We are beginning a new series devoted to the theory of decadence.[1] [1] For some time now, various criticisms of this concept have been piling up. To a large extent they have been the work of academic or parasitic grouplets. Others, however, express real incomprehension inside the revolutionary milieu,[2] [2] or come from searching elements who are posing genuine questions about the evolution of capitalism on a historic scale. We have already replied to the bulk of these criticisms.[3] [3] Today, however, we are seeing a change in their nature. They are no longer questions, misunderstandings or doubts; they no longer simply put certain aspects into question. Rather, we are seeing a total rejection, a type of criticism which amounts to an excommunication from marxism.
However, the theory of decadence is simply the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of the evolution of modes of production. It is thus the indispensable framework for understanding the historical period we are living in. Knowing whether society is still progressing, or whether it has had its day historically, is decisive for grasping what is at stake on the political and socio-economic levels, and acting accordingly. As with all past societies, the ascendant phase of capitalism expressed the historically necessary character of the relations of production it embodies, that is, their vital role in the expansion of society’s productive forces. The phase of decadence, by contrast, expresses the transformation of these relations into a growing barrier to this same development. This is one of the main theoretical acquisitions left us by Marx and Engels.
The 20th century was the most murderous in the entire history of humanity, both in the scale, the frequency and length of the wars which took up a large part of it, and in the incomparable breadth of the human catastrophes which it produced: from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide, taking in economic crises which have shaken the whole planet and hurled tens of millions of proletarians and human beings into abject poverty. There is no comparison between the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Belle Epoque, the bourgeois mode of production reached unprecedented heights: it had united the globe, reaching levels of productivity and technological sophistication which could only have been dreamed about before. Despite the accumulation of tensions in society's foundations, the last 20 years of capitalism's ascendancy (1894-1914) were the most prosperous yet; capitalism seemed invincible and armed conflicts were confined to the peripheries. Unlike the “long 19th century”, which was a period of almost uninterrupted moral, intellectual and material progress, since 1914 there has been a marked regression on all fronts. The increasingly apocalyptic character of economic and social life across the planet, and the threat of self-destruction in an endless series of conflicts and ever more grave ecological catastrophes, are neither a natural fatality, nor the product of simple human madness, nor a characteristic of capitalism since its origins: they are a manifestation of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production which, from being, from the 16th century to the First World War,[4] [4] a powerful factor in economic, social and political development, has become a fetter on all such development and a threat to the very survival of humanity.
Why is humanity faced with the question of survival at the very moment that it has achieved a level of development in the productive forces that would enable it to start moving, for the first time in its history, towards a world without material poverty, towards a unified society capable of basing its activity on the needs, desires and consciousness of mankind? Does the world proletariat really constitute the revolutionary force that can take humanity out of the impasse into which capitalism has led it? Why is it that most of the forms of workers’ struggle in our epoch can no longer be those of the last century, such as the fight for gradual reforms through trade unionism, parliamentarism, supporting the constitution of certain nation states or certain progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie? It is impossible to find one's bearings in the current historical situation, still less to play a vanguard role, without having a global, coherent vision which can answer these elementary but crucial questions. Marxism – historical materialism – is the only conception of the world which makes it possible to give such an answer. Its clear and simple response can be summed up in a few words; just like the modes of production which came before it, capitalism is not an eternal system: “Beyond a certain point, the development of the productive forces becomes a barrier to capital, and consequently the relation of capital becomes a barrier to the development of the productive forces of labour. Once this point has been reached, capital, ie wage labour, enters into the same relation to the development of social wealth and the productive forces as the guild system, serfdom and slavery did, and is, as a fetter, necessarily cast off. The last form of servility assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on the one hand and capital on the other, is thereby shed, and this shedding is itself the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital. It is precisely the production process of capital that gives rise to the material and spiritual conditions for the negation of wage labour and capital, which are themselves the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production.
The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions” (“Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” [also known as the Grundrisse], Collected Works Vol. 29, 133-4).
As long as capitalism fulfilled a historically progressive role and the proletariat was not sufficiently developed, proletarian struggles could not result in a triumphant world revolution; they did however allow the proletariat to recognise itself and assert itself as a class through the trade union and parliamentary struggle for real reforms and lasting improvements in its living conditions. From the moment when the capitalist system entered into decadence, the world communist revolution became a possibility and a necessity. The forms of the proletarian struggle were radically overturned; even on the immediate level, defensive struggles could no longer be expressed, either in form or content, through the means of struggle forged last century such as trade unionism and parliamentary representation for workers’ political organisations.
Brought into being by the revolutionary movements which put an end to the First World War, the Communist International was founded in 1919 around the recognition that the bourgeoisie was no longer a historically progressive class: “II – The period of the decadence of capitalism. After analysing the world economic situation, the Third Congress has noted with the greatest precision that capitalism, having completed its mission of developing the productive forces, has fallen into the most implacable contradiction with the needs not only of present historical evolution, but also with the most elementary requirements of human existence. This fundamental contradiction is both particularly reflected in the last imperialist war, and was further deepened by the war, which shook the whole system of production and circulation to its foundations. Capitalism has outlived itself, and has entered the phase where the destructive action of its unleashed forces ruins and paralyses the creative economic conquests already achieved by the proletariat in the chains of capitalist slavery (...) Capitalism today is going through nothing less than its death agony”.[5] [5] From then on, the understanding that the First World War marked the entry of the capitalist system into its decadent phase has been the common patrimony of the majority of the groups of the communist left who, thanks to this historical compass, have been able to remain on an intransigent and coherent class terrain. The ICC has only taken up and developed the heritage transmitted and enriched by the German and Dutch lefts in the 1930s and 40s and then by the Gauche Communiste de France in the 1940s and 50s.
Decisive class combats are on the horizon. It is therefore more than ever vital for the proletariat to re-appropriate its own conception of the world, which has been developed over nearly two centuries of workers’ struggles and theoretical elaboration by its political organisations. More than ever, the proletariat must understand that the present acceleration of barbarism and the uninterrupted increase in its exploitation are not a fact of nature, but are the result of the economic and social laws of capital which continue to rule the world even though they have been historically obsolete since the beginning of the 20th century. It is more vital than ever for the working class to understand that while the forms of struggle it learned in the 19th century (minimum programme of struggle for reforms, support for progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie etc) had a sense in the period of capitalism’s ascent when it could “tolerate” the existence of an organised proletariat within society, these same forms can only lead it into an impasse in the period of decadence. More than ever, it is vital for the proletariat to understand that the communist revolution is not an idle dream, a utopia, but a necessity and a possibility which have their scientific foundations in an understanding of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production.
The aim of this new series of articles on the theory of decadence will be to respond to all the objections raised against it. These objections are an obstacle in the way of the new revolutionary forces moving towards the positions of the communist left; they are also undermining political clarity among the groups of the revolutionary milieu.
From Marx to the communist left
In the first article in this series we will thus begin by reiterating – against those who claim that the concept and even the term decadence are absent from or are accorded no scientific value in the works of Marx and Engels – that this theory is nothing less than the core of historical materialism. We will show that this theoretical framework, as well as the term “decadence”, are indeed amply present throughout their work. Behind this critique or abandonment of the notion of decadence what is at stake is a rejection of the very core of marxism. It is perfectly understandable that the forces of the bourgeoisie should oppose the idea that their system is in decadence. The problem is that at the very time when it is vital to show the real dangers facing the working class and humanity, currents which claim to be marxist are rejecting the very tools supplied by the marxist method to grasp reality.[6] [6]
Contrary to what is generally asserted, the main discoveries in the work of Marx and Engels are not the existence of classes, or of the class struggle, or the labour theory of value, or surplus value. All these concepts had already been advanced by historians and economists at a time when the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class fighting against feudal resistance. The fundamentally new element in the work of Marx and Engels resides in their analysis of the historical character of the division into classes, of the dynamic underlying the succession of modes of production; this is what led them to understand the transitory nature of the capitalist mode of production and the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat as an intermediate phase towards a classless society. In other words, what constitutes the core of their discoveries is none other than historical materialism: “Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” (Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5th, 1852, Collected Works, vol.39, p.62-5, our emphasis).
According to our critics, the notion of decadence is not at all marxist and is not even to be found in the work of Marx and Engels. A simple reading of the latter's main texts shows on the contrary that this notion is indeed at the very heart of historical materialism. To the point, indeed, that for Engels, in his Anti-Dühring[7] [7] written in 1877, the most essential thing that Fourier and historical materialism have in common, is none other than the notion of the ascendancy and decadence of a mode of production, which are valid for the whole of human history: “But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society (...) Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race” (Anti-Dühring, 1877, Socialism I, Collected Works Vol.25, p.248, our emphasis).
It is perhaps in the passage from the Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, quoted in the opening section above, that Marx gives the clearest definition of what lies behind this notion of a phase of decadence. He identifies this phase as particular step in the life of a mode of production – “Beyond a certain point” – when the social relations of production become an obstacle for the development of the productive forces – “the relation of capital becomes a barrier to the development of the productive forces of labour”. Once economic development has reached this point, the persistence of these social relations of production – wage labour, serfdom, slavery – form a fundamental barrier to the development of the productive forces. This is the basic mechanism in the evolution of all modes of production: “Once this point has been reached, capital, ie wage labour, enters into the same relation to the development of social wealth and the productive forces as the guild system, serfdom and slavery did, and is, as a fetter, necessarily cast off”. Marx defines the characteristics of this very precisely “The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions”. This general theoretical definition of decadence would be used by Marx and Engels as an “operational scientific concept” in the concrete analysis of the evolution of modes of production.
Having devoted a good part of their energies to decoding the mechanisms and contradictions of capitalism, it was logical for Marx and Engels to make a substantial study of its birth within the entrails of feudalism. Thus in 1884 Engels produced a complement to his study The Peasant War in Germany, the aim of which was to provide the overall historical framework of the period in which the events he had analysed took place. He entitled this complement very explicitly “On the decline of feudalism and the emergence of national states”. Here are some highly significant extracts: “While the wild battles of the ruling feudal nobility filled the Middle Ages with their clamour, the quiet work of the oppressed classes had undermined the feudal system throughout Western Europe, had created conditions in which less and less room remained for the feudal lord (…) While the nobility became increasingly superfluous and an ever greater obstacle to development, the burghers of the towns became the class that embodied the further development of production and trade, of culture and of the social and political institutions.
All these advances in production and exchange were, in point of fact, by today’s standards, of a very limited nature. Production remained enthralled in the form of pure guild crafts, thus itself still retaining a feudal character; trade remained within the limits of European waters, and did not extend any further than the coastal towns of the Lavant, where the products of the Far East were acquired by exchange. But small scale and limited though the trades – and hence the trading burghers – remained, they were sufficient to overthrow feudal society, and at least they continued to move forward, whereas the nobility stagnated. (...) In the fifteenth century the feudal system was thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe (...) But everywhere – in the towns and in the country alike – there had been an increase in the elements among the population whose chief demand was to put an end to the constant, senseless warring, to the feuds between the feudal lords which made internal war permanent even when there was a foreign enemy on their native soil (...)
We have seen how the feudal nobility started to become superfluous in economic terms, indeed a hindrance, in the society of the later Middle Ages – how it already stood in the way, politically, of the development of the towns and the national state which was then only possible in a monarchist form. In spite of all this, it had been sustained by the fact that it had hitherto possessed a monopoly over the bearing of arms: without it no wars could be waged, no battles fought. This too was to change; the last step would be taken to make it clear to the feudal nobles that the period in which they had ruled society and the state was now over, that they were no longer of any use in their capacity as knights – not even on the battlefield” (Collected Works, Vol.26, p 556 – 562, our emphasis).
These long developments by Engels are particularly interesting in the sense that they take us back both to the process of the “decadence of feudalism” and at the same time to the “rise of the bourgeoisie” and the transition to capitalism. In a few phrases they announce the four main features of any period of decadence of a mode of production and of transition to another:
a) The slow and gradual emergence of a new revolutionary class which is the bearer of new social relations of production within the old declining society: “While the nobility became increasingly superfluous and an ever greater obstacle to development, the burghers of the towns became the class that embodied the further development of production and trade, of culture and of the scoail and political institutions”. The bourgeoisie represented the new, the nobility stood for the Ancien Regime; it was only once its economic power had been somewhat consolidated within the feudal mode of production that the bourgeoisie would feel strong enough to dispute power with the aristocracy. Let’s note in passing that this formally refutes the Bordigist version of history, a particularly deformed vision of historical materialism which postulates that each mode of production experiences one perpetually ascendant movement which only a brutal event (revolution? crisis?) suddenly drags to the ground, almost vertically. At the end of this “redemptive” catastrophe, a new social regime emerges from the bottom of the abyss: “the marxist vision can be represented as a series of branches, of curves ascending to the summit and then succeeded by a violent, sudden, almost vertical fall; and, at the end of this fall, a new social regime arises” (Bordiga, Rome meeting of 1951, published in Invariance n°4).[8] [8]
b) The dialectic between old and new at the level of the infrastructure: “All these advances in production and exchange were, in point of fact, by today’s standards, of a very limited nature. Production remained enthralled in the form of pure guild crafts, thus itself still retaining a feudal character; trade remained within the limits of European waters, and did not extend any further than the coastal towns of the Lavant, where the products of the Far east were acquired by exchange. But small scale and limited though the trades – and hence the trading burghers – remained, they were sufficient to overthrow feudal society, and at least they continued to move forward, whereas the nobility stagnated. (...) In the fifteenth century the feudal system was thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe”. However limited (“small scale”) the material progress made by the bourgeoisie, they were still enough to overturn a “stagnant” feudal society which was “thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe”, as Engels said. This also formally refutes another totally absurd, invented theory which holds that feudalism dies out because it was faced by a more effective mode of production which had, so to speak, outrun it in a race:
- “We have seen, in the preceding pages, that there are various ways a given mode of production can disappear (…) It can also be broken through from within by a rising form of production, to the point where the quantitative movement becomes a qualitative leap and the new form overturns the old one. This was the case with feudalism which gave birth to the capitalist mode of production” (Revue Internationale du Mouvement Communiste – RIMC);[9] [9]
- “Feudalism disappeared due to the success of the market economy. Unlike slavery, it did not disappear because of a lack of productivity. On the contrary: the birth and development of capitalist production was made possible by the increasing productivity of feudal agriculture, which made the mass of peasants superfluous and enabled them to become proletarians and create enough surplus value to feed the growing population of the towns. Capitalism replaced feudalism not because the productivity of the latter became stagnant, but because it was inferior to the productivity of capitalist production” (Internationalist Perspectives, “16 theses on the history and state of the capitalist economy”).[10] [10]
Marx, by contrast, speaks clearly about “the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production” , about “feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives”: “The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to disgrace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man” (Capital Vol. 1, Abstract of Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation. Lawrence and Wishart edition, p.669).
The analysis made by the founders of historical materialism, amply confirmed on the empirical level by historical studies,[11] [11] is diametrically opposite to the ramblings of those who reject the theory of decadence. The analysis of the decadence of feudalism and the transition to capitalism was clearly enunciated in the Communist Manifesto when Marx tells us that “modern bourgeois society (…) has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society”; that world trade and colonial markets have given “an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets… We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder” (Collected Works, Vol. 6, p.485 – 489). For those who know how to read, Marx is very clear: he talks about a “tottering feudal society”. Why was feudalism in decadence? Because “the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters”. It is within this feudal society in ruin that the transition to capitalism was to begin “modern bourgeois society… has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society”. Marx again developed this analysis in the Critique of Political Economy: “Only in the period of the decline and fall of the feudal system, but where it still struggles internally – as in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries – is there a golden age for labour in the process of becoming emancipated”.[12] [12] In order to characterise feudal decadence, which went from the beginning of the 14th century to the 18th century, Marx and Engels used numerous terms which admit of no ambiguity to anyone with a minimum of political honesty: “the feudal system was thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe”, “the nobility stagnated”, “the ruins of feudal society”, “tottering feudal society”, “the feudal relations of property (...) became so many fetters”, “the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production”.[13] [13]
c) The development of conflicts between different fractions of the ruling class: “While the wild battles of the ruling feudal nobility filled the Middle Ages with their clamour (...) the constant, senseless warring, (…) the feuds between the feudal lords which made internal war permanent even when there was a foreign enemy on their native soil”. What it could no longer procure through its economic and political domination over the peasantry, the feudal nobility tried to get hold of through violence. Confronted with growing difficulties in extracting enough surplus labour through feudal rents, the nobility began to tear itself apart in endless conflicts which had no other consequences than to ruin themselves and to ruin society as a whole. The Hundred Years War, which halved Europe's population, and the incessant monarchical wars, are the most striking examples.
d) The development of struggles by the exploited class: “the quiet work of the oppressed classes had undermined the feudal system throughout Western Europe, had created conditions in which less and less room remained for the feudal lord”. In the domain of social relations, the decadence of a mode of production takes the form of a quantitative and qualitative development of struggles between antagonistic classes: the struggle of the exploited class, which feels its misery all the more when exploitation is pushed to the limit by a desperate ruling class; struggles of the class which is the bearer of the new society and which comes up against the forces of the old social order (in past societies, this was always a new exploiting class; under capitalism, the proletariat is both the exploited class and the revolutionary class).
These long quotes about the end of the feudal mode of production and the transition to capitalism already fully demonstrate that the concept of decadence was not only theoretically defined by Marx and Engels, but that it was an operational scientific concept which they used to uncover the dynamic of the succession of modes of production which they had studied. It was thus perfectly logical for them to use this concept when they looked at primitive, Asiatic or ancient societies. Thus when they analysed the evolution of the slave mode of production, Max and Engels highlighted, in The German Ideology (1845-46) the general characteristics of decadence in this system: “The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently interrupted, the rural and urban population had decreased.” (The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook. Collected Works Vol.5 ,p.34, our emphasis). Similarly, in the analysis of primitive societies, we find the very core of Marx and Engels’ definition of the decadence of a mode of production: “The history of the decline of primitive communities …has still to be written. All we have so far are some rather meagre outlines… (secondly), the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development.” (First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich, 1881, Collected Works, Vol.24, p.358-359).
Finally, with the decadence of the Asiatic mode of production,[14] [14] this is what Marx says in Capital when he compares the stagnation of Asiatic societies with the transition to capitalism in Europe: “Usury has a revolutionary effect in all pre-capitalist modes of production only in so far as it destroys and dissolves those forms of property on whose solid foundation and continual reproduction in the same form the political organization is based. Under Asian forms, usury can continue a long time, without producing anything more than economic decay and political corruption. Only where and when the other prerequisites of capitalist production are present does usury become one of the means assisting in establishment of the new mode of production by ruining the feudal lord and small-scale producer, on the one hand, and centralizing the conditions of labour into capital, on the other.” (Capital Vol. III Part V, Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital, Chapter 36. Pre-Capitalist Relationships. Lawrence and Wishart edition, p.597).
There are those, who know perfectly well that Marx and Engels made abundant use of the concept of decadence for the modes of production that preceded capitalism, and yet who claim that “Marx only gave capitalism a progressive definition in the historic phase in which it eliminated the economic world of feudalism, engendering a vigorous period of development of the productive forces which had been inhibited by the previous economic form; but he did not go any further forward in a definition of decadence except for a one-off in his famous introduction to the Critique of Political Economy” (Prometeo n°8, December 2003). Nothing could be less true! Throughout their lives Marx and Engels analysed the evolution of capitalism and constantly tried to determine the criteria for the moment of its entry into decadence.
Thus, as early as the Communist Manifesto, they thought that capitalism had accomplished its historic mission and that the time was ripe for the passage to communism: “The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them (…) Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”.[15] [15]
We know that Marx and Engels later recognised that their diagnosis had been premature. Thus at the end of 1850 Marx wrote: “While this general prosperity lasts, enabling the productive forces of bourgeois society to develop to the full extent possible within the bourgeois system, there can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at a time when two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production (...) A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May-October 1850).
And in a very interesting letter to Engels, dated 8th October 1858, Marx went into the qualitative criteria for determining the passage to the phase of the decadence, ie “the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market”. In his opinion, these two criteria had been met for Europe – in 1858 he thought that the time for socialist revolution was ripe on the continent – but not yet for the rest of the globe where he still considered capitalism to be in its ascendant phase: “The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still, in the ascendant over a far greater area?” (Correspondence, Marx To Engels in Manchester, 8 October 1858).
In Capital, Marx said that capitalism “thus demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived” (Capital Vol. 3, Part 3: The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, Chapter 15: Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law). And again in 1881, in the second draft of his letter to Vera Zasulitch, Marx argues that capitalism had entered its decadent phase in the West: “the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime” (cited in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, RKP, p103). Again, for those who know how to read and have a basic degree of political honesty, the terms Marx uses to speak about the decadence of capitalism are unambiguous: period of senility, regressive social system, fetter on the development of the productive forces, system which has “more and more outlived” itself, etc.
Finally, Engels concluded this inquiry in 1895: “History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent (…) this only proves, once and for all, how impossible it was in 1848 to win social reconstruction by a simple surprise attack” (The Class Struggles In France, Introduction by Engels, 1895). In the words of Marx and Engels themselves, that “proves once and for all” the stupidity of the endless pages produced by parasitic elements about the possibility of the communist revolution from 1848 onwards: “We have on several occasions defended the thesis that communism has been possible since 1848” (Robin Goodfellow, ‘Communism as a historic necessity’, 1/2/04[16] [16]). Stupidities unfortunately shared to a large extent by the Bordigists of the PCI, who in a very bad polemic reproach us for affirming, along with Marx and Engels, that “the conditions for the overthrow of a social form do not exist at the moment of its apogee”, claiming that this “throws into the dustbin a century of the existence and struggle of the proletariat and its party (…) all of a sudden neither the birth of communist theory, nor the meaning and lessons or the revolutions of the 19th century, can be understood” (PCI pamphlet n°29, Le Courant Communiste Internationale: a contre-courant du marxisme et de la lutte de classe).
Why is this argument totally inept? Because at the moment that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, there were indeed periodic slow-downs in growth, taking the form of cyclical crises, and in examining these crises, they were able to analyses all the expressions of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. But these “revolts of the productive forces against modern relations of production” were simply youthful revolts. The outcome of these regular explosions was the strengthening of the system which, in a vigorous phase of growth, was able to rid itself of its childhood clothes and the last feudal obstacles in its path. In 1850, only 10% of the world population was integrated into capitalist social relations. The system of wage labour had its whole future in front of it. Marx and Engels had the brilliant perspicacity to see in capitalism’s crises of growth the essence of all its crises and thus to predict a future of profound convulsions. If they were able to do this, it is because, from its birth, a social form carries within itself in germ all the contradictions which will lead to its demise. But as long as these contradictions had not developed to the point where they became a permanent barrier to growth, they constituted the very motor of this growth. The sudden slow-downs in the capitalist economy in the 19th century were not at all like these permanent and growing barriers. Thus, taking forward Marx’s intuition about when capitalism would enter into decadence – with “the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market” – Rosa Luxemburg was able to draw out the dynamic and the moment: “we have behind us the, so to speak, previous youthful crises which followed these periodic developments. On the other hand, we still have not progressed to that degree of development and exhaustion of the world market which would produce the fatal, periodic collision of the forces of production with the limits of the market, which is the actual capitalist crisis of old age (…) If the world market has now more or less filled out, and can no longer be enlarged by sudden extensions; and if, at the same time, the productivity of labour strides relentlessly forward, then in more or less time the periodic conflict of the forces of production with the limits of exchange will begin, and will repeat itself more sharply and more stormily” (Social Reform or Revolution, 1899; the second part of the quote is from the 1908 edition).
We saw above that Marx and Engels made abundant use of the notion of decadence in their main writings on historical materialism and the critique of political economy (the German Ideology, Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, Critique of Political Economy, the post-face to The Peasant War in Germany), but also in a number of letters and prefaces. What about the book that the IBRP considers to be Marx’s masterpiece? They claim that the term decadence “never appears in the three volumes of Capital”.[17] [17] Apparently the IBRP has not read Capital very well because in all the parts where Marx deals either with the birth or the end of capitalism, the notion of decadence is indeed present!
Thus in the pages of Capital Marx confirms his analysis of the decadence of feudalism and within the latter, the transition to capitalism: “The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former (…) Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the abolition of serfdom has been long effected, and the highest development of the Middle Ages, the existence of sovereign towns, has long been on the wane (...) The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century” (Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence and Wishart edition, p. 668-9 and 672). Similarly, when Marx looks at capitalism’s insurmountable contradictions and when he envisages its replacement by communism, he indeed talks of “capitalism becoming senile”: "Here the capitalist mode of production is beset with another contradiction Its historical mission is unconstrained development in geometrical progression of the productivity of human labour. It goes back on its mission whenever, as here, it checks the development of productivity. It thus demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived" (Marx, Capital, Vol III, Part III, Chapter 15, Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law, our emphasis).[18] [18]
Let us note in passing that Marx envisages the period of capitalism’s senility as a phase where it has more and more “outlived itself”, where it becomes an obstacle to the development of productivity. This once again gives the lie to another theory invented wholesale by the group Internationalist Perspectives, according to which the decadence of capitalism (but also of feudalism, see above) is characterised by a full development of the productive forces and of the productivity of labour![19] [19]
Finally, in another passage from Capital, Marx recalls the general process of the succession of historical modes of production: “But each specific historical form of this process further develops its material foundations and social forms. Whenever a certain stage of maturity has been reached, the specific historical form is discarded and makes way for a higher one. The moment of arrival of such a crisis is disclosed by the depth and breadth attained by the contradictions and antagonisms between the distribution relations, and thus the specific historical form of their corresponding production relations, on the one hand, and the productive forces, the production powers and the development of their agencies, on the other hand. A conflict then ensues between the material development of production and its social form” (Marx, Capital, Vol III, Part VI, Chapter 51 “Distribution Relations and Production Relations”).[20] [20]
Here he takes up the terminology he used in the Critique of Political Economy which we will examine below. But first let us just point out that what is true for Capital is also true for the various preparatory works for it, where the notion of decadence is amply present.[21] [21] The best advice we can give the IBRP is to go back to school and learn how to read.
This is how Marx summarises the main results of his research in 1859 in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy: “The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies, can be summarised as follows.
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising form the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close” (our emphasis).
Our critics have the habitual dishonesty of avoiding the question of decadence by systematically transforming and reinterpreting the writings of Marx and Engels. This is especially the case with this extract from the Critique of Political Economy, which they claim – wrongly as we have already seen to be the only place where Marx talks about decadence! Thus for the IBRP, Marx, in this passage, is talking, not about two clearly distinct phases in the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production, but about the recurrent phenomenon of the economic crisis: “It’s the same when the defenders of this analysis [of decadence -ed] are pushed to cite the other phrase by Marx, according to which, at a certain level of the development of capitalism, the productive forces enter into contradiction with the relations of production, thus developing the process of decadence. The fact is that the expression in question relates to the phenomenon of the general crisis and the break in the relationship between the economic structure and the ideological superstructures which can generate class episodes heading in a revolutionary direction, and not to the question under discussion” Prometeo n°8, December 2003).
In itself, the quote from Marx leaves no room for ambiguity. It is clear, limpid, and follows the same logic as all the other extracts referred to in this article. From his letter to J Wedemeyer, we know how much Marx saw historical materialism as his real theoretical contribution, and when he summarises “the general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies”, he is talking precisely about the evolution of modes of production, their dynamics and contradictions articulated around the dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the productive forces. In a few phrases, Marx sums up the whole arc of human evolution: “In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production (…) This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close”. Nowhere, contrary to the IBRP’s claims, does Marx invoke recurrent cycles of crises, periodic collisions between the productive forces and the social relations of production, or periods of changes in the rate of profit; Marx is working on another scale, on the grand scale of the evolution of modes of production, of historical “epochs”. In this extract, like all the others we have cited, Marx clearly defines two broad phases in the historical evolution of a mode of production: an ascendant phase where the social relations of production push forward and facilitate the development of the productive forces, and a decadent phases in which “from forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters”. Marx makes it clear that this change takes place at a precise moment – “at a certain stage of their development” and does not speak at all about “recurrent and ever-increasing collisions” as in the IBRP’s improper interpretation. Furthermore, on several occasions in Capital Marx uses formulae that are identical to those in the Critique of Political Economy; and when he refers to the historically limited character of capitalism, he talks about two distinct phases in its evolution: “capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development” (Capital, Vol III, Part III, Chapter 15, op.cit.), or again when he argues that capitalism “demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived” (op cit).
We can forgive the IBRP for having some trouble in understanding Marx’s Critique of Political Economy – anyone can make a mistake. But when errors are repeated, even when it comes to quotes from what the IBRP sees as its Bible (Capital), this is more than a one-off failing.
As for our parasitic critics, they like to go in for long syntactical dissections. For RIMC, “the ICC takes the trouble to underline the phrase ‘So begins’, no doubt in order to put the accent, like the good gradualists they are, on the progressive character of the movement which it thinks it has identified. But we could just as well underline the words ‘social revolution’, which signifies precisely the opposite, since a revolution is the violent overturning of the existing order, in other words, a brutal and qualitative break in the ordering of things and events” (RIMC, ‘Dialectique’, op cit). Again, for anyone who can read, Marx talks about the opening of an “epoch of social revolution” (an “epoch” is a whole period in which a new order of things is established) and he argues that this change can last some time since he tells us that “With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed”. Farewell to the “sudden, violent, almost vertical fall, and, in the end, a new social regime arises”, Bordiga’s phrase repeated by the RIMC! Unlike the latter, Marx does not confuse a “change in the economic foundations” and a political revolution. The first slowly unfolds within the old society; the second is briefer, more circumscribed in time, although it can also stretch out for some time since the overthrow of the political power of an old ruling class by a new ruling class usually takes place after numerous aborted attempts, which may include temporary restorations after short-lived victories.
As far as the parasitic grouplets are concerned, their essential function is to cloud political clarity, to set Marx against the communist left and thus to create a barrier between the new searching elements and the revolutionary groups. With them things are clear. We only have to show how central was the theory of decadence in the work of Marx and Engels to annihilate all their claims that this is “a theory which deviates totally from the communist programme (…) such a method of analysis has nothing to do with communist theory (…) from the point of view of historical materialism the concept of decadence has no coherence. It is not part of the theoretical arsenal of the communist programme. As such it has to be totally rejected (…) No doubt the ICC will use this quote (from Marx’s first draft letter to Vera Zasulitch) since it uses the word ‘decadence’ twice, which is rare in Marx, for whom the term had no scientific value”. (RIMC, ‘Dialectique’, op cit). Such assertions are totally absurd. Motivated by a parasitic, anti-ICC concern, the only thing these allegations have in common is to exclude the concept of decadence from the work of Marx and Engels. Thus for Aufheben,[22] [22] “the theory of capitalist decline appeared for the first time in the Second International”, whereas for the RIMC (‘Dialectique’) it was born after the First World War: “the goal of this work is to make a global and definitive critique of the concept of ‘decadence’ which, as one of its major deviations born after the first post-war period, poisons communist theory and because of its obviously ideological character hinders any scientific work aimed at restoring communist theory”. Finally, for Internationalist Perspectives (“Towards a new theory of the decadence of capitalism”), Trotsky was the inventor of this concept: “the concept of the decadence of capitalism arose in the Third International, where it was developed in particular by Trotsky…”. Who can understand this? If there is one thing that must be obvious by now to the reader who has looked at the extracts from Marx and Engels used in this article, it is that the notion of decadence has its real origins precisely there, in their historical materialist method. Not only is this notion right at the heart of historical materialism and is defined very precisely at the theoretical and conceptual level, but it is also used as an operational scientific tool in the concrete analysis of the evolution of different modes of production. And if so many organisations of the workers’ movement have developed the notion of decadence, as the writings of the parasitic groups recognise despite themselves, it is simply because this notion is at the heart of marxism!
The Bordigists of the PCI have never accepted the analysis of decadence developed by the Italian Communist Left in exile between 1928 and 1945,[23] [23] despite their claim of historical continuity with it. Bordigism’s act of birth in 1952 was marked by the rejection of the concept;[24] [24] while Battaglia Comunista[25] [25] maintained the principal acquisitions of the Italian left on this point, the elements around Bordiga moved away from them when they founded the Parti Communiste Internationale. Despite, this major theoretical regression, the PCI has nevertheless always remained in the internationalist camp of the communist left. It has always been rooted in historical materialism and in fact, whatever its level of awareness, has always defended the broad lines of the analysis of decadence! To prove this, we need only cite its own basic positions on the back of all its publications: “Imperialist world wars show that capitalism’s crisis of disintegration is inevitable owing to the fact that it has entered definitively into the period in which its expansion no longer historically exalts the growth of the productive forces, but ties their accumulation to repeated and growing destructions” (basically, the ICC says nothing different!).[26] [26] We can cite a number of passages from their own texts where the very notion of the decadence of capitalism is recognised implicitly or explicitly: “while we insist on the cyclical nature of the crises and catastrophes of world capitalism, that in no way affects the general definition of its present stage, a stage of decadence in which ‘the objective premises for the proletarian revolution are not only ripe, but overripe’ as Trotsky put it” (Programme Communiste no. 81). And yet today, in its pamphlet criticising our positions, it tries over several pages to make a (very bad) polemic against the concept of decadence, without realising that it is once again contradicting itself: “because since 1914 the revolution and only the revolution has everywhere and always been on the agenda, i.e that the objective conditions are present everywhere, it is impossible to explain the absence of this revolution except by resorting to subjective factors: what’s lacking for the revolution to break out is only the consciousness of the proletariat. This is a deformed echo of the false positions of the great Trotsky at the end the 1930s. Trotsky also thought that the productive forces had reached the maximum possible under the capitalist regime and that consequently the objective conditions for the revolution were ripe (and that they had even begun to be ‘over-ripe’): the only obstacle was therefore to be found at the level of the subjective conditions” (PCI pamphlet no. 29). The mysteries of invariance!
As for Battaglia Comunista, it has to be said, despite its claims of continuity with the positions of the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left,[27] [27] that it is heading back to its Bordigist roots. Having rejected the positions of Bordiga in 1952 and having re-appropriated certain lessons from the Italian left in exile, today its explicit abandonment of the theory of decadence, developed precisely by the Fraction,[28] [28] takes Battaglia back to the sides of the Parti Communiste Internationale. It’s a return to sources, since both in the founding platform of 1946 and the platform of 1952, the notion of decadence is absent. The political vagueness of these two programmatic documents when it comes to understanding the period opened by the First World War has always been the matrix of the weaknesses and oscillations of Battaglia Comunista in the defence of class positions.
Finally, this examination has also allowed us to see that the writings of the founding fathers of marxism are very far from the different versions of historical materialism defended by all our critics. We are waiting for them to demonstrate, with the aid of the writings of Marx and Engels as we have done in this article with the concept of decadence, the validity of their own vision of the succession of modes of production! In the meantime, their rather grandiose pretensions to being experts in marxism make us smile a bit; knowing the works of Marx and Engels, we are assured of never losing our sense of humour.
For page after page the IFICC[29] [29] claims that it is fighting against a supposed degeneration of our organisation, focusing on our analysis of the balance of class forces, our orientation for intervention in the class struggle, our theory of the decomposition of capitalism, our attitude towards the regroupment of revolutionaries, our internal functioning, etc. It argues that the ICC is in its death agony and that now the IBRP represents the pole of clarification and regroupment: “With the opening of the course towards opportunism, sectarianism and defeatism by the official ICC, the IBRP is now at the centre of the dynamic towards the construction of the party”. This declaration of love is even accompanied by a pure and simple political alignment on the positions of the IBRP: “We are conscious that divergences exist between this organisation and ourselves, particular, on questions of methods of analysis more than on political positions” (Bulletin n°23). With a stroke of the pen, the IFICC, valiant defender of the orthodoxy of the ICC’s platform, eliminates all the important political divergences between the ICC and the IBRP. But there’s something even more significant. At a time when something which is at the very heart of the ICC platform – the question of decadence – has for two years been more or less openly put into question by the IBRP,[30] [30] and has been subjected to a very dishonest critique by the PCI (Programme Communiste), the IFICC finds nothing better to do than keep quiet in all languages and even to regret that we are taking up the defence of the analytical framework of decadence against the deviations of the PCI and the IBRP: “This is how they put into question the proletarian character of this organisation and of the IBRP by rejecting both of them to the margins of the proletarian camp (see International Review n°115)” (presentation to the IFICC Bulletin n°22)!
So far, the IFICC has managed to write no less than four articles on the subject of the decadence of capitalism (Bulletin n°19 ,20, 22 and 24). These articles are pompously entitled ‘Debate within the proletarian camp’, but the reader will not find the slightest reference to the IBRP’s abandonment of the concept of decadence! He will however find the habitual diatribe against our organisation claiming in the most ridiculous way that we are the ones abandoning the theory of decadence! Not a word on the IBRP which is explicitly putting the theory of decadence into question, and, on the other hand, bitter attacks on the ICC which intransigently defends this concept!
Four months after the publication by the IBRP of a new and long article explaining why it is putting into question the theory of decadence as elaborated by the communist left (Prometeo n°8, December 2003), the IFICC, in the presentation to its Bulletin n°24, April 2004, devotes a single line to applauding this “fundamental contribution”: “We salute the work of the comrades of the PCInt who have shown their concern to clarify the question. No doubt we will have occasion to come back to this”. The article by the IBRP is obviously not seen for what it is – a serious retreat on the programmatic level – but is played up as a contribution to the combat against our supposed political deviations: “the crisis into which the ICC is more and more sinking today is pushing the groups of the proletarian camp to go back over this question of decadence; this expresses their involvement in the combat against the opportunist slide of a group of the proletarian political milieu, their participation in a struggle to save what can be saved from the disaster of the opportunist slide of our organisation. We salute this effort…”
When flattery takes the place of a political line, it’s no longer just opportunism, it’s arse-licking. To cover up their behaviour as thugs and informers with a pseudo-political varnish, the IFICC rapidly ‘discovered’ important differences with the ICC, notably by ridding itself of our analysis of the decomposition of capitalism.[31] [31] The IFICC has had to eliminate what is politically most “unpopular” among the groups of the revolutionary milieu in order to approach them and get recognised by them. Thus it bends the knee to those it flatters. But they don’t seem to be taking the bait: “While we don’t exclude the possibility that individuals could come out of the ICC and join our ranks, it is quite impossible for there to arise from within it groups or fractions which, in the debate with their own organisation, arrive en bloc at positions which converge with ours (…) Such a result could only come from a complete questioning, or rather, a break with the practical, political and general programmatic positions of the ICC and not just their modification or improvement” (ICP pamphlet n°29). We couldn’t put it better ourselves! Having rid itself of the theory of decomposition, the IFICC is ready to reduce all the political divergences between the ICC and the IBRP to a few minor questions of “method of analysis”; tomorrow it will be quite prepared to dump the theory of decadence in order to seduce groups hostile to these two concepts, and thus to continue its dirty and thoroughly dishonest work of trying to isolate the ICC from the rest of the groups of the proletarian political milieu.
C. Mcl.
[1] [32] See the preceding series of 8 articles entitled ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism’ in International Review n°48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58 and 60.
[2] [33] See our articles in International Review n°77 and 78 on the rejection of the theory of decadence and war by the International Communist Party /Programme Communiste, and the articles in International Review n°79, 82, 83 and 86 on the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party and war, the historic crisis of capitalism and globalisation.
[3] [34] See International Review n°105 and 105 in response to a letter from Australia and n°111 and 112 in response to new revolutionary elements emerging in Russia
[4] [35] Properly speaking from the 16th century up to the bourgeois revolutions in the context of feudal decadence, and from the bourgeois revolutions to 1914 in the context of the ascendant phase of capitalism.
[5] [36] Manifestes, thèses, et résolutions des quatre premiers congrès mondiaux de l'Internationale Communiste 1919-23, Maspero, our translation from the French, our emphasis.
[6] [37] In the article “The economic crisis shows the bankruptcy of capitalist social relations of production” in International Review n°115, we already had occasion to show that the refusal of the IBRP and the PCI (Programme Communiste) to base themselves on his framework of analysis is at the root of their tendency to slide towards leftism and alternative worldism and away from the marxist analysis of the crisis and the social position of the working class.
[7] [38] To those who like to set Marx and against Engels, note the following: “I must note in passing that inasmuch as the mode of outlook expounded in this book was founded and developed in the far greater measure by Marx, and only to an insignificant degree by myself, it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge. I read the whole manuscript to him before it was printed, and the tenth chapter of the part on economics (“From Kritische Geschicte”) was written by Marx but unfortunately had to be shortened somewhat by me for purely external reasons”. (Preface by Engels, to the second edition, 23rd September 1885, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p.9).
[8] [39] For a critique of the Bordigist conception of historical evolution, see our article in International Review n°54, pp 14-19).
[9] [40] “Dialectique des forces productives et des rapports de production dans la theorie communiste” published in the Revue Internationale du Mouvement Commmuniste, written jointly by Communisme ou Civilisation, Communismo L’Union Proletarien and available at the following address: membres.lycos.fr/rgood/formprod.htm
[10] [41]users.skynet.be/ippi/4discus1tex.htm
[11] [42] See the interesting book by Guy Bois, La grande depression médiévale, XIVe et XV siècle, PUF.
[12] [43] Grundrisse, “Forms which precede capitalist production”. See www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm#iiie2 [44]
[13] [45] Simply recalling the analyses of Marx and Engels is enough to reply to the limitless historical stupidities of parasitic groups like Internationalist Perspectives, Robin Goodfellow (ex-Communisme ou Civilisation and RIMC) etc, who end up affirming the exact opposite of the founders of historical materialism and of undeniable historical facts. We will however take the opportunity to come back in more detail to their meanderings in future articles because, unfortunately, they can have a negative influence on young elements who are not solidly rooted in marxist positions.
[14] [46] This type of mode of production was identified by Marx in Asia, but it was not at all limited to this geographical region. Historically, it corresponds to the megalithic or Egyptian societies, etc, going back to 4000 years BC, the culmination of a slow process of society dividing into classes. The social differentiation which developed with the appearance of an economic surplus and the emergence of material wealth led to a political power in the form of a royal state. Slavery could exist within it, even to a considerable degree (servants, labourers on great public works, etc), but it only rarely dominated agricultural production; it was not yet the dominant form of production. Marx gave it a clear definition in Capital: “Should the direct producers not be confronted by a private landowner, but rather, as in Asia, under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign, then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale” (Vol III, Part VI, “Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent”). All these societies disappeared between 1000 and 500 BC. Their decadence was manifested in recurrent peasant revolts, in a gigantic development of unproductive state expenditure and in incessant wars between states trying through plunder to find a solution to internal blockages of production. Endless political conflicts and internecine rivalries within the ruling caste exhausted society’s resources, and the geographical limits to the expansion of empires showed that the maximum degree of development compatible with the relations of production had been reached.
[15] [47] These same disgruntled characters, in order to limit the significance of this sentence from the Manifesto, like to argue that this extract refers not to the general process of the passage from one mode of production to another but to the periodic return of conjunctural crises of overproduction that open up the possibility of a revolutionary outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth; the context of the extract is unambiguous, coming just after Marx has recalled the historic process of the transition between feudalism and capitalism. Furthermore, the whole argument distorts the objectives of the Manifesto, which was entirely devoted to showing the transitory character of modes of production and thus of capitalism; it did not seek to provide a detailed examination of the functioning of capitalism and its periodic crises, as would be the case with Capital later on.
[16] [48] Or again, the theory of decadence takes “the whole of communist theory to the realm of ideology and utopia since it would be posed outside any material base [in the ascendant phase – ed]. Humanity does not set itself problems which it cannot resolve practically. In these conditions, why lay claim to the positions of Marx and Engels? We would have to make the same criticism of them that they made of the utopian socialists. Scientific socialism would not be a break with utopian socialism but a new episode within the latter” (Robin Goodfellow, members.lycos.fr/resdint).
[17] [49] “What role then does the concept of decadence play in terms of the militant critique of political economy, ie for a deeper analysis of the characteristics and dynamic of capitalism in the period in which we live? None. To the extent that the word itself never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital. It is not through the concept of decadence that one can explain the mechanics of the crisis…” (“Comments on the Latest Crisis of the ICC”, Internationalist Communist n°21, p.23)
[19] [52] “Finally, the propensity of capital to increase productivity, and thereby to develop the productive forces, does not decrease in its decadent phase (...) The existence of capitalism in its decadent phase, tied to the production of surplus value extracted from living capital but faced with the fact that the mass of surplus value tends to diminish as the level of surplus labour increases, forces it to accelerate the development of the productive forces at an increasingly frenetic pace” (Perspective Internationaliste, "Valeur, décadence et technologie, 12 thèses", users.skynet.be/ippi/3thdecad.htm, our translation).
[21] [55] "The relations of domination and slavery (...) constitute a necessary ferment for the development and decline of all the original relations of property and production, just as they express their limited nature. For all that, they are reproduced in capital – in a mediated form – and they thus also constitute a ferment for its dissolution and are the emblem of its own limited nature” (Grundrisse, Editions Sociales, 1980, tome I : 438, our translation from the French). Later on, Marx writes: "From an ideal point of view, the dissolution of a given form of consciousness should be enough to kill an entire epoch. From a real point of view, this limit on consciousness corresponds to a given degree of the development of the material productive forces and therefore of wealth. In reality, the development did not take place on the old basis, it was the basis itself that developed. The maximum development of this basis itself (...) is the point where it has itself been elaborated to take the form in which it is compatible with the maximum development of the productive forces, and therefore also with the richest development of the individual. Once this point has been reached, further development appears as a decline and the new development begins on a new basis" (Grundrisse, Editions Sociales, 1980, tome II : 33, our translation from the French). Then again, in 1857, in the Grundrisse Marx speaks of the historical evolution of different modes of production and their ability to understand and criticise themselves in these terms: "The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself—leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence—it always conceives them one-sidedly" (“The method of political economy [56]”).
[22] [57] “On decadence: theory of decline or decline of theory” is a text by the British group Aufheben.
[23] [58] See our book The Italian Communist Left.
[24] [59] Read Bordiga’s critical reflections on the theory of decadence, written in 1951: ‘La doctrine du diable au corps’, republished in le Proletaire no. 464 (the PCI’s paper in France); also ‘Le renversement de la praxis dans la theorie marxiste’, republished in Programme Communiste no. 56 (the PCI’s theoretical review in French), as well as the proceedings of the 1951 Rome meeting published in Invariance no. 4
[25] [60] Battaglia Comunista, along with the Communist Workers’ Organisation, is one of the founding organisations of the IBRP.
[26] [61] In a recent pamphlet, entirely devoted to the critique of our positions (‘le Courant Communiste Internationale: a contre courant du marxisme et de la lutte de classe’), the PCI, carried away by its own prose, contradicts its own basic positions by arguing that “the ICC sees a whole series of phenomena such as the necessity for capital to periodically destroy itself as a condition for a new phase of accumulation…for the ICC these phenomena are supposedly new and are interpreted as the manifestations of decadence…and not as the expression of the development and strengthening of the capitalist mode of production “ (page 8). The PCI should tell us yes or no, as its basic statement of positions would seem to indicate, whether “imperialist world wars show that capitalism’s crisis of disintegration is inevitable owing to the fact that it has entered definitively into the period in which its expansion no longer historically exalts the growth of the productive forces, but ties their accumulation to repeated and growing destructions” - or whether, as it argues in its pamphlet “the necessity for capital to periodically destroy itself” is not a “manifestation of decadence” but “the expression of the development and strengthening of the capitalist mode of production”! Apparently programmatic invariance depends on what you happen to be saying at one moment or another!
[27] [62] “In conclusion, while the political émigrés, those who took on the entire work of the Left Fraction, did not take the initiative to form the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943, the party was founded on the bases which the Fraction defended from 1927 until the war” (introduction to the political platform of the Internationalist Communist Party, publications of the International Communist Left, 1946)
[28] [63] “The historical stakes under decadent capitalism. Since the opening of the imperialist phase of capitalism at the beginning of the present century, evolution has oscillated between imperialist war and proletarian revolution. In the epoch of the growth of capitalism, wars cleared the way for the expansion of the productive forces through destroying obsolete relations of production. In the phase of capitalist decadence, wars have no other function than to carry out the destruction of an excess of wealth…” (Resolution on the constitution of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left, Octobre no. 1, February 1938); “the 1914-18 war marked the final end of the phase of expansion of the capitalist regime…In the ultimate phase of capitalism, the phase of decline, it’s the fundamental stakes of the class struggle which determines historical evolution” (Manifesto of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left, Octobre no. 3, April 1938).
[29] [64] A so-called “Internal Fraction” of our organisation which regroups a few ex-members whom we had to expel because they behaved like informers (having previously stolen money and material and slandered our organisation). See “The police-like methods of the IFICC” on our website.
[30] [65] We responded as early as October 2002 to the appearance of the first indications that the IBRP was abandoning the notion of decadence (cf International Review nº111). A year later we made a substantial critique in International Review nº115
[31] [66] These elements shared the analysis of decomposition when they were still members of the ICC (see our article “Understanding the decomposition of capitalism” in International Review n°117).
Ever since 1968, and especially since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, many of those who want to work for the revolution have turned their backs on the experience of the Russian revolution and the 3rd International, to look for lessons for the proletariat's struggle and organisation in another tradition: “revolutionary syndicalism” (sometimes known as “anarcho-syndicalism”).[1] [69]
This current appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in some countries played an important role up until the 1930s. Its main characteristic was its rejection (or at the least, its considerable underestimation) of the proletariat's need to create a political party, whether for the struggle within capitalism, or in capitalism's revolutionary overthrow: the union was considered to be the only possible form of organisation. In fact, the approach of those who turn towards the syndicalist tradition springs in large part from the discredit that the very idea of political organisation has suffered as a result of the experience of Stalinism: first, the brutal repression in the USSR itself, then of the workers' revolts in East Germany and Hungary during the 1950s; the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the French CP's sabotage of the workers' struggles during May 1968; then the repression once again of the Polish workers' struggles at the beginning of the 1970s, etc. This situation has worsened since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the ruling class' disgusting campaigns aimed at identifying the collapse of Stalinism with the bankruptcy of communism and of marxism, thereby dealing a heavy blow at any idea of political regroupment on the basis of marxist principles.
One of the proletariat's great strengths is its ability to return constantly to its past defeats and errors, in order to understand them and to draw out the lessons that they hold for the present and future struggle. As Marx said: “proletarian revolutions (...) constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts” (The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). The experience of revolutionary syndicalism in the workers' movement is no exception to this necessity of critical examination in order to understand its lessons. To do so, we need to place syndicalist ideas and action in their historical context, which alone allows us to place their origins within the history of the workers' movement as a whole.
This is why we have decided to undertake a series of articles (to which this one serves as introduction), on the history of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. We will try to give an answer to the following questions:
- What principles and methods distinguish the syndicalist current?
- Has syndicalism left any valid lessons for the historic struggle of the working class?
- What conclusions should we draw from its betrayals, most notably in 1914 (the French CGT takes part in the national “Sacred Union” government from the very outset of the war), and in 1937 (participation of the Spanish CNT in the governments of both the Catalan Generalitat and the Madrid Republic during the civil war)?
- Has syndicalism any perspective to offer the working class today?
We will base our reply on the working class' concrete experience of syndicalism, through an analysis of several important periods in the life of the proletariat:
- The history of the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), strongly influenced if not dominated by the anarcho-syndicalists, from its formation until the war of 1914-18.
- The history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States up until the 1920s.
- The history of the shop-stewards' movement in Britain before and during World War I.
- The history of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the revolutionary wave that followed the Russian revolution, until it collapsed in the civil war of 1936-37.
- Finally, we will conclude with an examination of the concrete reality of syndicalism today, and of the currents that claim to belong to this tradition.
The purpose of this series is not to provide a detailed chronology of the various syndicalist organisations, but to demonstrate how syndicalism's principles have not only proven themselves inadequate as a compass for the proletariat's struggle for its emancipation, but in certain circumstances have even contributed to dragging it onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie. This historic, materialist approach will demonstrate the profound difference between anarchism and marxism, which is expressed particularly in their different attitudes towards the betrayals that have occurred within both the socialist and the anarchist movements.
The anarchists never hesitate to point the finger at the great betrayals of the socialist and communist movements: the socialist parties' participation in the war of 1914-18, and the Stalinist counter-revolution during the 1920s and 30s. They claim that this is the inevitable result of the “authoritarian” heritage passed from Marx to Stalin via Lenin; in short, a kind of “original sin”, in which they agree completely with all the bourgeoisie's propaganda about the “death of communism”. Their attitude is very different when it comes to the anarchists' own betrayals: neither the anti-German patriotism of Kropotkin or James Guillaume in 1914, nor the French CGT's unfailing support for the government of Sacred Union during the 1914-18 war, nor the CNT's participation in the bourgeois governments of the Spanish republic, can in their eyes, call into question the eternal “principles” of anarchism.
In the marxist movement, by contrast, the betrayals have always been fought and explained by the left.[2] [70]
The struggle of the lefts was never limited to a mere “reminder” of marxist principles. It was always a practical and theoretical effort to understand and to demonstrate where the origins of the betrayal lay, how it could be explained by changes in the historical, material situation of capitalism and especially how the change in situation had rendered obsolete the methods of struggle which up to then had proven appropriate in the struggle of the working class.
There is no equivalent amongst the anarchists and the anarcho-syndicalists, who continue to accord their principles an eternal, purely moral value, empty of any historic content. Faced with a “betrayal”, there is therefore nothing to be done but to reassert the same eternal values, and this is why, unlike marxism, the anarchist movement has never produced any left fractions. This is also why the real revolutionaries in the French syndicalist movement of 1914 (around Rosmer and Monatte) did not try to form a left current within the syndicalist movement, but turned instead towards bolshevism.
As we have seen above, at the heart of the divergence between the revolutionary syndicalist current and marxism lies the question of the organisational form that the working class needs for its struggle against capitalism. In fact, this question could not be understood overnight. The proletariat is the revolutionary class whose historic task is the overthrow of capitalism: that does not mean that it sprang fully formed into capitalist society, like Athena from the head of Zeus. On the contrary, the working class has had to win its consciousness at the price of enormous efforts and often bitter defeats. From the outset of the long road to its emancipation, the proletariat has had to confront two fundamental requirements:
- the need for all the workers to struggle collectively in the defence of their interests (first of all within capitalism, then for its overthrow);
- the need to bend their thinking towards the general goals of their struggle, and how these can be achieved.
Indeed, the whole history of the workers' movement throughout the 19th century was marked by constant efforts to find the most appropriate forms of organisation to answer these two fundamental needs, which, concretely, were to develop both a general organisation in order to regroup all the workers in struggle, and a political organisation, one of whose essential tasks is to give a clear perspective to these struggles.
The period from the early formation of the working-class until the Paris commune was marked by a whole series of efforts at proletarian organisation, in general strongly influenced by the specific history of the workers' movement in each country. During this period, one of the main tasks of the working-class and its organisational efforts was still to assert itself as a specific class separate from other classes in society (the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie), with which it might still occasionally share common objectives (such as the overthrow of the feudal order).
In this historical context, marked by the immaturity of a still-developing and inexperienced proletariat, these two fundamental needs of the working class found expression in organisations which either tended to turn towards the past (like the French "compagnons" who looked back to the feudal Guild system), or else failed to understand the need for a general organisation of the class in order to combat the capitalist order, despite their effective radical critique of capitalist society. Thus the proletariat's first political organisations were often characterised by a "sectarian" vision, which saw the revolution as the task, not of the class as a whole, but of a minority of plotters who would seize power in a coup d'etat, to place it afterwards in the hands of people. From this tradition come such great figures of the workers' movement as Gracchus Babeuf and Auguste Blanqui. During the same period, the Utopian socialists (the best-known being Fourier and Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in Britain) worked out their plans for a future society designed to replace that capitalist society, which they denounced mercilessly, and often with great insight.
The first mass working-class organisations often expressed both the tendency to seek an illusory return to the past, and also on occasions an intuition of the class' destiny which went well beyond its capacities at the time: on the one hand, for example, the clandestine trade union organisation in Britain at the end of the 18th century (which went under the name of the "Army of Redressers" under the command of the mythical General Ludd) often expressed a longing by the workers for a return to their artisan status; on the other hand, we find the Grand National Consolidated Union,[3] [71] which aimed, at the beginning of the 19th century, to unite the various corporatist movements in a revolutionary general strike, in a Utopian anticipation of the Soviets which were to be created a century later.
The bourgeoisie recognised very early on the danger that the mass organisation of workers represented for it: in 1793, in the midst of the French Revolution, the “Loi Chapelier” banned all forms of workers' association, including simple friendly societies for mutual economic assistance in the face of unemployment or illness.
As it developed, the proletariat asserted itself more and more as an autonomous class in relation to the other classes in society. In British Chartism, we can see both the embryo of the political class party as well as the first separation of the proletariat from the radical petty bourgeoisie. The wave of struggles which ended with the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 (and therefore also of Chartism) has left us the principles incorporated in the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless, the idea of a true proletarian political party was still to emerge, since the First International created in the 1860s combined the characteristics both of the political party and of the unitary mass organisation.
The Paris Commune of 1871, followed by the Hague Congress of the First International in 1872, marked a watershed in the development of workers' organisations. The ability of the working masses to go beyond the conspiratorial practice of the Blanquists was clearly demonstrated by their capacity for organisation, both in the success of the economic struggles of the workers organised in the International Workingmen's Association, and in the creation of the Commune, the first working-class power in history. Henceforward, only the anarchists with their ideology of the "exemplary act", in particular the followers of Bakunin,[4] [72] remained adepts of the ultra-minority conspiracy as a means of action. At the same time, the Commune had demonstrated the absurdity of the idea that the workers could simply ignore political activity (in other words, immediate demands made on the state and the revolutionary perspective of the seizure of political power).
The ebb in both the struggle and in class consciousness following the crushing defeat of the Commune meant that these lessons could not be drawn immediately. But the 30 years which followed the Commune witnessed a decantation within the proletariat's understanding of how to organise: on the one hand, the trade union organisation for the defence of the economic interests of each corporation or trade,[5] [73] and on the other hand the organisation of the political party both for the defence of the immediate general interests of the working class through parliamentary political action (struggles to impose a legal limit on the work of children and women, or on the working day, for example), and for the preparation and propaganda for the "maximum programme", in other words for the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
Because capitalism as a whole was still in its period of ascendancy, as demonstrated notably by an unprecedented expansion of the productive forces (the last 30 years of the 19th century witnessed both the expansion and the extension of capitalist production relations world wide), it was still possible for the working class to win lasting reforms from the bourgeoisie.[6] [74] Pressure on the bourgeois parties within the parliamentary framework made possible the adoption of laws favourable to the working-class, as well as the repeal of the anti-socialist laws banning the organisation of workers in trade unions and political parties.
Nonetheless, the very success of the workers' parties within capitalism also proved extremely dangerous. The reformist current considered that this situation, which had seen the influence of workers' organisation develop on the basis of real reforms won in favour of the working class, was definitive, when in fact it was merely temporary. The reformists, for whom "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing", found their main expression at the end of the 19th century, either in the political parties or in the trade unions, depending on the country. Thus in Germany, the attempt by the current around Bernstein to have an opportunist policy abandoning the revolutionary goal officially adopted as party policy, was vigorously fought within the Social Democratic party by the left wing around Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek. By contrast, the revisionist current more readily gained a strong influence in the great German trade union organisations. In France, the situation was reversed, the socialist party being much more profoundly marked than in Germany by reformist and opportunist ideology. This was demonstrated by the inclusion in the Waldeck-Rousseau government of 1899-1901, of the socialist minister, Alexandre Millerand.[7] [75] This participation in government was rejected by the whole Social Democracy in the congresses of the Second International, but was only abandoned with difficulty (and for some with many regrets) by the French Socialists themselves. It is therefore no accident that in 1914, in the break with the workers' organisations that had gone over to the enemy (the socialist parties and trade unions), the internationalist left emerged from the German party (the Spartacus group around Luxemburg and Liebknecht), and from the French unions (the internationalist tendency represented by Rosmer, Monatte, and Merrheim, amongst others).
Generally speaking, opportunism was most present in the parliamentary fractions of the socialist parties, and in a whole apparatus involved in parliamentary work. This apparatus also exercised the greatest attraction on all those careerist elements who joined the party in the hope of profiting from the growing influence of the workers' movement, but who of course had no interest in the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. As a result, there was a tendency within the working-class to identify political work with parliamentary activity, parliamentary activity with opportunism and careerism, careerism with the petty bourgeois intelligentsia of lawyers and journalists, and finally opportunism with the very notion of the political party.
Faced with the development of opportunism, the response of many revolutionary workers was to reject political activity as a whole, and, so to speak, to withdraw into the trade unions. And so, inasmuch as the revolutionary syndicalist movement was a truly working-class current, its aim, as we shall see, was to build trade unions which would be the unitary organs of the working-class capable of regrouping it for the defence of its economic interests, of preparing it for the day when it was to take power through the general strike, and of serving as the organisational structure of the future communist society. These unions were to be class unions, free of the careerism of an intelligentsia which wanted to use the workers' movement in order to make room for itself on the parliamentary benches, and independent – as the French CGT's 1906 Congress at Amiens emphasised – of all political parties.
In short, as Lenin said: "In Western Europe revolutionary syndicalism in many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism. In our country, too, the first steps of “Duma activity” increased opportunism to a tremendous extent and reduced the Mensheviks to servility before the Cadets (…) Syndicalism cannot help developing on Russian soil as a reaction against this shameful conduct of 'distinguished' Social-Democrats".[8] [76]
What then was this revolutionary syndicalism whose development Lenin foresaw? First of all, its different components shared a common vision of what a trade union should be. To summarise this conception, we cannot do better than to quote the preamble to the second constitution of the International Workers of the World (IWW), adopted in Chicago in 1908: "It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.[9] [77] The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old".[10] [78]
The union is therefore to be the unitary organisation of the class for the defence of its immediate interests, for the revolutionary seizure of power, and for the organisation of the future communist society. According to this vision, the political party is at best irrelevant (Bill Haywood considered that the IWW was "socialism in overalls"), and at worst a breeding ground for bureaucrats.
There are two major criticisms to be made of this syndicalist vision, to which we will return in greater detail later.
The first concerns the idea that it is possible "[to form] the structure of the new society within the shell of the old". This idea that it is possible to begin to build the new society within the old springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimates the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.
Any idea that it is possible to find an artificial shortcut, and so to avoid the inevitable constraints imposed by the transition from capitalism to classless society, in fact plays into the hands of such reactionary conceptions as self-management (in reality self-exploitation), or the construction of socialism in one country so dear to Stalin. When today's anarcho-syndicalists criticise the Bolsheviks for not having adopted radical measures of social transformation in October 1917, when capitalism's economic domination still covered the entire planet, including Russia, they merely reveal their reformist vision both of the revolution and of the new society which the revolution is to establish. This is hardly surprising since the syndicalist vision is in fact limited to changing the ownership of private property: the private property of the capitalists becomes the private property of a group of workers, since each factory, each enterprise, is to remain autonomous in relation to the others. This vision of the future social transformation is so limited that it foresees the same workers continuing to work in the same industries, and so necessarily in the same conditions.
Our second criticism of revolutionary syndicalism is that it completely ignored the real revolutionary experience of the working class. For the Marxists, the Russian Revolution of 1905 was a crucial moment, particularly in its spontaneous creation of the workers councils. For Lenin, the Soviets were "the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat". Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Pannekoek, in fact the whole left wing of the Social-Democracy which was later to form the Communist International, paid great attention to the analysis of these events, and of others such as the great strikes in Holland in 1903. Through the propaganda of the Second International's left currents, the political experience of 1905 thus became a vital element of working-class consciousness, which was to bear fruit in October 1917 in Russia (where the anarchists moreover played a minimal role) and throughout the revolutionary wave which saw the emergence of Soviets in Finland, Germany, and Hungary. The "revolutionary" syndicalists, on the contrary, remained stuck in abstract schemas which were based on the experience of reformist trade union struggle during capitalism's ascendant period, and which thus proved completely inadequate for the revolutionary struggle in decadent capitalism. It is true that the anarchists like to claim that the Spanish "revolution" was much deeper than the Russian Revolution in terms of social change. As we will see, nothing could be further from the truth.
Today's revolutionary syndicalists continue in the same tradition, completely ignoring the real experience of workers' struggles since 1968. In particular they take no account of the fact that, on the one hand, the organisational form adopted by the struggle is not the trade union but the sovereign general assembly with its elected and revocable delegates,[11] [79] while, on the other hand, the bourgeois state itself has directly incorporated the trade unions within it.[12] [80]
We have seen that the revolutionary syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists share a common vision of the union as the place where the working-class organises. Let us now look at three key elements which turn up regularly in syndicalist organisations, and which we will examine in greater detail in the next articles.
One might think that today, the question of direct action had been resolved by history. When revolutionary syndicalism first made its appearance, direct action was put forward in opposition to the action of "the leaders", in other words of the parliamentary leaders of the socialist parties or the trade union bureaucrats. However, since capitalism entered its decadent period not only have the "socialist" and "communist" parties definitively betrayed the proletariat, but also the very conditions of the class struggle mean that any action on the terrain of parliament or the conquest of political "rights" has become impossible. In this sense, the debate between "direct action" and "political action" is completely irrelevant. Some might conclude that history had settled the question, and that Marxists and anarchists could therefore agree to defend the direct action of the working-class in the struggle.
This is not in fact the case. The question of "direct action" goes to the heart of the divergence between the Marxist and anarchist conceptions of the role of the revolutionary minority. For the Marxists, the action of the revolutionary minority is that of the political vanguard of the working class and has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of minority action inherited from the "exemplary act" of the anarchists, which substitutes itself for the action of the class as a whole. The political orientations that the Marxist organisation puts forward to its class always depend on the level of the class struggle as a whole, on the greater or lesser capacity at any given moment of the whole proletariat to act as a class against the bourgeoisie, and to adopt the principles and the analyses of the communists in the struggle (to “seize the weapon of theory" as Marx put it). Anarcho-syndicalism, by contrast, remains infected by the essentially moral and minority vision of the anarchists. For this current there is no distinction between the "direct action" of the mass of workers, and that of a minority, however small.
The idea of the general strike is not specific to anarcho- syndicalism, since its first expression is to be found in the writings of the Utopian socialist Robert Owen at the beginning of the 19th century. This being said, it has become one of the major characteristics of syndicalist theory, and can be presented in three main aspects:[13] [81]
- the working-class' ability to carry out the general strike with success depends on the growth in number and in power of the union organisations (revolutionary ones, of course);
- the revolution is not a question of politics: in the anarcho- syndicalist vision, the general strike will simply paralyse the bourgeois state, which will then leave the workers undisturbed to carry out the transformation of society;
- the theory of the general strike is closely linked to that of self-management, which is put forward above all at the level of the factory or the workplace.
In reality, none of these ideas has survived the test of the concrete experience of the working-class itself.
First of all, the theory according to which the revolutionary period would be preceded by the continuous development in trade unions' strength has proven completely false. In neither the Russian nor the German revolutions were the trade unions organs of struggle or of the exercise of proletarian power. On the contrary, they turned out at best to be a conservative brake on the revolution (for example the railway workers' union in Russia, which opposed the revolution in 1917). In all the countries involved in World War I, the unions controlled the working class on behalf of the bourgeois state, in order to guarantee war production and to prevent any development of resistance to the slaughter. This role was adopted without hesitation by the leadership of the anarcho-syndicalist CGT as soon as France entered the war.
The result of revolutionary syndicalism's refusal of "politics" was to disarm the workers completely in confronting those questions, which are really posed in the critical moments of war and revolution. All those questions posed between 1914 and 1936 were political questions: what was the nature of the war that broke out in 1914, an imperialist war or a war for the defence of democratic rights against German militarism? What attitude should be adopted towards the "democratisation" of absolutist states in February 1917 (Russia) and in 1918 (Germany)? What attitude should be adopted towards the democratic state in Spain in 1936 – was it a bourgeois enemy or an antifascist ally? In every case, revolutionary syndicalism proved incapable of giving an answer, and ended up in a de facto alliance with the bourgeoisie.
Experience of the strike in Russia in 1905 called into question the theories that had been put forward up to then by both the anarchists and the Social-Democrats (the Marxists of their day). But only the left wing of Marxism proved capable of drawing the lessons from this crucial experience. "The Russian Revolution, which is the first historical experiment on the model of the class strike, not merely does not afford a vindication of anarchism, but actually means the historical liquidation of anarchism (...) Thus has historical dialectics, the rock on which the whole teaching of Marxian socialism rests, brought it about that today anarchism, with which the idea of the mass strike is indissolubly associated, has itself come to be opposed to the mass strike which was combated as the opposite of the political activity of the proletariat, appears today as the most powerful weapon of the struggle for political rights. If, therefore, the Russian Revolution makes imperative a fundamental revision of the old standpoint of Marxism on the question of the mass strike, it is once again Marxism whose general method and points of view have thereby, in new form, carried off the prize. 'The Moor’s beloved can die only by the hand of the Moor'" (Rosa Luxemburg, The mass strike, on marxists.org; the quotation is a reference to Shakespeare's play Othello).
At first sight, it might seem purely academic to distinguish between internationalism and anti-militarism. After all, anyone who is against the army must surely be for brotherhood among the peoples? Are these not, when it comes down to it, the same struggle? In reality, these two principles spring from two profoundly different approaches. Internationalism is based on the understanding that, although capitalism is a world system, it remains nonetheless incapable of going beyond the national framework and an increasingly frenzied competition between nations. As such, it engenders a movement that aims at the international overthrow of capitalist society, by a working-class that is also united internationally. Ever since 1848, the principal slogan of the workers' movement has not been anti-militarist, but internationalist: "Workers of all countries, unite!".[14] [82] But for the revolutionary Marxist left the social democracy before 1914, it was impossible to conceive the struggle against militarism as anything other than an aspect of a much wider struggle. "Social-democracy, in accordance with its conception of the essence of militarism, regards the complete abolition of militarism alone as impossible: militarism can only fall together with capitalism, the last class system of society (…) the goal of Social-Democracy's anti-militarist propaganda is not to fight the system as an isolated phenomenon, nor is its final aim the abolition of militarism alone" (Karl Liebknecht, Militarismus und anti-militarismus).
Anti-militarism, by contrast, is not necessarily internationalist, since it tends to take as its main enemy not capitalism as such, but only an aspect of capitalism. For the anarcho-syndicalists in the French CGT prior to 1914, anti-militarist propaganda was motivated above all by the immediate experience of the army being used against strikers. They considered it necessary both to give moral support to young proletarians during their military service, and to convince the troops to refuse to use their weapons against strikers. In itself, there is nothing to criticise in such an aim. But anarcho-syndicalists remained incapable of understanding militarism as a phenomenon integral to capitalism, a phenomenon which was to get worse in the period before 1914 as the great imperialist powers prepared for World War I. Typical of this incomprehension is the idea that militarism is in fact nothing but an excuse to justify the maintenance of an anti-working class repressive force, an idea expressed by the anarcho-syndicalist leaders Pouget and Pataud: "the government wanted to preserve warfare – for the fear of war was, for them, the best of devices for domination. Thanks to the fear of war, skilfully maintained, they could maintain standing armies throughout the country which, under the pretext of protecting the frontier, in reality only threatened the people and only protected the ruling class" (Comment nous ferons la révolution, Pouget and Pataud).
In fact the anti-militarism of the CGT was very like pacifism, in its ability to execute a 180° turn as soon as "the fatherland is in danger". In August 1914, the anti-militarists discovered overnight that the French bourgeoisie was "less militarist" than the German bourgeoisie, and that it was therefore necessary to defend the French "revolutionary tradition" of 1789 against the barbarous jackboot of the Prussian militarist, rather than "transforming the imperialist war into a civil war" to use Lenin's words.
Obviously, the question of militarism could no longer be posed in the same way after the awful slaughter of 1914-18, which far surpassed in horror anything that the anti-militarists of 1914 could have imagined. Anti-militarist ideology was thus superseded, as we might say, by the ideology of anti-fascism, as we will see when we come to consider the role of the CNT during the war in Spain in the 1930s. In both cases, syndicalists chose one camp – the more democratic bourgeoisie – against another, that of the more authoritarian, dictatorial bourgeoisie.
It was not necessarily obvious to their contemporaries that any differentiation existed between these two currents, which moreover were linked in many ways. Indeed, before 1914 one could say that the French CGT served as a beacon for the other syndicalist currents, in much the same way as the German SPD did for the other parties of the Second International. It nonetheless seems necessary, with historical hindsight, to distinguish between the positions of the anarcho-syndicalists and the revolutionary syndicalists. This distinction largely coincides with the difference between the industrially less developed countries (France and Spain), and two most important and most developed capitalist countries respectively of the 19th century (Britain) and of the 20th century (United States). Whereas anarcho-syndicalism is closely linked to the greater influence, within the workers' movement of the less developed countries, of the anarchism characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie and small artisan strata in the process of proletarianisation, revolutionary syndicalism was more a response to the problems of the proletariat highly concentrated in large-scale industry.
We will examine briefly three important elements which allow us to distinguish between these two currents.
For or against centralisation. Anarcho-syndicalism has always had a federalist vision whereby the federation is no more than the grouping of independent unions: the confederation has no authority at the level of each union. In the CGT in particular, this situation suited the anarcho-syndicalists perfectly since they dominated above all in the small trade unions and the system whereby each union had one vote at the level of the confederation gave them a weight in the CGT far greater than their real numerical importance.
The revolutionary syndicalism of the IWW was founded, by contrast, both implicitly and explicitly on the international centralisation of the working-class. It is no accident if one of the IWW's slogans is: "one big union". Even the union's name ("Industrial Workers of the World") declares clearly – even if the reality did not always live up to the ambition – its intention to regroup the workers of the whole world in one single organisation. The IWW statutes adopted in Chicago in 1905 established the authority of the central organ: "The subdivision International and National Industrial Unions shall have complete industrial autonomy in their respective internal affairs, provided the General Executive Board shall have power to control these Industrial Unions in matters concerning the interest of the general welfare" (see “Jim Crutchfield's IWW Page” cited above for the full text).
There was a considerable difference between anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary syndicalists in their attitude towards political action. Although there were members of socialist parties in some of the CGT unions, the anarcho-syndicalists themselves were "anti-political" seeing nothing in these parties but parliamentary manoeuvring or the manipulation of "leaders". The famous charter adopted by the Amiens Congress in 1906 declared the CGT's total independence from any parties or "sects" (a reference to anarchist groups). This refusal of any political vision (understood explicitly in terms of the parliamentary activity of the day) is one of the reasons why the CGT found itself completely unprepared politically for the war of 1914, which failed to follow the schema of the general strike on a purely "economic" terrain. The anarchist rejection of "politics" had no real equivalent during the foundation of the IWW, even if the founders considered themselves to be building a unitary organisation of the working-class and intended to maintain their entire freedom of action in relation to political parties. On the contrary, the best-known founders and leaders of the IWW were often also members of a political party: Big Bill Haywood was not only secretary of the Western Federation of Miners but also a member of the Socialist Party of America, as was A. Simons. Daniel De Leon of the Socialist Labor Party also played a leading role in the formation of the IWW. In the somewhat specific context of the United States, the IWW were often considered by the bourgeoisie and by the reformist AFL union (American Federation of Labour) as a trade union expression of political socialism. Even after the split of 1908, at the congress where the IWW modified their constitution to ban any acknowledgement of political (that is to say essentially electoral) action, members of the SPA continued to play a fundamental role within the IWW. Haywood in particular was elected to the executive committee of the SPA in 1911: his election represented moreover a victory for the revolutionaries against the reformists within the socialist party itself.
Similarly it would be impossible to explain the influence of revolutionary syndicalism among the shop stewards in Britain without mentioning the role played by John MacLean and the Scottish SLP. Nor is it any accident that the bastions of the shop stewards' movement (the coal and steel industry of South Wales, the industry along the Clyde River in Scotland, the region around Sheffield in England) were also to become bastions of the Communist Party in the years that followed the Russian Revolution.
Finally, the position that each of these two currents took towards the war is not the least of the differences between them. If we situate the period of syndicalism's greatest influence between 1900 and 1940, we can see a major difference between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism in their attitudes towards imperialist war:
- Anarcho-syndicalism foundered body and soul in its support for imperialist war: in 1914 the CGT enrolled the French working-class for war, while in 1936-37 Spanish CNT, through its antifascist ideology and its participation in government, became one of the main pillars of the bourgeois republic.
- Revolutionary syndicalism, on the other hand, remained true to its internationalist positions: the IWW in the United States, and the shop stewards in Britain, were at the heart of the workers resistance to the war.
Obviously, this distinction should be nuanced: revolutionary syndicalism had its weaknesses (notably a strong tendency to see the question of war solely through the narrow prism of the economic struggle against its effects). Nonetheless at the level of the organisations the distinction remains valid.
In short, while revolutionary syndicalism, despite its weaknesses, provided some of the working-class' most determined militants in the struggle against the war, anarcho- syndicalism provided ministers for the governments of Sacred Union in the bourgeois republics of France and Spain.
"Comrade Voinov is quite correct in taking the line of calling upon the Russian Social-Democrats to learn from the example of opportunism and from the example of syndicalism. Revolutionary work in the trade unions, shifting the emphasis from parliamentary trickery to the education of the proletariat, to rallying the purely class organisations, to the struggle outside parliament, to ability to use (and to prepare the masses for the possibility of successfully using) the general strike, as well as the 'December forms of struggle',[15] [83] in the Russian revolution – all this comes very strongly into prominence as the task of the Bolshevik trend. And the experience of the Russian revolution immensely facilitates this task for us, provides a wealth of practical guidance and historical data making it possible to appraise in the most concrete way the new methods of struggle, the mass strike, and the use of direct force. These methods of struggle are least of all ‘new’ to the Russian Bolsheviks, the Russian proletariat. They are ’new’ to the opportunists, who are doing their utmost to erase from the minds of the workers in the West the memory of the Commune, and from the minds of the workers in Russia the memory of December 1905. To strengthen these memories, to make a scientific study of that great experience, to spread its lessons among the masses and the realisation of its inevitable repetition on a new scale - this task of the revolutionary Social-Democrats in Russia opens up before us prospects infinitely richer than the one-sided "anti-opportunism" and "anti-parliamentarism" of the syndicalists" (Lenin, op. cit.). For Lenin, revolutionary syndicalism was a proletarian response to the opportunism and parliamentary cretinism of Social-Democracy, but it was a partial and schematic response, unable to grasp the watershed period of the early 20th century in all its complexity. Despite the historic differences which produced the different syndicalist currents, all had this defect in common. As we will see in the articles to come, this weakness proved fatal: at best the syndicalist current was unable to contribute fully to the development of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23; at worst, it foundered in open support for the imperialist capitalism which it had once thought to combat.
Jens, 4th July 2004
[1] [84] We will return later to the distinction between revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. To put it briefly, we can say that anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of revolutionary syndicalism. All the anarcho-syndicalists consider themselves to be revolutionary syndicalists, whereas the reverse is not the case. Where we use the term “syndicalism”, we refer to both currents indifferently.
[2] [85] The socialist parties' betrayal in 1914 was already being fought by the left wing in the socialist parties (Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, Lenin, Trotsky) from the beginning of the 20th century; the betrayal by the communist parties (who were to lead the counter-revolution in the 1920s-30s) was fought by the left communists (the KAPD in Germany, the GIK in Holland, the left of the Italian CP around Bordiga, then the fractions of the international Left in Bilan and Internationalisme).
[3] [86] The Grand National Consolidated Union was created in 1833, with the active participation of Robert Owen; according to the press of the day, it organised 800,000 British workers (see JT Murphy, Preparing for power).
[4] [87] The anarchists like to oppose the “libertarian” and “democratic” Bakunin to the “authoritarian” Marx. In reality, the aristocrat Bakunin had a profound contempt for the “people” who were to be led by the invisible hand of a secret conspiracy: “for the real revolution, we need not individuals placed at the head of the crowd commanding it, but men hidden invisibly within it, linking invisibly one crowd with the next, thus giving invisibly one and the same leadership, one and the same spirit and character to the movement. The secret preparatory organisation has no other meaning than that, and that is the only reason it is necessary” (Bakunin, The principles of revolution). See International Review n°88, “Questions of organisation”. For more details on Bakunin's organisational ideas, see the excellent biography by EH Carr.
[5] [88] In this period, the unions were organised by trade; moreover, union membership was generally limited to skilled workers.
[6] [89] As an example of the difference between capitalism's ascendant and decadent periods, we can cite the evolution of the working day. From 16-17 hours a day at the beginning of the 19th century, it had fallen towards ten hours or even eight hours in certain industries by the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, the working day (apart from swindles like the 35-hour week in France, which today is being called into question) has remained obstinately stuck around eight hours, and that despite a fantastic increase in productivity. In countries like Britain, the working day is now on the rise, the typical “9-5” job of the 1960s being replaced by a working day that ends at 6 o'clock or later.
[7] [90] Millerand was a lawyer much valued in the French workers' movement for his qualities in defending trade unionists in the courts. A protégé of Jaurès, he entered parliament in 1889 as an independent socialist. But his participation in the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet alienated him from the socialists, from whom he increasingly separated from 1905 onwards. He became Minister of Public Works in 1909, then served as Minister for War between 1912 and 1915.
[8] [91] Lenin's preface to a pamphlet by Voinov (Lunacharsky) on the party's attitude towards the unions (1907). In reality, syndicalism developed very little in Russia, and for one reason: the Russian workers turned towards a truly revolutionary marxist political party, the Bolsheviks. See www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/00.htm [92]
[9] [93] It should be noted that this vision of a historic mission of the working class is much more closely related to marxism than to anarchism.
[10] [94] “Jim Crutchfield's IWW Page” contains useful material for the history of the IWW. See here [95] for the IWW's 1908 Constitution.
[11] [96] See our articles on the class struggles in Poland in 1980-81, in International Review n°24-29.
[12] [97] For those who doubt the reality of this incorporation, we need only look at the extent to which the unions in “democratic” countries are financed by the state. For example, according to the French paper La Tribune of 23/02/2004, there are 2,500 civil servants paid by the Ministry of Education alone to take part in full-time union work. The same article gives details of the various subsidies paid to the unions, including some €35 million per year paid in the name of “union-management cooperation”.
[13] [98] The anarcho-syndicalist vision of the general strike is described in novel form, in the book Comment nous ferons la révolution written by two CGT leaders, Pouget and Pataud, in 1909 (Editions Syllepse).
[14] [99] The Communist Manifesto.
[15] [100] In other words, the Soviets.
The Bush administration has been very assertive in pushing its plan to build a National Defense System (NDS). Not one day passes without the bourgeois media mentioning this issue, and during the second week of June, George W. Bush made his first diplomatic trip to Europe, trying to persuade the "allies" that the American missile defense system would help the US protect them from potential missile attacks by rogue powers. What's going on? Why does the US want to scrap the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) -the treaty made with the old USSR in the height of the cold war? What's new in the imperialist, geopolitical scenario of the post-Cold War period?
First of all, it is is important to point out the Reagan administration had already posed the question of trashing the ABM treaty and building a space shield in what had come to be known as the Star Wars project during the 1980s. In continuity with this long-term design, the Clinton administration started the remodernization of the US military and went on with the testing of the technology necessary for the actual building of NDS. Clinton did not push the issue because of the repeated failures during tests of the military technology involved. But already in September 2000, Le Monde Diplomatique, a French bourgeois publication, concluded that Clinton's hesitations did not count much, since the choice of whether to go ahead or not rested ultimately with the new administration to be elected in November. Bush, then, is merely reviving a project that the American bourgeoisie has had for a long time. The question is, why right now?
If we are to believe the ideological justifications we find in the bourgeois press, NDS is a strategy that aims first and foremost at arms cuts. According to the bourgeoisie, NDS would discourage the production and use of nuclear arms. As a result, the working class is supposed to feel good about it, safe, and supportive of the project. The 1972 ABM treaty explicitly banned the building of a national defense system, reflecting the bourgeoisie's commitment to maintaining a "balance of power" as part of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). According to this doctrine, neither the US nor USSR would risk initiating a nuclear attack, because such an attack would prompt a retaliatory nuclear strike, that would lead to the destruction of both sides. A nuclear shield, or missile defense system, capable of shooting down the other side's missile, would have nullified the mutually assured destruction that was supposed to maintain the peace. Today the American bourgeoisie insists that the ABM treaty is outdated. What the US government is saying in essence is that they are no longer interested in a "balance of power." In fact, the existence of a US national defense system that can knock out another nation's missiles effectively destroys the concept of a "balance of power" and would establish an American military hegemony over the rest of the world.
Of course, the ABM treaty did not really provide for a safer world, and the US and Russia continued their arms race. Just like its predecessor, the NDS won't stabilize the world or provide safety. Quite the contrary. In the period of capitalist decadence, no nation is spared from having an interest in developing ever more sophisticated means of destruction with the hope of being up to the imperialist challenge of redividing the world and getting a slice of it for themselves. Today, the US uses the fact that nuclear weapons have or may spread to very unstable regions, especially so-called "rogue" states like, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, as an excuse to justify the implementation of NDS. In reality, NDS will help the US assert its control and hegemony all over the world.
The Bush administration correctly points out that the world has changed. What they are lying about is the reasons. The threat that the US faces is not just from the "rogue" states, but above all from the challenge to its domination by its former allies. Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the US has remained the sole superpower in the world. Its domination of the world, however, has remained uncontested. Starting from the Gulf war, down to the implementation of the various "rapid reaction forces" to "take care" of mulitiple smaller conflicts breaking out at the same time, to the "humanitarian" interventions, it's clear the US is facing not only a much more unpredictable and unstable world, but all, contestation. Such contestation, however, does not worry the American bourgeoisie so much when it springs from minor imperialist powers as when it is voiced by its European "allies." It is essentially in response to such a situation that the US is pushing NDS.
At the same time as the ruling class has cut social benefits, as the economic crisis deepens leaving hundreds of thousands jobless and hopeless, as the decomposition of this rotting system spreads epidemics, desperation, and wars, the bourgeoisie proposes to spend billions of dollars on new military systems of mass destruction. The working class needs to denounce the total irrationality of NDS, or any imperialist project of this bankrupt ruling class, even as ruling class propaganda will tell us that this new round of militarization of society will help the working class by creating jobs.
An, 23/7/01.
In the previous article in this series, we saw how the future Bolshevik, Trotsky, had failed to grasp the significance of the birth of Bolshevism, siding with the Mensheviks against Lenin. In this article, we look at how another great figure of the left wing of social democracy, Rosa Luxemburg – who in 1918 was to declare that “the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism” – also used her considerable polemical skills to support the Mensheviks against the so-called ‘ultra-centralism’ personified by Lenin.
Rosa Luxemburg’s response to Lenin’s One Step Forward was published in Neue Zeit (and the new Iskra) under the title ‘Organisational questions of Russian social democracy’. This work has subsequently been published under the title ‘Leninism or marxism’ and (often through selective quoting) has served as a reference point for councilists, anarchists, left social democrats and other ‘anti-Leninists’ for many decades.
In fact, it was not at all Rosa’s intention to place Lenin outside of marxism or the workers’ movement, however strong her criticisms of him were: they were offered in the spirit of vigorous but fraternal polemic. The article displays none of the personal tone contained in Trotsky’s texts of the same period.
Furthermore, Luxemburg begins by affirming the positive contribution made by Iskra prior to the Congress, in particular its consistent advocacy of the need to go beyond the phase of the circles “The problem on which Russian social democracy has been working during the last few is years is the transition from the dispersed, quite independent circles and local organisations, which corresponded to the preparatory and primarily propagandistic phase of the movement, to a form of organisation such as is required for a unified political action of the masses throughout the whole state.
Since, however, the most prominent trait of the old form of organisation, now grown unacceptable and politically outmoded, was dispersion and complete autonomy, or the self-sufficiency of the local organisations, it was quite natural that the watchword of the new phase of the preparatory work for the larger organisation should become centralism. The emphasis on centralism was the leitmotif of Iskra in its brilliant three-year campaign for preparing the last really constituent party congress, and the same thought dominated the entire 1903-4: the young guard of the party”.
And yet Luxemburg had few hesitations in siding with the Mensheviks in the dispute that arose during the Second Congress. Thus the rest of the text is a critique of the “ultra-centralist wing of the party”, led by Lenin.
There are various factors which could be invoked to explain this: certainly there were differences of approach and theory between Luxemburg and Lenin, especially on the key issue of class consciousness, which we will return to. Luxemburg, as well, had already clashed with Lenin on the national question, which may have predisposed her to argue against his method – she believed that his thinking was often rigid and scholastic. In particular, Luxemburg was, as the text shows, already grappling with the question of the mass strike and the spontaneity of the working class. Lenin’s insistence on the limitations of spontaneity must have seemed totally counter-productive, especially as she herself was faced with a real battle within the German party in defence of spontaneous mass action and against the rigid, bureaucratic view of the social democratic right wing and the trade union leaders, who feared the uncontrolled upsurge of the masses more than they feared capitalism. As we shall see, some of her polemic tends to project the experience of the German party onto the situation in Russia, which certainly led her to misinterpret the real significance of the divergences in the RSDLP.
Finally, we cannot discount the problem of a certain conservatism about authority. We have seen this in Trotsky’s reactions to the split. The Mensheviks had, in fact, been very quick to conduct a personalised campaign against Lenin with the aim of winning the German party to their positions: “The question is how to beat Lenin…Most of all, we must incite authorities like Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg against him” (cited by Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, OUP, 1969, p193) And there is no doubt that Kautsky and other German ‘leaders’ were swayed by the idea that Lenin was little more than an ambitious upstart. When Lyadov came to Germany to explain the Bolshevik case, Kautsky told him: “look, we do not know your Lenin. He is an unknown quantity for us, but we do know Plekhanov and Axelrod very well. It is only thanks to them that we have been able to obtain any light on the situation in Russia. We simply cannot just accept your contention that Plekhanov and Axelrod have turned into opportunists all of a sudden” (ibid). At this stage, Luxemburg’s polemic within the German party had been directed mainly at the openly revisionist wing led by Bernstein; she may have had her doubts about the ‘orthodox’ leadership, but she still saw it as an ally against the right, and may well have been influenced by this view of the split in Russia, based not on real political analysis but on a false ‘confidence’ in the old guard of the RSDLP. Later on, she would recognise the German leadership’s own slide into opportunism, not least on the question of the mass strike and the spontaneity of the class.
Be that as it may, Luxemburg, like Trotsky, seized on Lenin’s phrases in One Step Forward about Jacobinism (the revolutionary social democrat, Lenin had said, is “the Jacobin inseparably linked with the organisation of the class-conscious proletariat”), to argue that his “ultra-centralism” appears to be a regression to outmoded approaches to revolutionary activity, inherited from an immature phase of the workers’ movement: “To support centralisation in social democracy on these two principles – on the blind subordination of all party organisations and their activity, down to the last detail, to a central authority which alone thinks, acts and decides for all, and on a sharp separation of the organised nucleus of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu, as championed by Lenin – appears to us therefore as a mechanical carrying over of the organisational principles of the Blanquist movement of conspiratorial circles into the social democratic movement of the working masses” Like Trotsky, she rejects Lenin’s appeal to the proletarian discipline of the factory as a counter to the gentlemanly anarchism of the intellectuals: “The ‘discipline’ which Lenin has in mind is impressed upon the proletariat not only by the factory, but also by the barracks, and by the modern systems of bureaucracy, in short through the whole mechanism of the centralised bourgeois state”.
Luxemburg opposes Lenin’s view of the relationship of party to class with the following passage, whose significance we will return to in due course: “As a matter of fact, however, Social Democracy is not linked to or connected with the organisation of the working class, but is the movement of the working class itself. Social Democratic centralism must therefore be of an essentially different nature from that of the Blanquist. It can be nothing other than the over-riding general will of the enlightened and fighting vanguard of the workers as contrasted with the individual will of its different groups and individuals; it is, so to speak, a ‘self-centralism’ of the leading elements of the proletariat and their majority rule within their own party organisation”
Luxemburg also takes issue with Lenin’s explanation of opportunism and the methods he advocates to oppose it. She argues that he overemphasises the role of the intellectuals as a principal source of the opportunist trend in social democracy, and thus detaches the danger from its historical background. She accepts that opportunism may be strong amongst the academic element in the western parties, but she sees this as inseparable from the influences of parliamentarism and the reform struggle, and more generally the historic conditions in which social democracy is working in the west. She also notes that opportunism is not necessarily tied either to decentralisation or centralisation as forms of organisation, precisely because it is characterised by its lack of organisational principles. In fact, Luxemburg goes further than this, stressing that in the early phases of its life, in the face of conditions of economic and political backwardness, the opportunist trend in the German party, the Lasalle wing, favoured ultra-centralism over the Marxist Eisenach tendency - the implication being that in backward Russia opportunism would also be more likely to identify itself with the same ultra-centralising zeal.
Echoing an intervention by Trotsky at the Second Congress, Luxemburg argues that while precise rules and statutes are all very necessary, they can hardly act as a guarantee against the development of opportunism, which is a product of the very conditions in which the struggle of the working class is fought out: the tension between the necessity to struggle for its daily self-defence, and the historic goals of its movement. Having thus posed the problem in the broadest historical framework, Luxemburg feels free to make fun of Lenin’s supposed notion that “rigorous paragraphs on paper” can, in the battle against opportunism, make up for the absence of a revolutionary proletarian majority in the party. In the final analysis, neither the strictness of the central organs, nor the best party constitution, can replace the creativity of the masses when it comes to maintaining a revolutionary course against the temptations of opportunism. Hence her oft-quoted conclusion to the article: “let us say openly, that mistakes made by a really revolutionary working class movement are, historically, infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the most excellent ‘central committee’”
Lenin responded to Luxemburg in ’One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, reply by N Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg’, written in September 1904 and submitted to Neue Zeit. Kautsky however refused to publish the article and it was not published at all until 1930. Lenin welcomes the intervention of the German comrades into the debate, but regrets the fact that Luxemburg’s article “does not acquaint the reader with my book, but with something else” (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 7, op cit, p 472). Since he considers that Luxemburg has entirely missed the point in her polemic, he does not engage with her in a discussion about the general issues raised by it, but sticks to a restatement of the principal facts surrounding the split. He quietly thanks Rosa for “explaining the profound idea that slavish submission is very harmful to the party” (p474), but points out that he is not an advocate of a particular form of centralism, but simply defends “the elementary principles of any conceivable system of party organisation” (p 472) – the issue posed by the RSDLP Congress being not slavish submission to a central organ, but the domination of a minority, a circle within the party, over what should have been a sovereign Congress. He also shows how qualified was his use of the Jacobin analogy, which had in any case been frequently employed by Iskra and by Axelrod in particular. To make a comparison between the divisions in the proletarian party and the divisions between right and left wings in the French revolution, he insists, is not to argue that there is an identity between social democracy and Jacobinism. By the same token he waves aside the charge that his model of the party is based on the capitalist factory: “Comrade Luxemburg declares that I glorify the educational influence of the factory. That is not so. It was my opponent, not I, who said that I pictured the Party as a factory. I properly ridiculed him and proved with his own words that he confused two different aspects of factory discipline, which, unfortunately, is the case with Comrade Luxemburg to” (p 474). In fact, the squeamishness shown by both Trotsky and Luxemburg about the phrase ‘factory discipline’ obscures an important element of truth in Lenin’s use of the term. For Lenin, the positive aspect of what the proletariat learns through the ‘discipline’ of factory production is precisely the superiority of the collective over the individual – the necessity, in fact, for the association of the workers and the impossibility of the workers defending themselves as disparate individuals. It is this aspect of ‘factory discipline’ which has to be reflected not only in the general organisations of the working class, but also in its political organisations, through the triumph of the party spirit over the circle spirit and the gentlemanly anarchism of the intellectuals.
This leads on to Lenin’s central point: that Rosa’s critique of opportunism is far too general and abstract. Of course she is right to identify its fundamental roots in the historic conditions of the class struggle; but opportunism takes many forms and the specific Russian forms that manifested themselves at the Congress was an anarchist revolt against centralisation, a reversion by a part of the old Iskra group to views which it had come to the Congress to settle scores with in the first place, above all, the positions of the specifically Russian brand of Bernstein’s “the movement is everything, the goal nothing” – Economism. It is noticeable that Rosa remains silent on these questions, which is why Lenin devotes the second part of his article to providing a succinct account of how this relapse took place.
Lenin brushes aside Luxemburg’s “grandiloquent declamation” about the impossibility of fighting opportunism with rules and regulations “in themselves”; statutes cannot have such an autonomous existence, but they are nonetheless indispensable weapons for waging the combat against concrete manifestations of opportunism. “Never and nowhere have I talked such nonsense as that the party rules are weapon ‘in themselves’” (p 476). What Lenin does advocate is the conscious defence of the party’s own organisational principles, and the necessity for these principles to be codified in unambiguous statutes. This distinctive task of revolutionaries cannot be replaced by abstract appeals to the creative struggle of the masses to overcome the opportunist danger.
As we have said, Lenin chose not to go into some of the deeper issues posed in Rosa’s text: her errors on class consciousness and her identification between party and class, but it is necessary to deal with them briefly here.
In Luxemburg’s argument, the questions of class consciousness, centralism, and the relationship of party and class are inextricably connected.
“The paucity of the most important presuppositions for the full realisation of centralism in the Russian movement at the present time may, to be sure, have a very baneful effect. Nevertheless it is false, in our opinion, to believe that the majority rule of the enlightened workers within their party organisation, although as yet unattainable, may be replaced ‘temporarily’ by an assigned autocracy of the central authority of the party, and that the hitherto undeveloped public control on the part of the working masses over the acts and omissions of the party organs would be just as well replaced by the opposite control of the activity of the revolutionary workers by a central committee.
The history of the Russian movement itself furnishes many examples of the dubious value of centralism in this latter sense. The central committee with its almost unlimited authority of interference and control according to Lenin’s idea would evidently be an absurdity if it should limit its power to the purely technical side of the social democratic activity, to the outer means and accessories of agitation – say, to the supplying of party literature and suitable distribution of agitational and financial forces. It would have a comprehensible political purpose only if it were to employ its power in the creation of a unified fighting tactic and in arousing great political action in Russia. What do we see, however, in the phases through which the Russian revolution has already passed? Its most important and fruitful tactical turning points of the last decade were not by any means ‘invented’ by appointed leaders of the movement, and much less by leading organisations, but were in each case the spontaneous product of the unfettered movement itself.
This was so in the first stage of the genuine proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the elemental outbreak of the great St Petersburg strike in 1896 and which for the first time had inaugurated the economic mass action of the Russian proletariat. Similarly, the second phase, that of the political street demonstrations, was opened quite spontaneously as a result of the student unrests in St Petersburg in March 1901. The further significant tactical turning point, which opened up new horizons, was the mass strike which broke out ‘all of itself’ in Rostov-on-Don, with the ad hoc improvised street agitation, open air meetings, public addresses – things which the boldest blusterer among the Social Democrats would not have ventured to consider a few years earlier. In all these cases, in the beginning was ‘the deed’. The initiative and conscious leadership of the social democratic organisations played an exceedingly small role. This was not, however, so much the fault of defective preparations of these special organisations for their role, even though this factor may have been a considerable contributing cause, and certainly not of the lack at that time, in the Russian Social Democracy, of an all-powerful central committee in accordance with Lenin’s plan. On the contrary, such a committee would in all probability only have had the effect of making the indecision of the various party committees still grater, and of creating dissension between the storming masses and the procrastinating Social Democracy.
The same phenomenon, the small part played by the conscious initiative of the party leadership in the shaping of tactics, is still more observable in Germany and elsewhere. The fighting tactic of Social Democracy, at least as regards its main features, is definitely not ‘invented’, but is the result of a progressive series of great creative acts in the course of the class struggle which is often elemental and always experimenting. Here also the unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its carriers. The role of the social democratic leadership is one of an essentially conservative character, in that it leads to working out empirically to its ultimate consequences the new experience acquired in the struggle and quickly converting it into a bulwark against a further innovation in the grand style”.
The historical development of the communist programme has often taken the path of polemic between revolutionaries, of fierce debate between different currents within the movement. This has certainly been so in the case of the debates between Lenin and Luxemburg. On the national question, for example, it is Luxemburg who provides the fundamental framework for understanding the role of national struggles in the imperialist epoch, often in opposition to Lenin’s attachment to formulae left in abeyance from the previous epoch. And yet during the test of fire of the first world war, it was Lenin who articulated the clearest answer to all concessions to patriotism with his slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war” and Luxemburg who, in the Junius Pamphlet, weakened the clarity of her own arguments by toying with the idea of a ‘proletarian’ form of national defence.
When we look at the debate on organisation at the beginning of the century, we can see similar twists and turns of the dialectic. The long passage just quoted contains much that would form the backbone of her brilliant text The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions, which analyses the conditions of the class struggle in the newly-dawning historical epoch. Luxemburg, sooner than any other revolutionary of the day, saw that in this period, the proletariat would be compelled to develop its tactics, methods, and organisational forms in the heat of the struggle itself; they could not be planned in advance or organised down to the last detail by the revolutionary minority or indeed by any pre-existing organism. In 1904 she had already advanced towards these conclusions by observing recent mass movements in Russia; she would be vindicated even more definitively by the strikes and uprisings of 1905. True to Luxemburg’s diagnosis, the movement of 1905 was a general social explosion in which the working class went almost overnight from humble petitions to the Czar to mass strike and armed insurrection; equally consistent with her standpoint, the revolutionary vanguard often found itself lagging behind the movement. In particular, when the proletariat spontaneously discovered the form of organisation appropriate for the epoch of proletarian revolution – the workers’ councils, the soviets – many of those who thought they were applying Lenin’s theory of organisation reacted at first by demanding that these creations of unpredictable workers’ spontaneity either adopt the Bolshevik programme or dissolve, forcing Lenin himself to fulminate against the rigid formalism of his fellow Bolsheviks, to defend the necessity for both the soviets and the party. What further proof could there be of the tendency of the ‘revolutionary leadership’ to play a conservative role? And let us recall that Luxemburg’s battle to convince German social democracy of the importance of spontaneity was directed above all at the right wing of the party concentrated in the parliamentary fraction and the trade union hierarchy, who could not even conceive of a struggle that was not rigidly pre-planned and directed by the party/union Zentrum. Small wonder that she tended to see Lenin’s centralism as a ‘Russian’ variant of this bureaucrat’s vision of the class war.
And yet - exactly as we saw with Trotsky’s polemic - for all Luxemburg’s insights, there are two key flaws in this passage, flaws which confirm that, on the question of the revolutionary organisation, of its role and position within the mass upsurges of the new epoch, it was Lenin and not Luxemburg who had grasped the essentials.
The first flaw is connected to an oft-quoted sentence in the passage we have cited: “the unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its carriers”. This is of course the case as a general historical proposition; as Marx put it, man makes his history, but not in conditions of his own choosing. Hitherto, he has been at the mercy of the unconscious forces of nature and of the economy, which predominate over his conscious volition and ensure that all his best-laid plans have very different outcomes from those which he had intended. And for the same reasons, humanity’s understanding of its own position in the world remains under the sway of ideology – of myths, evasions and illusions perpetually reproduced by its own divisions, both at the individual and the collective level. In short, the unconscious necessarily precedes and dominates the conscious. But this approach ignores a fundamental characteristic of man’s conscious activity: its capacity to see ahead, to mould the future, in short, to submit the unconscious powers to his deliberate control. And with the proletariat and the proletarian revolution, this fundamental human characteristic can for the first time come to fruition. The proletariat is the class of consciousness, the class which, to emancipate itself, can and must reverse Luxemburg’s formula and subject the whole of social life to its conscious control. True this can only be fully realised in communism, when the proletariat will have dissolved itself; true that in its most elemental struggles for self-defence, its consciousness is no less elemental. But this does not alter the fact that it has a tendency to become more and more conscious of its historic goals, which implies the development of a consciousness that is able to foresee and shape the future. This domination of the conscious over the unconscious can only reach full flower in communism, but the revolution is already a qualitative step towards it. Hence the absolutely indispensable role of the revolutionary organisation, which has the specific role of analysing the lessons of the past in order capacity to foresee, as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, “the general line of march of the proletarian movement”, in short, to point the way towards the future.
Luxemburg, trapped in an argument which made it necessary to emphasise the domination of the unconscious, sees the role of the organisation as essentially conservative: to preserve the acquisitions of the past, to act as the memory of the working class. But while this is clearly vital, its ultimate purpose is anything but ‘conservative’: it is to anticipate the real direction of the future movement and actively influence the process leading towards it. Examples from the history of the revolutionary movement are not lacking. It was this capacity, for example, which enabled Marx to understand why humble, limited, even apparently anachronistic skirmishes such as those fought by the Silesian weavers in a semi-feudal Germany were indicators of the future class war, the first tangible evidence of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. We could equally point to the decisive intervention of Lenin in April 1917, who, even against the conservative elements ‘leading’ his own Bolshevik party, was able to announce and thus prepare for the coming revolutionary confrontation between the Russian working class and the ‘democratic’ Provisional Government. It was this tendency in Luxemburg’s approach to reduce consciousness to a passive reflection of an objective movement that led the Gauche Communiste de France – who were certainly not afraid to take Luxemburg’s side against Lenin on other crucial issues, such as imperialism and the national question – to argue that Lenin’s approach to the problem of class consciousness was more precise than that of Rosa:
“Lenin’s thesis of ‘socialist consciousness injected into the workers by the Party’ in opposition to Rosa’s thesis of the ‘spontaneity’ of the coming to consciousness, engendered during the course of a movement departing from the economic struggle and culminating in a revolutionary socialist struggle, is certainly more precise. The thesis of ‘spontaneity’, with its democratic appearance, reveals at root a mechanistic tendency towards rigorous economic determinism. It is based on a cause and effect relationship, with consciousness as merely an effect, the result of an initial movement, ie the economic struggle of the workers which gives rise to it. In this view, consciousness is see a, fundamentally passive in relation to the economic struggles which are the active factor. Lenin’s conception restores to socialist consciousness and the party which materialises it their character as an essentially active factor and principle. It does not detach itself from life and the movement but is included within it” (Internationalisme no. 38, ‘Sur la nature et la function du parti politique du proletariat’. The comrades of the GCF abstain here from criticising the polemical exaggerations in Lenin’s argument – its Kautskyite side which sees socialist consciousness as the literal creation of the intelligentsia. Despite the fact that much of this text is taken up with rejecting the substitutionist/militarist conception of the party, criticising Lenin’s mistakes about class consciousness was obviously secondary for them at this point. This is because the fundamental issue was to emphasise the active role of class consciousness against any tendency to reduce it to a passive reflection of the immediate resistance struggles of the workers.
A further error in Luxemburg’s remarks about the inherently conservative tendency of the party leadership is that it fails to place it in its proper historical context, thus virtually turning it into an original sin of all centralised organisations (a sentiment which would certainly be shared by the anarchists). Luxemburg, we saw earlier, correctly argued that the roots of opportunism must be sought in the most basic conditions of the proletariat’s life within bourgeois society. It follows that, since all proletarian political organisations must operate inside this society, they are therefore subject to the perpetual pressure of the dominant ideology; that there is an ‘unchanging’ danger of conservatism, of opportunist adaptations to immediate appearances, of resistance to making the challenging advances demanded by the evolution of the real movement. But it is certainly insufficient to leave this observation here. To begin with, we must emphasise that this danger is by no means limited to the central organs and can just as easily manifest itself among the local branches. This was clearly the case in the German SPD, where certain regions (such as Bavaria) were notoriously ‘permeable’ to various expressions of revisionism. Secondly, the opportunist menace, though permanent, is stronger in certain historical conditions than others. In the case of the Communist International, it was without doubt the decline of the revolutionary wave and the isolation of the proletarian regime in Russia which reinforced the threat to the point where it irreversibly condemned its parties to degeneration and betrayal. And in the period in which Luxemburg is elaborating her polemic against Lenin, the growing conservatism of the social democratic parties was precisely the reflection of definite historical conditions: capitalism’s epochal shift from its ascendant to its decadent phase, which while not yet completed, was already revealing the inadequacy of the old forms of class organisation, both general (the trade unions) and political (the ‘mass’ party). In these circumstances any serious critique of the conservative tendencies in social democracy would have to have been accompanied by a new conception of the party. The irony here is that Luxemburg’s analysis of the new forms and methods of the class struggle prepared the ground for such a new conception, as we already pointed out in the first article in this series. This was especially true of the Mass Strike pamphlet which stresses the role of political leadership which the party has to play within the mass movement. Indeed, the profound hostility it incurred from the ‘orthodox’ party centre was in itself proof that the old social democratic forms were tied to methods of struggle that were utterly unsuited to the new epoch. But it was Lenin who supplied the missing piece of the jigsaw by insisting on the need for a “revolutionary party of a new type”. This theoretical leap by Lenin was by no means fully elaborated, and we know only too well that the old social democratic conceptions continued to haunt the movement well into the epoch of wars and revolutions. But the fact remains that his brilliant intuition surged from the depths of the new reality: that the old mass parties could not, by definition, play the role of politically orienting the revolutionary struggle of the working class, any more than the trade unions could provide its general organisational framework.
Time and again, Luxemburg’s polemic against Lenin blurs the distinction between the party leadership, the party as a whole, and the class as a whole. In particular, the argument that it is the masses themselves (or the ‘masses’ within the party) who must lead the struggle against conservatism and opportunism is a generalisation which skates over the indispensable role of the organised political vanguard in this struggle. At the root of this argument is the false identification between party and class which we cited earlier on: “Social Democracy is not linked to or connected with the organisation of the working class, but is the movement of the working class itself”.
It is true that social democracy, the proletarian political fraction, group or party, is not something outside the class movement, that it is an organic product of the proletariat. But it is a particular and unique product; any tendency to merge it with the ‘movement in general’ is harmful both to the political minority and to the movement as a whole. In certain circumstances the erroneous identification between party and class can be used to justify substitutionist theories and practise: this was a marked tendency in the phase of the decline of the revolution in Russia, when some of the Bolsheviks began to theorise the idea that the class should unquestioningly submit to the directives of the party (in reality, the party-state), because the party could not but represent the real interests of the class in all circumstances and conditions. But in Luxemburg’s polemic against Lenin, we are looking at the symmetrical error, in which the particular life and tasks of the political organisation are lost in the mass movement - precisely what Lenin was opposing in his fight against Economism and Menshevism. Indeed, Luxemburg’s opposition to Lenin’s “sharp separation of the organised nucleus of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu,” her insistence that “an absolute dividing line cannot be erected between the class-conscious kernel of the proletariat already organised as a party cadre, and the immediate popular environment which is gripped by the class struggle”, could only, in the circumstances of the debate going on at the time, give succour to Martov’s argument that it would be perfectly fine for “every striker to declare himself a social democrat”. And as we pointed out in the previous article, the most important danger facing revolutionaries at this moment was not, as Trotsky was arguing, substitutionism, but its anarchist, ‘democratist’, Economist twin.
Thus Rosa Luxemburg – who would be attacked again and again as an ‘authoritarian’ within the SPD and the Polish social democracy precisely because of her consistent defence of centralisation – was at this particular moment in history swayed by the ‘democratic’ backlash against Lenin’s rigorous advocacy of organisational centralisation. Thus Rosa, who was at the heart of the struggle against opportunism within her own party, was to identify the ‘wrong’ wing as the source of the opportunist danger in the Russian party. History would not take long – less than a year in fact - to prove Lenin right in seeing the Mensheviks as the real crystallisation of opportunism in the RSDLP, and Bolshevism as the expression of the “revolutionary proletarian trend” in the party. But that will have to examined in a future article.
Amos
The initiative has been taken by three organisations (International Communist Current, the Moscow organisation of the Confederation of revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists, Russia, and the Group of the revolutionary proletarian collectivists, Russia) to set up an internationalist discussion forum [110]. The first subject submitted for debate is that of the lessons to be learned from the defeat of the October Revolution.
The terrible defeat of the October revolution by the Stalinist counter-revolution decimated the proletariat's revolutionary forces that followed, the long night of the counter-revolution and the bloodiest war that humanity has ever witnessed, left the tiny groups who remained faithful to the principles of proletarian internationalism scattered and terribly weakened.
The situation of the emerging revolutionary minorities and searching elements is thus doubly difficult today. Not only do they have to struggle to develop ideas and intervention, to understand the situation in which they act and to find an echo in the working class, they must also struggle against the terrible isolation and dispersal of revolutionary forces across the world.
It has always been a fundamental principle of the ICC that the future world wide unity of proletarian revolutionaries can never be forged unless the groups that exist today are able to debate the issues that both divide and unite them in an open and fraternal spirit. Such debate is necessary, not only for the vital clarification of the principles of working-class action, but also to break down the dominant isolation, to create confidence amongst the different groups that exist today, to help them learn what it means to work together internationally as fighters for a single class.
This is why we have undertaken to participate in an Internationalist Discussion Forum set up jointly with groups in Russia, and which for the moment is grouped around an Internet site.
The purpose of this forum is by no means to create an artificial political organisation, or to provide an unprincipled recruiting ground. On the contrary, as the founding address for the forum puts it: "Its purpose is to undertake a systematic discussion, with a view to clarification, of those questions which proved crucial for the workers' movement and which will continue to be so in the future confrontations between the classes: internationalism, the reasons for the defeat of the world revolutionary wave, the degeneration of the Russian revolution, state capitalism, national liberation, the role of the trade unions etc. Its purpose is to gather and to make known contributions on these questions, which put forward different approaches that have already appeared within the workers' movement, as well as differences of view, disagreements, or questionings that may exist amongst the participants in the forum. The forum is therefore an open place for the discussion and confrontation of political ideas, with the sole aim of clarification through political argument, following the proletarian method which excludes any approach in contradiction with the disinterested aim of the emancipation of the working class. In particular, it is not a "hunting ground" for unprincipled recruitment as this is habitually practised by organisations situated on the extreme left of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie (Trotskyists, etc)".
Such a forum can only be based on principles which separate it clearly from the left wing of capitalism. In this period, marked by generalised imperialist war, we consider that the question of internationalism is critical in separating those who seek to work for the revolutionary emancipation of the working class, and those who merely seek to strengthen the hold of the bourgeois state and its apparatus of control and mystification. Participation on the site is therefore dependent on certain political criteria in this sense.
As it stands today, the discussion group is still at its first, hesitant steps. We cannot know in advance whether it will be a success - there are no guarantees in revolutionary politics.But we remain convinced that only through such patient, unspectacular efforts can we help to lay the groundwork for the future political and organisational unity of the working class, that will be a vital weapon in its effort to overthrow capitalism and establish a new, communist society.
The capitalist class spares no expense when it comes to putting on a show to make the oppressed and exploited accept their fate. In ancient Rome, the Emperors knew that bread and circuses (“panem et circenses”) were necessary to reconcile the plebs to their situation. And when bread ran short, they added to the circus. In the Christian epoch, the ceremonial of the mass played essentially the same role. And, as with the Roman circus, the purpose was not only to divert the oppressed to make them forget the misery of their daily lives, but also to praise the strength and generosity of the ruling power of the day.
From this point of view, the bourgeoisie has invented nothing new. It has only developed vastly more sophisticated shows, adding its own mastery of capitalism's science and technology to all the experience of the ruling classes that preceded it.
Every day, and thanks above all to television, the “people” is treated to every imaginable kind of “reality show”, sporting event, and other celebrations of the luxury of modern society (even including royal weddings, centuries after the overthrow of the aristocracy's political power!). And on appropriate occasions, the bourgeoisie also uses important historical events not only to “amuse the people”, but to brainwash the population with lies and false lessons drawn from the events.
The 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings (6th June 1944) was a new example, and a particularly significant one.
All the journalists who covered the events noted that the ceremonies for the 60th anniversary far outdid those for the 50th in expense, media coverage, the participation of famous “personalities”, and “popular enthusiasm”. The same journalists have offered varied and sometimes surprising explanations for the paradox: the ceremonies were supposed to seal the new-found friendship between France and the USA after the disputes over the invasion of Iraq; or they were the last opportunity to express gratitude to the survivors and to treat those old men covered in medals, whether Appalachian miner, Oklahoma farmer or London truck driver, as VIPs for once in their lives.
Communists do not celebrate the D-Day Landings, as they might the Paris Commune or the revolution of October 1917. It is nonetheless their duty to explain what really happened in 1944, and what it meant, and to raise a small dam against the incoming tide of bourgeois lies, in the service of that tiny minority who are ready, today, to listen.
The history of humanity is rich in wars, yet never before 6th June 1944 had the world seen a military operation on the scale of the Normandy Landings.
On the night of 5th- 6th June, 6,939 ships crossed the English Channel: 1,213 warships, 4,126 landing barges, 736 supply ships and 864 merchant ships. Above their heads, the sky was criss-crossed with the vapour trails of 11,590 aircraft: 5,050 fighters, 5,110 bombers, 2,310 transport aircraft, 2,600 gliders and 700 reconnaissance craft. In terms of manpower, 132,715 men went ashore on D-Day, to join the 15,000 American and 7,000 British paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines the night before by 2,395 aircraft.
The figures are enormous, but they are far from revealing the full extent of the operation. Even before the landings, minesweepers had cleared five huge sea-lanes to allow the Armada through. The landings themselves only aimed at establishing a bridgehead, which would make it possible to unload far greater numbers of troops and quantities of equipment. In less than a month, 1.5 million Allied troops disembarked with their equipment, including tens of thousands of armoured vehicles (the Americans built 150,000 Sherman tanks alone). This meant mobilising gigantic material and human resources. For the ships to unload men and cargo, the Allies needed a deep-water harbour such as Cherbourg or Le Havre. But since these towns could not be taken immediately, two artificial ports had to be built offshore from the villages of Arromanches and Saint-Laurent by towing hundreds of huge concrete caissons across the Channel, then sinking them to create piers and jetties.[1] [113] For several weeks, Arromanches became the world's largest port by tonnage, until the Allies took Cherbourg a month after D-Day, shipping double the tonnage of New York harbour in 1939. By the 12th August, the Allies were able to begin using PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean), a submarine pipeline for fuel running from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg.
These colossal human and material resources are in themselves symbolic of what the capitalist system has become, swallowing vast quantities of technical prowess and human labour in the service of destruction. But over and above the enormous scale of “Operation Neptune” (as the Normandy Landings were code-named), we should remember that it was merely a preparation for some of the worst carnage in history: “Operation Overlord”, the whole military operation throughout the European theatre in mid-1944. All along the Normandy coast, one can still see the unending lines of white crosses that bear witness to the terrible price paid by a whole generation of young Americans, British, Germans, Canadians, etc., some of them barely 16 years old. The military cemeteries give no account of the civilian dead, the old, women, and children, who were killed during the fighting, sometimes in even greater numbers than the soldiers. The battle of Normandy, during which the Germans tried to prevent the Allies from gaining a foothold and then advancing into France, cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
The bourgeois media hides none of this. One sometimes even gets the impression that they are laying it on a bit thick when they describe the terrible massacre of that summer of 1944. The lie is in the interpretation of events.
The soldiers who disembarked on the 6th June 1944 and the days that followed are presented as the soldiers of “liberty” and “civilisation”. That is what they were told before the Landings, to persuade them to sacrifice their lives and it is what the numerous politicians, Bush, Blair, Chirac, Putin, Schröder, & Co, who visited the Normandy beaches on 6th June 2004 repeated. And all the commentators add: “where would we be today had these soldiers not made that terrible sacrifice? We would still be under the Nazi jackboot!”. What more need be said? However awful the slaughter may have been, it was a “necessary evil” to save “democracy and civilisation”.
These lies are repeated by all the enemies of yesteryear (the German chancellor was invited to the ceremony), and by practically the whole political spectrum, from the most reactionary right to the Trotskyists. Against these lies, it is necessary to repeat a few elementary truths.
The first truth that needs to be remembered is that World War II was not a struggle between a “democratic camp” and a “totalitarian camp” - unless one continues to consider Stalin as a great champion of democracy. This indeed is what the “communist” parties of the day pretended, and the others made little effort to give them the lie. The real communists, for their part, had long since denounced the Stalinist regime as the gravedigger of the October revolution and the spearhead of the world wide counter-revolution. In reality, in World War II just as in World War I, two imperialist camps fought over markets, raw material supplies and spheres of influence. And if Germany appeared as the aggressor, the “warmonger”, then this is simply because it had come out worst from the imperialist share-out that followed the Versailles treaty at the end of World War I, aggravating still further the unfavourable situation of Germany prior to 1914 that resulted from its late arrival on the imperial scene (small countries like Belgium and Holland had larger empires than Germany).
The second truth is this: despite all the talk about the “defence of civilisation”, it was hardly a preoccupation for the Allied leaders who demonstrated, on occasions, a capacity for barbarism wholly comparable to that of the Axis countries. Nor are we talking only of the Stalinist gulags, which were fully equal in horror to the Nazi concentration camps. The “democratic” countries have also demonstrated their talents in this domain. We will not review here all the crimes and acts of barbarity committed by the valiant “defenders of civilisation” (see, in particular, our article “Crimes and massacres of the great democracies” in International Review n°66). It is enough to remember that before World War II, and long before the Nazis came to power, these countries had “exported” their “civilisation” not only by the gospel, but also and above all by the sword, the gunship, and the machine gun, not to mention poison gas and torture. As for World War II, let us recall some of the Allies' indubitable demonstrations of “civilisation”. The first to spring to mind are of course the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6th and 9th August 1945, when atomic bombs were used for the first and only time in history, killing more than 100,000 civilians in a matter of seconds and leaving more than 100,000 others to die of radiation sickness after months or years of suffering.
The terrible toll exacted by Allied bombardments was not limited to the effects of nuclear weapons. The slaughter of the civilian population by the defenders of “civilisation” was also conducted using perfectly classical methods:
· the bombardment of Hamburg during July 1943: 50,000 dead;
· the bombardment of Tokyo in March 1945: 80,000 dead;
· the bombardment of Dresden on the 13th and 14th February 1945: 250,000 dead.
The last of these bombardments is particularly significant. Dresden contained no troop concentrations, no economic or industrial objective. It was crowded with refugees from the bombing of other cities. The Allies had already virtually won the war. But they intended to sow terror in the population, and above all among the workers, to discourage any return to the ideas of the end of World War I: that capitalism could be overthrown by revolutionary struggle.
The Nazi “war criminals” were judged in the Nuremberg trials that followed the war. They owed their condemnation not to the extent of their crimes, but to the fact that they belonged to the defeated camp. Otherwise, Churchill and Roosevelt, responsible for the decision to carry out the slaughter we have just mentioned, should have shared a place with their German counterparts in the dock.
Finally, there is another truth that needs to be established against the argument that if the Allies had not liberated Europe, then the suffering would have been still worse.
It is generally pointless to try to rewrite history with “ifs”; it is far more fruitful to understand why history took one course rather than another. This argument (“supposing the Allies had lost the war?”) is generally used by those whose intention is to justify the existing order on the grounds that it is the “lesser evil” (as Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others”).
In reality, the victory of “democracy” and “civilisation” in World War II did not put an end to the barbarity of the capitalist world. Since 1945, wars have taken as many victims as both world wars combined. The continued survival of the capitalist mode of production, whose obsolescence is demonstrated by the two world wars, the economic crisis of the 1930s that came between them, and the crisis of today, has subjected humanity to an unending series of deadly disasters (famine, epidemics, all the “natural” disasters whose worst effects could easily be avoided, etc.). Not to mention the fact that the continued survival of capitalism is mortgaging the survival of the human species through the irreversible destruction of the environment, thus preparing new natural – especially climatic – disasters, with all their terrifying consequences. And if the capitalist system has been able to survive for 50 years since World War II, it is because the “victory of democracy” was a terrible defeat for the working class: an ideological defeat which completed the counter-revolution that followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.
It is precisely because the bourgeoisie, with the help of all the so-called “workers' parties” (from socialists to Trotskyists, via the “communists”), succeeded in making the workers of the world's major capitalist nations – especially in the great industrial concentrations of Europe – believe that the victory of democracy was “their victory”, that they did not undertake a revolutionary struggle during and after the war, as they had done during World War I. In other words, the “victory of democracy” in general, and the D-Day landings that have been so lauded this June, offered a reprieve to decadent capitalism, allowing it to continue its bloody and catastrophic course for another half century.
Needless to say, none of the media mention this truth. On the contrary, the special zeal with which the powerful and their lackeys have celebrated this “great moment of Liberty” is a measure of the renewed unease with which the ruling class is beginning to envisage the perspective of a reawakening of the class struggle, as every day the crisis of capitalism demonstrates the system's historical bankruptcy and the necessity of overthrowing it.
Indeed, if there is one other lesson that the working class should learn from operations “Neptune” and “Overlord”, it is the bourgeoisie's remarkable capacity for deception.
At the Tehran conference of Allied leaders in December 1943, Churchill remarked to Stalin, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”. The idea is not a new one. In the 6th century BC, the Chinese strategist Sun Zi described the main rule in the art of war thus: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near”.[2] [114] In order to ensure the success of the greatest military operation in history, it was necessary to undertake one of the most gigantic enterprises of deception ever imagined. This was the operation codenamed “Fortitude”, designed to deceive the German High Command when the landings took place. It was developed by the London Control Section (LCS) set up by Churchill, which brought together the main British and American intelligence chiefs.
We will not describe in detail here all the means used to deceive the Germans, and will limit ourselves to some of the most important.
During the first half of 1944, the German leaders realised that the Allies intended to open a second front in Europe, in other words that a landing was planned. Thus far, the Allies knew that it was impossible to deceive the enemy. However, the question remained of exactly when and where the landings were planned, and the objective of “Special means” (to use the British term) was to make believe that they would take place at a date and location other than the Normandy beaches on 6th June 1944. In theory, the landings could take place anywhere between the Bay of Biscay and the north of Norway, a coastline several thousand miles long. However, inasmuch as the Allies had established the vast majority of their military bases in Britain, it seemed logical to expect a landing somewhere between Brittany and Holland. Hitler himself was convinced that it would take place in the Pas de Calais, where the Channel is narrowest: in particular, this would allow British fighter aircraft to take part in the operation despite their limited range.
Allied espionage had already reported this belief of the German High Command, and the aim of “Operation Fortitude” was to make sure that they continued to believe it for as long as possible, even after the Normandy landings, which were presented as no more than a diversion to prepare the “real” landing in the Pas de Calais. Indeed, Hitler still expected this “real” landing several weeks after the Allies had established the Normandy beachhead, and consequently refused to send the men and equipment massed in Northern France and Belgium to counter-attack in Normandy. When he understood what was happening, it was too late: the Allies had already landed enough troops and equipment to take Normandy and to advance on Paris and then into Germany.
The Allies spared no expense to deceive their enemy. Some of the means employed verged on the comical: take the example of Meyrick Edward Clifton James, a provincial actor in civilian life, who in May 1944 played the most important role of his career, when he impersonated General Montgomery, Britain's leading field general and the man in charge of the operational side of the Normandy landings. An almost perfect double for the general, dressed and made-up by specialists, James arrived in Gibraltar on 26th May on his way to Algiers, with the aim of making the Germans believe that the landings planned in the south of France (which followed D-Day by more than two months, on 15th August in Provence) were in fact to precede those in Normandy.[3] [115]
There existed a whole series of other episodes of the same kind, but the most decisive measure designed to convince the German leadership that the landings were to come in the Pas de Calais, was the formation of the First US Army Group (FUSAG) under the command of General Patton, one of America's best-known generals. FUSAG was encamped in South-East England, and so opposite the Pas de Calais, and comprised no less than one million men with all their equipment. However, FUSAG's main particularity was, that it was completely fictitious. The tanks that the German reconnaissance aircraft photographed were inflatable dummies, the aircraft were wooden models, the military camps were of cardboard, etc. The radio traffic generated by FUSAG was imitated by American and Canadian actors.[4] [116]
Some of the methods used to strengthen the German conviction that an attack on Northern France was imminent are indicative of the degree of cynicism of which the ruling class is capable. “Free French” agents working for the British were sent on a mission to sabotage the canons protecting that part of the coast. What they did not know, was that British double agents (whom the Germans thought were working for them) had betrayed them to the Gestapo, knowing that under torture they were bound to reveal their supposedly “sensitive” information.[5] [117]
What is striking, when we consider the “Special means” used by both camps during World War II, but especially by the Allies, is the incredible degree of Machiavellianism deployed to deceive the enemy. Indeed, for a long time after the war the US government tried to keep them hidden (in a memorandum of 28th August 1945, Truman banned any publication of information on the subject). The leading spheres of the ruling class have no interest in letting it be known how Machiavellian they are capable of being, especially not in a period when war has become permanent. After all, if a stratagem has not been revealed, it can be used again. As an example, we can point to the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, deliberately engineered by the British and American leadership with a view to bouncing a recalcitrant American population, as well as the isolationist sections of the American bourgeoisie, into World War II. This has always been denied by the American authorities (who have surrounded the events with a “bodyguard of lies”). If, as seems highly likely, the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001 was intended to happen by an American secret service which left Al Qaeda free to operate, in order to prepare the way for the war in Iraq, then we can understand their interest in keeping the reality of Pearl Harbor a secret today.[6] [118]
Finally, the working class should never forget that if the bourgeoisie is capable of incredible Machiavellianism in its imperialist wars, it is that much more so in the class war. One could even say that it is against the proletariat that the bourgeoisie deploys its greatest sophistication in the art of deception, for what is at stake then is not merely a matter of imperialist supremacy, but a question of life or death. In other words, even more than in wars between nations, it is in the class war that the bourgeoisie will “protect the truth with a bodyguard of lies”.
The fanfares that celebrated the Normandy landings are silent today, but the working class must never forget the real lessons of this event:
· that decadent capitalism can never put an end to war, it can only heap ruin upon ruin and wage war on an ever more terrible scale;
· that the ruling class is capable of every infamy, every lie, to preserve its domination over society;
· and that the proletariat must never underestimate the intelligence of the exploiting class, nor its ability to use the most sophisticated machinations to protect its power and privileges.
Fabienne
[1] [119] These were the famous “Mulberry Harbours”. The most spectacular feature of the Mulberry project was without doubt the construction of the huge, hollow blocks of concrete, or Phoenix caissons, to form the roadstead. Before being flooded, they each weighed between 1,600 and 6,000 tonnes, while the largest ones measured sixty metres by seventeen, and were the height of a five-storey building. A total of 40,000 workers were involved in this gigantic project, which required the opening of special building sites across England.
[2] [120] From the English text reproduced at https://www.chinapage.com/sunzi-e.html [121]
[3] [122] In the same vein, it is also worth mentioning “Operation Mincemeat”, aimed at deceiving the German High Command into the belief that the Allied landings in Sicily were only the prelude to much larger landings in Greece and Sardinia. A British submarine left drifting on the Spanish coast the corpse of a man identified by his papers as a Major William Martin – who had never in fact existed – with chained to his wrist an attaché case containing false documents intended to lend credibility to this story. The Spanish authorities (Spain was at this time under Franco's fascist regime, but had not joined Germany in the war) handed the documents back to the British embassy, but not before they had been photographed by the German secret service. Combined with other manoeuvres of the same kind, “Operation Mincemeat” proved a brilliant success, since it caused Hitler to send one of his most brilliant officers, Rommel, to Athens, in order to prepare for a landing in Greece that never happened.
[4] [123] FUSAG was supported by the equally fictitious British 4th Army of 350,000 men, based in Scotland supposedly in readiness for the invasion of Norway. The fact that the 4th Army did not exist did not prevent it, once the Normandy landings began, from moving south to join FUSAG in preparation for an attack on Calais...
[5] [124] This inglorious exploit of “Special means” is recounted in novel form by the American journalist Larry Collins (co-author of Is Paris burning) in his book Fortitude. Needless to say, this episode is not the only illustration of Allied cynicism. It is worth remembering the Dieppe landings of 19th August 1942. This operation involved 5,000 Canadian and 2,000 British troops, and had no intention of taking position in France. The Allied leadership knew from the outset that they were sending these young men into a bloodbath. The operation's sole objective was to conduct a “live test” of the German defence, and to gather information on the problems that would have to be solved for the Normandy landings to succeed.
[6] [125] See our article “Pearl Harbor 1941, the Twin Towers 2001, and the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie” in International Review n°108. Those who criticise our articles that highlight the Machiavellianism of the ruling class, on the grounds that it is incapable of undertaking the activity that we describe, should read The spy who came in from the cold, by ex-British agent John Le Carré, which is an excellent remedy for the naivety that afflicts our critics.
The first two articles in this series on the imperialist conflicts in the Middle East highlighted the manipulation of Arab and Zionist nationalism by the great powers, and especially by Britain, in order to dominate the region. They were also used as a weapon against the threat from the working class in the period immediately following the Russian revolution. In this article, we continue the study of imperialist rivalries in the region during the lead-up to World War II and the war itself, to reveal the utter cynicism of the imperialist policy of every faction of the bourgeoisie.
Both Palestinian peasants and workers, as well as Jewish workers were confronted with the false alternative of taking sides for one wing or the other of the bourgeoisie (Palestinian or Jewish). This false alternative meant that the workers were pulled onto the terrain of military confrontations for purely bourgeois demands. During the 1920s a series of violent clashes between Jews and Arabs and between Arabs and the British occupying forces occurred.
These clashes intensified after the world economic crisis of 1929. One of the factors responsible for their intensification was the increased immigration of Jewish refugees, who had fled from the effects of the world economic crisis and the repression the Nazis had started to unleash against Jews and the repression exercised by Stalinism. Between 1920 and 1930 the number of immigrants doubled, between 1933-39 some 200,000 new immigrants reached Palestine so that by 1939 the Jews made up 30% of the population.
The broader historical and international framework was the general, world wide sharpening of imperialist conflicts. Palestine and the Middle East as a whole were profoundly affected by the realignment of forces on the world arena during the 1930s.
On the one hand, the catastrophic defeat of the proletariat (victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, of fascism and nazism in Italy and Germany, enrolment of the workers under the banner of "anti-fascism" and the united front in France and Spain in 1936) made it almost impossible for either Jewish or Arab workers to oppose an internationalist class front to the increasingly bloody struggles between the Jewish and Palestinian bourgeoisies. The world wide defeat of the working class had left the bourgeoisie's hands free to open the road to a new generalised world war. At the same time, increasing numbers of Jews were fleeing repression and pogroms in Europe, sharpening the conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
On the other hand, the traditional imperialist rivalries in the area (between the French and the British) were fading as new and more dangerous rivals to those old bandits entered the area. Italy, already present in Libya after a war with Turkey in 1911, invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1936, threatening to encircle Egypt and the strategic Suez Canal. Germany, the most powerful member of the fascist Axis, worked in the background to extend its influence by offering support for local nationalist and imperialist ambitions, especially in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.[1] [127]
The historical course towards generalised war was going to engulf the Middle East.
Since the end of World War I the Zionists had demanded the general arming of Jews. In fact, this armament had already begun in secret. The Zionist "self-defence" organisation, Hagan, which was founded during World War I, was turned into a proper military unit. In 1935 a separate terrorist group Irgun Zwai Leumi – known as Ezel – with some 3,000-5,000 fighters was founded. General "conscription" in the Jewish community was introduced; all young men and women between the ages of 17 and 18 had to take part in this underground military service.
The Palestinian bourgeoisie for its part received armed backing from neighbouring countries.
In 1936 there was another escalation of clashes between Zionists and Arab nationalists. In April 1936 the Palestinian bourgeoisie called for a general strike against the British rulers, whom they wanted to force to abandon their pro-Zionist stand. The Arab nationalists with Amin Hussein at their head, called upon the workers and peasants to support their struggle against the Jews and British. The general strike lasted until October 1936 – and was only called off after an appeal by neighbouring countries such as Transjordan, Saudi-Arabia and Iraq, which had started to arm a Palestinian guerrilla.
The violent clashes continued until 1938. The British "protectors" mobilised 25,000 troops to defend their strategic Palestinian outpost.
In view of the general destabilisation of the situation, in 1937 the British bourgeoisie proposed a division of Palestine into two parts (report of the Peel Commission).
The Jews were to receive the fertile northern part of Palestine, the Palestinians should receive the less fertile south-east, Jerusalem should be put under an international mandate and be linked to the Mediterranean through a corridor.
Both Zionists and Palestinians nationalists rejected the Peel Commission plan. One wing of the Zionists insisted on total independence from Britain, they continued to arm themselves and intensified guerrilla action against the British occupying forces.
By presenting a plan of dividing Palestine into two parts, Britain was hoping to maintain its domination over Palestine in this strategically vital part of the world, which also saw a sharp increase of imperialist tensions – especially with Germany and Italy trying to penetrate into the region.
While the French Popular front granted Syria independence in 1936, which, however was only to become effective 3 years later, in 1939 France once again declared Syria to be a French ‘protectorate’.
This new alignment of imperialist forces was a real source of difficulty for the British bourgeoisie, which now had every interest in calming the situation in Palestine, and in preventing any of the parties to the conflict from seeking support from one of Britain's imperialist rivals. But as the conflict between Jewish immigrants and Arabs grew increasingly bitter, the pigeons of the old "divide and rule" policy came home to roost.
Britain had to try to ‘neutralise’ the Arab nationalists and force the Zionists to restrain themselves in their demand for a ‘national home’ for Jews.
Britain adopted a White book, which declared the territories occupied by the Jews constituted a “national home” for the Jews, that after a period of 5 years, during which annual immigration of Jews should not exceed 75,000, Jewish immigration should cease altogether – at a time when the massacres of Jewish people in Europe went into millions... At the same time the purchase of land by Jews should be limited.
These announcements were meant to curb rising Arab protests and were aimed at preventing the Arabs from turning against the British.
In view of the increasing violence between Zionists and Arab nationalists the further escalation of this conflict was only thwarted because an ‘overriding’ conflict – the confrontation between Germany and Italy and its enemies, i.e. the formation of the axis in Europe - pushed this conflict into the background for another 10 years.
And the looming world war once again forced the nationalists on both sides – the Arab bourgeoisie and the Zionists – to choose their imperialist camp.
With the outbreak of World War II, the Zionists decided to take sides with Britain and take position against German imperialism. They suspended their demand for a Jewish state proper as long as Britain was under threat by German attacks.
Within the Arab bourgeoisie the war led to a split – some of its fractions took sides with the British, others sided with Germany.
Even if the major battlefields during the Second World War were Europe and the Far East, the Middle East played a vital role for Britain and for Germany’s long-term strategic planning.
For Britain the defence of its positions in the Middle East continued to be a matter of life and death for the maintenance of its colonial empire, because once Egypt was lost, India would run the risk of falling into German and Japanese hands. Even as the Germans seemed about to invade Britain in 1940, Britain mobilised some 250,000 troops for the defence of the Suez-canal.
German military planning concerning the Middle East saw several about-turns.
At the beginning of the war, for some time at least, Germany’s strategy was to strike a secret deal with Russia over Eastern Anatolia. Similar as the secret deal between Stalin and Hitler over Poland (Russia and Germany settled to divide Poland amongst themselves), the German Foreign Secretary Ribbentrop suggested in November 1940 to Stalin that Russia and Germany divide up their zones of interests at the Iranian border and along the northern and south-eastern Anatolian flank. (The Palestine Question 1917-1948, Palestine and the Middle East policy of European Powers and the USA, 1918-48, p.193). But the German invasion into Russia in summer 1941 finally put an end to such plans.
One of Germany’s long-term military goal was, as elaborated in the Reichswehr headquarters in 1941, that once Russia was successfully defeated, Germany would kick Britain out of the Middle East and India. Immediately after the expected defeat of Russia, the Reichswehr planned a global offensive to occupy Iraq, find access to the Iraqi oil resources and threaten British positions in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
However, Germany alone was unable to launch such an offensive.
In order to be able to ‘reach’ Iraq, Germany still had to remove some obstacles: It had to pull Turkey on its side – which was wavering between Britain and Germany. German troops had to march through Syria (which was still under French occupation) and Lebanon. This meant that Germany had to ask the Vichy regime for permission before the Reichswehr could cross Syria and Lebanon.
And it had to count on the help of the weaker parts of its alliance – namely Italy, which had insufficient military resources to attack Britain.
As long as German military planning had to focus on the priority of mobilising its troops against Russia, it was unable to dedicate more forces in the Mediterranean.
Much against its will, after Italian troops were defeated by the British in Libya in 1940-41, in 1942 the German Afrika-Korps under Rommel intervened and tried to drive out the British army of Egypt and conquer the Suez Canal. But Germany did not have the means to sustain another front in Africa and the Middle East, all the more so since its offensive against Russia had come to a halt.
At the same time German capital confronted its own insurmountable contradictions. On the one hand it aimed at the “Endlösung” (Holocaust, the displacement and annihilation of all Jews), which meant that German capital was forcing the Jews to flee, hence driving many of them to Palestine. Thus Nazi policy was to a large extent responsible for the increase of the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Palestine – a situation which brought German capital into contradiction with the interests of the Palestine and Arab bourgeoisie.
On the other hand German imperialism had to look for allies amongst the Arab bourgeoisies to fight against the British. This is why the Nazis propagated the call of the Arab bourgeoisie for national unity and supported their rejection of a national home for the Jews.[2] [128]
In several countries, German imperialism managed to pull towards its side some factions of the Arab bourgeoisie.
In April 1941 parts of the army overthrew the government in Iraq and formed a government of national defence under Rachid Ali al-Kailani. This government deported all those who were considered to be pro-British. The Palestinian nationalists who had gone into exile in Iraq, formed volunteer brigades under the leadership of al-Hussein and these units participated in the struggle against the British.
When the British army intervened against the pro-German government in Iraq, Germany sent two air craft squadrons. However, the German army did not have adequate logistics at its disposal to support its troops at such a distance. To the great disappointment of the pro-German Iraqi government, Germany had to withdraw its squadrons. The British army in turn did not only mobilise its own troops, they also used a Zionist special unit against Germany. Britain released the Zionist terrorist David Raziel, a leader of the Zionist organisation Irgun Zvai Leumi from British internment and entrusted him with a special mission. His unit was to blow up oil fields in Iraq and assassinate members of the pro-German government.
However, at that stage the German bomber squadron managed to shoot down the Zionist terrorist flying in a British plane. This incident – despite its limited military significance – reveals, however, which fundamental interests Britain as the declining “superpower” at the time and Germany as the “challenger” were fighting for, which limits they were confronted with and which allies they relied upon in the region.
The mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Hussein, who had fled to Iraq and the leader of the pro-German Iraqi government Ali al-Keilani had to flee from Iraq. Via Turkey and Italy they managed to escape to Berlin, where they stayed in exile. Palestinian and Iraqi nationalists enjoying protection and exile offered by the Nazis!
At the same time the pro-German parts of the Arabic bourgeoisie only tended to take sides with Germany, as long as German imperialism was on the advance. Following its defeat at el-Alamein in 1942 and at Stalingrad in 1943, as soon as the tide turned against German imperialism, the pro-German parts of the Arabic bourgeoisie changed sides or were ousted by the pro-British parts of the local bourgeoisie.
The defeat of the Germans also forced the Zionists to change their tactics. While they had supported Britain as long as the colonial power was under Nazi threat, they now resumed their terror campaign against the British in Palestine, which was to last until 1948. A leading figure amongst the Zionist terrorists was Menachem Begin (who later became Prime Minister of Israel and who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yasser Arafat). Amongst others, the Zionists assassinated the English Minister Lord Moyne in Cairo.
In order to win Arab sympathy and prevent the Arab nationalists from moving closer to its German imperialist rival, Britain established a naval blockade around Palestine to curb the influx of Jewish refugees. Western democracy was willing to regulate the influx of refugees for the sake of its imperialist interests. The Jews may have felt thankful to have escaped death in the Nazi concentration camps, but the British bourgeoisie was unwilling to let the Jews settle in Palestine – because the arrival of the Jews at that moment did not fit into their imperialist plans.[3] [129]
The similarity between the situation of World War I and World War II is striking.
All the local contending imperialist factions had to choose between one imperialist camp or other. The dominant imperialist camp, Britain, challenged by Germany, defended its power tooth and nail.
However, Germany was faced with insurmountable obstacles in this region: its weaker military capabilities (having to intervene at such large distances overstrained its military and logistic resources) and its lack of strong and reliable allies. Germany was not in the position to offer any reward to any of its allies, nor did it have the military means to coerce a country into its bloc or offer any protection against the other bloc.
Thus it could only play a ‘challenging’ role vis-à-vis the still dominant power at the time – Britain. It could never do more than undermine British positions and it was unable to establish a firm strategic outpost of its own or keep a country firmly in its orbit.
At the same time, the balance of forces between the “Allied Forces” changed during World War II.
The USA strengthened their position at the expense of Britain. Britain, which was bled white by the war and on the verge of bankruptcy, became indebted to the USA. Thus as with any war, the imperialist pecking order was transformed.
As a result, from 1942 on the Zionist organisations turned towards the USA in order to win their support for the setting up of a Jewish home in Palestine. In November the Jewish Emergency Council met in New York and rejected the British White book of 1939. The key demand was the transformation of Palestine into an independent Zionist state – a demand directed against British interests.
Until World War II it was above all the western European powers that clashed over the Middle East (Britain, France, Italy, Germany). And while France and Britain were the main beneficiaries of the Ottoman empire's collapse after World War I, these two countries were now to be “toppled” by American and Russian imperialism, which both aimed was to curb British and French colonial influence.
Russia undertook everything to support any power which was aiming at a weakening of the position of the British. Via Czechoslovakia it supplied arms to the Zionist guerrilla forces. The USA also delivered arms and money to the Zionists – although the latter fought against their British war allies.
After the Far East became a second centre of war in World War II, the Middle East remained in the periphery of the worldwide imperialist confrontations. However, the beginning of the Cold War was to pull the Middle East into the centre of imperialist rivalries. While the Korean War (1950-53) was one of the first major confrontations between the Eastern and Western block, the formation of the State of Israel on May 15th 1948 was to open another theatre of war, which was to remain in the centre of East-West confrontations for decades.
The first half of the 20th century in the Middle East showed that national liberation had become impossible, and that all local bourgeois factions were sucked up in the global imperialist conflicts between the bigger imperialist rivals. More than ever the proletariat had no imperialist side to choose.
The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the opening of another round of 50 years of bloody confrontation. More than 100 years of conflicts in the Middle East have illustrated irrefutably that the declining capitalist system has nothing else to offer but war and annihilation.
DE
[1] [130] The Shah of Iran (father of the Shah deposed by Khomeini) was removed by the British in 1941 because of his supposed pro-Nazi sympathies.
[2] [131] Already in World War I for strategic reasons German imperialism had fostered the idea of an Arabian “jihad” against Britain, because it could hope to weaken British domination in the Middle East – even if the contradiction could not be overcome – because any Arabian ‚jihad‘ would also necessarily have to be turned against Turkish imperialism, Germany’s ally in the Middle East.
[3] [132] Britain for example prevented a ship with more than 5,000 Jewish refugees on board from entering Palestinian ports, because this would have been against British imperialist interests. In its odysee the boat was sent back to the Black sea, where it was sunk by the Russian army – more than 5,000 Jews drowned. In Mai 1939 930 Jewish refugees on board of the Hapag-Lloyd steamer ‘St-Louis’ sailed for Cuba. Having reached Cuban waters, they were refused entry. The ship was prevented from entering Miami harbour by the US-coast guard – despite of repeated appeals by many ‘personalities’. Finally the ship was sent back to Europe – where most of the Jewish refugees were massacred in the holocaust. Even after World War II, at the time of the blockade of the Palestine coast by British ships, 4.500 refugees on board of the ship “Exodus” tried to break the blockade. The British occupying forces didn’t want to let the ship enter Haifa, the Jewish terrorist organisation Haganah wanted to use the ship with all the refugees on board as a means to break the British blockade. The passengers were deported by the British to Hamburg.
The cynicism of the western bourgeoisie in relation to the fate of the Jews has been exposed by the PCI Le Prolétaire in its text Auschwitz – the great alibi).
All the great leaders of the capitalist world invited us to commemorate, with them, the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6th June 1944. As one man, Bush, Putin, Schröder, Blair, Chirac... the allies and enemies of yesteryear, in a moving spirit of unity, invited us to remember what, according to them, was a heroic epic in defence of liberty and democracy. The ruling ideology would have us believe, that these one-time allies and enemies have reflected on their past errors and corrected them, so that now it is possible to live in a world at peace, stable, and controlled. This world of peace – this “new world order” - is what we were promised already after the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989.
And yet, the 1990s have witnessed not only a continued development of military barbarism, but an increasing world wide social instability. The collapse of the Eastern bloc, which represented about a sixth of the world economy, marked capitalism's complete entry into its phase of decomposition. Imperialist tensions are no longer polarised by the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs but this does not mean that they have disappeared. They have taken the form of a war of each against all, unleashing armed conflict across the planet on a scale unseen since World War II. The perspective of peace and prosperity announced by the dominant American power has long since disappeared, to give way to the nightmare of a society tearing itself apart across the world, at the risk of dragging all humanity down to its ruin. Although this aspect of a “war of each against all” was already a determining feature of the first Gulf War in 1991, it remained hidden inasmuch as the USA succeeded in rallying the other great powers behind its leadership thanks to its remaining authority. The war of each against all, the defence by each power of its own imperialist interests to the detriment of its rivals, appeared more explicitly in the conflicts in Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, and Zaire. And the new millennium has seen a further intensification of these conflicts. After the 9/11 attack, the United States solemnly announced that they would make war on terrorism, free Afghanistan from the backward Taliban, and bring democracy and prosperity to Iraq. Today, the result is an increasingly bloody instability spreading not only to Iraq but to the rest of the region as well. What is new, is that the planet's greatest military power is beginning to lose its grip on the situation. The triumphant images of US troops entering Baghdad and overturning Saddam's statue, have been succeeded by daily killings that demonstrate the Americans' inability to stabilise the situation in which the population is subjected to appalling living conditions.
The bitter struggle between local warlords, more or less tied to different world or regional powers, already dominates Iraq and Afghanistan and is now beginning to spread to Saudi Arabia, with a wave of attacks on foreigners, oil installations, and the government. Instability in Saudi Arabia threatens the world's main source of oil (25% of proven world reserves), and creates a further risk for an already unstable world economic situation: that of an explosion in oil prices, already standing (as we write) at over $40 / barrel. The dynamic is such that even the great powers are no longer able to imprint their orientation on society, still less to offer it the slightest perspective.
The heart of Europe has not been spared the eruption of chaos in its midst, with the bomb attacks in Madrid on 11th March 2004. All this is an expression of “the world’s entry into a period of unprecedented instability” (Introduction to the “Theses on Decomposition”, 1990, in International Review n°107), which is accelerating today. In fact, the 1991 Gulf War already demonstrated that “faced with the tendency towards generalised chaos specific to the period of decomposition, and which has been considerably accelerated by the collapse of the Eastern bloc, there is no other way out for capitalism, in its attempts to hold together a disintegrating body, than to impose on society the iron straitjacket of military force. In this sense, the very means it uses to try to limit an increasingly bloody chaos are themselves a factor aggravating the barbarity of war into which capitalism is plunged” (“Militarism and decomposition”, International Review n°64).
The anti-Bush demonstrators, and all the honeyed words to the UN from powers like France and Germany, even the cries of despair from some fractions of the bourgeoisie in the United States, all propose to reverse this tendency and return to a stable world thanks to governments that would be less greedy and cynical, more generous and intelligent.
The bourgeoisie would indeed like to make us believe that peace and stability depend on those who rule us. In this sense, the preferred argument for the various national bourgeoisies who opposed the war in Iraq – because it went against their interests – is to say that if only Bush had respected “international law”, if he had respected the legitimacy of the UN, then Iraq would not have become the bloody quagmire that it is today, and the United States would not be in the mess it is in. Although the American bourgeoisie was generally in favour of the war, more and more voices are being raised to say that the present situation is the result of the incompetence of Bush and his administration, who have proven unable to stabilise Iraq. In fact, both these arguments are false. For the ruling class, they are born of a need to deceive, and to deceive themselves. Today's spreading anarchic instability is a pure product of capitalism's historic situation today. It has nothing to do with any one person's greater or lesser competence or personality. In reality: “As regards the international policy of the USA, the widespread use of armed force has not only been one of its methods for a long time, but is now the main instrument in the defence of its imperialist interests, as the ICC has shown since 1990, even before the Gulf war. The USA is faced with a world dominated by "every man for himself", where its former vassals are trying to withdraw as much as possible from the tight grip of the world cop, which they had to put up with as long as the threat from the rival bloc existed. In this situation, the only decisive way the US can impose its authority is to resort to the area in which they have a crushing superiority over all other states: military force. But in doing so, the US is caught in a contradiction:
– on the one hand, if it gives up using or extending the use of its military superiority, this will only encourage the countries contesting its authority to contest even more;
– on the other hand, when it does use brute force, even, and especially when this momentarily obliges its opponents to rein in their ambitions towards independence, this only pushes the latter to seize on the least occasion to get their revenge and squirm away from America's grasp” (“Resolution on the international situation at the 12th ICC Congress”, International Review n°90, 1997).
To lay the responsibility for war at the door of this or that head of state's incompetence, allows the ruling class to hide the reality, to hide the appalling responsibility of capitalism and with it the whole ruling class world wide. This logic makes it possible to absolve the system for its crimes by laying the blame on its scapegoats: Hitler's madness was responsible for World War II; Bush's incompetence is responsible for the war in Iraq and its attendant horrors. In reality, in each case the man, his temperament and his specificities, corresponds to the demands of the ruling class that put him in power. Both have done nothing other than apply the policies required by their class, in defence of their class interests. Hitler received the support of the whole German ruling class because he showed himself capable of preparing the war rendered inevitable by the crisis of capitalism and the defeat of the revolutionary wave that had followed October 1917. The German rearmament programme of the 1930s, followed by the World War against the USSR and the other Allies, was both inevitable, given the situation of Germany after the Versailles Treaty of 1919, and doomed to failure. It was, in this sense, profoundly irrational. Hitler's unbalanced mentality – or rather, the fact that such a mentality could become head of state – was nothing other than an expression of the irrationality of the war that the German bourgeoisie was preparing to wage. The same is true for Bush and his administration. They are, today, carrying out the only possible policy, from a capitalist standpoint, to defend US imperialist interests and world leadership: war, and a descent into militarism. The incompetence of the Bush administration, notably the influence within it of the neo-con warmongering faction represented by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, its inability to find a long-term vision on which to base its action, are expressions of the fact that the White House's foreign policy is both the only one possible, and doomed to failure. The fact that Colin Powell, also a member of the administration and one who knows what war is about, had his warnings about the lack of preparation for the conflict and its aftermath ignored, is further confirmation of this tendency to irrationality. The whole US bourgeoisie defends a militarist policy because it is the only one possible. Indeed, the disagreements within the US ruling class, faced with the catastrophe that the situation in Iraq represents for the credibility and world leadership of the United States, are purely of a tactical order, but in no sense a condemnation of the war itself. So true is this, that John Kerry, Democratic candidate at the next presidential elections, has no alternative policy to propose other than reinforcing the American troops already in Iraq. If the choice and success of government policy depended solely on the capacities of those in power, how could we explain the fact that the imperialist policy of Ronald Reagan – no less intellectually disadvantaged than Bush – encountered such success against Russian imperialism, especially in Afghanistan? The reason is to be found in the different underlying conditions: because, under Reagan, the USA was at the head of one of two rival imperialist blocs that dominated the world, and as a result enjoyed a far greater authority over the other members of its bloc. As for the “peace party” over Iraq, the attitude of Chirac or Schröder has nothing to do with their greater human or political qualities compared with Bush, and everything to do with the fact that war in Iraq directly threatened their own imperialist interests. For Germany, the fact that the USA has taken position in the region is an obstacle to its own advance into the region, which has always been a traditional target of German imperialism. France has been stripped of the influence it had in Iraq on the basis of its support for Saddam Hussein. It is not the capacities of those with influence in the bourgeois state, still less their good or ill will, that will put an end to war, but the class struggle.
The policy of the bourgeoisie is solely and implacably determined, in every country, by the defence of the national capital. To this end, it puts in power those who seem best able to meet its requirements. And if Kerry replaces Bush as president, this will be to breath new life into a policy which will remain essentially the same. Changing governments will not put an end to war: only destroying capitalism can do that.
Neither the planned (as we write) transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government, nor the unanimous UN vote in favour of this transfer, herald any greater stability in the future. No more than the project for a “Greater Middle East”. Still less the grand celebrations of the D-Day landings and all the declarations of good intentions that accompanied them.
Could Europe be an antidote to this disorder, or at least limit its extent? At the entry of the new member countries to the European Union, on 1st May 2004, and during the last European elections, France and Germany presented the construction of Europe as a factor for peace and stability in the world. If Europe could unite, this would be a guarantee of peace, so we are told. This is a lie. Supposing that all the states of Europe managed to march in step, a European bloc would also be a factor of world conflict, because it would be a rival to the United States. The proposed European constitution in fact expresses, in veiled terms, the ambition of certain states to use the European Union in order to play a role on the world imperialist arena: “Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the acts adopted by the Union in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness” (Article 15-2 of the Draft Treaty[1] [134]). Such an orientation can only be a threat to America's leadership, and this is why the US is constantly putting spanners in the works of the construction of any kind of European unity, for example by supporting the Turkish candidature for membership of the Union. This being said, European unity only exists at the level of propaganda. To have an idea of the absurdity of the notion of a “European bloc”, we need only look at the reality of the European Union: the European budget is a puny 4% of European GNP, most of which is destined not for military spending but for the Common Agricultural Policy; there is no military force under European command capable of vying with NATO or the American armed forces. Nor does the EU include a military super-power able to impose its will on the other members (one expression of this is the cacophony that reigns in the negotiations for the adoption of the new constitution).[2] [135] To cap it all, the policy of one of the main members of the Union, Britain, is aimed precisely (as it has been for the last 400 years) at maintaining divisions amongst the other European powers, its “allies” within the EU. In these circumstances, any European alliance can never be anything but a temporary and necessarily unstable agreement. The wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq have highlighted the disintegration of Europe's political unity as soon as the imperialist interests of its various member bourgeoisies are at stake. If there is currently a tendency for countries like Spain or Poland, or others in Central Europe, to turn towards Germany, then this can only be limited in time, as indeed are the different episodes in the on-off love affair between France and Germany. Whether the tendency of the moment is towards political union or towards open discord, the underlying exacerbation of tensions between the European Union's member states cannot be overcome. In the context of the bankruptcy of capitalism and the decomposition of bourgeois society, reality demonstrates that the only possible policy for each major power is to try to create difficulties for its rivals in order to gain the advantage for itself. This is the law of capitalism.
The growing, spreading anarchy and instability are not a specificity of this or that backward or exotic region: they are the product of capitalism in its present, irreversible phase of decomposition. And since capitalism dominates the planet, then it is the whole planet which is increasingly subject to chaos.
Only the world proletariat bears a perspective in itself, since it is not only the exploited class, but above all the revolutionary class in this society: in other words, the class which bears in itself other social relations free of exploitation, war, and poverty. Condensing within itself every misery, every injustice, and every exploitation, it potentially wields the force to overthrow capitalism and build a truly communist society. But if the working class is to live up to what history demands of it, then it must understand that war is a product of bankrupt capitalism; that the bourgeoisie is a cynical and deceitful class of exploiters, whose greatest fear is that the proletariat should see reality as it is, and not as it is presented by the exploiters. Only the development of the class struggle, for the defence of the workers' living conditions and, ultimately, the overthrow of capitalism, will allow the proletariat to hold back the bloody hand of the bourgeoisie. Let us remember that it was the class struggle of the workers of the early 20th century that put an end to World War I. The proletariat has a great historical responsibility before it. The development of its consciousness of what is at stake, and of its unity in struggle, will determine its ability to live up to this responsibility. The future of all humanity depends on it.
G. 15/07/2004
[2] [138]The new constitution is itself a defeat for the “federalists” who hoped to see a greater degree of European unity, since it avoids any notion of creating a real “European government” in favour of the existing inter-governmental snake-pit.
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[102] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[103] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/revolutionary-syndicalism
[104] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[105] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
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[108] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/second-international
[109] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[110] https://en.internationalism.org/forum
[111] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
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