental tenet of historical materialism. That is, has the capitalist mode of production become historically obsolete? Or, to use Marx's own concept, has it entered its decline? This is a decisive question for revolutionaries and for the working class. For the ICC, the capitalist system has been a decadent system of production since the First World War. This position is at the heart of our political platform.

To affirm that capitalism is still ascen­dant or youthful (even if ‘only' in certain areas of the planet) would be tantamount to saying that the communist revolution would be postponed for at least the coming historical period. A specific, and false, political practice would follow this affirmation.

On the other hand, to deny that the Marxist concept of decadence has any relevance to the capitalist mode of production would be a serious methodological error, leading to aberrant practices.

You also mention that overproduction is not the reason for the capitalist crisis. This may seem to be a criticism directed at Rosa Luxemburg, who analyzed precisely this problem in her The Accumulation of Capital. However, Luxemburg's analysis is above all an analysis of the historic decline of the capitalist system of its imperialist epoch. The question of the market and thus of overproduction is clearly relevant here, and not something to ignore as ‘underconsumption' (which was not Luxemburg's position). Even Mattick, who has consistently criticized Luxemburg's economic views, cannot ignore the question of the market:

"...the crisis must first make its appearance on the surface of the mar­ket, even though it was already present in changed value relations in the prod­uction process. And it is via the market that the needed reorganization of capital is brought about, even though this must be actualized through changes in the exploitative capital-labor relations at the point of production."[5]

We don't have to follow Mattick's reduct­ionism, which transforms the overproduct­ion crisis into a mere manifestation of changed value relations at the point of production. But evidently the crisis of markets expresses the historical limit­ation of capitalism in its imperialist epoch. This limitation is violently confirmed by the imperialist war of 1914. Mattick has not clearly answered this question: has capitalism entered its decadent phase or not? Luxembourg answer­ed yes, and provided an analysis to back this materialist affirmation. Those who insist that the reason for the crisis is only the falling rate of profit with its corresponding class struggle ‘at the point of production', generally ignore the question of decadence, and thus ignore the global analysis of capital Marx made, which included crises of overproduction. Since 1914, this crisis has become permanent, as capitalist expansion reached a structural barrier in a world market divided by imperialism.

How and when would capitalism reach its apogee and then decline, as previous modes of production had declined, Marx could not grasp fully. But it is surely a legitimate question for revolutionaries. This was at the heart of the debate between Luxembourg and Bernstein regarding reformism, and later between her and the German Social Democratic (Marxist) left against the right and Kautsky's ‘centre' in the SPD. Therefore we say without any hesitation that the really basic issue in ‘what is the reason for the capitalist crisis?' is the question of capitalist decadence. We agree that decadent capit­alism suffers internally from a growing organic composition which will make further accumulation impossible (as a tendency), and that it also suffers from an external problem (today affecting the whole world economy) which is the lack of profitable markets. How these two mortal crises interact and complement each other is a very complex problem. The question is not to deny one for the other; the question is to see how they express the utter putrefaction of the system today. For Marxists, the issue of capitalist decadence is a crucial and most practical issue.

2. The capitalist workers' organizations

"The basis of social democracy is the immediate consciousness of the masses."

But this ambiguous definition implies that Social Democracy is a stage of working class consciousness. Nothing could be further from the truth. The history of Social Democratic Parties shows that from 1914 they passed to the side of capital­ism. The First World War was their acid test, when they supported the imperialist butchery. This test was soon to be followed by a further immersion in the acid (or cesspool) by attacking the October revolution. Social Democracy, Menshevism, the ‘Socialist International' -- whatever name this repugnant capitalist faction may go under, it has definitely crossed the class barrier. In all countries where they exist, the Social Democratic parties are fart of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie. Social Democracy is not a servant of tine bourgeoisie -- it is a faction of the capitalist class.

It is one thing to say that the workers have illusions in Social Democracy. But it is another to say that these constit­ute something like a level or stage of consciousness proper to the nature of the working class. Class consciousness for the proletariat is not a mass of illusions and mystifications. It is the true perception of its class position in society, of its relationship to the means of production, the state, the other classes, and above all, perception of its revolutionary goals. Illusions, ideology, mystifications, are a product of capitalist society which inevitably affects the proletariat, distorting its class consciousness. Marx says that the ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class. This is generally true, but for the proletar­iat this only means that it can be under the influence of these alien ideas, not that it has a ‘bourgeois consciousness'. Social Democratic ideology, being part of capitalist ideology, thus affects layers of the working class. You say yourselves that "Social democratism is a counter­revolutionary movement." (thesis no. 8). For a party to be counter-revolutionary today means that it is capitalist. Other­wise the term ‘counter-revolutionary' would just be an insult, not a social and political definition as it is for Marxism.

The same applies to the trade unions. They do not, as you claim, "...take a bigger or smaller part of the surplus value from the capital." (thesis no.9) On the contrary, as capitalist organs, they help capitalism extract the maximum amount of surplus value possible. They do this in relative or absolute terms, but in either case they do it. In moments of deep crisis as today, they help ‘rationalize' the economy by supporting the draconian austerity measures of the government against the working class. They contribute directly to increasing unemployment. They try to deflect, fragment and dissipate the combativity of the workers. If the workers are able, here and there, to temporarily maintain their precarious living standards, this is because of their own determination, their own self-activity, not because of the unions. The unions are, as you say, "...opposed to the revolutionary workers' councils.".(thesis no.9) But why project their reactionary role only into the future, or the past (when the SPD unions opposed the German Revolution of 1918-19)? They are opposed today to any form of struggle preparatory to the workers' councils of tomorrow. The unions don't mediate the sale of labor power; they aren't the workers' ‘middlemen' in the labor market. In reality they depress the value of labor power constantly. They are a capitalist police force within the proletariat. If the situation requires it, the unions will physically defend the cap­italist state together with the other forces of repression. The trade unions are as capitalist and counter-revolutionary as Social Democracy, If the past 50 years of proletarian defeats show us something, it is this.

The term ‘capitalist workers' organization' is misleading as it implies that these capitalist organs have a dual class nature, half proletarian and half capitalist. It could also imply that during periods of economic boom these capitalist organs ‘serve' the workers, only to oppose them in periods of depression and crisis. But this is false. In any case, their class nature would be imprecisely defined by this term, thus, opening the door to all sorts of ‘trade-unionist' opportunisms.

Lenin and the Comintern coined the confus­ing idea of a ‘capitalist workers' party' in reference to the British Labor Party and other Social Democratic parties. This had an opportunist motive, as the 1921 tactic of the ‘united front' was to show. The Comintern called for ‘unity in action' with these parties, which had clearly passed to the camp of the bourgeoisie forever. Once a workers' organization betrays and becomes capitalist, it can't revert back to being proletarian. In making overtures to these class enemies, the Comintern hastened its own decline and degeneration. The fact that the Social Democratic parties and the unions had millions of workers didn't alter the basic, irrefutable fact that, politically, and hence sociologically, these organizations had become part and parcel of the capital­ist system.

The ‘Communist' parties are also part of the political apparatus of capitalism. Through Stalinism, they became active instigators of the counter-revolution which crushed the October Revolution and corrupted the Comintern in the 1920's and 1930's. These false communist parties are not, however, agents of Moscow or Peking, but loyal servants of their own national states. To call them ‘Leninist parties' is a travesty of history. The party of Lenin, the Bolsheviks, plus the initial Comintern, were organs of the working class in spite of all the deformations they contained. To identify them with the most brutal counter-revolution the prolet­ariat has ever suffered is profoundly mistaken.

This takes us to the question of the Russian Revolution. You claim that it was a ‘peasant revolution' (thesis no. 10). Hence, a bourgeois revolution? But this reveals a basic misunderstanding of what is a proletarian revolution and what is a bourgeois revolution. Let's deal first with the question of its proletarian nature.

The fact that October was a proletarian revolution was recognized by the whole communist movement of its time. Are you claiming that all these revolutionaries were blind to the real class nature of October? This is a completely unwarranted assumption, which partakes of Menshevik and Social Democratic prejudices. Not only Luxembourg and the Spartacists recognized October as theirs, but so did Gorter, Pannekoek, Roland-Holst, Bordiga, Fraina, Posmer, the Bulgarian Narrows, Pankhurst, etc. The revolutionary workers of that time also recognized it as such. In fact, the first imperialist war was stopped because all the imperialist governments feared a ‘Bolshevik infection' in their armies and populations. The October revolution was thought to be by revolutionar­ies the first of a series of international revolutions in this epoch of capitalist decay. This is why the Comintern was founded in 1919, to hasten the process of world revolution. The revolutionary wave failed in the end, but not because October was doomed to being a ‘peasant revolution'.

True, the October revolution had the part­icipation of millions of peasants who org­anized themselves in soldiers' soviets, village committees and rural soviets. But the main ‘peasant' party, the Social Revol­utionaries, had divided itself, one side supporting the bourgeoisie and the other supporting the most revolutionary workers' party at that time, the Bolsheviks. The peasants followed the city workers and took the lead from them. Yet the fact that the majority of the population was peasant doesn't make Red October ‘peasant'. The peasantry is not a class capable ever of ruling society, not even of creating mass parties autonomous of the bourgeoisie. No, the October revolution proves once and for all that the peasantry can only follow one of the main two classes of bourgeois society: the utterly reactionary bourg­eoisie or the working class. In October, the peasantry followed the proletariat, thus ensuring a mass popular support for the workers' revolution.

As regards the idea that October was a ‘bourgeois revolution'. This idea was defended by many ‘left-communists' and later by ‘council communists' when they suffered the whole weight and isolation of the counter-revolution. Originally, it was a Menshevik conception. But this view ignored the decadence of the world system manifested by the imperialist war. The bourgeoisie had become a socially decadent class everywhere; thus the period of ‘bourgeois revolutions' had come to a close. The communist revolution was posed objectively throughout the whole world. Russia was ready for socialism not because of its internal resources (which were backward) but because the whole world economy cried urgently for a communist reorganization and socialization of the productive forces, which were ‘over-ripe' for socialism. This the Bolsheviks saw clearly -- and put all their hopes in the extension of the world revolution. The Mensheviks, who saw every­thing in terms of isolated national econ­omies and ‘stages', were unable to grasp the new period of capitalism. Thus they were led to oppose the proletarian revol­ution, considering it ‘premature' or ‘anarchist'. The ‘left communists' who defended this idea of the ‘bourgeois rev­olution' in Russia surely didn't oppose the workers' revolution. But they were nonetheless defending an incoherent polit­ical framework.

The Bolshevik party that you misrepresent as a "...well-disciplined and united vanguard party" (thesis no.10) was a prol­etarian party based on the workers' coun­cils and factory committees. Its ideas, its revolutionary program (despite its imperfections) came from the international working class. To whom else could the slogans ‘down with the imperialist war', ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war', and ‘all power to the soviets' belong? To the bourgeoisie? To the peasan­try? No, these slogans expressed the needs of the world proletariat at that time. The idea that the Bolshevik party represented the ‘bureaucracy' -- the ‘new ruling class' -- is an anti-Marxist idea. First, because it is completely false regarding the Bolshevik party and second because it defends not only the idea of a ‘new class' but suggests a new, ‘third' mode of production, neither capitalist or communist. The dilemma of humanity would no longer be ‘socialism or barbarism', as the proletarian solution would seem to have failed, but ‘capitalism or barbarism' (sic!). Varieties of this ‘theory', defended by many renegades of Marxism like Burnham, Wittfogel, Cardan, etc, were first supported in the 1920s by Social Democratic pundits including Kautsky, Hilferding and Pauer. This type of ‘anti-Leninism' belongs to capitalism hook, line and sinker.

Once again, it is untrue that the goal of the workers' revolution is that "...the workers themselves will be the masters of production". (thesis no.10) This is at variance with the aim you defend in the first section, which is the creation of a mode of production based on need, on use values. Evidently, communism cannot be created by an elite or a ‘vanguard party' of any sort. It requires the fullest participation of the whole class, of the whole population, in the construction of a world free of nations, war, famine and despair. A world of human solidarity, where the individual will complement the community and vice versa. That certainly is the goal of the workers' revolution! In the road to this of course workers will be ‘masters of production', but not to maintain their fragmented status of ‘work­er' but to transform themselves into free associated producers. If communism is a classless society, the working class will have to disappear as a special or even ‘privileged' category of production. Communist humanity will ceaselessly try to master the whole of society, not only the production and distribution processes.

3. The present situation

When you assert that the "...reproduction of capital has not yet been thrown into a crisis which totally changes all social life." (thesis no. 11), in order to say that the immediate needs of the working class in Western Europe are not revolut­ionary, it is difficult to know what to say.

What events will convince you that capit­alism in Western Europe (not mentioning the rest of the world!) is in the deepest crisis since the 1930's? The search for an adequate dip in the falling rate of profit is surely not what you propose as that would be the crudest fatalism. The object­ive circumstances are ripe for a revolut­ionary overthrow -- indeed, they have been so for the past 60 years! The important, the decisive thing is that capitalism is sinking into its gravest economic crisis, and this is what will provide the working class with opportunities to dispel its illusions about surviving under capital­ism. Revolutionaries must therefore prepare themselves to intervene system­atically in this period, to patiently explain the goals of the movement, to participate and learn from the class struggle, so that their intervention really serves as an active factor in communist consciousness. The times are ripe, so ripe that the conditions for revolution could become ‘rotten' if the working class fails to destroy capitalism. The only outcome of that failure would be a third imperialist war and perhaps the annihilation of any communist future.

To say that Western Europe is in a ‘pre­revolutionary situation' (thesis no. 11) can only mean that today the class struggle is preparing itself, is maturing the conditions for a whole series of massive onslaughts against the capitalist system. To ignore this conclusion would be blindness. The unveiled and growing state violence in Western Europe fully confirms this trend: the bourgeoisie prepares itself for civil war against the threat of proletarian revolution. To say that the level of class consciousness is still not homogeneous and active enough as to attempt a revolutionary overthrow is one thing. But it is false to say that the needs of the class aren't revolutionary. What would they be then? More Social Democratic levels of ‘immediate conscious­ness'? More lessons on the ‘justification and limits' of trade unions today?

You seem to be saying that the defense of the immediate economic interests of the workers is capitalist, and that the unions carry out this function (well or badly depending on economic conditions). It has to defend its conditions of existence within capitalism. In the end, because of the crisis, and the threat of a new imperialist war, it will understand that it can only defend itself through a polit­ical offensive. In other words, the exploited and revolutionary natures of the working class always intermingle, and tend to consciously fuse as the capitalist system decomposes into full barbarism. Never has the system been so objectively vulnerable as today. At one point in their struggle, the workers will realize this. As we said before, the role of the unions is to confuse this unity of consciousness, to separate the economic struggles from the political ones, in order to sabotage and destroy both. The unions defend capitalism, not any ‘capitalist-worker' absurdity.

In your thesis no .17 you talk about the ‘left wing movement'. We assume you mean the extreme leftist groups. These groups defend, in one degree or another, the unions, Social Democracy, Stalinism and state capitalism. They participate in the electoral shams, they support inter-imperialist or bourgeois faction fights (in El Salvador, the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, etc). They are nothing but capitalist appendages of larger capit­alist groups. They are part of the ‘left of capital'. They aren't opportunist or reformist. Opportunism, reformism, and revisionism were specific historic deviat­ions in the workers' movement prior to 1914. The Comintern also suffered these diseases, though not for long, before it died. As mass phenomena, these deviations exist nowhere today. Capitalist decay, which has eroded any material possibility for a mass and permanent workers' movement (as was the Second International), indirectly too has eliminated the basis for these historic deformations which the proletariat suffered last century. Within the small revolutionary milieu which exists today, forms of opportunism can still be found, usually combined with its twin ailment, sectarianism. But this is due to theoretical sclerosis and conservatism, not to any ‘reformist mass base'. The extreme leftist groups, however, have different class nature to this milieu. The left Social Democrats (and their ‘youth' groups), the Trotskyists, ‘Communists', Maoists and other small fry of leftism-populism, belong entirely to the capitalist camp.

The destruction of the whole political apparatus of capitalism, of its left and right, is the task of the working class as a whole. What revolutionaries must untiringly do is to denounce the react­ionary, capitalist ideas and actions of these groups, especially the leftists as they do affect the class directly. This has to be done in front of the working class. If Social Democracy is, as you say, "...the most serious hindrance for the revolution and ... the last hope of the bourgeoisie ..." (thesis no.17) it follows that all its political parasites are also enemies of the working class. To say this to our class is an elementary responsibility.

As conclusion

The term ‘left communist' is today a misnomer because the previous mass comm­unist movement of the first revolutionary wave (1917-27) is dead. The ‘left comm­unists' of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were miniscule Marxist fractions that attempted to survive the counter-revolution and thus prepare the theoretical and practical re­armament of the future. These included the comrades of the GIK of Holland and Germany, the comrades of the ‘Italian Left' in exile who published Bilan, etc. Various tendencies which stem theoretic­ally from these fractions are alive today and growing. But there's no need to call ourselves ‘left communists', as we const­itute part of the only communist, ie, Marxist, movement of today. The leftist apparatus of capitalism has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the deadly opponent of communism and the working class. It is a decadent movement which defends state capitalism and the counter-revolut­ion. We are not its ‘left'.

Similarly, the name ‘council communism' is inadequate, as it identifies communism with councils. This is an unwarranted claim. The workers' councils still express that society is divided into classes. The term is therefore not synonymous with the communist mode of production. The name also implies that there are ‘varieties' of communists -- some ‘party communists', ‘state communists', .... ‘village commun­ists', or ‘borough communists'? But in reality we are simply communists.

To call ourselves ‘anti-capitalist workers' groups' would also be a misnomer. Revol­utionaries define themselves in an affirm­ative way, and don't conceal their views. An ‘anti-capitalist worker' is a purely negative definition. Revolutionary groups today can't limit themselves to be ‘infor­mation centers' -- or forums of local exper­iences. They aren't workers' discussion circles either, which are temporary by their very nature. Though vital for the class as a whole, these circles don't, and can't, carry out an active and system­atic international task of propaganda and agitation. Similarly, revolutionary groups aren't strike committees or the ‘Mister Do-Goods' at the service of strikes. A revolutionary group is a part of the class, but it is a political, and voluntary, part of the class. It attempts to defend a clear and coherent political platform in the working class struggle. In the movement of the class, it points out the general and final goals of the proletarian revolution.

The task of a genuine self-organization of the class falls upon the class itself, through its mass spontaneous action. Revolutionaries can't initiate that unitary task which can only be effected by hundreds of thousands if not millions of workers. The task of revolutionaries is to organize themselves, to clarify their ideas, so that they can participate and help fertil­ize the whole mass movement of tomorrow with lessons of the historical experience of the world proletariat. The working class struggle has a past, a present and an unfulfilled future. There is an org­anic link uniting these moments of its historic trajectory. Revolutionaries try to unravel this link in theoretical form first of all. To participate fully, with one's whole will and enthusiasm in this task, to contribute one's best insights and years to this struggle for human lib­eration, is to give hope and happiness its only meaning today!

International Communist Current

January 1981

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[1] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920; ‘Syndicalism and the Councils', article in L'Ordine Nuovo, 8 November 1919. London 1977, pp 110-111.

[2] Ibid, p.111

[3] For a comprehensive critique of the period (including the factory occupations) see ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Italy', in the ICC's International Review no. 2, p. 18

[4] Paul Mattick, ‘Workers' Control', in The New Left, Boston, 1970, p. 392.

[5] Paul Mattick, Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation, London, 1980, p. 123.

"Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realization of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we posses in our program is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist princip­les into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any soc­ialist party program or textbook. That is not a shortcoming but rather the very thing that makes scientific socialism superior to the utopian varieties." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, Ann Arbor 1972, pp.69-70.)

Thus Rosa Luxemburg poses the question of what economic and social measures should be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This approach remains valid for today. Above all, the proletariat must make sure that the capitalist state apparatus is destroyed. Political power is the essence of the proletarian dictatorship. Without that power, it will be impossible to carry out any economic, social or juridicial transformation in the transition period.

The experience of the Stalinist counter­revolution adds other guidelines of a very concrete and ‘negative' character. For example, the lesson that the nationalization of the means of production can't be ident­ified with their socialization. The Stal­inist nationalizations -- and even those of the period of ‘War Communism' (1918-1920) -- consolidated the totalitarian grip of the Russian state bureaucracy, giving it direct access to the surplus value of the Russian workers. Nationalization has become part and parcel of the general tendency of state capitalism. This is a decadent and arch-reactionary form of capitalism, based on a growing and permanent war economy. In Russia, the nationalizations that took place directly stimulated the counter-revolution.

However, even when claiming to agree with this general marxist approach, there are groups in the present revolutionary movement which deform and 'revise' it with 'social and economic' recipes added to the political power of the proletariat.

Among these tendencies, we think that FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario, Ferment Ouvrier Revolutionnaire, which publishes Alarma, Alarme, Focus, etc) distinguishes itself for its dangerous confusions. Our critique is therefore aimed at their way of posing the problem of the political and economic measures to be taken by the working class dictatorship.

How FOR interprets the experience of October 1917

According to FOR, the experience of the Russian Revolution raises the need of socializing the means of production from the first day of the revolution. The communist revolution is, according to them, as social as it is political. We read:

"...the Russian Revolution is a warning, and the Stalinist counter-revolution that supplanted it is a decisive chastisement for the world proletariat. The degeneration of the revolution was facilitated by the statification of the means of production in 1917, when the workers' revolution should have socialized them. Only the extinction of the state, as Marxism conceived of it, would have transformed the expropriation of the bourgeoisie into socialization. The statification that took place became, instead, the basis for the counter-revolution." (FOR, Second Communist Manifesto, Losfeld, Paris 1965, p. 24)

But FOR is wrong when it claims that there was statification (or nationalization) of the means of production in 1917. It needs to assert this in order to present ‘War Communism' as a ‘going beyond' of the initial Bolshevik economic project. The truth is that:

"Almost all the nationalizations that occ­urred before the summer of 1918 obeyed primitive reasons, provoked by the attit­ude of the capitalists, who refused to collaborate with the new regime." (Cited in the interesting study of Juan Antonio Garcia Diez, USSR, 1917-1929: from revolution to planning, Madrid 1969, p.53)

This is confirmed by other economic histo­rians of the Russian Revolution, like Carr, Davies, Dobb, Erlich, Lewin, Nove, etc.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Party had no intention of enlarging the state sector in the Russian economy to any great extent. This sector was already huge, exhibiting all the bureaucratic and militarized features of the war economy. On the contrary, the intention of the Bolsh­eviks was to politically control this state capitalism, as they awaited the world revolution. The disorganization of the country, and that of the central administration, was so deep that there was practically no state budget. Without intending to, the Bolshevik contributed to a monstrous inflation by printing their own paper money as the banks refused to help them (in 1921, each gold rouble was worth 80,000 paper roubles!)

The Bolsheviks had no concrete economic plan in 1917; only the maintenance of workers' power in the soviets, as they awaited the world revolution, especially in Europe. The Bolsheviks' merit was, according to Luxemburg,

"...having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of politica lpower..." (Luxemburg, ibid, p.80)

On the economic and social levels, Luxemburg criticized them severely, not because they defended a set of theoretic prescriptions, but because many of the measures of the soviet government were not appropriate to the circumstances. She criticized them because she saw in those empirical measures obstacles for the future development of the revolution.

‘War Communism', which developed during the Civil War, nevertheless marked a dangerous theorization of the measures adopted. For FOR, this period contained ‘non capitalist relations'. (FOR, ibid, p.25) In reality, FOR romantically ignores that ‘War Communism' was a war economy, and insinuates that it was a ‘non-capitalist' production and distribution. Bolsheviks like Lenin, Trotsky, Bukhararin, etc, even stated that this ‘political economy' was taking them into communism. In delirious tone, Bukharin wrote in 1920:

"The communist revolution of the proletariat is accompanied, as every revolution,   by a reduction in productive powers. The civil war, still in the powerful dimens­ions of modern class wars, since not only the bourgeoisie, but also the proletariat is organized as state power, signifies a net minus economically speaking..."

But there is no need to fear this, Bukharin consoles us:

"Then the costs of the revolution and the civil war appear as a temporary reduction of productive powers, through which, however, the basis for their powerful development is given by the restructuring of production relations according to a new basic design." (N.Bukharin, Economics of the Transition Period, New York 1971, pp 58-59.)

FOR remarks:

"The failure of this attempt (of ‘War Communism') due to the vertical fall in production (3 per cent of the 1913 figures), provoked the return to the mercantile system under the name of NEP -- ­New Economic Policy." (FOR, ibid, p.25)

FOR doesn't criticize ‘War Communism' in any serious way. But it does criticize the NEP, as if that policy expressed something of a ‘return to capitalism'. Since, according to FOR, ‘War Communism' was a ‘non-capitalist' policy, it is logical to suppose that NEP was its opposite. But this is false.

It must be openly said that ‘War Communism' had nothing to do with a ‘communist production and distribution'. To identify communism with war is a monstrosity, even if done between quotation marks. Soviet Russia in 1918-20 was a society militarized to the maximum. The working class lost power in the soviets during that period, a period that FOR idealizes. True, the war against the counter-revolution had to be carried out and won, and this could only be done together with the world revolution and the creation of a Red Army. But the world revolution did not come and the whole defense of Russia fell on the shoulders of a state organized into barracks. The working class and the peasantry supported most heroically and fervently that war against world reaction, but there is no need to idealize or paint in different colors what really went on.

The Civil War plus the social, economic and police methods added to the current military ones, enormously bloated the state bureauc­racy, infecting the party and crushing the soviets. This repressive apparatus, which contained nothing ‘soviet' anymore, is the one that organized the NEP. Between ‘War Communism' and NEP there is thus an unden­iable continuity. FOR doesn't answer this question: What was the mode of production under ‘War Communism'? Far from clearing anything up, ‘non-capitalist' is only a confusing term. A war economy can only be capitalist. It is the essence of the dec­adent economy, of the systematic production of armaments, of the total domination of militarism.

‘War Communism' was a political and military effort of the Russian proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This is what matters about it above all -- ie, its aspect of political control and proletarian orientation. This was a temporary, passing effort that could only dangerously grow as the world revolution was delayed. It was an effort that contained enormous dangers for the proletariat. The class was already organized into barracks and almost without its own voice. The ‘non-capitalist' content didn't exist except at the already mentioned political level. If it were not like that, the Inca Empire, with its ‘non-capitalist production and distrib­ution' would be a good forerunner of the communist revolution!

‘War Communism' was based on the following supposedly ‘anti-capitalist' methods:

-- the concentration of production and dist­ribution through bureaucratic departments (the glavki);

-- the hierarchical and military adminis­tration of the whole of social life;

-- an ‘egalitarian' system of rationing;

-- the massive use of the labor force through ‘industrial armies';

-- the application of terrorist methods in the factories by the Cheka, against strikes and ‘counter-revolutionary' elements;

-- the enormous increase in the black market;

-- the policy of rural requisitioning;

-- the elimination of economic incentives and the unrestrained use of ‘shock' methods (udarnost) to eliminate deficiencies in industrial branches;

-- the effective nationalization of all branch­es that supplied the war economy;

-- the elimination of money;

-- the systematic use of state propaganda to raise the working class and popular morale;

-- free public transport, communications and rent.

If we don't take into account the political aspect of the still-present workers' power, this is the description of a war economy, that is, of a crisis economy. It is inter­esting to note that ‘War Communism' just could not be planned. Such a measure would have been resisted by the working class, as it would have meant the rapid, permanent and totalitarian consolidation of the bureaucracy. Military planning would have only been poss­ible over the backs of a completely exhausted and defeated proletariat. This is why Stalin­ism could add ‘the plan' (a decadent planning) only in 1928 and thereafter to an economy in all other respects similar to ‘War Communism'. The fundamental difference was that the work­ing class had lost political power by 1928. If in 1918-20 it could somewhat control ‘War Communism' (a policy which after all did express passing through urgent needs), and even use this policy to defeat external reaction, during the last years of NEP the class had lost all political power. But under ‘War Communism' as under NEP and the Stalinist 5-year Plan, the law of value continued to rule. Wage labor could be disguised, money could be made to ‘disappear', but capitalism didn't cease to exist for all that. It is not possible to destroy it by administrative or purely political means in one single country.

That the already bureaucratized Bolshevik Party realized that ‘War Communism' could not survive the Civil War goes to show that that workers' party still exercised certain political control over the state that emerg­ed from the Russian Revolution. Here we must say ‘certain' because that control was relative, and decreasing. Also, it shouldn't be forgotten that the Bolsheviks were remind­ed of the need to cast off ‘War Communism' by the workers and sailors of Petrograd and Kronstadt. These paid heavily for their impertinence. In reality, the Kronstadt revolt was waged against the so-called ‘non-capitalist production and distribution' and against the whole terrorist state app­aratus and one-party system already in power in Russia during the Civil War.

We don't have to repeat endlessly that all this happened because of the isolation from the world revolution. That is true. But it isn't enough to say this. The manner in which this isolation manifested itself within the Russian Revolution is also important, because of the examples and concrete lessons that can be extracted for the future world revolution. ‘War Communism' was an inevit­able though dismal expression of the political class from its class brothers in Europe.

By theorizing ‘War Communism', certain Bolsheviks like Bukharin, Kritsman, etc, implicitly defended a sort of communism in one country. True, in 1920 no Bolshevik would have dared say that openly. But it is contained in the conception of a ‘non-capitalist production and distribution' existing in one country or ‘proletarian state' (another equally false conception, which sometimes FOR appears to defend and sometimes not).

The fundamental internal error of the Russian Revolution was to have identified dictatorship of the party with proletarian dictatorship, with the dictatorship of the workers' councils. This was a fatal substitutionist mistake of the Bolsheviks. From a broader historical level, this error expressed a whole period of revolutionary theory and practice that was coming to a close and which is non‑existent today. Among today's Bordigists it is possible to find caricatured remnants of this substitutionist conception. Today that conception is obsolete and reactionary. ­But the mistake of the Bolsheviks or, if you wish, the limitation of the Russian Revolution, is not that they did not transcend the ‘purely political' level of social revolution. How could they transcend that level if the revolution was isolated? What they did on the social and economic level was the most that could be done. This is true regarding ‘War Communism' and even the NEP. These two policies contained profound dangers and unsuspected traps for the political power of the proletariat. But as long as the proletariat maintained itself in power, economic mistakes could be mended and rectified; in the meantime, the awaited world revolution remained the final perspective. If it was impossible to arrive at an ‘integral communism' (an empty phrase of British CWO, the Communist Workers Organization), this wasn't because the working class didn't want to or because it had no other ‘great experiences' (like the Spanish collectives in 1936). The poverty of Russia, it's terribly low cultural level, the blood-letting of the World War and the Civil War, all this did not allow the working class to maintain its grip on political power. Also, Bolshevism's treason should be added as a fundamental internal cause.

But how can the absence of 'non-capitalist' measures such as the disappearance of the law­of value, wage labour, commodity production, the state and even of classes (in one single country?), explain the internal defeat of the Russian Revolution? Yet this is what FOR appears to be saying. Let's quote:

"Capitalism will always surge forth if from the start its life source is not dried up: the production and distribution based on wage labor ... What the prol­etariat of each country must take into account is the industrial level of the world, not only that of ‘its' nation. (Grandizo Munis, ‘Revolutionary Class, Political Organization, Dictatorship of the Proletariat', Alarma No.24, 1973,p.9. A part of this appears in 2nd Conference of Groups of the Communist Left, Vol.1, 178, p.81)

Nevertheless, in spite of what FOR suggests here, the ‘life source' of world capitalism doesn't exist in small puddles, each to dry up, country by country. FOR seems oblivious to the fact that capitalism as a social system exists at the world scale, as an international relation. The law of value cannot therefore be eliminated except on a world level. Since it affects the whole world proletariat, it is impossible to think that an isolated sector of the working class can escape its laws. The latter is a typical mystification which thought that the state and capitalism could be eliminated via a false village or district communalism. In the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, the idea acquired its industrial ‘variant', but it remains the same localist, narrow and selfish mystification.

In the above mentioned article by Munis, we are warned that the proletariat must not count ‘only' on the industrial level of ‘its' nation. Wise advice, though not very clarifying. If Munis refers to the possibility and need of taking political power in one country whichever it is, it is a good advice, even if not that new.

It is true that what matters is the world level, not each country's. Still, when it is said that communist production and distribution can be started ‘immediately', as FOR claims, the industrial level of each country would matter absolutely. It would be the fundamental and decisive factor. Of course, such an affirmation would place FOR -- even if it is a revolutionary tendency -- in the chauvinist tradition of a Volmar or a Stalin. But what is really tragic is that we would have to accept that communism is impossible, as it can't be possible in one country. FOR would answer irately that it doesn't defend the idea of ‘socialism in one country'. That is good to hear, but it can't be denied that FOR's way of posing the economic and social tasks -- as important as the political ones according to its view -- suggests a sort of ‘communism in one country'. What other meaning can it have to say that capitalism will always surge forth unless its   ‘life source' is ‘dried up'? But we have already seen that it can't be ‘dried up' in one country. Thus, it will return inevitably to where the proletariat has taken power, since the class couldn't ‘dry up' the capitalist ‘life source' of wage labor. But, can wage labor be eliminated in one country or region? According to FOR, it seems that the answer is yes. That's the question. Once that is accepted, ‘socialism in one country' follows too. One is either coherent ... or not.

In an otherwise excellent polemic against the Bordigist sentinels of Le Proletaire, Munis repeats:

"In our conception, ... it's the most important imposition of the proletarian dictatorship and without it there will never be a transition period to communism." (Munis, ibid, Alarma, No.25, 1973, p.13.)

This refers to the need to abolish wage labor. Munis describes the need for politi­cal power as "...a more than centenarian commonplace." But the abolition of wage labor is that too.

Now, it is true that without the abolition of wage labor there will be no communism. The same goes for frontiers, state, classes. It isn't necessary to repeat that communism is a mode of production based on the most complete freedom of the individual, in the production of use values, in the complete disappearance of classes and the law of value, In this we agree with FOR. The diff­erence emerges when we confront the emphasis given in practice to economic and social measures. We will notice here that the question of political power, far from being a ‘commonplace', is what is decisive for the world revolution. But not for FOR.

The approach of Munis is trapped by the whole (myopic) vision of the Trotskyist and even Bukharinist anti-Stalinist Oppositions. Munis thinks that economic or social measures of the ‘non-capitalist' type will provide us with guarantees against the counter-revol­ution. In spite of the importance of a lot of the writing of Preobrazhenski, Bukharin and other Bolshevik economists, their contrib­utions don't through much light on the real problems that the class faced in 1924-1930. Preobrazhenski talked about a ‘socialist accumulation', of the need to establish an economic equilibrium between town and country etc. In spite of his political divergences with the Left Opposition, Bukharin used similar arguments. They all remained prison­ers of the idea of ‘what can be done econom­ically to survive in one single country?'

This was a false problem because it appeared when the working class had lost its class power, its political power. When this happened, all discussion about the soviet ‘economy' became pure charlatanry and a technocratic mystification. With its barb­arous five-year plans, its police terror and its final massacre of the already vanquished Bolshevik Party, the Stalinist rabble terminated all these false debates.

Although it is true that today's proletarian revolution will find itself in more favor­able conditions than in 1917-27, we can't console ourselves by thinking that the terr­ible problems are going to disappear. The proletariat will inherit a putrefying and decadent economic system. The Civil War will add to this waste with more destruction. The delirious acclamations of Bukharin regarding this decline have to be avoided at all costs, as any sort of apocalyptic or Messianic thought regarding the ‘immediate' communist revolution has to be. This has nothing to do with gradualism. It is a matter of calling things by their name.

It is evident that if the working class takes power, let's say, in Bolivia (even if momentarily), its capacity to ‘socialize' will be very restricted. It is possible that for FOR this inconvenience will not be worth bothering about. For example, the Bolivian proletariat could bring back to life the ‘communist' Aymara spirit, and even Tupac-Amaru who could become People's Commissar. In Paraguay, just to give another hypothetical example, the proletariat could return to an ancient type of Jesuit ‘commun­ism' of the Conquista times. One must always keep one's chin up, as every cloud has a silver lining: Didn't Marx himself talk about a ‘crude communism', based on general­ized misery? One could argue, wasn't that a type of ‘communism'? Yes, but is it... applicable to our days? Perhaps FOR would like to answer? It seems that FOR's attach­ment to the collectives in Spain has also brought forth a special nostalgia for ‘primitive communism'.

But jokes aside (which we hope that FOR does not take to heart!), it must be said that the proletariat assumes political power with the goal of the world communist revolution. Therefore, on the economic and social plane, the measures adopted must tend in that direction. That is why they are subordinated to the need to conserve the political power of the free, sovereign and autonomous workers' councils, inasmuch as they are expressions of the ruling revolutionary class. Political power is the precondition for all ‘social transformation' -- be it ulterior, immediate, long term or whatever you want to call it. Political power is primary. That doesn't change. On the economic level, there is a lot of room to experiment (relatively) and also to make mistakes that don't have to be fatal. But any alteration on the political level rapidly implies the complete return of capitalism.

The depth of the economic transformations possible in each country will depend, of course, on the concrete material level of that country. But under no circumstances will workers turn their backs on the needs of the world revolution. In this sense, it is possible that there will be a type of ‘war communism', or a war economy under the direct control of the workers' councils. Nationalizations will not exist, but there will be the active and responsible participation of a soviet apparatus of government controlled by the working class. Does FOR think this is im­possible? Is this to be ‘too attached to the Russian model'?

To give primacy to the abolition of wage labor, thinking that by this we will arrive at the

"immediate break-up of the law of value (exchange of equivalents) leading to its later disappearance..." (Munis, ibid, p. 6)

is sheer ‘modernist' phantasy. It's the type of illusion that in certain moments would help to disarm the proletariat, isolating it from the rest of the world class. If the class is told that it has ‘socialized' ‘its' sector of the world economy, that it has ‘broken up' the law of value in ‘its' region, it will also be told that it should defend that ‘communist' sector which is supposedly qualitatively superior to external capitalism. Nothing would be further from the truth than that demagogy. What we defend is the political power of the proletariat.

What would defeat any sector of the working class which has taken power is the isolation of the revolution. In other words, the lack of clear consciousness in the rest of the world class regarding the need to extend the solidarity needed by the world revolution. Therein lies the real problem! FOR doesn't see it this way, even if at times it makes a curtsy in that direction. The problem isn't that capitalism is going to ‘re-emerge' there where its life source hasn't dried out, but that capitalism continues to exist on a world level, even if one, two or a few capit­alist states have been defeated. To think that capitalism can be destroyed in one country alone is pure phrase mongering, and reveals a profound ignorance of the capital­ist economy as Marx analyzed it. Or we are dealing with a ‘simultaneous revolution' in all countries, capable of shortening enormously the period of civil war, so that entry into the world period of transition proper is accordingly hastened. This would be ideal, but probably it won't happen in this instantaneous manner, in spite of the efforts of FOR. To have hopes, to be open to unexpected possibilities, is one thing. But to base a whole revolutionary perspective on them and even write a Second Communist Manifesto in this spirit, is another thing. True freedom comes from the recognition of necessity, not from voluntarist hullabaloos.

In spite of its basic confusions regarding what was ‘War Communism' in the October Revolution, at least FOR understands that it was a proletarian revolution, that it was the political effort of the class to maintain itself in power. But let's see now what FOR tells us about Spain 1936...

How FOR focuses on the collectives in Spain in 1936

According to FOR, the attempt of ‘War Communism' never transcended the stage of political power of the working class, even if ‘anti-capitalist' relations were intro­duced during it. To show us an even more profound example of ‘non-capitalist' measures or relations, FOR presents us the 1936-37 collectives in Spain. Munis describes them thus:

"The 1936-37 collectives in Spain aren't a case of self-management... (sic!) Some of them organized a sort of local communism keeping no exchange relations except towards the outside, just like the ancient societies of primitive communism. Others were trade or village co-operatives, whose members distributed among themselves the previous profits of capitalism. They all more or less abandoned the payment of the workers according to the laws of the labor market. Some more than others abandoned payment according to necessary labor and surplus labor, sources from where capitalism extracts surplus value and the whole substance of its social organization. Also, the collectives gave the combat militias abundant and regular donations in kind. The collectives therefore can't be defined except by their revolutionary characteristics (sic!); in sum, by the system of prod­uction and distribution which broke with the capitalist notions of value (exchange value necessarily)..." (Munis, Protest letter to the magazine Autogestion et Socialisme, in Alarma no.22/23, 1972, p.11)

In his book on Spain, Jalones de derrota: promesa de victoria (1948), Munis is even more enthusiastic:

"Once industry -- excepting small-scale units -- were expropriated, the workers put it to work by organizing themselves in local and regional collectives, and also according to industrial branches. This is a phenomenon in marked contrast to that of the Russian Revolution, and confirms the intensity of the Spanish revolutionary movement. The great maj­ority of technicians and, in general, skilled workers, collaborated courageous­ly with the collective workers from day one. They didn't show any evidence of not wanting to integrate themselves into the new economy. Administration and production benefitted by this; the step towards an economy without capitalists was taken without the obstacles and productivity losses caused by the tech­nicians' sabotage in the Russian Revolut­ion of 1917. On the contrary, the economy ruled by the collectives made quick and enormous progress. The stimulus of a triumphant revolution, the delight of working for a system that would replace the exploitation of man with his freedom from the misery of wage slavery, the con­viction of giving hope to all the earth's oppressed, the opportunity of victory over their oppressors, all this created marvels. The productive superiority of socialism over capitalism was brilliantly shown through the work of the worker and peasant collectives. The intervention of the capitalist state, ruled by the political good-for-nothings of the Popular Front, did not rebuild the yoke destroyed in July (1936)". (Munis, Jalones de derrota: promesa de victoria (Espana 1930-39), Mexico 1948, p.340. Title in English: Banner of Defeat: Promise of Victory (Spain 1930-39)

'This is not the place to continue a polemic on the Civil War in Spain. We have already published a lot on that tragic chapter of the counter-revolution which opened the door to the second imperialist massacre. (See the articles by Bilan in the ICC's International Review: Nos 4, 6, 7 and the article ‘The Myth of the Spanish Collectives' in No.15) Here we will briefly state that Munis and FOR have always defended the   erroneous idea that in Spain there was a so-called ‘revolution'. Nothing is further from the truth. Although it is true that the working class in Spain destroyed the bourgeois political apparatus in 1936 and that in May 1937 the class rose, too late, against Stalinism and the Popular Front government, this doesn't deny that the class was defeated, and absorbed by the inter-imperialist conflict between the Republic and Fascism. The class caved in ideologically under the weight of this wretched anti-fascist campaign. It was massacred in the war and killed off by the Francoist dictatorship, one of the worst in this century.

The collectives were ideal to deflect the attention of the proletariat from its real immediate objective: the total destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus with all its parties, including the left ones. The latter had revived the state apparatus after the armed workers had disorganized it in 1936. After the class had done this, it was nevertheless seduced by the struggle of the Popular Front against the Franco insurrection. The collectives and the factory committees capitulated in front of this filth. The state apparatus was reconstituted, and it integrated the working class into the military front, channeling the class struggle towards the bourgeois massacre. Bilan (of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left), opposed any idea of support for the so-called ‘Spanish Revolution'. They correctly affirmed:

"...when the proletariat is not in power -- as is the case in Spain -- the militarization of the factories is the same as militarization of the factories in any capitalist state at war." (International Review No.6, p.15)

Bilan supported the working class in Spain during those tragic hours: it pointed out the only path to follow:

"As for the workers of the Iberian Peninsular, they have but only one road today, that of 19 July: strikes in all industries whether engaged in the war or not; class struggle against Companys and Franco; against the ukases (edicts) of their trade unions and the Popular Front; and for the destruction of the capitalist state." (ibid, p.18)

How distant are these words from the phrase mongering about ‘the superiority of socialism over capitalism' shown by the collectives! No, the truth has to be confronted: in Spain there was no social revolution. Capitalism survived because the working class in Spain, isolated from the agonizing world revolution, was led to ‘self-manage' a ‘collectivized' war economy on behalf of Spanish capitalism. Under such conditions, to affirm that the ‘Spanish Revolution' went beyond the Russian Revolution at the level of ‘non-capitalist' relations is pure ideological humbug.

Munis and FOR reveal here an incapacity to  understand what was the October Revolution and what was the counter-revolution in Spain. This is a profound mistake for a revolutionary tendency. To minimize the content of the former in favor of the latter is simply incredible. In reality, when Munis and FOR defend the collectives, they are ‘theorizing' the support given to the Republican government by the Trotskyists during the Civil War. There just isn't any other way of explaining this fanatical devotion to the collectives, which were the trap of the Republican bourgeoisie in 1936-37. We know already that according to FOR, the Trotskyist    tradition is revolutionary -- FOR considers itself its historic inheritor. But let us examine in passing what was being said by the Trotskyists of the Bolshevik-Leninist section (for the 1Vth International) during         the Civil War:

"Long live the revolutionary offensive!

No compromises. We call for the disarming of the reactionary Republican Nation al Guard (Guardia Civil) and of the Shock Guard. The moment is decisive. The next         time it will be too late. We call for a General Strike in all the industries that don't produce for the war effort. Only proletarian power can guarantee military victory.     

For the total arming of the working class!

Long live the unity of action of CNT-FAI-POUM!

Long live the revolutionary proletariant front!

Create revolutionary defense committees in the workshops, factories and neighborhoods!"

(Munis, in Jalones, p.305)

Trotskyism's reactionary position immediately catches the eye: "...guarantee the military victory." And for whom? For the Republic! According to the Trotskyists, this ‘military victory' must not be threatened by irresponsible strikes in military industries. Yes, that was -- and is -- a fundamental difference between Trotskyism and Marxism. The first couldn't distinguish between revolution and counter-revolution and the Marxists not only could, but also confirmed the primacy, the fundamental need, of insuring political power before any attempt at ‘re-organizing' society. If the bourgeois war in Spain did anything for revolutionary theory, it was to confirm this lesson of the working class.

In chapter XVII of Jalones, titled ‘Property', Munis openly claims that in Spain "...a new economic system was being born, the socialist system." (Munis, ibid, pp.339-340) The future communist revolution, Munis warns us, will have to continue and perfect this project. Munis doesn't care that all that ‘socialist' effort was pledged to a 100% capitalist war, to a massacre and preparatory beheading of the second world butchery, with its 60 million corpses. In the final analysis, Munis continues to support the anti-fascist war of 1936-38, and, from this standpoint, he hasn't broken with the Trotskyist myths. The mystification suffered by the prolet­ariat is something Munis admits, but without knowing what to do about it: "the proletariat continued to consider the economy as its own and capitalism definitively gone." (Munis, ibid, p.346)

Instead of criticizing these mystifications of the proletariat, Munis adapts to them, idolizes and ‘theorizes' them. Therein lies what is negative, retrogressive in FOR and its tin pan serenades about the ‘Spanish Revolution'. Its criticism is purely economic, dealing above all with the lack of planning at the national scale. For Munis, "the seizure and putting into action of the productive centers by their workers was a necessary first step. To stay there would have been lamentable." (Munis, ibid, p.345) Munis also mentions political power later, saying that it was ‘decisive' (!) for the revolution. But this is to inform us that the CNT wasn't up to scratch, implying that the CNT was an organ of the class (another swindle). According to FOR, the CNT was a proletarian organization that forgot the ‘common place' of political power. This is the way the clear and trenchant FOR presents the ‘Spanish Revolution'.

Munis' book appeared in 1948. It is possible that his ideas have changed. But it should be marked that in the Re-affirmation written in March 1972 (at the end of the book), Munis makes no comment or criticism of the Trotsky­ist activities in Spain during the Civil War. In this sense, Munis has not changed his ideas about the ‘Spanish Revolution' in more than 45 years. To be attached too much to the ‘Russian model' is not a crime for revol­utionaries. It may be a ‘conservative shackle', but as it belongs to the history of our own class, that is why we must absorb all its lessons, because it was a proletarian revolution. It's the opposite regarding the so-called ‘Spanish Revolution'. Our class never took political power there; on the contrary, in part through the collectives, it was convinced that was a ‘common place' better left in the hands of Messrs CNT-FAI-­POUM. Thus the class was immobilized and massacred by the Republicans and their Stal­inist henchmen, plus the Franco troops. For Munis, this massacre doesn't tarnish at all the sublimely redeeming task of the coll­ectives. Faced with such lyricism, we say that to be attached -- even by a tiny bit -- to the ‘Spanish model', is a monstrous error for revolutionaries!

For Munis and FOR, the political power of the class appears sometimes as something important and decisive and sometimes as something that could -- and should -- come after. It's something like a ‘commonplace', not worthy of much discussion since ‘we all know that'. But in fact FOR doesn't know it. The Spanish experience shows, in a negative manner, the primacy of political power over so-called ‘socialist' measures or relations. Munis and FOR don't seem to realize that in the Spanish war political power and ‘collectivist' mystification existed in inverse proportion. The one cancelled the other, and it couldn't have been otherwise. (As we have said, Munis sometimes insists that political power is decisive. See, for example, Jalones, pp.357-­358. This is a dualism that constantly haunts the FOR!)

"The longer we look back at 1917, the greater is the importance acquired by the Spanish Revolution. It went deeper than the Russian Revolution ... in the realm of thought, only despicable apologies for theory can be made if the contribution of the Spanish Revolution is ignored; more precisely, if what is ignored is that contribution which contrasts with that of the Russian Revolution, transcending or negating it." ( Munis, ibid, p.345)

For our part, we prefer to base our persp­ectives on the real experiences of the proletariat and not on modernist ‘innovation' like those of the FOR. Being an exploited and a revolutionary class, the working class expresses this complementary nature through its historical struggles. It uses its econ­omic struggles to help itself reach an understanding of its historic tasks. That revolutionary understanding finds an immediate obstacle in each capitalist state, which has to be overthrown in each country by the working class. But the working class can't dissolve itself as an exploited category except on a universal scale, because that possibility is intimately linked to the world economy, which goes beyond the resource of each national economy. Luxemburg's concept of global capital is important in this respect. The capitalist state can be over­thrown in each national economy. But the capitalist character of the world economy, of the world market, can only be eliminated on the universal plane. The working class can institute its dictatorship (although not for long) in one single country or a handful of countries, but it can't create communism in one country or region of the world. Its revolutionary power is expressed by its undiluted internationalist orientation, directed foremost to helping destroy the capitalist state everywhere, to destroy that police apparatus of terror throughout the planet. That period may last a few years, and as long as it isn't finished, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to adopt real and definite communist measures. The total destruction of the economic bases of the capitalist mode of production can't be but the task of the whole world working class, centralized and united, without nations, or commodity exchange. In a certain way, until the working class reaches that level, it will remain an economic class, since the condition of penury and economic disequilibrium will persist. It is thus that the exploited and revolutionary natures of the working class join hands, tending to consciously fuse in the long historic process of the proletar­ian dictatorship and the total communist transformation.

We don't pretend to consider this important discussion closed. But we did want to put forward our criticism of the FOR's conception regarding the problems of the proletarian revolution. Nothing that FOR adduces in supp­ort of an ‘immediate communism' convinces us that the way Rosa Luxemburg posed the question is wrong (see quote at beginning of article). Even worse is then the idea that the Russian Revolution wasn't as deep as the ‘Spanish Revolution'. FOR's ideas on ‘the tasks of our epoch' are connected to this vision of a socialism that can be reached in any moment and whenever the proletariat wants it. This immediatist, voluntarist conception has been criticized often in our press. (We mention, among others, Internationalism no.25, review of The Alarm, and no.27, in which the positions of Munis/FOR regarding the recent mass strike in Poland are discussed.)

The dangerous confusions of FOR hide an incapacity to grasp what is the decadence of capitalism and what are the tasks of the working class in this historic period. Equally, FOR has never been able to under­stand the meaning of the historic courses that have unfolded this century after 1914. It never grasped, for example, that the struggle of the Spanish proletariat in 1936 could not change the course towards a second imperialist war. What crucially confirmed this was the tremendous political confusion of the proletariat in Spain. Instead of continuing its struggle against the state apparatus and all its political and trade union wings, it allowed itself to be shack­led by the latter, and abandoned its class terrain. (In a recent and excessively vit­riolic polemic, FOR repeats its usual sayings about Spain 1936, without adding anything new -- the famous ‘Spanish Revolution' persists as ever. See ‘Broken Trajectory of Revolution Internationale'.) There's the real tragedy of the world proletariat in Spain!

But for FOR, this ‘jalon de derrota' (ie banner of defeat) in reality confirmed the ‘superiority' of socialism over capitalism. But how mistaken is this vision of the comm­unist revolution, a view incapable of seeing when that movement for the total liberation of mankind has fallen into the blackest pit. If the proletariat is not able to underst­and when and how its struggle, its perspect­ives and its most selfless efforts were displaced by the enemy class and recuperated by it momentarily, the proletariat will never be able to raise itself to its histor­ic mission. The proletariat's future world liberation requires constantly a profound balance sheet of the last 50 years. When FOR realizes this need, and more than any­thing, what was Trotskyism, and the so-called ‘Spanish Revolution', only then will it be able to really go forward and blossom into the promise of all that enormous rev­olutionary passion contained in its public­ations.

Mack

There is a class antagonism within the working class itself, an antagonism between the "most exploited" strata and the privileged layers. There is a "labour aristocracy" enjoying higher wages and better working conditions; a section of the working class which receives a share of the super-profits extracted by "its imperialism" from colonial exploitation. Thus there is a layer of the working class which does not in fact belong to the working class, but to the bourgeoisie, a layer of "bourgeois-workers".

These are the main points common to all theories of the "labour aristocracy". This is a theoretical tool whose principal value lies in the fact that it allows one, to whatever extent one feels to be necessary, to blur the line which divides the working class from global capitalism.

This theory allows one to condemn whole sections of the working class (workers in advanced industrialized countries, for example) as "bourgeois", and to define bourgeois organizations (the left-wing parties and the unions, for example) as "working class".

This theory originated in the analysis developed by Lenin during World War I, and taken up by the Third International. Some proletarian political currents, who give themselves the strange title of "Leninist", still cling to this theoretical oddity, which they do not always know what to do with, apart from using it to cloud over questions of primary importance to the class struggle. For decades, the Stalinists have also made use of this theory, invoking the prestigious name Lenin to legitimize their counter-revolutionary politics.

But this theory has also been taken up, in various different forms, by groups coming out of Stalinism - via Maoism - which have come to reject many of the worst lies of official Stalinism (in particular the myth of the existence of socialist states, whether in Russia, China or elsewhere.)

These groups, such as Operai e Teoria in Italy, Le Bolshevik (now Groupe Ouvriere Internationaliste, publishing Revolution Mondiale) in France, and the Marxist Workers' Committee in the USA, take up very radical positions against the unions and the left-wing parties. In this way they have gained a degree of influence among some groups of militant workers. But for these currents, ex-"Third Worldists", the critique of the unions and the left-wing parties is based on their enthusiastic support for the division of the working class, between the "lowest layers" -- which they call the true proletariat -- and the "labour aristocracy".

This is how Operai e Teoria formulates this theory of the division of the working class:

"Not to recognize the internal divisions among productive workers, the importance of the struggle against the labour aris­tocracy, and the necessity for revolutionaries to work towards achieving a split, a clean break between the interests of the lower strata and those of the labour aristocracy, not only signifies the failure to understand the history of the workers' movement, but -- and this is more serious -- also allows the proletar­iat to be lined up behind the bourgeoisie." (Operai e Teoria, no.7, Oct-Nov 1980, our emphasis.)[1]

In this article, we will not attempt to chart the theoretical contradictions of the "Leninist" groups. Our aim is to demonstrate the theoretical inconsistency and the political dangers of the theory of the labour aristocracy as it is defended by various Maoist and ex-Maoist groups, often working within the most combative sections of the working class. We aim to show:

-- that this theory is based on a socio‑logical analysis which ignores the historical nature of the proletariat as a class;

-- that the definition, or rather defin­itions of the "labour aristocracy" become even more flawed and contradictory in the light of all the different divi­sions which capitalism has sown within the working class;

-- that the practical result of concep­tions of this kind can only be to divide workers from each other in their struggles, and to isolate the "most ex­ploited" workers from the rest of their class;

-- that these conceptions lead to con­fusions about the nature of the unions and the left-wing parties -- specifically to the confusion that these are "bour­geois-workers" organisations (this am­biguity was already present in the conceptions of the Communist Inter­national);

-- that it is wrong to look to Marx, Engels or Lenin to support this theory, since even when they talked, more or less precisely about the existence of a "labour aristocracy" or about the "bourgeoisification of the working class in England in the nineteenth century", they never supported any theory about the necessity to divide the working class. Just the opposite.

I. A sociological theory

One can look at the working class in two ways. One can look as it is most of the time, that is, downtrodden, divided and atomized into millions of solitary individuals, with no relation to each other.

Or one can look at the working class from an historical standpoint. One can see it as a social class with a history of more than two centuries of struggle, and a future as the instigator of the most far-reaching revolution in the history of humanity.

The first vision is an immediatist vision of a defeated class, while the second is a vision of class struggle. The second is the Marxist vision which understands that the working class is more than what it is now; that it is above all what it will be forced to become. Marxism is not a sociological study of a defeated working class. Its aim is to understand proletarian class struggle which is something completely different.

The theory that fundamental antagonisms exist within the working class is based on a conception which takes account only of the immediate reality of a defeated, atomized working class. Anyone who knows the history of workers' revolutions knows that the highest moments of proletarian struggle have only been achieved through the widest possible generalization of working class unity.

To say that unity between the most exploited and less exploited sections of the working class is impossible, is to ignore the entire history of the workers' movement. History shows that at every important stage in its struggle, the working class confronts the problem of how to achieve the greatest possible degree of unity.

There is a fundamental tendency in the dev­elopment of the workers' movement from the first associations of artisan workers, through the trade unions, to the formation of workers' councils. This tendency is the search for ever-greater unity. The workers' councils, spontaneously created for the first time by workers in Russia in 1905, are the most unified form of organization con­ceivable. Since they are based on mass assemblies, they allow the greatest possible number of workers to participate in the struggle.

This development is not only a reflection of the development of class consciousness, of an understanding of the necessity for class unity. The development of this understanding is itself a reflection of the development of the material conditions in which the working class lives and struggles.

The development of manufacturing industry destroyed the specializations inherited from the feudal artisan of the past. It brought about the uniformity of the proletariat, and transformed the working class into a commodity which is able to produce shoes, or, just as easily, cannons, without the services of cobbler or blacksmith.

Moreover the development of capitalism involves the development of gigantic urban industrial centres in which millions of workers are crowded together. In these centres, struggle takes on an explosive character, because of the rapidity with which these millions of workers can organise and co-ordinate themselves for united action.

"But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the prol­etariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level." (Marx and Engels, The Communist Mani­festo, ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians')

In the recent struggles in Poland where workers have demonstrated their ability to unite and organize themselves in a way which has astonished the world, there has been no sign of a struggle between qual­ified and unqualified workers. Instead we have seen the unification of all sectors in the mass assemblies, in the struggle and for the struggle.

But to understand "miracles" of this kind, our eyes must not be fixed, like those of the sociologists, on the immediate reality of the working class when it is not struggling. When the proletariat is not struggling, when the bourgeoisie succeeds in reducing wages to the absolute minimum required for their subsistence, then the working class is indeed completely divided.

Since its origins, the working class, which is subjected to the last, but also the most absolute form of exploitation known in his­tory, has lived in one way when it is passive and submissive to the bourgeoisie, and in a totally different way when it rises up against its oppressors.

This separation between two forms of exi­stence (united and in struggle, or divided and passive) has become more and more marked as capitalism has developed. Apart from the period at the end of the nineteenth century, when the proletariat was able for a while to compel the bourgeoisie to accept the existence of genuine unions and mass parties, the level of unity achieved by the working class during periods of struggle has tended to increase, but so has the division and atomization of the working class during periods of "social peace".

The same conditions of life and work of the working class which lead it to struggle in a more and more unified way, lead, outside periods of struggle, to the division and atomization of the working class into the mass of solitary individuals which we can see today.

Competition between workers outside periods of struggle has been a characteristic of the proletariat since its origins. But this was less strongly expressed in early capitalism, when workers "had a trade", when education was not widespread, and when the knowledge of each proletarian was a vital "tool of the trade". The cobbler does not compete with the blacksmith. But to the extent that, increasingly, "anyone can produce anything", due to the advance of industry and educa­tion, this is reflected in capitalism by a situation where "anyone can take anyone else's job."

Faced with the problem of finding work, the worker in industrial capitalism knows that this depends on how many applicants there are for the same job. The development of industry thus increasingly tends to set workers against each other as individuals, when they are not involved in struggle. Marx described this process in the follow­ing way:

"The growth of productive capital implies the accumulation and concentration of capital. This centralization implies a greater division of labour and a greater use of machinery. The greater division of labour destroys the especial skill of the labourer; and by putting in the place of this skilled work labour which anyone can perform it increases competition among the workers." (Marx, Speech on the Question of Free Trade -- generally published with The Poverty of Philosophy)

The development of industry thus creates the material conditions for the existence of a united and conscious humanity, but at the same time, within the framework of the law of capitalism where the survival of the worker depends on his ability to sell his labour power, it engenders a greater comp­etition than ever before.

To attempt to base a theory of the class struggle of the proletariat on an immediatist study of a divided and defeated proletariat, while ignoring the historical experience of struggles in the past, in­evitably leads to the conception that wor­king class unity will never be possible. And the more one resorts to an ahistorical, immediatist vision -- under the pretexts that "we must be concrete", or "we must have an immediate effect" -- the more any real understanding of the proletariat is turned on its head.

A conception which denies the possibility of working class unity is in the last analysis a theorization of the defeat of the proletariat, of the times when it is not struggling. It is the bourgeois vision of the proletariat as ignorant, divided, atomized and defeated individuals. It is a variety of sociology.

An "ouvrierist" conception

Since it does not see the working class as an historical force, this conception con­ceives of the working class as a sum of revolutionary individuals. Ouvrierism is not based on the assertion of the revolut­ionary nature of the working class, but is a sociological cult of individual workers. Imbued with this kind of vision, political currents with Maoist origins attach great importance to the social origins of members of political organizations, to the extent that a large number of their members from bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origins abandon their studies -- particularly in the period since 1968 -- to take jobs in factories (which only serves to reinforce the cult of the individual worker.)

Thus, the Marxist Workers' Committee, a group which has evolved to the point where it thinks that there are no longer any workers' states and that Russia has been capitalist since 1924 (the death of Lenin) wrote an article in the first issue of its publication Marxist Worker (Summer 1979), titled ‘25 Years of Struggle - Our History':

"Our experience in the old revisionist party, the Communist Party of the USA, and in the American Workers' Communist Party (Maoist), leads us to conclude that the founders of scientific socialism were right to affirm that a real workers' party must develop an organization of theoretically advanced workers, since not only the whole of the membership, but also the leadership, should come in the first place from the working class."

What conception of the working class can be "learned well" in a bourgeois, Stalinist organisation? Here we should recall two examples from the history of the workers' movement, which demonstrate the consequences of the ouvrierist principle.

We should recall the struggle by the "worker" Tolain, French delegate to the first congress of the International Workingmens' Associat­ion, against accepting Marx as a delegate. Tolain argued against the acceptance of Marx on the basis of the principle that "the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves," since Marx was not a worker but an intellectual. After a debate, Tolain's motion was reject­ed. Tolain, the worker, was later to be found fighting alongside the "Versaillais" against the workers' insurrection which set up the Paris Commune.

We should also recall how German Social Democracy succeeded in November 1918 in preventing Rosa Luxemburg from speaking at the Congress of Workers' Councils, because she also was not a worker, and how she was assassinated a few weeks later by the Freikorps, under orders from the worker Noske, who bloodily crushed the Berlin insurrection in January 1919. It is not each individual worker, but the working class which is revolutionary.

Ouvrierism does not understand this differ­ence and thus understands neither the worker as an individual, nor the working class as a class.

II. The labour aristocracy: an impossible definition

It is obvious that different workers have different wages, and different living and working conditions. It is also a banality to say that, in general, the more comfortable the situation of an individual in society, the more he wants to preserve it. But to deduce from this the existence of a stable stratum within the proletariat whose interests are opposed to those of the rest of their class, and aligned to those of the bourgeoisie, or to try to establish a mecha­nical link between levels of exploitation and consciousness and combativity, is to make a theoretical leap fraught with danger.

In the early years of capitalism, when large numbers of workers were still more or less artisans, with individual skills and corpor­ate concerns, it was possible at given moments, ie during periods of economic prosperity, to more clearly identify sections of the working class with particular privileges.

Thus, in passing, in his personal correspondence, Engels noted the existence of a "labour aristocracy" of "mechanics, carpenters and joiners, and building workers" who in the nineteenth century were organized to the extent, and enjoyed certain privileges derived from the importance of their qualifications, and the monopoly they held in these qualifications.

But the development of capitalism, with the de-skilling of work on the one hand, and on other the multiplication of artificial divisions within the working class, to attempt to define a "labour aristocracy" in the sense of precise stratum having priv­ileges which distinguish it qualitatively from the rest of the working class, is a completely arbitrary exercise. Capitalism has systematically divided the working class with the aim of creating situations where the interests of some workers are opposed to the interests of others.

We have already insisted on how the devel­opment of industry has led, in periods when the working class is not struggling, to the development of competition between workers, through the destruction of specialist skills. However capitalism is not content with divisions which can be engendered in the labour process itself. Like other ex­ploiting classes in the past, the bourgeoi­sie knows and applies the old principle: divide and rule. And it does so cynically and methodically, in a way that is unprec­edented in history.

Capitalism makes use of the "natural" div­isions of sex and age, taken over from past societies. Although the privileged pos­ition of adult males due to their physical strength progressively disappears with the development of industry, capitalism con­sciously maintains divisions of this kind with the aim of dividing the labour force and justifying the lower wages of women, the young and the old.

Capitalism also takes over from the past divisions based on race and geographical origin. At its origins, capital, still essentially in the form of commercial cap­ital, grew rich from -- among other things -- the slave trade. In its fully developed form, capital continues to make use of diff­erences of race and nationality to exert a permanent downward pressure on wages. From the treatment of Irish workers in eight­teenth and nineteenth century England, to that of Turkish and Yugoslav workers in Germany in 1980, capitalism has pursued the same policy of dividing the working class. Capitalism knows exactly how it can profit from tribal divisions in Africa, religious differences in Ulster, caste differences in India, or racial differences in America and in the principal European powers, which were reconstructed after the war with the aid of a massive importation of workers from Asia, Africa and the less developed European countries (Turkey, Greece, Ireland, Port­ugal, Spain, Italy, etc.)

But capitalism is not content to maintain and foster the so-called "natural" divisions within the working class. Through the generalization of wage labour and the "scientific" organisation of exploitation (Taylorism, bonus schemes, etc), the task of dividing the working class has acquired the status of a profession: sociologists, psy­chiatrists and union officers work hand in hand with personnel managers to divise "viable" methods of organizing production and of ensuring that the law of "every man for himself" reigns in the factories and the offices, so that everyone feels that his are opposed to those of everyone else. It is in capitalism that the famous epigram "man is a wolf to man" corfresponds most nearly to reality. By making wages dependent on the productivity of others, by creating all kinds of artificial wage differentials for the same work (which is now taken to the limit through the use of computers in management), capitalisms sows more divisions within the exploited class than ever.

In these conditions, it is almost impossible to not to for each category of workers, another category which is either more or less "privileged".

If one takes account of the privileges which a worker be given on account of his or her age, sex, race, or experience, the nature of his or her work (manual or non-manual), his or her position in the process of production, bonuses earned, etc, etc, one can find an infinite number of definitions of a "labour aristocracy". In doing so, one will not be one step closer to an understanding of the revolutionary nature of the working class.

Following the logic of their "anti-labour aristocracy" stance, the gems of Maoist wisdom on the subject of the labour aristocracy include the need to organize the "true proletariat", "the most exploited strata." These groups are thus forced not only to try to find an adequate definition of a "labour aristocracy", but also a corresponding definition of the "pure" strata of the proletariat. A large part of their "theoretical" work is dedicated to this task, and the results vary according to different groups or tendencies, and the country or period with which they are concerned.

Thus, for example, in countries like England, France, or Germany, the immigrant workers are the true proletariat, and white workers are the aristocracy. In America, according to this logic, the whole working class can be considered to be "bourgeoisified" (the living standard of a black worker in America being perhaps a hundred times greater than a worker in India); but one could also, foll­owing the same logic, deduce that only the white workers belong to the aristocracy. Looked at in one way, black American workers are "aristocrats", but from another point of view they are the "most exploited". For Operai e Teoria the "real working class" is made up of workers who work on production lines. For some groups however, industrial workers in the underdeveloped countries are classed as "aristocrats", since their living standards are much higher than the unemployed masses in the shanty towns around the cities.

The definition of this famous "aristocracy" thus varies from one group to another, encompassing anything from 100% to 50% or 20% of the working class, according to the whim of the resident theoreticians.

III. A theory to divide the working class

Alongside their attempts to work out or clarify their various sociological definitions of strata within the proletariat, the intervention of these organizations towards the working class aims, to a greater or lesser extent, to divide workers -- as they admit themselves.

This is based on the creation of organizations which regroup only those workers which they can be sure are not part of the "labouraristocracy": black or immigrant workers' organizations, organizations of workers who work on the production line, etc ...

This for example is the origin of the particular form of racism which has developed in certain groups within the immigrant communities in the most industrialized European countries, which has transformed the traditional "anti-white" racism into a "Marxist-Leninist" anti-white labour aristocracy racism.          In the less developed countries, which are exporters of labour, the advocates of this theory set out to stir up hostility among less qualified workers towards the qualified workers.

Within these organizations, a hostility is cultivated towards the "labour aristocracy", which soon comes to be used as the scapegoat for all the misfortunes which befall the "most exploited strata".

In the best of cases, it is claimed that the separate unity of the most exploited sectors serves as an example and is a stimulus towards the wider unification of the working class. But this completely ignores how working class unity is actually brought about.

The living example of Poland in 1980 makes this question perfectly clear. Working class unity is not the culmination of a series of partial unifications, one following the other, sector by sector, after years of systematic work. In real life this unification takes place in an explosive manner, in a few days or weeks. The outbreak of class struggle and its generalization are the product of many different, unforseen factors.

But Poland has only confirmed once again what has been shown by all explosions of class struggle since the 1905 struggles in Russia. For 75 years there has never been working class unity except in struggle and for struggle. But when the working class unites, it does so all at once, and on the largest possible scale. For 75 years, when workers have struggled on their own class terrain, what one has seen is not a fight between different sections of the working class, but on the contrary a tendency to­wards ever-greater unity. The proletariat is the first class in history which is not divided within itself by real economic antagonisms. Contrary to peasants and ar­tisans, the working class does not possess its own means of production. It possesses only its labour power, and its labour power is collective.

The only weapon which the proletariat has against the bourgeoisie is its numbers. But numbers, without unity, is nothing. The achievement of this unity is the fun­damental struggle of the proletariat to affirm its power. It is no accident that the bourgeoisie expends so much effort to prevent this from happening.

It is turning the world on its head to claim, as does Operai e Teoria, that the idea of the necessity of working class unity is bourgeois:

"... There is not one voice among the bourgeoisie to support this division (between the lowest strata and the "aristocracy"). On the contrary there is a chorus of bourgeois propaganda which argues for the necessity of sacrifices because ‘we are all in the same boat'." (Operai e Teoria, no.7, p.10)

The bourgeoisie does not talk about working class unity, but about national unity. What it says is not "all workers are in the same boat" but "the workers are in the same boat as the bourgeoisie." Which is not at all the same thing. But this is difficult to understand for those who have "learned" their Marxism from nationalists like Mao, Stalin and Ho Chi Minh. Against all these Stalinist distortions, communists can only affirm the lessons of the historical practice of the proletariat. As the Communist Manifesto already advocated in 1848, they must "point out and bring to the fore the common interests of the entire proletariat" (our emphasis)

IV. An ambiguous conception of Left parties and unions

How could such a theory find the least echo among the working class?

Probably the principal reason why this con­ception is listened to by some workers with­out laughter or anger is because it appears to give an explanation of why and how the so-called "workers" unions carry out their despicable sabotage of the class struggle.

According to this theory, the unions, as well as the left-wing parties, are the expression of the material interests of certain layers of the working class, ie the most privilege layers. In times of "social peace", for certain workers, victims of the racism of white workers or the contempt of more qualified workers, or disgusted by the way the left parties and unions are involved in the management of capitalism, this theory seems on the one hand to offer a coherent explanation of these phenomena, and on the other hand offer an immediate perspective for action: to organize separately from the "aristocrats". Unfortunately this conception is theoretically false and politically dangerous.

Here for example is how Le Bolshevik in France formulates this idea:

"The Communist Party (of France) is not a workers' party. By its composition, largely intellectual and petty-bourg­eois, and above all by its reformist, ultra-chauvinist political line, the CP of Marchais and Seguy is a bourgeois party.

It is not the political and ideological representative of the working class. It represents the higher layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and the labour aris­tocracy." (Le Bolshevik, no 112, Feb 80)

In other words, the interests of a section of the working class, the "aristocracy", are the same as those of the bourgeoisie, because the party which represents their interests is "bourgeois". This identity between the political line of parties of the "labour aristocracy" and those of the bour­geoisie has an economic basis: the "aris­tocracy" receives crumbs from the super-profits extracted by their national capital from the colonies and the semi-colonies.

Lenin formulated an analogous theory to try to explain the betrayal of social democracy during World War I.

"For decades the source of opportunism (this is the name Lenin gave to the re­formist tendencies which dominated the workers' organisations and which participated in World War I) lay in the peculiar­ities of such a period in the development of capitalism when the comparatively peaceful and civilised existence of a layer of privileged workers turned them ‘bourgeois', gave them crumbs from the profits of their own national capital, removed them from the sufferings, mis­eries, and revolutionary sentiments of the ruined and impoverished masses ... The economic foundation of chauvinism and opportunism in the labour movement is the same: it is an alliance between the none too numerous upper strata of the proletariat and the petty-bourgeois strata, enjoying crumbs out of the priv­ileges of ‘their' national capital as opposed to the masses of tale proletar­ians, the masses of the workers and the oppressed in general."(Lenin, The War and the Second Inter­national)

A critique of Lenin's explanation of the betrayal of the Second International

Before dealing with the theories of his epigones, we want to pause for a while to look at the conception developed by Lenin to explain the new class nature of the Social Democratic workers' parties, following their betrayal of the proletarian camp.

History posed the following question to revolutionaries: for decades European social democracy, founded by Marx, Engels and others, which was born out of bitter and prolonged workers' struggles, has constituted a real instrument for the defence of working class interests. But now virtually the whole of the social democratic movement, including both the mass parties and the unions, was aligned with the national bour­geoisie of their respective countries against the workers of other countries. How could one define the class nature of this monstrous product of history?

To give an idea of the shock that this be­trayal caused among the tiny minority which still clung to revolutionary internation­alist positions, we can recall for example Lenin's astonishment when he saw the edition of Vorwarts (publication of the German Social Democratic Party) announcing the vote by socialist parliamentary delegates in favour of war credits. He thought that it was a fake put out to support the propaganda in favour of the war. We can also recall the difficulties of the Germans Spartacists, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in finally breaking the umbilical cord which linked them organically to their "parent or­ganisation".

When the war exploded, Social Democratic policy was overtly bourgeois, but the major­ity of members of the parties and unions were still workers. How was such a contra­diction to be explained?

The Social Democrats, now patriots, said "this proves that internationalism is not a truly working class concept." Rejecting such an analysis Lenin replied, following the same logic, that not all workers had re­jected internationalism, but only a "privi­leged minority" which was "removed from the sufferings, miseries, and revolutionary sentiments of the ruined and impoverished masses." Lenin's concern was perfectly correct: to show that the fact that the European proletariat had allowed itself to be drawn into the imperialist war did not mean that wars of this kind corresponded to the interests of the working class in the different countries concerned. But the arguments he used were false, and disproved by reality itself. Lenin said that the "patriotic" workers were those who had int­erests in common with "their" national cap­ital, which corrupted a "labour aristocracy" by throwing it "a few crumbs of profit."

How large is this corrupted section of the working class? "An infinitesimal part," replies Lenin in The War and the Second International; "the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy," he says in the preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

But reality demonstrates:

1. that it was not an "infinitesimal" minority of the proletariat which benefitted from the expansion of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twent­ieth centuries, but all industrial workers. The abolition of child labour, the restric­tion of female labour, the reduction of the working day to ten hours, the creation of state schools and public hospitals, etc -- all these measures, which workers' struggles had extracted from capitalism during a period of rapid expansion, had benefitted above all the "lowest", most exploited strata of the working class;

2. that Lenin's vision of an infinitesimal minority of corrupted workers, isolated in the middle of a gigantic mass of suffering workers who were possessed by "revolutionary sentiments", was, on the eve of World War I, pure invention. Almost all workers in the principal powers -- poor or rich, qualified or unqualified, unionised or non-unionised, answered the call to arms and wanted to de­feat the "enemy" and massacre them in the defence of "their" national masters;

3. that the "economic explanation" about the "crumbs of profit" shared out by the imper­ialist power among their qualified workers does not make any sense. First of all be­cause, as we have seen, it was not a tiny minority of workers whose conditions had improved during the period of capitalist ex­pansion, but all workers in the industrial­ised countries. Secondly because, by defin­ition, the capitalists do not share out their profits, nor their super-profits with those whom they exploit.

The increased wages and greatly improved living standards of workers in the indust­rialised countries was not the result of the generosity of capitalists who were prepared to share out their profits, but of the successful pressure that workers in this period were able to apply to their national capitalisms. The economic prosperity of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century led everywhere to a reduction in the number of unemployed workers in capitalism's "reserve army". On the labour market, labour power as a commodity became scarcer and thus more expensive, as more factories were set up and existing factories worked at full capac­ity. This was the state of affairs during this period. Workers were able, by organ­ising themselves even in a limited way (in trade unions and mass parties), to sell their labour power at a higher price and obtain real improvements in their conditions of ex­istence.

The opening up of the world market to certain industrialised centres, more or less confined to Europe and North America, allowed capital­ism to develop with tremendous force. The periodic crises of over-production were over­come with an apparently ever increasing speed and energy. The industrialised centres ex­panded by absorbing an ever growing number of peasants and artisans who were thus transformed into workers, into proletarians. The labour power of qualified workers, who had acquired their skills over many years, became a precious commodity to the capital­ists.

So there is certainly a link between the global expansion of capitalism and the in­creased standard of living of industrial workers, but is not the link described by Lenin. The improvement of the proletarian condition did not affect an "infinitesimal" minority, but the whole working class. It was not the result of the "corruption" of workers by their capitalist masters but of the workers' struggles in a period of cap­italist prosperity.

If the European and American workers, en masse, identified their interests with those of their national capital, following the lead of their political and trade union organizations, it was because, over a period of decades, they had been living in the period of the greatest material prosperity known to mankind. If the idea of the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism made such great inroads into the workers' movement, it was because social prosperity often appeared as the result of conscious forces in society. The barbarism or World War I drowned these illusions in the mud of the trenches at Verdun. But nonetheless it was these illusions which had allowed the capitalist generals to send more than twenty million men to their deaths in the inter-imperialist butchery.

The world war marked a definite end to any possibility of the cohabitation between the "reformists" and the revolutionaries within the workers' movement. By transforming themselves into recruiting sergeants for the imperialist armies, the majority reformist tendencies within the Second International passed body and soul into the camp of cap­italism.

From this point they were no longer working class tendencies strongly influenced by the ideology of the dominant class, but cogs in the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie.

The Social Democratic parties are no longer "bourgeoisified workers' organizations" but bourgeois organizations working within the working class. They no longer represent the working class, or even a section of it. They are an incarnation of the interests of the national capital as a whole.

Social Democracy is no more "working class" because it contains workers, than the bars of a cage are "animal" because they contain animals. The massacre of German workers after the war by the Social Democratic government was a bloody proof of which side of the barricade Social Democracy was henceforth to belong to.[2]

The theory that the left-wing parties and their unions defend the interests of the "labour aristocracy" always entails, in one way or another, the idea that they are workers' organizations all the same.

The practical importance of this theoretical question emerges when the working class is confronted with an attack by a section of the bourgeoisie against these organizations. It was in the name of the defence of these "workers' organizations" that "Western dem­ocracy" led workers into the struggle "against fascism" -- from 1936 in Spain to Hiroshima.

It is this ambiguity which is useful to Lenin's epigones today. The Maoist current came out of the Communist Parties. The Maoists are chips off the Stalinist bloc, who split off under the pressure of the development of inter-imperialist conflicts (particularly between China and Russia) and the intensification of the class struggle.

Many groups of Maoist origin assert that the CPs are "bourgeois" organizations, but they are always quick to make it clear that the CPs are based on the "labour aristocracy", and for this reason are partly "bourgeoisified workers' organizations".....One can see the importance that this "nuance" can have for groups which, like the Marxist Workers' Committee, fiercely defend their "25 years of struggle"[3], more than three-quarters of which were spent inside the Stalinist party. According to their theory these years were not spent working for the bourgeoisie....but for the "labour aristocracy".

Any ambiguity about which side of the barricade the left-wing parties stand, can have deadly consequences for the working class. Over the past 60 years, almost every important working class movement has been crushed by the left, or with its complicity. The theory of the "labour aristocracy", by cultivation this ambiguity, disarms the class by blurring the one issue which needs to be as clear-cut as possible before engaging in any battle: who is the enemy.  

V. A gross deformation of Marxism

We have shown how the theory of the labour aristocracy, as it is defended by Maoist and ex-Maoist groups, betrays a sociological un­derstanding of the working class, a vision acquired by these currents through their experience with Stalinism.

The understanding of this experience is replaced by a quasi-religious study of certain texts of the proletarian "evangelists", from which extracts are quoted as the absolute proof of what they say. (The evolution of Maoist groups can be measured by the number of evangelists' heads they have removed from their icons: to start with there is Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Mao is the first to go, and then, at a more advanced stage, when some groups begin to open their eyes towards the Stalin­ist counter-revolution, Stalin is eliminated as well. But at the same time, the other three remain, with their religious status further enhanced.)

To find out whether this or that idea or political position is true or false, these organizations do not ask themselves the question: has this been confirmed or not by the real living practice of workers' struggles in the past? ... but: can this be justified by a quotation from Marx, Engels or Lenin, or not?

Thus, to "scientifically" demonstrate the proof of the theory of the labour aris­tocracy, these groups bombard their readers with knowingly selected quotations from Marx, Engels or Lenin.

These ultra-Leninist groups base themselves on Lenin's mistakes on the question of the "labour aristocracy", but they forget that Lenin never drew the aberrant conclusions arrived at by Operai e Teoria, according to which revolutionaries must no longer "point out and bring to the fore the common inter­ests of the entire proletariat," as the Manifesto says, but work to achieve "a split, a clean break between the interests of the lower strata and those of the labour aris­tocracy." (Operai e Teoria)

Lenin never called for workers to organize independently of and against the rest of their class. On the contrary, Lenin's attack against the Social Democratic patriots as a political current was matched by his defence of the necessity for the unity of all workers in their unitary organizations. The slogan "all power to the soviets," that is to say, all power to the broadest and most unitary organizations the working class was able to create, a slogan of which he was one of the staunchest defenders, was not a call for the division of the working class but on the contrary for the strongest possible unity for the purpose of seizing power.

As for the references by these currents to certain quotations from Engels, they are simply an attempt to make isolated phrases by Engels say something he never said. Engels spoke in many places of a "labour aristocracy" within the working class. But what was he talking about?

In some cases he is referring to the English working class, which as whole enjoyed living standards and working conditions which were much superior to those of workers in other countries. On other cases, he refers to more specialized workers within the British working class itself, who still retained artisan skills (mechanics, carpen­ters and joiners, and building workers). But in doing so, his aim is to dispel any illusions which might exist within the British working class about the possibility of being a real "aristocracy". He empha­sizes the fact that the evolution of cap­italism takes place above all through econ­omic crises, which force it to reduce the conditions of all workers to the lowest common level, and which destroy the material basis of the "privileges" of minority groups of workers, even among the working class in Britain. Thus in a debate in the Inter­national Workingmens' Association (First International) he said;

"As it happens, this (the adoption of the motion from Halos on the Irish section of the IWA) would only serve to strengthen the opinion, which has already been current for too long among the English workers, according to which, in relation to the Irish, they are superior beings and form a kind of aristocracy, in the same way as the whites in the slave states think of themselves as being sup­erior in relation to the blacks."

And Engels explains how the economic crisis tends to undermine this opinion which has already been current for too long:

"With the ending of (English) industrial supremacy, the working class in England will lose its privileged condition. As a whole -- including the privileged min­ority of leaders -- it will find itself once more at the level of workers abroad."

And, referring to the old unions which jealously defend their position as organ­izations regrouping only the most special­ised workers:

"Finally, it (the acute crisis of capital­ism) must break out, and it is to be hoped that this will put an end to the old unions."[4]

The practical experience of workers' struggles in the twentieth century, which have given rise to "new" forms of organ­ization based on general assembles with delegates elected to committees or councils, has effectively put an end not only to the old unions of specialized workers, but also to trade unions of all kinds, which are inevitably based entirely on professional categories.

Engels spoke of a kind of "labour aristo­cracy" with the aim of strengthening the movement towards the indispensable unity of the working class.

To finish with these "Marxist" references, let us briefly consider the research of Operai e Teoria which claims to have found an explanation by Marx for the antagonisms which supposedly set workers against each other.

"All (the workers) as an organic whole produce surplus value, but not all pro­duce the same quantity since they are not all subjected to the massive extortion of relative surplus value."

From all the evidence, these people have not even gone to the trouble of finding out what "relative surplus value" is. Marx used this term to define the phenomenon of the growing proportion of labour time stolen by capital from the working class by means of increased productivity.

Contrary to the extraction of "absolute surplus value" which essentially depends on the duration of labour time, "relative surplus value" depends in the first place on the social productivity of the working class as a whole.

Increased productivity is expressed by the fact that less hours of labour are needed to produce the same quantity of goods. In­creased social productivity is expressed by the fact that less social labour time is needed to produce the goods necessary for subsistence.

The products necessary to maintain labour power, those which the worker needs to buy with his wages, contain less and less value. Even if he is now able to buy two shirts instead of one, these two shirts cost less labour to produce than one did previously, thanks to increased productivity. The difference between the value produced by the worker and that part of the value which he gets back in the form of wages -- this diff­erence being the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist -- increases even though the absolute duration of his labour remains unchanged.

Relative surplus value is exploitation through the strengthening of the hold of capital over the whole of social life[5]. It is the most collective form of exploit­ation that is possible in a class society (which is why it is the last form of ex­ploitation.)

And in this sense it is suffered by all workers with an equal intensity.

The increasing reliance of capitalism on relative surplus value does not lead to the development of economic antagonisms within the working class as Operai e Teoria claim, but on the contrary to the growing uniformity of the objective situation of workers in relation to capital.

One cannot read Marx through the eyes of Stalinist sociologists.

Certain political currents coming out of Maoism seem to adopt a radical anti-union stance. This gives the illusion of being a step forward towards class positions. But the theory which underlies their position, as well as the political conclusions which it leads to, turn this anti-unionism into a new way of dividing the working class.

The unionist form of organization is historically dead from the point of view of the class struggle, precisely because it cannot lead to a real class unity. Organization into branches, trades, on an strictly economic basis, is no longer a basis for the unity which is absolutely indispensable for all struggle under totalitarian capitalism.

Rejecting the unions, only to divide the working class in other ways: this is the result of anti-unionism based on an opposition to the "labour aristocracy".

RV

---

[1] This is taken from an article where Operai e Teoria attempt to answer the criticisms of Battaglia Communista (Partito Communista Internationalista) which, despite being "Leninist", reproaches O e T

-- for "supporting the capitalist process of division of the working class;"

-- for basing their theory on the "objective incorrect idea of privileges" within the working class;

-- for not understanding "the tendency of capitalism in crisis to progressively erode the conditions of existence of the entire proletariat, and thus to bring about its economic unifications."

These criticisms of Battaglia are certainly correct, but it does not take them to their logical conclusion, for fear of casting doubt on the words of their "master", Lenin.   

[2] The compromises the Third international was forced to make with the Social Democratic parties after 1920, at the expense of the working class tendencies accused of being "ultra-left", found its theoretical justification in the ambiguity of the term "bourgeois-workers' parties" that was used to describe the patriotic Social Democrats. This is how Lenin's International came to demand that the British communists should join the "Labour" Party!

[3] Marxist Worker, no 1, 1979, '25 years of Struggle: Our History'.

[4] Part of an intervention at the meeting of the General Council of the IWA in May 1872.

[5] The predominance of relative surplus value over absolute value was one of the essential characteristics of what Marx called "the real domination of capital."