The importance of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, and even of the wave of class struggle which swept Eastern Europe in 1953-56, was not least to have shown the potential which exists for the internationalization of the proletarian struggle, for the real constitution of the working class as a single, unified, world-wide revolutionary force. But, as we saw in part 1 of this article, this potential could not be realized at that time. These class movements of millions of workers were shattered by their isolation at a world scale. As we saw, the history of the great upheavals of the eastern and central European workers from the 20's to the 50's is, above all, the history of their isolation from the rest of the proletariat. This came about because, in addition to all the permanent barriers which capitalism imposes on the working class (into factories, industries, nations etc.), a global shift in the balance of class forces took place at the beginning of this century, in favor of the bourgeoisie, which would determine the whole development of the class struggle for six decades. The decisive moment in this process was the inability of the proletariat to prevent the outbreak of World War I. The result of this unprecedented defeat which was August 1914, was to give free reign to the barbarism of decadent capitalism, to imperialist war, which split the world proletariat right down the middle. The tendency of capitalism in its period of imperialist decline is not only to reinforce the unity of each national capital around the state, but also to divide the world into two great warring imperialist camps. The result for the proletariat which was not strong enough to confront and destroy this system before it collapsed into barbarism, was to have its organizations, its political lessons, its traditions of struggle wiped out in an ocean of blood and misery.

As we saw in part 1, the revolutionary wave was confined mainly to the countries defeated in World War I, whereas the struggles of the 50's remained within a Russian Bloc emerging out of the 1939-45 carve-up, which had to brutally concentrate its forces and frontally attack the proletariat in order to try and keep pace with the American Bloc, and therefore hardly benefited from the post-war reconstruction boom. The conse­quences of this international isolation of militant parts of the proletariat, imposed by the divisions of imperialism itself, are extremely grave:

-- It becomes impossible for the proletariat as a whole even to begin to attack the roots of the system of exploitation they are fighting against, since this can only be done on a world scale.

-- The power of the world bourgeoisie remains intact, and is directed against the proletariat in a unified, co-ordinated manner.

-- The working class is prevented from fully understanding the tasks of the period, since a revolutionary consciousness is based precisely on the understanding of the everyday experiences of the struggle (the defeats organized by the unions, the brutal reality behind the mask of democracy etc), as being part of the conditions of workers everywhere, indissolubly bound up with and pointing towards the need to smash the system worldwide. This profound insight can only be the product of the world wide struggles of the workers, meeting the same conditions, the same tasks, and the same enemy everywhere. It is in the heat of worldwide generalization of struggles that the international unity of the proletariat will be forged.

In the present, second part of this article we are examining the development of the proletarian struggle in the 1970's and into the 80's. It is the end of the counter-revolution, the beginning of the international resurgence of the proletarian fight. It is the end of the isolation of the workers of the east. It is the period of the redressing of the global balance of class forces, which for over half a century stood in favor of capitalism. For the first time ever, the period opening up is one of simultaneous generalization of the economic crisis and of the proletarian resistance across the globe. This international response of the proletariat has forced the world bourgeoisie to unite its forces, to prepare to confront and defeat the workers in order to open up the path to its own 'solution' to the crisis ‑ global war. In this way, by blocking off the road to imperialist war, by raising the specter of the proletarian revolution, the working class has progressively closed off the split torn within its ranks by two imperialist world wars. The last decade has shown that the conditions of struggle of the workers, and the response of the bourge­oisie, are becoming more and more unified. It is a world moving, not towards war but towards world­wide class war.

The conditions of the working class in the ‘socialist paradise'

Since the end of World War 2, daily life for workers in Eastern Europe has come to resemble the ‘home front' of a world in a permanent state of war. The naive belief of the post-war Eastern European working class in the possibility of a better life under capitalism is a good example of the fact that, in the epoch of world capital­ism, the conditions prevailing at the global level are more important in determining the state of consciousness of the class in any one region of the globe than are the specific conditions prevailing in that region. There was nothing in the everyday life of the workers of the east to nourish illusions in the progressive nature of their ‘own' regimes! They had to go hungry, in order that tanks could be built. They had to queue for hours for the most basic foodstuffs. Every protest, every class resistance, was considered mutiny and treated as such. In a world still dominated by the antagonism between rival imperialist blocs, and not yet by the battle between classes, the illusions of the workers -- especially in the east -- concentrated above all on conditions in the other bloc. The western illusions in the progressive nature of the ‘socialist' east, and the Eastern illusions in the permanent and paradisical nature of the western post war reconstruction, which they hoped ‘their' bourgeoisie would sooner or later be drawn into, were two sides of a single coin. It was a period when the conditions of struggle in the 2 blocs were radically different, which itself lent credence to the myth that contending social systems were in operation in east and west. In the west the class struggle was declared to be a thing of the past. In the east, where it wasn't supposed to exist anymore either, it was even harder to hide. The struggles there were explosive but isolated, and could be presented to the workers in the west as national liberation movements or as reactions to the flaws of an otherwise genuine socialism. In the East and in the West, the crisis in the Russian Bloc became so oppressive and so permanent that it was possible for the world bourgeoisie to declare: "That's not crisis, that's Socialism"! 

Autarky and the war economy

Only through the severest autarchy can the countries of the Russian Bloc prevent themselves from falling under the control of American imper­ialism. The direct and unlimited control of the economy and of foreign trade exercised by the state in these countries, the restrictions on direct investment of capital from the west, on East-West trade, on the movement of labor etc, are not at all proofs of the non-capitalist nature of COMECON, as the Trotskyists pretend. They serve exclusively the preservation of the Russian bloc against western domination.

In having to isolate themselves from the main centers of world capitalism, the already uncomp­etitive national capitals of the east fall even further behind the technological level of the west. Their progressive loss of competitiveness means that they are only able to realize a fraction of their invested capital on the ‘world market'. The lions' shares of commodities produced by COMECON are sold within its borders. Like any individual capitalist who has to buy his own produce because he can find nobody else to take them, the laws of capitalism dictate that the Russian bloc go out of business sooner or later. Only, at the level of national capitals and imperialist blocs, the verdict of bankruptcy only finally falls with the outcome of imperialist world war.

In order to evade the verdict of history, the Eastern European bourgeoisie has to try and keep up with the west at the military level. To even attempt this, it must invest a much higher pro­portion of its wealth in the military sector than the west. Building up for years behind the aut­archy lines drawn up at Yalta and Potsdam, the "Socialist Countries" were able to achieve spect­acular growth rates during the 50's and 60's. But apart from the war sector there was little real growth, just a spewing up of often unusable industrial goods, which in the west would find a market only at scrap yards.

In the 1970's COMECON began to open itself up somewhat more to the west. This did not take place, as the Trotskyists reported, in order to raise the living standards of the workers. Nor did it signify, as many western politicians believed at the time, a capitulation of the Kremlin before the western money-bags. The opening took place in order to modernize a hopelessly outdated war machine. This opening could pretend to banish the danger of world war, and to open up a new era of economic expansion. For the workers of the east, this modernization meant a temporary increase in the supply of certain consumer goods, and increased possibilities of visiting, or even of working in the west. Poland, possessing as it does large reserves of coal, an ice free coastline, and large reserves of cheap labor power slumbering in the agricultural sector, was specially selected by the Kremlin to become the motor force of the modernization. This is why Poland became the focal point of the contradiction between the false illusions nourished by the modernization on the one hand, and the real stepping up of the war economy on the other. As such it became the most important centre of the development of the class struggle for over a decade.

The ‘70's saw the first dents appearing in the illusions concerning the west, caused by the sharpening of the crisis and the class struggle there. Nevertheless, this decade was characterized above all by the slump in the living condit­ions of the workers accompanied by heightened illusions in a future of peace and prosperity. This explosive contradiction between illusion and reality broke to the surface after the downturn in the world economy at the end of the 70's. Its first fruits in the 1980's, the years of truth, have been the mass strikes in Poland, and the world wide echo which these struggles have found.

The ‘Acquisitions of October'

Whether in the east or in the west, there are no lack of defenders of the ‘gains of the October Revolution' which the workers of the Russian bloc are supposed to enjoy. We will examine some of these gains. For example, the alleged rise in real wages and shortened working hours. Based on official figures, and on sources such as Nikita Kruschev's own memoirs, Schwendtke and Tsikarlieff, coming from Russian dissident circles, calculate the following:

"In a word, whether according to the soviet or to foreign information, the fixing of the average income of industrial workers in Russia before the First World War at 60 to 70 roubles a month can be taken as accurate. This means that the present earnings, corresponding to the nominal value of the rouble, are twice as high as before the revolution, and that in the face of prices, which are 5 to 6 times higher, today's worker in the USSR lives 2-1/2 to 3 times worse than before the revolution. The number of working days in the year in the soviet era, despite the introduction of the 5 day week, is higher than before the revolution, as a result of the many church holidays, which were observed in the old period. Whereas today there are 8 free days a year and the general number of days worked total 252, the working year before the revolution consisted of only 237 days, which by the way amounts to an average working week of 4-1/2 days...If we divide the monthly income -- 150 soviet against 70 Czar­ist roubles -- by the number of' work days in the month (21 days in the USSR, 19.75 in Russia) we get a daily earnings of 7.14 roubles in the USSR and 3.54 in Russia. We now give the prices of the most important foodstuffs.

	Russia 1913	USSR 1976
Bread 1kg	6.7 Kop.	18 Kop.
Sugar 1 kg	30 Kop.	90 Kop.
Butter 1 kg	1 Rouble	3.6 Roubles
Meat 1 kg	40 Kop.	2.5 Roubles"
See Arbeiteropposition in der Sowjetunion; Schwendtke Hg.

 

"A 1967 handbook of Soviet labor statistics showed that over 20% of workers employed in the highest paid sector, the construction industry, were below the poverty line, and over 60% of those in the low paid textile and food industries were under the poverty line." (‘The Soviet Working Class, Discontent and Opposition'; M. Holubenko in Critique.)

In the Russian bloc women are almost totally employed. East Germany for example has the high­est rate of women employed in industry in the world. They play a similar role to the immigrant workers in the west, receiving on average half the male salary. They are employed not only in factories, but also on building sites, in the construction of roads and railways, for example in Siberia, etc.

"Recently the road from Rewda to Swerdlowsk has been widened through the addition of a second lane. This extremely severe physical work was carried out by 90% women. They worked with picks, shovels and crowbars. In fact women of national minorities are predominant here (Mordva, Tachunaschi, Marejer). If in the west it is sometimes possible to mistake a young man for a girl, because of clothing and hair style, in Russia it's the opposite, as a result of their dirty work clothes, hands, way of walking, cursing and drinking" (Schwendtke, page 62).

In our opinion, these reports of the misery of the conditions of the workers in the ‘socialist countries' tend if anything to underestimate the situation. For instance, the figures on the work­ing day given above ignore the constant rise in compulsory -- often unpaid -- overtime. In 1970, workers in the Warski Docks in Sczcecin said they had to do over 80 hours of overtime a month (see ‘Rote Fahne uber Polen'). And even if standards of living are much lower in the USSR, especially its Asiatic parts, than in eastern Europe, the benefits of permanent austerity have not bypassed the workers of the satellite countries either:

"A study of the revolution and its causes published clandestinely in Hungary at the begin­ning of 1957 under the pseudonym Hungaricus, draws an official Hungarian statistics to argue that the level of real wages had fallen some 20% during the years of socialist construction from 1949 to 1953. The average monthly workers' wage was less than the price of a new suit, while the daily pay of a worker on a state farm was insufficient to buy one kilo of meat. Indeed, the Hungaricus pamphlet contends only 15% of Hungarian families lived above the regime's own declared ‘minimum standard of living', with 30% attaining it and 55% living below it. This meant that in15% of working class families, not every member had a blanket to sleep under, and 20% of workers didn't even have a winter coat. It was these sans-manteaux, Hungaricus suggests, who were to provide the front-line troops to be found attack­ing the Soviet tanks in October 1956" (Lomax, ‘The Working Class in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956'). You don't have to look any further for the principal cause of the 1953-56 wave of class struggle!

With regard to the famous ‘abolition of unemployment' in the Russian Bloc, we quote from the oppositional Osteuropa No. 4, ‘Unterboschaf­tigung and Arbeitslosigkeit in der Sowjetunion':

"With the beginning of the Stalinist 5 Year Plans, the Labor Exchanges were closed. Those who wanted work were sent to the socialist construct­ion sites in the most far flung regions... Through declaring the abolition of unemployment, and ceasing the payment of unemployment benefits, the government condemned millions to misery and hunger. Stalin also made use of concentration camps in his ‘conquest of unemployment', which siphoned off the surplus labor power in the most populous regions. According to the calculations of the expert of the BBC, Pospelowski, 2% to 3% of the working population was unemployed in the 1960's, that means 3 to 4 million people. Not included in these figures are school leavers, people who for technological reasons are idle waiting for work, the only partially employed seasonal Kolkhotz chosen-peasants and workers on the Sowchosen. Taken as a percentage of the population, that amounts to more unemployed then in West Germany during the 1967-69 recession, and in absolute figures more unemployed than in the post war years in the USA. Pospelowski adds that this is the total figure for the long term unemployed according to figures for 1957. He considers that, when we include the temporary unemployed... a total of 5% of the working population would be unemployed... since then, the number of long-term unemployed has increased considerably".

It is a true reflection of the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production that unemployment should be a major problem in countries where the bourgeoisie has to compensate for a lower organic composition of capital and a lower technological level through increased use of labor power, so that unemployment grows alongside an increase in the shortage of labor. Since 1967 employment offices have been reopened in all the big Russian cities. They send the unemployed to the extreme north and the Far East. As a result of ‘rationalizations' in the Russian economy during the 5 Year Plan 1971-75, 20 million workers were fired from their jobs. In addition there are over 10 million seasonal workers. Since the beginning of the 70's, the work camps and ‘Pioneer colonies' of Siberia have become once more an important outlet for the unemploy­ment explosion and for the flight from the land.

Despite the discreet silence of the pro-Russian Left in the west, the existence of unemployment in the east has been an open secret there for years. We will mention as an example a reader's letter to the Russian teachers' news­paper Utschitelskaja Gazeta, published on the 18.1.1965:

"How can one reconcile oneself to such disgraceful circumstances, when in a middle-sized city there are still young people who have neither worked nor gone to school for years now. Left to themselves, they lounge around on the streets for years on end, pick pocketing, selling things, and getting drunk at the railway stations." (Schwendtke, 75). In addition to direct unemployment -- the Polish government is threatening to lay off over 2 million workers presently -- industry is plagued by stoppages due to lack of fuel supplies, spare parts, raw materials or repair services. In 1979 the KOR claimed that up to a third of Polish industry was lying idle at any given time for such reasons. The figure would certainly be higher today. For workers on piece rates this means a further drastic drop in take-home pay. Industry is also racked by astronomically high turnover rates, as starving workers search desperately for a better deal. Today, the Russian bourgeoisie is forced to allow workers to change jobs twice a year, in order to avoid social explosions.

"The turnover of labor is the main plague of the soviet economic system. The loss of work hours due to turnover in the Soviet Union is much greater than in the USA as a result of strikes. For example, in the factory where I was working, with a staff of 560 people, more than 500 employees left during the year 1973" (Nikolai Dragosch, founder of the ‘Democratic Unification of the USSR', ‘Wir Mussen die Angst Uberwinden').

In the face of the immediate need to survive, workers live through pillaging the factories they work in. These actions are an expression of the extreme atomization of the class outside periods of struggle, but they also reveal the absence of any identification with the profits of ‘their' company or with the fulfilling of the 5 Year Plans.

"The automobile plant in Gorki maintains at its own cost a criminality-department of the militia, consisting of about 40 persons, who in daily controls confiscate about 20,000 roubles worth of tools and spare parts from workers. The desperation of' workers goes so far, that they cut up the bodies of Volga cars into several pieces with a torch, fling them over the fence, weld them together again, and sell them." (Schwendtke, 69)

And these are the words of a foreman at the Obuda shipyards in Budapest: "They say copper is needed for the ships destined for the Soviet Union? Plated sheets will be good enough for them! The copper will be sold to the small foundries." (Quoted in Lomax, 32)

In the face of the naked realities of permanent economic crisis, police control and open repression have long been the main means of keeping the proletariat in check. In the following pages we will see how little state terror has succeeded in paralyzing a proletariat driven to revolt by a deteriorating social situation, a growing scarcity of consumer goods, soaring prices, especially on the black markets, speed-ups in the factories, the collapse of social services, the most severe housing shortage since 1945, constant humiliation at the hands of the cops and the administration. The workers have begun to question every aspect of capitalist control, from the unions and the police to the vodka bottle.

The upsurge of the class struggle in the USSR 

"The editors estimate that until the middle of the ‘70's, of the spontaneous actions of the workers, not more than 10% have become known publically, or to people in the west." (Schwendtke, 148). Holubenko comments in the same vein "... samizdat has yielded little on the question of working class opposition. Samizdat, which now reaches the west in well over 1,000 items a year, is written mostly by ‘liberal' or right wing intelligentsia, and reflects the concerns of that intelligentsia." (Holubenko, 4)

But the problem goes much further than that. The western espionage services are extremely well informed of what the working class in the Russian bloc is doing, as are of course the broadcasting services transmitting toward the east (Radio Liberty, BBC, Deutsche Welle etc) who collaborate closely with the former. What we are dealing with here is a massive black-out on news of the class struggle on the part of the ‘free world'. This censorship concerns first of all the information given to the workers in the east, in order to lessen the danger of generalization. One of the best known examples of this is the decision of Radio Free Europe in Munich to refuse to broad­cast a series of letters sent by the striking Rumanian miners in 1977, who wanted to use the radio station in order to inform other Rumanian and eastern European workers of their actions. Secondly it concerns the information allowed to pass through to the workers in the west. For example the Russian strikes in Kaliningrad, Lwow and several cities in Byelorrussia which broke out in solidarity with the Polish upsurge of 1970, are well known in Poland itself, but were report­ed in the west only in 1974, and even then via the Hsinhua Press Service, Peking (9.1.74).

The western bourgeoisie has good reason to collaborate with its Russian counterpart in shrouding the activities of the workers, especially in the USSR, in silence. The workers in the west would hardly continue to believe that ‘the Russians' are about to invade ‘us' over here if they knew that the Russian proletariat is engaged in almost permanent struggle with its ‘own' bourgeoisie. On the other hand it would give the world proletariat a greater feeling of force and unity to know that one of its strongest detachments had returned to the path of the class war. In part 1 of this article we dealt with the revival of the class struggle in the USSR in the ‘50's and into the ‘60's. In part 1, written in November 1980,  and dealing with the strike wave of the early ‘60's -- with its culmination point in Novocherkassk 1962 -- we commented -- erroneous­ly, it appears -- on the absence of strike comm­ittees or other means of organizing and coordinating the struggle beyond the first spontaneous  outbursts. One account tells how: "The insurgents in the Donbas region reportedly considered the demonstrations in Novocherkassk unsuccessful because they rebelled there without the consent of the strike organization offices in Rostov, Lugansk, Tagonrog and other cities. This would confirm rumors and reports concerning a headquarters for organized opposition in the Donbas." (Cornelia Gerstenmaier , ‘Voices of the Silent').

The strike wave of 1962 was provoked by the announcement of price increases on meat and dairy products. "Sit down strikes, mass protest demonstrations on factory premises, street demonstrations, and in several instances in many parts of the Soviet Union, large scale rioting occurred. Evidence at hand speaks of such occurrences at Grosny, Krasnodar, Donetsk, Yaroslav, Zhdanov, Gorki and even Moscow itself, inhere reportedly a mass meeting took place at the Moskvich Automobile Factory." (Holubenko, 12) Holubenko, basing himself on the reports of a Canadian Stalinist called Kolasky, who spent two years in the USSR, also mentions a strike of port workers in Odessa against food shortages, and a strike at the motorcycle factory in Kiev. Chauviers' text (‘The Working Class and the Unions in Soviet Companies') talks of a strike in Vladivostok against food shortages, which led to a bloody rising.

Until 1969 relative quiet returned to the strike front. The new Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership began by being more compromising over wages. Since 1969, however, wages have been steadily below the level even of the Khrushchev era. Already warned by the big strikes in the Donez Basin and in Charkov in 1967, the government decided to phase in the necessary price increases. Also, the forces of repression were strengthened in advance.

"Since 1965, and especially since 1967, many new organizations have been established to reinforce the police and special agent depart­ments. The power of the police has widened, the number of policemen greatly increased and pro­fessional security officers, night shift police stations and motorized police units set up. Furthermore, a series of new laws have been put into effect to ‘strengthen the social order in all fields of law'. Ordinances, decrees and laws such as the one passed in July 1969, which emphasized the suppression of dangerous political offenders, mass riots, and the murder of police­men, reflects a new emphasis on ‘law and order'. There is also the unprecedented promotion of' KGB security chiefs to positions in the central and republican politburos." (Holubenko, 18)

The strike wave of 1969-73 in the USSR was one of the most important if less well known elements in the international resurgence of the world proletariat in response to the re-entry of the capitalist system into open international crisis -- all over the ‘Soviet Union' workers began to come out in protest against food shortages, rising prices, and bad housing conditions. Some of the strikes of ‘69 known to us:

-- In mid-May 1969, workers at the Kiev Hydro­electric Station in the village of Beryozka met to discuss the housing problem. Many of them were still in prefabricated huts and in railway coaches despite the authorities' promise to provide housing. The workers declared that they no longer believed the local authorities, and decided to write to the central committee of the Communist Party. After their meeting the workers marched off with banners such as "All power to the Soviets" (Reddaway, ‘Uncensored Russia'). The report stems from the clandestine oppositional journal Chronicle of Recent Events.

-- A strike movement broke out in Sverdlovsk against a 25% drop in wages with the introduction of the 5-day week and of new wage norms. Centered on the big rubber plant, the strike, according to Schwendtke, took on semi-insurrectional forms. The civil war militia (‘BON' and ‘MWD') had to be called off and all the demands of the workers conceded.

-- In Krasnodar, Kuban, the workers refused to go to the factories until adequate food supplies arrived in the shops.

-- In Gorki, women working at the big armaments factory "walked off the job stating that they were going to buy meat and would not return to work until they had bought enough of it" (Holubenko, 16).

-- In 1970 a strike movement broke out involving several factories in Vladimir.

-- In 1971, in the largest equipment factory of the USSR, the Kirov plant in Kopeyske, the strike ended with the arrest of strike militants by the KGB.

"The most important disturbances in this period took place in Dnipropetrovsk and Dniprodzerzhinsk in the heavy industrial region of Southern Ukraine. In September 1972, in Dniprop­etrovsk, thousands of workers went on strike, demanding higher wages and a general improve­ment in the standard of living. The strikes inv­olved more than one factory and were repressed at the cost of many dead and wounded. However, a month later in October 1972, riots broke out again in the same city. The demands: better provisioning, improvement in living conditions, and the right to choose a job instead of having it imposed... Fortunately, because of the exist­ence of a recent samizdat document, a good deal more information is available on the riots which occurred in Dniprodzerzhinsk, a city of 270, 000, several kilometers from Dnipropetrovsk. Specifically, the militia arrested a few drunken members of a wedding party, loaded them into a police wagon, and drove off. Minutes later, the police wagon crashed, and the militia (who themselves had been drinking) concentrated on saving themselves, leaving the arrested to burn to death in the wagon, which exploded. The assembled crowd marched in fury to the city's central militia building and ransacked it, burning police files and causing other damage. The crowd then marched to the party headquart­ers where the person ‘on duty' ordered the crowd with threats to disperse immediately. The crowd surged forward and attacked the party head­quarters, whereupon two militia battalions open­ed fire. There were ten dead, including militia killed by the crowd. The riot is an example of the strained social relations in the Soviet Union -- an example of how an apparently small incident can spark off a major event which far surpasses the importance of the incident itself." (Holubenko, the Samizdat source is Ukrain'ske Slovo. The Ukranian Donbas has long been a centre of proletarian resistance, and already particip­ated in the 1956 wave of struggles which shook Eastern Europe. The ‘56 wave in the Donbas is mentioned by Holubenko, as well as by the ‘Czechoslovakian Socialist Opposition' in its publication in West Germany, Listy Blatter, September 1976. Listy also mentions "mass demon­strations of the proletariat in Krasnodar, Naltschyk, KrivyjRik" and the popular rising in Tashkent in 1968).

For the year 1973, the end-point of the second postwar strike wave in the USSR, we can mention the following important actions:

-- A strike in the largest factory in Vytebsk against a 20% drop in wages. The KGB tried unsucc­essfully to track down the ‘Ringleaders'

"In May 1973, thousands of workers at the machine building factory on the busy Brest Litovsk Chausee in Kiev went on strike at 11.00 demand­ing higher pay. The factory director immediately telephoned the Central Committee of the Commun­ist Party of the Ukraine. By 15.00 the workers were informed that their salaries were to be increased, and most of the top administrators of the factory were dismissed. It is important that the local population, according to this report, attributed the success of this strike to the fact that it had an organized character and that the regime was afraid that this strike might develop into a ‘Ukrainian Szczecin'." (Holubenko, source: Sucharnist, Munich.)

-- The popular rising in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1973, which led to street fighting and the erection of barricades, and which was bloodily suppressed (mentioned by Listy). This explosion, of popular rage, provoked by the worsening economic situation and by increased police repression, had heavy nationalist undertones. A similar revolt took place in Tiflis, Georgia, on May 1st 1974, developing out of the official May Day Demonstration.

-- Finally, in the winter of 1973, the strike wave reached the western metropoles of Moscow and Leningrad, with scores of stoppages on construct­ion sites being reported.

Polish interlude 1970-76

The reappearance of the proletarian fight in the 1970's was international in its dimensions. But it was not yet generalized. In the USSR, the struggles were numerous and violent, but they remained isolated and often unorganized. They took place mostly outside the industrial centers of the Russian USSR. This is not to say that great masses of workers were not involved. There are tremendous concentrations of the proletariat especially in parts of the Ukraine and western Siberia. But these workers are more isolated from each other and from the main concentrations of the world proletariat. Even more important, these struggles can be limited through the use of national, regional, and linguistic mystifications (the ‘Soviet' proletariat speaks over 100 languages), which present the fight as being against ‘the Russians'. Through assuring more favorable supplies of foodstuffs and consumer goods on the one hand, and through a formidable array of the forces of repression on the other, the state has been able to maintain its social control in Moscow and in Leningrad, where the proletariat has been more decimated by the defeat of the revolutionary wave of the twenties, and by the resulting war and state terror, than anywhere else in the world. This control over the Russian USSR is decisive.

In the 1970's, Poland became the main centre within the Russian bloc of the worldwide resurg­ence of the class struggle. The proletariat in Hungary and East Germany was still reeling under the double defeats of the ‘20's and ‘50's. The Czechoslovakian workers had, in addition, to re­cover from the heavy blow of the ‘68-69 defeat as well. These are precisely the most important countries of the bloc for the perspective of the unfolding of the world revolution, being highly industrialized, with significant concentrations of workers rich in the traditions of struggle, and bordering as they do onto the industrial heartlands of Western Europe, most significantly West Germany.

As for Poland, which once belonged to the ‘agricultural belt' along with Rumania and Bulgaria, but which underwent an important industrialization after the war, its historical role consists in becoming a revolutionary transmission belt between the front line industrialized countries of the bloc to its west, and the USSR to its east. Because the workers of eastern and central Europe had to bear the main brunt of the counter-revolution from the ‘20's to the ‘50's, the response of the proletariat there to the reappearance of open world-wide capitalist crisis has been more hesitant and uneven than in the west. As a result, the Polish transmission belt appeared long before the un­folding of mass struggles to the east or to the west which it could link to one another. This is the real basis of all the illusions about Polish exceptionalism -- or the notion that Poland is the centre of the world -- which, however much they hate capitalism and its state, will continue to tie the workers there to national ‘solutions', to the Polish national capital, until mass struggles erupt elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the Polish workers were not alone in this period, either world-wide or in the east. We have already mentioned the Russian solidarity strike with the Polish revolt of 1970.  This explosion in turn was preceded by an important strike of the Rumanian miners, and the big strike wave in the USSR, which began 18 months earlier. The bourgeoisie of the whole bloc was shocked by the upsurge.

"Everywhere, the Five Year Plans were altered in favor of the supply of consumer goods and food­stuffs. In Bulgaria, price rises previously planned for 1.1. 71 were withdrawn, in the USSR in March great fuss was made over the sinking of certain prices. In the GDR the events in Poland accelerated the outbreak of a latent political crisis which left its mark in the replacement of Walter Ulbricht by Honecker. The SED lowered the prices for textiles and other industrial goods, after there had been unrest over hidden price rises, and raised pensions." (Koenen and Kuhn, Freiheit, Unabhangigkeit und Brot.)

In November 1972, with the two year price freeze in Poland forced on Gierek by the workers from Lodz in February 1971 about to run out, the dockers of Gdansk and Szczecin struck, just as the trade union congress was assembling in Warsaw to argue against the prolongation of the price freeze. Gierek flew to Gdansk to pacify the work­ers. In his absence the textile workers in Lodz and the miners in Katowice came out. President Jaroszewicz had to appear on TV to announce the continuation of the price freeze (See Green in Die Internationale 13, p26). The workers were defending their living standards without hesit­ation. In the Baltic shipyards in 1974 for example, a new productivity deal provoked a massive protest strike. Reports of similar incidents came in from many parts of the country. By March 1975 there was no meat left in the shops. In order to forestall a proletarian explosion, the meat reserves of the army were rushed to the Baltic ports and to the Silesian mine-fields. Instead, the textile workers in Lodz went on strike. There were hunger riots in Warsaw. In Radom, the munitions workers forced the release of 150 women who had been arrested after going on strike. (Reported in Der Spiegel, 13/3/75).

In June 1976 an attempt was made to raise food prices by up to 60%. The reaction was immediate. In Radom, a demonstration of the munitions workers called out the workers of the whole city. The party headquarters were burnt out, and 7 workers were killed in barricade fighting. There followed a wave of repression: 2000 workers were arrested. At the same time, in the massive tractor factory at Ursus near Warsaw, 15,000 downed tools and blocked off the Moscow to Paris railway line, taking the international express hostage. The police arrested 600 workers, and 1000 more were sacked immediately. In Plock the workers marched to the party headquarters, singing the Internationale, and to the army barracks to fraternize with the soldiers there. Here again, over 100 workers were arrested, This use of massive repression in secondary industrial centers couldn't halt the movement, because the dockers on the Baltic, the automobile workers of Warsaw, workers in Lodz, Poznan etc were coming out. It seemed like it would only be a matter of hours before they would be joined by the Silesian miners. Gierek was forced to withdraw the price rises immediately. But this concession was followed by a wave of mass arrests, torturings, and police atrocities. The price rises were enforced more slowly, less obviously, but just as surely. In the face of this vicious bourgeois counter-attack, and in view of the fact that their living standards were deterior­ating despite even the most resolute struggles, the proletariat in Poland entered a period of retreat and reflection.

The period ‘76-80 was one of relative quiet on the Polish strike front. For those who only look at the surface of events it could have seemed like a period of defeat. But the deepening of the class struggle internationally, the slow but sure maturation of the second world-wide wave of proletarian resistance since 1968, which already in the period ‘76-81 has reached a qualitatively higher level, would soon reveal the ripening of the conditions for a future revolutionary wave going on below the surface.

Krespel

III

"....The Russian Revolution reserves a chair in ancient history for Kautsky...." and in Philosophy for Harper.

Following the various criticisms we made of Harper's philosophy, we now want to show that the political standpoint that he derives from his philosophy in actual practice takes him away from revolutionary positions (our initial aim was not to make a profound philosophical study, but simply to show that while all of Harper's criticisms of so-called mechanistic materialism are based on a correct, if somewhat schematic, exposition of the problem of human knowledge and praxis, their practical political application leads him into vulgar mechanistic standpoint as well) ,

For Harper

1) The Russian revolution, in its philosophical manifestations (the critique of idealism) was entirely an expression of bourgeois materialist thought ... thoroughly conditioned by the necessities of the Russian milieu.

2) Russia, from an economic point of view colonized by foreign capital, needed to ally itself with the revolution of the proletariat. Therefore, Harper adds,

"Lenin...had to rely on the working class, and because his fight had to be implacable and radical, he espoused the most radical ideology of the Western proletariat fighting world-capitalism, viz Marxism. Since, however, the Russian revolution showed a mixture of two characters, middle-class revolution in its immediate aims, proletarian revolution in its active forces, the appropriate bolshevist theory too had to present two characters, middle-class materialism in its basic philo­sophy, proletarian evolutionism in its doctrine of class fight." (Lenin as Philosopher, Merlin Press, p.96)

And from there Harper goes on to characterize the conceptions of Lenin and his friends as a typica­lly Russian form of Marxism except, perhaps, for Plekhanov, whom Harper sees as the most west­ern kind of Marxist, though by no means complete­ly free of bourgeois materialism.

If it is really possible for a bourgeois movement to rely on "a revolutionary movement of the proletariat fighting world capitalism" (Harper), and if the result of this fight has been the establishment of a bureaucracy as a ruling class that has stolen the fruits of the international proletarian revolution, then the door is open to the conclusion reached by James Burnham.

According to Burnham, the techno-bureaucracy has established its power in a struggle against the old capitalist form of society, and it has done this by relying on a working class movement. From this point of view, socialism is just a utopia.

It's no accident that Harper's conclusions are the same as Burnham's. The only difference is that Harper ‘believes' in socialism whereas Burnham ‘believes' that socialism is a utopia[1]. But they both share the same critical method, one which is quite foreign to the revolutionary method.

Harper -- who joined the Communist International, who formed the Dutch Communist Party, who partic­ipated in the CI in the crucial years of the revolution, who helped mobilize the proletariat of Europe in the defense of this "counter-revol­utionary Russian state" -- explains himself thus:

"if it had been known at the time..." (ie. Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism), "one could have predicted..." (the degenera­tion of the Russian revolution and of Bolshevism into a state capitalism supporting itself on the working class).

We can reply to Harper that a number of ‘enlight­ened' Marxists did predict this, and arrived at the same conclusions as Harper about the Russian revolution well before he did. We can, for example, cite the case of Karl Kautsky.

Karl Kautsky's position on the Russian revolution was given a broad public through the extensive debate that took place between him, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg (1915-1918, Lenin: Against the Stream; Socialism and War; Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism; State and Revolution; The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Kautsky: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 1921, Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution. 1922, Kautsky: Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism).

From the series of articles by Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism, published in Belgium, in French in 1922, one can see how similar Kautsky's conclusions are to those of Harper.

"...And this book (Luxemburg's Russian Revolution) puts us (Kautsky) in the para­doxical position of being compelled to defend the Bolsheviks against more than one of Rosa Luxemburg's accusations". (Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism).

What Kautsky does is to defend the ‘errors' of the Bolsheviks (which Luxemburg criticizes in her pamphlet) by portraying them as logical consequences of the bourgeois revolution in Russia; by showing that the Bolsheviks could only carry out what the Russian milieu destined them to, namely, the bourgeois revolution.

To give a few examples: Rosa criticized the Bolshevik slogans and policies concerning the dividing up of the land by the small peasants. She felt that this would lead to all sorts of difficulties and advocated the immediate collectivization of land. Lenin had already responded to such arguments when Kautsky made them from a different starting point (cf. the chapter ‘Subserviency to the Bourgeoisie in the Guise of "Economic" Analysis', in The Prolet­arian Revolution and. the Renegade Kautsky).

Kautsky:

"...There is no doubt that this (the dividing up of the land) constitutes a powerful obstacle to the progress of socialism in Russia. But this was something that was impossible to prevent: one can only say that it could have been carried out in a more rational manner than the Bolsheviks did it. This is precisely the proof that Russia is essentially at the stage of the bourgeois revolution. This is why the Bolsheviks' bourgeois agrarian reforms will outlive the Bolsheviks, whereas they themselves have had to recognize that the socialist measures they took are incapable of lasting and have in fact been prejudicial..."

Of course, Kautsky's mighty arguments were totally invalidated by that other ‘socialist' Stalin, who collectivized the land and ‘socialized' industry when the revolution had already been strangled to death.

And here is along sample of Kautsky's views on the development of Marxism in Russia. It is strangely reminiscent of Harper's dialectic (see ‘The Russian Revolution' chapter in Lenin As Philosopher).

"...As with the French, the Russian revolut­ionaries inherited from the reactionaries this belief in the exemplary importance of their nation over the other nations...

"...When Marxism reached Russia from the decaying west, it had to fight very energetically against this illusion, and demonstrate that the social revolution could only come out of a highly developed capitalism. The revolution that Russia was heading towards would necessarily be, first of all, a bourgeois revolution on the model of the ones that had taken place in the west, But as time went by, this conception seemed restrictive and paralyzing to the more impatient Marxist elements, esp­ecially after 1905, when the Russian prolet­ariat fought so triumphantly and stirred the enthusiasm of the whole European proletariat. From then on, the most radical Russian Marxists developed a particular nuance of Marxism. That part of Marxism which made socialism depend on economic conditions, on the advanced development of industrial capitalism, more and more faded away from their eyes. Now Marxism as a theory of the class struggle was increasingly emphasized, Moreover, it was seen simply in terms of the struggle for political power by any means, divorced from its material base. With this way of approaching the question, the Russian proletariat ended up being seen as an extraordinary being, the model for the prol­etariat of the entire world. And the prolet­arians of other countries began to believe it -- to praise the Russian proletariat as the guide for the whole international proletariat in the struggle for socialism. It's not difficult to explain this. The west had the bourgeois revolutions behind it and the pro­letarian revolutions in front of it. But the latter required a strength which hadn't yet been achieved anywhere. Thus, in the west, we find ourselves in an intermediate stage between two revolutionary epochs, and this puts the patience of the advanced elements to a hard test.

"Russia, on the other hand, was so backward that it still had the bourgeois revolution and the overthrow of absolutism in front of it.

"This task didn't require the proletariat to be as strong as it would have to be to carry out the exclusive conquest of working class power in the west. Thus the Russian revol­ution took place sooner that the revolution in the west. It was essentially a bourgeois revolution, but this didn't become clear for some time, because the bourgeois classes in Russia today were much weaker that they were in France at the end of the 18th century. If one neglected the economic base, if one looked only at the class struggle and the relative strength of the proletariat, it could for a time really seem as though the Russian prol­etariat was superior to the proletariat of western Europe and was determined to be its guide..." (Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism).

In a more philosophical way, Harper reiterates Kautsky's arguments one by one.

Kautsky puts forward two opposing conceptions of socialism:

1) In the first, socialism can only be realized on the basis of advanced capitalism (Kautsky's position, and that of the Mensheviks. This position was also used by the German social democrats, including Noske, in order to criticize the Russian revolution. It's a conception which in fact led to the adoption of state capitalist measures, supported by a ‘part of the masses', against the revolutionary proletariat).

2) In the second, "the struggle for political power, by any means, divorced from its economic base", would allow socialism to be built even in Russia (this is Kautsky's version of the Bolsheviks' position).

In fact, Lenin and Trotsky said: the bourgeois revolution in Russia can only be made through the insurrection of the proletariat. Since the insurrection of the proletariat has an objective tendency to develop on an international scale, we can, given the level of the development of the productive forces on a world scale, hope that this Russian insurrection will provoke a world-wide movement.

From the point of view of the development of the productive forces in Russia alone, the Russian revolution would be a bourgeois one; but the realization of socialism was possible if the revolution broke out on a world scale. Lenin and Trotsky, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, thought that the level of development of the productive forces on a world scale not only made socialism possible -- they made it a necessity. They all agreed that capitalism had reached its epoch of "(world) wars and revolutions". They only disagreed about the economic causes of this situation. For socialism to be possible, the Russian revolution could not remain isolated.

Alongside the Mensheviks, Kautsky replied that Lenin and Trotsky saw the revolution as a ‘voluntarist' affair, the mere seizure of power through a Bolshevik putsch. They even compared Bolshevism with Blanquism.

All these ‘enlightened' Marxists and socialists are precisely the ones Harper seems to cite as an example, as those who ‘issued Marxist warnings', who were against ‘the international workers' movement being led by the Russians' -- people like Kautsky:

"...that Lenin did not understand Marxism as the theory of proletarian revolution, that he did not understand capitalism, bourgeoisie, proletariat in their highest modern develop­ment was shown strikingly when from Russia, by means of the Third International, the world revolution was to be started, and the advice and warnings of Western Marxists were entire­ly disregarded" (Lenin As Philosopher, p.98).

All of them with Kautsky to the fore reproach Bolsheviks for not taking into account the backward state of the economy. In reality, from1905 onwards, Trotsky had a masterful response to all these "honest family heads" as Lenin called them. He showed how, on the one hand, the advanced level of industrial concentration in Russia, and, on the other hand, its backward social situation (the delay in the bourgeois revolution), ensured that Russia would be in a constantly revolutionary state; and this revolution would be proletarian, or it would be nothing.

Harper, building his theory and his philosophical critique on Kautsky's theory and historico-econ­omic critique, says that owing to the backward state of the Russian economy, to the inevita­bility of the bourgeois revolution in Russia on the economic level, the philosophy of the Russian revolution had to carry on the first phase of Marx's thought, ie, the Feuerbachian, revolut­ionary bourgeois democratic phase: "religion is the opium of the people" (the critique of religion). It was thus natural that Lenin and his friends didn't attain the second phase of Marxist philosophy, the revolutionary proletarian dia­lectical phase: "social existence determines consciousness". (Harper forgets to point out -- even though it's impossible for him not to have known this -- that the main struggle of the Bolsheviks before 1918 was directed against all the social democratic currents to their right, both the governmental and the centrist factions; and that this battle was waged on a very broad scale, through the whole European press and pamphlets in many languages, where­as Materialism and Empiriocriticism was only known to a wider Russian public much later, was translated into German quite a bit later, into French even later still, and was very little read outside Russia. One feels just­ified in asking whether the spirit of Materialism and Empiriocriticism was contained in these articles and pamphlets. Harper doesn't attempt to prove this, and with good reason). Anyway, Harper, like Kautsky, con­cludes from all this that despite the voluntarist conception of class struggle held by Lenin and Trotsky, who wanted to "make the Russian proletariat the orchestral conductor of the world revolution..." the revolution was doomed to be philosophically bourgeois, since Lenin and his friends had adopted a Feuerbachian bourgeois materialist philosophy (Marx phase one).

These ideas bring Harper and Kautsky together in their critique of the Russian revolution -- both in their approach to the fundamentals of the problem, and in the way they both accuse the Bolsheviks of wanting to direct the world revolution from the Kremlin.

But there is more. In his philosophical expose Harper argues that Engels wasn't a dialectical materialist, that his conceptions of knowledge were still profoundly marked by the natural sciences and bourgeois materialism. To verify this theory you would have to examine the writings of Engels in detail, which. Harper doesn't do. Mondolfo, on the other hand, in an important work on dialectical materialism seems to want to demonstrate the opposite, which proves that this isn't a new quarrel. Whatever the case, I think that new generations can often observe in those who preceded them what have noted in Lenin or Engels, who - made a critique of the philosophies of their time on the basis of the same level of scientific knowledge, and were often far too schematic in their approaches. But the real point is to study their general attitude, not simply their philosophical position -- to see whether, in their general activity, they situated themselves on the terrain of praxis, of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach.

In this what Sydney Hook says about the work of Lenin in his Understanding Marx is much closer to reality:

"What is strange is that Lenin seems not to notice the incompatibility between, on the one hand, his political activism and the reciprocal dynamic philosophy of action of What Is To Be Done, and, on the other hand, the absolutely mechanistic theory of knowledge which he de­fends so violently in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Here he follows Engels word for word in his statement that "sensations are the copies, the photographs, the reflection, the mirror image of things", and that mind is not an active factor in knowledge. He seems to believe that if one argues for the particip­ation of mind as an active factor in knowledge, conditioned by the nervous system and the entire history of the past, it must follow that the mind creates everything that exists, including its own brain. That would be idealism in its most characteristic form, and idealism means religion and belief in God.

"But the passage from the first to the second proposition is the most obvious non sequitur one could imagine. In reality, in the inter­est of his conception of Marxism as the theory and practice of the social revolution, Lenin had to admit that consciousness is an active business, a process in which matter, culture and mind react reciprocally on each other, and that the sensations don't constitute knowledge but are a part of the material worked upon by knowledge.

"This is the position Marx takes in his Theses on Feuerbach and in The German Ideology. Whoever sees the sensations as exact copies of the external world, themselves leading to knowledge, cannot avoid fatalism and mechanism. In Lenin's political writings, rather than his technical writings, one finds no trace of this Lockean dualist epistemology. His What Is To Be Done, as we have seen, contains a frank acceptance of the active role of class knowledge in the social process. It's in his practical writings dealing with the concrete problems of agitation, revolution and recon­struction that you find the real philosophy of Lenin...." (Understanding Marx, Sydney Hook, p.57-8)[2].

The clearest testimony to what Sydney Hook says, putting Harper alongside Plekhanov and Kautsky, is something Trotsky wrote in My Life. Speaking about Plekhanov, he says, "His strength was being undermined by the very thing that was giving strength to Lenin -- the approach of the revolution ... He was Marxian propagandist and polemist-in-chief, but not a revolutionary politician of the proletariat. The nearer the shadow of the revolution crept the more evident it became that Plekhanov was losing ground..."

We can see now that what's original in Harper isn't his philosophical thesis (which is, on the cont­rary, a statement of position following on from many others), but above all the conclusion he draws from it.

This is a fatalistic conclusion, lust like Kautsky's. In his pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism Kautsky cites a phrase written to him by Engels in a personal letter:

"...the real, and not the illusory ends of a revolution are always realized by this revolution later on".

This is what Kautsky tries to demonstrate in his pamphlet, and this is what Harper argues for (to those who want to follow him in his conclusions) in Lenin As Philosopher. Having fought against the bourgeois materialism of Lenin and Engels, he comes to the most vulgarly mechanistic concl­usion about the Russian revolution, portraying it as a ‘fatal product', a ‘real and not illusory end'. The Russian revolution produced what it had to produce -- it was all inscribed in Material­ism and Empiriocriticism and in the economic conditions of Russia; the world proletariat was simply used as an ideological cover for all this. What's more, Pannekoek goes on to argue that the new class in power in Russia quite naturally took up Leninism's mode of thinking, its bourgeois materialism, in their struggle against the established bourgeois strata, who on the philo­sophical level had fallen back into religious cretinism, mysticism and idealism, and had become conservative and reactionary. This new, fresh philosophy, this new state capitalist class of intellectuals and technicians, find their raison d'être in Materialism and Empiriocriticism and Stalinism, and are rising in all count­ries...Thus we have the equation: Marx phase one = Lenin's Materialism = Stalin!

Without knowing Harper's work, Burnham has under­stood this equation very well -- just as the anarchists have been repeating it for ages without understanding it. It''s obvious that Harper does­n't say this quite so brutally, but the fact that he opens the door to all Burnham's bourgeois and anarchist conclusions is enough to show the underlying flaw in Lenin As Philosopher.

Finally, when he comes to draw the ‘pure' prolet­arian lessons of the Russian revolution (I would point out that the language of Harper and Kautsky always talks about the ‘Russian revol­ution' and not the ‘October revolution', which is quite a significant distinction), Harper separates the action of the Russian working class from the ‘bourgeois' influence of the Bolsheviks, and ends up saying that it is the generalized strikes and soviets (or councils) ‘in themselves' which produced the Russian revolution and which bring us the following positive lessons:

1) the proletariat must detach itself ideo­logically from bourgeois influence ‘man by man'

2) it must gradually learn, on its own, how to manage the factories and organize production

3) generalized strikes and the councils are the exclusive weapons of the proletariat.

This conclusion is a refined type of reformism, and what's more, is totally anti-dialectical.

Even if it were realizable, this ‘man by man' detachment from bourgeois ideology would post­pone socialism for centuries. It turns the Marxist doctrine into a beautiful fairytale for the childish workers, to give them the courage to face up to life. If every man had to be detached from the ruling ideology of bourgeois society on an individual basis, then Marxism becomes no more than an idea -- an eternally valid idea, but no more. In reality, it's the working class as a whole which detaches itself in certain historic conditions, when it's thrown with particular violence against the old system. Socialism can't be realized ‘man by man', as the old reformists used to believe, arguing that you had first to reform men before you could reform society. In fact the two can't be separated: society changes when humanity enters into movement not ‘man by man', but ‘as one man', when it finds itself in particular historic conditions.

The fact that Harper repeats the old reformist refrains in a seemingly new form, allows him, under a philosophical-dialectical verbiage to gloss over the real problems of the Russian revolution, to dismiss its fundamental contri­butions as no more than reasons of the Russian state. We refer to Lenin's position against the war and Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.

Oh yes, Messrs. Kautsky and Harper, you may some­times hit the mark in a purely negative critique of the philosophical or economic theories of Lenin and Trotsky, but that in no way means that you have reached a revolutionary position. In their political positions during the crucial, insurrectionary phase of the Russian revolution, it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the true Marxist revolutionaries.

It's not enough, twenty years after the battle, and having yourself participated in the front line, to philosophically conclude that all this had to end up in the Stalinist state. You also have to ask how and why Lenin and Trotsky could base themselves on the international workers' movement, and prove to us that Stalinism was the inevitable product of this movement.

Harper, just like Kautsky, is incapable of answering these questions, because in their political positions, in the face of the bour­geoisie, in an imperialist war, or a phase of revolution, they lack the concepts that would allow them to approach these problems. They may know Lenin ‘as philosopher' or as a ‘head of state', but they don't know Lenin as a revolutionary Marxist, the real face of Lenin, when he fought against the imperialist war, or the real face of Trotsky, when he fought against the mechanistic concept of an ‘inevitable' capitalist development for Russia. They don't know the real face of October, which aren't just the mass strikes or the soviets. Lenin wasn't attached to the soviets in an absolute way, as Harper is, because he believed that the forms of proletarian power emerged spontaneously out of the struggle. In that I think that Lenin was also more Marxist, because he wasn't attached to soviets, unions, or parliamentarian­ ism (even if he was mistaken) in a definitive manner, but according to whether they were appropriate to the class struggle at a given time.

On the other hand, Harper's quasi-theological attachment to the councils now leads him to a position of advocating a form of workers' co-management under capitalism, as a kind of apprenticeship in socialism. But it's not the role of revolutionaries to advocate this kind of apprenticeship. Together with the ‘man by man' theory of socialism, this kind of apprenticeship would condemn humanity to eternal slavery and alienation, with or without councils, with or without ‘council communists' and their schemes for apprentice­ ship under the capitalist regime -- a vulgar reformist-conception which is simply the other side of Kautskyian coin.

As for the ‘struggle of the workers themselves', with its ‘appropriate' means -- strikes, etc -- we have seen the results. It comes close to the ‘strike-cultivating' theories of the Trotskyists and anarchists, with their latter-day versions of the old ‘trade unionist' and ‘economist' traditions which Lenin attacked so violently in What Is To Be Done. This means that the anti-union position of the council communists, correct in a purely negative sense, is no less false ‘in itself', because the unions are replaced by their younger brothers, the soviets, and play the same role, as though the content could be changed by changing the name. One no longer calls the party the party or unions, unions, but one replaces them by the same organizations that have the same functions but a different name. If one were to call cats ‘Raminagrobis' they would still have the same anatomy and the same place in the world. But for some they would have become a myth, and it's a curious thing that there are ‘dialectical' philosophers and materialists whose point of view is so narrow that they try to convince us that their world of mythological constructions, a world in which ‘raminagrobis' have replaced cats, really is a new world.

Thus: in the old world, Kautsky was a vulgar reformist, whereas, in the new world, Trotskyists, anarchists and council communists are ‘authentic revolutionaries'. In fact they are even more grossly reformist than the great theoretician of reformism, Kautsky.

The fact that Harper takes up the classical arguments of bourgeois reformism, both Menshevik and Kautskyist (and, more recently ‘Burnhamite'), against the Russian revolution, should not surprise us too much. Instead of trying to draw the real lessons of the revolutionary epoch as a Marxist would (and as Marx and Engels did, for example, with regard to the Paris Commune), Harper tries to condemn the Russian revolution ‘en bloc', as well as the Bolshevism that was linked to it (just as Blanquism and Proudhonism were linked to the Paris Commune).

If, instead of trying to condemn the Bolsheviks as being ‘appropriate to the Russian milieu', Harper had asked himself about the level of thought reached by the left of social democracy which all of us come out of, he would have reached very different conclusions in his book. He would have seen that this level of thought (even amongst those who were the most developed in dialectics) was insufficient for solving certain of the problems posed by the Russian revolution, especially the problem of party and state. On the eve of the Russian revolution, no Marxist had a very precise understanding of these problems, and for good reasons.

We insist that at all levels of knowledge -‑ philosophical, economic, and political - the Bolsheviks in 1917 were amongst the most advanced revolutionaries in the whole world, and this was to a large extent thanks to the presence of Lenin and Trotsky.

If subsequent events seem, to contradict this, it's not because their intellectual development was appropriate to the ‘Russian milieu', but because of the general level of the international workers' movement; and this poses philosophical problems which Harper hasn't even tried to raise.

Philipe

 

---

 

[1] ICC note: In a future issue of International Review, we will see how one of Harper's best disciples, Canne-Meyer, ended up, albeit with regret and sadness, at the same conclusion as Burnham about socialism being a utopia. Fundamentally, with a great deal more blather, this was the conclusion also reached by the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and its mentor, Chalieu-Castoriadis-Cardan.

[2] Note from the original text: Against the Harper/Kautsky thesis on a ‘specifically Russian milieu', we can cite Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed are products of other circumstances and that the educator needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society....The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice". 

Economic crisis and class struggle

In our press, we have often characterized the 1980s as ‘the years of truth’ (see, in particular, the International Review numbers 20 and 26). The first two years of the decade have confirmed this analysis. The years 1980‑81 have witnessed events of the greatest importance, events that are particularly significant for the stakes that will, in large part, be played out during the 1980s --imperialist war or worldwide proletarian revolution.

The illusions about the economic situation -- which determines the whole of social life -- have come brutally to an end; 1980 and 1981 appear as the years of a new recession in the world economy, with a massive growth of inflation and an unprecedented rise in unemployment.

The bourgeoisie’s response to this crisis -- wor­sening inter-imperialist tensions and the preparations for war -- has fully lived up to the causes that prompted it. 1980 began with the invasion of Afghanistan, while at the close of 1981 comes an intense growth in armaments throughout the world, and the opening in Geneva of new negotiations between Russia and the US over ‘disarmament’. We have already seen their role as a smoke-screen designed to conceal the headlong arms-race towards a new holocaust.

The workers’ response has also lived up to the raising of the stakes; during the summer of 1980 there took shape in Poland the mightiest move­ment of the world proletariat for more than half a century. A movement that every bourgeoisie spared no efforts to stifle, and which it has not yet managed to deal with. A movement which showed, at the same time, the capacity of the capitalist class for solidarity in the face of the proletarian struggle, and the necessity for this struggle to spread to the world level.

This article aims to take stock of these three fundamental elements of humanity’s destiny: the capitalist crisis, and the response of bourg­eoisie and proletariat respectively.

A continuously deteriorating economic crisis

In 1969, the leader of the world’s greatest power triumphantly declared: “We have finally learned to manage a modern economy in such a way as to assure its continuous expansion”[1]. A year later, the United States entered its worst rec­ession since the war: -0.1% growth of the Gross Domestic Product (nowhere near as bad as it was to become later) .

In 1975, Chirac, Prime Minister of the world’s fifth largest power, was taking his turn to play Nostradamus: “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.” A year later, he was obliged to make way for ‘France’s best economist’, Prof­essor Barre, who, on his departure in May 1981, left the situation even worse than he had found it (unemployment doubled, inflation at 14% inst­ead of 11%).

A year ago, the American bourgeoisie chose Reagan to put an end to the crisis (at least this is what he said). But the remedies concoc­ted by Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize for Econom­ics, and a few other adepts of ‘supply-side economics’ have achieved nothing. The American economy is plunging into a new recession, unemp­loyment is approaching the 10 million mark (a post-war record) , and even David Stockman, dir­ector of the budget, admits that he didn’t really believe in the success of the economic policy for which he himself was largely responsible.

As regularly as autumn follows summer and win­ter follows autumn, the world’s leaders have deceived both themselves and their audience in announcing “the end of the tunnel” as if in a surrealist film, the tunnel’s end has seemed to retreat more and more as the train advanced to the point where it is no more than a little speck of light, soon to disappear altogether.

But the western leaders don’t hold a monopoly on hazardous predictions.

In September 1980, Gierek was replaced by Kania at the head of the PUWP for having led the Polish economy to disaster. With Kania, things would be different! And different they were -- to the point where the economic situa­tion of the summer of 1980 takes on an air of prosperity compared with the situation today; a fall in production of 4% has been followed by a collapse of 15%. Kania, after being tri­umphantly re-elected to the leadership of the party in July, disappeared into oblivion in October.

As for Brezhnev, his regularly disappointed predictions are at least as numerous as the plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In an outburst of lucidity, and with a certain humor that was probably unintended, Brezhnev recently finished by observing that after three consecutive years of bad harvests caused by the weather, the analysis of the Russian climate would have to be revised.

In recent years, the whole of Comecon has been marked by a chronic inability to meet the obj­ectives of the 1976-1980 plan. While the most ‘serious’ member, East Germany, managed to raise the national income by 80% of the plan’s forecast, for Hungary this figure falls to 50%. As for Poland, its growth in relation to 1976 has been zero, which comes down to saying that it produces only 70% of what was forecast by the planners. So much for the ‘great wor­kers’ victory’ that the planned economy is supposed to represent, according to the Trotskyists!

As for the state monopoly of foreign trade -- the other ‘great workers’ victory’ according to the Trotskyists -- it too has demonstrated its remarkable effectiveness: the countries that make up Comecon are among the most indebted in the world.

As for the myth of the absence of inflation in these countries, it has been killed off ever since the massive and repeated official price increases -- going as high as 200% (eg 170% on the price of bread in Poland) .

In 1936, Trotsky saw the economic progress of the USSR as proof of socialism’s superiority over capitalism; “There is no longer any need to argue with the bourgeois economists; socialism has shown its right to victory, not in the pages of Capital, but in an economic ar­ena that covers a sixth of the planet; not in the language of dialectics, but in that of iron, cement and electricity”[2].

With the same logic, we would today be obliged to come to the opposite conclusion -- that cap­italism is superior to socialism, so obvious is the economic weakness and fragility of the so-called ‘socialist’ countries. Moreover, this is the battle-cry of the western econ­omists to justify their defense of the capit­alist mode of production. In fact, the crisis hitting the eastern bloc is a new illustra­tion of what revolutionaries have always said -- that there is nothing socialist about the USSR and its satellites. These are capitalist econ­omies, and relatively under-developed ones at that.

But the cries of satisfaction coming from the defenders of private capitalism, as they point the finger of scorn at the countries of the eastern bloc are unable, though this is their purpose, to conceal the gravity of the crisis in the very heart of the citadels of world capital.

The following graphs give an idea of the dev­elopment of the three main economic indicators for the whole of the OECD (ie the most devel­oped western countries): these are inflation, the annual variation in the Gross Domestic Product and the rate of unemployment.

The yearly figures are already significant in themselves, but it is more interesting to ex­amine the mean for a period of several years (1961-64, 1965-69, 1970-74, 1975-79, 1980-81). For the three indicators that we are consider­ing, the figures show a constant deterioration in the situation of western capitalism. 

AVERAGE VALUE OF THREE ECONOMIC INDICATORS (in %)
Period	65-69	70-74	75-79	80-81
Annual variation in GNP (OECD total)	5.1	3.9	3.1	1.25
Rate of unemployment (15 principal OECD countries)	2.66	3.36	5.16	6.35
Annual variation in consumer prices (OECD total)	3.7	7.4	9.3	11.7

For some people, of course, this is not yet the ‘real’ crisis, since we have not seen a massive decline in production over a long per­iod, as was the case during the 30s: for the moment, the average rates of growth are still positive. There are two things to be said in reply to this argument:

1) As we have already pointed out in previous articles, while the bourgeoisie has not ‘learnt’ to resolve the crisis -- for the good reason that it is insoluble -- it has, by contrast, learnt since 1929 how to slow down its devel­opment, in particular through the massive use of state capitalist measures, and through the leading countries in each bloc taking in hand the affairs of a number of their satellites (essentially via Comecon in the eastern, and via the OECD and the IMF in the western bloc) . Moreover, it is worth remarking that notwith­standing inter-imperialist antagonisms, the richer bloc may, when the need arises, come to the aid of the stricken economy of a coun­try in the enemy bloc, especially if it is threatened by social upheavals. Western aid to Poland and the adherence of Poland and Hungary to the IMF are good illustrations of this.

2) The existence of a real crisis is not indic­ated solely by a decline in production. The continuing decline in the average rates of growth, clearly shown by the graph, demon­strates that something has definitively broken down in the world economic machinery. Further­more, the present massive introduction of automation means that the yearly rate of inc­rease in labor productivity is such that, in good times or bad, and even if many companies have to shut up shop, the total volume of pro­duction may increase from one year to another, without this indicating the slightest health in the economy[3].

In fact, among the most significant indicat­ors of the deepening crisis, the increase in unemployment is especially important. This is a direct expression of capitalism’s inability to integrate new workers into its productive apparatus. Worse still, it expresses the be­ginning of their large-scale rejection. And this is the case not only in the Third World, as it was during the post-war reconstruction, but in the capitalist metropoles themselves -- the developed countries. This is a flagrant sign of the historical bankruptcy of a mode of production whose mission was to spread its relations of production -- the exploitation of wage labor -- throughout the world, but which is now not even capable of maintaining them in its own strongholds (not to mention the sit­uation in the Third World, where unemployment has held tragic sway for decades).

The development of the rate of inflation is another highly significant indicator of the constant breakdown in capitalism’s function­ing. Inflation is a direct expression of cap­italism’s headlong flight forward which has become its mode of survival. Unable to find solvent outlets for its production, the sys­tem is drawing credits on its future by in­debting itself massively and continuously. And it is the state that shows the way. By means of constantly growing budget deficits and use of paper money, the bourgeoisie tries to create artificial markets to re­place those that slip from the grasp of national production. Currencies are more and more turning into ‘funny money’, IOUs put out by states that are themselves no longer solvent. And this ‘funny money’ can only go on diminishing in value, whence the increase in inflation.

When it tries to put a limit to this phenomenon, economic policy only succeeds, in the end, in bringing about a recession: the attempt to mort­gage the future a little less puts the present more at risk. We have seen the result of Mrs. Thatcher’s ‘shock treatment’, which incr­eased unemployment by 68% in a year, to over 3 million (a record since the ‘30s). Reagan’s magic potion has also had wonderful results: 9 million unemployed, 8.4% of the working pop­ulation in November 1981 (Reagan had under­taken not to go beyond 8%). As for Schmidt’s elixir, it also has proved its worth -- unemp­loyment increased by 54% in a year.

In fact, every bourgeoisie is caught more and more tightly between two scissor-blades: recession and inflation. Every attempt to escape one of these scourges ends up falling into the other -- without, however, getting away from the first.

Reagan, for example, amongst many other pro­mises, announced a reduction of the budget deficit to $42.5 billion for the fiscal year 1981-2: the forecast is now in the order of $100 billion for this fiscal year, and $125 billion and $145 billion for the following two.

We could go on citing figures which all high­light the dead-end that capitalism has run into. In fact, plain common sense is enough to see that this system’s crisis has no solution: if the conditions of 1965-69 brought about the worse conditions of 1970-74 (see Table 4) , and if these in their turn resulted in the still worse ones of 1975-79, it is hard to see how, or by what miracle, things could suddenly get better.

Already in 1974, the then French president Giscard d’Estaing declared, in a burst of lucidity: “The world is unhappy. It is unhappy because it does not know where it is going, and guesses that if it knew, it would find out that it is heading for a catastrophe” (24/10/74).

More recently, the OECD in its July 1981 ‘Economic Perspectives’ gave a touching ex­ample of the anguish that grips the bourg­eoisie every time it considers its own future. Put off by years of forecasts that have turned out to be overoptimistic, and refusing to probe lucidly into the world’s economic future for fear of “finding that it is heading for a catastrophe”, this serious organization if ever there was one wrote: “In most countries, the immediate perspective is complex and difficult.... Forecasts can never be considered as certain. Even behavior, whose reg­ularity, which is the very basis of any fore­cast, appears to be well-established, can change, sometimes very abruptly…..     

If, as often happens, the many hypotheses at the foundation of our forecasts are not confirmed, the future can appear in a very diff­erent light.”

In other words, the OECD admitted that it was no longer of any use ... This inability of the bourgeoisie to forecast its own future ex­presses the fact that as a class it no longer has any future to offer humanity other than a general holocaust.

Only the working class can give humanity any future. This is why it alone is able to understand the perspectives facing the world today, in particular through its revolutionary currents basing themselves firmly on Marxist theory. This is why revolutionaries, without any of the immense resources for study and investigation available to the bourgeoisie, were able to write as early as 1972:

“... the coming crisis is indeed of the same type as those which have plunged the world during the 20th century into the greatest catastrophes and barbarities of its existence. This is no longer a crisis of growth like those of the previous century, but a true death-crisis.

Without wanting to make predictions as to the time-scale, we can therefore indicate the following perspectives for the capitalist world:

-- massive reduction in world commerce;

-- commercial wars between different countries;

-- setting-up of' protectionist measures, and the break-up of customs unions (EEC etc);

-- a return to autarky;

-- falling production;

-- massive increase in unemployment;

-- reduction in workers’ real wages.”

(Revolution Internationale Ancienne Serie no 7, March/April 1972)

And it is for the same reasons that in 1968, at a time when no-one yet spoke of the crisis, which revolutionaries were already writing:

“1967 saw the fall of the £ Sterling, 1968 has seen Johnson’s measures; and as inter-imperial­ist struggles make the threat of war ever more present, we see the decomposition of the capit­alist system, which was hidden for a few years by the intoxication of the ‘progress’ that foll­owed the Second World War.

We are not prophets, and we do not claim to guess when and how future events will take place. But what we are indeed aware and sure of', as far as the process that capitalism is at present plunged in is concerned, is that it cannot be stopped by reforms, devaluations or any other variety of capitalist economic meas­ure, and that it is leading directly to crisis.” (Internacionalismo, January 1968. Press of the ICC in Venezuela.)

The bourgeoisie’s response to the crisis

Increasingly, the bourgeoisie is mortgaging the future, through runaway indebtedness and inflation. But its forward flight is not limited to the economic level. As in the past, at the bottom of the economic abyss lies generalized imperialist war. As surely as the great crisis of the 30s led to World War II, so the present crisis is pushing capitalism to a third holo­caust.

The threat of war no longer has to be demon­strated -- it is more and more among the daily preoccupations of the vast majority of the population. It is enshrined in the enormous acceleration in all countries’ military efforts, and especially in that of the most powerful countries: as he presented his military program, Reagan declared (12 October): “No American administration since Eisenhower has presented a nuclear project of this scale.” It appears in the development and installation of new and ever more sophisticated weapons: the Backfire bomber and the SS-20 on the Russian side, neutron bomb, cruise missile and Per­shing 2 on the American. It is revealed in the fact that more and more it is Europe -- central theatre of the two previous world wars -- that is becoming the main ground for military prep­arations: the present controversy and the Russian-US negotiations at Geneva over ‘Euro­missiles’ are good illustrations. In the same way as the crisis struck violently first at capitalism’s periphery, and then struck at its heart, so war, which has for so long confined its ravages to the Third World (Far East, Middle East and Africa) , now extends its threat to the metropoles.

But the third holocaust is not being prepared by the accumulation of armaments alone. It also in­volves a process of closing ranks around the leading countries of the two blocs. This is especially clear in the west, where despite all the declarations and campaigns of the various parties, the governments are drawn into toeing the line behind the positions of the US. Schmidt, for example, has seemed to be acting as a sharp-shooter and to be disobeying Amer­ican instructions. In fact his 22 November meeting with Brezhnev was not an occasion for infidelity to his bloc: quite the reverse -- the positions he adopted during this meeting even earned him the congratulations of the right-wing opposition in the Bundestag.

For his part, Mitterand has adopted a fine air of independence from the US as far as the Third World is concerned. At the North-South summit of Cancun, he made a song and dance against Reagan’s positions and in favor of ‘global negotiations’ between developed and under­developed countries, so that the former should come to the aid of the latter, Two days prev­iously, in Mexico City, he had made a moving speech, prepared by his counselor Regis Debray (one-time admirer of Che Guevara), in which he addressed himself to “those who take up arms to defend their liberty”. His message to “all freedom fighters” was that “courage, freedom will win!”

These declarations, along with the recognition of the E1 Salvador guerrilla movements, seemed like spanners in the works of American policy. In fact, it was simply a division of labor within the western bloc between those who use the language of intimidation (which is dominant as far as the Third World is concerned) and those who have the specific job of giving the western bloc control over opposition and guerr­illa movements and preventing them from going over to the Russians.

The American bloc has already long since del­egated to French imperialism the job of keep­ing order in certain zones in the Third World. Mitterand has taken over the job of policing Africa from Giscard (as we have recently seen in Chad). Given his ‘socialist’ and ‘humanist’ image, he has also been given a mandate, along with his Mexican acolyte Lopez Portillo, of doing the bloc’s public relations as regards the bourgeois movements struggling against Latin America’s military regimes.

But these ‘deviant’ declarations do not express the real ties between French and Amer­ican imperialism. These are to be seen in Mitterand’s other declarations, following the 18 October meeting with Reagan at York­town:

“These were good conversations. Dialogue is easy between friends ... We spoke with the frankness of old friends who can say everything without destroying anything”; and Mitterand emphasized “the good health of Franco-American friendship, which is not threatened by our divergences.”

The idea of a rise in neutralism, so often put forward in the bourgeois media (and which finds a complement in the idea of the ‘disintegra­tion of the blocs’ so dear to the groups Pour une Intervention Communiste and Volonte Comm­uniste), is basically no more than a propaganda exercise, aimed at allowing the continued strengthening of the ties amongst members of the western bloc, faced with its growing imper­ialist rivalries with the Russian bloc.

A recent illustration of this tendency to strengthen the western bloc was given by Sadat’s assassination, in which the ‘hand of Moscow’ was detected -- as propaganda demanded. In reality, Sadat’s death was very convenient for the west. On the one hand, it allowed the replacement of an increasingly unpopular leader confronting a growing social discontent. Continued US support for Sadat was likely to end up in an Iran-style situation. On the other hand, (as Cheysson, French Minister of Foreign Affairs bluntly put it) it opened the way towards reconciliation amongst the Arab coun­tries, and especially the two most powerful -- Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And this restoration of Arab unity, which had fallen apart after the Camp David agreements, and which can only be realized under the American aegis, is indeed one of the spearheads of western imper­ialism in the face of instability in Iran and the Russian thrust in Afghanistan. If anyone’s ‘hand’ is behind the religious extremists who carried out the assassination, it is certainly not the KGB’s, but rather the CIA’s -- which, moreover, was responsible for Sadat’s security arrangements.

Sadat’s assassination was presented as a threat to ‘peace’. In a sense this is true, but for quite different reasons from those put forward by western propaganda. If this event contri­butes to the march towards war, it is not because Sadat was a ‘man of peace’; he never has been, whether in 1973 when he started the war against Israel, or at Camp David, designed to strengthen the west’s political and military positions in the Middle East, in the framework of the ‘Pax Americana’. And, as always in dec­adent capitalism, peace in one part of the world is simply a preparation for a still more widespread and murderous war elsewhere.

This is a cruel reality of the world today: peace, and talk of peace, has no other purpose than to pave the way for war. This is the significance of the present enormous pacifist campaigns being unleashed in Western Europe.

History shows that world wars have always been prepared by pacifist campaigns. Even before 1914, the reformist wing of the Social-Democ­racy, notably under Jaures’ leadership, under­took an intense pacifist propaganda -- the better to call the workers to war in August 1914 in the name of ‘defending civilization’: the same civilization which they proposed pre­viously to defend by demonstrating for peace. While Jaures, who was assassinated on the eve of the war, did not have the chance to take this final step, by contrast Leon Jouhaux, leader of CGT and who had taken a leading part in the pacifist campaigns, ended up in the Government of National Unity. From before 1914 then, the pacifism promoted by the reformists was one of capitalism’s methods used to bind the proletariat hand and foot, and hurl it into the imperialist massacre.

In the same way, in 1934, the Amsterdam-Plegel movement (so called after the two towns that hosted the preparatory conferences) fixed itself the objective of the struggle for peace, under the aegis of the Stalinist parties and their fellow-travelers, with the participa­tion of the Socialists and the enthusiastic adherence of the Trotskyists (and even the anarchists). This movement ended up in the ‘Popular Fronts’ against fascism (supposedly the main war-monger) , and was one of the means by which the proletariat was mobilized for World War II.

The same maneuver was used again at the begin­ning of the ‘50s, when the ‘cold war’ made its appearance as the preliminary of a Third World War. Following the ‘Stockholm appeal’ against atomic weapons, the Stalinist parties set in motion an immense campaign of petition-signing ‘for peace’, which met with a certain unden­iable success (to the point where prostitutes caught in the act of soliciting their clients claimed in their defense to be soliciting signatures for the petition!).'Although this time, the inter-imperialist tensions did not result in a new world war, the methods for preparing it had once again been put to work.

Why are wars always preceded by pacifist cam­paigns?

In the first place, by proposing to put pressure on governments to ‘keep the peace’ or ‘give up armaments’, they give credence to the idea that governments have a choice between several policies, that imperialist war is not an inevitable evil of decadent capitalism, but the result of a ‘war-mongering’ policy on the part of a particular section of the bourg­eoisie. Once this idea is well fixed in the workers’ heads, it can then be used to con­vince them that it is ‘the other country’s’ bourgeoisie that is ‘war-mongering’, that ‘wants war’, and so that the ‘sacred union’ is necessary to fight it and prevent its victory. This is how the French Socialists in 1914 called for a struggle against ‘Pruss­ian militarism’, and the German Socialists for a struggle against ‘Tsarism and its allies’. This is how the Stalinists and social-demo­crats prepared the ‘anti-fascist’ crusade of World War II.

Secondly, pacifist campaigns tend to deny class differences and antagonisms, in that they draw together all those citizens who are ‘against war’. In doing so, they channel and dilute proletarian combativity into an inter-classist morass, where all ‘men of goodwill’ meet, but where the proletariat loses sight of its class interests. They are thus a formidable barrier to the class struggle -- which is the only real obstacle to the bourgeois conclusion to the contradictions of capitalism: imperialist war.

This is why, both before and during World War I (in particular under Lenin’s leadership), rev­olutionaries fought against pacifism, and put forward the revolutionary slogan “Change the imperialist war into a civil war” against slogans of the reformists; this is why they explained that the scourge of war could dis­appear only with the disappearance of capitalism itself. In the same way, the only ones to re­main on a class terrain between the wars and during the second were those who maintained this position against the pacifists of the day.

Today’s pacifist campaigns have exactly the same function as those in the past. They are the follow-up to the previous campaigns for the ‘defense of human rights’ promoted by Carter, and the ‘defense of the free world’ promoted by Reagan. But while the previous campaigns were in the main a failure, the pacifist ones are meeting with a far greater success, for they are based on a real anxiety on the part especially of the population of Western Europe. For the moment, they are not directly anti-Russian as were their predecessors. In some places they even enjoy the support of the eastern bloc, through the Stalinist parties. But even if their main target is for the mom­ent the military policy of the western bloc (in particular the Pershing and cruise missiles and the neutron bomb), this is only of second­ary importance, since they are only a first step in the mobilization of the proletariat in the west behind ‘its’ bloc. At the right moment it will be ‘shown’ that the real danger to peace is the ‘other side’, the eastern bloc. In the meantime, the object is above all to prevent the proletariat from appearing as an autonomous social force, as it has begun to do especially since the strikes in Poland.

The main thing for the bourgeoisie is that the workers should be unable to understand the link between the struggles they are forced to wage against austerity, and the struggle against the threat of war. Nothing worries the capitalist class more than the prospect of the proletariat becoming aware of what is really at stake in its struggles, since the significance of the class struggle today is not limited to the economic demands which accompany it; it is a real barrier to the bourgeoisie’s preparations for imperialist war, and constitutes the work­ing class’ preparations for the overthrow of capitalism.

The pacifist campaigns are thus a smoke­screen designed to mislead the working class, to take it onto unfavorable ground, and to imprison its struggles in the strictly econ­omic arena. They aim at defusing the resurg­ence of the class struggle and in so doing, to remove capitalism’s only real obstacle on the road to imperialist war.

The role of revolutionaries is to denounce them as such.

What perspectives for the working class?

The struggle of the working class, because it threatens the very foundations of this society of exploitation and not just a particular section of it, and because it therefore obliges the world bourgeoisie to close ranks, is the only force within society capable of throwing the imperialist war out of gear. We have seen this once again during 1980. Following the invasion of Afghanistan, the first part of the year was dominated by an unprecedented aggrav­ation of inter-bloc tension. By contrast, as soon as the mass strike exploded in Poland, the overall situation was transformed.

The escalation of war propaganda was temp­orarily halted, and in November of 1980, even before his investiture, Reagan sent his per­sonal ambassador Percy to renew a contact with the Russian government that had been broken since the end of 1979. Although America continued its diatribes over Poland, they had a quite different meaning from those following the invasion of Afghanistan. Certainly, the occasion is too good to miss for presenting Russia to western opinion as the ‘bad guy’ that has it in for ‘the independence of the Polish people’. But the main purpose of America’s warnings to the USSR against any temptation to invade Poland was precisely to make this threat credible in the eyes of Polish workers, and thus encourage them to stick to ‘moderation’.

Confronting the proletariat in Poland, we have seen the creation of a real ‘Holy Alliance’ of the whole world bourgeoisie, which has shared out the dirty work both on the external level (eastern and western blocs) and on the internal (UPWP and Solidarity) so as to isolate the proletariat and curb its struggle[4]. This is why the question of the worldwide generalization of proletarian combat has become so fundamental, as we have so often emphasized in these pages[5].

Today we can see how, for lack of such generalization, the bourgeoisie has progressively recovered the ground that it had to yield in August 1980. By deciding (2 December 1981) to use force against the striking trainee firemen (6000 riot police against 300 firemen) the Polish authorities scored a new point against the working class. This progressive recovery goes back to February 1981 with Jaruzelski’s appointment as head of government. It opened out in March with police violence at Bydgoszcz, where the authorities deliberately provoked the working class (even if Walesa presented the affair as ‘a plot against Jaruzelski’), so that they could go ahead with preparing for the repression. And moreover, it was not so much the government as Solidarity that played the crucial part here. After a lot of noise over a 4-hour warning strike and the preparation of an unlimited general strike, Solidarity signed a compromise with the government and made the workers swallow it.

The process continued with Jaruzelski’s nomin­ation in October as First Secretary of the UPWP. From this moment, the general held three key posts: at the head of the party, the govern­ment and the army. And, just as after his nom­ination in February, that of October was foll­owed by a brutal and still more massive use of the police -- this time under his direct respon­sibility.

Today, it is once again up to Solidarity -- using a radicalized language if necessary -- to defuse the accumulating discontent of the workers, who are faced with the government’s counter-offensive and the continuing decline of their living conditions. And so, on 7 December, the government gleefully and repeatedly broadcast Walesa’s radical words at the 3 December meeting of Solidarity’s leaders, following the police intervention:

“I've got no more illusions. Things have gone so far that we mus to tell people everything, tell them that what’s at stake is nothing less than changing reality. No system can be changed without breaking something. The main thing is to win.”

The aim of this government maneuver is obvious: to intimidate the population by threatening serious repercussions to such talk. The other aim is to refurbish Walesa’s image amongst the most combative workers, since the government will still need him to calm them down when the moment comes.

The bourgeoisie’s strategy is obvious -- to drive the proletariat to a choice between capitulation or a head-on attack which it knows it would lose, given its present isolation.

This is why the international generalization of the class struggle appears every day as a still more imperious necessity.

For the moment, this generalization is slow in coming. In the eastern bloc, we have seen a rising combativity amongst the workers most hard-hit by the crisis -- in Rumania (where the government has taken over the western pacifist campaigns!). This combativity will only find a full expression in every country, east and west, when the economic pressure on the working masses becomes intolerable. With the worsening of the crisis, this pressure is dev­eloping everywhere. But at first, it tends to provoke a greater passivity in the proletariat (although the significance of such figures should always be examined with caution, stat­istics reveal an almost universal decline in strike-days lost and in the number of disputes for 1980 and the beginning of 1981). This does not mean that the proletariat has already lost -- although this would become a danger were such passivity to continue. Rather, it is a sign of awareness spreading through the class of what is at stake in the coming struggles, of the full extent of the tasks that await it. If the proletariat still hesitates, this is because it is beginning to realize that ‘the years of truth’ have begun.

F.M.  (8 December 1981)

In August 1980 the workers of Poland gave us the example of the mass strike, of self-organization in the struggle, of true workers' solidarity. Since December 13, 1981, they have given us the example of the courage and combativity which proves that the workers' reaction to the crisis will not be the same as in the thirties. It is precisely because the working class didn't knuckle under when faced with the whole armed might of the capitalist state, it's because even a year of union sabotage and all the illusions fostered by the different agencies of the bourgeoisie were not able to dry up this exceptional force of combativity, that we know that the revolution is possible.

Even if they are not directly aware of it, it is not as ‘Poles' that the workers of Poland have been fighting. Their courage, their determination in an unequal and desperate fight are not the specific characteristics of ‘the Polish people', These are traits specific to the world working class. In history, there are many examples of the heroic courage the proletariat of all countries is capable of: the ‘Communards' of 1871, the Russian and Polish workers of 1905-1906, the workers of Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, China and so many other countries in 1917-1927.

What kind of defeat?

In Poland today, a battalion of the world working class is being attacked with all the violence capitalism is capable of: tanks, machine guns, mass arrests, concentration camps, mines flooded with gas or water (an old capitalist ‘technique' used particularly by the English bourgeoisie in India in the thirties). A battalion of the world working class which is fighting magnificently, to the last ounce of courage. That the battle is lost is obvious: today the authorities announce with satisfaction that there are no longer any points of resistance. Even the passive resistance will be overcome in the long run because it is no longer the fruit of a mass movement, of the collective and organized action of the working class, but the product of a sum of workers who have been reduced to atomization by repression and terror.

And even if this form of resistance keeps up for a long time, the bourgeoisie will still have won a victory by eliminating the most direct expressions of the life of the working class: mass strikes, general assemblies, comparing experiences and open discussion among workers.

We have to face reality. The proletariat in Poland has suffered a defeat today. But this defeat is neither definitive nor irreversible. The workers have not been crushed.

As revolutionaries have observed for a long time, particularly Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, the proletar­iat is condemned to experience defeats until the    day of its final victory over capitalism. By drawing the lessons of defeats in the clearest way possible the proletariat finds the force to prepare the victories of tomorrow.

In itself, a partial defeat is not a catastrophe for the working class. It is part of its long, hard road towards the revolution. It is a school where the proletariat learns to understand its enemy and to understand itself, to evaluate the forces it must develop for future battles, the weaknesses it has to overcome. It is an inevitable aspect of the matura­tion of class consciousness which will be one of its most crucial weapons in the decisive confrontations to come.

However, every defeat of the proletariat does not have the same meaning. There are defeats which only lead to long-term demoralization and disarray within the working class. These are defeats which take place in the context of a general course of retreat of class struggle, of the triumph of the counter-revolution. Such was the defeat suffered in Spain between 1936 and 1939. In this case, not only did the proletariat lose a million from its ranks, but this sacrifice only prepared the way for the 50 million dead in World War II. In general what characterizes the type of defeat is that the proletariat did not fight directly on its class terrain, but let itself be dragged onto a bourgeois terrain like ‘anti-fascism' in 1936.

On the other hand, defeats which take place in the context of a course towards rising class struggle are fought out on a proletarian terrain. The working class is defeated but it hasn't been enlisted to fight for objectives which aren't its own. The revolution of 1905 was a rehearsal for the victory which came in 1917 because the proletariat in Russia in 1905 fought on its own terrain even if it didn't win right away: the terrain of the mass strike, of the struggle to defend its economic and political interests, of self-organization in the soviets.

In spite of all the maneuvers and the negative weight of Solidarity, in spite of all the Polish flags and the pictures of the Virgin which hampered its movement, the proletariat in Poland was capable of remaining on its own terrain in the struggle against increased exploitation and capitalist repression. Those who fixate on the bourgeois claptrap the working class hasn't yet got rid of cannot understand this and greet the workers' combat in Poland with skepticism. They belong in the same category as those who in 1936 imagined that a red flag gave a proletarian character to anti‑fascism.

In the course of a year and a half of fighting in Poland, themes of bourgeois mystification have not been lacking. But these were not themes to mobilize the working class. On the contrary, they were themes to demobilize the workers' struggles which generally sprang up with class demands (against price rises, food restrictions, repression, arbitrary use of authority in factories, in favor of reducing hours, etc),

This is what allows us to say that the proletariat of today is not fighting against the crisis in the same way it did in the thirties. This is what shows us that the magnificent resistance of the workers in Poland is not just a shot in the dark but the way in which the workers pass the torch of the struggle to their class brothers in other countries.

The defeat today thus belongs to the category of those which directly contribute to the preparation of the final victory of the proletariat. But this can really be so only if the working class draws the maximum of lessons and gives itself the means to avoid such defeats in the future. In fact, the tactic the bourgeoisie is trying to use, as in the past (particularly in Germany in the early 1920's) consists of beating the proletariat group by group, factory by factory, country by country, A series of partial defeats like today's could lead to an irreversible weakening of the working class, to the reversal of the course of history, Then there would no longer be the perspective of the proletarian response to the crisis -- the revolution -- but only the bourgeois response -- world imperialist war.

What lessons?

The essential questions to be raised are therefore:

How did it happen?

Why was the bourgeoisie able to inflict such a bloody setback on the proletariat?

How can we avoid such defeats, such repression, in the future?

The first essential point that should be clear for the proletariat is that the world bourgeoisie is not reacting in a scattered, dispersed way towards class struggle but through concerted action. It is true that the bourgeois class is riddled with a multitude of conflicts of interest which the crisis merely sharpens and which culminate in a division of the world into military blocs, But history has taught us, and today's reality confirms once again, that the bourgeoisie is capable of overcoming its antagonisms when its survival as a class is threat­ened. On many occasions in the columns of this Review and in our territorial press we have pointed out the division of labor between the different factions of the bourgeoisie in its efforts to deal with the workers' struggle in Poland: between the government and Solidarity, between East and West, between right and left. We return to that subject here, in order to denounce the monstrous duplicity of the American bloc, which is waxing indignant over the repression against the Polish workers and over Russia's collaboration in this repression.

It's important to remember that this ‘indignation', for which Reagan is now the main mouthpiece and which is becoming a major part of the western bloc's ideological preparations for war, was not at all in evidence when the state of siege was first imposed.

For several days, the bourgeoisie of the west, Washington included, was putting out the myth of a "strictly Polish affair", It was only after it became clear that the western workers were unable to express a real solidarity with their class brothers in Poland, that whatever feelings of solidarity they did express were being suitably channeled by the unions and the left, that the western bourgeoisie, feeling secure on the class struggle front, could afford the luxury of using the repression in its propaganda against the Russian bloc -- a repression which it had directly helped to prepare.

If there is still any proof needed of the compli­city between the great powers in the repression of the workers in Poland, we only have to take note of the declaration made by M. Doumeng, a member of the French Communist Party and a bigwig in a major commercial enterprise (in Paris Match of 1 January) To the question "Concerning the military coup in Poland, do you believe that the Soviet Union and the United States got together beforehand", Doumeng answered openly: "What strikes me is that both have an interest in order reigning in Poland. I was in Poland three weeks ago. I met a very powerful American businessman. He was there to explain to the Polish government that he was prepared to lend the Polish government a billion dollars on one condition: order must be restored in Poland." It's not because he is s member of the French CP that this individual can say such things. You could read exactly the same sort of thing in the Wall Street Journal immediately after Jaruselski's coup.

But neither side admits that the solidarity between east and west is not just limited to finance, In the last analysis, the bourgeoisie is ready to write off the economic collapse of Poland. What was important to the bourgeoisie above all was to silence a proletariat that was giving too much of a ‘bad example' to the proletariats of other countries -- and to do this before other workers took up this example under pressure front increas­ing misery.

This is the second essential point that should be clear for the world working class: the bourgeois repression in Poland was possible only because the proletariat of this country remained isolated. (cf. the article in this issue ‘Economic Crisis and Class Struggle').

This isolation in particular allowed Solidarnosc to weaken the working class in Poland and facil­itated the impact of its democratic, union, self-management and nationalist mystifications.

Poland today is a tragic example of the need for the proletariat to generalize its struggle on a world scale, If this lesson isn't understood, if the proletariat lets itself be turned around by the false campaigns of ‘solidarity' orchestrated by the left factions of capital, if it doesn't realize that the only true solidarity is to be found in the common struggle against misery and exploitation, then there will be other, worse repressions and at the end of the line, an imperialist holocaust.

FM

(4 January 1982)

Over the last few months, the revolutionary milieu has been going through a series of political convulsions. Some organizations have disappeared or fallen apart:

-- the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste, France) has just dissolved. Only one of its factions, ‘Groupe Volonte Communiste', is continuing a political existence (see Revolut­ion Internationale 88)

-- FOR (Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionaire) has dissolved its section in Spain and separated itself from comrades in the USA.

Other groups have seen militants leaving their ranks:

-- the International Communist Party (Communist Program) has just excluded its sections in the south of France and some in Italy, including the Turin section.

-- in the ICC there have also been a number of departures and exclusions.

Other groups are going through a profound polit­ical regression:

-- the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalisti (Italy, originating in a split from Communist Program and thus from the revolutionary milieu) have just published a declaration in favor of political unification with the crypto-Trotskyist group Combat Communiste in France.

Still others have experienced a temporary dis­orientation:

-- the Communist Workers Organization in Britain, after calling for an immediate insurrection in Poland, has made a complete volte-face in its appreciation of the situation (in Workers Voice 4 the CWO ran the headline ‘Revolution Now!' In the next issue the CWO honestly criticized this erroneous analysis, which it now sees as an "adventurist" call. The CWO is one of the rare groups in the revolutionary milieu capable of openly and publicly correcting its mistakes).

Why all these convulsions? Why is the tiny min­ority of the working class, the revolutionary milieu, being reduced even more, and what conc­lusions should we draw from it? Why these fail­ures and political disorientations?

It's all the more difficult to answer these questions seeing that the ‘revolutionary pol­itical milieu' is no more than a juxtaposition of' political groups, each one jealously guard­ing its ‘secrets', keeping silent about its crises, its internal life, thinking that it's quite alright to gloat over other groups' problems. The political milieu has no framework for debating its problems and clarifying its political positions.

It's thus difficult to say with any certainty what the precise political reasons behind these convulsions are. But all the same it's necessary to try to draw up an initial balance sheet of the present situation, even if it means correcting it later on.

We think that today's milieu

-- is paying the price for the political and organizational immaturity which has existed for a long time in a milieu ravaged by sectarianism

-- is going through political convulsions because its political positions and its practice are inadequate in the face of the new situation opened up by the mass strike in Poland.

The ICC's own problems must be seen in the context of the same problem: how to contribute to the growth of class consciousness in these ‘years of truth'.

The failure of the International Conferences

The immaturities which the milieu is paying for today, and will pay for even more tomorrow, were already clearly revealed in the failure of the international conferences from 1977 to 1980. This was the failure of the political milieu that emerged out of the first wave of class struggle after 1968 and that lived through the reflux of the mid-70s.,

The cycle of international conferences called by Battaglia Comunista and fully supported by the ICC[1] was the first serious attempt since 1968 to break down the isolation between revolutionary groups.

From the beginning of the conferences, the ICP (Program), in its disdainful isolation, refused to participate, convinced that the hist­orical, formal party, indivisible and invariant, existed already in its own program and organization. Believing that it alone exists, the ICP refused to take part in an international polit­ical discussion, attributing to others its own view of the conferences, as a place to go fishing for recruits, which supposedly doesn't interest the ICP.

The FOR, after having agreed in principle with the first conference, and after coming to the first session of the second one, withdrew from the proceedings with a theatrical display which barely covered its inability to defend its positions -- above all the one that denies the significance of the economic crisis of the system and instead talks vaguely about a ‘crisis of civilization'.

The PIC, after communicating its agreement in writing, suddenly changed its mind. It refused to participate in a discussion which, even before it took place, was denounced as a ‘dialogue of the deaf'... But it was the PIC that was deaf, and the result of this sort of attitude is that the PIC will never hear any­thing again, because it's dead.

But sectarianism didn't stop at the door of the conferences. The spirit of the sect, the refusal to take discussions to their conclusion, obstructed all the work of the conferences.

It's true that the conferences did help to dismantle the wall of suspicions and misunderstandings which existed between the groups. They debated questions that are essential for the revolutionary milieu: where we have reached in the crisis of capitalism and the evolution of the class struggle; what is the role of the unions, of nationalism and ‘national liberation struggles'; what is the function of the organization of revolutionaries. These debates were published in pamphlets and distributed din three languages. In this sense, the conferences were an important gain for the future.

But they never really understood why they existed, or the seriousness of their tasks. Political sclerosis, the fear of taking the confrontation of political analyses and pos­itions to its conclusions, meant that these discussions were more like a ‘match' between ‘rival' groups than a real search for under­standing, for fruitful debate. The conferences as such always refused to issue a summary of the agreements and disagreements between the groups. Even more serious: under the pretext that revolutionary organizations can't sign any common declarations unless they agree about everything, Battaglia, CWO, and Eveil Internat­ionaliste refused to affirm, with the ICC and the Nuclei, the most basic revolutionary principles against the danger of imperialist war today! The conference remained ‘dumb' towards its political responsibilities, towards the working class. The idea that a revolutionary group comes out of the working class and must be historically accountable to the class, that it's not just a circle which can say what it likes or act like a weathervane -- this idea has not yet entered the heads of most of today's revolutionary milieu.

At the third conference, thinking it was time to make an a priori political selection, BC and CWO, proposed, as a new criterion for participating in the conferences, a resolution on the party which, they said, would exclude ‘spontaneists' (like the ICC). Without any real discussion, the ICC thus found itself excluded from the conferences through a sordid maneuver.

At the time some groups talked a lot about the need for a ‘strict selection' amongst revolutionary organizations. They wanted to limit the discussion on the party and other questions in advance, so as to avoid having to confront the ‘kill-joys' of the ICC. Instead of encour­aging the continuation of political debate, this ‘selection' by maneuver, which attributed to the ICC all kinds of imaginary positions instead of listening to the ones we really defend on the party, stifled all debate and the conferences themselves: there have been none since then. Seduced by Battaglia's flirtations into believing in a premature ‘regroupment', the political milieu thus rejected the chance of creating a framework for the international political discussion that is so indispensable to it.

"..... selection arises out of the practice of the class or in relation to world wars, not as a result of discussion conducted behind closed doors...This is why, to begin with, it is necessary not to over-estimate the capacity of ‘self-selection' through simple debate. Selection -- speak of that at the required time". (‘Sectarianism, An Inheritance From The Counter-revolution That Must Be Transcended', in IR22)

And in fact, it's today's objective reality which is carrying through a process of decant­ation in the revolutionary milieu. But we no longer have an organized framework for debating the current difficulties: we are just having violent convulsions that take place in a confused, dispersed manner,

The years of truth

The international conferences fell apart in May 1980, only a couple of months before the outbreak of the mass strikes in Poland. These mass strikes were the most important sign that we are entering a new cycle of international class struggle. They mark the beginning of a decisive phase, of a period of unprecedented class con­frontations that will determine the future of humanity: capitalist war or proletarian revol­ution.

It's the reality of this new period which is throwing down a challenge to the dispersed revolutionary groups: are they sufficiently politically armed to understand and face up to the demands of this new situation?

In order to understand these new demands, we must outline the essential aspects of the accelerating historical process over the last ten years:

-- the grave accentuation of the economic crisis which is hitting all the countries of the world, including -- in fact, in the most brutal manner -- the countries of the eastern bloc, as well as the giants of the western bloc, West Germany and Japan. Today, this crisis and unemployment aren't limited to particular cate­gories of society but are biting into the main concentrations of the western working class. Rationing and shortages in the east are the future that this society holds in store for workers everywhere;

-- the attempt to push the crisis onto the peripheral countries, the ‘Third World', no longer makes up for the economic failure of the great powers. As for the under-developed countries themselves, it has led to genocides whose hopelessness is becoming harder and harder to conceal;

-- the aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions, above all between the two blocs. The crisis already holds within itself the premises for a new war, and its present evol­ution is accelerating the preparations for war. The danger of war exists as long as capitalism exists, but today the road towards a world conflict is barred by the combativity of the proletariat;

-- the deepening crisis has provoked a new wave of international class struggle; the mass strike in Poland 1980 is an announcement that there are going to be decisive class confrontations in the years to come. All the elements of the present situation converge in the lessons of Poland and in the necessity for the internationalization of workers' struggle;

-- the bourgeoisie, on an international scale, has recognized the danger which this class combativity poses to its system. Across national frontiers, even across the blocs, the capitalist class is working together against the danger of the mass strike. In the decisive confrontations of this period, the proletariat won't be facing up to a bourgeoisie that is surprised and disconcerted as it was during the first wave of struggles after 1968. It will be dealing with a bourgeoisie that has been well warned and is fully prepared to use all its skills of mystification, diversion and repression;

-- the bourgeois strategy against the prolet­ariat is based essentially on the left, and is most effective when the left is in ‘opposition' to the governing parties, thus hiding the real convergence between all bourgeois parties and unions, which are ensconced in the machinery of state capitalism, of the state totalitarianism that marks the decadence of the system. The main cleavage in society, between the working class and the bourgeoisie that has taken refuge in the hypertrophied capitalist state, is thus hidden behind the facade of ‘democratic choice'. The aim of the unions and the ideological campaigns of the left is to disarm the working class and set it up for repression when the time is right. The key to the historic course res­ides in the capacity of the working class to resist being mobilized behind the left.

The proletariat of the main industrial centers only partially understands these overall aspects of the current situation, But the maturation of class consciousness in the face of the deterioration of the objective situation -- clearly demonstrated in the mass strikes in Poland -- is not a ‘Polish' phenomenon but part of a long, tortuous, painful process which is unfolding on an international scale, and which only comes to the surface at certain important moments. The strikes in Poland are part of a process leading towards the unification of the class across capitalist barriers and national front­iers.

But for the revolutionary minorities, those who have to contribute to the development of class consciousness, the years of truth represent a more immediately tangible challenge, since revolutionary organizations operate at the consc­ious level or not at all. Are they to be a mere reflection of the hesitations and con­fusions in the working class, of the disper­sion that has reigned in the past, or are they going to be equal to the demands posed by the mass strike and become an active factor in the historical situation? History doesn't grant pardons: if today's revolutionary organizations aren't able to respond to the demands of the hour, they will be swept aside pitilessly

The demands of the present period

It's inevitable that the demands of the new period of accelerating events should shake a political milieu composed essentially of groups constituted during the years of reflux and out of what was left from 1968. But 1968 and the first wave of workers' struggles again­st the crisis didn't leave behind sufficient acquisitions to ensure a profound political stability today. What's more, groups life the ICP or BC, who came directly out of political fractions created during the counter-revolutionary period prior to 1968, while having an important degree of political stability, also went through a process of sclerosis in their political positions and in their organizational life, which is exposing them as much as anyone else to the convulsions of the present period.

On top of this, the pressure imposed by the state terror of the bourgeoisie is growing, in itself leading to a decantation in our ranks of those who haven't yet understood what political commitment really means.

Very broadly, we can define the demands of this period in the following way:

-- the need for a coherent programmatic framework, synthesizing the acquisitions of Marxism in the light of a principled critique of the positions of the Third International;

-- the capacity to apply this framework to an analysis of the present balance of forces between the classes;

-- an understanding of the question of organization of revolutionaries as a political question in itself; the need to create an inter­national, centralized framework for this organization, to clearly define its role and pra­ctice in the process of revolutionary regroup­ment and in the unification of the class as a whole.

If we look at the present trajectory of certain political groups, including the ICC, we will see that these three aspects are linked, but that each one needs a particular examination,

1) Concerning the programmatic framework, the principles deriving from the history of the workers' movement: unless you base yourself on the acquisition of Marxism, you are doomed. Groups like the PIC, which in its last phase threw away the acquisitions of the 1st, 2nd, and Third Internationals, seeing them all as degenerate and counter-revolutionary, leave the historical ground of Marxism and end up simply disappearing. Without the real historical dim­ension of Marxism any so-called ‘principles' become mere abstractions.

But it's also true that Marxism isn't a bible in which every letter has to be retained. This way of looking at Marxism also leads to failure, although in a less immediately catastrophic way. Bourgeois ideology always uses the past errors of the workers' movement to insert itself into the class.

Having a programmatic framework adequate for today necessarily implies a critical re-examination of the Third International. Today's direct continuators of the Italian left have stopped half-way in their critical balance-sheet of the positions of the Communist International. That is why a group that has come out of the Italian left, and which still claims descent from it, the Nuclei, can now think about uniting with a variant of Trotskyism -‑ on the union question, on ‘national liberation', and even on parliamentarism. It only had to make one step towards finding an area of ‘entente' with Trotskyism. What the Nuclei is now actually doing -- sliding towards leftism -- remains an implicit danger for all those who make an ‘integral' defense of the positions of the 2nd Congress of the CI, after 60 years of experience with trade unions, parliamentarism, and the national question. We've seen BC's ‘union groups' and ‘united front at the base' and the splits which these gave rise to in 1980. We see this danger today in the ICP (Program) with its ‘tactical' front against repression, which seems to have been one of the factors behind the recent split.

Moreover, the blindness of these groups to the positive contributions of the German left leaves them without any framework for arriving at a real understanding of the mass strike in Poland and its political significance (for an analysis of the mass strike today, see IR27, ‘Notes on the Mass Strike, Yesterday and Today').

The mass strike in Poland raises concretely, for the first time since 1917, the question of the role of the workers' councils, which in May ‘68 in France could only be posed verbally, in a confused way, through the ‘action committees', which brought together student contestation and the beginnings of a working class resurgence, The schema of the Italian left, or those under its influence like the CWO, which sees the working class and its councils as a mere mass to be maneuvered by the party, whose task it is to take power, is less and less connected to the reality of our epoch; it is a theoretical error for which the working class has already paid dearly (for the implications of Poland at the level of the question of the party, see IR24 ‘In the Light of the Events in Poland, The Role of Revolutionaries'). Also, for the ICP (Program), for example, unions, strike committ­ees, workers' councils are all at the same level -- they are manifestations of ‘workers' associationism' which has to be subordinated to the party. Thus, the ICP was not only unable to grasp the dynamic of the mass strike, but the events in Poland also revealed its ambiguities on the union question. Confusions on the role of unions today, illusions about the possibility of ‘rank and file' or ‘radical' union work, lead you into playing the game of Solidarnosc and, whether you like it or not, helping to tie the proletariat to the state.

The outbreak of the mass strike has exposed the programmatic weaknesses of a number of organizations. Groups who don't have a theoretical framework that will enable them to understand the present period and to react quickly to the sudden upsurges of the working class, will tend to fall into adopting superficial and erroneous positions. When you don't understand that the development of proletarian consciousness is a process, it's easy to be blase about the efforts of the workers, to see only their weaknesses and to miss their positive lessons and potentialities. Moreover, the activist tendencies of certain groups pushes them into a localist viewpoint: what's happening ‘at home' seems to have a greater importance than ‘far off' strikes in Poland in which it's difficult to have a direct ‘physical' (ie. local) presence. Thus the most important political aspect of Poland hasn't been understood: the need for political organizations to generalize the lessons of Poland to the international proletariat.

If at the beginning most groups tended to under­estimate the historic importance of these events, certain groups then went in the opposition dir­ection, calling for an ‘insurrection' in Poland on its own. This kind of call, completely adventurist in the present situation, raises a fundamental question about the maturation of the conditions for revolution. We began a discussion on internationalization in IR26 ‘The Historic Conditions For The Generalization Of Working Class Struggle' -- without getting much echo in the milieu.

Political incomprehensions and weaknesses have always had repercussions at the level of a group's organizational life. Two examples.

The PIC seriously underestimated the significance of the mass strike. Following the events of August 1980 all the PIC could see were ‘priests' and trade unionism. This mistaken position gave rise to a discussion in the group, resulting in a rectification in its paper Jeune Taupe! But divergences remained, involving a discussion about the role of revolutionary organizations. Three ideas about organization came out of this debate, giving rise to three tendencies, each one more vague than the other. Those who defended the least vague ideas left to form Volonte Communiste in. Paris, leaving the PIC to dissolve. This is a logical conclusion when you don't know why you exist.

The FOR also missed the real significance of Poland. This group, which has never made an analysis of the objective conditions for the dev­elopment of revolutionary consciousness, believes that the revolution is ‘always possible', that it's just a question of ‘will'. This is why it could write in its paper Alarme at the end of 1980: "The movement (in Poland) shows more insufficiencies from the revolutionary point of view than positive aspects" -- while at the same time calling for the formation of workers' councils and for the communist revolution. It's like its fiery leaflet at the time of Longwy-Denain in France, calling for the seizure of power! A divergence on the appre­ciation of the events in Poland seems to be one of the reasons behind the departure (or exclus­ion?) of the comrades of the FOR in the USA (the Focus group).

It's extremely serious when political organizations of the working class are so badly mistaken about such historically important events. What's more, in the future, adventurist calls could have extremely disastrous repercussions. If the present political milieu isn't able to rise to its tasks at the level of principles, it will be doomed to decomposition.

2) At the level of concretizing principles and drawing out more conjunctural political analyses and orientations, the acceleration of events has also inevitably posed problems for groups. The PIC with its theory of the ‘crumbl­ing of the blocs' (whereas in reality the two blocs are confronting each other more and more openly) got lost at this level, because it couldn't distinguish between the particular economic interests of certain countries (Japan and Germany) and the much more powerful military, strategic and economic needs of the bloc as a whole, which force each country to integrate itself into the bloc at the risk of perishing. The real nature of state capitalism and of the totalitarian tendencies of the decadent bour­geoisie escapes both the PIC and the FOR.

BC saw the counter-revolution lasting until 1980, but foresaw the ‘social democratization of the Stalinist parties' (taking Euro­communism at face value), whereas in reality the game of ‘opposition' has pushed the CPs in the opposite direction. The ICC has had difficulties in linking aspects of the new period to the analysis of the left in opposition and has sometimes slipped into making local electoral predictions which proved to be erroneous. Today we are seeing more clearly how to strengthen this analysis but this effort has created tremors in the organization.

It's inevitable that the present situation, where we are seeing a slow, painful develop­ment of class consciousness in response to an economic crisis of the system, should disorient revolutionary organizations to some degree. In 1871, 1905 and 1917 it was the imperialist war which directly and rapidly gave rise to the insurrection. For all groups (especially those like the ICP who refuse to see the revolution coming from anywhere except a war today), this situation poses new questions which don't have a direct parallel with the workers' struggles against the cyclical crises of ascendant cap­italism. The capacity to orient oneself in practice depends, above all, on the solidarity of one's principles. It is this theoretical and programmatic clarity alone which can guide us and decide our fate as political groups.

The thing to avoid in this period of rising struggles is panicking about not receiving an immediate echo in the class and sliding, via activism, towards leftism. We have seen where this has led the Nuclei. We've seen the PIC's activism dissolving into nothing. It also seems that those who advocated the ‘anti-repression front' in the ICP excluded those who weren't convinced. We see the opposite in the ICC: among others, it was the activist, leftist-type tendencies who left. We've also seen impatience about the ‘insurrection' and various unsuccessful attempts to build ‘workers groups' in the factories. The class struggle threatens to shake us even more violently if we don't learn how to develop our intervention without falling into activism. And above all if the question of the role of the revolutionary organization isn't clear.

3) The question of organization is generally the one around which all the others crystallize in a movement of upheaval. What has to be emphasized here is essentially the need to respond to the demands of the present period with an international organizational framework. Only an international organization can face up to the needs of the proletariat, to its unifi­cation through the internationalization of its struggles. The dislocation of the FOR's inter­national effort demonstrates what we have been saying for a long time: it's not so easy to create an international organization which has an intense but unified political life. You can't improve such things, especially if you haven't got a coherent view of the role of revolutionaries.

The ICC has also gone through a crisis recently, essentially over the question: centralism or federalism; the unity of the organization or individual agitation. These difficulties have led us to a deep re-examination of whether the organization as a whole has really assimilated the principles of centralization and its statutes. We will develop this point further on.

Splits, dispersion of revolutionary organizations obviously go against the general tendency in this historic period of rising struggle: the tendency towards the unification of the class and its political expressions[2]. We have always said that it was irresponsible of the PIC to have split from the ICC on the issue of when to produce a leaflet on the events in Chile (the ICC in fact produced the leaflet 4 days later). You don't enter or leave polit­ical groups as if they were shops. It's poss­ible, even probable, that irresponsible acts of this kind are hiding more basic disagree­ments, but this kind of behavior obstructs discussion, because in such cases you don't know what the real disagreements are, or whether they are serious enough to warrant a split. Acting like this is no help to the political milieu.

Similarly, we also said it was irresponsible when, in 1975, a number of groups, who then had the same basic platform as the ICC (incl­uding the old Workers' Voice and what's now the CWO), refused to associate themselves to the formation of the ICC. A group is defined by its platform. By maintaining a separate existence for secondary or localist reasons, you discredit the very idea of revolutionary organization. Following this, the groups who survived found a number of ‘reasons' and new positions to justify their separate existence, but without ever confronting the problem of sectarianism.

But if we think that the process of unification will take place in the light of the class struggle, we shouldn't see the present decant­ation as something entirely negative, We don't regret the fact that a confused group like the PIC has disappeared and thus eliminated a smoke­screen from the eyes of the working class. Neither do we regret that elements who have been sliding towards leftism or demoralization are leaving our own ranks.

If the political milieu has to pay for its imm­aturities, it's better if this is done as thor­oughly as possible. We've often asked ourselves how the unity of tomorrow is going to be forged: will it be through a gradual expansion of the milieu from the 1970's? Today we have part of the answer: it won't be through a gradual expansion but through convulsions, clashes and crises, which will sweep away all the debris, everything that is useless for the future -- through tough ordeals that will test the validity of the existing political and organizational framework. The winds of destruction are not yet stilled, but when the class stru­ggle has truly tested today's milieu there will be a clearer basis for a new point of departure.

The debates in the ICC

The demands of the new period have thus caused certain upheavals in the ICC. The source of these difficulties resides, as always, in political and organizational weaknesses.

At the ICC's 3rd Congress in 1979 we decided to respond to the new period of rising workers' struggles by accelerating and broadening our intervention. This orientation was correct and necessary, but it was often misinterpreted within the organization.

For example, the ICC's intervention in the Rotterdam dock strike, at Longwy-Denain[3] or Sonacotra in France, in the steel strike in Britain, revealed certain political misunderstandings. Does a revolutionary organization intervene at the level of collecting strike-funds, of acting principally as ‘hewers of wood' for the workers in struggle, or should it intervene at the political level in the general assemblies? What do we say when the workers have been dragooned into union ‘strike committees' whose aim is to stifle the struggle?

It's quite normal that these and many other questions should arise when an organization begins to be tested by the struggle. On a general level, our response was to make a deeper study of the overall conditions of the class struggle in the period of decadence, insisting on the differences between the 19th century and today, on the impossibility, the danger, of trying to use the same tactics as in the past (see IR 23 ‘The Proletarian Struggle In the Decadence of Capitalism'). But we had a lot of trouble concretizing this appreciation and the discussion in the organization tended to remain on the surface, which resulted in a poor assimilation of the whole problem.

Moreover, we had to respond to a tendency to give way on matters of principle, especially during the steel strike in Britain. Although the organization as such took a clear position on the union character of the ‘strike committees' which served to stifle the enormous combativity of the workers, certain comrades, through activism or demoralization, began to question the very basis of our position on the unions, seeing these union committees as a ‘hybrid' form which could allow the workers to take a step forward. This discussion was linked to the wider issue of the danger of ‘rank and file' or ‘radical' unionism, of sliding towards leftism and leftist practices.

In general, the idea of expanding our intervent­ion was too often seen as a green light to localist and immediatist tendencies, to the detriment of our international unity. We tended to overestimate the possibilities of getting an immediate echo in the class, of overestimating strikes which were only a prelude to more decisive confrontations. The fixation of part of the organization on the steel strike in Britain blinded the same elements to the events in Poland. But in fact it is the mass strike in Poland which has helped us to rectify our activities and our analyses.

The ICC, which was formed in 1975, during the period of temporary reflux, has often believed that, when the struggle picked up again, all our problems would disappear in the general enthusiasm. Now we understand that this isn't the case -- that this was a childish view of the ordeals history has in store. Although in our analyses of the proletariat's struggle we have been able to clarify debates fairly quickly, the organization has had a tendency to see only this aspect, and thus to miss out on examining the balance between the classes. Although we have developed the analysis of the historic course at the theoretical level, at the day-to-day level there was a resistance against analyzing the response of the bourgeoisie as a whole -- its global strategy against the working class. Comrades thought we would become ‘bourgeois researchers' if we talked too much about the strategy of the bourgeoisie! There was a lot of difficulty in seeing the extreme importance of understanding what the class enemy is up to.

At the beginning of the new wave of struggles, in 1978-9, we wrote about the ‘years of truth', about the potential of the situation opening up, and about the efforts of the bourgeois state to protect itself by making the fullest use of rank and file unionism and of ‘the left in opposition'. When one begins to put forward a new analysis, it is inevitably limited to its broad outlines, and this can give the impression of a certain schematism. For example, in 1967-8, when the forerunners of the ICC talked about the crisis of capitalism, they were often written off as being crazy, because many superficial facts seemed to be against this thesis. However, it was still correct. In the same way, the analysis of the present per­iod, and of the ‘left in opposition', needs to be deepened, especially in those cases when, formally speaking, we went wrong by trying to use the analysis for local electoral prognoses, without taking into account the contingent factors involved. Nevertheless, we are still developing this study, rectifying our errors without throwing out the general framework. But, following the elections in France, certain comrades wanted to abandon any reference to this framework, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We opened up the debate in our public press (cf IR 26, RI July ‘81, WR August '81, Internationalism 30), and we will continue to do so if need be. In the next issue of the IR we will be publishing one of the fruits of our internal discussion -- a study of the organization and consciousness of the bourgeoisie in the period of decadence, the epoch of state capitalism. For us, the existence of divergences in our ranks is not a weakness: what is dangerous is the flight into impulsive reactions which reject the need for a coherent analyses, for a clear theoretical framework. This can only lead to total disorientation. We will be continuing the discussion of the left in opposition within the theoretical framework that we have established.

Although we are aware of the dangers of self‑satisfaction, we can still say that, despite its contingent political weaknesses, the ICC does have a coherent framework of principles which has enabled it to respond to events and continue its work, rectifying errors when necessary. In contrast to the groups who are not equipped to face up to the present period and the period to come, the ICC will be able to contribute a great deal to the struggle of the proletariat as long as it rigorously applies its method and principles. There's a very big difference between an erroneous contingent analysis of the elections in France and an inability to understand a mass strike or the historic course.

Organizational difficulties

As we said, political weaknesses manifest themselves at the organizational level. With the ICC, a lack of rigor in its immediate analyses and activities gave rise to a whole series of discussions on internal functioning:

-- Are we ‘individuals' vis-a-vis the working class (the myth of the revolutionary as a ‘sniper'), or does the working class secrete political organizations who have a collective responsibility towards the class?

-- On the rights of minorities in relation to the unity of the organization. We think that a minority, as long as it has not convinced the organization of the validity of its posit­ions, must abide by the only way of functioning we know: the carrying out of decisions arrived at by a majority. These decisions are not necessarily correct (history has often demonst­rated the contrary), but as long as the organization has not changed its opinion, it must speak with one voice; it must act as an inter­national unity. This doesn't mean that we must keep our divergences ‘secret': on the contrary we think that our internal discussions must be opened up publicly.

But no minority can be permitted to sabotage the work of the whole. It's certainly difficult to live with disagreements on questions of analysis, to have a non-monolithic organization, but we are convinced that this is the only principled way to ensure that the political life of the proletariat really expresses itself within the revolutionary organization.

-- Centralism versus federalism. Localist tendencies can always arise within an inter­national organization but it would be deadly to make concessions to them[4]. We have also seen debates degenerate into calumnies about our internal functioning. Some started calling the organization ‘bureaucratic' for the simple reason that we take decisions in a centralized manner.

We can't go into all the aspects of these debates here. We will return to them in due course. But while not all the criticisms made are entirely without foundation, the main problems have been an incomplete assimilation of our basic positions on organization, a tendency to rush through the integration of new members, a lack of rigor in our organizational practice etc.

The most important point to make here is that this discussion often glossed over the real underlying divergences. The history of the workers' movement shows us that a question of organization can often be a profoundly serious criterion of discrimination: we have only to recall the debates between Marx and Bakunin in the First International on centralism and federalism, or the debates about the criteria for joining the Russian social democratic party at its second congress, which resulted in the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Today the question of the international unity of a proletarian political organization is a fundamental one, as are the questions of militant commitment and the collective responsibility of a revolutionary group. Today's movement is still haunted by the memory of Stalinist practices and this continues to be an obstacle to real organizational work. The movement suffers wither from a stifling of debates and minorities, as in the ICP, or from minorities failing to recognize their duties towards the organization and to see how precious a revolutionary organization is to the proletariat, as has sometimes happened in the ICC.

After our 4th Congress where we noted our organizational weaknesses, we decided to begin a discussion on organizational questions with a view to holding an extraordinary ICC conference. The aim of this conference would be to allow us to draw up a balance sheet of the organizational experience of the ICC since its inception, and to help us improve our internal functioning.

We take a collective responsibility for the incomprehensions that have arisen in our organization. It's not our intention, either inside or outside the organization, to make those who have left the ICC the escape-goats for our errors. The weaknesses of our organization are a product of the whole and it's often for secondary or even accidental reasons that certain individuals crystallize the difficulties of the whole more than others (others who may also have shared the same ideas at a given moment).

But events in the ICC were precipitated this summer. Just as we began this discussion in our internal bulletins, a ‘tendency' suddenly declared its existence, without any documents defining its positions, while at the same time it began to circulate ‘clandestine' texts outside the organization, denigrating it in all kinds of ways. Three days after the organization at last officially received a collective docum­ent announcing the formation of a tendency, most of its members, rather than staying to discuss, left the organization, stealing material and keeping the organization's money they held. Without clarifying divergences, without waiting for the conference, others left through sheer demoralization.

The recent events

Why did the discussions suddenly turn out so badly? Why were they accompanied by an unpreced­ented campaign of calumny against the ICC? Partly, no doubt, because we reacted too slowly to the political issues involved. But the main reason behind this precipitation was the manipulations of a particularly dangerous individ­ual, ‘Chenier'. We now have a number of documents proving the existence of a whole sordid, secret plot, minutely and cold-bloodedly planned out, with instructions by Chenier on how to use personal ties, how to burden others with organizational tasks, how to "drown" the central organs and under­mine the organization "without scruple". This ‘project' used gossip and all kinds of intrigues based on a personal, clandestine network. We can only regret that a certain number of comrades allowed themselves to be whipped up into a fever of contestation and dragged into secret correspondence and meet­ings which set up a clandestine organization within the organization. Chenier's traject­ory through the political milieu shows that he has acted in the same way in all the groups he's been through, each time disorg­anizing them from within.

When the ICC published in its press a ‘warning' against Chenier's activities, we were only doing our duty towards the political milieu. Some interpreted what we wrote as being a more precise denunciation: they are wrong. We have no formal proof that Chenier belongs to a state agency or something similar and we have never claimed this. What we have said is that this is a shady element whose behavior is dangerous for political organizations, and this is some­thing of which we are profoundly convinced. Those who ignore this warning do so at their own risk, as the ICC has learned through its own experience. Any political group can find out about his trajectory by asking the ones he has been through. What we can say is that those who work deliberately to destroy revolut­ionary organizations on behalf of the state and its appendages would not act differently from the way Chenier did.

The response of the political milieu to this warning shows its weaknesses. It's as though the possibility of such things had never entered the heads of certain groups. Do we really believe that the problem of security doesn't exist? In any case, the sectarianism of a group like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste simply used our efforts to denigrate the ICC. They wrote, in a letter to the ICC (17/11/81) that "this warning serves only to throw discredit on a militant breaking with you, and on the whole of his tendency." But the ICC has seen a lot of comrades leaving it (including the GCI) and has never ‘used' anything except political discussions to respond to political questions. In 13 years of our existence as a political current we have never excluded militants for having political divergences[5]; still less have we descended to inventing stories about security. If we granted to resort to ‘maneuvers' we would have acted like Chenier: in secret, through plots, never saying anything openly. But our aim is not to ‘get rid' of people who have political disagreements. On the contrary: it was the unprincipled, precipitous departure of certain members of the ‘tendency' manip­ulated by Chenier which closed the door to the clarification of divergences. And this is quite logical: a manipulator is always afraid of discussion. Open discussion cuts the strings which allow him to play on particular individuals. Chenier precipitated these departures to avoid discussion and we denounce him for his work of destruction.

It's understandable that serious political groups should ask us questions about this: to a certain extent, one should be wary of accusat­ions. We regret that today's political milieu lacks the least framework to deal with problems of this kind while continuing with the confront­ations of political positions. If this had been the case, we would have immediately opened up the question to the collectivity. This collect­ivity doesn't exist, so we went ahead with carrying out our responsibilities and warning the others -- even those who have used this warning to feed their own shabby anti-ICC prejudices. Now that we have recovered most of the material stolen from us, we consider the Chenier affair closed. And now that Chenier has reached the end of his work of destruction, taking advantage of a moment of weakness in the ICC, it seems that he is retiring from politics.

When they stole from the organization, the other ex-comrades (Chenier not included) no doubt did not realize the gravity of what they were doing. Especially if you come from the leftist milieu, where these sorts of actions are commonplace. By reacting against this despicable act the ICC has defended not only its own organization but a general policy with regard to behavior within the revolutionary movement.

To steal the collective resources of a revolut­ionary organization is to reduce it to silence. It's a political act with serious consequences. We warned, in writing, all the elements involved in the act that we condemned it and would respond to it. They replied that the ICC was a band of "outraged proprietors" and that the stolen material was a "compensation" for the subscriptions they'd paid previously! Thus any treasurer, when he leaves an organization, can take the funds. Is a revolutionary organization like a building society -- when you leave it, you withdraw your investments, with interest if possible?

The ICC is not a group of pacifists. We got our material back. In response to our legitimate and extremely controlled effort of recuperation, our ex-comrades, on several occasions, threatened to call the police. No doubt because of their political confusions as much as their cowardice.

Non-violence within the revolutionary milieu, the repudiation of the use of violence or theft to regulate disagreements, is a principle that absolutely must be defended. Without it, revolutionary activity is impossible. We defended the principle not only for the ICC, but for the revolutionary milieu as a whole. When you leave a group, should you try to destroy it? Do you have the right to decide, from one day to the next, that a group is ‘degenerate', ‘dead' ‘useless' or ‘bureaucratic' in order to justify stealing its means of intervention? These are the habits of the leftist morass, and if revol­utionary groups don't clearly and publicly take a position on these questions, the revolutionary milieu won't exist. If revolutionary organizations don't react against this sectarianism which makes the nearest revolutionary group enemy no.1, there will be no political milieu in the period to come. This is the way to open the door to the bourgeois state in its efforts to destroy revolutionary organizations. The question of non-violence within revolution­ary organizations and between them is only one aspect of a much more profound question: non-violence within the working class. We have raised this question before and it's time for other groups who claim to be revolutionary to take a clear position on it.

The ICC has continued with its work on the extraordinary conference; and even in the absence of some of the individuals concerned we will continue to debate their political positions so that we can more clearly define our own orientation.

For the whole revolutionary milieu as for the ICC the issue is the same: either we will be equal to our tasks, or we will disappear.

JA

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[1] The participants in the international conferences were the Nuclei and Battaglia Comunista (Italy), the ICC, CWO (UK), Internationell Revolution (Sweden - now a section of the ICC), and, at the 3rd conference Eveil Internationaliste (France). The GCI, a split from the ICC in 1978, came to the 3rd Conference as an observer. Their ‘participation' consisted in denouncing the conference and sabotaging the agenda. For the political criteria for participating, see three pamphlets produced on the conferences.

[2] Although the tendency towards the regroupment of revolutionaries is the best expression of the needs of the class, we don't see it as an absolute. This tendency won't ever be completed in the formation of a single class party before the revolution. We reject the Bordigist conception which on principle admits of only one political expression of the proletariat.

[3] Cf IR 20, ‘Reply to our Critics'

[4] The ex-members who now form the group News of War and Revolution in Britain left the ICC in June expressing one aspect of the localist, federalist weakness. For them, as for our ex-members in Manchester are now working with elements from the decomposing libertarian group Solidarity, dedicating themselves in theory and practice to a purely local work (see WR November-December, 1981). The ‘Ouvrier Internationaliste' group formed by Chenier in Lille collapsed after two issues, attempting to ‘intervene' by selling door-to-door in the good old leftist tradition favored by Lutte Ouvriere. The ‘discussion circle' formed in London by ex-tendency members has also dissolved itself in total confusion.

[5] The ICC excluded the members who stole from the organization for "behavior unworthy of communist militants". Contrary to the ill-informed chatter now in circulation (notably in GCI's letter, and their article in Le Communiste no 12) the ex-ICC members in Britain who formed News of War and Revolution had nothing to do with the theft, the recuperation, or the exclusions. The profoundly erroneous positions they have taken up over this affair cannot be put at the same level.