Revolution and counter-revolution

It's no coincidence that the counter‑revolution which struck back against the post-World War I upheavals of the working class, and was to hold the world in its bloody grasp until the end of the 1960s, took on its most vicious form precisely in those countries where proletarian resistance had been strongest: in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and in all the countries wedged in between, from Finland to Yugoslavia. The workers between the Urals and the Rhine were the first and most deter­mined in revolting against the imperialist massacre of 1914-15, and against the suffering being heaped on their class by an historically bank­rupt capitalism. This is why they became the special target of a world bourgeoisie momentar­ily uniting against a common enemy. The bourg­eoisie of the victorious western powers armed and reinforced the governments and the armed gangs of this whole area all the more, the more brut­ally they attacked the workers. And they even sent their own armies to attempt to occupy the USSR, the Balkans, the Ruhr etc, fighting among themselves over the spoils, but always out to smash the proletarian resistance.

Already in 1919, after the fall of the Soviet Republic there, open white terror reigned in Hungary. From Budapest (1919) to Sofia or Cracow (1923), all the revolutionary upheavals of the class were crushed, and the young commu­nist parties severely weakened, often to the brink of physical extermination. This was, for example, the case in Yugoslavia, where hundreds of thousands of communist militants were murdered or jailed.

The nationalist counter-revolution

And so, whereas the defeat of the working class in the advanced countries of the west would be completed in the 1930s through ideological mobili­zation for war on the part of the ‘democratic' state, the crushing of the proletariat in the east became very quickly a physical annihilation as well. But it was not so much the machine guns and torture chambers of the terrorist state as the weight of nationalism in Eastern Europe and of social democracy in Germany and Austria which broke the back of the European proletariat in those fateful post-war years.

The creation of a mosaic of nation states in Eastern Europe at the end of World War I filled the immediate counter-revolutionary role of driving a nationalist wedge between proletarian Russia and the German working class. This is why the Polish communists, already in 1917, were against the national independence for the Polish bourgeoisie which the Bolsheviks in Russia were proclaiming. In continuing the fight against Polish nationalism, associated above all with Rosa Luxemburg, they were effectively declaring war on the rabidly chauvinist Polish social democrats, whose latter day political heir, the KOR, we will be meeting later. The Bolsheviks were right to insist on the cultural and ling­uistic rights of the workers and oppressed, and to insist on this especially for Eastern Europe. But they should have known that these ‘rights' will never be respected by the bourgeoisie! In­deed the young post-war Polish state, for example, immediately proceeded to viciously discriminate against the Lithuanians, White Russians and other cultural minorities within its boundaries. But above all they were wrong to hold up to the workers the goal of creating or defending nation states, which can only mean submitting to the political leadership of the bourgeoisie, and that at a time when the proletarian revolution, the destruction of all nation states, was on the agenda of history.

When the Red Army tried to capture Warsaw in 1920, the Polish workers rallied behind their bourgeoisie, repulsing the offensive. This showed the impossibility of spreading the proletarian revolution in a military way. It also showed the strength of nationalist ideology in countries where nation states had just been form­ed, and where exploitation has always proceeded with the weighty assistance of foreign parasites, so that the native parasites can more easily give themselves a popular image. Nationalism, which in this century has always been a death sentence for our class, has continued to weigh heavily on the liberation struggle of the working class in East­ern Europe, to this day.

The unity of the proletariat East and West

The fact that the long-awaited proletarian revo­lution broke out in Eastern Europe and not in the industrial heartlands, caused the greatest confu­sion among revolutionaries at that time. Thus, the Bolsheviks, for example, saw the February 1917 events in Russia as being in some way a bour­geois revolution, and even afterwards there were notions in the party about completing the bourg­eois tasks in the proletarian revolution. But it was very soon understood that Eastern Europe was the weak link in the chain of imperialism, lacking as it did a bourgeois democratic tradition, esta­blished trade unions and a strong social democ­racy, and possessing a numerically weak but very combative proletariat.

In the immediate post-war years the concern of the proletarian movement was to spread the revol­utionary flame westwards to the industrial centers of capitalism. At that time, as today, the central task of the international proletariat could only be to bridge the gap between east and west, created then by the splitting of Europe into defeated and victorious countries as a legacy of the war. In that period, as today, when the whole bourgeoisie spreads the lie that there are two differing social systems in east and west, revolutionaries had to fight tooth and nail against the idea that there was any­thing fundamentally different in the conditions and goals of the struggle of the workers east and west. It was necessary, against the lies, for example, of German social democracy, accord­ing to whom class rule in Eastern Europe was especially brutal and totalitarian -- lies which were to justify the SPD's support for its government in the war against Russia -- to insist that this special brutality was something con­junctural, and that the western democracies are every bit as savage and dictatorial in reality. This political war waged by the communists against the defenders of democratic imperialism, against those who weep crocodile tears for the massacred workers in far away Finland or Hungary while all the while calmly shooting down the proletariat in Germany themselves, is still being fought today -- against the social demo­crats, the Stalinists, the leftists. At all times, the task of the communists is to defend the fundamental unity of the international class struggle; to show that the iron curtain should not be a barrier to the collective struggle of the workers of the world. Today, as during the revolutionary wave, the tasks of the movement are the same everywhere. Today, as then, the workers of Eastern Europe can for a moment become the vanguard of the world proletariat. Just as in 1917, when the workers of the world had to follow the example of their Russian class brothers, today they must learn from the class struggle in Poland. But they must also go beyond this example, as the Communist Inter­national well understood, and become in their turn a source of inspiration and clarification for the workers of the east.

The legacy of the counter-revolution

The open white terror which engulfed eastern and central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s -- forever associated with names like Noske, Horthy, Pilsudski, Hitler, Stalin -- ended up almost physically eliminating social democracy as well, as the needs of the various national capitals in a region where the working class had been heavily defeated, and dominated by Germany and Russia, changed radically. But none of this, however, could lead to a weakening of social democratic illusions in the class, which can only be over­come through the experience of the class strug­gle. Precisely because decadent capitalism assumed, so quickly, in these countries the form of an open dictatorship, dispensing with such refinements as the parliamentary circus or ‘independent trade unions' the lure of these organs, which once upon time, in the youth of capitalism, had advanced the position of the working class, grew rather than waned with the advance of the counter-revolution. Neither fascism nor Stalinism were able to stamp out the nostalgia of the Eastern European workers for instruments which today, in the west, are the embodiment of the anti-proletarian forces. The social democratic legacy, the belief in the possibility of transforming the lot of the workers within a capitalism which today can only offer misery and destruction, and the nationalist legacy of the post-World War I era, represent today the nightmare weight of the past holding back the struggle for a new world, and at a time when the material base for such illusions is rapidly disappearing. The most mortal blow which the counter­revolution struck against the workers' move­ment was the reinforcement of such illusions.

The workers did not take the defeats of the 1930s lying down. Everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe we find examples of heroic rearguard battles, which were not, however, able to stem the tide. We could mention, for example, the bitter resistance of the German unemployed workers in the early thirties, or the massive wave of wildcats and occupations which swept Poland in the 1930s, centered around the proletarian bastion of Lodz. In Russia itself, the proletariat continued to offer resistance to the victorious counter­revolution right into the thirties.

But these were really desperate blows of self-defense struck by a class no longer capa­ble of developing a perspective of its own.

The increasing hopelessness of the situation was already foreshadowed by the Kronstadt rising of 1921, which attempted to restore the central role of the workers' councils in Russia. The movement was crushed by the very same Bolshevik party which had been in the previous years the advance guard of the world proletariat. The degeneration of the whole Communist International, in face of the worldwide retreat and eventual crushing of the revolutionary struggles of the working class, opened up the way for the comp­lete triumph of Stalinism. Stalinism was the most perverse form which the bourgeois counter­revolution took on, because it destroyed the organizations and buried the programmatic gains of the proletariat from within, turning the vanguard parties of the Comintern into state capitalist terror organizations, and repressing the class in the name of ‘socialism'. In this way, all the traditions of the workers' move­ment, first in Russia and then in the whole of Eastern Europe, were completely wiped out. The very names of Marx and Lenin, wielded by the Stalinists to disguise their capitalist nature, became identified with exploitation in the eyes of the workers in the way that say Siemens and Krupp are in Germany. In 1956, the Hungarian workers in revolt even took to burn­ing these ‘holy books' of the government on the streets. Nothing symbolized the triumph of Stalinism better than that.

The resistance of the workers in the post-war period

The burial of the October and the World Revo­lution, the annihilation of the Bolshevik party and of the Communist International from within, the liquidation of the power of the workers' councils -- these were the principal preconditions for the rise of ‘red' Soviet imperialism. Red with the blood of all the workers and revolutio­naries it butchered, symbolized by Stalin, the philistine hangman, it was the worthy successor of the czarist and the international imperialism against which Lenin declared civil war in 1914.

The Nazis raised the slogan ‘Work Makes You Free' (‘Arbeit macht frei') over the gates of Auschwitz. But they gassed their victims. In Stalinist Russia, on the other hand, the words of national socialism were taken literally. In the camps of Siberia, millions were worked to death. Trotsky in the 193Os, forgetting about political class criteria, forgetting about the workers altogether, called this grim bastion of the counter-revolution a degenerated workers' state because of the specific way the exploiters there managed their economy. His followers ended up saluting the conquest of Eastern Europe by the ‘USSR' as the extension of the gains of October.

The end of the 1939-45 war brought with it a burst of militancy on the part of the workers in Europe, not only in France and Italy, but also in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria. But the wor­kers were not able to confront capitalism as an autonomous class, or even to defend themselves effectively. On the contrary, the whole class was gripped by anti-fascist and patriotic fever, and the committees which it set up at that time only served the bolstering of the anti-fascist state and the organization of the immediate rec­onstruction of the economy under the thumb of Stalin/Churchill/Roosevelt/Truman. Towards the end of the war there were suicidal acts of reb­ellion against Nazi state terror: for example the strikes in Lodz and other Polish cities; revolts in Jewish ghettos and in concentration camps; outbreaks of armed resistance by workers (even in Germany); and moments of mutiny or even of fraternization among the proletarians in uniform. But these flickers of resistance, which for a moment could even raise the hopes of the few re­maining revolutionaries in Europe who had not been hunted down by the democratic, fascist or Stalin­ist states, remained the exception. World War II was in fact the climax of the most crushing defeat which the proletariat had ever suffered. You only have to think of the out and out barbar­ism, say, of the war on the eastern front, where the German and Russian working class were pitted against each other in a bloody fratricide which left over 25 million dead.

The Warsaw Rising

Without a hope or perspective of its own, the class could be driven to acts of sheer desperation. The best example of this is the Warsaw Rising, which began on 1 August 1944. The insur­rection was called by the ‘Polish Council of National Unity', comprising all the anti-German forces of the bourgeoisie, including old Pilsudski generals and the Polish Socialist Party, who bet­ween them had put down many a movement of the workers. Although the Stalinists were forced to participate in order not to lose their last influ­ence among the workers and their ‘place of honor' among the bourgeoisie in the post-war carve-up, the rising was as much anti-Russian as anti-German. It was supposedly the last grand fling with which the Poles could ‘liberate' them­selves and their capital city, before Stalin could do so. The Russian army was poised just fifteen miles from Warsaw. The workers didn't need any urging. They fought the Gestapo for sixty-three days, holding whole districts of the city under their control for long periods. The bourgeois initiators of the rising, sitting tight in London, knew very well that the Gestapo would not leave the city before having destroyed the resistance of the hated workers. What they really wanted was not a ‘Polish liberation of Warsaw' -- which never came into question -- but rather a bloodbath which would seal national honor and unity for the coming years. And when the Gestapo had stamped out the last resis­tance, it abandoned the city to Stalin, leaving a quarter of a million dead behind it. And the ‘Soviet armies', which twelve years later would be so quick to enter Budapest to smash the workers' soviet, waited patiently until their brown terrorist friends had finished their work. The Kremlin didn't want to have to deal either with armed workers or with popular pro-western factions of the Polish bourgeoisie.

The establishment of Stalinist rule

In order to weather the storm of the last hostilities and of the demobilization, and in order not to sharpen inter-imperialist tensions between the victorious allies too soon, the Stalinists joined popular front governments in the Eastern European countries at the end of the war; governments which included social democratic, right-wing and even fascist groupings.

In view of the presence of Stalin's armies in Eastern Europe, the taking over of complete state control through the Stalinists was not in itself a problem, and succeeded almost ‘organically' everywhere. In Czechoslovakia a few demos were organized by the Communist Party with the help of the police in Prague 1948 (going down in the Stalinist history books as the heroic Czechoslovakian insurrection). But only the com­plete statification of the economy and the fusion of the state with the CPs in Eastern Europe could guarantee the definitive passing of the ‘people's democracies' under Russian control. The main problem facing the new rulers was that of establ­ishing regimes which would have a certain measure of support among the population, especially among the workers. In pre-World War I Eastern Europe, the Stalinists had been small and isolated in many of these countries, and even in places where it was more influential, like in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, it had usually had to play second fiddle to the social democrats.

Nevertheless, the Stalinists in Eastern Europe were able to gain a certain basis of support within society. It did not have to rule from the very beginning through sheer state terror, unlike the Stalinist regime in the USSR. Nowhere in Eastern Europe, outside of Russia, had the Stalinists been clearly identified as the direct instrument of the counter-revolution. Until 1945, it had always been an oppositional, not a govern­mental party. Moreover, the rabid racism and chauvinism and the anti-fascism of this faction of capital worked to its benefit in the early days of its rule. In this way, Stalinism in Eastern Europe benefited from coming to power at the deepest point of the counter-revolution. From the beginning, it was able to use anti-Germanism to divide the working class, expelling millions of workers and peasants from the bloc along the most racially ‘scientific' lines. Over a hundred thousand German-speaking ex-concentra­tion camp inmates, who had resisted the Nazi terror, were expelled from Czechoslovakia for example. But even anti-Germanism only supple­mented, and did not replace the by then already traditional anti-semitism in the Stalinist arsenal.

From 1948 onwards, there followed a sharpening of inter-imperialist tensions between the Russian and American dominated blocs, expressed especially by increased competition at the military level. At this time moreover, the period of post-war reconstruction was coming into full swing. In east and west this meant the same thing for workers: higher levels of exploitation; lower real wages; a sharpening of state repression; a further militarization of society. This process also entailed a tightening up of the unity of the respective blocs, which in the Russian camp could only be achieved through terroristic methods: the anti-Titoist trials.

In view of the relative economic weakness of the eastern bloc, the attacks against the living standards of the class in the Russian-dominated countries had to be even more brutal than in the west. State repression escalated to keep the lid on social unrest.

The struggles of 1953

In 1953, mass proletarian resistance erupted openly for the first time since the war. In the space of two months, five outbreaks of class struggle shook the self-confidence of the bour­geoisie. At the beginning of June, riots in Pilsen (Czechoslovakia) had to be put down by the army. In the vast Vorkuta labor camp in Russia, half a million prisoners rebelled, led by thousands of miners, instigating a general strike. In East Germany, there was a workers' revolt on 17 June which paralyzed the national forces of repression, and had to be crushed by Russian tanks.

On the same day as the East German workers rose, demonstrations and riots took place in seven Pol­ish cities. Martial law was imposed in Warsaw, Cracow and in Silesia, and Russian tanks had to participate in quelling the disturbances. Almost at the same time too, the first big strikes since the late forties broke out in Hungary, beginning at the great Matyas Rakosi iron and steel works in Csepel, Budapest. The strikes spread to many industrial centers in Hungary, and mass demonstra­tions by Hungarian peasants took place on the Great Hungarian Plain[1] (as Nagy's Memoirs attest).

On 16 June, building workers in East Berlin downed tools, marched to government buildings, and began calling for a generalized strike against the rai­sing of norms and the lowering of real wages. Twenty-Four hours later, most of the industrial centers of the country were paralyzed. Spontan­eously formed strike committees, co-coordinating the struggle at the level of whole cities, organized the spreading of the strike. State and party buildings were attacked, prisoners were freed, and the police were fought off wherever they appeared. For the first time ever, the attempt was made to spread the struggle across the frontiers of the imperialist blocs. In Berlin, the demonstrators marched into the western sector of the city, calling for the solidarity of the work­ers there. The western allies, who would cert­ainly have preferred it if the Berlin Wall had already been built at that time, had to seal off their sector in order to prevent a generalization.[2]

The East German revolt, weighed down as it was by illusions in western democracy, nationalism, etc, could not threaten the class rule of the bourgeoi­sie. But it certainly did threaten the stability of the Stalinist regime and the effectiveness of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as the west­ern bulwark of the Russian bloc. The events of 1953 encouraged the bourgeoisie throughout the bloc to take the initiative in:

-- reducing permanent open state terror against the proletariat, which was becoming increasingly dangerous;

-- cutting back on internal party terror as a method of resolving faction fights. In this way it was hoped to become more flexible in dealing with an increasingly difficult social situation;

-- restricting the use of open terror in the process of production, a method more appropriate to the period of worldwide depression and war in the thirties and forties, than to the relative stability of the period of post-war reconstruction;

-- declaring a period of ‘peaceful co-existence' with the American bloc, in the hope of benefiting from the post-war boom in the west.

The almost suspiciously timely death of Stalin allowed Khrushchev to introduce political and eco­nomic initiatives in this direction. Whereas 1953 seemed to underlay the danger of not execu­ting this change in policy, the bourgeoisie feared that this change itself might be interpre­ted as a sign of weakness, either by the workers or by the western imperialist rivals. As a result, Stalinism followed a zig-zag course over the following three years, veering between the old style and the new. In fact, the classical expression of open political crisis in Eastern Europe is not mass trials and purges, which usually show that one faction has gained the upper hand, but this hesitant veering between several different factions and courses.

The 1956 upsurge

"Warning! Citizens of Budapest! Be on your guard! Almost 10 million counter-revolutio­naries are at large in the country. In the former aristocratic quarters such as Csepel and Kispest more than 10,000 former landowners, capitalists, generals and bishops are entrenched. Due to the ravages of these gangs, altogether only six workers have remained alive -- and they have formed a government under Kadar." (Poster on a street wall in Budapest, November 1956.)

In 1956 the class struggle erupted in Poland and Hungary. On 28 June, an insurrectional strike broke out in Poznan (Poland), and had to be put down by the army. This event, which was the high­light of a series of sporadic strikes in Poland, centered in Silesia and the Baltic coast -- speeded up the coming to power of a ‘reformist' faction led by Gomulka, a rabid nationalist[3]. Gomulka realized the importance of anti-Stalinism and of nationalist demagogy in diffusing a dangerous situation. But the Kremlin suspected that his extreme nationalism would favor the growth of organized anti-Russian tendencies in Poland, and it opposed the Gomulkite plan to isolate the proletariat through making concessions to the peasantry on the question of collectivization. But despite the disapproval of the Russians, who even went as far as threatening with a military invasion, Gomulka was convinced of his messianic role in saving Polish capital from an upsurge of the proletariat. In fact he knew that a display of opposition to Moscow could only raise the thinly worn popularity of the Stalinists in Poland. He therefore ordered the Polish army to seal off the frontier to Russia, and even threatened to arm the workers of Warsaw in the event of an invasion. But contrary to what, for example, the Trotskyists today still claim - namely that the Gomulkites threatened the Russians with a popular rising - what Polish Stalinism was actually trying to do was to warn his friends in the Kremlin of the danger of such a rising.

Krushchev knew very well that Poland, wedged as it was in between Russia and its military out­post the GDR, couldn't possibly ally itself with the American bloc, either under Gomulka or under anyone else. So the Russians could be persuaded to back down, and this ‘national triumph' added gloss to the reformist lies which the Gomulkites were pedalling.

Although the Polish bourgeoisie obviously succeeded in heading off bigger explosions in this way, the situation remained critical. On 22 October there were violent clashes between workers and cops in Wroclow. A day later there were stormy demonstrations in Gdansk, and strikes broke out again in several parts of the country, including at the key Zeran car plant in Warsaw.

On the same day (23 October), a demonstration called by oppositional Stalinist student groups in Budapest (Hungary), in solidarity with Poland, attracted hundreds of thousands of people. The demo was intended as a show of support for Gomulka, and not for the workers striking against his government. Its immediate aim was to sweep the ‘reformist' wing of the Hungarian bourgeoisie, led by Nagy, into power. The demo ended with violent clashes between young workers and the political police and Russian tank units. Street battles raged all night. The workers had begun to arm themselves[4].

As the first dramatic news of the Budapest events reached Warsaw, Gomulka was addressing a mass meeting of a quarter of a million people. He warned the Polish workers not to ‘meddle in Hungarian affairs'. The main thing now was to ‘defend the gains of the Polish October', and to ensure that no further dilemmas would befall the fatherland.

Within twenty-four hours of the first clashes in Budapest, a ‘progressive' Nagy-led government had been installed in office, and immediately appealed for the restoration of order, while all the time working closely together with the Russian generals. On the evening of the same day, the revolt had developed into a full scale insurrection. Two days later, the entire coun­try was paralyzed by a mass strike of over 4 million workers. The extension of the mass strike, the spreading of news and the maintenance of essential services, lay in the hands of the workers' councils. The latter had sprung up everywhere, elected in the factories and responsible to the mass assemblies there. Within days, these councils were assuring the centralization of the struggle. Within a fortnight, this centralization was established for the whole country.

The regimes of the eastern bloc are as rigid as corpses, insensitive to the changing needs of the situation. But when they see their very existence being threatened, they become remarkably flexible and astute. Within a few days of the outbreak of fighting, the Nagy government had stopped denouncing the resistance, and was even trying to place itself at the head of the movement, in order to steer it away from a direct confrontation with the state. The workers' councils would be recognized and legalized, it was announced. Since it wasn't possible to smash them, they would have to be bureaucratically strangulated, by integrating them into the capitalist state. And the withdrawal of the Russian armed forces was promised.

For five days, the badly battered Russian army divisions were withdrawn. But in those five days, the political position of the Hungarian Stalinists worsened steadily. The Nagy faction, who had been presented as the ‘savior of the nation', was after only one week in power, fast losing the confidence of the working class. Now, with time running out, it had no alternative but to make itself the false spokesman of the movement, using to the full all the bourgeois mystifications which were preventing the revolt from becoming a revolution. The democratic and above all the nationalist illusions of the workers had to be bolstered, while at the same time the government would try and take the direction of the movement out of the hands of the workers' councils. To this end, Nagy declared Hungary's neutrality, and its intention of can­celling its membership of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. It was a desperate gamble, an attempt to do ‘a Gomulka' under much more unfavorable circumstances. And it failed. On the one hand, because Moscow was not prepared to withdraw its troops from a country bordering on the western bloc. On the other hand, the workers' councils were for the main part dazzled by Nagy's move, but were unwilling to give up the control of their own struggle.

But decisive for the fate of the proletarian re­volt in Hungary was now the development in Poland. Workers' demonstrations in solidarity with Hungary were still taking place in a number of cities. A mass solidarity meeting was held at the Zeran works in Warsaw. But basically the Gomulkites had the situation under control. The identifica­tion of the Polish workers with the ‘fatherland' remained strong. An internationalist struggle of the Polish workers alongside their Hungarian class brothers was not on the cards.

With Gomulka and the nationalist poison assuring order in Poland, the Russian armed forces now had a free hand to deal with the Hungarian proletariat. Five days after leaving Budapest, the Soviet army returned to crush the workers' soviet. They pounded the workers' districts to rubble, killing an estimated 30,000 people. But despite the occu­pation, the mass strike continued for weeks, and those in the councils who argued to break it off had their mandates removed. And even after the mass strike had to end, acts of resistance con­tinued to occur regularly until well into January 1957. In Poland, workers demonstrated in Warsaw, and clashed with police in Bydgoscz and Wroclaw, and tried to sack the Russian Consulate in Szczecin. But the workers in Poland did not identify their own exploiters as murderers of the Hungarian proletariat. And even in Hungary itself, the workers' councils continued until their disso­lution to negotiate with the new henchman, Kadar, and hesitated to believe that he and his lot had collaborated with the Kremlin in crushing the class. 

1956: Some conclusions

The Eastern European strike wave was not the inaugurator of worldwide upsurges of the class struggle, or even of a new period of resistance on the part of the eastern workers themselves. Rather it represented the last great fight of the world proletariat in the teeth of the counter-revolution. And yet, in the history of the liberation movement of the proletariat, it was of great importance. It affirmed the revolutio­nary character of the working class, and showed clearly that the worldwide reversal which the class had suffered was not permanent. As such, it pointed already to the coming of a new upsurge of the proletarian struggle, which followed just over a decade later. It began to clear the way for a second assault on the capitalist system, which today for the first time since the post-World War I revolutionary wave is slowly but surely coming into motion. The 1956 struggles proved:

-- that the bourgeoisie cannot hold the proletariat under its control forever, once it starts to lose its ideological control;

-- that the working class, far from needing ‘independent trade unions' and ‘democratic rights' in order to wage its struggle, develops its resistance and confronts the capitalist state all the quicker, the more these organs of the bourgeoisie are missing or ineffective;

-- that the mass organs of proletarian strug­gle, the workers' councils, and the assemblies and committees of workers in struggle which pre­cede them, are the one and only feasible form of organization of the workers in the period of capitalist decline.

Furthermore, 1953-56 proved conclusively that the goals and the methods of struggle of workers today are the same everywhere. The notion of a fundamental difference between east and west, whether its:

-- the counter-revolutionary lie of the Stalin­ists and Trotskyists about socialism or a workers' state in the Russian bloc;

-- or the western legend about a free and a totalitarian world in conflict with one another;

-- or the Bordigist conception about the exis­tence of a ‘youthful capitalism' in Stalin's Russia and post-war Eastern Europe, completing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution;

-- or the tendency prevalent in the early days of the KAPD, clearly formulated by Gorter in his ‘Reply to Comrade Lenin' to divide Europe east and west by an imaginary line -- say from Danzig to Trieste -- west of which the workers were supposed to be more capable of autonomously organizing themselves than in the east

-- all this is wrong! There is no qualitative difference between east and west. The most you can say is that in many respects the situation in the east is an extreme example of the general conditions of decadent capitalism everywhere. The different pace and evolution of the same  class struggle, which we have to examine, shows us that in some respects the maturation of the class struggle in the Russian bloc is in advance  of, and in other respects behind that of the west. And this only proves the necessity for the whole class to draw all the lessons of its struggles wherever they take place.

It is vital for the workers and revolutionaries of the west to learn from the way their class brothers in the east immediately, and often violently, confront the state in mass struggle, spreading the movement as many workers as possible, and making this generalization the most pressing concern of the whole fight. This astonishingly explosive nature of the class strug­gle in the east is conditioned by a number of circumstances:

-- the lack of any buffers, such as ‘independent' trade unions, ‘alternative' politi­cal parties, a legal and ‘democratic' procedure, which would divert the class away from direct collisions with the state;

-- since almost all Eastern European workers have the same employer -- the state -- the mysti­fications of workers in different enterprises, industries, cities etc, having separate inter­ests is greatly weakened. Moreover, the state becomes the immediate aim of any class movement; even the simplest wage claims take on a political nature more swiftly. It is very obvious that the state is the collective enemy of all the workers;

-- the ever-present threat of state repression gives the workers no alternative but to spread their struggle, if they don't want to get massacred.

These conditions exist in the west too, although in a much less acute form. The point however is to see how the deepening and the generalization of the world economic crisis will inevitably accentuate these conditions in the west as well. In this way, the international crisis of world capitalism is today laying the material base for the international resistance of tomorrow. It is already opening up the perspective of the internationalization of struggles.

In fact there is nothing more natural than for the workers, who everywhere have the same inter­ests to defend, to unite their forces and strug­gle as a single class. It's the bourgeoisie, split into innumerable national capitals and factions within each country, who need the capi­talist state in order to defend common class interests. But in the period of the disinte­gration of capitalism, the state is not merely forced to hold together the economic and social fabric, it also organizes itself permanently to prevent the unification of the working class. It reinforces the division of the proletariat into different nations, regions, industries, imperialist blocs etc, with all its strength disguising the fact that these divisions repre­sent conflicts of interests within the exploiters' camp. This is why the state so carefully cultivates all those weapons, from nationalism to the unions, which prevent the unification of the proletariat.

The limitations of the workers' struggles of the 1950s were ultimately defined by the period of counter-revolution in which they took place, even if here and there these limits were trans­cended. In Poland, the movement never went be­yond trying to pressurize the Stalinist party, or supporting one faction of it against another. In East Germany 1953, the democratic and natio­nalist illusions remained unbroken, expressed in the workers' sympathies for ‘the west' and for West German Social Democracy. And all of these upsurges were dominated by nationalism, and by the idea that not capitalism but ‘the Russians' are to blame for everything. In the last analy­sis, as the ‘reformists' a la Gomulka and Nagy were being exposed, nationalism remained the only shield protecting the state, deflecting the anger of the workers against the capable Russian army. These were proletarian, not nationalist movements, and this is why nationa­lism destroyed them. It prevented the exten­sion of the struggle across the borders, and that was decisive. In 1917, it was possible for the proletariat to take power -- in Russia -- at a time when the class struggle remained below the surface in almost every other major country. This was because the world bourgeoi­sie was locked in the deadly conflict of World War I, and the workers in Petrograd and Moscow found themselves to begin with up against the Russian bourgeoisie alone. But already by 1919, as the revolutionary wave began to spread to other countries, the world bourgeoisie was uniting against it. Today, just in 1919 or in 1956, the exploiters are united the world over against the proletariat. At the same time as they prepare for war against each other, they come to each other's aid when their system as a whole is endangered.

In November 1956 the Hungarian proletariat was confronted with the realization that even the strengthening of the council movement, the maintenance of a solid strike front comprising millions of workers, paralyzing the economy, and the unbrolen combativity of the class in the teeth of the Russian military occupation, remained ineffective. The lionhearted working class of Hungary remained helpless, trapped within the national frontiers, the nationalist prison.

It was national isolation, not the panzers of modern imperialism, which defeated them. At moments when the bourgeoisie feels its rule in danger, it cares little for the state of the economy, and would have been prepared to sit out even this total strike for months on end, if it thought it could grind down its adver­sary in this way. It was precisely nationa­list ideology, all the garbage which the wor­kers had spewed at them about the ‘rights of the Hungarian people' by the Stalinists them­selves, but equally by the BBC and Radio Free Europe, which saved the Stalinist party and the capitalist state from taking a severe mauling. For all the power of their movement, the Hungarian workers did not succeed in destro­ying the state or any of its institutions. While they were taking on the Hungarian poli­tical police and the Russian tanks in the first days of the revolt, Nagy was reorganizing the regular police and armed forces, whole units of which had gone over to him and his nationa­list crusade. Some of the workers' councils seem to have thought that these units had come over the side of the proletariat, but in fact they only seemed to make common cause with the workers, to the extent that the latter followed nationalist goals. Within forty-eight hours of Nagy's restructuring of the police and the army, they were already being used against intransigent groups of insurgent workers! The workers' councils, dazed by the patriotic hullabaluh, even wanted to assist in the appoint­ment of officers for this army. This is the way in which nationalism serves to tie the prole­tariat to the exploiters and their state.

The extension of the struggle of the working class beyond national frontiers is today an absolute precondition for smashing the state in any single country. The value of the struggles of the fifties was to show the indispensability of this. Only an international struggle today can be a really effective one, allowing the proletariat to unfold its true potential.

As 1956 shows, along with the generalization of the crisis and the simultaneousness of the class struggle in different countries, another key to the internationalization of the proletarian fight is the realization on the part of the wor­kers that they are facing an enemy united against them on a world scale. In Hungary, the workers removed the troops, police and customs officers from the frontier areas, in order to make it possible for help to arrive from outside. The Russian, Czechoslovakian and Austrian bourgeoi­sies reacted by sealing off their borders to Hungary through their armies. The Austrian authorities even invited the Russians to inspect the thoroughness of this operation[5]. In face of the united front of the world bourgeoisie, in east and west, the workers began to break from the national prison and appeal to their class brothers in other countries. The workers' coun­cils in several border areas began to appeal directly for the support of the workers in Russia, Czechoslovakia and Austria, and the proclamation of the workers' councils of Budapest, on the occasion of the last 48-hour total strike of the workers in December, appealed to the workers of the whole world to join in solidarity strikes with the struggles of the proletariat in Hungary[6].

Doomed by the period of worldwide defeat in which it took place, the Eastern European wave of the fifties was isolated by the division of the industrial world into two imperialist blocs, one of which, the American bloc, was only then experiencing the first ‘euphoria' of the post­war reconstruction boom. The objective condi­tions for internationalization, above all across the frontiers of the blocs -- namely the generalization of the crisis and the class struggle -- did not exist on a world scale, and this prevented the decisive break with nationa­lism in Eastern Europe as well. Only an open fight of the workers in different parts of the world will be able to demonstrate to the workers of the world that not this government and that trade union, but every fatherland and every trade union, defends capitalist barbarism against the workers and have to be destroyed. None of the burning issues of the proletarian revolution can be resolved on anything else except a world scale.

The end of the counter-revolution

The class struggle in Russia

In considering the class struggle of the East European workers in the 1950s, we have omitted, until now, the development in Russia itself, the leading member of the bloc. In the USSR, as in the whole world, the years after 1948 witnessed a sharp, frontal attack against the living standards of the exploited. And this provoked, as in the satellite countries of the Russian bloc, a deter­mined proletarian reaction. If we are mentioning the Russian development separately, this is because of the special circumstances which prevail there:

-- the standard of living of the workers and peasants in Russia is dramatically lower than in any Eastern European country, especially when we include Asiatic Russia;

-- Stalinism in Russia doesn't enjoy as much as an iota of working class confidence. There were and are no Nagys or Gomulkas to lead the workers astray here;

-- the bourgeoisie assures its control of every aspect of life, through outright repression, to a degree which would seem unimaginable in Eastern Europe, even in the GDR.

But the number and kind of illusions which the workers have in their rulers -- in the USSR very few indeed -- is only one element determining the balance of class forces. Another, equally important one is the proletariat''s ability to develop a perspec­tive, an alternative of its own. And at no time in any country in the world has the working class found it harder to do this than in Stalinist Russia. Added to the completeness of the counter­revolution in this country, the proletariat is faced today with the problem of the enormous distances which separate the working class centers from each other and from the great pro­letarian concentration which is Western Europe. This geographical isolation is reinforced politi­cally and militarily by the state.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the Russian prole­tariat, which had terrorized the capitalist world some thirty years before, began to take up its struggle again. The first outbreaks of resistance were in the Siberian concentration camps: in Ekibadus (1951) ; in a series of camps, Pestscharij, Wochruschewo, Oserlag, Gorlag, Norilsk (1952); in Retschlag-Volkuta (July, 1953), and in Kengir and Kasachstan (1954) . These insur­rectional strikes, involving several million pri­soners altogether, were brutally crushed by the KGB. Solzhenitsyn, who was one of the most impor­tant documenters of the Stalinist camps, insisted nonetheless that these revolts were not futile, and that they directly forced the central govern­ment to close down these honorable institutions of ‘socialist realism'.

The first record of strikes by ‘free' workers which we possess for post-war Russia concerns the walk out at the Thalman works in Voronesch (1959) which won the support of the whole city and ended with the arrest of every single striker by the KGB. A year later, on a construction site in Temir-Tau, Kasachstan, a violent strike broke out in protest against the ‘privileges' enjoyed by Bulgarian workers on the site. This conflict within the workforce, which allowed itself to be divided in this way, made it easy for KGB repression. They piled the corpses onto lorries.

In the years 1960-62 a series of strikes broke out in the metal industries of Kasaskstan and in the mining region of the Donbas and the Kouzbas . The highpoint of this wave was rea­ched at Nowotschkesk, where a mass rebellion of the whole city developed out of a strike of 20,000 workers at the locomotive plant against the raising of norms and prices. KGB troops had to be flown in, several days after the first out­burst of resistance, after police and local army units refused to fire on the workers. The KGB initiated a bloodbath, and afterwards they sent the ‘ring-leaders' to Siberia and executed the troops who had refused to open fire. Nevertheless, it was the first time that the workers answered the KGB with their own class violence. They even tried to storm the army barracks, to arm themselves. One of the slogans of the revolt was: ‘Slaughter Krushchev'.

In the years 1965-69, big strikes broke out for the first time in the main urban centers of European Russia, in the Leningrad chemical industry, aced in metal and car plants in Moscow. For the later 1960s we have many reports of strikes in various parts of Russia, for example in Kiev, in the Swerdlowsk region, in the Moldavian republic, etc.

The Russian bourgeoisie, well aware of the danger of such strikes spreading or of link­ing up with one another, always reacts to such events immediately. Within hours it makes concessions or flies in the KGB, or both. The class struggle of the fifties and sixties in the USSR was a series of furious, spontaneous outbursts, often lasting no more than some hours, and never breaking out of the trap of geographical isolation. For all of these out­bursts -- and we have only mentioned some of them -- we do not possess a single account of the formation of a strike committee, although there are often mass meetings. These strug­gles, notable for the great courage and determination which they show, are still characterized by a certain desperation, by a lack of a perspective for organizing a collec­tive fight against the state. But their appearance alone was an unmistakable sign that the long period of worldwide counter­-revolution was drawing to a close[7].

Czechoslovakia

Another sign of this was the development of workers' struggles in Czechoslovakia at the end of the sixties. Czechoslovakia was the most successful and highly developed Eastern European economy in the late forties and during the fifties. It helped to power the post-war reconstruction of Eastern Europe, exporting capital goods to its neighbors and enjoying the highest standard of living in Comecon. But in the 1960s it began to lose its competitive posi­tion rapidly. The best chance for the bourgeoi­sie to counteract this tendency was to modernize industry through obtaining trade agreements and technology from the west, and to finance this by considerably lowering real wages. But the danger of such a policy had already been shown in the fifties, and this lesson was underlined by the outbreak of strikes in various parts of the country in 1966-67.

It was this situation of crisis which brought the Dubcek faction of the state party to power. It inaugurated a policy of liberalization, in the hope of getting the workers to accept austerity in return for the privilege of reading ‘hard words' of criticism against ‘leading comrades' in their daily papers. The ‘Prague Spring' of 1968, unfolding under the paternal eye of the government and the police, released the nationalist and regionalist zeal of the stu­dents, intellectuals and lower functionaries, who now felt themselves able to identify with the state again. But this patriotic fervor, coupled with the reappearance of oppositional parties -- none of which however wanted any­thing else but to give Stalinism a human face -- breaking loose as it did at a time when Czechoslovakia was economically opening up to the west, went too far for the liking of Moscow and East Berlin.

The occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops which followed represented more a reinforcement of the unity of the Russian bloc at the military and political level, rather than a determined blow against the proletariat. But Dubcek, who thought he had had the situa­tion under control, and who entertained no illu­sions at all about being able to lead Czechoslovakia out of the Russian bloc, was furious about the invasion. While of course using the opportunity to bolster natio­nalist feelings, his government now had to con­centrate itself on preventing any working class resistance to the invasion. In fact, Dubcekism, which inspired many intellectuals, had little impact on the workers. During the ‘Prague Spring' a whole series of wildcat strikes broke out in various parts of the country, particularly in the transport and the industrial sectors. Strike committees were formed to centralize the struggle, and to defend the strikers from state repression. In all the big factories massive wage demands were raised, to compensate for years of continual impoverishment. In many plants, resolutions were passed, condemning the centerpiece of Dubcek's ‘reformism' -- the closing down of unprofitable factories. They remained unimpr­essed by all the great plans to form ‘workers' councils' in the factories, which were supposed to get workers involved in the more effective organization of their own exploitation. When elections were eventually held to these famous factory councils, only 20 per cent of shop floor workers bothered to vote.

This class response to Dubcekism was broken by the August ‘68 invasion which ‘at last' began to bring the workers under the influence of the nat­ionalist hysteria. Also, the class struggle was derailed by an important radicalization of the trade unions, who had supported Dubcek's austerity program, and now took up an oppositional stance, supporting the remaining Dubcekists in the gov­ernment -- who for their part were busy restoring law and order in collaboration with the native and ‘visiting' armed forces. While the students and oppositionalists were leading the workers in mass demonstrations -- orderly reaffirmations of patriotism -- and condemning Dubcek's betrayal (of the national capital), the unions were threatening to unleash general strikes if the Dubcekists were removed from the government. But Dubcekism's historic role was already fulfilled, for the moment at least. And when its leaders quickly disappeared from the pinnacle of the state, the trade unions ditched their militant plans, more fearful of their ‘own' workers, who might get out of control, than of the Russians ... and settled for more peaceful forms of patriotism.

Poland 1970

The class struggle of the Czechoslovakian prole­tariat in the spring and summer of 1968 was impor­tant not only for the temporary resistance of the workers to the nationalist and democratic bombardment of the bourgeoisie -- which represented an important breakthrough -- but especially because it took place within the context of a worldwide upsurge of proletarian class struggle in response to the descent of the world economy into open crisis at the end of the period of post-war reconstruction. Although the workers in Czechoslovakia didn't go anything like as far as their class brothers in France in the Spring of 1968 (above all the weight of nationalist mystifications once more proved too strong in the east), there were many similarities in the two situations which once more went to confirm the fundamental convergence of the conditions of the proletariat in east and west in face of the advancing crisis of the system. We could mention:

-- the sudden, completely unexpected outburst of class struggle, catching the trade unions on the wrong foot, and shaking the confidence of rul­ing factions (Dubcek, de Gaulle) who felt them­selves well in control;

-- a clear response of the class in refusing to pay for the capitalist crisis;

-- the weight of oppositionalist ideology, chiefly carried by the students, greatly hampering the development of proletarian consciousness and class autonomy.

But the most dramatic, definitive affirmation that in the Russian bloc as well the black night of the counter-revolution had come to an end was Poland 1970-71. In December 1970 the Polish working class responded massively and completely spontaneously to price rises of from 30 per cent upwards. Stalinist party headquarters were des­troyed by the workers. The strike movement spread from the Baltic coast to Poznan, to Katowice and Upper Silesia, Wroclaw and Cracow. On 17 December Gomulka sent his tanks rolling into the Baltic ports. Several hundred workers were murdered. Street battles raged in Szszecin and Gdansk. The repression did not succeed in crushing the movement. On 21 December, a strike wave erupted in Warsaw. Gomulka was fired; his suc­cessor Gierek had to go straight away to negot­iate personally with the workers from the Warski docks in Szszecin. Gierek made some concessions, but refused to take back the price rises. On 11 February, a mass strike broke out in Lodz, led by 10,000 textile workers. Now Gierek backed down; the price rises were rescinded[8].

The repression of the Polish state had been out­flanked by the generalization of the movement across the country. But why did the forces of the Warsaw Pact not intervene, as they had done two years earlier in Prague?

* The struggles of the Polish workers were situa­ted firmly on the terrain of working class de­mands; they were resisting attacks on their living standards, and not calling for any kind of ‘national renewal'. They understood that the enemy is also at home, and not just in Russia.

* There were no appeals to any so-called democra­tic forces either within the Polish CP or in the west. Many workers still imagined it was neces­sary to bridge the ‘gap' between party and workers, but there was no longer any faction of the ruling party who enjoyed the confidence of the workers, and therefore no-one who would be able to lead them up the garden path.

For the first time since the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 Europe experienced a mass struggle which led to a generalization across national frontiers. The Polish events set off a wave of strikes and protests in the Baltic republics of Russia and in White Russia, centered on the cities of Lwow and Kaliningrad.

The Polish upsurge was the product of a whole process of maturation going on within the class in the fifties and sixties. On the one hand, the proletariat was recovering its self-confidence and combativity, as a new generation of workers, reared on the post-war promises of a better world, and unscarred by the bitter defeats of the counter­revolutionary period, was no longer prepared to accept poverty and resignation. On the other hand, these years saw the weakening of a whole series of mystifications within the class. The anti-fascism of the wartime and post-war period had been dealt blows by the realization that the ‘liberators' from fascist rule themselves used concentration camps, police terror and open racism to secure their class rule. And the illusion that some kind of ‘socialism' or the gradual abolition of classes was being under­taken was shattered by the sight of the fabu­lous luxury in which the ‘red bourgeoisie' live, and by the constant deterioration of the work­ers' living standards. Similarly, workers soon learnt that the defense of their own class inte­rests entailed violent confrontations with the ‘workers' state'! Hungary ‘56 had shown the futility of struggling within a nationalist per­spective, and the struggles on 1970-71 in Poland and North West Russia went on to show where the alternative would lie. From Hungary ‘56 to Czechoslovakia ‘68, the idea that radical fact­ions of the Stalinist party can support the working class has been greatly discredited. To­day, in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania or Russia, only oppositionalists outside the CP can gain a real hearing from the workers. The workers still have a lot to learn about the oppositionalists, it's true. But at least they now know where they stand vis a vis the Stalinists, and that's already a big step. Finally, the acceleration of the crisis itself undermines all the illusions about being able to reform the system. The crisis today is acting as a catalyst in the revolutionization of the proletariat.

The weakening of the ideological grip of bour­geois ideology over the proletariat has allowed the development of working class autonomy -- of which 1970-71 in Poland was the first example -- at a much higher level than in the fifties. Aut­onomy is never purely an organizational question, although of course independent organization of the class in its mass assemblies and strike com­mittees is absolutely indispensable for a prolet­arian struggle. Autonomy is bound up as well with the political orientation which the workers in struggle are able to give themselves. In the per­iod of state capitalist totalitarianism, the bour­geoisie will invariably succeed in implanting it­self in the organs of struggle of the workers us­ing its trade unions and radical factions. But this is precisely why mass organs of struggle, organizing the workers independently of all other classes in society, are so crucial. Because with them, the continuous ideological battle between the two classes takes place on a terrain favorable to the workers. This is the world of the collective struggle itself, of the mass participation of all the workers. This is the road which the proletariat in Poland took in 1970, and has stayed on ever since. It is not only the road of generalized and mass struggle, but also the first precondition for the politicization of the class war, for forging the weapons of the class party and class-wide debate, which will be capable of bringing the whole structure of bourgeois ideology crashing to the ground. In 1970-71 the radicalized Stalinist party base and the unions, and even top state functionaries, could enter the strike committees and assemblies and defend the standpoint of the bourgeoisie there. And yet in the end it was the proletariat who came out of the conflict strengthened.

1970-71 was the first major struggle of the working class in Eastern Europe since the October Revolution which the bourgeoisie was unable to ideologically sidetrack or immediately and violently crush. This breakthrough came about as soon as the ideological hegemony of the bour­geoisie began to totter. The state had to temp­orarily retreat because its attempt to crush the           enemy failed. State violence and ideological control are not two alternative methods which the bourgeoisie can use separately from one another. Repression can only be effective as long as it is reinforced by ideological control, which will prevent the proletariat from defending itself or from hitting back effectively. The class struggle in Poland, already in 1970, illustrated that the working class need not be intimidated by the terrorist state, so long as it is aware of its own class interests, and organizes itself autonomously as a unified class to defend them. This political and organizational autonomy is the most important factor favoring the generalization and the politicization of the fight. This revolutionary perspective, the development among workers in all countries of a consciousness of the need for a unified, international assault against a world bourgeoisie ready to unite against any proleta­rian upsurge -- this is the only immediate and practical perspective which communists can offer to their class brothers in east and west.

Krespel, 1980

 

---

[1] These events are reported by Lomax in ‘The Working Class in the Hungarian Revolution', Critique no. 12.

[2] See International Review of the ICC, no. 15, ‘The East German Workers Insurrection of June 1953'.

[3] See F. Lewis The Polish Volcano, N. Bethell Gomulka

[4] On Hungary '56 see for example, Poland-Hungary 1956 (JJ Maireand), Nagy (P. Broue); Laski Hungarian Revolution for documentation, proclamations of the workers' councils etc. See also A. Anderson Hungary 1956 (Solidarity London) or Goszotony Der Ungarische Volksaufstand in Augenzeugenberichten. In the press of the ICC, ‘Hungary 1956: The Specter of the Workers' Councils', in World Revolution no. 9

[5] "The Austrian government ordered the creation of a forbidden zone along the Austrian-Hungarian border.....The defense minister inspected the zone, accompanied by the military attaches of the four Great Powers, including the USSR. The military attaches were in this way able to convince themselves of the effectiveness of the measures being taken to protect the security of the Austrian borders and neutrality." (From a memorandum of the Austrian government, quoted in Die Ungarische Revolution der Arbeiterrate, pps 83-84.

[6] Report on the Daily Mail, 10.12.56.

[7] See for example Arbeiteropposition in der Sowjetunion, A. Schwendtke (Hrg); Workers Against the Gulag, Pluto Press; Politische Opposition in der Sowjetunion 1960-72; The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn; Die USSR ist ein grobes Konsentrationslager, Sacharow; State Capitalism in Russia, Tony Cliff.

In the press of the ICC: ‘Class Struggle in the USSR', Revolution Internationale nos 30 & 31 and World Revolution no. 10

[8] See Misere et Revolte de l'ouvrier Polonais, Paul Barton; Poland: le Crepuscule des Bureacrats, Cahiers Rouges no. 3; Rote Fahnen uber Polen, Minutes of the Debate between Gierek and the workers on the Warski docks in Szczecin. The best source of all is Capitalisme et Lutte de Classes en Pologne 1970-71 from ICO.

In the press of ICC see ‘Pologne: de '70 a '80, un renforcement de la class ouvriere', in Revolution Internationale no. 80 

II

Harper as philosopher, or, the philosophy of his critical and political errors

There's a phenomenon in the process of knowledge in bourgeois society which Harper hasn't talked about. That is, the influence of the capitalist division of labor: first on the development of knowledge in the natural sciences and, second, on the development of knowledge in the workers' move­ment.

At one point Harper says that, in each of its revolutions, the bourgeoisie must appear to be different from what it was in the previous one, and from what it actually is at that moment. It must hide its real goals.

This is true. But because Harper doesn't talk about the process of knowledge in history, because he doesn't explicitly pose the problem of its formation, he ends up posing it implicitly in no less mechanistic a manner than the one which he himself accuses Lenin of employing.

The process whereby knowledge is formed depends on the conditions of the production of scientif­ic conceptions and ideas in general. These conditions in turn are linked to the general conditions of production, ie to the practical application of ideas.

As bourgeois society develops -- as its condit­ions of production, its economic mode of existence evolve -- its own ideology develops also: its scientific conceptions, as well as its conceptions of the world and about the world.

Science is a very particular branch of the production of ideas that are necessary for the life of capitalist society, for the continuation and evolution of its mode of production.

The economic mode of production not only applies practically what science elaborates theoretical­ly: it also has a great influence on the manner in which ideas and sciences are elaborated.

Just as the capitalist division of labor imposes an extreme specialization in all areas concerned with the practical realization of production, it also imposes an extreme specialization, a further division of labor, in the area of the formation of ideas, and especially in the area of science.

The specialization of science and of scientists is an expression of the universal division of labor in capitalism; and scientific specialists are as necessary to capitalism as army generals, experts in military technique, administrators and directors.

The bourgeoisie is quite capable of making a synthesis in the field of science as long as it doesn't have a direct affect on its mode of exploitation. As soon as it touches on this, the bourgeoisie unconsciously distorts reality. In the sphere of history, economics, sociology, and philosophy, it can only arrive at incomplete synthesis.

When the bourgeoisie concentrates on practical application and scientific. investigation it is essentially materialist. But since it is unable to arrive at a total synthesis, since it is unconsciously impelled to hide its own exist­ence and oppose the scientific laws of the development of society -- laws discovered by socialists -- it can only deal with this psychological barrier in front of its own social-historic reality by resorting to philosophical idealism, and this idealism imbues its whole ideology. This distortion of reality, a necessary aspect of bourgeois society, can be accomplished quite effectively through the bourgeoisie's various philosophical systems. But the bourgeoisie also tends to borrow elements from philosophies and ideologies that emerged in previous modes of exploitation.

This is because these ideologies don't threaten the bourgeoisie's existence -- on the contrary, they can be used to hide it. But it's also because all ruling classes in history, as conservative classes, have shown this need to use old methods of conservation, which are then of course used for their own needs, disfigured to fit in with their own shape.

This is why, in the early history of the bour­geoisie, even bourgeois philosophers could, to a certain extent, be materialist (insofar as they emphasized the necessity for the develop­ment of natural science) . But they were entirely idealist as soon as they tried to rationalize and justify the existence of the bourgeoisie itself. Those who put more emphasis on the first aspects of bourgeois thought could appear to be more materialist, those who were more concerned with justifying the existence of the bourgeoisie had to be more idealist.

Only the scientific socialists, beginning with Marx, were able to make a synthesis of the sciences in relation to human social development. This synthesis was in fact the necessary point of departure for their revolutionary critique.

To the extent that they were posing new scient­ific problems, the materialists of the revolutionary epoch of the bourgeoisie were impelled to attempt a synthesis of their knowledge and their conceptions of social development. But they were never able to question the social existence of the bourgeoisie; on the contrary, they had to justify it. There were individuals who tried to make this synthesis, from Descartes to Hegel. They were so concerned with attem­pting to make a total synthesis, with looking at the whole evolution of the world and of ideas from a dialectical standpoint, that they could not avoid expressing in the most complete manner this dual and contradictory aspect of bourgeois ideology. But they were exceptions.

What was actually pushing these individuals towards activity of this kind still remained obscure, since historical, social, economic and psychological knowledge was still at its elementary stage. We can only reaffirm the banal truth that they were dominated by the preoccupations of the society around them. Although they aim to build a new society, both the proletariat and socialists live and develop under capitalism, and they are therefore, in the sphere of knowledge, influenced by the laws of capitalism.

Communist militants specialize in politics, even though more universal knowledge and syntheses are useful to them as well.

Thus, within the workers' movement there is a division between political currents and the class in general. Even within the political currents there can be divisions between theoreticians of history, economics, and philos­ophy. The process that gives rise to the theoreticians of socialism is comparable to the one that gave rise to thinkers and philosophers in the revolutionary epoch of the bourgeoisie.

The influence of bourgeois education, of the bourgeois milieu in general, has always weighed heavily on the formation of ideas within the workers' movement. Both the develop­ment of society, and the development of science, has been decisive factors in the evolution of the workers' movement. This may sound like a tautology, but it is something that can never be repeated often enough. This constant parallel between the evolution of society, and the evolution of the proletariat and of socialists, is a heavy burden on the latter.

The vestiges of religions, ie, of precapit­alist historical epochs, certainly become an atavistic element in the ‘reactionary' bour­geoisie, but above all in the bourgeoisie as the last exploiting class in history. Despite this, religion isn't the most dangerous part of the ideology of this exploiting class - it's the whole ideology that is dangerous. In bourgeois ideology, alongside religion, chauvinism, and all the verbal idealism, there is also a narrow, dry, static materialism. As well as the idealist aspect of bourgeois thought, there is also the materialism of the natural sciences, which is an integral part of its ideology. For the bourgeoisie, which attempts to hide the unity of its existence by the plurality of its myths, these different ideologies aren't part of a whole, but socialists must indeed treat them as such.

In this way we can appreciate how hard it has been for the workers' movement to disengage it­self from bourgeois ideology as a whole -- from its incomplete materialism. Wasn't Bergson a great influence in the formation of certain currents of the workers' movement in France? The real problem is how to make each new ideology, each new idea, the object of a critical study, without falling into the dilemma of adopting or rejecting it. It's also a question of seeing all scientific progress not as real progress, but as some­thing that is only potentially progress or the enrichment of knowledge, something whose capacity to be practically applied is dep­endent on the fluctuations in the economic life of capitalism.

This is the only way in which socialists can maintain a permanently critical stance, allowing them to make a real study of ideas. With regard to science, their task is to theoreti­cally assimilate its results, while understanding that its practical applications can only really serve human needs in a society evolving towards socialism.

The development of knowledge in the workers' movement thus involves seeing the theoretical development of the sciences as its own acquisition. But it must integrate this development into a more overall understand­ing which is centered round the practical realization of the social revolution, the basis for all real progress in society.

Thus the workers' movement is specialized by its own revolutionary social existence, by the fact that it is struggling within capitalism and against the bourgeoisie, and in the strictly political sphere which -- up until the insurrection -- is the focal point in the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

It's this which ensures that the development of knowledge in the workers' movement has a dual aspect, dependent on the progress made towards the real liberation of the proletariat. On the one hand it is political, involved with immediate and burning issues. On the other hand it is theoretical and scientific, evolving more slowly and (up till now) mainly in periods of reflux in the workers' movement. In this aspect it deals with questions that are equally as important as political problems, and certainly inter­related with them, but in a less immediate and burning way.

In the political sphere, as society develops, so also do immediate class frontiers, through the political struggle of the proletariat.

The political struggle of the proletariat, the formation of a revolutionary workers' movement in opposition to the bourgeoisie, evolves in relation to the constant evolution of capitalist society.

The class politics of the proletariat thus vary from day to day, and even, to some extent, locally (later on we will see to what extent). It's in this day to day struggle, in these divergences between political parties and groups, in the tactics of place and moment, that the class frontiers are developed. These come later, in a mere general, less immediate way, posing the more distant goals of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, which are contained in the great directing principles of political groups or parties.

Thus, differences about political work are posed first in program, then in practical applications, in day-to-day activity. The evolution of these differences reflects the general evol­ution of society, the evolution of classes, their methods of struggle, their ideologies, theories and political practice.

In contrast to this, the synthesis of the scientific dialectic in the purely philoso­phical sphere of knowledge doesn't develop in the dialectically immediate way of the practical, political class struggle. Its dialectic is much more removed, more sporadic, without apparent links either to the local milieu or the social milieu, somewhat like the development of the applied sciences, the natural sciences, at the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism.

Harper doesn't make these distinctions. He fails to point out that knowledge has different manifestations in human thought, that it is extremely divided into various specializations according to the period, the social context, etc.

To put it in a somewhat crude and simplified way, human knowledge develops in response to the needs confronted by different social form­ations, and the various branches of knowledge develop in relation to the practical applica­tions envisaged. The more the sphere of knowledge is immediately connected to practical application, the easier it is to mark its progress. On the other hand, the more one is dealing with attempts at a syn­thesis the harder it is to follow this progress, because a synthesis depends on laws that are so complicated, and deriving from so many complex and diverse factors, that it is practically impossible for us today to plunge into such studies.

Moreover, practice encompasses the broad social masses whereas synthesis is very often done by individuals. Social processes are determined by general laws which are more easily and more immediately controllable. The individual is much more subject to particularities which are almost imperceptible to a historical science which is still at an early stage.

This is why we think that Harper has made a grave error in embarking upon a study of the problem of knowledge which restricts itself to pointing out the difference between the bourgeois approach to the problem, and the socialist, revolutionary approach, and which does not deal with the historic process through which ideas are formed. Because he operates in this manner, Harper's dialectic remains impotent and vulgar. So, after giving us an interesting essay correctly criticizing the manner in which Lenin attacks empirio-criticism (ie. showing Lenin's text as a vulgar polemic in the sphere of science, a dubious mish-mash of bourgeois materialism and Marxism), Harper's conclusions leave us with platitudes that are even more flagrant than Lenin's dialectic in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

The proletariat disengages itself from the bourgeois social milieu through a continual struggle: but it cannot totally acquire an independent ideology, in the full sense of the term, until it has practically carried out the generalized insurrection, until it has made the socialist revolution a living reality. When the proletariat achieves a total ideological and political independence, when it is conscious of the only solution to the social-economic morass of capitalism -- the construc­tion of a classless society -- at this precise moment it no longer exists as a class for cap­italism. Through the dual power it has establ­ished in its favor, it creates the social-historical environment favorable to its complete disappearance as a class. The socialist revolution is therefore made up of two essential moments: before and after the in­surrection.

The proletariat can only develop a totally independent ideology when it has created an environment favorable to its disappearance ie, after the insurrection. Before the in­surrection, the main goal of its ideology is the practical realization of the insurrection: this demands a consciousness of the need for the insurrection, and the existence of the possibilities and means for carrying it out. After the insurrection the main practical question becomes, on the one hand, the management of society, and on the other hand, the abolition of the contradictions bequeathed by capitalism. The fundamental preoccupation will then be: how to move towards communism, how to resolve the problems of the ‘transit­ion period'. Social consciousness, even that of the proletariat cannot be totally liber­ated from bourgeois ideology until this period of generalized insurrection has begun. Until then, until this act of liberation through violence, all the bourgeois ideologies, the whole of bourgeois culture, its science and its art, will have their impact on the thinking of socialists. A socialist synthesis is something that emerges extremely slowly out of the evolut­ion of the workers' movement. In the history of the workers' movement, it's often been the case that those who have been most capable of making a profound analysis of the class struggle and the evolution of capitalism have been outside the real movement itself -- more observers than actors. This is the case with Harper in comparison to Lenin.

Similarly, there can be a gap between theory and practice in the socialist movement, so that certain theoretical studies remain valid even though the people who formulated them have political practices which are not adequate for the struggle of the proletariat. And the reverse can also be true.

In the movement which plunged Russian society into three revolutions in twelve years, the practical tasks of the class struggle were the main ones. The needs generated by the struggle, the seizure of power, the exercise of power gave rise to politicians of the proletariat like Lenin and Trotsky -- men of action, tribunes, polemicists -- rather than to philosophers and economists. Those who were the philosophers and economists in the period of the IInd and IIIrd Internationals were very often outside of the practical revolutionary movement, or did their main work in periods of reflux in the revolutionary tide.

Between 1900 and 1924, Lenin was propelled by the stream of the rising revolution. All his work throbs with the life of this struggle, its ups and downs, its historical and above all its human tragedy. His work is mainly political and polemical, a fighting work. His essential contribution to the workers' movement is thus the political aspect of his work, and not his philosophy and economic studies, whose quality is more doubtful because they lack analytical depth, scientific knowledge, and the possibil­ities of a theoretical synthesis. In contrast to this turbulent historical situation in Russia, the calm that prevailed in Holland, on the margins of the class struggle in Germany, allowed the ideological development of someone like Harper, in a period of retreat in the class struggle.

Harper violently attacks Lenin at his weak point, ignoring the most important and vibrant part of his work, and he falls into error when he tries to draw conclusions about Lenin's thought and about the significance of his work. And while they are incomplete or mistaken about Lenin, Harper's conclusions fall into journalistic platitudes when they deal with the Russian revolution as a whole. By restricting himself to Materialism and Empirio-criticism he shows that he has understood nothing of Lenin's main work. But his errors about the Russian revolution are even more serious, and we shall return to them.

Philippe

(To be continued)

We publish below a leaflet written and distributed by some contacts in Ecuador at the time of the Peru/Ecuador war in January 1981.

The warlike events which are now provoking deaths and tensions between the populations of Peru and Ecuador have an historical and material explana­tion. Peace in capitalism is nothing but the continuation of war through diplomatic ways. The capitalist states arm themselves to the teeth to defend their territorial basis and the resources on which the process of accumulation develops. In order to safeguard the bourgeoisies' economic interests.

It is not by chance that, a few days after imperialism had established a conservative government at the head of the state, new focuses of war appeared in these semi-colonial countries. The capitalist crisis is a world crisis which madly leads the capitalist societies towards war. The US has been strongly hit by the weight of the crisis, but they have the political capacity, the military and economic power to transmit it to the dependant societies of the periphery. The stake is high.

The currents in favor of democratization for the people of Latin America, most of which hide themselves behind the human rights, have represented a constant disequilibrium for the plans and the global strategies of imperialism. When the confrontations inside capitalism internationally, led by the two great powers, are confrontations between blocs, Yankee imperialism tries to homogenize the governments of its bloc under puppet military regimes which can respond as one to their boss in the North. On the other hand, the revitalization of the Yankee economy, which suffers from all the effects of the capitalist crisis -- narrowness of the basis of accumulation, inflation, saturation of markets, competition in the spheres of production and markets, difficulty of finding productive investments, massive unemployment and tensions -- needs to consolidate itself through a warlike competition. So, the balance of payments of the Yankee economy may tend towards equilibrium, soaked in the blood of the workers and peasants of Peru and Ecuador.

In times of war, there is neither aggressor nor aggressed. Each state tries to justify the reason why it is fighting by the enemy's foolishness. With nationalism, it tries to master the proletariat and to launch it into the defense of its resources, the bourgeoisie's resources. The Ecuadorian territory and the Peruvian territory do not belong to the Ecuadorians or to the Peruvians. They belong to the bourgeoisie. The soldiers from the people, whether they are Ecuadorian or Peruvian, must take their arms and shoot in the air. The enemy is capital.

The world capitalist crisis manifests itself with a profound gravity for the peoples of peripheral countries which are dependent upon Yankee imperialism. This crisis is relatively deeper in a Peru where, particularly in the cities, people crowd together in the streets, seeking for a job and for food. The rate of inflation and the cost of living in Peru lead to a state of social decomposition and tension which can hardly be controlled, except through repression and arms. The Peruvian bourgeoisie, influenced by a continental policy which had been formulated long before Reagan came to power, opted to launch the Peruvian army in an invasion. So that the contradictions caused by capitalism, ie. human misery, starvation, malnutrition, unemployment, could be momentarily forgotten in the name of national unity.

Cowboy Reagan's policy regarding Ecuador has also an explanation. A social-democrat govern­ment in gestation, which expresses itself weakly through Roldos, contaminated by Christian democracy, allied to imperialism, has carried as its own national flag the mystif­ication of human rights. In its short time of democratic life, the external allies of Ecuador are the weakest countries politi­cally of Latin America; El Salvador and Nicaragua. Mexico is not a direct ally, despite the coincidence of certain of its ideas with the Ecuadorian capitalist govern­ment. The plan of imperialism is to isolate Ecuador, to place it in a situation of deeper dependence, to destabilize its false demo­cracy which is in any case an obstacle to the plan of continental subordination. So, oil will be able to flow more easily, arms will be sold in greater quantity, the multination­als will find no more obstruction inside the Andrean Pact. And, on the political level, imperialism will be able to establish a dictatorial democracy led by Christian-demo­cracy. The people will go out in the streets mobilized by the right of capital. If the diplomatic negotiations have no result, a lot of blood will flow, in the name of imperialism, of nationalism, and with the international blessing of the Pope who will probably call for peace between peoples.

The proletarians of the world have no country, their real enemy is capital. It is time to take the lands and the factories, in Peru and in Ecuador.

ICC

ICC's Response

The media hacks of east and west have been peddling a particular cliché for decades: that in Latin America the revolt against misery is always and inevitably a patriotic, nationalist revolt. The star and symbol of all this is Guevara, whose image is widely sold on tee-shirts and ash-trays.

But if there's one part of the world where, since 1968, the working class has begun to raise its head, to find its own class terrain not only against ‘Yankee imperialism' but also against ‘its own' national capital, its own patriotic bosses and native exploiters, it is in South America. The massive, violent struggles of the car workers in Argentina in 1969, the strikes of the Chilean miners against the Allende government (strikes which Fidel Castro in person tried to stop in the name of ‘defending the fatherland'), the Bolivian tin miners' strikes, the struggles of oil workers and iron miners in Peru at the beginning of 1981, the recent massive strike of the Sao Paulo metal workers in Brazil -- these are only a few of the more powerful movements of the working class on this continent.

These proletarian struggles have been a challenge to nationalism in an implicit way - through the refusal to make a distinction between foreign and native capital - rather than in a clear and explicit way. As yet, there is no major proletar­ian political force capable of defending and deepening explicitly the internationalist content of the workers' struggle. What's more, the most nationalist elements are recruited by the political organizations which specialize in controlling the proletariat.

At the end of January 1981 a ‘war' broke out between Peru and Ecuador. It was fought over territory that might be a source of oil. Internally, each country used the war to try and stir up nationalist enthusiasm, to impose military discipline and a minimal degree of national unity, especially in Peru which was violently shaken by workers' struggles at the end of 1980.

As usual, all the nationalist political forces, from military-men to radical trade unionists, in both Peru and Ecuador, called on the workers and peasants to defend ‘their' country.

In these conditions we can see how important it is that a voice, no matter how weak, was raised in on one of the belligerent countries, saying: "In the name of national sovereignty, the national bourgeoisies ask the people to give their blood in order to safeguard the bourgeoisie's economic interests.....The proletarians of the world have no country, their real enemy is capital".

Such a voice is an expression of a profound movement ripening in the soil of world capitalist society -- a movement whose major protagonist is the international proletariat.

The text published here was written and distributed in Ecuador during these events. It was signed ICC but it was not a text of our organization. The comrades who wrote the text probably did this because they sympathize with our ideas; but they are not part of our organization.

The essential aspect of this text is its clear internationalist position. However the document raises other questions. Among these, the issue of ‘democracy' in Latin America and its relations with US imperialism. Here the text says

"The plan of imperialism ... is to destabilize (the) false democracy which is in any case an obstacle to the plan of continental subordinat­ion."

Such a formulation implies that the setting up of democratic masquerades in Latin America goes against the plans of US imperialism for the region.

In the present period and in the semi-colonial countries, the no.1 problem for the US Empire is to ensure a minimum of stability: stability within the US bloc as well as social stability, both of these being connected since the aim is to reduce the risk of ‘destabilization' through the infiltration of pro-Russian parties into social movements.

In the under-developed countries where the army is the only coherent, centralized administrative force on the national level, military dictatorships are the simplest way of setting up a power structure. But when ‘uncontrolled' social movements and class struggle threaten the social order, the USA is quite capable of understanding the need for more ‘democratic' regimes, which give free rein to the organizations best equipped to control the workers (left parties and unions) . These democra­cies are generally only fig-leaves in front of the real power of the army. The strategies of US capital in the region can accommodate themselves either to hard military regimes or to ‘democra­cies' which are really just as hard as soon as it becomes clear that such ‘democracies' are necessary for the maintenance of order.

It may be that this is merely an imprecise formulation in the text. Thus, a few lines further on, it talks about a "dictatorial democracy led by Christian-democracy" as the plan of imperialism. But then why all these developments about the countries ‘allied to Ecuador'?

If nationalism is one trap for the workers of Latin America, bourgeois democracy is another. The Chilean workers know the price they had to pay for their illusions in Allende and his appeals to trust the ‘democratic' national army[1].

That's why it's vital to avoid any ambiguity on this question.

---

[1] After a failed coup d'état, Allende convened mass meetings to call on the population to remain calm and obey the troops who had remained loyal. Among the names he applauded was a certain Pinochet .. .

Notes on the Mass Strike

 

The wave of strikes in Poland during the summer of 1980 has rightly been described as a classic example of the mass strike phenomenon analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg in 1906. Such a clear correlation between the workers' movement of recent times in Poland and the events described by Luxemburg in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions[1] 75 years ago impels revolutionary socialists to make a thorough assessment of the relevance of Luxemburg's analysis to today's class struggle.

As a contribution to this ongoing assessment we shall try to sketch out, in the following article, to what extent Luxemburg's theory corresponds to the reality of the present battles of the working class.

The economic, social and political conditions of the mass strike

For Rosa Luxemburg, the mass strike was the result of a particular stage in the development of capitalism observable at the turn of the century. The mass strike "...is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historic inevitability." (pp 160-161) The mass strike is not an accidental thing, nor does it result from propa­ganda or preparation in advance -- it cannot be artificially created -- it is the product of a definite stage in the evolution of the contra­dictions of capitalism. Although Luxemburg often refers to particular mass strikes, the whole thrust of her pamphlet is to show that a mass strike cannot be viewed in isolation: it only makes sense as a product, of a new historical period.

This new period was invariable in all count­ries. In arguing against the idea that the mass strike was peculiar to Russian absolutism, Luxemburg states that its cause was to be found not just in the conditions of Russia but also in the circumstances of Western Europe and North America: that is, in "...large scale industry with all its consequences -- modern class divisions, sharp social contrasts." (p201) For her the 1905 Russian Revolution, of which the mass strike was such an important part, only realized "...in, the particular affairs of absolutist Russia the general results of international capitalist development." The Russian Revolution was, according to Luxemburg, the "the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the west." (p203)

This ‘present stage' was in fact that of capitalism in its twilight years. The growth of inter-imperialist conflict and the threat of world war, the end of any gradual improvement in the workers' standard of living; in short, the increasing threat to the very existence of the proletariat within capitalism -- these were the new historical circumstances accompanying the advent of the mass strike.

Luxemburg saw clearly that the mass strike was a product of changing economic conditions of historic dimensions, conditions which we know today to be those of the end of capitalist ascendancy, conditions which prefigured those of capitalist decadence.

Powerful concentrations of workers now existed in the advanced capitalist countries, accustomed to collective struggle, whose conditions of life and work were comparable everywhere. The bourgeoisie, as a result of economic development, was becoming a more concentrated class and increasingly identified itself with the state apparatus Like the proletariat, the capitalists had learned to stand together against their class enemy.

Just as economic conditions were making it more difficult for the workers to win reforms at the point of production, so too the "ruin of bourgeois democracy" which Luxemburg mentions in her pamphlet, made it more and more difficult for the proletariat to consolidate any gains on the parliamentary level. Thus the political, as well as the economical, context of the mass strike was not merely Russian absolutism but also the increasing decay of bourgeois rule in every country. In every field -- economic, social and political -- capitalism had laid the basis for huge class confrontations on a world-wide scale.

The purpose of the mass strike

The mass strike did not express a new purpose of the proletarian struggle. It rather expressed the ‘old' purpose of this struggle in a manner appropriate to new historical conditions. The motive behind the fight of the working class will always be the same: the attempt to limit capi­talist exploitation within bourgeois society, and to abolish exploitation together with bour­geois society itself. In the ascendant period of capitalism the workers' struggle was, for histo­rical reasons, typically separated into an imme­diate defensive aspect, implying but postponing the offensive revolutionary aspect for the distant future.

But the mass strike, due to the objective causes mentioned already (leading to the impossibility of the class defending itself within the system) brought the two aspects of the proleta­rian fight together. Therefore, according to Luxemburg any small, apparently defensive strike could explode into generalized confrontations "in the sultry air of the period of revolution". For example:

"The conflict of the two Putilov workers who had been subjected to disciplinary punishment had changed within a week into the prologue of the most violent revolution of modern times." (p l70)

Conversely the revolutionary upsurge, given a momentary setback, could disperse into many isolated strikes which later on, would fertilize a renewed general assault on the system.

Just as the offensive, generalized struggles fused with defensive, localized fights, so too did the economic and political aspects of the workers' struggle interact together in the period of mass strikes. In the parliamentarian period (ie the heyday of capitalist ascendancy) the economic and political aspects of the stru­ggle were separated artificially, again for historically determined reasons. The political struggle was not "directed by the masses themselves in direct action, but in correspondence with the form of the bourgeois state, in a representative fashion by the presence of legislative delegates." But "as soon as the masses appear on the scene" all this changes because "in a revolutionary mass action the political and the economic struggle are one". (p 208) In these conditions the political fights of the workers become intimately linked with the economic struggle, particularly as the indirect political fight in parliament is no longer realistic.

In describing the content of the mass strike, Luxemburg warns, above all, against separating out its different aspects. This is because the hallmark of the mass strike period is the coming together of the different facets of the prole­tarian struggle: offensive/defensive, generalized/ localized, political/economic -- the whole move­ment heading towards revolution. The very nature of the conditions which the proletariat responds to in the mass strike creates an unbreakable inter-connection between these different parts of the working class struggle. To dissect them, to find for example "the purely political mass strike" would by this dissection "as with any other, not perceive the phenomenon in its living essence, but ... kill it altogether". (p 185)

The form of the struggle in the mass strike period

The objective of the trade union form of organization -- to win gains for the workers within the system -- becomes less and less feasible in the conditions giving rise to the mass strike. As Luxemburg said in her later polemic with Karl Kautsky[2], in this period the proletariat didn't go into struggle with the certain prospect that it would win real improvements. She shows statis­tically that a quarter of the contemporary strikes were totally unsuccessful. Rather, workers embarked on strikes because there was no other way to survive -- a situation which inevit­ably opened up the possibility of an offensive generalized struggle. Consequently, the gains of the fight were not so much a gradual economic improvement but the intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat in spite of defeats on the economic level. That's why Luxemburg says that the phase of open insurrection "cannot come in any other way than through the school of a series of preparatory outward ‘defects'". (p 181) In other words, real victory or defeat of the mass strike is not determined in any one of its episodes but in its culminating act -- the revo­lutionary upsurge itself. Thus it was not accidental that the economic and political achievements of the Russian workers obtained by storm in 1905 and before, were clawed back following the defeat of the revolution. The role of the trade unions, to win economic improvement within the capitalist system, was therefore being eclipsed.

There were further aspects of the undermining of the unions by the mass strike, which flowed from the latter's revolutionary implications.

* the mass strike could not be prepared in advance, it emerged without any master plan as the "method of motion of the proletarian mass". The trade unions, devoted to permanent organization, preoccupied with their bank balances and membership figures, could not even hope to be equal to the organization of the mass strikes the form of which evolved in and through the struggle itself.

* the trade unions split the workers and their interests up into all the different branches of industry while the mass strike "flowed together from individual points from different causes", and thus tended to eliminate all divisions within the proletariat.

* the trade unions only organized a minority of the working class while the mass strike drew together all layers of the class from the unionized to the non-unionized.

While the new character of the proletarian struggle was passing the unions by, the unions themselves were siding more and more with the capitalist order against the mass strike. The trade unions' opposition to the mass strike was expressed in two ways according to Luxemburg. One was the straightforward hostility of bureaucrats like Bomelberg, exemplified by the refusal of the trade union congress at Cologne to even discuss the mass strike. To do so, according to the bureaucrats, would be "playing with fire". The other form this opposition took was the apparent support of radical unionists and the French and Italian syndicalists. They were very much in favor of an ‘attempt' with the mass strike, as though this form of struggle could be embarked upon at the whim of the trade union apparatus. But both the opponents and the supporters of the mass strike in the trade unions shared the ahistorical view that the mass strike is not a phenomenon emerging from the very depths of the activity of the working class but merely a technical means of struggle to be decided upon or forbidden according to the taste of the trade unions. Inevitably, the representatives of the unions, at all levels, couldn't comprehend a movement whose impetus not only could not be controlled by them but which ultimately required new forms antagonistic to the unions.

The response to the mass strike of the radi­cal and rank-and-file wing of the unions or the syndicalists was undoubtedly an attempt to be equal to the needs of the class struggle, But it was the form and function of trade unionism itself (the will of its militants notwith­standing) which was being bypassed by the mass strike. Radical unionism expressed a proleta­rian response within the unions. But after the definitive betrayal by the trade unions of the working class in the First World War and the subsequent revolutionary wave, radical unionism was also recuperated and became a valuable weapon for emasculating the class struggle.

We aren't suggesting that this was Luxemburg's conception of the trade union question in her mass strike pamphlet. For her, the bankruptcy of the union approach could still be corrected and this was an understandable point of view at a time when the unions had yet to become the simple agents of capital that they are today. The final chapter of her pamphlet suggests that the subordination of the unions to the direction of the Social Democratic Party could check their reactionary tendencies. But these tendencies turned out to be irredeemable.

Luxemburg also sees the emergence of numerous trade unions during the mass strike in Russia as a natural and healthy result of the wave of stru­ggles. We on the other hand, while agreeing that workers' self-organization can only develop out of real struggles, see this understandable trend as the perpetuation of a tradition rapidly becoming out-dated.

Furthermore, Luxemburg sees the Petrograd Soviet of 1905 as a complementary organization to the unions. In fact history would prove that these two forms were antagonistic to each other. The workers' councils would express the epoch of mass strikes and revolutions. The trade unions were the organs of the era of defensive and localized workers' struggles.

It was no accident that the first workers' council emerged in the wake of the period of mass strikes in Russia. Created by and for the stru­ggle with elected and revocable delegates, these organs could not only regroup all workers in struggle but could centralize all aspects of the combat -- economic and political, offensive and defensive -- into a revolutionary wave. It was the workers' council, anticipating the structure and purpose of future strike committees and general assemblies, that most naturally conformed to the direction and goals of the mass strike movement in Russia.

Even though it was impossible for Luxemburg to draw out all the lessons for working class action in the new period opening up at the turn of the century, revolutionaries today are indebted to her for their comprehension of the organizational consequences of the mass strike. The most import­ant one is that the mass strike and the trade union are, in essence, antagonistic to each other, a consequence implied though not explicit in Luxemburg's pamphlet.

* * * *

We must now try to understand what applicabi­lity, or lack of it, Luxemburg's analysis has for the present day class struggle; to see to what degree the proletarian struggle during the decadence of capitalism confirms or contradicts the main lines of the mass strike as analyzed by her.

Objective conditions of the class struggle in decadence

The period since 1968 expresses the culmina­tion of the permanent crisis of capitalism: the impossibility of any further expansion of the system; the incredible acceleration of inter-imperialist antagonisms, the results of which threaten the end of all human civilization.

Everywhere the state, with a terrible expansion of its repressive arsenal, takes up the interests of the bourgeoisie. Facing it is a working class which, while declining in size in relation to the rest of society since the 1900s has been concentrated still further, and the fate of its existence in each country has been equalized to an unprecedented degree. On the political level the ‘ruin of bourgeois democ­racy' is so blatant that its real function as a smokescreen for the mass terror of the capita­list state can barely be hidden.

In what way do these objective conditions of the class struggle today correspond to the conditions of the mass strike described by Rosa Luxemburg? Their identity lies in the fact that the characteristics of today's period are the final bitter climax of the tendencies in capitalist development prevalent in the 1900s.

The mass strikes of the early years of this century were a response to the end of the era of capitalist ascendancy and the onset of the conditions of capitalist decadence. Considering that these conditions have become absolutely open and chronic today, one would think that the objective propulsion toward the mass strike is a thousand times greater and stronger at the present time than eighty-odd years ago,

The ‘general results of international capi­talist development' which for Luxemburg were the root cause of the emergence of the historic phenomenon of the mass strike, have been arrived at over and over again since the beginning of the century. Today they are more strikingly obvious than ever.

Of course the mass strikes that Luxemburg described didn't fall strictly into the period of capitalist decadence usually delineated by revolutionaries. But we know that while the date of 1914 is a vital landmark in the onset of capitalist senility and the political positions that flow from it, the outbreak of World War I was the confirmation of the economic impasse of the preceding decade or so. 1914 was the conclu­sive proof that the economic, social and politi­cal conditions of capitalist decadence had been well and truly laid.

In this sense the new historic conditions which gave rise to the mass strike in the first place are still with us today. If we were to argue against this we would have to show how the basic conditions facing the proletariat in capi­talism's infrastructure today are decisively different to what they were less than 80 years ago. But this would be difficult to do because the typical conditions of the world in 1905 -- great inter-imperialist contrasts and the frame­work of huge class confrontations -- are at this time more typical than ever! The first decade of the twentieth century was certainly not the apogee of capitalist ascendancy! Capitalism was already over the hill and rolling toward cycles of world war, reconstruction and crisis:

" ...the present Russian Revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already over the summit, which is on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society." (p 203) What incredible insight into the phases of ascent and decline of capitalism from this revolutionary in 1906!

The mass strike and the period of revolution

The mass strike then is a result, at root, of the circumstances of capitalism in decline. But for Luxemburg the material causes which were ultimately responsible for the mass strike are not entirely sufficient to explain why this type of fight emerged when it did. For her the mass strike is the product of the revolutionary period. The period of open decline of capitalism must coincide with the undefeated upward movement of the class, in order for the class to be in a position to use the crisis as a lever to advance its own class interests through the mass strike. Conversely, after decisive defeats, the condi­tions of decadence will tend to reinforce the proletariat's passivity rather than give rise to mass strikes. This helps to explain why the mass strike period petered out after the mid­-1920s, and only recently re-emerged, in the present epoch since 1968.

Is today's period, then, one leading to revo­lution like the years 1896-1905 in Russia? Undoubtedly yes. 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution and opened up an epoch leading to revolutionary confrontations -- not just in one country -- but the whole world over. It might be argued that despite the fact that 1968 marked the end of the era of proletarian defeat we are not yet in a revolutionary period. This is quite true, if by ‘revolutionary period' we understand only the period of dual power and armed insurrec­tion, But Luxemburg meant ‘revolutionary period' in a much wider sense. For her the Russian Revol­ution didn't begin on its ‘official' date of 22 January 1905; she traces its origins right back to 1896, nine years before! -- the year of the powerful strikes in St Petersburg. The time of open insurrection in 1905 was for Luxemburg the culmination of a long period of revolution of the Russian working class.

In fact this is the only coherent way of interpreting the concept of the revolutionary period. If a revolution is the assumption of power by one class at the expense of the old ruling class, then the subterranean reversal of the old balance of class forces in favor of the revolutionary class is as vital a part of the revolutionary period as the moment of, open fighting, military clashes and so forth. This doesn't mean that both aspects of the revolutionary period are exactly the same - 1896=1905 -- but that they can't be arbitra­rily divided and the open insurrectionary phase separated and opposed to its prepara­tory phase.

It we were to do this we would be incapable of explaining why Luxemburg dates the beginning of the mass strike movement in Russia as 1896, or why she gives numerous examples of mass strikes in countries where no insurrection was taking place at the time. Furthermore Luxem­burg's famous statement that the mass strike was the ‘rallying idea' of a movement which might ‘last for decades' would be incomprehensible from the vision that only the period of insurrec­tion itself can give rise to mass strikes.

Of course, at the time of the overthrow of the old ruling class the mass strikes will reach their highest point of development -- but this doesn't at all contradict the fact that the period of mass strikes begins when the perspec­tive of revolution is first opened up. For us this means that the epoch of today' mass strikes begin in 1968.

The dynamic of today's struggle

It has already been stated that the basic content of the proletarian struggle remains the same but expresses itself differently according to the historical period. The tendency for the different aspects of this struggle to come toge­ther -- the attempt to limit exploitation and the attempt to abolish it altogether -- in the mass strikes described by Luxemburg, is once again with us today, propelled by the same material contingencies as 80 years ago. The characteristic nature of the struggle of the past twelve years (ie what distinguished the battle since 1968 from the fight of the previous 40 years) is that of the interaction of the defensive with the offensive, the oscillation from economic to political confrontations.

This is not necessarily a question of the conscious plan of the working class, but a result of the fact that the prospect of even preserving living standards becomes less and less possible today. It's just because of this that all strikes tend to become battles for survival:

"...strikes which grow not ‘ever more infre­quent' but ever more frequent; which mostly end without any ‘definite successes' a all -- but in spite or rather because of this are of greater significance as explosions of a deep inner contradiction which spills over into the realm of polities". It's the economic conditions of open crisis today which, as in the 1900s, bring forth the dynamic of the mass strike, and begin to concentrate the different aspects of the working class struggle.

But perhaps in describing the present phase as a period of mass strikes we're missing something. Aren't most of the struggles of the past twelve years, called, continued and ended by the trade unions? Doesn't this mean that today's struggles are trade unionist that is motivated by purely defensive and economic interests having no conn­ection with the phenomenon of the mass strike? Besides the fact that the most significant of the battles of the last 12 years have broken trade union containment, such a conclusion would fail to account for a basic truth of the class struggle in the decadence of capitalism: within every strike which appears to be controlled by the unions, there are two class forces at work. In all union-controlled struggles today, a fight now open, now concealed, is fought between the workers themselves and their so-called represen­tatives: the trade union officials of the bourgeoisie. Thus workers in decadent capitalism have the following double misfortune: not only their open adversaries like the employers and the right-wing parties are their enemies, but so are their alleged friends the trade unions and all their supporters.

Today workers are driven by the crisis and their self-confidence as an undefeated class to question the purely defensive economic and sec­tional limitations imposed on their struggle. The trade unions, however, have the job of maintaining order in production and ending strikes. These capitalist organizations continually attempt to derail the workers into the dead-end of trade unionism. The battle between the unions and the proletariat, sometimes overt but still more often covert, is fundamentally not a conse­quence of the conscious plans of the workers or the trade unions but a result of objective eco­nomic causes which, in the last analysis, force them to act against each other.

The motor force of the contemporary class struggle is therefore not to be found in the depth of illusions of workers in the trade unions at any given time, nor in the most radical actions of the unions to stretch with the stru­ggle at a certain moment, but in the dynamic of the conflicting class interests of the workers and the trade unions.

This internal mechanism of the period leading to revolutionary confrontations will, along with the increasing strength and clarity of communist intervention, reveal to workers the nature of the struggle they are already engaged in, while the attempt of the trade unions both to mystify the workers and to defend the ever more decrepit capitalist economy will lead workers to destroy in practice these organs of the bourgeoisie.

It would therefore be disastrous for would-be revolutionaries to judge the dynamic of the workers' struggle by its trade unionist appearance, as do all strands of bourgeois opinion.

The pre-condition for enlightening and clarifying the revolutionary possibilities in the workers' struggle is obviously recognizing that these possibilities actually exist.

It is not accidental that the Polish summer of 1980, the highest moment in the present period of mass strikes since 1968, has revealed starkly the contradiction between the real momentum of the workers' struggle and that of trade unionism. The Polish strike wave encompassed literally the mass of the working class in that country, rea­ching out to all industries and occupations. From dispersed points and from different initial causes the movement coalesced, through sympathy strikes and solidarity actions, into a general strike against the capitalist state. The workers were originally attempting to defend themselves against food shortages and price rises. Faced with an intransigent, brutal state and a bank­rupt national economy, the movement went onto the offensive, and developed political objectives.

The workers threw aside the trade unions and created their own organizations: general assemb­lies and strike committees to centralize their struggle, enlisting the enormous energy of the proletarian mass. Here was a peerless example of the mass strike!

The fact that the demand for free trade unions became dominant in the strikes' objectives; the fact that the MKS (inter-factory strike committ­ees) dissolved themselves to make way for the new union Solidarity, can't obscure the real dynamic of the millions of Polish workers who made the ruling class tremble in historic style.

The point of departure for revolutionary activity in 1981 is to recognize that the mass strike in Poland is the harbinger of future revolutionary confrontations, whilst identifying the immense illusions workers still have in trade unionism today. The events in Poland recently have dealt a cruel blow to the theory that the class struggle in our time is trade unionist, despite the misleading impressions of superficial appearances.

But if one theory is that the class struggle is by nature a trade unionist one, even at its highest moments, another is that these highest moments expressed in mass strikes are exceptional phenomena, quite distinct in character from less dramatic episodes of class combat. According to this supposition, most of the time the workers' struggle is simply defensive and economistic and thus falls organically under the aegis of the trade unions, while on the other, isolated occasions (like in Poland) the workers go onto the offensive, taking up political demands, thereby reflecting a different purpose than before.

Besides being incoherent -- implying that the proletarian struggle can be trade unionist (ie capitalist) or proletarian at different times -- this view falls into the trap of separating out the different aspects of the mass strike period -- defensive/offensive, economic/political -- and thus as Luxemburg said: undermining the living essence of the mass strike and killing it altogether. In the mass strike period, every defensive struggle, however modest, contains the germ or possibility of an offensive movement and offensive struggle is founded on the constant need of the class to defend itself. The inter­connection between the political struggle and the economic struggle is a similar one.

But the view that separates out these aspects interprets the mass strike in isolation -- as a strike with masses of people, occurring out of the blue, as the result basically of conjunctural circumstances: like the weakness of the trade unions in a given country, or the backwardness of this or that economy. This view sees the mass strike as only an offensive, political affair underplaying the fact that this aspect of the mass strike is nourished by defensive, localized and economic struggles. Above all, this stand­point fails to see that we are living in the period of mass strikes today, propelled not by local or temporary conditions but by the gen­eral plight of capitalist decadence to be found in every country.

Yet the fact that some of the most significant examples of mass strikes have taken place in the backward countries and the eastern bloc seems to lend credence to the idea of the exceptional nature of this type of struggle, just as the occurrence of the mass strike in Russia in the early 1900s seemed to justify the vision that they wouldn't be found breaking out on western soil.

But the answer Luxemburg gave to the idea of the Russian exclusivity of the mass strike is very relevant today too. She admitted that the existence of parliamentarism and trade unionism in the west could temporarily stifle the impuls­ion toward the mass strike, but not eliminate it altogether because it sprang from the basis of international capitalist development. If the mass strike in Germany and elsewhere in the west took on a ‘concealed and latent' character rather than a ‘practical and active' quality as it did in Russia, this could not hide the fact that the mass strike was an historic and inter­national phenomenon. This argument is applic­able today to the idea that the mass strike can't be found in the west. It's true of course that Russia in 1905 represented a huge qualit­ative leap in the development of the class struggle, just as Poland 1980 has today. The present evolution of class combativity points to greater and greater heights to be reached by the offensive generalized and politicized peaks of the struggle. But it's equally true that these peaks, like Poland, are intimately connected to the ‘concealed and latent' manifestations of the mass strike in the west, because it emerges from the same causes and confronts the same problems.

So, even if parliamentarism and the soph­isticated trade unions of the west can muffle the tendencies which break out in huge mass strikes in Poland, these tendencies haven't disappeared. On the contrary, the open mass strikes which have up till now been mainly contained in the west will accumulate even greater force when their restrictions are swept away. In the end it is the scale of the contr­adictions in capitalism which will determine how explosive future mass strikes will become: ".., the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labor, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become." (p202)

What then is the perspective for the prog­ression of the mass strike phenomenon, in the east and the west? Rather than a sudden and complete break with economic, defensive and union-contained struggles, the qualitative leaps of consciousness, self-organization in the mass strike will advance in an upward spiral of workers' struggles. The concealed and latent phases of the fight, which will often follow open confrontations, as they have in Poland, will continue to fertilize future mass strike explosions. This undulating movement of advance and retreat, offense and defense, dispersion and generalization, will become more intense in relation to the growing impact of austerity and the threat of war. Finally, "... in the storm of the revolutionary period lost ground is recovered, unequal things are equalized and the whole pace of social progress changes at one stroke to the double-quick." (p 206)

However, if we have presented the objective possibility of the evolution of the mass strike, it musn't be forgotten that workers will have to become more and more conscious of the struggle in which they are engaged in order to bring it to a successful conclusion. This is particularly vital in regard to the trade unions which, over the past century, have adapted themselves to the mass strike the better to contain it. There isn't room to go into all the means of adaptation the unions can employ, we can only mention that they generally take the form of false substitutes for the real thing: sham generalization of struggles, radical tactics emptied of any affect, political demands which amount to supporting one clown in the parliamentary circus.

The victorious development of the mass strike will ultimately depend on the ability of the working class to defeat the fifth column of the trade unions as well as their open enemies, like the police, employers, right-wing politicians, etc.

But the main aim of this text isn't to elab­orate the obstacles of consciousness on the road to the successful culmination of the mass strike. Rather, it is to outline the objective possib­ilities of the mass strike in our era, on the scale of economic necessity and organization.

The form of the working class struggle today

The mass strike period tends to undermine the trade unions in the long term. The apparent form of the modern class struggle -- the trade unionist one, is just that -- appearance. Its real purpose doesn't correspond to the function of the unions but obeys objective causes which propel the class into the dynamic of the mass strike. What then is the genuine, most appropriate form of the mass strike in our period? The general assembly of workers in struggle and its committees of elected, revocable delegates.

Yet this form, which is animated by the same spirit as the soviets themselves, is the except­ion and not the rule in the organization of the majority of workers' struggles today. It's only at its highest moments that the struggle throws up mass assemblies and strike committees outside of union control. And even in these situations, as in Poland in 1980, the workers' organizations often succumb in the end to trade unionism. But we can't explain this predicament of today's struggles by asserting that sometimes they are trade unionist and at other times under the sway of proletarian self-organization. The only coher­ent interpretation of the facts is that it is extremely difficult for real workers' self-organization to emerge.

The bourgeoisie has the following advantages in this domain: all its organs of power -- economic, social, military, political and ideological -- are already permanently in place, tried and tested over decades. In particular, the trade unions have the advantage of the workers' misplaced confidence due to historical memory of their once proletarian nature. The unions also have an organizational structure permanently within the working class. The proletariat has only recently emerged from the deepest defeat in its history without any permanent organizations to protect it.

How difficult it is, therefore, for the prol­etariat to find the form most appropriate to its struggle: As soon as discontent as much as raises its head, the unions are there to ‘take charge' of it, with the connivance of all the represent­atives of the capitalist order.

Furthermore, workers don't go into struggle today in order to realize high ideals, to deliberately fight trade unions, but for very practical and immediate purposes -- to try and preserve their livelihoods. That's why in most cases today workers accept the trade union self-appointed ‘leadership'. No wonder it's vainly when the trade unions are non-existent or openly oppose strikes that the general assembly form emerges.

Only after confronting the sabotage of the unions again and again, in the context of a deepening world crisis and developing momentum of the mass strike will the independent general assembly form become typical rather than atypical as in the present stage in the class struggle. In Western Europe this will mean open confront­ation with the state.

Even then, workers will confront further problems; although their elemental conscious control of their struggles will already have given a hugh impetus on the road to revolution. The trade unions' permanent presence on a national level will continue to be an enormous threat to the class, whose temporary, assembly-controlled struggles may begin from localized and dispersed points and involve bitter fight­ing in order to centralize on even a regional level.

Because the mass strike is not a single event but a ‘rallying idea of a movement lasting years, perhaps decades' (that is, an evolving trend, a developing movement) its form, as a result, will not emerge immediately, perfectly, fully mature either. Its genuine form will take shape in response to the quickening pace of the mass strike period, punctuated by qualitative leaps in self-organization as well as partial retreats and recuperation, under constant fire from the trade unions, but aided by the clear inter­vention of revolutionaries. More than anything else, the historic law of motion of the class struggle today doesn't lie in its form but in the objective conditions which push it forward. The dynamic of the mass strike period:

"... does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution." (p182)

Does this mean that the form of the class struggle is unimportant today, that it doesn't matter really whether the workers remain within union containment or not? Not at all. If the driving force behind the actions of all classes is economic interest, these interests can only be realized by the necessary level of conscious­ness and organization. And the economic interest of the working class -- to abolish exploitation altogether -- requires a degree of self-organization and self-consciousness never achieved by any other class in history. Therefore, to bring its subjective awareness into harmony with its economic interests is the primordial task of the proletariat.

If the proletariat proved incapable of liber­ating itself at decisive moments from the organizational and ideological grip of the trade unions, then the class would never realize the promise of the mass strike -- the revolution -- but be crushed by the counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie.

Conclusion

This article has tried to show that the move­ment in Poland in the summer of 1980 was not an isolated example of the mass strike phenomenon but rather the highest expression of a general international tendency in the proletarian class struggle whose objective causes and essential dynamic were analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg 75 years ago.

To understand this is to realize that the message of revolutionaries today is not a utopian joke but conforms to a historical trend of universal proportions.

FS

---

[1] All quotes come from Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York 1970

[2] Theory and Practice, News and Letters pamphlet, 1980.

The workers' struggles in Poland constitute the most important movement of the world proletariat for over half a century One year after they began; the balance-sheet of these struggles is rich with lessons for the working class in all countries and for the most advanced sectors of the class, the revolutionary groups. This article will look at some of the elements that make up this balance-sheet, as well as the perspectives deriving from it. Only some of the elements, because this experience of the prole­tariat is so rich, so important, that it cannot be dealt with exhaustively in a single article. Moreover, the situation that has emerged in Poland is in many ways so new, is still evolving so quickly, that it compels revolutionaries to have an open mind, and a great deal of prudence and humility, when they come to make judgments about the future of the movement.

A balance sheet that confirms the positions of the communist left

The workers' movement has a long history. Each one of its successive experiences is a step along the road it started, out on nearly two hundred years ago. In this sense, while every new experience confronts conditions and circum­stances which haven't been seen before and which allow specific lessons to be drawn, one of the characteristics of the workers' movement is that, with every step it takes, and before it can go any further, it is compelled to rediscover methods and lessons which it had already acquired in the past.

Last century, and in the early years of this century, these lessons of the past were part of the daily life of the workers, transmitted prim­arily by the activity and propaganda of their organizations: trade unions and workers' parties. When capitalism entered into another phase, its epoch of decadence, the movement of the class had to adapt itself to new conditions. The 1905 revolution in the Russian empire was the first great experience of this new epoch of class struggle -- an epoch in which the goal of the struggle had to be the violent overthrow of capitalism and the seizure of power by the world proletariat. The 1905 movement was rich in less­ons for the struggles that were to follow, espec­ially for the revolutionary wave which lasted from 1917 to 1923. In this movement, the prol­etariat discovered two essential instruments for its struggle in the period of decadence: the mass strike and its self-organization in workers' councils.

But while the lessons of 1905 were preserved in the memories of the Russian workers in 1917; while the example of October 1917 served as a beacon to the proletariat's battles in Germany, Hungary, Italy and many other countries between 1918 and 1923, and even up to 1927 in China, the period that followed was very different. The revolutionary wave which followed WWI gave way to the longest, deepest counter-revolution in the history of the workers' movement. All the gains of the struggles of the first quarter of the twentieth century were gradually forgotten by the proletarian masses, and only a few small groups were able to conserve and defend these gains against the storms and stresses of that period. These were the groups of the communist left: the left fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), the Dutch internationalist communists, and the various nuclei that were politically connected to these currents.

The events in Poland -- the most important exper­ience of the world proletariat since the historic resurgence of its struggles at the end of the 1960s -- are a striking confirmation of the positions defended by the communist left for decades. Whether we're talking about the nature of the so-called ‘socialist' countries, the analyses of the present period of capitalism's life, the role of the unions, the characteristics of the proletarian movement in this period, or the role of revolutionaries within this movement, the workers' struggles in Poland provide a living verification of the correctness of the positions which were gradually worked out by the various left communist groups in the inter-war period, and which acquired their most complete, synthetic form in the Gauche Communiste de France (which published Internationalisme up till 1952) and in the ICC today.

1. The nature of the so-called socialist countries

Not all the currents of the communist left were able to analyze, with the same degree of speed and clarity, the nature of the society which emerged in Russia after the defeat of the post­war revolutionary wave and the degeneration of the power born out of the October 1917 revolution. For a long time, the Italian left talked about a ‘workers' state' whereas, as early as the 1920s, the German-Dutch left analyzed this society as ‘state capitalist' But what these two currents of the communist left had in common, in opposition to both Stalinism and Trotskyism, was that they both clearly stated that the regime in the USSR was counter-revolutionary, that the proletariat was exploited there as it was every­where else, that there were no ‘gains' to defend in this regime, and that any call to ‘defend the USSR' was simply a rallying-cry for participating in a new imperialist war.

Since that time, the capitalist nature of the society that now exists in Russia and the other so-called ‘socialist' countries has been per­fectly clear to all the currents of the comm­unist left. What's more, this idea is now becom­ing more and more widespread in the world working class -- so much so, that certain social democrats don't hesitate to call these countries ‘state capitalist', with the aim of damning the Stalin­ist parties and rallying the workers to the defense of the west, which is described as capitalist, but ‘democratic' and thus preferable to the eastern bloc which is both capitalist and ‘totalitarian'.

But the workers' struggles in Poland provide a decisive weapon against all mystifications about the nature of these regimes such as the ones the Stalinists and Trotskyists still peddle. They show workers everywhere that in these countries of ‘real socialism', as in all countries, society is divided into classes with irreconcilable interests: exploiters with privileges comparable to those of exploiters in the west and exploited whose poverty and oppression, rises up the more: the world economy sinks down. These struggles cast a bright light on those great proletarian ‘conquests' which the workers themselves only hear about in the lullabies of official propa­ganda. They show the true merits of the ‘planned economy' and the ‘monopoly of foreign trade' which the Trotskyists make such a song and dance about. These wonderful ‘gains' haven't prevented the Polish economy from being utterly disorganized and up to its neck in debt. Finally, these struggles, in their objectives and in their methods, prove that the proletarian struggle is the same in all countries, and this is because everywhere it faces the same enemy: capitalism.

The blows delivered by the Polish workers against these mystifications about the real nature of the ‘socialist' countries are extremely important to the struggle of the world proletariat, even if the ‘socialist' image of these countries had already been rather tarnished for some time. The whole mystification about ‘socialist' Russia was at the centre of capitalism's counter-revolut­ionary offensive before and after World War II with the aim either of derailing workers' struggles into the ‘defense of the socialist father land', or of making the workers feel disgusted with any idea of a revolutionary struggle.

The revolutionary movement of tomorrow, the signs of which are already appearing today, will have to be quite clear about the fact that its enemy is the same everywhere, that there are no ‘workers' bastions' in the world today, not even degenerated ones. The struggles in Poland have already been a great step in this direction.

2. The present period in capitalism's life

Following on from the Communist International, the communist left[1], which emerged from the CI during the 1920s, based its positions on the analysis that the period opened up by World War I was the decadent epoch of capitalism. This was the period in which the system could only survive through a hellish cycle of crisis, war, recon­struction, new crisis, and so on.

After all the illusions about capitalism at last freeing itself from crises, which the Nobel Prize winners in economics were able to sell in the post-war reconstruction period, the crisis which has been hitting all countries for over ten years now is a confirmation of this class­ical marxist position. However, the ideologues of the left have always maintained -- not without some echo in certain sectors of the proletariat -- that the statification of the economy can be a remedy for this sickness. One of the great lessons of the workers' struggle in Poland, responding as they do to a chaos-ridden economy, is that this ‘remedy' is no remedy at all, and that it can even make things worse. The bank­ruptcy of the western model of capitalism: isn't due to the evil games of the ‘big monopolies' and the ‘multinationals'. The bankruptcy of the completely statified capitalisms proves that it isn't this or that form of capitalism which is rotten and decaying. It's the whole capit­alist mode of production which is rotten, and that's why it must give way to another mode of production.

3. The nature of the trade unions

One of the most important lessons of the struggles in Poland concerns the role and nature of the trade unions, something that was understood long ago by the German and Dutch left.

These struggles have shown that the proleta­riat doesn't need unions to embark upon massive, determined struggles. In August 1980 every worker in Poland was aware that the existing unions were simply the servile auxiliary of the ruling party and the police. Thus the proletariat in Poland went into action outside and against the unions, creating its own organs of struggle, the MKS -- strike committees based on general assemblies and their elected, revocable delegates. These organs were created in the struggle itself, not prior to it.

Since August 1980, all the activities of Solida­rity have demonstrated that even when they're ‘free', ‘independent', and enjoy the confidence of the workers, the trade unions are the enemies of the class struggle. The experience the Polish workers are currently going through is full of lessons for the world proletariat. It offers living proof that, everywhere in the world, the class struggle comes up against the unions, and this isn't simply because the unions are bureaucratized or because their leaders have sold out. Every day the events in Poland give the lie to the idea that the class struggle can restore a proletarian life to the existing unions, or that workers can create new unions which will avoid the faults of the old ones. Hardly had the new unions in Poland been created, with the main leaders of the August strike at their head, than they began to play the same role as the old unions and as unions everywhere in the world: sabotaging struggles, demobilizing and discoura­ging the workers, diverting their discontent into the dead-ends of ‘self-management' and the defense of the national economy. And this isn't because of ‘bad leaders' or a ‘lack of democracy' it's the basic structure of unionism -- i.e a permanent organization based on the defense of the workers' immediate interests -- that can't be maintained for the working class in decadent capitalism, in the epoch where reforms are no longer possible, where the state tends to incor­porate the whole of civil society, such a struc­ture can only be sucked up by the state and turned into an instrument for defending the national economy. And such a structure will provide itself with leaders and mechanisms which correspond to its function. The best working class militant will become yet another union goon if he accepts a place in such a structure. The greatest formal democracy, such as exists in principle in Solidarity, won't prevent someone like Walesa from negotiating directly with the authorities over the best way to sabotage struggles, or from spending his time playing the role of ‘mobile fireman' rushing from one part of the country to the next in order to deal with the smallest spark of social revolt.

The balance-sheet of a year of struggles in Poland is clear. Never was the proletariat stronger than when there were no unions, when it was the assemblies of workers in struggle which had the responsibility for running the struggle, for electing, controlling, and, when necessary, revoking the delegates elected onto the movement's centralizing organs.

Since that time, the creation and development of Solidarity has permitted the following situation: a deterioration of living standards far worse than that which provoked the strikes of summer 1980 has been met by the workers with a much weaker and more dispersed response. It's Solidarity that has been able to achieve what the old unions were unable to do: make the workers accept a prolongation of the working week (the giving up of ‘free Saturdays'), a tripling of the price of bread and massive increases in the price of other basic necessi­ties, and increasingly severe shortages. It's Solidarity which has managed to drive the Polish workers into the impasse of self-manage­ment, which they showed little interest in last year, and which gives them the ‘right' to decide as long as this is compatible with the views of the ruling party -- who should be in charge of their exploitation. It's Solidarity which, by demobilizing so many struggles, has prepared the ground for the authorities' present offensive on the issues of censorship and repression.

The proletariat of Poland is much weaker today with a ‘free' trade union which enjoys its ‘confidence' than when it didn't rely on any trade union to defend its interests. And all the possible ‘renovations' of the union by elements more radical than Walesa won't change this. All over the world, this kind of ‘rank and file' unionism has shown its true nature. What­ever illusions its defenders might have, its function is to brighten up the image of an organization which can only serve the interests of capitalism.

This is what the clearest currents of the commu­nist left have been saying for a long time. This is what has to be understood by those communist currents who, with their chatter about ‘workers' associationism', are bolstering illusions about the possibility of the working class equipping itself with union-type organizations.

Even if the workers in Poland today are to a large extent caught in the trap of Solidarity -- in fact, precisely because of this -- the strugg­les there have helped to expose one of the most tenacious and dangerous mystifications for the working class: the mystification of trade union­ism. It's up to workers and revolutionaries of all countries to draw the lessons.

4. The characteristics of proletarian struggle in this period and the role of revolutionaries

We have dealt at great length with this question in this Review (‘Mass Strikes in Poland 80' -- IR 23; ‘Notes on the Mass Strike, Yesterday and Today' -- IR 27; ‘In the Light of the Events in Poland, the Role of Revolutionaries' -- IR 24), we will return briefly to this question here, to highlight two points:

1. In returning to the path of struggle, the proletariat inevitably rediscovers the weapon of the mass strike

2. The development of the struggle in Poland has clarified the tasks of revolutionaries in the epoch of capitalism's decay.

It was Rosa Luxemburg (cf. the article in this issue) who, in 1906, was the first to point out the new characteristics of the proletarian struggle, making a profound analysis of the phenomenon of the mass strike. She based her analysis on the experience of the 1905-6 revolution in the Russian empire, notably in Poland where she was herself living in this period. Through an irony of history, it's once again in Poland, in the Russian imperialist bloc, that the proletariat has revived this method of struggle with the greatest determination. This isn't entirely an accident. As in 1905, the proletariat of these countries is being subjec­ted to the contradictions of capitalism in the most violent manner. As in 1905, there was in these countries no ‘democratic' union structure capable of absorbing the discontent and combativity of the workers.

But, leaving these analogies aside, it's nece­ssary to point out the importance of the example of the mass strike in Poland. The strikes in Poland show, contrary to what was the case last century, and contrary to the views of the union bureaucrats against whom Rosa Luxemburg was polemicizing, that the proletarian struggle of our epoch doesn't result from a prior organization, but arises spontaneously from the very soil of a society in crisis. The organization doesn't precede the struggle; it is created in the struggle.

This fundamental fact gives revolutionary organizations a very different function from the one they had last century. When the trade union type of organization was a precondition for the stru­ggle (cf ‘The Proletarian Struggle in the Deca­dence of Capitalism', IR 23), the role of revo­lutionaries was to participate actively in the construction of these fighting organs. To a certain extent it could be said that revolution­aries had to ‘organize' the class for its day to day struggle against capital. But when the organization is a product of struggles which arise spontaneously in response to the convul­sions wracking capitalist society, there can no longer be any question of revolutionaries ‘organizing' the class or ‘preparing' its resistance against the growing attacks of capital. The role of revolutionary organizations is then situated at a very different level: not the preparation of immediate economic struggles but the preparation of the proletarian revolution. This means intervening within these immediate struggles to point out their global, historic perspective, and, in general, to defend the totality of the revolu­tionary positions.

The experience of the workers' struggle in Poland, the lessons that important sectors of the world proletariat are beginning to draw from them (like the workers at FIAT in Turin who shouted ‘like in Gdansk' in their demonstrations) are a powerful illustration of how revolutionary consciousness develops in the working class. As we have seen, many of the lessons of the struggles in Poland have for decades been part of the programmatic heritage of the communist left. But all the obstinate, patient propaganda carried out by the groups of this current over many years has been far less effective in making the world proletariat assimilate these lessons than a few months of class struggle in Poland. The consciousness of the proletariat doesn't precede its being, but flows out of its development. And the proletariat only develops its being through its struggle against capitalism, and through the self-organization that emerges in and for this struggle. It's only when it begins to act as a class, and thus to struggle on a massive scale, that the proletariat is up to drawing the lessons of its struggles, past and present. This doesn't mean that revolutionary organizations have no role to play in this pro­cess. Their task is precisely to systematize these lessons, to integrate them into a global, coherent analysis, to connect them to the whole past experience of the class and to the pers­pectives for its future battles. But their intervention and propaganda within the class can only really find an echo in the mass of workers when the class is confronted, in practice, in a living experience, with the fundamental questions raised by this intervention.

Only when they base themselves on the first stirrings of class consciousness of which they themselves are an expression -- can revolutionary organizations hope to be heard by the class as a whole, to fertilize the class struggle.

New problems posed by the struggles in Poland

While important proletarian movements generally see the workers rediscovering methods and lessons that were already valid in the past, this doesn't mean that the class struggle is merely a monotonous repetition of old scen­arios. Since it emerges from conditions that are in constant evolution, each new movement of the class brings with it new lessons to enrich its historical store of experience. At certain crucial moments in the life of society, such as revolutions or periods in between major epochs, it may even be the case that a particular struggle provides the world proletariat with new elements that are so fundamental that the whole perspective for the historic movement of the class is affected by it. This was the case with the Paris Commune, and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in Russia. The first demonstrated the necessity for the proletariat to destroy the capitalist state from top to bottom. The second, situated at a turning point in the life of capit­alism, between its ascendant and decadent phases, showed what instruments the proletariat needed in this new period, both for the resistance against capital's attack and for embarking upon an offen­sive against the existing order: the mass strike and the workers' councils. The third, up to now the only serious experience of the proletariat exercising power in an entire country, has allowed the class to approach the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat, its relations with the transitional state, and the role of the proletarian party in the entire revolutionary process.

The workers' struggles in Poland, despite their importance, have not provided the proletariat with such fundamental elements as the ones just mentioned. However, it's necessary to point to certain problems to which practice has not yet given a decisive response, even though they have long been posed on a theoretical level, and are being elevated into the front rank of concern for the working class by the events in Poland.

In the first place, the struggles in Poland are a clear illustration of a general phenomenon which we have already pointed out in our press and which is something new in the history of the workers' movement: the development of a revol­utionary proletarian wave not in response to a war (as in 1905 and 1917 in Russia, 1918 in Germany and the rest of Europe) but to the econ­omic collapse of capitalism, ‘confirming', as one might put it, to the schema envisaged by Marx and Engels last century. In other texts we have analyzed in some detail the characteristics imposed on the present wave of workers' struggles by the conditions in which they are unfolding: a long-drawn out movement, arising out of essent­ially economic demands (whereas in 1917, for example, the main demand, peace, was directly political). We only return to this question here to point out that these new conditions require revolutionaries to have a vigilant, critical, modest and open-minded attitude, in order to avoid falling into schemas of the past that are obsolete for today. Those groups who consider that the next revolutionary wave will, as in the past, arise out of an imperialist war have already fallen into such schemas.

The struggles in Poland are a clear indication of the fact that capitalism won't be able to impose its own solution to the general crisis of its economy until it has defeated the prolet­ariat. As long as the various national fractions of the bourgeoisie have their survival as a class threatened by the combativity of the workers, they can't take the risk of allowing their struggles for world hegemony to degenerate into a confrontation which would weaken them in front of their common, mortal enemy: the proletariat. This is what the year 1980 showed: while the first part of the year was marked by a very tangible aggravation of tensions between the two imperialist blocs, these tensions -- though they don't disappear -- were pushed into the background, as far as the world bourgeoisie was concerned, by the August strikes. After these struggles, the bourgeoisie had to do all it could -- and in a coordinated manner -- to stifle the workers' combativity. Not one sector of the bourgeoisie failed to respond to this call. The USSR and its acolytes used military maneuvers and promises of ‘fraternal aid' to intimidate the Polish workers, they diligently denounced Walesa and Kuron every time these latter needed to polish up their image, tarnished as it was by their incessant anti-strike activity. The western countries provided loans and basic foodstuffs at a reduced rate; they sent over their trade union officials with propaganda material and good advice for Solidarity; they did all they could to give credibility to the idea that the Warsaw Pact would intervene if things didn't calm down; they gave the ‘socialist' Chancellor of Austria, Kreisky, and the president of the ‘Socialist International', Brandt, the job of exhorting the Polish workers to get down to work.

In other words: although the gangsters who run the world will never miss the opportunity to stab each other in the back, they are ready to come together in a ‘Sacred Union' as soon as the proletarian enemy raises its head. The working class struggle, as it is now going on, is truly the only obstacle to a new generalized war. The events in Poland demonstrate once again that the perspective isn't imperialist war, but class war. The next revolution won't arise out of a world war; the next war could only take place over the revolution's dead body.

The other problem posed by the events in Poland is more specific: it relates to the kind of weapons that the bourgeoisie is going to use against the working class in the Russian bloc countries.

In Poland, we've seen that the bourgeoisie has been forced to defend itself with the kind of tactics more familiar in the west: the division of labor between government teams whose job is to talk ‘frankly', to use the intransigent language of austerity and repression (the Reagan and Thatcher model), and opposition teams who speak a ‘working class' language and whose job is to paralyze the workers' response to the attacks of capital. But whereas the western bourgeoisies are old hands at this sort of game, and have a well-ensconced ‘democratic' system to play it with, it's much harder for the eastern bloc bourgeoisies to play such a game, since their method of rule is based on a party-state which is the absolute master of all areas of social life.

In December 1980, we already pointed out this contradiction:

"... a Stalinist regime cannot tolerate the existence of such oppositional forces without profound dangers to itself; this is just as true today as it was yesterday. The congenital fragility and rigidity of these regimes has not disappeared by magic, thanks to the explosion o f workers' struggles ... The regime is forced to tolerate a foreign body within its entrails, which it needs in order to survive, ,but this body .., is rejected by all the fibers of the regime's own organism. Thus, the regime is going through the worst convulsions in its history." (International Review 24)

Since then, the Party has succeeded -- notably after its 9th Congress and, once again, thanks to the collaboration of the major powers in stabilizing its internal situation around Kania and establishing a modus vivendi with Solidarity, This modus vivendi, however, hasn't done away with bitter attacks and denunciations. As in the west, all this is part of the game which allows each protagonist to be credible in the role it's playing. By showing his teeth, the ‘wicked' actor shows that, if necessary, he wouldn't hesitate to use repression; at the same time, he makes the public sympathized with the ‘nice' actor who, by standing up to the nasty one, takes on all the allure of a hero.

But the confrontations between Solidarity and the Polish CP aren't just cinema, just as the opposition between right and left in the western countries isn't just cinema. In the west, however, the existing institutional framework generally makes it possible to ‘make do' with these oppositions so they don't threaten the stability of the regime, and so that inter-bourgeois struggles for power are contained within, and resolved by, the formula most appropriate for dealing with the proletarian enemy. In Poland on the other hand, although the ruling class has, using a lot of improv­isations, but with some momentary success, managed to install these kinds of mechanisms, there's no indication that this is something definitive and capable of being exported to other ‘socialist' countries. The same invective which serves to give credibility to your friendly enemy when the maintenance of order demands it can be used to crush your erstwhile partner when he's no longer any use to you (cf the relation between fascism and democracy in the inter-war years).

By forcing the bourgeoisie to adopt a division of labor to which it is structurally inadapted, the proletarian struggles in Poland have created a living contradiction. It's still too early to see how it will turn out. Faced with a situation unprecedented in history ("the age of the never-­seen-before", as a Solidarity leader, Gwiazda, put it), the task of revolutionaries is to approach the unfolding events in a modest manner.

Perspectives

As we have seen, revolutionaries can't give a detailed prediction of tomorrow's events. On the other hand, they must be able to trace the more general perspectives for the movement, to identify the next step the proletariat is going to have to make on the way to the revolution. We identified this step immediately after the August 1980 strikes in the IC''s international leaflet ‘Poland, in the East as in the West, the Same Workers' Struggle Against Capitalist Exploitation' (6.9.80): the world-wide generalization of the struggle.

Internationalism is one of the basic positions of the proletarian program -- perhaps the most important. It was forcefully expressed in the watchword of the Communist League, and in the hymn of the working class. It was the dividing line between proletarian and bourgeois currents in the degenerating Second and Third Internat­ionals. The privileged place given to inter­nationalism isn't due to some general principle of human fraternity. It expresses a vital, practical necessity of the proletarian struggle. As early as 1847, Engels wrote "The communist revolution will not be a purely national revol­ution. It will break out simultaneously in all the advanced countries.." (Principles of Communism)

The events in Poland show just how true this is. They demonstrate the necessity for the prolet­ariat to unite on a world-wide scale against a bourgeoisie which is capable of acting in a concerted manner, of achieving a degree of solidarity which cuts across its inter‑imperialist antagonisms, when it's facing up to its mortal enemy. This is why we can only attack the utterly absurd slogans adopted by the Communist Workers' Organization in Workers' Voice 4, where they call on the Polish workers to make the "Revolution Now!" In this article, the CWO claims that "To call for revolution today is not simple-minded adventurism," although they are well aware that "Given the facts that the class enemy has had 12 months to prepare to crush the class, and that the Polish workers have not yet created a revolutionary leadership aware of the issues at stake, the chances of victory appear very slim." Despite its lack of under­standing about all this, the CWO knows that the USSR isn't going to let the workers make a revolution at its front door with impunity. But the CWO has found the solution: "We call on the workers of Poland to take the road of armed struggle against the capitalist state and to fraternize with the workers in uniform who will be sent to crush them." So -- all that's needed is to think about fraternizing with the Russian troops.

It's quite true that this is a real possibility: it's one of the reasons why the USSR hasn't intervened in Poland to deal with the prolet­ariat. But to go from there to thinking that the Warsaw Pact is already incapable of putting down the Polish workers is to give oneself incredible illusions about the present conditions for the revolution in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. Because that's what we're talking about: the proletariat can only make the revolution in one country if it's already on the cards in another. And the few strikes which have taken place in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania and even Russia since August 1980 hardly allow us to say that the situation in these countries is ripe for a generalized class confrontation.

The proletariat cannot make the revolution ‘by surprise'. The revolution can only be the result, the culminating point, of an international wave of struggles, which we're just seeing the very beginnings of now. Any attempt by the proletariat of a given country to launch itself into a struggle for power without taking into account the level of struggle in other countries is doomed to end in bloody failure. And those who, like the CWO, call on the workers to hurl them­selves into such adventures, are irresponsible imbeciles[2].

The internationalization of struggles isn't only indispensable as a step towards the proletarian revolution, as a way of staying the bourgeoisie's hand against the proletariat's initial attempts to take power. It's a precondition for the Polish workers, and those of other countries, to break through the mystifications which are currently holding back their struggles. If we examine the reasons for the present success of Solidarity's maneuvers, we can see that they are essentially rooted in the isolation of the Polish proletariat.

As long as the proletariat of the other eastern bloc countries, especially Russia, hasn't entered into the battle, then all the noise about an intervention by the ‘fraternal' countries will continue, and anti-Russian nationalism and religion will maintain their hold over the Polish workers.

As long as the workers of the west haven't dev­eloped the struggle against their own ‘independent' unions, their own ‘democratic' regimes, the workers of the east won't be able to make a definitive break with their illusions about ‘free trade unions' and ‘democracy'.

As long as the basic practice of the worldwide struggle hasn't made the workers understand that they have no ‘national economy' to defend, that there's no possibility of improving the economic situation in the context of one country and of capitalist relations of production, they will still accept sacrifices in the name of the ‘national interest', and mystifications about ‘self-management' will continue to have an impact.

In Poland, as everywhere else, the qualitative evolution of the struggle depends on its generalization onto a world-wide scale. This is what revolutionaries must say clearly to their class, instead of presenting the workers' struggles in Poland as the result of historical conditions peculiar to that country. In this sense, an article like the one that appears in Programme Communiste 86 is hardly a contribution to the development of class consciousness, despite the internationalist phrases you can find in it. This article refers to the events of 1773, 1792 and 1795 and to the "heroism of Kosciuszko" to explain the present struggles, rather than situating them in the context of a world-wide resurgence of struggles. The article makes the Polish proletariat the heroic heir of the revolutionary Polish bourgeoisie of yesterday, and even reproaches the Polish bourgeoisie of today for its submissive stance towards Russia.

More than ever we have to say, as we did in December 1980, that "In Poland, the problem can only be posed. It's up to the world proletariat" (International Review 24). And, because it's falling apart everywhere, its world capitalism itself which is creating the conditions for this world-wide upsurge of class struggle.

FM (3.10.81)

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[1] Bordiga, the founder of the Italian Left, rejected the notion of the decadence of capitalism. But the Italian Left current as a whole, notably the review Bilan, held firm to this analysis up to WW II.

[2] Since this article was written, the CWO have declared that they were wrong to make this call for immediate insurrection (Workers' Voice 5)