The proletarian struggle in Poland has marked a new and decisive step forward in the continuing process of mass strike which began with the struggles at Denain and Longwy, reemerged in the dockers' strike at Rotterdam and in the British steel strike, and which posed in differing degrees in each struggle the need for the self-organization, extension and generalization of the struggle.

1) These struggles have confirmed the new characteristics of proletarian struggle in decadence. Although they are a response to the aggravation of the economic crisis, they cannot aim at a real improvement in the workers' living and working conditions. In addition to the economic demands that form the basis for these struggles to start from, they prefigure and prepare the future revolutionary assault on the state, the only historic response open to the working class in face of the generalized crisis of capitalism.

In these struggles the real antagonism existing between the needs and practice of the working class and all the false stra­tegies and conceptions of unionism could be seen. All these unionist-style strategies have been the reply of the bourgeoisie to the working class in struggle. They have all attempted to undermine the self-organization of the working class and the dynamic toward generalization contained in its struggles. As well as that, the methods of trade unionism derail the development of political consciousness within the working class, a consciousness that has been emerging in this period.

2) In future, the only way for the prole­tariat to go forward will increasingly be for it to go beyond corporatism, localism, and nationalism by setting up in its struggles general assemblies and elected and revocable strike committees, and by deepening the political antagonisms between all the bourgeois factions acting inside the class and inside the organized prole­tariat.

3) The other fundamental aspect of the present struggles is that they act as a historical brake against the tendency towards war contained in the blind contra­dictions of the decadent capitalist system in crisis. For the first time in history, today's period is one in which the prole­tariat has been able to impose on the bourgeoisie its own initiative in the class struggle. Unlike the 1930s when the econo­mic crisis accentuated the defeat suffered by the working class in the 1920s, through­out the 1970s it was possible to see the slow and chaotic reconstitution of the strength of the working class. This new upsurge of proletarian struggle has preven­ted the bourgeoisie from leading society toward another world war. The inability of the bourgeoisie to take this road rests on the fact that those parties most capable of mobilizing the proletariat for a new massacre are the leftist parties, but they are precisely the parties which the new upsurge in working class struggle has brought into question.

4) Faced with a proletariat which is regaining its class strength once more, the Left has seen its margin of maneuver reduced, and its capacity to mystify the class , which it had accumulated during the years of counter-revolution, has been reduced as well. During these last ten years a crisis has developed within these parties: they've been wracked by splits and a real erosion of their militant base. The appearance of new leftist groups corresponds to the bourgeoisie's need to adapt to the struggles of the working class, but at the same time such a dispersal shows the poten­tially real weaknesses of the Left in future.

5) Such an erosion of the Stalinist and Social Democratic counter-revolutionary machines has repercussions on the whole political apparatus of the bourgeoisie. The Stalinist and Social Democratic machines are an integral part of the state and they share all the characteristics of the deca­dent bourgeoisie -- its senility and its incapacity to become a homogeneous bloc when faced with its historical enemy, the working class. In fact, it is the state itself which has been weakened by the blows delivered by the workers' struggle. But weakness doesn't mean outright collapse. Each bourgeois party, using its own methods and its specific arsenal of anti-working class measures, tries to prevent the out­right collapse of the state. The bourgeoi­sie is threatened by working class struggle, but it is also forced to adopt stringent austerity measures to avoid the utter economic bankruptcy of its system. Caught in this contradiction it tries, where it can, to react and respond to the struggle of the working class by bringing forward a whole series of tactics essentially based on democratic mystifications and illusions. The other aspect of the bourgeoisie's tactics is its necessity to find a way of breaking the struggles from the inside, either by openly sabotaging them or by politically derailing them.

6) Today the activity of the Left parties is right at the centre of the problem confronting the bourgeoisie. How is it to defeat the proletariat and make it accept austerity and later on the war? But, in reality, in the period to come, an increas­ing instability will become evident in bourgeois politics because the Left parties are going to be forced to develop more and more incoherent political orientations in the face of the working class:

-- in opposition they risk losing their influence because they cannot present themselves eternally as defenders of the immediate interests of the working class. Because of that, they risk losing their capacity to sabotage struggles from within.

-- in power, they quickly lose their credibility in the eyes of the working class by organizing and managing austerity. Today, workers forget less and less easily what the Left has done when it is in power.

7) In the years ahead, we will see the ripening of a generalized political crisis within the bourgeoisie. But, contrary to those years in which the proletariat was not able to use such a crisis for its own ends, we are now entering a period when it is going to become crucial for the working class to take advantage of the crisis of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, the political character of the struggles that have just happened will become more and more explicit and pose in clearer terms the importance of the role and intervention of revolutionary groups. Given the need for revolutionaries to understand how the working class is to achieve a unification of its struggle, the ability of revolution­aries to analyze the contradictions wracking the bourgeoisie as a whole and tearing apart each of the individual national bourgeoisies, will be decisive in the ripening of class consciousness.

CH.

The proposed counter-resolution was: retain points 1, 2 and 7 of the Resolution on class struggle and replace the rest with the counter-resolution.

The course of the economic crisis

In the report on the ‘Crisis and Inter-Imperialist Conflicts’ adopted at the Third Congress of the ICC in 1979, we pointed out that all the palliatives with which world capital had tried to bring about a recovery from the slump of 1974-75 (the third and sharpest downturn since the onset of the open crisis of overproduction in 1967) had failed. The excess industrial capacity and slackening rate of investment in new plant throughout the advanced countries of the American bloc, the virtual bankruptcy of the backward societies in the Western orbit, and the failure of the various Five-Year Plans to achieve their goals through­out the Russian bloc, led us to conclude that world capitalism stood on “...the brink of another decline in industrial production, investment and trade -- stronger than the downturns of 1971 and 1974 -- as the 1980s begin”. (International Review no.18, p. 8)

In the third volume of Capital, Karl Marx lays bare the link between the fall in the rate of profit and the saturation of the market[1]. The economic crisis of capitalism, whether in its cyclical form in the ascendant phase or in the form of an historic crisis (which poses the alternative, inter-imperialist world war or prolet­arian revolution) which characterizes the decadent phase, explodes in three inter-connected manifestations according to Marx: overproduction of commodities, overproduction of capital and overproduction of labor power. We can best gauge the extent to which our forecast of 1979 that capitalism “…stands poised on the brink of new and even more devastating economic cataclysms” (International Review no.18,p.3), has been confirmed by first tracing the course of the economic crisis on these three levels in the industrial behemoths of the West, which dominate the world economy.

The West

The slowdown in the growth of industrial production[2] which characterized the EEC, Japan and the US in 1979 has now given way to a sharp decline in industrial output in the EEC:

The catastrophic nature of this collapse of industrial production can best be seen in Britain where manufacturing output has fallen 15 percent since 1979 and now stands at its lowest level since 1967; the extent of overproduction in key industries can be found in the fact that under the EEC’s mandatory production controls for steel, production of that basic commodity will be 20 per cent lower by April 1981 than it was in 1979; while production of automobiles will fall 10 to 12 per cent this year, as Japanese companies compensate for the sat­uration of the world market by renewed dumping in Europe. In West Germany, the mighty engineering sector which was the key to that country’s trade surplus over the past several years has now followed the steel and auto producers along the path of falling output.

In the US, stagnation in industrial production during 1979 gave way to an abrupt drop in 1980; and the mild upturn at the end of last year was quickly trans­formed into a new downturn -- a “double-dip” recession, which presages the only kind of “recovery” that capitalism can generate today:

The magnitude of the decline in output in key industries in the US can be seen in the fact that in February 1981 the production of steel and lumber (the basis of the housing industry) was only at the same level as in 1967, while automobile production was even lower than it had been in 1967.

Japan alone among the industrial giants of the American bloc has so far escaped this slump in manufacturing output[3]. But Japan's industries are so completely dependent on exports that domestic demand is incapable of providing any significant compensation for the shocks which the looming protectionism of its major trading partners and/or a downturn in world trade will bring.

The enormous overproduction of commodities which has produced this downturn in industrial production has in its wake already brought about a strong fall in investment in capital goods and the beginnings of a collapse of manufacturing profits. In 1981 real spending on plant and equipment is expected to fall 2-3 per cent in West Germany, 7 per cent in Italy and10.25 per cent in Britain. In the US, as the utilization of manufacturing capacity has declined, investment in new plant has fallen below the level necessary to maintain America’s industrial base at competitive levels:

Meanwhile, the more than four billion dollars lost by American automakers in 1980 is certainly the most spectacular harbinger of the general collapse of profits which this overproduction of commodities must result in.

The barrier of a saturated world market, the lack of effective demand relative to the hyper-developed productive capacity of world capitalism means that at the level of global capital any effort to counteract the decline in the rate of profit by new inves­tments to raise the productivity of labor can only exacerbate the difficulty of realizing the mass of surplus value by adding to the plethora of unsaleable commodities. Therefore, as industrial output falls, a growing mass of unemployed capital thirsting for profit is frantically hurled into the activity of speculation. It is possible that the overproduction of capital has already thrown one trillion dollars into speculation. It is this veritable flood of unemployed capital seeking a profitable short-term placement that has kept oil prices rising despite a 6 per cent fall in demand in the American bloc during 1980. The feverish excitement in the gold markets in the face of a decline in the demand for industrial gold has led specialists in precious metals to estimate that “50 percent of demand is now speculatively oriented” (New York Times, International Economic Survey, 8 February 1981). The fiasco of the Hunt brothers’ efforts to corner the silver market, the heavy trading in currency futures and foreign exchange by the world’s leading corporations and financial institutions, all attest to the frantic search for short-term profits on the part of idle capital. Indeed, today the very price of the world’s major currencies is increasingly determined by the rise and fall of interest rates -- the fluctuations ions of which can send billions of dollars scurrying from one country to another almost overnight. This vast overproduction of capital has spawned an enormous speculative bubble which threatens to burst with catastrophic consequences for world capital.

As industrial production slumped during 1980-81, unemployment rose at an accelerat­ed rate throughout the industrialized countries of the American bloc:

Unemployment rates

	March 1979	March 1980	March 1981
France	6.1%	6.6%	7.5%
W. Germany	4.1%	3.5%	4.6%
Holland	5.1%	5.0%	8.1%
Italy	8.0%	8.2%	8.6%
Japan	2.1%	1.9%	2.1%
Sweden	2.1%	2.2%	2.5%
USA	5.7%	6.0%	7.3%
Britain	5.6%	5.7%	9.6%

The real dimensions of this “excess pop­ulation” (Marx), which is one of the most vicious manifestations of the economic crisis of capitalism, can be seen in the OECD’s prediction that by mid 1981 there will be 23 million officially unemployed workers in the industrialized countries of the American bloc. In Holland, there is now more unemployment than at any time since the end of World War II. In Britain, there will be more than three million jobless workers by mid 1981 -- a higher fig­ure than that reached even in the depths of the depression in the 1930s. In West Germ­any, economists at the Commerzbank not only predict a rise of unemployment for an official figure of 4.8 per cent, but also forecast that the number of short-time workers will rise from 130,000 to 520,000 this year. The racist attacks on immigrant workers in France (orchestrated by the gov­ernment and the left in opposition alike), the plans of giant firms, like Italy’s FIAT (announced layoffs of 24,000 workers) and France’s Rhone-Poulenc (a projected 25 per cent cut in its workforce), to further slash their labor force, are so many signs of the grim fate that capital is planning for millions more workers in the 1980s.

To these devastating manifestations of the open crisis of overproduction (over­production of commodities, capital and labor-power) must be added another manif­estation, no less ominous for capital: galloping inflation in the very midst of a collapse of production and profits. Capit­alism, caught in the grip of a permanent crisis, has reacted by using the drug of inflation (creation of money and credit) in a desperate effort to compensate for the lack of effective demand brought about by the definitive saturation of the world market. This continuous and deliberate bloating of the money supply has now so swollen the costs of production that it has dragged down an already rapidly falling rate of profit and accelerated the very breakdown in production it was originally intended to prevent. Moreover, while in the other downturns in production since the onset of the open crisis -- 1967, 1971, 1974­-1975 -- the rate of inflation fell, in the present downturn it has leaped ever higher.

The underdeveloped countries

In the backward Asian, African and Latin American countries which provide vital materials and necessary markets for the American bloc, the past two years have seen ranks of the impoverished peasantry and inhabitants of the miserable shanty towns swell. Today, according to the World Bank -- one of the institutions by which American three continents -- 800 million underfed human beings subsist in conditions of ‘absolute poverty’. Apart from a few oil-producing countries, the flow of dollars to whom provides a market for Western arms manufacturers or winds up on deposit in Western banks, the countries of the ‘third world’ have been reduced, by mounting trade and balance of payments deficits and a sky­rocketing burden of foreign debt, to virt­ual bankruptcy. An absolute dependence on imported food -- the grim product of the chronic agricultural crisis capitalism has provoked -- has meant that these countries’ overall payments deficits have risen from $12 billion in 1973 to an anticipated $82 billion in 1981. Meanwhile, constant borrowing from Western private and public financial institutions, largely to cover these deficits, has resulted in an astro­nomical foreign debt of 290 billion dollars for these starving countries as a whole.

Over the past two years, a string of countries beginning with Zaire, Jamaica and Peru, continuing with Turkey, and most recently including Sudan and Bolivia, have tottered on the brink of bankruptcy and had to request a rescheduling of their debts from their imperialist creditors. In each of these cases, the only alternative to default and an immediate end to imports has been to accept some form of de facto cont­rol by the IMF -- the primary instrument of American imperialism’s domination of the backward countries of its bloc -- is a quid pro quo for the necessary debt rescheduling. This control has usually taken three complementary forms:

1. Devaluation of the debtor countries’ currency, which means that for the same amount of their own money its creditors can appropriate a much greater volume of raw materials.

2. Higher food prices in order to restrict imports, which means an even greater harv­est of starvation in the “third world”.

3. Wage freezes so as to extract even more surplus value from the laboring population with which to pay back the interest and principal on the enormous debt.

With an inflation rate of 7per cent to 15 per cent and a budget deficit last year of $11 billion dollars, China too has foll­owed the path of so many other backward countries of the American bloc to the IMF hot in hand. In her first year as a member of the IMF (which completed her   economic integration into the American bloc) China has borrowed nearly $1.5 billion. Moreover, confirming our 1979 forecast that China would not fulfill the hopes of Western businessmen for a vast market in which to dispose of their overproduction, China has already this year cancelled or “deferred” capital investments contracted with western firms worth $3.5 billion. The 13 per cent cut in state spending announced in February indicates that the Peking regime has now officially embarked on the same path of draconian austerity as the rest of the capitalist world.

THE Russian bloc

1n our 1979 report on the “Crisis and Inter-Imperialist Conflicts” we showed how one of the most important manifestations of the world economic crisis in the Russian bloc was a chronic scarcity of capital. During the 1970s, the Russian bloc prevent­ed the downturn in production to which this scarcity of capital would have condemned it, by massive loans from Western banks and governments. This flow of money capital to the East (which financed the imports of Western capital goods and technology) allowed the economies of the Russian bloc to continue growing -- albeit at a much slower rate than before the onset of the open crisis of world overproduction. The example of Poland illustrates how economic activity was maintained in the face of a saturated world market and a scarcity of capital. In1971, Poland’s foreign debt was a miniscule $800 million; in 1980 (just before the outbreak of the mass strike in August) it had grown to a staggering $23.5 billion. However, by 1979, the greater part of the new loans were necessary just to assure the interest and repayment of principal on old loans, rather than to expand production.     As a result, the Polish economy -- before the mass strike -- had begun to collapse:

Poland’s economic collapse differs only in its sharpness from the economic downturn in which the whole of the Russian bloc is now mired. Thus, in Russia agricultural production declined 3 per cent in 1980 and production in key industrial sectors like coal, steel, nuclear reactors and electric power fell far short of the goals set in the last Five-Year Plan.

World trade

The economic slump which has now simultaneously hit all sectors of world capital ‑- both the advanced and backward countries of the American bloc and the whole of the Russian bloc -- has led to a continued and ever faster decline in the rate of growth of world trade:

A brief description of the ways in which world capital sought to ‘recover’ from slump of 1974-75 and the failure of that effort, is necessary to demonstrate why world trade is today virtually stagnant. Two basic economic stratagems were used to create a temporary pick-up in economic activity. First, the US became the ‘locomotive’ of the world economy by artificially providing a market for the rest of its bloc through enormous trade deficits. Between 1976-1980 the US bought commodities overseas to a value of 100 billion dollars more than it sold. Only the US -- because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency -- could run up such a trade deficit without the necessity for a massive devaluation of its currency. Second, the US flooded the world with dollars in an unprecedented credit expansion in the form of loans to the backward countries and to the Russian bloc (this latter largely by way of financial institutions based in Europe). This mass of paper values temporarily created an effective demand which allowed world trade to pick up. The virtual bankruptcy of the backward countries of the American bloc, which has driven country after country to avoid default by putting itself under the fiscal dictatorship of the IMF and submit itself to its austerity plans, has already removed one of the crutches which has propped up world trade over the past several years. A drastic reduction in imports by these countries -- necessary if a train of bankruptcies and a possibly mortal blow to the international monetary system is to be averted -- will have a catastrophic effect on the world’s industrial giants: 55% of the exports of the EEC (taken as one trad­ing bloc), 46% of the exports of Japan and 46% of the US and Canada’s exports now find their market in the backward countries. This collapse of the backward countries as a market has put at risk half the exports of the industrialized countries! The growing economic and political risks of continued massive loans to the Russian bloc are now removing another crutch on which the growth of world trade has depended. Finally, the US has begun to take rigorous steps to reduce its own payments and trade deficits so as to prevent another and more devastating dollar crisis. Such a policy by Washington, however, means that the US can no longer play the role of locomotive of the world economy -- a role in which no other country can possibly replace it.

The resultant stagnation and impending decline in world trade will have a devastating effect on industrial production in the US, Japan and the EEC, where the domestic market is -- as we have seen -- already super-saturated. Japan and Europe have long been absolutely dependent on export markets in the US, the backward countries and - particularly in the case of Europe -- the Russian bloc to maintain their industrial activity. American capitalism, long protected from the vicissitudes of world trade by a huge domestic market, is today hardly less dependent on exports than the rest of its bloc: exports now account for an unprecedented 20% of domestic indust­rial production.

It is this reality of a deepening world slump that has lead even representatives of the bourgeoisie, such as the authors of France’s New Five Year economic plan to point to the certainty that “tomorrow will be worse than today”. Revolutionary Marxists (who alone can understand why the course of the economic crisis must lead capitalism to the abyss) who can see that this historic crisis has created the very preconditions for the destruction of capitalism by the proletariat, can only respond by a whole‑hearted “welcome the depression!”

Having traced the course of the economic crisis, we now want to briefly sketch the economic policies with which the capitalist class in both the American and Russian blocs will attempt to respond to the global depression.

The response of the bourgeoisie

State capitalism

In the American bloc, the economic crisis ­is greatly accelerating the tendency towards state capitalism[4]. State capitalism cannot simply be reduced to nationalization of the means of production -- which is but one particular manifestation that it can assume. One of the architects of state capitalism in the 1930’s, Hiram Schacht, Hitler’s first economic Czar, showed in reality what the basic principle of state capitalism is: “der Stadt am Stever der Wirtschaft” (the state as rudder of the economy). Within the framework of the anarchy of the world market, whose sole regulator is ultimately the capitalist law value, it is the state which charts the course for the economy of each national capital. This can be clearly seen in the case of France, under the centre-right government of Giscerd-Barre. The state has selected “strategic” industries, such as nuclear power, aerospace and telecommunications, in which it plans to invest or direct the investment of billions of dollars, while at the same time it has decided to wind down certain traditional industries such as steel, shipbuilding and textiles. Using a combination of nationalization, subsidies and state orders, indicative planning and political pressure, the French state is orchestrating mergers (the reorganization of the special steels industry, the centralization of truck making in the hands of state-owned Renault), creating new industrial groups (the formation of a telecommunications trust, beginning with Matra’s takeover of Hachette) and is maneuvering foreign capital out of key sectors ofthe economy (the takeover ofEmrain-Schreider by Paribus).                    

In completing the process of organizing each national capital into a single economic bloc, the capitalist state is faced with the dilemma of adopting a coherent fiscal and monetary policy with which to steer the economy in the midst of a simultaneous collapse of industrial production and galloping inflation. Today, no major western country is seriously contemplating a thoroughgoing reflationary policy; the specter of hyper-inflation and the definitive collapse of its currency precludes the massive public works programs which Hitler in Germany, the Popular Front in France or Roosevelt in the US could institute in the 1930’s, when the collapse of production had brought with it rapidly falling prices. However, the alternative of a deflationary policy, if it seems the only way to prevent hyper-inflation, will bring about a further disastrous plunge in industrial production, profits and investment (as well as a drastic rise in unemployment). In Britain where the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher has resorted to a deflationary of policy (albeit with inconsistencies), the results have been catastrophic for capital: industrial output down 15%; since 1979 leading British ‘multinationals’ like GKN and Lucas which had made profits even in the downturn of ‘67, ‘71, and ‘74-‘75 chalked up losses; bankruptcies rose 50% in 1980 while unemployment increased by 900,000 last year alone. This de-industrialization, which is turning Britain’s manufacturing heartland into a desert, has also provided the Treasury with a pyrrhic victory: the annual rate of inflation has come down from over 20% to a still ominous 13%. Small wonder that the Confederation of British Industry (the organ of industrial capital) has frantically called for a reversal of Thatcher’s deflation by way of a massive reflationary program of public investment (roads, pipelines, nuclear energy, transport and communications) to save them from the impending catastrophe.

‘Supply-side’ economics                                                     

The bankruptcy of both orthodox def lationary policies and classical reflationary policies in the face of the combined onslaught of overproduction and inflation has led to a frantic search for ‘new’ economic nostrums on the part of the bourgeoisie and its intellectual. hangers-on. The latest of these is supply-side economics, to which an important part of the Reagan administration is firmly committed. The basis of supply-side economics is the belief that far-reaching cuts in tax rates (primarily for business and the rich) will produce such an increase in investment and a concomitant rise in industrial output that government revenues will actually rise and a balanced budget be achieved. The fallaciousness of this ‘reasoning’ will be quickly revealed if Reagan’s $54 billion tax cut is implemented unmodified and without the drastic budget cuts that the deflationists who run the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board want: the billions cut from taxes will not flow into investment in new productive plant or businesses at a time when there is already a huge overproduction of capital; rather these billions will fuel speculative activity, bringing a dramatic collapse of paper values one step closer, or will generate a short-lived boom in unproductive consumption by the rich, which will fuel the inflation which is ravaging the economy. Moreover, behind the extreme right rhetoric of its partisans, supply-side economics turns out to be merely a variant of the Keynesianism which has dominated the world economy since the 1930s. The public works projects of traditional Keynesianism and the tax cuts of supply-side economics both vainly seek to compensate for a chronic lack of effective demand relative to the mass of commodities which a hyper-developed industrial apparatus spews forth. And in a world in the grip of galloping inflation, any such attempts to make up for the lack of demand by budget deficits risks pushing capitalism over the abyss.

Attack on workers living conditions

The more the devastating blows of the world crisis destroy the very possibility of coherent economic policy, the more the bourgeoisie is driven to rely on a direct assault on the living conditions of the proletariat as its primary reaction to an objective reality which has escaped all control. By attempting to drastically alter the ratio between wages and surplus value, the bourgeoisie cannot relieve the problem of global overproduction which bars an economic recovery whatever the rate of profit may be; however, such a policy - if it is successful - can increase the competitive­ness of national capital at the expense of its rivals. This has brought about a two-pronged offensive by capital. First, against employment: drastic cuts in the workforce, with a consequent ‘rationalization’ and speed-up for the remaining workers is vital for the survival of each enterprise (though the growth of unemploy­ment only exacerbates the difficulties of each national economy as a totality); in Britain, for example, GKN has shed 27% of its workforce over the past 15 months, while British Steel has laid-off 60,000 workers and announced that an additional 20,000 will be sacked. Second, against wages: in Belgium the unions and employers, under government prodding, signed a pact for a two-year wage deal in February, and   the government has since proposed abandoning indexed wages (which rise under the impact of inflation) and a 10% cut in the wages of workers whose firms receive financial aid from the state. The economic stability of the countries of the American bloc is now absolutely dependent on the success of this offensive against the proletariat.

The Eastern bloc

The economic situation in the Russian bloc is, if anything, even more desperate than that faced by the industrialized countries of the American bloc. The cumulative     effects of a chronic scarcity of capital, the growing obstacles to loans from the West with which to purchase the technology that the Russian bloc lacks, the ever shrinking market for its export industries, have combined to put an end to the ‘goulash socialism’ with which first Khrushchev and then Brezhnev sought to contain the explosive outburst of class struggle which the death of Stalin had unleashed throughout the bloc. Draconian austerity and a new direct assault on the miserable living and working conditions of the proletariat is the real basis of the new Five Year Plan unveiled at the 26th Congress of the Russian Communist Party this year. In his report to the Congress, Brezhnev said that Russia will “achieve more while using fewer resources in production” under the 1981-85 Plan. Here was the veiled admission of the scarcity of capital. The switch to more intensive methods of production was no longer, according to Brezhnev, “a choice but a necessity”. The effort to raise productivity by 17-20% over the next five years, with less capital investment than in the previous five, can only mean that not productivity (which is dependent on constant capital), but the intensity of labor must grow. Brezhnev’s report, therefore, announced that the Russian economy must henceforth depend to an ever-increasing extent on the extraction of absolute surplus value rather than rela­tive surplus value -- precisely the same course that capital had embarked upon in the Ameri­can bloc. In the East too, then, the very existence of the capitalist regime depends on the bureaucracy’s success in this attack on the working class.

Inter-imperialist antagonisms

As the curve of the economic crisis spirals upwards, it intensifies the inter-imperialist antagonisms to the breaking point. There is a direct and immediate link between the deepening world economic crisis and the clashes between the imperi­alist blocs. For capital, there is only one ‘solution’ to its historic crisis: inter-imperialist world war. The more quickly the various economic palliatives prove futile, the more deliberately each of the imperialist blocs must prepare for a violent redivision of the world market.

The Reagan Presidency corresponds to a new determination by the American bourgeoi­sie to assume an increasingly bellicose posture around the world. Underlying this heightened aggressiveness is the bourgeois­ie’s growing recognition that war with Russia is its only real option -- a view not usually so openly expressed as it was by Richard Piper, the Russian specialist at the National Security Council, when he said in March that war was inevitable if the Russians did not abandon ‘communism’. The strategy that is emerging within the ruling circles of American imperialism is no longer based simply on the view that its Russian antagonist must be prevented from breaking out of its Eurasian heartland; today the conviction is growing in both the Pentagon and on Wall Street that having established its military hegemony up to the banks of the Elbe after two world wars, America must now finish the job and extend its domination beyond the Urals. This is the real meaning behind the Reagan Administration’s determination to increase mili­tary spending by 7% annually in real terms (so that it will account for more than a third of the Federal Budget). The 200,000 man Rapid Deployment Force, the string of bases in the Middle East (including the ultra-modern installations in the Sinai that America hopes to take-over when Israel withdraws next year), the new “strategic consensus” that Secretary of State Haig is forging in the area stretching from Palestine to Egypt (and significantly taking in Iraq), the project for a 600 ship navy by 1990 and the new manned bomber for the Air Force, constitute so many direct prepara­tions for offensive war in the coming decades.

While the strategic balance between the Russian and American blocs has continued its onward shift in favor of Washington (the Russian army is bogged down in Afghanistan, an upsurge of the working class in Poland may yet force the Kremlin bureaucracy to attempt to crush the prole­tariat, which even if successful will tie down an immense army of occupation and disrupt the Warsaw Pact), this does not mean that Russian imperialism will now adapt a defensive strategy. As we pointed out in our report to the Third Congress of the ICC, the economically weaker Russian bloc can only hope to counteract America’s overwhelming industrial might by seizing the advanced industrial infrastructure of Europe and/or Japan. Russia’s strategy of seeking domination of the oil-rich Middle East has as its primary aim to make Europe and Japan as dependent on Moscow for the fuel to run their industry as they now are on the US, and thus detach them from the American bloc. The growing bellicosity of the US can only increase the despera­tion of the Kremlin bureaucracy to make its bid in the Middle East while there is still any chance of success. To this must be added another factor which is pushing Rus­sian imperialism down the path of military adventure: the scarcity of capital with which to develop her Siberian oil reserves means that both her war industries and her capacity to control her bloc by pro­viding so vital a resource will soon be at risk -- all of which will only intensify the pressure to grab the Arabian oil fields in the coming years.

The pursuit of these warlike strategies by Russian and American imperialism is dependent on the further consolidation and strengthening of their respective blocs. However, the very deepening of the economic crisis which is pushing American imperial­ism to more directly plan for war is also creating stresses and strains within the Western Alliance. Japan’s massive export offensive, which produced an EEC trade deficit with Tokyo of $11.5 billion and an American trade deficit with Japan of $12.2 billion in 1980, has provoked a growing protectionist sentiment on the part of powerful factions of the bourgeoisie in both Europe and America. While the US has moved quickly to assert the cohesiveness of its bloc through pressure on Japan to ‘voluntarily’ limit its exports and to remove its own barriers to imports and foreign investment, the clamor for protectionism (and even autarky) by bourgeois factions in Europe is a growing danger to which Washington must respond.

While France and Britain have resolutely backed the US in its increasingly aggressive posture towards the Russians, America’s pressure on Europe to reduce its trade links with the Russian bloc and to have second thoughts about its participation in the projected natural gas pipeline from Siberia, has run into growing resistance -- particu­larly from West Germany. Eastern Europe and Russia are one of the few markets where German (and more generally European) capi­tal does not face stiff competition from the US and/or Japan. The limitation of trade and economic links with Russia, which America’s strategy entails, will consider­ably reduce the small degree of autonomy which German capital has acquired since the last war. To these economic considera­tions must be added the fact that important segments of the European bourgeoisie still hesitate to accept all of the consequences of the strategy Washington wants to impose (the basing of Pershing II missiles in Europe) because a war would immediately turn Europe into a bloody battlefield. Nonetheless, to the degree that these hesi­tations are not just a facade to divert the proletariat from its own class terrain or a cloak behind which stand pro-Moscow factions of the bourgeoisie, they will ultimately give way to the impervious nece­ssity to strengthen the bloc as it prepares for war.

As Russian imperialism moves to streng­then its bloc, it is encountering resist­ance on the part of certain of the bureau­cracies of Eastern Europe. The Romanian and Hungarian bureaucracies in particular are loathe to put their own complex trade and economic links with Western Europe at risk, as it is only through these links that they have achieved any autonomy vis-a-vis Moscow. Nevertheless, the growing dependence on Russian loans (as these countries reach the limits of their credit­worthiness in the West), reliance on Moscow for raw materials, and the ominous Brezhnev Doctrine, will ultimately prevail over the hesitations of the little Stalins.

****************************

If the upward curve of the economic crisis inexorably drives the bourgeoisie towards inter-imperialist war, the outcome of the historic crisis is not determined by the course of the economic crisis alone. It is the intersection of the curve of the economic crisis and the curve of the class struggle that determines whether the historic crisis will end in inter-imperialist world war or proletarian revolution.

If the upward curve of the economic crisis intersects with a downward curve of the class struggle (as in the 1930s) imperialist ­war is inevitable. If, however, the wave of the economic crisis intersects with an ascendant curve of class struggle, then the road to war is barred and an historic course towards class war between the bour­geoisie and the proletariat is on the agenda. The present ascendant course of class struggle is today the real key to the international situation. The menace of the proletariat increasingly determines the actions of the capitalist class every­where. The vast arrays of weapons with which the capitalist classes of both blocs have armed themselves to fight an inter-imperialist war are now being prepared for use in a class war. The strengthening of the blocs, which is a pre-requisite for war against the rival bloc, is now a direct and immediate preparation to confront the proletariat wherever it challenges the role of capital. 

"Run, comrade, the old world is behind you"

History is accelerating. The gaping wounds of the old world are getting deeper and multiplying.

In one year, hunger has killed more people in the third world than during the six years of World War II. Workers in the so-called ‘communist' countries are experiencing food shortages just like during wartime. The economy of the western bloc is trapped in an irreversible downward spiral, throwing millions of workers out of work.

The only form of production which is really increasing is arms production.

At the same time, the response by the working class -- from Brazil to China, from Britain to Poland -- is growing wider, deeper, and increasingly determined, raising the question at a practical level of the necessity for the internationalization of proletarian action in all countries.

The struggles in Poland have forced the whole world once again to speak of "what the workers have done". The revolutionary class which exists within the working class is once again clearly visible for all to see.

And this has led to a rapid acceleration of history. The old world is falling apart and at the same time its gravedigger is raising its head.

The wind from Gdansk is a sign of the revolutionary storms which will soon follow.

Two years ago at our Third Congress (cf International Review 18) we said that the 1980s would be "The Years of Truth". Events have already confirmed this statement.

More and more revolutionaries will be faced ­with the problem of understanding and analyzing things ‘calmly', at a time when events are moving faster all the time.

The Fourth Congress was permeated by the new rhythm of history, and the organization was able to get a clear idea of the extent and nature of the difficulties that this ‘acceleration' entails for revolutionaries.

Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, that "theoretically (communists) have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletar­ian movement." But this advantage isn't given to them automatically or miraculous­ly as soon as they constitute themselves into a political organization. They can only acquire it through a systematic collective work, in which their analyses are constantly confronted by living, historical reality, as well as by a generalized, on-going debate within organizations.

The texts from the 4th Congress which we are publishing here illustrate the effort  of the Current to really understand "the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the workers'        movement."

The reports and resolutions are the texts which introduced and concluded the debates. The "Counter-resolution on the Class Struggle" was a contribution to the debate, developing a point of view different from the "majority" view finally adopted by       the Congress.

The report "Generalized Economic Crisis and Inter-Imperialist Antagonisms", as well as the "Resolution on the Crisis", outline the perspectives for the aggravation of the economic crisis and the evolution of the tension between different capitalist powers      and imperialist blocs. 

The report "Perspectives for the International Class Struggle (A Breach is Opened in Poland)" and the "Resolution on the Class Struggle" show the stage reached in the evolution of the confrontation between the two principle classes in society. They analyze the strengths and weaknesses, not only of the proletariat, but also of its mortal enemy: the world bourgeoisie.

The text "The Historic Conditions for the Generalization of Working Class Struggle" addresses the principal problem raised by the workers' struggles in Poland: the necessity for the internationalization of proletarian struggles, which will enable them to display their revolutionary force.

The "Counter-Resolution on the Class Struggle" (signed Chenier) concentrates above all on the relation between the development of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletarian struggle. As opposed to the resolution adopted by the Congress which emphasizes the efforts of the bourgeoisie to develop a single international strategy to confront the proletariat (‘the left in opposition'), and to respond in a coordinated way to the threat posed by the international working class, the text by Chenier emphas­izes above all the "senility and incapacity (of the bourgeoisie) to become a homogenous bloc when faced with its historical enemy."

Taken together, these texts will show the reader the stage of development of the general analysis of the historical situation reached by the ICC at its 4th International Congress.

"The theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes." (Communist Manifesto)

1. Years of Truth

"In the ‘60s, the bourgeoisie gave us misery in exchange for crumbs, in the ‘70s, they gave us more misery in exchange for promises; with the ‘80s we are in for still more misery in exchange for....... misery!" Accion Proletaria[1]

1. The present state of the capitalist crisis is pushing the two fundamental hist­oric classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie -- towards a fight to the death, a fight stripped of all ambiguity, a fight to impose their respective historic altern­atives: Revolution or War, Communism or Barbarism.

2. The bourgeoisie has seen the bankruptcy of all the plans for economic ‘recovery' that it tried out in a thousand different ways during the ‘70s. Each failure is another proof that its only way out is a third imperialist world war.

On the other hand, the continued and undefeated resistance of the proletariat (whose highest expression is the struggle in Poland) forces the bourgeoisie to face up to the ‘social question'; that is to say, the whole axis of its economic and political drive towards war can only be a strategy for confronting and defeating the proletariat.

3) For the proletariat, the perspective of a draw up a balance sheet of the proletariat's ‘solution' to the crisis within capitalism, experience in its developing struggle, which disorientated and slowed down its struggle during the ‘70s, is giving way to the bitter reality of a radical, absolute, and permanent decline in its standard of living. Increasingly, the misery imposed by capitalism ceases to be a merely quanti­tative phenomenon. The proletariat now faces the qualitative reality of degradat­ion, humiliation and insecurity in every aspect of its existence.

The proletariat is learning that purely economic struggles and confrontations that remain partial and limited, end up having no effect on the bourgeoisie, and that the relative and momentary crumbs won in the great battles of 1965-73 have disappeared without trace over the last five years, giving way to an unprecedented and unrestr­ained decline in its living conditions. All this points to one and only one perspective: a generalized confrontation with capital with a perspective of revolution.

4) These overall historic conditions form the starting point of our evaluation of the present state of the class struggle. The question posed in this report is: how do the proletariat and the bourgeoisie respond to their historic crossing of the ways? From here, we go on to analyze the strategy and weapons used by the bourgeoisie and its strong and weak points.

2. The response of the bourgeoisie

5) At the 3rd ICC Congress we pointed to the reality of the world bourgeoisie's political -­crisis and analyzed in detail its characteristics. Its origins -- which we can now determine with greater hindsight -- lie in the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie's policies in the face of the rise of the class struggle beginning in ‘78, and in the overall situation that we have defined in the previous section.

This political crisis has given rise to a complete reorientation of bourgeois strategy in particular towards the proletariat. This reorientation of its apparatus and political activity has allowed the bourgeoisie to act more coherently and to undertake a more systematic, concentrated and effective campaign against the proletariat. In the short term, ­the bourgeoisie is strengthened, though, as we shall see later, this strategy will weaken it in the long term.

6) As we pointed out at the 3rd Congress, the main axis of this reorientation has been the left's passage into the opposition, and consequently, the right's accession to power. But before analyzing this axis in detail, we aim to examine the ideological framework that characterizes bourgeois policies as a whole in the present period.

Capitalist domination rests on two foundations. One is that of repression and terror, while the other, which hides and reinforces the first is that of ideological mystification. This second foundation always relies on a material basis which gives it its credibility. While it contains a whole ­series of mystifications fed from capitalism's deepest roots (democracy, human rights), ­bourgeois ideology as a whole -- that is to say, all those mystifications and ‘alternatives' that maintain its domination -- must adapt itself to the different conjunctures imposed by the crisis, the class struggle and inter-imperialist conflict. If it fails to do this it risks losing all its credibility and, therefore, its grip on the proletariat.

During the ‘70s, this ideological frame­work revolved around the illusion that the workers, by making a whole series of sacrifices and accepting policies of increasing austerity, could get out of the crises and win back their lost ‘prosperity'. Through the myth of a national and negotiated solution to the crisis, which was incarnated in the perspective of the left in power, and whose ever-present ideology was ‘the advance of progressive forces towards social change' the bourgeoisie was able to maintain its domination, momentarily restraining and paralyzing the workers' struggles, making them swallow ever stronger doses of austerity, and rebuilding its national unity around these plans.

The 3rd Congress registered the crisis of this ideological orientation, pointing out the overall objective conditions which have broken it up. At the same time it noted the renewal of the proletarian struggle, which was developing as both cause and effect of this weakening of bourgeois domination. Had the bourgeoisie maintained the same political and ideological orientations of the previous phase, the dangerous vacuum appearing within its system of social control would have deepened further. The last two years have born witness, through a series of ideological and political crises, the process whereby the bourgeoisie has reorientated its strategy and ideology.

The bourgeoisie has openly recognized the seriousness of the crisis. It now presents us with the terrifying spectacle of the catastrophes and dangers that menace the ‘national community' and speaks straightforwardly of the perspective of war. This is the new language of ‘truth' and ‘sincerity'.

Given this somber, demoralizing and futureless perspective, where the ‘national community' is supposed to be under threat from all kinds of shadowy, undefinable forces - ‘terrorism', ‘imperialist encroachment', ‘totalitarianism' etc -- there is supposedly no other remedy than to accept the most terrible sacrifices, and to swallow the policies of ‘blood, sweat and tears', to save the ‘little we have'.

The bourgeoisie is trying to recreate its national unity by means of this ‘sincerity', which aims at the complete demoralization of the working class. In this way, the bourgeoisie adapts to the chaos and decomposition of its own social system, trying to drag the proletariat down with it. Faced with the enormous responsibilities imposed by this moment in history, the workers have tended to adopt a concerned, reflective stance. The bourgeoisie is trying to take advantage of this mood and transform it into demoralization, apathy, and despair.

Naturally, the final aim of this ideological orientation can only be the defeat of the proletariat, its unconditional submission to the drive towards war. And it can only be applied through a huge campaign of division and exhaustion carried out by the left and the unions from their base in the opposition.

7) In decadent capitalism, the state, whether ‘democratic' or ‘dictatorial', is transformed into a monstrous totalitarian apparatus which stretches its tentacles into the whole of social life, and submits the proletariat to an absolute and systematic occupation. In the countries of ‘democratic' totalitarianism this occupation is the specific function of the parties of the left (Stalinists, social democrats, and their leftist hangers-on).

As we pointed out at the 3rd Congress, the orientation of the left in power which predominated during the ‘70s resulted in a tremendous erosion of its apparatus. This weakened its hold on the proletariat and reduced its ability to fulfil its specific function within he bourgeois state -- that is to say to straitjacket the proletariat. All this has produced a profound crisis within this apparatus, which has been driven to take up a position where it can effectively carry out its role -- in other words, in opposition.

In fact, it is only in opposition (or rather, liberated from all direct governmental responsibility) that the left and the unions can devote themselves without any ambiguity to their specific role of stifling any attempts at workers' struggle, and hemming the workers in behind capitalism's plans for national solidarity and war.

But the left's passage into opposition is not simply a change of tactic to restore its control over the workers; it is also the best way of integrating this bourgeois faction in to capitalisms overall strategy, which is basically to demoralize and defeat the proletariat in order to open up the road to war.

A. Because it is only within a general orientation of ‘opposition' that the left and the unions are able to imprison the workers in tactics based on defensiveness and desperation:

-- isolated, corporatist struggles atomizing the workers in all kinds of divisions by factory, by trade etc.

-- humiliating and exhausting actions: hunger strikes, sit-ins, petitions to the authorities and public personalities.

-- reducing solidarity to individualist and moralist forms that systematically lead to a feeling of impotence and division.

-- deliberately fomenting in the workers a distrust in their own self-activity and self-organization, leading them to trust in the ‘mediation' of all types of institutions, organisms and ‘progressive' personalities.

B. Because only from the opposition can the left and the unions make credible their alternative of sharing out misery by accepting the imperatives of the national econ­omy. This permeates all their approaches to the struggle.

The left and the unions adapt themselves to the instinctive consciousness of the workers who know that in the present situation there's little possibility of winning immediate demands. To avoid the necessary leap of the workers to a higher level of massive struggles, the left and unions attempt to transform that consciousness into a defeatist vision: facing the crisis the only thing to be done is to share out the misery amongst everybody. This vision is 100%consistent with the strategy of isolat­ing and wasting away struggles. It is the best way of leading workers towards the logic of national solidarity. Within the framework of a ‘threatened national commun­ity', workers should accept the greatest sacrifices as long as they receive a ‘just and equal' treatment. In order to obtain it, they have to struggle against all the parties and bosses who are not for ‘solidar­ity', who are ‘anti-democratic' and ‘anti-patriotic', etc.

Paraphrasing Marx, the whole aim of the left and the unions is to ensure that workers don't see in their misery anything except misery, to prevent them seeing that their present misery is preparing the basis for definitively abolishing this misery.

C. Because only from the opposition can the left drown workers in the ideology of demoralization and nihilism that permeates the plans of the bourgeoisie as a whole. From within that perspective, the left,

-- turns reality on its head by presenting its passage to the opposition as resulting from the coming to power of the right. It implies that this is the result of a defeat of the workers and of a failure of the exp­ectations of ‘social change' and ‘radical reforms' prevalent in the ‘70s. Everywhere it asserts that society is becoming ‘more right-wing', and workers too.

-- attempts to ‘prove' that workers are ‘defeated' and becoming more ‘right-wing', using as proofs the present maturation of workers' consciousness, with its apparent apathy and refusa1 to struggle under unfav­ourable conditions. In this way, the left tries to demoralize and later defeat the workers.

-- deliberately offers no ways out of the present situation except the very demoralizing ones of accepting misery, sacrifices for the nation, and struggling defensively for old myths that nobody believes in any­more, such as ‘socialism', ‘democracy', etc. All this essentially obeys the need to demoralize and discourage workers, to make them suffer the barbarous misery that the bourgeoisie imposes.

In reality the role the left in opposit­ion is similar to that of a ‘workers' law­yer who says that he's doing everything possible for them but claims that ‘times aren't so good', ‘the enemy is powerful', and since ‘the client doesn't co-operate', there's not much he can do.

D. Because it is only from the opposition that the left and the unions can presently unfold a whole panoply of broad, flexible tactics for confronting and dispersing the workers' struggles. The experience of these last years show us this variety of tactics used by the left and unions:

-- accepting the generalization of the class struggle, including some of its violent reactions, but at the same time totally strangling their self-organization (as was the case in Longwy-Denain);

-- allowing a local and short-lived devel­opment of self-organization and generalization of the class struggle, but maintain­ing a firm control on the national scale (British steel strike);

-- establishing a ‘cordon sanitaire' around a radical and self-organized struggle, in order to totally block its generalization (Rotterdam);

-- sharing out roles of ‘moderates', and ‘radicals' between two factions of a trade union (New York subway), between two unions (as in France or Spain) or between the Stalinist party and the unions (Fiat, Italy), with the aim of retaining overall control over the workers;

-- anticipating workers' discontent through fake struggles that at times can achieve a massive and spectacular character (Sweden);

-- impeding the maturation of workers struggles by provoking premature clashes under unfavourable conditions.

This broad rainbow of tactics also allows the left and the unions to better conceal themselves in front of the workers. These tactics allow them to dilute their responsibilities, to wash their faces from time to time, to present themselves not as a unified and monolithic apparatus, but as a ‘living, democratic, organ', where all sorts of tendencies can co-exist. This makes the denouncing of the unions and the left a more difficult and complex task.

In a general way, we can conclude that the turn of the left towards the opposition means a short term reinforcement of their control of the class, which allows them to develop a tactic of attrition, isolation and demoralization of the workers' strugg­les. This tactic flows from the general strategy of the bourgeoisie aimed at the demoralization and defeat of the proletar­iat.

But, in the longer term, in contrast to the ‘30s, such a turn does not mean that the left has the capacity to lock the working class inside a bourgeois perspective dressed up as a ‘worker's alternative', or to carry out physical shackling of the proletariat, its subordination to a naked and asphyxiating control without any political justification.

8) The perspective of the left in opposit­ion is complemented by two other elements of the present global strategy of the bourgeoisie:

A. The systematic reinforcement of rep­ression and state terror;

B. The ideological campaigns of pro-war and nationalist hysteria.

A. All the states in the world are quantit­atively and qualitatively developing the instruments of their repressive and terror­istic apparatus (police, courts, army, propag­anda). The goal of all this is:

-- to create a mechanism which can be comb­ined with the tactics of attrition and dispersion favored by the left and the unions;

-- to prevent the generalized confrontations that are maturing today. This massive reinforcement of the state's terrorist arse­nal is justified and supported wholeheart­edly by the left which:

-- participates without hesitation in the anti-terrorist campaigns and ceaselessly calls for the repressive reinforcement of the state;

-- demands more repression and more police under the excuse of anti-fascism and anti-­racism (Belgium);

-- never tires of demanding the insatiable increase of military budgets in the name of ‘the defense of national sovereignty'.

Its protests against repressive acts never question this reinforcement of the state. The left limits itself to uttering pious moanings against the most explicit and extreme aspects and criticizes (in the name of social peace and the national int­erest) the unthinking, excessively partisan or too provocative use of repression.

In reality, in spite of their formal separation and their apparent antagonism, the trade union and left apparatus and the police apparatus complement each other in front of the class struggle. Repression is unleashed on the workers once they have been isolated and disarmed by the practices of the left and the unions; at the same time, by being directed selectively to the more radical sectors of the workers, repression pushes the majority of the workers towards accepting the methods and defeatist alternatives of the left and the unions.

8. On top of the fundamental ideological orientations that we mentioned in point 6, the bourgeoisie has attempted to develop hysterical pro-war and nationalist campaigns which aim to politically weaken the class and to mobilize it along with the rest of the population behind its plans for sacrifice and war.

The deep exhaustion of the old mystifications (anti-fascism, anti-terrorism, democracy, national defense, etc.) means that these campaigns have in general had little success. Rather than taking a coherent and systematic form, they have been     based largely on the exploitation of particular events;

-- the case of the hostages was utilized in the USA in order to prop up the campaign of a national solidarity;

-- the acts carried out by the extreme right, in France, Italy and Belgium have resulted in anti-fascist campaigns;

-- the threat of invasion by Russia has been used in Poland as a ,justification for social peace;

-- anti-terrorism in Spain and Italy;

-- the general elections in Germany were the springboard for a gigantic campaign of war preparations under the guise of pacificism.

The balance-sheet of these campaigns is not positive for the bourgeoisie:

-- at least in the immediate, they have not had an impact on the proletariat;

-- their mystifications have been exposed and the bourgeoisie's prestige has decrea­sed due to the internal contradictions of the events involved (i.e, the earthquake in Italy or the Arregui case in Spain vis-a-vis the anti-terrorist hysteria);

-- these campaigns have mainly attempted to foment an atmosphere of insecurity, confus­ion and demoralization. They have not been as successful as part of a coherent polit­ical strategy for the ideological mobilization of the class the bourgeoisie is far from having such a strategy today.

9) Throughout this section we have analyzed in detail the bourgeoisie's response to its present historical dilemma. The question we must ask ourselves is: does that answer mean a strengthening of the bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the proletariat? Can such a response defeat the proletarian resurgence which began in 1978?

For us, the whole orientation of the politics of the bourgeoisie over the last three years have led to a short term strengthening of the ruling class; but it also expresses a position of weakness lead­ing to an effective weakening in the long term.

We are now going to develop this apparently contradictory thesis.

In the short term, this orientation allows the bourgeoisie:

A. to use coherently and without compromise all of its social and political forces:

-- the right, in power, organizes a frontal attack against the class without any risk of losing prestige or contradicting its basis of support in society;

-- the left, placed in opposition, can dedicate itself, without any handicaps, to demobilizing the workers, and exhausting their struggles, thus aiding capitalism's attacks, and creating a climate of demoralization and impotence in order to prepare defeat in the future;

B. to concentrate coherently and cohesively all its forces and instruments against the proletariat. Today, in spite of the internal conflicts of capital and its weaknesses and anachronisms, we are seeing a systematic and combined offensive of the whole of its forces against the workers. There is a degree of coordination, a capacity for working together, and a unity of strategy never seen in the past amongst the bourgeois forces. Left and right, bosses and unions, repressive bodies and the media, church and secular institutions, etc., coordinate their efforts in the same anti-proletarian direction. They know how to converge from their various, divergent and contradictory positions to a single front line defending the bourgeois order. This means a higher level of bourgeois action against the working class in contrast with the previous period, when the bourgeoisie used repression without really linking it to mystifications or used mystifications without openly employing repression;

C. to develop a strategy of isolating and exhausting flare-ups of class struggle, of drowning them in the general climate of demoralization, with the aim of facilitat­ing the total, final defeat of the prolet­ariat and opening up a definitive course towards war.

This reorientation of the bourgeois state apparatus is having a certain immed­iate effectiveness. It has, up to a point, managed to contain the development of class antagonisms in the main proletarian concen­trations, giving the state a spectacular facade of force and power. Now, even if we must not underestimate at all the force of the bourgeoisie and must denounce in detail and to the maximum degree its campaigns and maneuvers, such denunciations would be useless if they weren't informed by a clear vision of the weakness and fragility, the profound contradictions, underlying the power of the bourgeoisie today.

We must not forget that all this reorie­ntation has taken place with the aim of confronting the proletarian reemergence since 1978; in other words, that the start­ing point of this reorientation is a posit­ion of weakness and surprise on the part of the bourgeoisie. As the battles in Poland show, the present situation continues to be determined by the inability of the bourge­oisie to subordinate the proletariat and crush class antagonisms. At the present level of the capitalist crisis, such an incapacity is a grave danger for bourgeois power, because it weakens it economically and politically, deepening its contradict­ions and increasing its inability to drag society towards its ‘solution' to the crisis -- world war.

Therefore, the present coherence and strength of bourgeois political strategy must be essentially interpreted as the last resort, the supreme effort of the bourgeois state to avoid a generalized class confrontation.

This must not lead us to underestimate the force of the bourgeoisie, because the possibilities opened up by its recent political reorientation are certainly not exhausted, and the working class is going to go through a hard period during which the danger of being crushed by the present concentration and combination of bourgeois resources will be ever-present. But, at the same time, we cannot ignore that the decisive word is still with the proletariat. As long as the class is capable of deepening the breach opened by the massive struggles in Poland, it will be able to overcome the weight of the tremendous concentration of enemy forces facing it, and open up a process of breaking up the bourgeois front. In this process, all the aspects that today appear as strong points of capitalism will be transformed into marks of its weakness.

As we mentioned at the beginning, the present strategy of the bourgeoisie recognizes openly the breakdown of its social system, the fact that it really has nothing to offer except war. This admittance can have the immediate and dangerous effect of demoralizing the proletariat and trapping it in the barbarism imposed on it by capit­al. But if the proletariat manages to broaden its struggles to break the chain of isolation and attrition, the very sincerity by the bourgeoisie will create an enormous vacuum. This would allow workers to develop a revolutionary alternative because they would have clear confirmation of the chaos of the bourgeoisie's system.

"When the bourgeoisie admits that its system is bankrupt, that it has noth­ing else to offer except imperialist butchery, it is contributing to the creation of the conditions which can allow the proletariat to find the path of its historic alternative to the capitalist system"[2]

The left in opposition is showing its momentary capacity to stop workers' strugg­les and it could succeed in exhausting and sinking the immense combativity of the proletariat. But, at the same time, such a political orientation is dangerous because it has no illusory perspectives to offer the proletariat. Thus, this whole orient­ation can end up showing the essential character of the left and the unions as 'oppositional' appendages to capitalism's policy of war and misery, as mere instrum­ents for the physical straight jacketing and policing of the proletariat.

Equally, the reinforcement of repression and bourgeois state terror can sow within the proletariat a momentary climate of fear and impotence, but in the long run this reinforcement shows its class character and thus the need to confront it violently without pacifist, democratic or legalist illusions.

Finally, the campaigns of nationalist and warlike hysteria launched by capital can intoxicate the proletariat with chauv­inist and inter-classist poisons, but the weakness of their ideological bases and the capitalist contradictions that underlie them can lead to the contrary result: they become additional factors forcing the proletariat to clarify its revolutionary alternative and deepen its class autonomy.

The tendency for the left to go into opposition, and the reinforcement of the repressive apparatus, express a process of formal reinforcement of the bourgeois state that hides a more profound real weakening.

In the final analysis, the present facade of cohesion and strength the bourg­eois front has the clay feet of a profound incapacity to transcend its internal contr­adictions and channel the whole of society towards bourgeois alternatives. Everything that today lurks in the darkness can be brutally exposed to the light of day if the proletariat develops a front line of massive class combats. Far from being a simple hypothesis or the faraway echo of old historical experiences, this is a real poss­ibility clearly announced by the Polish mass strikes:

"It is not only in the struggles of the proletariat that the events in Poland prefigure what will increasingly become the general situation of all the industrialized countries. The internal convulsions of the ruling class that we can see in Poland today, including their more exaggerated aspects, are an indication of sub­terranean developments going on throughout bourgeois society. Since August the ruling circles in Poland have been in a state of genuine panic. In government circles, for the past five months, ministerial portfolios have been constantly changing hands. It has even got to the point that a government ministry has been entrusted to a Catholic. But the convulsions have been strongest in the most important force within the ruling class: the party."[3]

3. The response of the proletariat

10. Once we have examined the strategy of the bourgeoisie, let's make a balance-sheet of the response that the working class is giving in the present historical situation. In order to do this we have to ask ourselves the following three questions:

1) Is it becoming aware of the historic responsibilities it bears in the present situation?

2) To what extent do its most recent struggles express that awareness? Do they constitute a step forward towards the revolution?

3) What lessons and perspectives are to be drawn from those struggles?

To answer these three questions is the intention of the present section.

11. "When it is a question of making a precise study of the strikes, comb­inations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organization as a class, some are gripped by a real panic, and the others exhibit a transcendental disdain."[4]

The process through which the working class matures its understanding of the historical situation and of the tasks that it faces is not at all simple nor self-evident.

The thought and will of the working class are expressed exclusively through its mass­ struggles against the bourgeois order; and when looking at these struggles we need to have an approach that captures their objective dynamic if we are to understand their true historical meaning. There is always a brutal discrepancy between the objective impact of the struggles and the subjective representations that workers make them.

The present situation expresses, in an extreme manner, this difficulty of grasping the real direction of workers' struggles. Our Third Congress announced a new period of proletarian resurgence after 1978, but remarked that such a resurgence would follow a contradictory, slow and painful course, expressed by a series of sudden explosions and not by a progressive, cumulative, and gradual movement. The struggles of 1979/80, and especially the Polish strikes, have confirmed that prediction completely. However, seeing the ascendant dynamic of the movement and appreciating its steps forward has become very difficult for the class and for its revolutionary groups.

This has become quite clear in respect of the struggles in Poland. Many revolut­ionary groups have expressed a transcenden­tal disdain towards them. They see only the surface appearances, which are conven­iently deformed by the bourgeoisie: workers receiving communion, Polish flags, Walesa, etc. Our organization has had to carry out a determined struggle against such ways of looking at the Polish events, because they express a conception of the development of the class struggle and class consciousness which has pernicious consequences in the present situation.

Let's say once and for all, that the proletariat is the class that concentrates all the inhumanity of bourgeois society. It suffers from a profound dispossession and alienation. Therefore, its existence man­ifests in an extreme and sharp way a fund­amental blemish of bourgeois society: the separation between being and consciousness, the discrepancy, or even the opposition, between the objective reality of social acts and the subjective representation made    of them by their protagonists. The working class is no stranger to this phenomenon, and this discrepancy will exist until the final triumph of its movement for liberation.

The working class does not react to such a discrepancy by creating a ‘new culture', or by elaborating a ‘new science', but by overcoming the separation between being and consciousness in the course of the struggle itself. It gives rise to a conscious movement which, over and above all the subjective representations that can be made of it, tends to overthrow the objective conditions    that give rise to this discrepancy in the first place (capitalist exploitation, class divisions, etc).

Thus, when we analyze in depth the Polish events, we see that the proletariat in that country, in spite of its weaknesses, has expressed in the struggle a clear understanding of the fundamental needs of the present historical situation:

A. It's capacity to generalize its struggle, must to maintain a massive pressure, backed by force, against the state, while at the same time avoiding premature or unfavourable confrontations, expresses its active grasp of the present historic moment and of the responsibilities faced by our class.

B. Its will towards self-organization and of the unity shows that it has understood clearly the class confrontations that await it.

C. Its class struggle response to the appeals of the bourgeoisie to be responsible towards the national economy, express how the class senses the irreconcilable opposition that exists between class interests and national interests.

It is not a question of glorifying this comprehension, which is still more or less instinctive, but of recognizing its reality and using it as a point of departure for the action of communist minorities of the proletariat and for the development of new struggles.

Now, the question that is posed immediately is: has the rest of the world proletariat grasped the ‘message' of its Polish brothers? Can we affirm with certainty that the whole of the world proletariat is preparing itself to answer the demands of this crucial historical conjuncture?

At first sight, it seems as if the of battles in Longwy-Denain, the British steel strike, Rotterdam, and above all Poland have not had any immediate effect. After these struggles nobody has seen the expected wave of international class struggle. Does this mean that our 3rd Congress' announcement of a new cycle of class struggle was false? Not at all! The analysis of the historical conditions that we have made in the first part of this report, and the balance sheet of the struggles we are going to go through, clearly confirm such a perspective. However what we must clarify is the concrete path that the class is moving along towards that perspective.

Longwy-Denain, British steel strike, Rotterdam, etc. have been the first attem­pts, the first signposts, of that new wave. Together they constitute a sort of reconn­aissance of the terrain. The immediate outcome of this has generally been a fail­ure, but it has taught the class the tremendous road it has to traverse, the ferocious concentration of forces that it faces, the weakness of the resources that it has available. It has shown that the problems posed are greater than the problems solved. All this has made the class stand back and embark on a subterranean process of maturation.

In appearance Poland has aggravated this falling back of the western proletariat. Although it has answered many of the problems that were posed in Longwy-Denain, the British steel strike, it has also sharply clarified the tremendous scope that proletarian struggles have today, the enormous preconditions they must fulfill to struggle with a minimum possibility of victory. All that tends to perpetuate the tense calm we are living today.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this, we must clearly establish the enormous impact that the struggle of the Polish proletariat has had on its class brothers in the rest of the world. This has been proven by the magnificent call of the Fiat workers: Gdansk-Turin, same combat; the struggles that have continued in Rumania, Hungary, Russia, Czechoslovakia, among the Berlin railway workers, etc. The struggle Polish workers have awakened enormous expectations amongst the workers of Germany, Spain, France, etc.

The present state of class consciousness can be summarized as follows: workers instinctively realize that the historical situation is very grave, that every struggle is critically important. They realize the truth that each struggle is forced to confront the concentrated and combined force of all the weapons the enemy has at its disposal. All this leads to a certain paralysis -- to a process of reflection which gives rise to doubts and even disorientation.

This difficult process of maturation contains great dangers. For its part the bourgeoisie acts in a decisive manner, seeking to isolate and exhaust each outburst of struggle, presenting what is a process of maturation as a defeat and a sign of demoralization. This danger exists! But we would be abdicating our responsibility in the face of this danger if we failed to see the objective dynamic struggle which is developing, and did not intervene resolutely with the aim of transforming all the anxieties, the apparent apathy, and the searchings of today into the beginnings of struggles which will accelerate and strengthen the immense process of ripening class struggle.

12) At the 3rd International Congress, on the basis of the as yet embryonic experience of the struggles by miners in America, of steel workers in Germany, of workers in Iran and Longwy/Denain ... we took the risk, on the basis of a concrete, global, analysis of seeing in these struggles the start of a new wave of proletarian struggle which would bring an end to the relative reflux of 1973-78. Today we can categorically confirm that such a start has been made:

-- September 1979: Rotterdam strike.

-- January-April 1980: steel strike in Britain.

-- March-April 1980: social revolts in Syria, Korea, Algeria and Holland.

-- May 1980: strikes in the New York metro and at Gorky and Toggliatigrad in the imperialist metropoles.

-- July-August 1980: mass strikes in Poland.

-- after Poland strikes at Fiat, in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Russia, In appearance Poland has aggravated this Bulgaria ...

-- October-November 1980: wave of relatively large strikes in Portugal and Ireland.

-- starting in December 1980: gigantic workers' and peasants' movements in Peru.

Poland is at the epicenter of this development of the class struggle. The struggles which preceded those in Poland had some positive aspects, but they lacked many things on an overall level:

-- Longwy/Denain raised the question of class violence and the need for generalization, but there was no self-organization.

-- the steel workers in Britain developed self-organization and generalized the fight at a local level, but failed to do            so on a national level. 

-- in Korea, the semi-insurrectional movement was crushed with a total absence of coordination and self-organization.

-- in Brazil and Rotterdam self-organization triumphed but there was no generalization.

What the class movement in Poland did was to unify all the partial tendencies of these struggles in a single large mass strike which in turn provided the answer -- or the beginnings of an answer -- to all the questions raised by earlier struggles.

Poland is the most important class movement not only since the proletarian resurgence of 1978, but since the crushing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-26. It places the whole of the present, cycle of the class struggle at a higher level, simply by crystallizing all the tendencies which emerged during the previous struggles. Clearly, the lessons of Poland will take time to be assimilated by workers in other countries, and some time and work will be needed before they crystallize into struggles at a higher level. But this cannot hide the immense step forward which has been taken by the proletariat in Poland and the necessity to generalize the lessons of Poland to the whole working class.

4. Fundamental perspectives for the future struggles

13) The lessons of the mass strike in Poland, in the light of the class positions based on the historical struggle of the proletariat, provide us with the basic characteristics which must be met by struggles in the future if they are to attain the higher level which is demanded by the historical situation, which Poland has in a fundamental way helped to bring about.

14) The proletarian revolt against the bourgeois order opens up an immense process of self-organization and self-activity of working class whose unitary and centralized expression are general assemblies and elected and revocable strike committees.      

These organizations are the minimum precondition for the unification of the whole class movement at a given stage of         its development; while they provide a foundation for the development of a more advanced class movement, they also create problems for the evolution of this movement, because of their association with a particular stage of struggle.

These limitations make them vulnerable to the activities of the bourgeoisie, which does not abandon the terrain of working class organization but, of the contrary, attempts, through its unions and oppositional forces, to attack the proletarian movement from within, and divests these organizations of all working class content, while at the same time maintaining the form and the name in order to trick the workers better. This makes working class organs, as long as the revolution has not triumphed, a battle-ground between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (represented by the unions and the left).

However this reality, a product of the totalitarian character of decadent capitalism, must not lead us to consider working class organs as mere forms without a content or as hybrid organizations without a definite class character. And above all this must not lead us to the much more ser­ious error of comparing them with organisms created by the unions to suppress proletarian self-organization (Intersyndicales in France, or ‘strike committees' in Britain) or with the various other types of unionist organisms.

The organs which emanate from mass strikes express the will of the working class to

-- constitute itself as an organized force against capital;

-- unify and centralize its self-activity and self-organization;

-- take complete control of its struggle.

This, despite all the temporary limitations of their composition and form, and the penetration which they suffer from bourgeois forces, places them in a camp which is diametrically opposed to all quasi-unionist forms of organization.

15) Generalization. In the present period, class solidarity, the generalization of struggles, has a more profound significance     for the proletariat than it had in the ‘60s and '70s.

In these years, the working class launched itself into broad movements characterized by solidarity and self-organization. But conditions in this period still allowed partial struggles to be relatively successful. This was because they either won temporary gains, or they temporarily pushed back the bourgeoisie. Within this framework, generalization, whatever its potential, was only understood in a limited way, as simply ‘support', or as the idea that ‘if they win, we'll be able to win too'.

These ideas, while being a basic starting point for all working class struggles, are inadequate in the face of the present situation. In present conditions class solidarity can only be conceived of in the sense of joining the struggle, extending the confrontation, with the aim of constituting a social force which can successfully confront the bourgeois state and open up the way to revolution. In the present situation, class solidarity becomes a question of life or death: any struggle, by any sector of the working class, is inevitably an expression of the struggle which must be taken up by the whole working class.

16) Demand struggles and revolutionary struggle. One of the problems which makes it very difficult for struggles to break out at the moment, is the impossibility, which is becoming increasingly obvious, of winning economic gains which last for more than a few months. This is clearly apparent in Poland: the gigantic mass strike has won satisfaction on only a few points in the Gdansk agreement.

Does this mean, that economic struggle is useless and that it must abandoned in fav­or of an abstract ‘political struggle' or a no less ethereal simultaneous general strike on the appointed day?

Not at all! Demand struggles are the profound basis of the revolutionary struggle of the working class because the working class is both an exploited class and the revolutionary class in capitalist society -- because its immediate interest in resisting exploitation coincides with its historical interest in the abolition of exploitation.

Because of this, as we have seen in Poland, mass political struggle (the strikes in August) are prepared for by a wave of partial, economic struggles (the strikes in July) and then give way again to a new series of economic struggles.

The revolutionary potential of the demand struggles of the proletariat lies in the fact that they express a logic diametrically opposed to that which regulates capitalist society. The logic capitalism demands that the workers subordinate their interests and needs to those of commodity production and the national interest. Workers oppose this with the logic of their human needs, and this is the underlying basis of communism: To each according to his needs, from each according to his capabilities.

"The workers must declare that as human beings, they cannot adapt them­selves to existing conditions, but that the conditions must adapt them­selves to them as human beings." (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England)

The political struggle of the proletar­iat doesn't mean abandoning or ‘transcend­ing' the economic struggle. The political struggle must take as a point of departure the basic logic contained in the economic struggle, leading it onto the only terrain­ where it can realize its whole potentiality: the terrain of a general confrontation between classes, of a war to the death against the bourgeois state. Therefore, the political struggle is not a supposed ‘political reform of the state', or a better transition program, nor is it waiting for a D-day when there will be a political general strike. It means the comprehension by the workers that the inexorable deepening of the crisis, the fate of humanity, depends exclusively on the relation of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose interests and objectives are radically opposed. From that standpoint, the ‘political' problem of the working class is how to constitute itself into a social force capable of destroying the bourgeois state.

The metaphysical question of ‘economic struggle or political struggle' disappears when seen in this manner. The issue faced by each immediate struggle is not its immediate results but above all, its contribution to altering the relation of forces between the classes in favor of the proletariat. The issue is not a possible temporary victory which would vanish in a few days, but the capacity to express and answer problems that belong to the whole of the class. In that sense defensive struggles acquire all their importance:

"These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; They decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie is approaching. They are the military school of the work­ing man in which they prepare thems­elves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of ind­ustry that these too have joined the labor movement."[5]

17) Internationalism. At the 3rd Congress)  we were pointing out that the "objective internationalisation of struggles" implicit in the proletarian resurgence of 1978 was its "first and main" characteristic. Such internationalization was based on the fact that "we're heading towards equalization in misery of the workers in all enterprises, countries and regions". The dynamic of the events since then confirms such an analysis, but it also opens up perspectives that we must clarify and deepen. The maturation of the new cycle of workers' struggles is not a product of a sum of national processes; it follows a directly international dynamic.

Thus the continuation of Longwy-Denain is not to be found in France, apart from the effects it may have had on the French proletariat, but in Rotterdam, or the British steel strike. The mass strike in Poland is, as we have demonstrated, the synthesis of the struggles in Longwy-Denain, Rotterdam, Brazil, British steel strike, Korea, Russia, etc. The Polish workers knew for example about the strikes in Gorky and Togliattigrad and took them into account in their struggle. But, and this is more important, the problems that had been posed in the later dynamic of the Polish strikes (control over the states repressive apparatus, of the means of communication, continuation of the confrontations) express problems of the class movement that can be resolved only if the proletarian struggle is generalized on the international scale.

All this requires that the working class conceives internationalism less as a  question of simple mutual support and more as the self-awareness of a world class, with common interests and a common enemy, and above all, with a historic responsibility towards the dilemma ‘war or revolution'.

18) The struggle against war. If there's something that the experience of the last three years shows with crushing evidence, it is that the proletariat is the only social force capable of opposing the capitalist tendency towards war.

The struggle of the proletariat destabilized that pro-Yankee bastion, Iran, sinking its army (the fifth strongest in the world), The Russian bloc was unable to take advantage of this event, which constit­uted a frontal assault on the whole war machine of world capitalism. In 1980 the struggle of the Polish proletariat has brutally destabilized a pro-Russian bastion and the American bloc was also unable to exploit the situation, except in its propaganda.

What's more, 1980, which began with a very serious step towards war with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, ended, after the Polish events, in a relative limitation of inter-imperialist conflicts. We now saw the phenomenon of inter-imperialist cooperation between the two blocs to confront the common enemy: the proletariat. All this shows us the decisive force that the proletariat can wield against capitalism's war plans. Such a force is not one of ‘moral pressure' to ‘force both blocs to live in peace'. With or without class struggle the inter-imperialist tensions continue to deepen because their source is the insoluble contradictions of capitalism. The effect of the proletarian struggle is that it destabilizes capitalism's plans, that it aggravates its inner contradictions, altering the relation of forces towards the revolution, and in so doing, it blocks the historic tendency linked to capitalism's very existence, the tendency towards war.

The experience of local wars such as those in Iran-Iraq, or the one between Peru and Ecuador, shows us that though at the historic level the proletarian alternative is to impede the course towards war, at the level of local wars this alternative is expressed by a workers' struggle based on the principle of revolutionary defeatism: massive desertions, fraternization of troops of both sides, turning the guns towards one's own officers and cap­italists, transformation of the imperial­ist war into a civil war.

Local wars like those between Peru-Ecuador or Iran-Iraq are also police oper­ations within the bloc and attempts of the national capitals involved to provide out lets for their sharp internal class contra­dictions. In that sense, they aren't steps towards war but more products of capitalism's contradictions. Thus in spite of their possible immediate success in reconstituting national unity, they weaken cap­italism later on by provoking a higher and more violent aggravation of class antagonisms.

19) The struggle against repression. At the 3rd Congress we insisted that, faced with a level of repression that will become ever more systematic; and ferocious, the defense of the workers did not reside in ‘democratic guarantees' nor in armed groups that would militarily prepare the class, but in massive and violent struggle.

The experience of the mass strike in Poland has absolutely confirmed this prognosis, allowing us to make it more precise with regard to the historic experience of the proletariat.

­"The Polish workers have neutralized state repression not by ‘pacificism' but because from the start they have taken all the measures of force needed to dis­arm repression at its root. By occupy­ing factories day and night through mas­sive picketing, by maintaining mobilizations in the workers' neighborhoods against any police provocation, by every­where preparing measures of mass workers' self-defense and above all by extending and unifying the strikes throughout the country, a step which gives meaning to all the rest."[6]

The Polish experience clarifies what we mean by proletarian violence and by struggle against the repressive apparatus of capitalism. The working class can't ever fall into legalism and docility, but this doesn't mean that its struggle consists of looking for confrontations at any price, or of creating heroes or spilling blood, or resorting to ‘exemplary punishments'. Both these alternatives are radically false: legalism is the cynical hypocrisy of capitalism, and is a mere cover for the latter, namely its real practice: a blind, inhuman and irrational violence.

The class struggle is situated on another terrain, which is both social and political:  the terrain where the class, through mass struggles, becomes a revolutionary force capable of:

-- exerting upon capitalism and its state an increasingly asphyxiating pressure;

-- isolating them politically;

-- multiplying the internal contradictions within their own repressive apparatus; dividing, dispersing and finally neutralizing this apparatus.

"The whole secret and the whole force of certainty of the victory of the proletarian revolution resides in the fact that, in the long run, no government in the world can withstand a conscious popular mass, if their struggle extends itself incessantly and continues to grow in magnitude. Massacres and the brutal superiority of the government are but an apparent superiority over the masses."[7]

Naturally this historic tendency of the ­ class struggle does not constitute an infallible formula to resolve the problem of repression, including that of insurrection, ­ in ‘the most peaceful possible way', but it     remains a basic orientation for all the stages of the proletarian confrontation with capital. Therefore we aren't for any idea of the spontaneous collapse of the state through the pressure of the mass strike, but for two totally different things:

A. That an explosion of mass strikes weakens and momentarily paralyses the repression of the capitalist state;

B. That the terrain of mass struggle and the imposition of the immense social force that goes with it, is what the class must maintain, in order to use it as a springboard for higher confrontations.

At a higher level of confrontation - the insurrection - it would be very dangerous to assume a simple spontaneous collapse of the state. It's important to recognized that the state, once faced with a decisive situation, will muster forces even from its weakness, it will re-adapt, re-orient and re-organize itself, generally around ‘proletarian' forces (like, for example, the Mensheviks in Russia), and will attempt to bloodily crush the class movement. Therefore if the latter wants to pass on to a superior revolutionary level, it must prepare itself for the total destruction of the bourgeois state through insurrection, which is, according to Marx, an art which requires conscious and minute preparation on the part of the class. But such an art can only be realized through the mass mobilization and organization of the class.

20) The proletariat and other oppressed strata.

"Movements of social revolt against the existing order contribute to a process which leads to the growing isolation of the state and at the same time create the social conditions in which the proletariat can develop its own forms of struggle, and emerge as the only force in society able to provide an alternative to capitalism."[8]

This affirmation serves as the basis to continue and deepen the question of the relation between the proletariat and other oppressed strata.

The mass strike of the proletariat creates a climate of rebellion, direct action and questioning of the bourgeois order, and in different degrees the various sectors of the oppressed non-exploiting strata are affected by this climate. This does not mean, of course, that these strata have to wait until the proletariat jumps onto the scene before they can follow. Nobody is pretending to ‘give lessons' about the actions of these desperate strata or oppose what is an inevitable process, or, on the other hand, consider them as the basis for a supposed re-awakening of the prole­tariat. What is important is to recognize them as a maturation of the contradictions of capitalism, to encourage them in their revolt against an increasingly inhuman existence, and give them a perspective of uniting with the proletarian struggle.

4. The perspective of the revolution

21) A clear conclusion emerges today: we are living in a decisive epoch in which the class confrontations that will decide the fate of humanity are being prepared. As we remarked in section II, one of the main weapons of the bourgeoisie in the present situation is to drown the proletariat in a total lack of perspective, making it believe that there's no way out of this world of catastrophes and barbarism that capitalism imposes on us. This lack of perspective is not only a product of its ideological action, but above all of the immediate material action of capitalism's left and union apparatuses, which have the task of isolating and exhausting the struggle.

The massive struggles that are being   prepared must have a clear consciousness of the situation they will confront: they aren't going to gain any immediate satisfaction. Their real effect will be to throw into sharp relief the latent chaos of the capitalist economy, which will result in a ­gigantic destabilization of its political, economic and social structure. Of course, within that destabilization, the workers will be protected by the favorable relation of forces they have imposed and will be able to obtain many immediate demands. However, the price of this will be the aggravation of capitalist chaos to its extremes. If, at this point, the class gets lost in a myriad of local and partial actions, even if very radical, in the end the class will be swallowed up by the very chaos of the bourgeois order. Capitalism, which operates on a centralized world level, would recover control after this epidemic. ­Faced with the future massive mobilizations of our class, one of the main lines of defense of capitalism will be precisely the action of the left and the unions, which will try to imprison these explosions in a multitude of radical but chaotic actions through self-management, federalism, populism, etc.

The answer to this problem is not at all that workers should abandon their healthy, merciless economic struggles, but that they should concentrate them around the revolutionary attack against the bourgeois state, to destroy it and construct on its ruins the dictatorship of the workers' councils, which is the only possible basis for realizing the immense historical possibilities of this epoch.

Consequently, one of the fundamental needs of the present situation is that the perspective of revolution takes clearer and more concrete shape in the concerns and consciousness of the workers. The revolutionary alternative is the vital orientation which gives life and strength to future class battles. Revolutionaries must actively contribute to this with their analyses and with their defense of the historic experiences of the proletariat.

22) But another imperative need of the present situation, directly linked to what has been said above, is the development of the communist forces of the class to a higher level. They must converge towards the Party of the world revolution.

The first stage of the present historic resurgence of the proletariat (in the ‘60s and ‘70s) resulted in the development of a whole series of communist nuclei capable of programmatically re-appropriating the historic experiences of the proletariat. They also re-connected the threads with the past workers' organizations, threads cut by 50 years of counter-revolution. Now it is  important to understand that, in connection with the new stage in the class resurgence that work must equally pass onto a superior stage. In the course of future battles, the working class must create the revolutionary forces around the internationalist communist poles that have already been consolidated, which will concentrate their energies, and strengthen their movement towards the communist revolution and its world Party.

18.2.81

---

[1] Editorial in Accion Proletaria 28

[2] International Review 23, ‘International Class Struggle'

[3] International Review 24, ‘The international dimension of the workers' struggles in Poland'

[4] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy

[5] Ibid.

[6] Accion Proletaria 33, ‘Poland at the center of the world situation'

[7] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘In the Revolutionary Hour' (not in English)

[8] International Review 23, ‘International Class Struggle'

It's necessary to analyze the class struggle on three complementary but distinct levels, in order to understand its characteristics and draw its perspectives:

-- on the general historic level of the decadence of capitalism.

-- on the level of the resurgence of proletarian struggle at the end of 1960s, after half a century of counter-revolution.

-- on the level of the present phase of the struggle, which has picked up again after the pause which succeeded the 1968-74 wave.

1) Like all workers' struggles in the decadent period of capitalism, struggles today have the following characteristics:

-- they develop at the same time as the crisis of capitalist society deepens, in contrast to those of the last century (especially the second half), when the cyclical crisis generally proved fatal to the struggle.

-- their dynamic compels them to go beyond categories (trades, industrial branches), prefiguring and creating the conditions for the future revolutionary confrontation, when it won't be a sum of particular sectors of the class who go into action, but the whole proletariat as a class.

-- as in all periods they are organized, but this can't be done in advance of the struggle: although the workers can at no point give up the struggle for the defense of their economic interests, any permanent organization based on the defense of these interests (unions) is doomed to recuperation by capitalism and integration into the state. Since capitalism entered into its decadent phase, the proletariat can no longer organize itself before the struggle -- it organizes itself in the struggle, and this organization takes the form of general assemblies, elected and revocable strike committees, and, in revolutionary periods, the workers councils.

-- since they are up against a highly concentrated capitalism, struggles can only be effective if they tend to extend themselves. Unlike in the past, the length of a struggle is no longer a real weapon if the struggle remains isolated; because of this, real proletarian solidarity can no longer take the form of collecting funds for strikers. Solidarity means extending the struggle: in the period of decadence, the proletariat's most important weapon for responding to the ferocious attacks of a system at the end of its tether, and for preparing the overthrow of the system, is the mass strike, the real expression of class solidarity.

2. Since 1847 it's been clear for revol­utionaries that "the communist revolution ... won't be purely a national revolution, that it will take place at the same time in all the civilized countries." (Engels, The Principles of Communism) And the first revolutionary wave of this century (1917-23) did take place on a world scale. On this level, the present historical reawakening of the class struggle, which has to culminate in the communist revolution, isn't different from the previous one: right from the start, its theatre was the world. But the specific conditions in which it's taking place (an acute economic crisis of capitalism and not an imperialist war) provides it with advantages which the previous one lacked as regards the world­wide extension of the revolutionary struggle.

While the imperialist war had the effect of brutally plunging the proletariat of the belligerent countries into a common situa­tion marked by atrocious deprivation and absurd massacres -- which, in the first war, led to the rapid disintegration of capital­ist mystifications and forced the class to pose immediately the problem of the politicization of the struggle, as well as its world-wide character -- the imperialist war also brought with it a whole series of obstacles to the generalization of revol­utionary struggles on a world scale:

-- the division between ‘victorious' and ‘beaten' countries: in the former, the proletariat was more easily prey to the chauvinist poison poured out in huge doses by the bourgeoisie, in the second, while national demoralization created the best conditions for the development of internationalism, it by no means closed the door to revanchist feelings (cf ‘national Bolshevism' in Germany) . 

-- the division between belligerent and ‘neutral' countries: in the latter countries the proletariat didn't suffer a massive deterioration of its living standards.

-- faced with a revolutionary movement born out of the imperialist war, the bourgeoisie could resort to bringing a halt to hostilities (cf Germany in November 1918).

-- once the imperialist war was over, capitalism had the possibility of reconstructing itself and thus, to some extent, of improving its economic situation. This broke the élan of the proletarian movement by depriving it of its basic nourishment: the economic struggle, and the obvious bankruptcy of the system.

By contrast, the gradual development of a general crisis of the capitalist economy ‑- although it doesn't allow for the development of such a rapid awareness about the real stakes of the struggle and the necessity for internationalism -- does eliminate the above obstacles in the following way:

-- it puts the proletariat of all countries on the same level: the world crisis doesn't spare any national economy.

-- it offers the bourgeoisie no way out except a new imperialist war, which it can't unleash until the proletariat has been defeated.

3. While the necessities we have been talk­ing about have been imposed on the working class since the historic re-emergence of its struggle at the end of the 1960s, it's only through a gradual process that the prole­tariat is able to develop an awareness of these necessities. Since the battles which began in 1968 and lasted until 1974 (‘76 in Spain), the class has been confronted with the obstacle of the unions, with the need to organize and extend its struggle, with the world-wide character of the struggle. However a consciousness of these needs has only developed in a very embryonic way, amongst a minority of the class (May 1968 saw a general strike in France, but it was controlled by the unions; in Italy, workers went outside the unions, but the movement was recuperated through ‘base committees'; in Spain there was an assembly movement, but it was channeled towards ‘rank and file unionism'; the strikes in France and Italy had an international impact, but were looked at in a passive way by workers in other countries, etc.). Drawing strength from these weaknesses of the proletariat -- weaknesses derived to a great extent from the counter-revolutionary period which the class was just emerging from -- the bourg­eoisie was effectively able to launch its counter-offensive from the mid-1970s, based on the tactic of the ‘left in power' or ‘on the road to power'. But this tactic was also to some extent facilitated by the relatively tolerable level of the crisis up to 1974 and by an illusion widely held in all layers of society: that the collapse of 1974-75 was only a passing phase.

With the new aggravation of the economic crisis that took place at the crossroads of the 1970s and the ‘80s, a new situation opened up both for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. After the ‘years of illusion' came the ‘years of truth', posing much more sharply the historic alternative between war and revolution, sweeping away the illusions about an ‘alternative' that could take the system out of its crisis, forcing the proletariat to see what is at stake in its struggle in a far sharper way than ever before.

4. These ‘years of truth' have forced the bourgeoisie to launch another kind of offensive against the working class -- an offensive much less based on illusions about a ‘rosy future', much more based on ‘truths' that can no longer be hidden and which are used to demoralize the prole­tariat.

This offensive is also based on a systematic division of labor between the differ­ent sections of the bourgeoisie, so that the ruling class can, through the various parts of its state machine, get a firm grip on the whole of social life, so that it can plug the gaps opened up in its class rule by the crisis.

In this division of labor, it's the task of the right -- that is, the political sector which, whatever its label, is not directly linked to the function of control­ling and mystifying the workers -- to ‘speak openly' and firmly carry out the government role which it's tending to assume more and more. Meanwhile the left -- that is, the bourgeois factions who, because of their language and their implantation in the wor­king class, have the specific task of mystifying and controlling the workers -- from the opposition stance which it's adopted in most countries, has the job of preventing this ‘tough line' allowing the proletariat to develop a clear awareness of its situation, to push its class response further forward.

Thus when the right in power says that the crisis is international and has no sol­ution on a national scale, the left in opposition loudly proclaims the contrary, to prevent the working class from becoming conscious of the bankruptcy of the capital­ist economy and the world-wide dimension of its struggles.

When the right puts forward the idea that war is a real danger, the left obscure this reality with all sorts of pacifist drivel, to prevent the working class from understanding what's really at stake in the present situation.

When the right presents the growth of unemployment and austerity as inevitable, the left comes along to say the opposite, talking about ‘bad management' by the right­ist parties, about the role of the big monopolies, about ‘making the rich pay', in order to hide the fact that there is no solution, that, whatever remedy it looks for, capitalism in all its forms is doomed and offers only growing misery.

When the right in power increases the means and measures of repression in the name of ‘insecurity' and the ‘terrorist' or even the ‘fascist' threat, the left comes along to make the working class accept these measures by hysterically invoking the same threats, by calling for a more ‘demo­cratic' use of repression, in order to pre­vent workers becoming aware that it's the whole society of exploitation, whatever forces are running it, which is the cause of oppression and repression.

Thus, in all the domains where the bourgeoisie is carrying out its offensive, it's up to the left-wing sectors, those in whom the working class has the most ill­usions, to make sure this offensive isn't met with growing resistance, that it does­n't open the workers' eyes to the fact that there's no way out except the overthrow of capitalism, to make sure that this offen­sive only gives rise to disorientation, resignation, and despair.

The fact that the bourgeoisie is now being led to play the card of the ‘left in opposition' against the working class doesn't mean that this card is the only one that can be used at all times and in all circum­stances. In particular, in certain situa­tions the left carries out its role better by participation in power: either in gov­ernments of ‘national unity' during imper­ialist wars, or directly at the head of governments in revolutionary periods. Moreover its adoption of a ‘determined' oppositional role corresponds to a general need of the bourgeoisie in the present period of rising class struggle after the reflux of the 1970s. This doesn't mean that this need is always concretized in an immediate and optimum manner. But all the specific examples (whether for electoral or other reasons) which show the inability of the bourgeoisie to clearly put its left parties into opposition must be understood as expressions of the particular weakness of this class -- manifestations of a polit­ical crisis which can only get worse and worse.

5. Only by going into opposition could the left retain some credibility in the eyes of the workers, make them believe its lies, sabotage from within the struggles inevitab­ly produced by the growth of mass poverty.

Freed of its governmental responsibilities, the left today can use a more ‘radic­al', ‘working class' language. It can take up certain aspirations of the class, the better to stifle them. It can call for struggle, for the extension of struggle, even for its ‘self-organization' when it has the guarantee that its unions will keep control of this ‘extension' and that this ‘self-organization' remains isolated.

In the coming period, the left and the unions, as they've already begun to do, won't spare any effort to deafen the prol­etarians with their ‘combative' language, to disorientate them with their facade of intransigence and with their adroit div­ision of labor between the union hierarchy and ‘rank and file unionism'. All this is aimed at exhausting proletarian combativity, dispersing it, preventing workers coming to a real understanding of what's really at stake in the struggle.

6. Even if it's being done in a prevent­ative, systematic manner, coordinated on a world scale, this new offensive of the bourgeoisie has not, as yet, met with a total success. The developments over the last years - the Rotterdam strike (September 1979), the British steel-workers' strike (January-April'80), the metal     workers' strike in Brazil (April ‘80), the New York transit strike and the strikes in Gorki and Toggliattigrad (May ‘80), and above all the immense movement of the workers in Poland -- have confirmed the perspective put forward by the 3rd congress of the ICC: "after a period of relative reflux during the mid-1970s, the working class is once again tending to the combativity which it showed in a generalized and often spectacular manner after 1968." (‘Resolution on the International Situation', IR18)

Thus while the movement of the left into opposition has enabled the bourgeoisie to strengthen its positions, this was a strengthening only in relation to the old tactic of the ‘left in power', which had become out of date with the aggravation of the crisis and the resurgence of class ­struggle: it doesn't constitute an absolute strengthening vis-a-vis the working class.

7. In the same way, while this strengthening certainly has taken place, it's only for the moment. As the struggle moves forward it will tend to overcome the obstacles which the left puts in way of the development of class consciousness. Thus in the last two years, another point made by the3rd congress has also been confirmed: "Even if it doesn't appear immediately in a clear way, one of the essential characteristics of this new wave of struggle will be a tendency to take off from the highest qualitative level reached by the last wave. This will express itself in a more marked tendency to go beyond the unions, to extend struggles outside professional and sectional limits, to develop a clearer awareness of the international character of the class struggle." (‘Resolution on the International Situation')

This confirmation has essentially been supplied by the workers of Poland. The struggle in Poland has provided answers to a whole series of questions which were posed in previous struggles without being answered in a clear way:

-- the necessity for the extension of the struggle (Rotterdam).

-- the necessity for self-organization (steel strike in Britain).

-- the attitude towards repression (Longwy/ Denain).

On all these points the struggles in Poland represent a great step forward in the world-wide struggle of the proletariat, which is why these struggles are the most important for half a century.

But these struggles have in turn posed a new question for the proletariat - a question which the workers in Poland can't answer for themselves: the necessity for the world-wide generalization of the struggle.

Capitalism itself has already begun to answer this question through the unity it's displaying against the working class -- a       unity within the blocs and also, despite all their imperialist antagonisms, between the blocs.

From the west to the east, all capitalist countries are pushing their internal divisions into the background in the face of the proletarian danger. They are drawing common lessons about the most effective measures to take against the working class: the utilization of nationalist, democratic, trade unionist mystifications; threats of military intervention; repression.

In regions like Central America (El Salvador), the Middle East, SE Asia, the proletariat is isolated because it isn't strongly concentrated and doesn't have the same traditions of struggle as in Europe or North America. In these areas a bloody and ferocious repression is being meted out to the sound of crocodile tears from the leaders of the major powers, who are the main suppliers of aid to those who actually carry out the repression.

Thus its important to underline the fact that it's Europe and the main industrialized countries which will provide the most solid base for the next revolutionary wave -‑ which will then rebound to the proletariat of the under-developed or weakly industrialized countries. We cannot envisage this happening in a completely simultaneous way, but the internationalization of the world class struggle certainly demands the generalization of the struggle to several countries at the same time.

The further development of the proletarian struggle depends on this question being answered. This includes Poland itself, where the present obstacles - threats of intervention, nationalism, democratic and trade unionist illusions - can only be overcome through the development of world struggles, more particularly in the Russian bloc (to overcome the first two obstacles) and in the western bloc (to overcome the second two).

In Poland, the crucial question of the world-wide generalization of the struggle can only be posed. It's up to the world proletariat to provide the answer.

1. In June 1979 the third congress of the ICC affirmed “in the coming period we are going to see a further deepening of the world crisis of capitalism, notably in the form of a new burst of inflation and a marked slowing down in production which threatens to go far beyond the 1974-75 recession and lead to a brutal increase in unemployment.” (‘Resolution on the International Situation’, IR18) This prediction -- in no way based on a mystical prophecy but on the application of Marxist theory to the present conditions of the life of society and on an analysis of the inevi­table failure of the palliatives used by capitalism to try to get out of the collapse of 1974-75 -- has been confirmed in the past two years. The present situation clearly illustrates what the ICC has always said about the nature of the crisis: that we are dealing with a general crisis of overproduction which in the capitalist metropoles takes the form of an overprod­uction of commodities, capital and labor power.

2. The overproduction of commodities is manifested in the fall of industrial pro­duction which has reached its depths in a country like Britain (minus 15% between 1979/80) but is also violently hitting countries like West Germany (where following the decline of steel and cars it’s now a sector like metal making, so decisive for this particular country, which is in decline), and America where the recession has illustrated the growing uselessness of the policies of recovery, leading to a decline in steel production to its 1967 level and in car production to an ever lower level. Only Japan, thanks to its exceptional productivity in these sectors, has for the moment escaped this fate, but only in a most tenuous way when we take into account the growth of protectionism towards Japanese goods and the narrowing of the market in Europe and America.

3. The fall in industrial production has resulted, and will tend to do so more and more, in a fall in investment and profits. In one year (1979/80) we have seen, with regard to expenditure on factories and in­dustrial equipment, a 3% fall in Germany, 7% in Italy, 10.2% in Britain. As for the fall in profit, it is illustrated in a spectacular way by the loss of 4 billion dollars in the American car industry in 1980.

The attempt, analyzed by Marx in Capital, to counteract the fall in the rate of profit by increasing the mass of surplus value is coming up against, the growing saturation of the market. Rather than investing in production which may not be able to acquire any solvable buyers, the existing capitals are engaging in speculation, which explains the sudden rise in gold prices, as well as the rise in oil prices at a time when the consumption of oil is declining. Thus over a thousand billion dollars in “floating capital” are moving around the world following the fluctuations in the price of raw materials. Used mere­ly in the daily search for profitable in­vestments, this capital is completely sterile as far as the development of production is concerned.

4. The overproduction of commodities and of capital is accompanied, especially in the western countries, by an overproduct­ion of the commodity labor power. In the last two years five million extra unemployed have, in the advanced countries in the OECD alone, joined the already gigan­tic army of the unemployed, which had reached 23 million by 1981. These figures already clearly refute the arguments of those who try to establish a fundamental difference between the crisis of the thirties and the present crisis: with 3 million unemployed in mid-1981, Britain has already gone beyond the figures of the pre-war period, and many other countries in Europe are also about to set new records, with rates of unemployment involving more than 10% of the active population.

5. Inflation, the result of the desperate attempt to counterbalance the lack of solvable demand through the creation of credit and through printing money, has remained at high levels despite the present recession, in contrast to 1967, ‘71, and ‘74/75 where the fall in pro­duction was accompanied by a certain fall in price levels. This confirms the in­creasing gravity of the crisis, which can no longer oscillate between inflation and recession but is manifested simultaneously in these two forms. This also confirms the patent failure of the policy which allowed for a certain ‘recovery’ after the 1974/75 recession: the resort to enormous budgetary and commercial deficits by the USA, which took the role of ‘locomotive’ of the world economy. Only America, because of its economic strength and because its currency is the main reserve currency, could play such a role. But this role could only be played for a short time. Based on the increasing use of printed money, the mechanism which allowed for the recovery ended up accelerating inflation both in America and in the rest of the world. This in turn threatened to lead to the explosion of the whole inter­national monetary structure and thus of the whole world economy.

6. This unprecedented aggravation of the economic crisis doesn’t only affect the most industrialized western countries. One of the most significant events in recent years has been the definitive down­fall of the myth of the so-called ‘socia­list’ countries, which were supposedly able to escape the general crisis of the system. The mass strikes in Poland have opened the eyes of the whole world to the economic bankruptcy and the capitalist nature of the eastern bloc countries. These countries -- which are dependent on an imperialist power (Russia) which arrived too late on the arena of a world market already dominated by capitalism in decline -- have for decades been burdened by an inability to compete with the most industrialized countries of the western bloc. Their only answer has been to com­mit themselves to the upbuilding of a war economy with a view to ensuring the military domination of conquered regions by the whole imperialist bloc. This situation has led to the sterilization of capital in unproductive or unprofitable sectors -- a phenomenon which expresses the same inability to utilize the productive forces as in the more industrialized countries, but with much more tragic con­sequences, since these countries always tend to lose out on the world market. During the 1970s, the Russian bloc, ham­pered by this relative scarcity of capital vis-a-vis the economically stronger coun­tries, was only able to respond to the fall in production caused by the world crisis by borrowing massively from the western banks and states. Thus these countries have only been able to stay afloat at the price of colossal indebtedness, which places them in a situation similar to that of the ‘third world’ countries:

-- the foreign debts of a country like Poland went from $800 million in 1971 to $23.5 billion in 1980 with a leap of nearly $10 billion in the last two years alone.

-- the overall annual deficit of the ‘third world’ countries went from $12 billion in 1973 to $83 billion in 1981, leaving the total debt of these coun­tries at $290 billion.

This indebtedness cannot continue at the present level because:

-- the commodities produced thanks to the investments realized in these countries are harder and harder to sell, and when they are sold it’s at the expense of the commodities produced by the countries who supply the funds.

-- the simple payment of interest ab­sorbs a growing part of the exports of these countries (often more than a half), and can only be met by incurring new debts. These in turn jeopardize the financial organisms which supply the loans, since they have less and less chance of getting reimbursed.

Despite the immense needs of these coun­tries their ability to absorb the commod­ities thrown onto the world market is thus going to diminish more and more, with the most catastrophic consequences. This is already illustrated by:

-- the fact that the IMF has had to take charge of the backward countries of the bloc, which tends to reduce their consumption even more (devaluation of their currencies, wages freezes).

-- the drastic reduction of state expen­diture in China (minus 13% in 1980), and the cancelling of orders worth more than $3.5 billion by this country.

-- the catastrophic economic problems of the countries of the Russian bloc (a general inability to reach even the most modest objectives of their economic plans). These countries now have less and less to exchange with the west.

7. Thus in a few years we have seen the using up of all the recipes (America as a locomotive, the indebtedness of the under­developed countries) which allowed a cer­tain revival of economic activity after 1976. These miracle recipes, which the bourgeoisie made so much noise about, have shown themselves to be worse than useless because they have only been an attempt to put off for the future the problems of today. And the new panacea known as ‘supply side economics’, so dear to Reagan and Thatcher, won’t be able to change any­thing either. Easing the tax burden on capital runs the risk of simply throwing the capital freed by this into speculative activity, rather than into productive in­vestment for which no market exists.

The only realistic objective such a policy could have is to massively reduce the cost of labor power through new lay­offs and wage cuts. This may improve the competiveness of the countries involved, but only at the expense of other countries, without benefit for a world market which is getting narrower all the time.

8. At the beginning of the 1980s then, world capital has reached a total economic impasse. The illusions which the bour­geoisie could have and propagate in the ‘70s about some kind of ‘recovery’ or ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ have now collapsed both for the bourgeoisie and for the rest of society. The ‘80s can thus be seen to be ‘years of truth’: years in which society will be faced, in the most acute way, with the historic alternative outlined by the Communist International: world imperialist war or class war.

The year 1980 contained a clear summary both of this alternative and of the tend­ency which dominates this alternative: the course towards the intensification of the class struggle, holding back the war-like tendencies of the bourgeoisie. While the first part of the year was dominated by a definite aggravation of imperialist tension following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the second part put these tensions into the background, and was dom­inated by the proletarian response to the growing misery imposed on it by the cap­italist crisis. The highest expression of this was the formidable struggles in Poland.

9. As long as it hasn’t been swept away by the proletarian revolution, capitalism won’t stop preparing itself for a new world holocaust. Thus we are now seeing a new escalation of these preparations, notably through a considerable increase of expenditure on arms. The function of this is not at all to boost the economy but purely and simply to strengthen the milit­ary positions of each bloc. In other words,

-- to prepare for war

-- to strengthen inter-imperialist rivalries

-- to subjugate the whole of society.

Although the deepening of the economic crisis can lead to political ructions within certain national bourgeoisies, weakening their participation in the unity and solidarity of the bloc, preparations are also going ahead with regard to the political strengthening of the blocs with a view to a future confrontation; the strivings for independence on the part of some countries based on particular political and economic interests (eg Germany’s trade with the Eastern bloc, Rumania's ‘independence’ from Russia) or reticence about being in the front line of a future conflict (reservations about Pershing II rockets), will more and more have to give way to an unquestioning solidarity with the leaders of the blocs, which alone have the capacity to guarantee their military security and economic survival.

10. The election of Reagan to the head of the world’s major power expresses this orientation of each bloc towards more and more political and military preparations for a generalized confrontation. But this isn’t its only significance. It can be seen even more clearly as an aspect of the bourgeoisie’s present offensive against the proletariat, which is being orchestrated by the ‘hard-line’, ‘strong-arm’ gov­ernments who have replaced the previous language of illusions with the ‘language of truth’. Because while on the one hand the crisis is more and more pushing the bourgeoisie towards war, it is also pushing its mortal enemy, the proletariat, towards the development of its class struggle.

The very fact that world war has not yet broken out, even though the objective conditions and the military/strategic preparations for it are more than ripe, demonstrates the size of the obstacle which the combativity of the proletariat represents to the designs of imperialism. While the aggravation of the crisis can only sharpen the antagonisms between cap­italist states, the development of the class struggle, as the events in Poland show, will more and more force these states to dedicate a growing part of their energies towards this main battlefield, which is one that threatens their very existence and which will compel them to show a level of solidarity unprecedented in history in their attempts to deal with the proletariat.

 

Preliminary considerations: Economic and Political struggle

1. The events of Longwy and Denain made us understand and adopt as a central theme of our intervention the conception of "extension"; the events of Poland, that of "generalization".

These two terms relate not only to qualitatively different responses, but also to different situations.

2. If the economic struggle of the proletariat contains a political element, and vice versa; if -- in contrast to Lenin's thesis -- it is not possible to separate the struggle of the proletariat that takes place within ‘trade unionist' limitations from the struggle for socialism (these two threads forming one whole); if it is impossible to divide the character of the proletariat (which is historically unique, being at one and the same time exploited and revolutionary), -- it is nonetheless true that these two aspects, the economic and political struggle (which are constants in the struggle of the class) represent particular moments in the time and scope of the class struggle. In consequence they never remain in the same relationship or the same balance. Just as we must reject any idea which tends to divide the class struggle (and therefore the unity of the class) we must not fail to appreciate the significant specificities of the two aspects and what they reveal (as the revolutionary syndicallists did at the end of the last century and ­the beginning of the 20th).

3. We can also establish the relationship of the economic and the political struggles within the general struggle of the proletariat and within the historic periods of capitalist society. This relationship changes along with the change in period, to the point of being completely overturned. The former is determined by the latter which is, in its turn, determined by the evolution of capitalism and the development of its internal contradictions.

In the ascendant phase of capitalism revolution was not objectively and practically on the agenda, and given that situation, the struggle in defense of economic interests[1] necessarily took precedence over the political struggle within the overall struggles of the proletariat. Revolutionary (political) upsurges, however important they may have been, could only be circumstantial and isolated phenomena in that epoch. This was as true for June 1848 as it was for the Paris Commune. In short, the economic struggle was at that time the predominant aspect of the global struggle of the class. This balance tended to be overthrown as capitalism entered its decadent period. 1905 was a demonstration of that tendency in the ‘changeover' period, and the process had been fully accomplished by the onset of World War One.

4. As has already been explained elsewhere (see International Review, no.23; ‘Proletarian Struggle in Decadence') economic struggle in the ascendant period inevitably developed in a corporatist form, ie occupation-based, limited and very dispersed. This was also the case because the prolet­ariat was facing a capitalism with millions of bosses and small, widely dispersed and isolated factories. The unions were the appropriate form for this stage and content of struggle. But through the change in period, when a highly concentrated and centralized capitalism moved into the phase of decadence taking on the economic-­political form of state capitalism (a change which made political struggle of the proletariat predominant), the economic str­uggle of the class underwent profound changes. It encountered the impossibility of maintaining permanent unitary organs strictly for economic defense; the inevit­ability of a fusion between economic defense and the general political character of the struggle; the need for mass active participation in the struggle through mass strikes and general assemblies. These new conditions of ‘economic' struggle posed imperative demands which boil down to two points; the autonomy and self-organization of tine class; and the extension of the struggle.

5. The extension of the struggle, which is absolutely inseparable from the overt and generalized self-organization of the class as a whole, must of necessity go beyond all partial divisions, be they occupational, factoryist, regionalist, between unemployed and factory workers. However, it remains within a national framework, within the geo-political boundaries of a particular country. Extension generally has its point of departure on the terrain of economic demands, the struggle against austerity and the effects of the crisis on the daily lives of the workers. We would distinguish this from generalization essentially by the following criteria: firstly, generalization means the struggle extending beyond national boundaries with other countries; secondly, this can only be done by the struggle taking on, very directly, a rev­olutionary political character.

The object of these theses is to look at the historic conditions for generalization. This can only be done by detaching this question from other considerations and relevant questions, which although they must be taken into account, can also cloud the issue and hinder this examination. We hope we've managed to do this in this preliminary section and so now we'll move on to look at generalization.

6. In Principles of Communism, a pamphlet written in October/November 1847, which seems to serve as a draft outline for the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote; "Question 19 - Will this revolution be made in one country? Answer - No. Major industry, in creating the world market has drawn the peoples of the world so closely together, particularly the most advanced nations, that each nation is dependent on what happens in every other. It has furthermore regim­ented social development in the advanced countries to the point that, in all countries, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes in society, and the struggle between these classes has become the major struggle in our epoch. The comm­unist revolution, therefore, will not be a purely national one, it will erupt simultaneously in all the developed countries, ie in England, America, France and Germany."

Here Engels is not concerned with res­ponding to the aberrant theory of ‘social­ism in one country' in whose name the Stalinist counter-revolution took place, but with the revolution itself. It is the revolution itself which "will erupt simult­aneously in all the advanced countries". This thesis, elaborated for the first time by Engels, and although it is insufficient­ly developed and supported in this text, is nevertheless a fundamental tenet of Marxist theory and the Marxist movement. It expresses the concept of the essential int­ernational generalization of the proletar­ian revolution, both in its content and its scale.

7. We also find this thesis at the heart of the Communist Manifesto, as well as in the other works of Marx and Engels, both before and after the 1848 revolution. In Class Struggles in France, for example, Marx, commenting on the defeat in June, wrote:

"Finally, with the victories of the Holy Alliance, Europe has assumed a form in which any new proletarian uprising in France will immediately coincide with a world war. The new French revolution will be forced to leave its natural soil immediately and to conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be carried out."

Not only is the essential international character of the revolution strongly reass­erted ("the terrain on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be carried out"), but it is further re-emphasized as the historic basis of the revolution is made clear; ie the economic crisis of the capitalist system.

"A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relation of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world that he has called up by his spells." (The Communist Manifesto)

8. There might perhaps be some doubt as to the reality of the decline of the capital­ist system in 1848! History has given the lie to this ‘reality' and revolutionaries, beginning with Marx and Engels, have had to correct this error. Only those who adhere to the ‘letter' rather than the ‘spirit' can still today support the idea that the proletarian revolution was on the agenda in 1848 -- that it was already possible and even a necessity. As a matter of fact, it does say in the Communist Manifesto that:

"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 as soon as they overcome these fetters they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, and endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

That 1848 did not see the generalization of the proletarian revolution (which was to begin in England and America) was undoubtedly due to the fact that the historic conditions were not then ripe, despite what Marx and Engels believed. 1848 heralded the opening of an era of expansion for capitalism. But what is fundamental, and still stands as the great advance made by the Communist Manifesto, is the analysis which locates the inevitability of the proletarian revolution in the economic crisis of the capitalist system. This is the backbone of all Marxist theory.

Nevertheless, this affirmation -- both of the determinism of the crisis and of the imperative need for the internationalization of the revolution -- remained far too general, ie too abstract and with little inter-connection, so that it didn't express concretely the historic conditions necessary for the internationalization of the revolution. For example, although they understood the bourgeois character of the 1848 German revolution, Marx and Engels believed for some time, in the heat of the moment, that it was possible to graft the proletarian revolution on to it. This was their vision of the ‘permanent revolution' expressed in ‘The Address to the Central Council of the Communist League' in March 1850. (Again, this response was to be proved false and rapidly abandoned). They should have recognised that the bourgeois revolution does not constitute a determinant for the proletarian revolution, nor even a condition for its generalization. As Engels wrote in ‘Some notes on the History of the Communist League' in 1855, they should have been aware that "a new period of unparalleled prosperity had opened up": and he recalled what they wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, at the end of 1850:

"In the presence of general prosperity when the productive forces of bourgeois society are expanding with all the luxuriance possible within the bourgeois framework, there can be no question of a true revolution. A true revolution is only possible in periods when there is conflict between two factors, modern forms of production and the relations of bourgeois production."

9. In the wake of the experiences and lessons of the 1848-50 revolutions, Marx and Engels broke with "these radical makers of revolutions" and firmly upheld the premise of the economic crisis as the basis of revolution. They impatiently awaited and scrutinized the return of the crisis (see their correspondence between 1854 and 1855) and effectively foresaw its recurrence in1856. But their hopes were again dashed for they still held to the view in the Manifesto, that saw, in the cyclical crises, a continual return to the possibility of revolution. There is an abyss between the cyclical crises and the permanent crisis of capitalism. The cyclical crises do indicate the inherent contradiction within the capitalist system between the productive forces and the relations of production, but these remain latent and not explosive. They are even a stimulant in as much as they force capitalism to seek out solutions, most notably in the quest for new markets. In fact, the cyclical crises which followed on from each other in the latter half of the last century never gave rise to revolutionary upsurges, still less to their generalization. Marx and Engels were henceforth convinced of this fact, and were amongst the first to caution the Paris workers against a premature insurrection, one doomed to failure; likewise they were the most severe critics of Blanquism and the voluntarist deviations of Bakunin and his followers, those great experts on revolutionary phraseology and adventurist activity.

10. The bloody obliteration of the Paris Commune seemed to offer the proof, not of the futility of the communist revolution (which remained a historic necessity and probability) nor of the indispensible need of its generalization if it were to triumph,      but rather of the immaturity of conditions; invalidating and confirming at one and the same time the perspective set out by Marx in ‘Class Struggle in France', that the "new French revolution will be fated to leave its natural soil immediately and to conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be carried out". The defeat of the Commune and the ensuing great leap forward of global capitalism brought with them decades of disarray for the workers' movement. On the one hand it gave rise to anarcho-syndicalism which threw overboard all theoretical study and, regardless of cost, feverishly sought the revolution in the immediate economic struggle and looked there for the conditions of generalization. It believed it had finally discovered all these in the ‘general strike', a creation of their own imagination and of their desire for a panacea for all ills. On the other hand, it produced a separation within the class struggle between the economic struggle (unions) and the political struggle (parties). Within the heart of the socialist movement there arose a confrontation between a majority who remained unaware of the new conditions, and who were moving more and more openly towards the gradualism and reformism of bourgeois democracy, and a widely dispersed minority who were striving to maintain their position on the basis of revolutionary Marxism.

Despite the persistence and indeed the growth of the class struggle, the revolution and the conditions for its generalization seemed a long way from reality, from the real evolution of capitalism. Socialism became a distant ideal, the object of theoretical research and abstract speculation. The problem with the class struggle in the last decades of the nineteenth century lay not so much in the difficulties revolutionaries found in seeing the correct response, but in the situation itself, which did not quite contain it, or more precisely, would not allow it to reveal its secrets.

The mass strike

11. 1905 came as a crack of lightning in a tranquil sky. Not because the movement was not foreseen; on the contrary. The whole       world was waiting for it, particularly the socialists who had in fact prepared for it. The aging Engels had already foreseen these events sometime before his death. But what was surprising was the impulsive strength of the young Russian proletariat, and the faint-heartedness of the bourgeoisie. The socialists had prepared for this, but not amidst such political disarray and confusion. The Mensheviks saw it simply as an anti-feudal revolution and assigned to the proletariat a simple role of support for a bourgeois government. The Bolsheviks saw it as a bourgeois democratic revolution with a predominantly working class partic­ipation -- though it also prefigured a "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants". Others, such as Trotsky and Parvus, spoke of a "workers' government" and took up again the old slogan of ‘perman­ent revolution'. The models to which everyone referred were the bourgeois revolutions of 1789 and 1848. At the basis of all these analyses lay the specificity of conditions in Russia. The context of the global situation and the historic period of capitalism was shunted into the background. And yet we were seeing absolutely new phenomena: the total impotence of the bourgeoisie, who sought refuge in the embrace of the Tsarist monarchy; the immobility of an immense peasant population and of an army largely made up of peasants; a spontaneous movement of a sort never seen before, which involved the vast majority of workers, who organized themselves, took the initiative in all cities, forced the authorities to retreat and largely went beyond the socialist part­ies and their dictates; finally, the emergence of a new form of proletarian organization, which united the economic and political struggle, the workers' soviets. And while the socialist parties were bickering over the nature of these events and their perspectives, the workers were acting spontaneously, organizing themselves in a centralized way, showing a surprising creative ability. All this put into question the classic conception of the role and function of the political party, ie its relation to the class, the role it played in the nineteenth century as organizer of the class. It also put into question the classic mode of action of past struggles. Corporatist and unionist strikes were superseded by a new and more dynamic mode, with a mass character, as Luxemburg recognized in the Mass Strike.

1905 is the prime example of extension and spontaneous self-organization of the proletariat's struggle. Its repercussions in other countries were weak, but were nevertheless an indication of the tendency towards generalization.

The right wing of the Second International, the majority, surprised by the violence of events, failed to understand anything of what was taking place, but showed its resounding disapproval of and disgust for the development of the class struggle -- thus foreshadowing the process which was to lead them into the camp of the class enemy. The left wing found in these events a confirmation of its revolutionary positions, but was far from appreciating their true significance and from understanding that the capitalist world was at the turning point in its evolution from apogee to its decline. The new situation imposed the need for profound theoretical reflection, for a re-examination of the evolution of capitalism; above all, for an analysis of its final epoch, imperialism, and the movement towards the collapse of capitalism. This study was very sketchy and inadequately developed, because events were moving on very quickly.

1914 War, 1917 Revolution, 1939 War

12. 1914 arrived, fully confirming their analysis of the new historic period, summed up by Lenin in the phrase; "imperialist wars and proletarian revolutions". Never­theless it became clear that the capitalist system had entered its historic phase of decadence. The world war was the clearest manifestation of this; the era of proletar­ian revolution had arrived.

The strong points of this analysis were,

a) Capitalism as a system had periods of development and decline.

b) The cyclical crises of the ascendant period could not be the determinant of prol­etarian revolution. Only the period of decadence of the entire capitalist system made revolution necessary and possible.

c) This revolution can therefore only be a global one and the more speedily it generalizes to the majority of the major indust­rial countries, the greater will be its chance of success.

This was not simply a return to the pos­itions expressed by Engels in the Principles of Communism, but a strengthening of them, with a precision about the historic period of revolution which only reality allowed to be developed fully. But there is a whole series of questions remaining to be clarif­ied: the definition of imperialism and the question of the saturation of markets[2]; the theorization of a so-called law of ‘uneven development of capitalism'[3]; the theory of the "weakest link"[4]; and the anachronistic adherence to the old methods of struggle which were totally inadequate for the new period -- parliamentarism, trade unionism, the united front, national liber­ation, etc. In other words it was precisely the questions which touched on the problem of generalization which were the least elaborated and to which clearly false prem­ises were given.

13. Furthermore, since revolutionaries saw the eruption of world war as the irrefutable proof of the ‘catastrophic collapse' of cap­italism under the weight of its own contradictions, and thus as the basic objective determinant of the revolution, they believed that the world war provided the necessary conditions for the generalization of the revolution. Wasn't it true that revolutions at that time were closely tied to capitalism's wars? This was true for the Paris Commune -- which followed directly the Franco-Prussian war -- and also for 1905, which followed the Russo-Japanese war. Using these examples revolutionaries logically began to reason in these terms: that world war necessarily creates the conditions for the generalization of the revolution.          

The eruption of the Russian revolution and the revolutionary wave which followed it served as proof, reinforcing this conviction which has remained dominant amongst revolutionaries to this day. For example, is it not the case that the Bordigists and many other revolutionaries attach so little importance to the question of the historic course because they rely on the war which must in their eyes give birth to the revolution? But if we look at more recent experiences in history the arguments put forward in favor of that idea are far from being as convincing as they appear. It is true that wars can determine the social convulsions which lead to revolutionary explosions and even victories. But these victories are isolated, and of short duration as in the case of the Commune and of 1905 (which were also in an historically immature period), or of Hungary. Even if the proletariat managed to retain power for a fairly long time, its isolation rapidly condemns it to degeneration and ultimately counter-revolution -- as the Russian revolution shows.       

14. Why? Because there cannot be a successful revolutionary movement which does not contain and develop the tendency towards internationalization of the struggle, just as there can be no real internationalization of struggle which is not revolutionary. This implies that the conditions for a triumphant revolution lie in the economic and political situation and a balance of forces favorable to the proletariat (against capitalism) on a global level. War is certainly a peak in the crisis of capitalism, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it is also a ‘response' by capitalism to the crisis. It is an advanced moment of barbarism which as such does not greatly favor the conditions for the generalization of the revolution.

Let's look closer. Already, during the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg issued a warning from her prison, and drew attention to the fact that the bourgeoisie was in the process of massacring the finest flower of the proletariat -- its youth, the best fighters of the revolutionary class. The Second World War showed in its technique and in its organization, the capacity of the bourgeoisie to multiply this massacre (by at least 2-1/2), to snuff out any tiny glimmerings of class struggle and liquidate any organization of the working class.

This applied to the army as well as to the civil population.

On the level of ‘massacres', the implications of a new war, with all the developments in modern technology, are better not thought of. On another level, the First World War was a war fought in the trenches, which allowed a certain amount of contact between soldiers of enemy camps; hence the keynote of intervention -- fraternization -‑ and the possibility of its realization. This was not the case n the Second World War, in which the infantry played a secondary role. In any future war people will be massacred in their hundreds of thousands, like at Hiroshima, without even having seen ‘the enemy'.

In the revolutionary movement in Russia it should be said that the soldiers were the last bastions to be won over or just neutralized. It was the sailors, the "floating proletariat", who were the armed wing of the revolution. This was even clearer in Germany. The reason for this was very simple: the army was not a place where there was a concentration of workers, but a place where the workers were submerged in a mass of peasants and other strata.

The bourgeoisie showed in the Second World War how fully it had assimilated the lessons of how to deal with the dangers of workers' revolts. In 1943 Britain volunt­arily held back from using the advantage given to it by the collapse of Mussolini's army, and did not invade the north. It left it to the German army to instigate the repression of the workers in Milan and Turin As Churchill explained this was the policy of "leaving the Italians to stew in their own juice for a necessary period of time". The same policy was used by the Russian army when it halted for three days in front of the gates of Warsaw and Buda­pest -- to give the retreating German army enough time to accomplish its bloody task. Then came the rapid advances of the Russian and American armies in Germany -- to replace as quickly as possible the defeated Hitlerite apparatus and crush any embryonic attempts at an uprising.

But what is still more important, and which greatly diminishes the effectiveness of revolutionary defeatism, is the fact that the war produced victors as well as vanquished. In the defeated countries, as well as revolutionary anger against the bourgeoisie, there was a desire for revenge produced in the general population. This of backward tendency penetrated even into the ranks of revolutionaries, as is witnessed by the tendency in the KAPD which advocated national-communism, and the struggle against the Treaty of Versailles which was to become the axis of the KPD's propaganda. Worse still was the effect produced amongst the workers in the victorious countries. As the aftermath of the First World War had already shown, and still more so the Second, what prevailed was a spirit of lassitude if not of chauvinistic delirium pure and simple -- even if alongside this there was a real, though slow, upturn in the class struggle.

15. No -- war does not create the most favorable conditions for the generalization of the revolution. Contrary to the thesis on war which implies the view of an extrem­ely rapid progression which surprises the bourgeoisie (on the Russian model), the revolution emerges, as Luxemburg said at the founding congress of the German CP, as a long and painful process, full of false starts, advances and retreats in the strug­gle. It is in this process that the conditions mature for generalization, the raising of consciousness and the capacity for self-organization. Revolutionaries must cease making their impatience a point of reference and learn to work in the long term, as reality dictates.

16. We have defined the period of reconstr­uction as an interval in the cycle of ‘crisis - war - reconstruction - crisis', the movement of decadence. What is fundam­ental is not the intermediary terms (war and reconstruction) but the starting point and the finishing point. None of the inter­mediary phases are fatal; only the extreme points (‘crisis - crisis') mark the fixed character of the historic period.

War is only posed after a proletarian defeat which will give the bourgeoisie a free hand to lead society into the deepest of catastrophes. This situation does not exist today. Since the beginning of the conjunctural crisis at the end of the six­ties, the proletariat has again taken up its struggle and through ups and downs has developed it -- Poland today being the high­est point for the last half century.

But Poland is not the final point and it would be pure adventurist verbiage to demand that it be more than it is. In Poland an advanced position has been reach­ed and occupied by a section of the proletarian army. Now the mass of the class must join them. While it waits to do so the proletariat has no interest in sacrificing one of its most combative parts in premature military confrontations, which, being isolated, will be destined to defeat. Vict­ory can only be gained by a generalized advance of the class.

The conditions for generalization can be found in the crisis itself. The inevitable submersion of capitalism in a deeper and deeper crisis creates the inexorable march towards the generalization of the struggle, the condition for the opening of the revol­ution on a global level and for its final victory.

 

---

[1] To avoid any misunderstanding, let us define more precisely this term ‘economic'. By this we understand anything which concerns the general and immediate living conditions of the class: this is distinct from the term ‘political' which refers strictly to the future historic goals of the proletariat.

[2] The failure to give an exact definition of imperialism led to a division of the world into imperialist and anti-imperialist countries, and thus made a link between the proletarian revolution and national liberation struggles.

[3] This theory put into question the indispensible unity of simultaneous revolutionary waves, and later allowed Stalin to develop his theory of ‘socialism in one country'! Uneven development was a factor in the development of the bourgeois revolutions and in the beginnings of capitalism. The development of capitalism has led to the development of interdependence and thus the unification of global production, which finds its fulfillment in the phase of decadence as all countries are dragged into barbarism.

[4] By sticking to the letter and making an axis of this theory one ends up giving preference to the maturity of the conditions for revolution in the under-developed countries at the expense of the highly industrialized nations with a more concentrated, more experienced proletariat. This denies completely everything Marx and Engels said on the subject.