The life of revolutionary organizations is part of the life of the revolutionary class. Even if they don't have much size or influence, even if certain organizations have a tendency to forget it, proletarian political organizations are secreted by the proletariat and its historical struggle for communism. To under­stand this is to understand the responsibility that these organizations have.

The Fifth Congress of the ICC, which took place at the beginning of July, and which was attend­ed by delegates from ten countries, was thus -- both in its strengths and weaknesses -- not a private event, the work of a few individuals, but a moment in the life of the working class.

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

As usual, our Congress devoted itself both to defining the characteristics and perspectives of the present historical period, and to exam­ining the state of the organization and draw up the main lines of its activity in the near future. It also looked at the general question of the proletarian political party and adopted an "Address to Proletarian Groups" which put forward the necessity -- faced with the crisis which for over two years has been hitting an already weak revolutionary milieu -- to work to­wards a greater spirit of debate and fraternal confrontation to fight more energetically than ever against any spirit of sectarianism.

The international situation

"At the beginning of the ‘80s we analyzed the new decade as the ‘years of truth', in which the convulsions and open bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production would reveal in all its clarity the historic alternative: communist revolution or generalized imperialist war. At the end of the first third of the this period we can say that this analysis has been fully confirmed: never, never, since the 1930s, has it been so clear that the capitalist economy is in a total impasse; never, since the last world war, has the bourgeoisie set in motion such huge military arsenals, or mobilized so much productive effort towards destruction; never, since the 1920s, has the proletariat fought battles on the scale of those which shook Poland and the whole ruling class in 1980-81. However, all this is just the beginning. In particular, although the bourgeoisie is apparently consoling itself by talking about the ‘economic recovery', they have a hard time masking the fact that the worst of the crisis is still ahead of us. Similarly, the worldwide retreat in the workers' struggle following the tremendous fight in Poland is only a pause before the enormous class confrontations that will in­volve the decisive detachments of the world proletariat, those of the industrial metropoles and of Western Europe in particular."

(‘Resolution on the International Situation')

The reports and resolution on the internation­al situation adopted at this Congress thus emphasized:

(a) on the level of the crisis of capital

-- the impossibility for the world bourge­oisie to put forward any economic policy that will really enable it to get its economic machinery rolling again;

-- that capital is more and more revealing itself to be an anachronistic social relation­ship whose maintenance can only give rise to poverty and barbarism;

(b) on the level of the class struggle

-- that the retreat in the workers' struggle, especially in Western Europe, since 1980, a retreat produced by an international counter­offensive of the bourgeoisie, will inevitably be a temporary one, since the deepening crisis and the wearing down of bourgeois mystificat­ions are creating the conditions for going be­yond it;

-- that while the proletariat may still be to a considerable extent paralyzed and disoriented by the sheer breadth of capital's economic and political attack, its combativity remains in­tact and -- in contrast to the 1930s -- it is not really mobilized behind capital on an ideolog­ical level;

-- that, in this sense, the present historic course is still the one that was opened up in 1968: towards increasingly decisive class con­frontations that will pose the possibility of a victorious, world-wide communist revolution.

The state of the ICC and the crisis in the revolutionary milieu

In these conditions, can it be said that the ICC, and more generally the revolutionary mil­ieu as a whole, have been and are up to the de­mands of the situation? How have the revolut­ionary organizations been adapting to and pre­paring for the trials of history? This is what we said in the ‘Resolution on the Life and Act­ivities of the ICC', adopted by the Fifth Congress:

"Since its Fourth Congress, the ICC has been through the most serious crisis in its exist­ence. A crisis which wasn't limited to the vic­issitudes of the ‘Chenier affair' and profound­ly shook the organization, very nearly making it fall apart, resulting, directly or indirect­ly in the departure of forty members and cut­ting in half the membership of its second lar­gest section. A crisis which took the form of a blindness and disorientation the like of which the ICC has not seen since its creation. A crisis which demanded the mobilization of ex­ceptional methods if it was to be overcome: the holding of an extraordinary international conference, the discussion and adoption of basic orientation texts on the function and function­ing of the revolutionary organization, the adoption of new statutes."

Already in 1982, in a resolution adopted by its extraordinary international conference, the ICC pointed out that

"the difficulties that the ICC has been going through are not unique to it and are an expression of a crisis which is hitting the whole revolutionary milieu. This crisis is the expression of the fact that the convulsions of the ‘years of truth' which are hitting society do not spare the communist groups. For them as well the‘80s are the years of truth and history will not forgive them any weaknesses."

The 5th Congress drew up a positive balance sheet of the way the ICC faced up to this crisis:

"The ICC bears with it all the weaknesses that affect the entire proletarian milieu. If it has resisted these weaknesses better, if it has been able to avoid falling apart like other groups, if it was essentially able to regain its balance after the crisis of ‘81, it's essentially because of the solid frame­work of its platform and statutes, based on the experience of the whole communist left (even if it neglected, forgot or ignored them for a while)." (‘Resolution on the Life and Activities of the ICC').

If it is to avoid being at the mercy of violent routs in the face of growing social chaos, a permanent objective of any communist organization must be to arm itself with the programmatic and organizational means to under­stand and adapt itself to the demands of the historic period. This is how the 5th Congress concretized this effort in its resolution on activities:

"The 4th Congress, held 9 months after the mass strikes in Poland, could not yet see the tendency towards a retreat in the struggle. The 5th Congress, on the other hand, is quite aware that, over the last two years, the offensive of the entire world bour­geoisie, based around the card of the ‘left in opposition', has been crowned with a cert­ain amount of success, the consequence of this being not only a very definite diminution in the class struggle, but also in the audience for revolutionary ideas (drop in sales, attend­ance at public meetings, etc). This situation is only temporary, but as long as it lasts revolutionaries must take it into account so as not to waste their energies and arrive exhausted at the decisive battles. In this sense the ad­vice of the extraordinary conference remains as valid as ever:

‘When necessary the organization must undertake a retreat in good order to devote its efforts to what is essential in the present period: the strengthening of the political and organizational framework. ‘Better less but better'."

The control that a revolutionary organization has to have over its own activities is all the more important when the historic period is, in the most profound sense, one of rising class struggle. The organization must be prepared to be able to accelerate its intervention without much warning and without falling into activist stampedes, as was too often the case during the struggles of 1978-80.

The Statutes

It's not enough, however, for a communist organization to have a good analysis of the historic situation and a general orientation for its activity. It must also have an organizational structure and mode of life which allows it to translate these orientations into its daily practice, with a real homogeneity between all its sections.

The statutes of the organization are the in­struments for realizing this objective. The product of the historic experience of all the communist organizations of the past, and of the organization's capacity to assimilate these experiences and apply them to the problems of its time, the statutes of an organization are a real expression of its organizational and political maturity. They are a practical concretization of all the organization's positions on questions as essential as: the way the rev­olutionary process and class consciousness dev­elop, the place that revolutionaries have within this process, centralization and workers' democracy, the relations that must exist within the revolutionary class and thus within its political organization. Thus, in line with its general conception, the ICC's statutes are the materialization of a rejection of, for example, federalist, monolithic, and substitutionist tendencies (see ‘The Functioning of the Rev­olutionary Organization' in IR 33).

By adopting new statutes[1], the ICC has strengthened its capacity to face up to the tasks of the hour. But while the statutes are an immediate organizational framework, they are also a preparation for the future. This preparation requires a continually enriched and renewed understanding of the forms, the function, and the operation of the communist organizations of the proletariat. Thus the 5th Congress also put the question of the party on its agenda.

The Party

The text adopted by the Congress does not con­tain any particular innovations of what has been the ICC's analysis since its inception. It is, above all, an affirmation of the method with which this question must be approached: ie, the historical method.

Too often the debates on the question of the communist organization get bogged down in ideo­logical analyses (councilism, partyism) where abstract and purely logical syllogisms ignore and cover up the essential point: the practice, the historic experience of the real movement.

The conferences of the communist left were scuttled by the Partito Comunista Internazionalist (Battaglia Comunista) and the Communist Workers' Organization in the name of their dis­agreement with the ICC on the question of the party. Instead of, as the ICC insisted, having an open public debate on the question, these organizations preferred to run away, from confrontation by imposing their conception of the party as a criterion for participation in the conferences, thereby excluding the ICC.

The publication of the document adopted by the 5th Congress thus aims to contribute to this de­bate on the only basis which can serve as an objective point of reference; the experience of our class. It is therefore an appeal to the other revolutionary organizations to take up their responsibilities and to see their real importance -- without megalomaniac overestimation or self- castrating underestimation.

The address to proletarian political groups

The ruling class fears nothing more than the perspective of the communist revolution. Proletarian political groups are the main defenders of this revolutionary perspective. When they are weakened, the exploiting class is strength­ened.

Faced with the present situation of crisis in the revolutionary milieu, faced with a period in which the responsibilities of what is going to have to be a vanguard of the world proletariat are becoming more and more urgent, it's more necessary than ever to fight against tendencies towards atomization, act­ivist or academicist fragmentation, sectar­ianism and the denigration of other groups for its own sake. More than ever it's vital that revolutionary groups give themselves the means to have a political life in which they don't ignore each other, in which open theor­etical debate and confrontation makes it poss­ible to go beyond disagreements, and which serves as a point of reference for all the communist forces that will be engendered by the intensification and generalization of the class struggle.

This is the aim of the text adopted by the 5th Congress of the ICC.

---

[1] These are in fact a reformulation of the statutes adopted at the Ist Congress of the ICC in 1976, taking subsequent experience into account.

The 1980s are proving themselves to be the ‘years of truth' for the whole of humanity.

Through its inexorable aggravation, the world economic crisis which has been shaking capitalism for the last 15 years is more and more demonstrating that the system is in a total impasse. It is showing the reality of the historic alternative already put forward by the Communist International: either the proletarian response to the crisis, the development of class struggle leading to the revolution, or its bourgeois outcome: a generalized imperialist holocaust threatening the whole of humanity with destruction. Thus the revolutionary groups have a considerable responsibility as an active factor in the capacity of the proletariat to give a positive answer to this alternative. However, for the whole political milieu of revolutionary organizations, the acceleration of history in these past years has led us not to a strengthening of these groups, but to a series of internal organizational crises; to activist escapades, or to paralysis at moments of rising struggle (especially at the time of Poland 1980) and to tendencies towards demoralization, exhaustion and introspection when the struggle is in retreat. Instead of serving as a reference point, a beacon in the emerging social storms, the political vanguard of the proletariat frequently finds itself being buffeted and shaken by the turbulence of the historic crisis of capitalism.

In the short term, the counter-offensive unleashed by the bourgeoisie at the beginning of the 80s is hitting the revolutionary class, but also its political vanguard. This is all the more so because it has been unable to find the means for overcoming its dispersion and its divisions which are an inheritance of the terrible counter revolution which descended on the proletariat between the 20s and the 60s.

The international conferences of the groups of the communist left (1977-80) could have been a reference point on a world scale, a frame­work for trying to go beyond these weaknesses. But the weight of immaturity, of sclerosis and sectarianism, having kept these conferences ‘dumb' by refusing to take up any common pos­itions, finally put an end to this effort.

In the present conditions, it is of the utmost importance that all revolutionary organizations see the gravity of the situation and the res­ponsibilities they have; and in particular, they know how to mount a real, effective resi­stance to the pressures of a bourgeoisie with its back to the wall. These responsibilities cannot be carried out by the mere efforts of each group taken individually. It is a question of establishing a conscious co-operation between all organizations, not in order to carry out hasty and artificial re­groupments, but to develop a will and an approach which centers its attention on a systematic work of fraternal debate and confrontation between proletarian political forces.

In this sense the work undertaken with the first three conferences of the communist left must be resumed. It must be based on the same criteria of demarcation which were used for these conferences, because these criteria weren't circumstantial but were the result of the whole historical experience of the working class since the revolutionary wave after World War I. It must also be based on the lessons of the failure of these conferences and notably on the fact that they must be seen not as simple forums of discussion but as a militant effort -- one of whose most notable tasks is to take a position on the main events in the class struggle and the life of society.

The time has not yet come for calling for new conferences of communist groups: there is much ground to be covered before the conditions for such an effort can exist. However, the development of such conditions is something that must be prepared right now. It is in this perspective that, at its Vth Internat­ional Congress, the ICC issues an address to all revolutionary groups, calling on them to take up their responsibilities in the face of such a grave historical situation:

-- recognition of the existence of a prolet­arian milieu: communist groups must reject the megalomaniac pretensions of each one being the only holder of class positions;

-- systematic development of a spirit and a will towards debating and confronting political positions: this is the first pre­condition of a decantation and clarification in the milieu and the class as a whole, and it must take place in the respective publi­cations, public meetings, etc;

-- in these debates, a rejection of dilett­antism and irresponsible blather, of sectarianism and the systematic denigration of other organizations.

The huge class confrontations which are brewing are also a test for the communist groups: either they will be able to take up their responsibilities and make a real contribution to the struggle, or they will stay in their present isolation and will be swept away by the tidal wave of history without being able to carry out the functions for which the class gave rise to them.

1. The question of the communist party and its relationship with the class must be situated in the context of our basic texts on the function of the organization of revolutionaries[1] [6].

2. The communist party is a part of the class -- an organism secreted by the class in its movement, with the aim of developing the historic struggle of the class towards its ultimate vict­ory, the radical transformation of social rela­tions, the foundation of a society which realizes the unity of the human community: each for all, and all for each.

3. Against the thesis defended by Lenin in What Is To Be Done, the idea of 'the party in the service of the class', and contrary to the stupid caricatures of ‘Leninism' championed by the var­ious Bordigist tendencies who say that it is the party which founds the class, we affirm along with Luxemburg that the party is a product of the class itself, in the sense that the constit­ution of the party is the expression of the process whereby the class comes to consciousness through its struggle: it is a manifestation of the level of consciousness reached by the class. This formulation has nothing in common with an­other conception developed by the kind of upside-down Bordigism which, in the 1970s, reached its most complete form in the magazine Invariance which said that ‘the class is the party'. Such a simplistic conception replaces the whole, the unity of the whole and its real movement, by a mere identification of these ele­ments, ignoring the differences that do exist, the dialectical links within the unity of which they are an integral part.

4. This ‘identificationist' conception is unable to grasp the role played by the different elements that emerge from this unity. It doesn't see any movement: it is static, not dynamic. It is fundamentally ahistorical. It is the same as the idealist, moralizing view of the modernists, those latter-day epigones of degenerating coun­cilism, who have fallen into the old dichotomy between black and white, good and evil - and for whom any political organization within the class is by definition an absolute evil.

5. The main error of the councilism of the Dutch Left, under the influence of Pannekoek, is that it attributes a purely educational, peda­gogic role to the groups and currents that arise within the class. It ignores their political role as an integral, militant part of the prol­etariat, whose task within the class is to de­fend and elaborate coherent positions crystallized in a communist program, and in view of which these groups act in an organized manner. By attributing to them solely the role of ed­ucators, rather than the defense of the communist program, Pannekoek's councilist organization becomes the ‘counselor' of the class, thus joining up with Lenin's vision of an organization in the service of the class. Both con­ceptions end up negating the idea that the party is a part of the class, one of the active organisms produced by the class.

6. Political society is the unified social world of a humanity which has lost itself by div­iding into classes -- a loss which humanity, in the person of the proletariat and through its struggle, is painfully seeking to overcome. In this sense the struggle of the proletariat still necessarily takes on a political character (to the extent that this is still the struggle of a    class).

In fact, the struggle of the proletariat is fund­amentally a social struggle, in the fullest sense of the term. Its victory implies the dissolution of all classes and of the working class itself, into the human community that will be reconstit­uted on a planetary scale. However, this social solution necessarily involves a political struggle, a struggle for power over society, for which the working class provides itself with the necessary instruments -- revolutionary organizations, political parties.

7. The formation of political parties express­ing and defending class interests is not specific to the proletariat. We have seen it with all classes in history. The level of development, definition and structure of these forces reflects the classes they emanate from. They find their most advanced form in capitalist society -- the last class society in history -- where social classes have their most complete development, and where the antagonisms between them appear in the clearest manner.

However, if there are indisputable common points between the parties of the proletariat and those of other classes -- notably the bourgeoisie -- the differences between them are also considerable.

As with previous historic classes, the objective of the bourgeoisie, in establishing its power over society, was not to abolish exploitation but to perpetuate it in other forms; not to suppress the division of society into classes but to install a new class society; not to destroy the state but to perfect it. The kind of political organisms the bourgeoisie equips itself with, their mode of action and intervention in soc­iety, are directly determined by these object­ives: bourgeois parties are state parties whose specific role is to take and exercise state power as an emanation and guarantee of the perpetuation of class divisions in society.

The proletariat on the other hand is the last class in history: its seizure of political power has the objective of abolishing class divisions and eliminating the state, the expression of these divisions. In this sense, the parties of the proletariat are not state parties. Their aim is not to take and hold state power; on the contrary, their ultimate goal is the disappear­ance of the state and of classes.

8. We must guard against an abusive interpreta­tion of the somewhat unfortunate phrase in the Communist Manifesto (which can only be understood in the political context of the pre-1848 period), where it says that "communists do not form a distinct party ..." Taken literally, this phrase is in obvious contradiction with the fact that this was the manifesto of a particular organization called precisely the Communist League. This is all the more surprising when you consider the two men who wrote the manifesto, Marx and Engels, who throughout their lives were militants of the general movement of the class. They were party men, men of political action.

9. As part of the general movement of the class which gives rise to them, these political organ­isms, the parties, evolve with the development of the class struggle. As with any living organ­ism, these political parties of the proletariat have a history, one which is indissolubly linked to the history of the general movement of the class, with its high points and momentary retreats.

You cannot study or understand the history of this organism, the party, unless you situate it in the general context of the different stages the movement of the class has gone through, of the problems posed to the class, of its efforts at any given moment to become aware of these problems, to respond to them adequately, to draw the lessons from experience and use these lessons as a springboard towards future struggles.

While political parties are a major factor in the development of the class, they are thus, at the same time, an expression of the real state of the class at a given moment in its history.

10. Throughout its history, the working class has been subjected to the weight of bourgeois ideology which tends to deform and corrupt prol­etarian parties, to distort their real function. In response to this tendency, revolutionary frac­tions have arisen with the aim of elaborating and clarifying communist positions, of making them more precise. This was notably the case with the communist left which came out of the Third Inter­national: any understanding of the question of the party necessarily involves assimilating the experience and the acquisitions of the whole international communist left.

It was the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, however, which had the specific merit of pointing out the qualitative differences in the organization of revolutionaries according to whether the period was one of developing class struggle or one of defeat or retreat. The Italian Fraction showed what form the revolutionary organization took in each of these two periods: in the first case, the form of the party, an organization the which could have a direct and immediate influence on the class struggle; in the second case, a num­erically restricted organization with a much weaker influence in the immediate life of the class. To this second type of organization it gave the distinctive name of the ‘fraction' which, between two periods in the development of the class struggle, ie two moments in the exist­ence of the party, constitutes a link, an organic bridge between the past and future party.

The Italian Fraction fought against the incom­prehensions of someone like Trotsky, who believed that you could create a party and an inter­national in any old situation -- for example, in the 1930s -- but who ended up with splits and an even greater dispersal of revolutionary elements. It rejected the subtle theorizations of Bordiga[2] [7] who, by juggling with words and with empty abstractions, came up with sophistries such as ‘the invariance of the program' and the dist­inction between the ‘historic' party and the ‘formal' party. Against these various aberra­tions, the Italian Fraction demonstrated the validity of its thesis by basing itself on solid ground -- the experience of a century's history of the workers' movement.

11. Real history rather than fantasy shows us that the existence of the class party goes through a cyclical movement of emergence, devel­opment and passing away. This passing away may take the form of its internal degeneration, its passage into the enemy camp, or its disappearance pure and simple, leaving more or less long inter­vals until once again the conditions for its re­emergence make their appearance. This applies both to the pre-marxist period, beginning with Babeuf, to the successive appearance of revol­utionary organizations during the life and act­ivity of Marx and Engels, and to the period from their deaths to the present day. The Communist League only lasted 5 years (1847-52), the First International nine years (1864-73), the Second 25 years (1889-1914), the Communist International 8 years (counting generously, 1919-27). Obviously, there is a continuity here: they are all organisms of the same class, successive mom­ents in the unity of the class which, like the solar system in relation to the planets, can appear as a stable whole within which its var­ious organisms have their movement. But there can be no stability or fixity in this organism called the party.

The Bordigist pseudo-theory of the ‘historic' party and the ‘formal' party is essentially a mystical one. According to this theory the real party is (like the program) something fixed, immutable, invariant. But this party only mani­fests its reality in the ‘formal' party. So what happens to the ‘historic' party when the ‘formal' party disappears? It becomes invisible and inop­erative, but still exists somewhere, because it's immortal. This is a return to the themes and problems of idealist, religious philosophy which separates spirit from matter, soul from body ‑- one existing in eternal beatitude, the other in this mortal coil.

12. No enlightened, voluntarist theory of spontaneous generation or of exceptional intelligence can explain the phenomenon of the emergence and existence of the party, still less provide reasons for its periodicity, for the order of succession of its different moments. Only an app­roach which takes into account the real movement of the class struggle -- itself conditioned by the evolution of the capitalist system and of its contradictions -- can give a valid answer to the problem of the party, by inserting it into the reality of the class movement.

13. The same approach must be used when we look at the variability in the functions of the party at different stages of history. Just as ancient philosophy encompassed various disciplines, the party, produced by the class movement of the proletariat, carried out, in the first stages of its history, a whole number of tasks within the class. In particular,

-- it was the crucible for the theoretical elabor­ation of the class;

-- it made explicit the final goals potentially contained in the struggles of the class;           

-- it was an active organ within the class, in the front line of the defense of the class' immediate economic and political interests;

-- it functioned as an educator, multiplying and diversifying its interventions in the class and carrying out this education at all levels, through its press and through conferences, through organizing evening courses, workers' colleges, etc;

-- it carried out the dissemination of revolutionary ideas and propaganda within the class; 

-- it ardently and tirelessly combated the pre­judices of bourgeois ideology which continuously penetrates the thinking of the workers and obstructs the development of class con­sciousness;

• - it acted as an agitator, organizing and multi­plying workers' demonstrations, rallies, meetings and other actions of the class;

-- it acted as an organizer, creating and support­ing all sorts of workers' associations -- cultural ones, and those for the defense of its  immediate material conditions -- mutual aid, production co-ops, strike funds, financial solidarity, and above all the formation of the unitary, permanent organizations for the defense of the immediate economic interests of the class: the unions;

-- it waged the struggle for political reforms that were in the immediate interest of the workers -- universal suffrage, electoral particip­ation -- through the presence of workers' repre­sentatives in parliament.

Four great steps in the life of the proletariat: 1848, 1870, 1914, 1917

14. The history of the last 140 years has seen four great upheavals in capitalism:

-- 1848 completion of the cycle of anti-feudal revolutions by the bourgeoisie;

-- 1870 with the Franco-Prussian war, completion of the constitution of the great economic and political units of capitalism -- the nation states -- and the opening-up of the long epoch of capitalist expansion across the globe -- of colonialism;

-- 1914 culminating point of the imperialist phase. The exacerbation of the system's contradictions, its entry, with the First World War, into its phase of decline;

-- 1917 the first breach in the system, posing the necessity for a transformation of society.

15. How did the proletariat respond to these four crucial events?

-- 1848. Behind the bourgeoisie appeared the giant shadow of the young proletariat (the June workers' uprising in Paris), an event announced a few months before by the constitution of the Communist League. The first real party of the modern proletariat, this organization, breaking with the romanticism of the conspiratorial societies, announced and demonstrated in a coherent program (the Manifesto) the inevitability of the downfall of capitalism as a result of its insurmountable internal contradictions. It defined the proletariat as the subject of the historical solution to the contradictions of capitalism. Through its revolution, the proletariat would put an end to the long phase of the division of humanity into antagonistic classes, of the exploitation of man by man. Opposing any kind of revolutionary phraseology or voluntarism, the League recognized that 1852 marked the victory of capitalism over the first workers' uprisings in a situation where the conditions for the triumph of the socialist revolution had not yet ripened. And it was in these new conditions of defeat that the League inevitably had to disappear as an active centralized political organization.

-- 1870. The militants of the League didn't disappear into the void. While waiting for the maturation of the conditions for a new wave of workers' struggles, they carried on the work of theoretical elaboration, of assimilating the experience of the class. After the great social convulsions of 1848 the bourgeoisie made great strides in its development and its expansion. Some 15 years later we find a proletariat that is more numerous, has spread to more countries, is more mature and is determined to enter into mighty struggles, not yet for the revolution (because the objective conditions still aren't­ ripe) but for the defense of its immediate economic interests. It was in this context that, in 1864, on the initiative of workers from France and Britain, the First International was founded. This organization regrouped tens of thousands of workers from all the industrialized countries and those on the road to industrialization from America to Russia. The former militants of the Communist League quite naturally found themselves in the ranks of this International Workingmen's Association where, with Marx at the helm, they occupied positions of the highest responsibility.

From one year to the next, and all over the world, the International became the rallying cry for more and more workers who were everywhere becoming more and more combative. The point was soon reached when the International became a major concern for all the governments of Europe. It was within this general organization of the class that the marxist current, the authentic expression of the proletariat, came up against Bakunin's anarchist current, representing the petty bourgeois ideology which still had a considerable influence among the proletarians of the first generation and among the semi-proletarianized artisans.

The Franco-Prussian war, the miserable defeat of the Second Empire and its fall in France, the felony of the Republican bourgeoisie, the misery and hunger of the Parisian workers besieged by Bismark, the provocation of the government ... all this pushed the Parisian workrs into a premature armed confrontation with the aim of getting rid of the bourgeois government and proclaiming the Commune. The crushing of the Commune was inevitable. It certainly demonstrated the combativity of the working class, its exasp­erated determination to attack capital and its state, and it left priceless lessons to future generations of the world proletariat. But its defeat in a huge bloodbath had as an immediate and irremediable consequence the disappearance of the International.

-- 1914. The bloody triumph of capital, the mass­acre of the Commune and the ensuing disappearance of the International, was to weigh heavily for many years and scar a whole generation of the proletariat. But once its wounds began to heal the proletariat gradually regained confidence in itself and in its ability to fight capitalism. Slowly the organizations of the class were recon­stituted: labor funds, unions, political parties. These latter tended to centralize themselves, first nationally, then on an international scale, giving birth in 1889 (18 years after the Commune) to the Second International which was a strictly political organization.

But the capitalist system was then at the peak of its development on a world scale. It was draw­ing the maximum of profit out of the existence of a market which seemed unlimited. This was the golden age of colonialism, of the development of the means of production and of relative surplus value instead of absolute surplus value. The struggle of the proletariat for the reduction of the working day, for wage increases, for polit­ical reforms, generally paid dividends. The sit­uation looked as if it could go on forever, lead­ing to the illusion that capitalism could grad­ually be transformed into socialism through a series of reforms. This illusion is known as ref­ormism, an illness which deeply penetrated the minds of the workers and their political and economic organizations (especially the economic ones), undermining class consciousness and ob­scuring the proletariat's revolutionary mission.

The triumph of reformism ultimately meant the defeat of the proletariat. It was a triumph for the bourgeoisie, which won the proletariat over to its own nationalist and patriotic values. The proletariat's union and party organizations became hopelessly corrupted, and passed once and for all into the camp of capital.

-- 1917. Lulled, chloroformed, betrayed by the passage of its organizations into the bourgeois camp, soiled by the nationalism and patriotism administered by the bourgeoisie in extra-large doses, the proletariat was mobilized for war, deafened by shell-fire, plunged into a sea of blood, surrounded on all sides by corpses. It took three years of this cataclysm of world imperialist war for the proletariat to wake up and see what was really happening.

1917 was the first explosion of a revolutionary wave that was to last for several years. During the course of this explosion the proletariat was led to reconstitute new class organizations which corresponded to its new tasks -- not in the form of the unions, which was henceforth totally un­suitable for the period of capitalism's decad­ence, but in the form of the workers' councils; not by resuscitating Social-Democracy, which had passed once and for all into the enemy camp, but by creating a world communist party -- the Third International -- which was capable of undertaking the task of the hour: contributing towards the world proletarian revolution. The new party, the new Communist International, was constituted around the left fractions and minorities of the Second International, those who for many years had been fighting reformist ideology, who had denounced the treason of Social-Democracy, who had struggled against the war and against the ideology of national defense: in short, those who had remained loyal to marxism and to the proletarian revolution.

The test of the counter-revolution

16. This first great wave of the proletarian revolution failed because it arose during the course of a war, which isn't the most favorable condition for the revolution, and also because of the immaturity of the proletariat's conscious­ness. This expressed itself among other things in the survival, within the new International, of many of the positions inherited from Social-Democracy:

-- the false responses to the problem of the party's role in the revolution, of the rela­tionship between party and class;

-- the identification between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship of the party;

-- the particularly dangerous confusion on the question of the state in the period of transition, which was proclaimed a ‘proletarian' or ‘socialist' state.

These errors, together with the survival of the soviet state which was labeled a ‘workers' state', the insufficiency of the Left Opposi­tion's analysis of the degeneration of this state (the idea that it still retained its proletarian character and guarded the ‘gains of October'), interacting with each other and with the success­ive defeats of the proletariat in other countries (for which they were partly responsible), served to re-establish a balance of forces in favor of the world bourgeoisie, leading to the historic crushing of the class. All these elements also led to the disarray, degeneration and death of the Bolshevik party and all the parties of the Third International which now joined the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The depth of the defeat suffered by the prolet­ariat was in direct proportion to the height of the revolutionary wave which preceded this def­eat. Neither the great crisis, which broke out in 1929, nor the Second World War of 1939-45, nor the post-war reconstruction period, saw any significant proletarian upsurges. Even in the few countries where the workers' combativity persisted because it hadn't been put to the test directly, this combativity was easily pushed off its class terrain by the political forces of the left, which had the specific task of preparing the ground for the next world war. This was the case with the 1936 general strike in France, and the Spanish workers' uprising in the same year, which was rapidly diverted into a ‘civil war' between fascism and anti-fascism, a general re­hearsal for the coming world war. In other countries like Russia, Rumania, Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Balkans, or Portugal, the proletariat was subjected to the most ferocious repression. Millions were thrown into prison or into concentration camps. All the conditions for the re-emergence of the class party were absent. Only the voluntarism and total incomprehension of reality of someone like Trotsky, who saw 1936 as the beginning of the proletarian revolution in France and Spain, and who confused Russian state capitalism with the survival of the ‘gains of October', could allow him and his followers to rush into the adventure of proclaiming new, supposedly revolutionary parties and a new international. And this came after his current had gone back for a sojourn in the ‘socialist' parties of the defunct Second International.

Far from being a period of convergence for the revolutionary forces, of a centripetal movement towards unification and the formation of the class party, this period was marked by a categ­orically centrifugal movement. It was a time of dispersal, of fragmentation, for revolutionary groups and elements: the British Left had long ago disappeared; the Russian Left had been physically exterminated in Stalin's jails; the German Left had been completely liquidated. The revolutionary groups that survived became iso­lated, turned in on themselves, and wasted away more as each year passed.

The 1936 war in Spain led to a severe selection among those groups -- between those who got caught up in anti-fascism and those who stayed firmly on a class terrain: the Fractions of the International Communist Left, which carried on a work of theoretical development, subjecting the political positions of the Communist Inter­national at its height to the most severe crit­ique, a fertile and fearless critique which was based on the real experience of the movement since 1917.

The International Communist Left was itself shak­en by events. First by the split by a minority in 1936, which opted to participate in the war in Spain alongside the anti-fascist republicans; then at the beginning of the world war by the departure of a minority proclaiming ‘the social disappearance of the proletariat' in times of war, and thus the impossibility of any activity and of maintaining the organization of the Fractions. The third and definitive crisis came in 1945 with the split by the French Fraction (the GCF) which was opposed to the decision to dissolve the International Communist Left and to the enrolment of its members, as individuals, in a party proclaimed in Italy -- a party whose plat­form and positions were not known; all that was known being the fact that it had been constit­uted around O. Damen and Bordiga, two eminent fig­ures of the Italian Left in the 1920s. Thus the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left came to its sad end.

The main lessons of a century's history concerning the nature and function of the Party

17. This rapid survey of the history of the workers' movement teaches us that:

a) there is a close link between the class as a whole and the party as a particular organism of this whole. There are periods when the class exists without the party, but the party can never exist without the class;

b) the class secretes the party as an indis­pensible organism in the maturation of class consciousness, so that the class is able to attain its final victory. The final triumph of the proletariat would be impossible if it hadn't developed the organs which are indis­pensible to it: notably the general unitary organs of the class, grouping together all the workers, and its political organization, the party, which is formed round a general program made up of positions which indi­cate the ultimate aim of the proletarian struggle -- communism - and the means to attain it.

c) there is a substantial difference of evolution between the general organizations that are open to all workers and the polit­ical organization, the party. In the ascen­dant period of capitalism, the general organization of the class, whose task was to defend its immediate economic interests, while going through important structural changes, had a permanent existence. This was not the case with the political organization, the party, which only existed in an intermittent manner, in periods of growing class combativity. This observation strongly underlines the fact that the existence of the party is closely dependent on the state of the class struggle. In the case of a period of rising struggles, the conditions were there for the party to emerge and to act. In periods of reflux, with the disappearance of these necessary conditions, the party tended to disappear. In the first case centripetal tendencies dominated, in the second, centrifugal ones.

d) On this point, we should point out that things are somewhat different in the decadent period of capitalism. In this period, when the maintenance and improvement of working class living conditions is no longer possible there can no longer be a permanent organization which carries out this function. This is why trade unionism has lost any proletarian content, and the unions can only maintain their exist­ence and permanence as appendages of the state whose task is to contain, control and derail any expression of the class struggle. In this period, only wildcat strikes, tending towards the mass strike, controlled and dir­ected by general assemblies, have a clear class content. Because of this these assem­blies cannot, at the beginning, exist perm­anently. A general organization of the class can only become permanent when the defense of the proletariat's immediate interests become intermingled with the possibility of revolution, ie in a revolutionary period, when the workers' councils are formed. This is the only moment in the history of capitalism when the permane­nce of this organization is really general, concretizing the real unity of the class. This isn't the case with the political party which can perfectly well arise before this culminating point marked by the workers' councils. This is so because its existence isn't conditioned by the final moment, but simply by a period of rising class struggle.

e) With the historical evolution of the class struggle certain functions of the party have changed. To enumerate some examples:

-- as the class struggle evolves, as the workers accumulate experience and attain a higher cultural level, the party gradually loses its role of general educator;

-- this is even more the case with regard to its organizing role within the class. A working class like the British proletariat in 1864 which was capable of taking the initiative in the formation of the International Workingmen's Association really had no need of a tutor to teach it how to organize. The notion of going ‘to the people' or the workers in order to organize them may have made sense in a backward country like Russia was at the end of the 19th century, but it could make no sense at all in industrialized countries like Britain, France, etc. The foundation of the IWA in 1864 wasn't the work of any party. In the main no such parties existed, and in the rare cases where they did, as with Chartism in Britain and Blanquism in France, they were in complete decomposition.

The First International was much closer to being a general organisation than an organisation like the Communist League, i.e. a party-type organisation, strictly grouped and selected on the basis of a coherent theoretical and political programme. Because the First International took this form, it was possible for diverse currents to coexist and confront each other within it -- the marxist (collectivist) wing, ouvrierists, Proudhonists, anarchists, and even, at the beginning, a current as bizarre as the Mazzinists. The International was a crucible in which ideas and currents were decanted, but a party is already the product of a decantation. This is why the currents within the International remained informal. Only one political party in the full sense of the term was born after the dissolution of the Communist League and during the period of the Ist International: the Eisenach social democratic party, a marxist tendency formed in 1868 under the leadership of W. Liebknecht and Bebel. It wasn't until 1878, for the elections in France, that the Parti Ouvrier was formed, led by Guesde and Lafargue and with the direct participation of Marx, who wrote its political platform.

It wasn't until the 1880s, with the accel­erating development of capitalism and the resurgence of class struggle, that the need and possibility were felt for the formation of political parties to carry out the political struggle properly speaking, organs distinct from the unions, whose task was to defend the workers' immediate economic interests. In the 1880s there began a real process towards the formation of parties in nearly all the industrialized or industrializing countries, following in the wake of German social democracy, which took the initiative for the formation of the Second International in 1889.

The Second International was the result of a political decantation which had been going on in the workers' movement since the dissolution of the First International 16 years before, and of the unification of the marxist current on an international scale. It proclaimed the ‘scientific socialism' which had been formulated 40 years before by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. It no longer gave itself the task, as the First International had done, of organizing an inquiry into the living conditions of the working class in various countries, or of elaborating lists of economic demands. This kind of activity was left to the unions. On the other hand, it did take up the task of struggling for immediate political demands, universal suffrage, freedom of assembly and of the press, participation in electoral campaigns, the struggles for political reforms, against the colonialist policies of the bourgeoisie, against its foreign policies, against militarism, etc, while at the same time carrying on the work of theoretical elaboration, of defending the final goals of the movement, the socialist revolution.

Engels was quite right, in one of his prefaces to the Communist Manifesto, written in the 1880s, to say that the First internat­ional had completely carried out its tasks in the historic period in which it had arisen. He was wrong in his hasty conclusion that the political movement of the class, the formation of parties in different countries, had advanced so much that the working class "no longer needs an international organization". With all its insufficiencies, all its errors, and despite the penetration of reformism (finding its main support in the unions) which would ultimately win out and cause it to lose its proletarian character, the Second International also accomplished an eminently positive work in the class, a work which is still an acquis­ition of the movement, if only because it served as an unequalled terrain for theo­retical confrontation and clarification in a number of spheres -- as an arena for a confrontation between the political positions of the left and Bernstein's revisionism and Kautsky's centrism. It was within the Second International that the revolutionary left lived and learned to struggle.

When all the varieties of modernism moralizers amuse themselves today by drawing up a totally negative balance-sheet of history -- that is when they have any idea of history at all -- when they entirely dismiss the contr­ibution the Second International made to the workers' movement, they only display their utter ignorance of what is a historical movement in development. They don't even understand that the little they do know they owe to the living history of the working class! They throw the baby out with the bathwater, and they don't see that their own ideas and ‘inventions', which they think are original, come from the wastepaper bins of the workers' movement, from the utopian epoch which is long gone. Even bastards have parents, even if the parents didn't intend to have them!

Like the modernists the Bordigists also ignore the living history of the working class, a class in movement and evolution, with its moments of strength and its moments of weakness. Instead of studying it and understanding it, they replace it with dead gods, eternally immobile, mummified into absolute Good and Evil.

18. The reawakening of the proletariat after three years of imperialist massacre, and after the shameful betrayal and death of the Second International, opened up a new period which made it possible to reconstitute the class party. This new period of social struggles, which saw the rapid collapse of fortresses which had seemed impregnable, of mighty empires, monarchies and military machines such as those of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany, represented not simply a moment in the evolution of the workers' movement, but a qualitative leap in history, because it straight away posed the problem of the revolution, of the seizure of political power by the working class. For the first time in history the working class and its recently formed communist parties had to respond to a whole series of crucial questions each one of which was a matter of life or death for these questions -- and sometimes they had no idea at all, or ideas that were frankly anachronistic and erroneous. Only tiny dwarfs with a large touch of meg­alomania, who have never seen a revolution, not even from afar -- and the proletarian revolution is the greatest leap in the whole of human history up to now -- can, sixty years afterwards, point a contempt­uous, self-satisfied finger at the errors and stutterings of those giants who dared to storm the heights of the capitalist world and resolutely followed the path of the revolution.

Yes, the working class, and above all its parties and the Communist International often groped in the dark, improvised, and committed grave errors which got in the way of the revolution. But they did leave us with inestimable acquisitions, a rich experience which we must study in detail in order to understand the difficulties they met with, to avoid the traps they fell into, to overcome the errors they made, and, on the basis of their experience, to give a more adequate response to the problems posed by the revolution. We have to take advantage of the distance in time between us and them in order to try and resolve these problems, if only partially -- without losing sight of the fact that the next revolution will bring with it new problems which we can't completely foresee.

19. To return to the precise problem of the party and its function in the present period and in the revolution, we can outline an answer above all in terms of what a party is not, in order to then establish what it should be.

a) The party cannot claim to be the sole and exclusive bearer or representative of class consciousness. It is not predestined to have any such monopoly. Class consciousness is inherent in the class as a whole. The party is the most advanced organ of this conscious­ness and no more. This does not imply that it is infallible, nor that at certain times it may be behind the consciousness attained by other sectors or fractions of the classy. The working class is not homogeneous but it tends to become so. The same goes for class consciousness which tends to homogenize itself and to generalize. It's the task of the party -- and this is one of its main functions - to contribute consciously to the acceleration of this process.

b) Thus the task of the party is to orientate the class, to fertilize its struggle; it's not the leader in the sense of something which takes decisions on its own, in place of the class.

c) Because of this we can recognize the possibility that various groups (whether or not they are called parties doesn't matter) can arise within the class and its unitary organizations, the workers' councils. Not only can the communist party not in any way assume the right to forbid such groups or put pressure on them, it must energetically combat any such attempts.

d) Like the class which, as a whole, can contain within it several more or less coherent revolutionary tendencies, the party, within the framework of its program, will recognize the possibilities of divergences and tendencies. The communist party will categorically reject the conception of monolithic party.

e) The party can in no way come up with a recipe book which responds in detail to all the questions posed by the struggle. It is neither a technical, administrative or executive organ of the class. It is and must remain a political organ. This principle applies both to the struggles which precede the revolution and to those of the revolution itself. In particular it's not the party's role to be the ‘general staff' of the insurrection.

f) The discipline in organization and in action which the party demands from its members can only be a reality in the frame­work of a constant freedom of discussion and criticism, within the bounds of the party's platform. It cannot demand of members who disagree with certain important positions to present and defend these positions to the world outside -- it can't force them to be party spokesmen on these issues against their conviction. This is as much out of the concern to respect the integrity of its members as for the general interest of the organization as a whole. To entrust the defense of impo­rtant positions of the organization to comrades who don't agree with them results in a poor defense of those positions. In the same sense, the party can't resort to repressive measures to put pressure on its members. On principle, the party rejects the use of force and violence, or of relations of force within the class and in its own relationship to the class.

g) The party as such does not ask the class to ‘have confidence' in it, to delegate the power of decision to it as such. On principle, the communist party is against any delegation of power by the class to any organ, group, or party which is not under its constant control. The communist party is for the real practice of elected, revocable delegates, responsible at all times to the assemblies which elect them; in this sense, it is against any method of election lists presented by political parties. Any other conception inevitably leads to a substitutionist practice.

While the party has the right to demand that one of its members resigns from a post, committee or even a state organ, to which this militant was elected by an assembly and to which he is still responsible, the party cannot demand that he is replaced by another member by its own decision alone.

h) Finally, and in contrast to bourgeois parties, the proletarian party doesn't have the role of taking over or running the state. This principle is intimately linked to the need for the class as a whole to maintain its independence vis-a-vis the transitional state. The abandoning of this principle would inevitably lead to the party losing its proletarian character.

i) From all the above it follows that the proletarian party in our epoch cannot be a mass party. Since it does not have the task of running the state or organizing the class, since it is selected round a program that is as coherent as possible, the party will necessarily be a minority organization up to and during the revolutionary period. In this sense, the CI's conception of the ‘mass revolutionary party', which was wrong at the time, the product of a period that was already past, must be categorically rejected.

20. The ICC analyses the period opened up by the resurgence of workers' struggles in 1968 as a period of historical revival in the class struggle, in response to the open crisis that emerged with the end of the post-World War II reconstruction period. In line with this analysis, it considers that this period contains the premises for the reconstitution of the party. However, even if they do so in conditions that are independent of their will, it is men who make history. In this sense, the formation of the future party will be the result of a conscious and deliberate effort -- an effort to which the existing revolutionary groups must devote themselves right now.

This effort necessitates a clear compre­hension both of the general characteristics of the process by which the party is formed -- those which are valid in all periods -- and of the specific, historically unprec­edented conditions which pertain to the emergence of tomorrow's party.

21. One of the main specificities about the emergence of the future party resides in the fact that, in contrast to the past, it will straight away take place on a world scale.

Already in the past, the political organizations of the class were world-wide, tending towards a world unity. However, these world organizations were the result of the regroupment of formations that had been more or less constituted at the national level, and around a formation emanating from a particular national sector of the proletariat which occupied a vanguard position in the workers' movement as a whole.

Thus, in 1884, the IWA was constituted essentially round the proletariat of Britain (the founding conference was held in London, which was also the seat of the General Council up till 1872; and for a long time the British Trade Unions were the most important contingent of the IWA). At this time, Britain was by far the most developed country, the place where capitalism was most powerful and concentrated.

Similarly, the Second International was formed mainly round German Social Demo­cracy which was the oldest, most developed most powerful workers' party in Europe and the world -- the result, above all, of the formidable development of German capitalism in the second half of the 19th century.

Finally, the indisputable pole of the Third International was the Bolshevik party, not because of the prominence of capitalism in Russia (which, though fifth in the world's industrial league, remained very backward) but because the proletariat in this country was, due to specific circumstances, the first (and only) one to overthrow the capitalist state and take power during the first great revolutionary wave.

The situation today is considerably different from that which prevailed at various points in the past. On the one hand, the period of the decadence of capitalism has prevented the emergence of new big sectors of the world proletariat which might have represented a new pole for the whole workers' movement (as was the case with Germany last century).

On the other hand, in decadent capitalism there has been a considerable leveling out of the economic, social, and political characteristics of the system, especially in the advanced countries. Never before in its history has the capitalist world, despite its insurmountable national and bloc divisions, reached -- due, among other things, to the development of world trade and the use of modern means of comm­unication -- such a high degree of homogeneity, of interdependence between its different parts. For the working class, this has meant an unprecedented leveling out of its living conditions and, to a certain extent, of its political experience.

Finally, the present circumstances of the historic development of the class struggle towards revolution (simultaneous aggrav­ation of the economic crisis in all countries and not imperialist war as in 1917, the considerable level of the bourgeoisie's unity against the proletariat) imply that this development will tend towards a much higher degree of simultaneity, unity and generalization than in the past.

All these conditions imply that the future world party won't be formed around this a or that national sector of the proletariat, as in the past, but that it will straight away be constituted on a world scale around the clearest, most coherent, most developed political positions.

In particular it's for this reason that, much more today than in the past, it is vital that the different communist groups that exist today mobilize and unify their efforts towards the constitution of this pole and, in the first place, towards the clarification of proletarian political positions.

These essential tasks are a major part of the conscious and deliberate assumption by revolutionaries of their responsibilities in the process towards the formation of the future party.

22. In line with this perspective, the ICC insists on the urgent necessity to break with the isolation to which the existing communist groups find themselves, to fight against the tendency to make yesterday's objective necessity a virtue for today. Such a tendency can only be the result of a sectarian standpoint. Our task is to create a real international discussion among these groups, with the firm intention of eliminating misunderstandings,  incomprehensions, false interpretations based on the needs of polemic or on ignorance of the positions of this or that group. This is the only way to get to a real confrontation of political positions and to open up a process of decantation and regroupment.

The ICC doesn't ignore the enormous difficulties that will be encountered in taking up this task. These difficulties are largely the result of the terrible counter-revolution that the working class was subjected to for over 40 years, a counter-revolution which brought an end to the left fractions which came out of the CI and broke the organic continuity which had existed between the different prolet­arian political organizations since the middle of the last century. Because of this break in organic continuity, the future party won't be formed in the manner envisaged by the Italian Fraction, with the Fraction constituting a bridge between the old and the new party.

This situation makes it even more vital to carry forward the process of confront­ation and decantation that leads to the regroupment of communist organizations. The ICC has attempted to contribute to such a process through contacts with other groups in the communist camp; we have suggested and actively participated in international conferences between proletarian groups. We have to recognize the failure of this initial effort, due above all to the sectarian split of the groups who are the debris of the Italian left, now more or less sclerotic despite all their pretensions to being the ‘historic party'. These ‘parties' (there are now about five of them) are doomed to an irreversible sclerosis if they persist in this attitude.

For its part, the ICC is convinced that there's no other way. It's the way which has always triumphed in the history of the workers' movement -- the way of Marx and Engels, of Lenin and Luxemburg, of Bilan and the International Communist Left in the 1930s. It's the only way that has any hope of bearing fruit, and the ICC is more than ever determined to keep to it.

 

[1] [8] Without being exhaustive, we can cite the following texts

-- point 16 of ICC's platform

-- ICC's contribution to the 2nd International Conference of groups of the communist left

-- ICC's pamphlet Communist Organization and Class Consciousness.

[2] [9] The aberrant analysis developed by Bordiga - notably after 1948 - should not obscure the crucial role he played in the formation of the Communist Party of Italy and in the struggle of the Left against the degeneration of the Communist International. However, recognition of the importance of this contribution cannot justify adhering to these aberrations, or considering them to be the alpha and omega of communist positions.

Economic crisis: Descent into the abyss and the impasse of the capitalist class

This part of the report on the international situation is concerned with the course of the world capitalist economic crisis which is, ultimately, the determining factor in the development of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the axis around which the shifting rapport de force between the capitalist class and the proletariat revolves[1]. The actual evolution of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the course of the class struggle can be analyzed only on the basis of a clear understanding of the course of the economic crisis itself.

Unlike 1929-1933, which saw an abrupt collapse of the world capitalist economy, the consolida­tion of the universal tendency to state capit­alism made it possible to ‘phase in' the present world crisis of overproduction during the 1970s. The systematic recourse to a massive expansion of credit, orchestrated by the central banks of the industrialized countries of the American bloc, and in particular by the international finance arms of American state capitalism (the IMF, the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, etc) momentarily permitted world capital to compensate for the growing lack of effective demand on a saturated world market. This creation of a vast mountain of fictitious capital (to which there corresponds no real capital assets) could do no more, however, than provide the world economy with a decade of chronic stagnation, punctuated by two increasingly sharp downturns in industrial production (1970 and 1974-75), together with galloping inflation. This latter had by 1979-1980 brought the capitalist metropoles themselves to the brink of a hyper-inflation which would have quickly led to a collapse of the world economy. The only course open to world capital, if it was not to be consumed in the whirlwind of a hyper-inflation, was a shift to an economic policy of deflation and auster­ity. However, no longer able to rely on a Keynesian policy of steady credit expansion, the ever larger doses of which had alone made it possible to phase in the crisis, world capital over the past three years has plunged headlong into the dark abyss of a depression which on the economic level has already con­firmed the ICC's analysis of the ‘80s as the years of truth.

In this text, we shall first survey the curr­ent economic situation of world capital focus­ing on the key indices which clearly show the desperate condition of the global economy today. We shall then demonstrate the increas­ingly narrow range of economic policies avail­able to capital as it tries to slow down its descent into the abyss. In demonstrating the impasse into which the crisis has led the capitalist class, we shall show how in terms of the economic perspective alone[2] the situation of the capitalist class is today much worse than was the case 50 years ago, in 1933.

**********

The current economic situation of world capital

Perhaps the most infallible index of the existence of a super-saturated world market is the figures for industrial output and the percentage of industrial capacity which is idle. Industrial output in the seven largest industrial countries of the American bloc (US, Japan, West Germany, France, Italy, Canada, France) was virtually stagnant in 1981 rising a miniscule 0.8% with respect to 1980. In 1982, industrial output plunged in these same countries, falling 4.5% for the year. In the US, industrial production began to collapse in the second half of 1981 and had declined more than 12% by the end of 1982, In Britain, the fall in industrial production since its cyclical peak in 1979 is 16%, while in Canada output in August 1982 was 14.75% below its June 1981 peak. In West Germany, France and Italy, where the collapse began somewhat later, industrial output fell 6% during July, August and September 1982, comp­ared to the preceding three months., Meanwhile, by the end of 1982, 31.6% of the industrial plant in the US and 31.8% of the industrial plant in Canada lay idle, the glaring express­ion of the hypertrophy of productive capacity in the face of the chronic lack of effective demand which is the hallmark of capitalism's permanent crisis.

The counterpart to this sharp decline in output and bloated mass of idle plant through­out the advanced countries of the American bloc, which account for by far the largest part of the world's industrial production, has been a no less devastating collapse in produc­tive investments. Thus, in the US, between the second and forth quarters of 1982, business investment in new plant and machinery fell 14.5%. Meanwhile, in West Germany, machinery and equipment investments declined 6.5% and construction investment 15% during the first half of 1982.

In the advanced countries of the American bloc, the saturation of the world market man­ifests itself in the form of a mounting stock­pile of unsaleable commodities, and an over­production of capital for which no productive investment is possible. In the countries of the Russian bloc, the same global crisis of overproduction manifests itself in long lines before empty stores and the rationing of basic necessities for the working class, together with a chronic scarcity of capital with which to vainly attempt to overcome the backwardn­ess which is the historical legacy of an imp­erialist bloc which arrived on the world market in the full decadence of capitalism. The impact of the economic crisis on the Stalinist regimes can be seen in the fact that in Russia itself, industrial production rose an anemic 2.8% in 1982 instead of the planned 4.7% rise, the smallest increase in production since World War II. Given the fact that the military sector -- which represents a steriliza­tion of capital, though absolutely essential in terms of inter-imperialist competition accounts for perhaps 25% of Russian production, and that output in this sector is growing at an extremely rapid pace, this means that there has been a very sharp downturn in the output of the productive sector of the Russian economy. In those economies of the Russian bloc most immediately bound to conditions on the world market, the situation is even more grim. In Poland, industrial output in 1982 declined 5% with respect to 1981. In Hungary and Czechos­lovakia, industrial production was virtually stagnant, rising only 1%, while in Romania industrial output rose 2.5% instead of the 5.5% target the planners had set.

In the handful of third world countries which are not totally dependent on the production of foodstuffs and raw materials for export, but which also have a significant industrial sector, the same picture of decline or stagnation in industrial output is repeated. In Mexico, land of the last great ‘economic miracle' of the 1970s, the bubble has burst and industrial output has begun to plunge, declining 1% in 1982. In Argentina, industrial production fell by more than 4%, while in Brazil and India output in industrial sectors was stagnant.

The same crisis of overproduction which has brought about this decline in industrial output is also working havoc with that part of the economy devoted to the production of food­stuffs and raw materials. Thus, in a world where an ever-growing mass of the population is condemned to starvation, 16% of world-wide grain production in 1982 was unsaleable, adding 35 million metric tons of grain to the already swollen world stocks. The glut of food and raw materials for which there is no effective demand has led to a collapse of prices in 1982:

Wheat ---------- -15%	Iron ---------- -31%
Corn ------------ -12%	Zinc --------- -15%
Sugar ----------- -38%	Coal --------- -12%
Oil -------------- -15%

For farmers this has meant a crisis of devast­ating proportions, not seen since the 1930s. All commodity crops (eg corn, cotton, sugar, soybeans) are now selling below farmers' real production costs. In the US, the agricultural giant of the world economy, since 1979 net income for farmers has plunged 50%, from $32.3 billion to 16.5 billion in 1982. Mean­while, the interest on farm loans alone was $22 billion in 1982 -- far in excess of net income. The result has been a spate of bank­ruptcies and forced sales of farms which are spreading like a plague through the country­side.

The situation of the world market has now led to a decline in the volume of world trade for two years in a row, the first time this has happened since the end of World War II and the creation of GATT, when a victorious American imperialism imposed its brand of free trade on a prostrate world. To this fact must be added the unraveling of the complex financial network set up by the American state to facilit­ate the flow of trade on a world market, the bulk of which had fallen under its domination in 1945. In 1982, an unprecedented 30% of world trade -- in contrast to 2% just two years ago -- was carried on in the form of barter.

The recourse to barter has been imposed by the dearth of foreign exchange, the collapse in the value of most currencies and the lack of credit available to the bulk of the world's countries. This fact is one more indication that the elaborate financial mechan­isms created by capital to link the various parts of the world are disintegrating before its very eyes.

The massive recourse to credit, which made it possible to stave off an abrupt collapse of the world economy during the ‘70s, but which had to be restrained as the advanced countr­ies hurtled towards hyper-inflation, has left world capital with an enormous and insupport­able burden of debt. The foreign debt of the third world and Russian bloc countries has now reached an astronomical $853 billion! Caught between this crushing burden of debt on the one hand and the downturn in production, prices and trade on the other, the three biggest debtors, Mexico ($81 billion), Brazil ($70 billion) and Argentina ($40 billion), whose ‘economic miracles' had been built on a foundation of paper, lurched into bankruptcy in 1982. The biggest debtors of the Russian bloc, Poland ($27 billion) and Romania ($10 billion), also declared themselves insolvent. Only a frantic rescheduling of debts and moratoria on payments worked out by the IMF, the World Bank and ‘private' lenders prevented the whole international monetary system from collapsing like a house of cards. Moreover, both the debt and the danger of bankruptcy by third world and Russian bloc countries is only the tip of the iceberg. The debt of the advanced countries of the American bloc by far overshadows the debts of the poor countr­ies and has made the financial situation of even these industrial giants precarious. In the US, the cumulative result of the hyper­trophy of credit is a public and private sector debt which has now reached a stagger­ing level of five trillion dollars!

A capitalist crisis is always a crisis of profitability, one in which not only the rate of profit but the mass of profit sinks. The situation of American capital, the dominant national capital in the world, can perhaps illustrate the increasingly precarious state of this most important index of the health of the capitalist economy. In the US, pre-tax corporate profits, which were running at an annual rate of $260 billion in the first quarter of 1980, sunk to an annual rate of only $170 billion at the end of 1982. The after-tax profits of the largest American companies declined almost 20% in 1982; in the key oil industry, the profits of the twenty-five largest American companies fell 27% in 1982. Beyond this dramatic fall in the mass of profit, is the fact that crit­ical sectors of basic industry in the US are now operating at a loss: steel, automobiles, machine tools, agricultural implements, non­ferrous metals, mining. The American steel industry, to take a glaring example, lost $684 million in 1982.

The enormous rise in unemployment is at one and the same time the expression of the barbarism of capitalism, which condemns an ever-growing mass of humanity to the scrap heap, and the admission of the historical bankruptcy of a mode of production which can no longer profitably exploit the labor-power of its wage-slaves. In the industrialized countries of the American bloc, there are now 32 million unemployed workers, on the basis of official government figures which clearly hide the real depth of this catastrophe. (thus, if unemployment today were measured on the same basis in the US as in the 1930s, the unemployment rate for American workers would be the highest since 1935!) The extent of the increase in unemployment in these countries is but one more devastating index of capitalism's plunge into the abyss:

	1980	1981	1982
U.S.	7%	7.5%	10%
Japan	2%	2.2%	2.4%
W. Germany	3%	4.4%	7%
France	6.3%	7.3%	9%
Britain	7.3%	11.4%	13%
Italy	7.4%	8.3%	10%
Canada	7.5%	7.5%	11%
Belgium	9%	11.1%	15%
Netherlands	4.9%	7.5%	10.4%
Spain	11.2%	14%	16%

In the backward countries, meanwhile, capitalism continues at an even faster rate -- its grisly process of creating a permanent mass of unemployed living in sub-human cond­itions in shanty towns, or mobilized to work in slave labor battalions in the country­side (China, Vietnam, etc).

Three years of deflationary policies in the metropoles of the American bloc, after a decade during which an abrupt collapse a la 1929 was only averted by the creation of a mass of paper values, has accelerated the downward plunge without, however, banishing the specter of hyper-inflation. A number of key economies remained caught in the grips of double-digit inflation at the end of 1982!

Annual rate of consumer price increases:

FRANCE ----- 12.6%	CANADA ----- 11%
ITALY --------16.6%	SPAIN            --------- 16%

An unparalleled budget deficit in the US of over $200 billion for 1983, massive foreign borrowings by countries like France, Canada Spain and Italy to shore up their collapsing economies, together with interest rates which remain at historically extremely high levels, all indicate that the inflationary whirlwind remains a real danger to the terminally ill capitalist economy.

All of the indices, therefore, show that over the past three years, the world economic crisis has taken a qualitative leap forward from which -- as we will now show - no recovery is possible.

The impasse of the capitalist class

Even in this epoch of an historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, which poses the alternative of imperialist world war or proletarian revolution as the only possible outcomes to the economic collapse, the course of the crisis is never straight down. The crisis retains its zig-zag charact­er, though its basic thrust is to become even deeper. Therefore, the descent of world capitalism into the abyss of depression is not incompatible with short, cyclical upturns, limited both in time and space. Indeed, the American economy is probably already beginn­ing to experience such an upturn. However, unlike the situation after 1933, when it was possible for capital to stimulate the economy for a period of five or six years through the consolidation of state capitalism and a variety of Keynesian economic policies, today such policies and therefore such a recovery is excluded.

The year 1933 saw Roosevelt and Hitler come to power in the US and Germany in the midst of a quasi-total economic collapse. In Germany Hitler and his economic czar Hjalman Schacht launched a recovery program based on autarky and the deficit financing of vast public works and armaments projects. Industrial production in Germany rose 90% between 1933-38, while unemployment declined from 3.7 million workers to 200,000 over the same period. Roosevelt and his ‘brains trust' utilized the protectionism begun by the Snoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 together with a combination of Keynesian pol­icies consisting of deficit spending, credit expansion and monetary inflation, and the creation of a ‘social wage' to compensate for the lack of effective demand[3] -- which brought about an annual growth in GNP of 9.1% during 1933-35 and 9.8% during 1935-38, Cert­ainly the vast expansion of state capitalism and the utilization of Keynesian economic policies, which were the basis of the five years of recovery, could not provide any solut­ion to the historic crisis of capitalism. In the US, from September 1937 to June 1938, ind­ustrial output dropped 30%, while unemployment rose 22%. Before this devastating new stage in the economic crisis could spread to Europe, the second imperialist butchery had begun and capitalism had thereby provided the only ‘solution' to the economic crisis of which it is capable.

The situation which faces world capital today is qualitatively different from that prevail­ing in 1933. The type of policies which made it possible for the capitalist class to bring about an economic upturn for five years, during which time the economic, military and ideo­logical preparations for imperialist world war were completed, are precluded in the present conjuncture. The universal tendency to state capitalism, which was the response of capital to the necessity to centralize and organize its productive apparatus for the world war during 1914-18, had to a consider­able degree been attenuated during the phase of reconstruction in the 1920s. The utilization of state capitalist measures after 1933, therefore, for several years had the effect of rationalizing a productive and financial apparatus which was obsolete in the face of the needs of capital itself, faced as it was with a permanent crisis. Today, however, after fifty years of almost uninterrupted expansion of state capitalism under either a Stalinist or ‘democratic' form, the capitalist economic base is crumbling under the very weight of the parasitism of the leviathan state. Additional state capitalist measures -- however necessary as capital reacts to growing inter-imperialist antagonisms and to the danger of proletarian class struggle - far from stimulating an economic upturn only constitute a further burden on an economy smothered under the unproductive weight of a parasitic bureaucracy.

The Keynesian reflationary economic policies introduced after 1933 had as their point of departure four years of deflation and rapidly falling prices, during which a mountain of debt was liquidated. As a result a vast expansion of credit and massive deficit financing could compensate for an effective lack of demand without immediately provoking galloping inflation or a breakdown of the monetary system. Today, though, after decades during which the drug of credit was lavishly administered to a capitalist economy mired in a permanent crisis, world capital totters on the brink of hyper­inflation and is suffocating under a mount­ain of debt. These very Keynesian economic policies must now be reversed if the capit­alist patient is not to die of an overdose of the lethal drug which was used to keep it alive over the past years.

After 1933, the expansion of the ‘social wage', that part of the cost of producing and reproducing the commodity labor-power (variable capital) paid directly by the state, which was primarily a means of bind­ing the working class to the capitalist state, also acted as a stimulant to the depressed economy. This growth of the social wage has always been linked to Keynesian reflationary policies, and, therefore, it follows that in the present situation the social wage is everywhere under attack and is being savagely cut. This dismantling of the ‘welfare state' necessarily being carried out by governments of the left and right alike, removes one of the key ideological props of capitalist domination over the proletariat; at the same time it will lead to a further shrinking of a market which is already too small to absorb the plethora of commodities the industrial plant of capitalism is capable of producing.

The war economy, which was the real axis around which state capitalism developed again beginning in the 1930s, has never been an economic policy, an attempt to overcome the intrinsic barriers to the accumulation of capital; it is by its very nature unproductive in capitalist terms. The real function of the war economy is always a direct preparat­ion for inter-imperialist war itself. Nonethe­less, after 1933, within the framework of the period of savage deflation which had just occurred, the war economy could have the subsidiary effect of momentarily stimulating the economy. Today, while armaments production must grow at an ever-faster rate as the two imperialist blocs prepare for war, its econ­omic impact -- in sharp contrast to the 1930s -- will be disastrous for capital. In the face of    already unmanageable budget deficits, the massive increase in military spending, which the growth of inter-imperialist antagon­isms makes necessary, is an economic burden which will only accelerate capitalism's descent into the abyss.

After 1933 autarky and protectionism were utilized by Hitler and Roosevelt, together with deficit financing, to temporarily overcome the saturation of the home market even while world trade stagnated. Today, the extreme inter-dependence of the advanced capitalist economies of the American bloc under US dom­ination is such that the dominant factions of capital in each country are bound to the Ameri­can imposed version of ‘free trade' which has prevailed since 1945. Certainly there are real and growing sectors of capital in each country demanding a shift to protectionism, but these remain concentrated in the most anachronistic and weakest sectors of each economy. A thorough-going policy of protect­ionism or autarky is opposed by the most pow­erful sectors of the capitalist class because it directly threatens to exacerbate the collap­se of world trade and the international monet­ary system, as well as the very coherence of the American bloc. The real value of protect­ionism for capital today is not as an economic policy as in the 30s but as a nationalist mystification to attempt to derail the class struggle -- a tool particularly important to the left of capital in opposition.

What we are now seeing is nothing less than the complete bankruptcy of Keynesianism, of the economic policies upon which capitalism has relied since the 1930s. The state can no longer compensate for the lack of effective demand on a saturated market through reflationary policies, which was the veritable lynchpin of Keynesianism. Moreover, while the state's direction and control over the economy -- the other basis of Keynesianism -- will continue to grow at an ever faster rate, it is now absolutely clear that this can provide no ‘solution' to the economic crisis. The bank­ruptcy of Keynesianism is the glaring manifestation of the impasse of the capitalist class, the confirmation of the fact that in economic terms the perspective facing world capital today is much more grim than it was in 1933.

The long dependence on Keynesianism having shattered the very basis for the continuation of these reflationary policies, capital has no new economic palliatives with which to replace them. The only policy open to capital today is deflation and austerity, economic policies which can only push capital further into the abyss of world depression, while at the same time destroying the bases on which it has sought to maintain a semblance of ideological control over the proletariat (welfare state, social wage, etc.).

To prevent the collapse of the whole internat­ional monetary system -- the veritable spinal column of world capital -- by hyper-inflation requires policies of austerity and deflation which will accelerate the plunge in industrial production and world trade. Yet these policies themselves will generate ever new pressures towards a generalized bankruptcy by debtor nations and enterprises which would also result in the very collapse of the monetary system which the austerity measures were intended to prevent. This dilemma is insoluble short of a destruction of capital values only possible through a third inter-imperial­ist war -- though the physical destruction of such a holocaust would very probably make any kind of ‘reconstruction' problematic. Nevertheless, it is this very path that capital -- because of the nature of its own contradictions -- must take. This means that capital must attempt to respond to this new stage in the unfolding of its historic crisis, not with economic policies, which are today no more than a very short-term holding operat­ion, but with a political strategy designed to first derail and then defeat the working class. Only such a defeat can open the way to the capitalist ‘solution'.

********

 

---

[1] This, of course must not lead to overlook the fact that the ways in which capital reacts to inter-imperialist antagonisms and class struggle can itself affect the way the crisis unfolds.

[2] The situation of the capitalist class vis-à-vis the proletariat is examined in the other part of the report on the international situation.

[3] Clearly the objective function of all these policies was to bind the proletariat to the capitalist state and allow imperialism to complete its mobilization for world war.

"The military coup of 13 December 1981 has put an end to the most important prolonged combat between the world working class and capital for half a century. Never, since the histor­ical resurgence of the proletariat struggle at the end of the 60s, has the working class taken its combativity, its solidarity and its self-organization so far. Never before has the class used so extensively the indispensible weapon of the struggle in the period of decadence -- the mass strike. Never had the class given the bourgeoisie such a fright, nor forced it to use so many methods of defense. Today, the proletariat in Poland has been gagged. Once again, it has shed its blood, and, in contrast to the sequel to 1970 and 1976, its exploitation has been multiplied tenfold, it has been reduced to near-famine; misery and terror is unleashed on it. This episode is thus concluded with a defeat for the working class. But it is important for the proletar­iat, now that force of arms and the combined strength of the whole bourgeoisie has obliged it to leave the stage in Poland, to draw as many lessons as it can from the experience it has just gone through. The class -- and its communist vanguard -- must be able to answer the question: ‘Where are we? What are the perspec­tives for the class struggle?'" (IR no29 ‘After the Repression in Poland')

Where are we?

In August 1980, the mass strike of the workers in Poland gave a reply to the questions posed but never resolved in the struggles of their class brothers in Western Europe:

-- the need to extend the struggle (Rotterdam dockers' strike, Autumn 1979)

-- the need for self-organization (British steel strike, Winter-Spring 80)

-- the attitude to state repression (Longwy/Denain Winter 79).

Their combat thus confirmed the end of the reflux in the class struggle that had marked the 1970s, already announced by the strikes of 1978-80 in Western Europe.

It showed the world proletariat the true capit­alist nature of the so-called ‘socialist' states, thus killing a lie that had already lost much of its credibility, but retained certain vigor within the working class.

This combat was a concrete brake on imperialist tensions paralyzing the Russian military appara­tus in Eastern Europe, and demonstrating to the whole world bourgeoisie the combativity of the proletariat in the heart of Europe.

Nonetheless, the workers in Poland remained isolated, and the call of their struggle was not answered. The question they could not answer by themselves was that of the generalization of the class struggle, which implied that workers in other countries take up the combat.

The defeat of the workers in Poland is not a ‘Polish' defeat, but a defeat for the whole world proletariat; it is an expression of the world proletariat's weakness. The mystifica­tions that allowed the bourgeoisie to derail the class struggle and impose its repression are fundamentally the same as those faced by the workers in Western Europe: democracy, nationalism and unionism. They are the same as those that allowed the bourgeoisie to force a retreat on the struggles in Western Europe, and of which the defeat in Poland is a result.

The proletariat in Western Europe is at the heart of the capitalist world. It is the most experienced fraction of the world proletariat, and so has confronted the bourgeoisie's most perfected mystifications. If the struggle in Poland made it possible to understand the capitalist nature of the Eastern bloc countries only the struggle of the western proletariat will really be able to purge the illusions of democracy, nationalism and unionism -- which are a brake on the struggle everywhere -- from the consciousness of workers through-out the world.

After the strikes of 1978-80, there was a lull in Western Europe. The bourgeoisie's counter­offensive began at the end of the 70s, with the reorganization of its political apparatus (the left in opposition), the development of rank‑and-file unionism, and the campaigns of ideological disorientation. This whole strategy, orchestrated in a more or less organized and unified way at world level, produced a weak­ening of the workers' struggle in Western Europe.

Moreover, the absence of any clear workers' reaction to the direct participation of French and Italian contingents in the Lebanon, and of British troops in the Falklands conflict in the midst of a constant increase in military budgets, and with the deafening tramp of boots transmitted by the media, might lay doubt in the Western European proletariat's ability to assume it historic responsibilities and oppose the bourgeoisie's solution to the crisis of capitalism: generalized imperialist war.

The First and Second World Wars were made possible by the bourgeoisie's ability to pro­fit from the weaknesses of the European prol­etariat, and to enroll it behind the bourgeoi­sie's own imperialist objectives.

Today, with the retreat of the world proletariat, concretized by the defeat in Poland, and accom­panied by the beating of the drums of war, the specter of the 1930s and World War II returns to haunt the workers.

However, the balance sheet of the reflux in class struggle should not lead us to alarmist conclusions. The bourgeoisie has started a new offensive against the proletariat, but its conditions, reason, and nature demonstrate its limits.

Today, the situation is very different from what it was in the 30s. This is what we will try to show in the following section.

The differences between the 30s and today

1. The Proletariat today is not defeated.

The generation of proletarians that found itself confronted with the open crisis of capitalism that began in 1929, and was to lead to the war of 1939-45, had already lived through the crushing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The world proletariat came out of this defeat with its combative potential profoundly affected, especially where the revolutionary perspective had stood out most forcibly: in Germany and Russia.

But even in those countries where the repression was less violent, as in the western democracies (France, Britain, the USA), the proletariat's combativity was profoundly affected by the ideological confusion brought about by the defeat of the revolution and the resulting collapse of the IIIrd International.

The defeat of the revolution was a defeat for the world proletariat, and the proletariat was weakened on a world level. This was the essen­tial factor that was to allow the bourgeoisie to march the workers off to the Second World War.

This is not the situation today: the genera­tion of proletarians that is now confronted with the open crisis of capital is not coming out of the defeat of a revolutionary wave. In the period following the Second World War, the bourgeoisie maintained its control over the proletariat much more through the illusions based on the relative prosperity arising out of the reconstruction rather than on direct oppression. Today, while the slow but inexor­able aggravation of the crisis undermines these illusions, the potential combativity of this new generation of workers remains intact.

The working class may be confused by its lack of experience -- the result of 50 years of counter-revolution -- but it is not demoralized, and above all it has not been drawn into the defense of the state, which leads straight to war. From this point of view, the main pre­condition for the outbreak of a Third World War is missing.

2. The Bourgeoisie's room for maneuver has been reduced.

However, the difference between the present situation and that of the 30s doesn't only exist at the level of the historic conditions of the proletarian struggle.

History doesn't repeat itself: since it entered its period of decadence, capitalism has contin­ued to transform itself. And while the causes of its open crisis are fundamentally the same, the characteristics of its development have changed. This reality expresses itself at the level of the terms of control which the bour­geoisie seeks to re-impose on the proletariat.

Today's developing economic crisis is getting worse, despite all the policies of state capitalism systematized since the 1930s. This is a clear demonstration of the real ineffectiveness of the policies of statification of the economy which, during the crisis of the 30s, gave the bourgeoisie sufficient breathing space to complete the mobilization of the proletariat for the war.

For a mystification to have any effect over the proletariat, it must be based on a reality. The ‘effectiveness' of state capitalist measures in the 1930s, which allowed the bourgeoisie temporarily to redress the economic situation, was above all a result of their newness. Economic illusions gave the bou­rgeoisie a foundation for political illusions and thus enabled it to defuse the workers' combativity. State capitalism hid behind the myth of the social state: National-socialism in Germany, the Popular Front in France or Spain, the Welfare State in the US or Britain. The social state is the political corollary of state capitalism on the economic level. Directed at the proletariat, it allowed the bourgeoisie to keep the working class in the shackles of the counter-revolution, behind the banner of democracy, right up to today.

Thanks to state capitalism, the bourgeoisie has been able to contain temporarily the most important manifestations of the economic crisis, and thanks to the Welfare State, it has been able to avoid the political crisis. But the crisis which is developing today in spite of the state's intensive inter­vention in economic life tends to wear out the illusion of the Welfare Stare and the illusion of democracy in general. The bour­geoisie is no longer really able to slow down the effects of the crisis, and so the whole basis of its control over the proletariat during the last decades is pushed more and more into a political crisis.

The capitalist economic crisis leaves the bourgeoisie no way out of a confrontation with the proletariat. Both classes are being pushed towards this confrontation because all the bourgeoisie's ideological weapons are being worn out by the economic bankruptcy of its system. During the 30s, the bourgeoisie could make it seem as if the bankruptcy of 1929 was only that of private capitalism, and so could preserve the most essential illusions: that the state stands above classes, that the working class has its place and can defend its interests there. Today the economic crisis demonstrates what revolutionaries have always proclaimed, that all this is nothing but an illusion.

In the practical reality of its existence, the proletariat is beginning to see the state for what it really is: an instrument of coercion at the service of one class -- the bourgeoisie. Thus, all the mystifications that the bourg­eoisie has erected to hide the totalitarian reality of the state are starting to wear out.

3. An illustration of these differences: the question of unemployment.

The Crash of 1929 was to throw millions of workers into the most total destitution. The unemployment figures rose continuously from 1929-34. However, the application of state capitalist measures -- public works in the USA (eg the Tennessee Valley Authority), the development of the war economy in Germany and Britain, -- made it possible to limit them momentarily, without them ever falling to the pre-1929 level. But this also made it possible to reinforce the idea that there existed a real solution to the crisis of capital: the inter­vention of the state. Furthermore, the cre­ation of unemployment benefit, and other forms of aid to the unemployed, which had not existed previously, made it possible to stren­gthen the workers' confidence in the state as their protector against uncontrolled private capitalism.

During the 30s, the bourgeoisie was thus able to defuse the social bomb of unemployment. Following the determined struggles of unempl­oyed workers, notably 1930-32 in the USA, the state's policy made it possible to absorb the workers' combativity, and prepare their ideological enrolment behind the ‘left' democratic state, the defender of the workers against big business[1]. In this way the bourgeoisie prepared the coming enrolment in the imper­ialist war.

Today, the situation is radically different. Unemployment is developing inexorably, without the bourgeoisie being able to take the slightest economic measure to slow it down, and in the absence of any political illusion to make it acceptable. In the developed countries, unemployment has now reached the level of the late 1930s. As the failure of the reflationary policies of the 1970s has shown no reflation in the future will be able to reabsorb the unemployed; on the contrary, faced with the aggravated competition on the world market, investments are much more aimed at increasing productivity than expanding production.

Moreover, unlike the 30s, the capitalist state can no longer base its control on its supposed generosity, through the creation of increased social protection for the unemployed; on the contrary, it is obliged to attack the ‘gains' of the Welfare State set up after the 1929 crisis, and perfected during the reconstr­uction period. The capitalist state can no longer afford the policies for mystifying the proletariat that have allowed it to ensure its domination up to now. In practice, the bourgeoisie is compelled to destroy the bases of its ideological control over the prolet­ariat.

4. The Question of war.

One of the characteristics of the 1930s was the preparation of the Second World War, on the one hand through an increase in military program, and on the other hand through the development of localized conflicts on the periphery, such as the conflict between Japan and China, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the war in Spain, Nazi Germany's Auschluss in Austria.

From this point of view, are we in the same situation as that which preceded the Second World War?

However, the increase in the military programs in recent years in all countries, and especially in the most powerful, the most heavily armed at the outset, shows that, as in the 30s, the pressure of the crisis pushes the bourgeoisie further into growing inter-imperialist tens­ions. Each bloc accelerates the reinforcement of its military arsenal.

Moreover, certain conflicts at the periphery recall the ones which preceded the Second World War: the invasion of Afghanistan with the direct presence of 100,000 Russian soldiers the Israeli intervention in Lebanon to expel all soviet presence from the region, the diff­erent conflicts in Africa and Asia where the Russian bloc uses Cuban, Libyan or Vietnamese troops to fight its wars, and even the war between Iraq and Iran which has already pro­duced more than 300,000 dead and wounded, where Russia plays no direct role, but whose aim is to restore the western bloc's military potential weakened in Iran and is a response to Russia's offensive in Afghanistan.

All these conflicts are the expression of real imperialist tensions which torture the world. However -- and here resides the whole difference between today and the 30s -- other open conflicts, like those in El Salvador and the Falklands, while they occur within the context of world imperialism, are not expressions of real inter-imperialist rivalries, whether local or global. These ‘wars' serve above all to feed the intensive propaganda campaigns which the bour­geoisie inflicts on the proletariat. And the sound of marching boots is amplified out of all proportion by the media, which bring the horrors of war to every home, sowing fears about a Third World War.

The events in Poland reveal the real aims of these campaigns. The strikes in Poland were the pretext for a hysterical propaganda in each bloc, Russia denouncing the West's ‘un­acceptable interference', the USA and its allies shrieking about the menace of a Russian invasion. Was history going to repeat itself? Would Poland be at the origin of the 3rd World War as it was at that of the 2nd?

In reality, this warlike facade hid the fact that the two blocs were working hand in hand to beat the workers' struggle in Poland. The West gave the bourgeoisie in the East room for maneuver by supplying credits; to intimidate the Polish workers, the West lent credence to the danger of a Russian invasion, through its pro­paganda relayed over the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe. In the West itself, the bourgeoisie did everything in its power to make the ‘problem' a specifically Polish one in order to isolate the proletariat. And by trumpeting that the mass strike in Poland created a danger of war, it hammered home the idea that the class struggle leads to imperi­alist war.

We can see what the bourgeoisie uses its war­like propaganda for: dividing and intimidating the proletariat. This concern is decisive for the bourgeoisie to the extent that the prolet­ariat, in Western Europe especially, is not enrolled in the preparations for war.

This is the fundamental difference with the 1930s. In the 30s, the Russian and German proletariats, physically crushed, were unable to put up any opposition to the war. In the West, the anti-fascist campaigns succeeded in enrolling the workers behind the banner of democracy.

Today, the bourgeoisie has not got the workers under control in the very heart of capital's contradictions -- in Europe, which has already seen two world wars unleashed over its soil, and which is now the prize at stake in a hypo­thetical 3rd World War. This is expressed in the fact that conflicts remain on the periphery where weaker and more isolated fractions of the proletariat can more easily be mobilized behind the illusions of nationalism. But even in Israel, where the bourgeoisie has had an easy time playing on local and historical specificities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify, in the eyes of the proletariat, the necessity of the war -- as we have seen from the resistance amongst the troops to the intervention in Lebanon.

The lack of any reaction from the proletariat in France and Britain to the dispatch of professional contingents to the Falklands or the Lebanon is certainly not a sign of the working class' strength, but neither does it prove that the proletariat supports these measures. In fact, we have only seen a real reaction from the proletariat to war during the war itself -- whether it be on the Marne front in 1917, on the Russian front, in Italy in 1943, or in Germany in 1945.

The proletariat's struggle against war develops out of its struggle against the attacks of the bourgeoisie at the economic level. Out of this struggle arises a consciousness of the necessity to fight against imperialist war. For it is at this level that the alternative between guns and butter is made concrete.

As long as the European proletariat -- the decisive fraction of the world proletariat -- has not been beaten on the terrain of the defense of its living standards, it cannot be mobilized for war, it cannot be made to sacrifice life itself.

The historic course today is not open for war. A course towards war, like that of the 30s, presupposes the prior crushing of the only force capable of preventing the unleashing of imperialist rivalries -- the proletariat. On the contrary, the present historic course is towards the development of class confront­ations, giving rise to the perspective of revolution.

However, this doesn't mean that the course can't be overturned, that the revolution is inevitable, an already accomplished fact.

In the present situation, all the bourgeoisie's efforts are aimed at undoing the proletariat -- first at demobilizing it, from its own struggle then at mobilizing it for war. This is a permanent pressure exerted on the working class and it expresses itself in the advances, retreats, and detours followed by the class struggle.

The bourgeoisie is adapting its weapons for confronting the proletariat in today's conditions

1. For the bourgeoisie as well: the end of illusions.

During the 1970s, the bourgeoisie thought it was living through a repetition of the 30s, in the illusion that the same remedies could be applied mechanically to the same disease. The bourgeois states went into debt to finance the reflationary policies that were to put an end to the crisis, and above all were to delay and spread out the necessary frontal attack on the living conditions of the proletariat in the industrial centers of world capitalism. This was the essential condition for trying to strengthen the state's hold over the proletariat in the capitalist metropoles, where the exploited class is the most concentrated, and where most of the world's wealth is produced.

This economic policy had its corollary in the ideological attack on the proletariat after the first upsurge in response to the first signs of the crisis (May 68 in France, the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969, etc) is the policy that allowed the bourgeoisie to impose a retreat on the class struggle during the 70s: the "Programme Commun" in France, the Social Contract in Britain, Social Democracy in power in Northern Europe, and the Democrats in power with Carter as President in the USA. At the end of the 70s, the campaigns for ‘human rights' hid the same humanist themes that had made it possible in the 1930s to enroll the proletariat under the banner of anti-fascism. However, the failure of these policies of reflation, which were unable to soak up unemployment, and only accelerated inflation, put an end to the bourgeoisie's illusion that the proletariat could be controlled so easily. The 70s showed the bourgeoisie, firstly, that the proletariat is not as weak as it was in the 30s, and secondly, that the contradictions of capitalism have been sharpened throughout the period of decadence, to the point where the bourgeoisie today no longer has the same room for maneuver on the economic level. These two aspects are expressed on the political level, in the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Because the ‘recipes' inherited from the 1930s no longer work either on the economic level or the political level; because, in these new conditions, the old forms of mystification and control are no longer enough to prevent the revolutionary class from developing a political consciousness, the bourgeoisie is faced with an urgent need to adapt if it is to maintain it its control over the proletariat. It is com­pelled to become more intelligent, to streng­then and homogenize its system of control. But in a general context where the ruling class is getting weaker, this strengthening is essentially a strengthening of the state -- which is rather like reinforcing a castle built on sand.

2. Unity of the bourgeoisie and ideological campaigns.

The need to confront the working class has become a prime preoccupation of the bourgeoisie, which thus tends to relegate its internal tensions, on the national and international level, to the background.

Confronted with the proletarian class, whose strength lies in its ability to unite, and to develop its political consciousness, the bourgeoisie is also forced by circumstances to be more united. At the same time as the economic crisis pushes the bourgeoisie towards an exacerbation of its inter-imperialist rivalries, the fact that all factions of the bourgeoisie are confronted with the same enemy -- the working class -- also pushes them to unite.

This is not a new phenomenon; history has already given us some clear examples:

-- faced with the Paris Commune, the warring French and German armies united to crush the Parisian insurrection;

-- faced with the victorious revolution in Russia, and the threat of one in Germany, the bourgeoisie put an end to the 1st World War, and united its efforts to crush the revolutionary wave.

This unity is also made possible by decades of decadence, of the concentration of power in the hands of the state. This is a reality which tends to become permanent, and which marks the whole international balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In recent years, since the failure of the classic 1930s style methods, this has appeared in the bourgeoisie's development of an international strategy, aimed not only at the reinforcement of its repressive arsenal, but above all at a more effective use of its ideological campaigns, through a stricter control over the mass media.

The bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns have developed internationally around two main, mutually dependent, themes -- war and pacifism. These campaigns might seem paradoxical in a period when the road to war is closed, and when the war campaigns around the ideology of human rights have ended in failure. However, precisely because the proletariat is not immediately confronted with the problem of war, these are not, in fact, real war campaigns; rather, they aim at hindering the development of the proletariat's class consciousness by hiding from it the revolutionary alternative.

The bourgeoisie is trying to make use of the same reaction of fear as it used during the anti-terrorist campaigns to gain acceptance for police control. The bourgeoisie's aim, in filling the newspapers and the TV screens with the horrors of war, is not an immediate mobilization of the working class in a war, but to immobilize the class' reaction, to austerity, and to thrust it into the arms of the ‘pacifist' left, while at the same time using the illusion of non-alignment to rein­force nationalist feeling.

These campaigns around the war thus have meaning and effectiveness only to the extent that there exists a left in opposition able to profit from them by means of a corresp­onding pacifism and neutralism.

3. The left in opposition.

With the decline of its economy, the bour­geoisie can no longer simultaneously keep the left in government and make the workers think of the same left as the defender of their interests.

The left of the bourgeoisie's political app­aratus is the faction specifically destined to exercise the state's ideological control over the proletariat; it can only do so as long as the left attaches itself to the working class' political and trade union traditions. Unable to maintain the credibility of the left, and so of the state, with the left in government, the bourgeoisie has been forced to reorganize itself so as to put the left in opposition. At a time when the state must apply increasingly drastic anti-working class measures, the left must be in opposition if it is to continue to appear credible. Behind this question, the whole relationship of the proletariat to the state is at stake.

Increasingly, the crisis widens the gulf that separates the state from civil society. The working class especially is losing ill­usions in the Welfare State, and is becoming clearer as to the state's anti-proletarian role; the class is obliged to lose its demo­cratic illusions. The bourgeoisie is trying to block this process of developing consciou­sness by identifying the state with the right and maintaining the illusory opposition of a ‘good', ‘left wing' state.

Because the effects of the crisis were still felt relatively weakly in the centers of capital during the 70s, the bourgeoisie could then use electoral campaigns and the democratic mystification to drown the proletariat in the population in general. Within the left, the electoral political parties played the deter­minant role, while the trade unions' job was essentially to keep the workers on the electo­ral terrain. The new upsurge in workers' combativity at the end of the 70s was to show that the electoral lie was no longer enough. The bourgeoisie had to confront the proletariat at the very roots of its struggle. The role of the trade unions has become preponderant. The ‘radicalization' of their language, and of rank-and-file union activity, aims to hinder, demoralize, delay, and to prevent the extension and self-organization of workers' strikes. Radical unionism is becoming the spearhead of the bourgeoisie's offensive against the workers, and we have seen its effectiveness against the workers' struggles of recent years.

This general strategy of the left in opposition, concretized in the central countries (USA, West Germany, Britain, Belgium, Holland) is not contradicted by the arrival of the left in power in certain countries.

The bourgeoisie is not a unified class; it is divided, and has difficulty in overcoming its internal tensions. These tensions appear within the state, and are expressed in the flexibility of the political apparatus. The division of labor imposed by the need to put the left in opposition implies a uni­fication of the bourgeoisie behind the state, which comes up against the ideological weakness of certain sectors of the traditional right. The arrival of the left in power in France showed up this weakness, and surprised the world bourgeoisie. This slip-up on the part of the bourgeoisie, in the heart of ind­ustrial Europe considerably weakens its capacity to control the proletariat. The left in government must impose on the workers the austerity necessary for the national capital. In doing so, the left shows itself to be like the right, and so loses its power to mystify and control a fraction of the world prolet­ariat which has distinguished itself hist­orically by its political sense, and whose experience in the strikes of 1968 that marked the end of 50 years of counter-revol­ution has not been forgotten.

The arrival of the socialists in power in Greece, Sweden and Spain does not have the same importance, since the proletariat in these countries has a less central role to play. Moreover, the arrival of the left in power in these countries was not a surprise for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie prepared for this situation because it could not do otherwise. The right's chronic weak­ness in these countries -- the weight of their fascist past in Spain and Greece, the right's inexperience in Sweden, where the social-democracy has monopolized power for decades -- is a congenital weakness.

Nevertheless, the right in these countries will be on hand to be called back into government in the context of the right in power/left in opposition line-up -- a line­up that will increasingly be imposed as a necessity in the face of the developing class struggle. Only through a period of convalescence in opposition will these right-wing factions be able to restructure themselves so that they can effectively assume government office in the future.

Because any development in the class struggle has international repercussions, the bourgeoisie must close ranks at an international level. We have seen, with the class struggle in Poland, how the bour­geoisie is capable of overcoming it imperia­list divisions in order to face the proleta­riat with a united front, and to lend credi­bility to the myth of the left in opposition in its union form, through Solidarnosc. Solidarnosc's ‘life' in Poland, in the teeth of all the rigidity of the Stalinist political apparatus, was made possible by the union of all the forces of the world bourgeoisie against the workers.

The immediate aim of the bourgeoisie's present offensive is not to enroll the working class --because this is not possible today -- but to confront it and block the development of its unity, to fragment and demoralize it. The impact of such an offensive cannot be judged in the short term. However, we can already get an idea of its effectiveness from the retreat in the class struggle in 1981-82, concretized by the defeat in Poland, which itself increased the retreat and the confusion of the world proletariat.

However, because the world proletariat, and especially the proletariat in Western Europe, is not enrolled for war, its combative potential is still fundamentally intact. This is true despite the partial defeat in Poland, and despite ails the illusions which still weigh on the class. Because it compels the class to struggle, to abandon these illusions, the cap­italist crisis is the best ally of the prolet­ariat.

"What matters, is not what any particular pro­letarian thinks, or even the proletariat as a whole at a given moment in its history, but what it is historically obliged to do, in conformity with its being". (Marx, The Holy Family)

What perspectives?

Up to now, the central fraction of the prolet­ariat in the industrialized countries has been relatively lightly attacked by the rigors of austerity, compared to its class brothers in the peripheral countries. Cap­italism's plunge into the crisis forces the bourgeoisie into an ever more severe attack on the living conditions of the proletariat in the world's greatest industrial concen­tration -- Western Europe.

Given the essential subjective precondition, the non-defeat of the proletariat and the fact that its combative potential remains intact, the accelerated deepening of the crisis is the necessary objective precondition for the opening of a revolutionary period. This crisis pushes the proletariat to generalize its strikes and its consciousness, and to put forward in practice the revolutionary perspective.

1. The question of unemployment and the generalization of the struggle.

It is now the question of unemployment which best concretizes the meaning of the crisis for the working class in the developed countries: 32 million unemployed in the OECD, ie the equivalent of the active popu­lations of Germany, Holland and Belgium put together. Nor is there any improvement in sight; the worse of the crisis is still to come.

At first, the bourgeoisie was able to use the slow growth of unemployment to divide the workers. ‘Accept redundancies to save the business'; the description of the unem­ployed as privileged scroungers; ‘throw out the immigrants to save jobs': all these lies will be smashed to pieces by the accelerated development of unemployment.

Up to now, the bourgeoisie has been able to limit the impact of unemployment on working class combativity, firstly by paying unempl­oyment benefits, and then by developing the illusion that unemployment was a necessary sacrifice to put an end to the crisis. This situation must come to an end with the inexor­able deepening of the crisis, as the bourgeoisie is forced into ever heavier attacks on the living conditions of the unemployed, in common with the rest of the proletariat.

Unemployment affects the whole proletariat; irrespective of national, ethnic, or corpor­atist divisions, unemployment shows the workers what threatens them all, and so lays the base for the unity of the working class.

The problem of unemployment, in all the industrialized countries, is posed at an international level; it shows that the situation is the same everywhere, no matter what lies each national bourgeoisie uses.

The inevitable development of unemployment must push the proletariat to struggle. The workers are faced with the concrete choice between struggle and the slow death of unemployed misery. The queues of unemployed at the soup kitchen show unsparingly what capital is preparing for all of us. The proletarians will have to struggle, because their survival is at stake.

All the bourgeoisie's lies are wearing thin under the pressure of the crisis and the workers' resistance. The development of the crisis must weaken the bourgeoisie and strengthen the proletariat in the historic struggle that opposes them. The bourgeoisie's ability to face up to the proletariat is determined by the dynamic of this struggle.

Throughout the 70s, one could say that the workers showed more combativity than a real consciousness of their goals and the means of to attain them. This phenomenon was shown very clearly in Poland where the enormous combativity of the proletariat -- revealed in the massive character of its struggle and its ability to face up to the threat of repression -- came up against the most classic democratic illusions -- pluralism, unionism, nationalism.

It was these illusions that ended up exhausting the dynamic of the mass strike, of extension and self-organization.

The first months of the mass strike in Poland lit up the world scene with the force and rapidity of its dynamic. While this dynamic demonstrated the proletariat's vitality, it was also made possible by the local weakness of the bourgeoisie. This weakness is linked to specific aspects of the Eastern bloc coun­tries, and is expressed in the rigidity of the political apparatus, which leaves little room for the opposition forces needed to mystify the proletariat. The bourgeoisie in the Russian bloc could only overcome this chronic weakness in order to confront the class struggle in Poland thanks to the aid of the world bourgeoisie, economic as much as political, which made it possible to ‘breath life' into the Solidarnosc variety of the rank-and-file unionist illusion.

In the same way, the development of the class struggle in France in May 68 was facilitated by the unpreparedness of a bourgeoisie which still thought the working class was as passive as it had known it over the previous 40 years.

Today, the proletariat of Western Europe is in a different situation; 15 years of economic crisis and class struggle have put the bour­geoisie on its guard. It has reorganized and adapted its political apparatus to confront the foreseeable development of the class struggle. The West European proletariat must confront the most experienced faction of the world bourgeoisie, the most perfected mystif­ications, and the most sophisticated apparatus of social control, of which the left in opposition trick is one of the most important elements.

2. Generalization of class consciousness and the union hurdle.

Since the resurgence of the class struggle in 1968, all the working class' most significant combats have gone beyond, to a greater or lesser extent, the union apparatus.

The unions are the spearhead of the ruling class apparatus of control over the working class. In every workplace, the unions over­see the workers on behalf of the state, in order to prevent the struggle from starting if possible, and to derail it if not. They are the bourgeoisie's forward troops on the front of the class struggle.

In 1917, the question of war played a central role in the development of the proletariat's consciousness; nonetheless, the unions question came to the forefront as soon as it was a matter of extending the revolution to Western Europe.

Today, with the road to war closed, the union question is central to the development of the proletariat's overall consciousness, because the unions are the first obstacle the workers confront at every point in their struggle.

No struggle can go beyond the national framework without going beyond the union apparatus and developing into a mass strike. The national question and the union question are intimately linked. The proletariat in Poland was unable to answer the question it posed, of the struggle's international generalization, because this question is linked to the ability to overcome the illusions of unionism, the left, and democracy. The working class in Poland could not answer this question alone, due to its specific situation and experience.

The proletariat of Western Europe, by contrast, because it is not in same isolated position, because it has accumulated decades of exper­ience in confronting unions and the left, because today more than ever it is pushed to struggle by the crisis, because its combative potential remains intact, because it is not mobilized for war, finds itself in more favorable conditions than it has ever known for clarifying the real nature of the unions, the left and democracy.

The workers of Western Europe are the best placed to sweep away the obstacles placed before them and their class brothers in the rest of the planet -- obstacles aimed at preventing them from putting forward a revolutionary perspective in their struggles.

The proletariat of Western Europe is not in the same situation as in May 68, nor in that of Poland 1980. The dynamic of the mass strike cannot get under way without a movement that goes beyond the union apparatus; and this is made more difficult by the left in opposition and by rank-and-file unionism.  In the struggle itself, the proletariat will have to learn the difficult lesson. This conscious­ness cannot be acquired at once, in one struggle; the road towards generalization will be marked by advances and retreats, and so also by moments of confusion, a sign that the class is breaking with its illusions.

However, the calm of these last two years is not due uniquely to the bourgeoisie's political offensive; it is also an inherent product of the difficulties in the process of development of proletarian conscious­ness. Up to now, since the resurgence of 1968, the consciousness that accompanied the combat­ivity of the proletariat has been marked by con­fusions about the possibility of finding a way out of the crisis. These illusions cannot survive. While the whole activity of the bourgeoisie seeks to isolate struggles under union control in order to lead them into a dead end, all the proletariat's experience of its defeats, where these isolated strikes have won nothing, pushes it increasingly to take on the political aspects contained in the economic basis of its struggles. Because the problem is general, the proletariat is pushed to generalize its struggles and its consciousness.

The proletariat's ability to develop the mass strike and to put forward the revolutionary perspective in practice depends on its ability to clarify these questions, by confronting the trade unions and developing its own self-organization.

The revolutionary perspective is not just a theoretical, but is above all a practical question. In May 1968, the striking workers posed the question of revolution -- though obviously without being able to answer it in practice -- and so gave a perspective for the whole period to come. In the years that followed, the bourgeoisie did everything it could to hide the necessity, and above all the possibility, of the revolution.

The world working class' consciousness that the communist revolution is not only necessary, but above all possible, depends on the European proletariat's ability to struggle, and to show concretely that there is an alternative to capitalist barbarism.

3. The importance of the proletariat in Western Europe.

It was the crushing of the German proletariat that stopped the extension of the Russian revolution; it was the bourgeoisie's control over the European proletariat which made World War II possible; it was the reawakening of the class struggle in Europe which marked the end of the period of counter-revolution; it was the retreat of the European proletariat before the mystification of the left in power that deter­mined the reflux of the 1970s; it was the exhaustion of this mystification that made possible the resurgence of the class struggle at the end the 70s; and it is the bourgeoisie's counter-offensive behind the left in opposition that is at the origin of the reflux of 1981-82.

Today more than ever, the role of the western European proletariat is crucial -- both on the level of the objective conditions within which its struggle develops (the obvious nature of the crisis as a crisis of over­production which makes the revolution possible) and on the level of subjective conditions (its experience of the most sophisticated bourgeois mystifications).

The revolutionary perspective, the very future of humanity, depends on the coming struggles of the western European proleta­riat, on its capacity to draw the lessons from its defeats and its victories.

Rosa Luxemburg said: "The proletariat is the first class that comes to power after a series of defeats".

The defeat of the workers in Poland was one of those defeats that announce the future perspectives of the class struggle. It showed the strength of the enemy and led to a disorientation of the world proletariat. Nevertheless, the struggles that preceded it served to clarify for the whole world prol­etariat the nature of the Eastern bloc countries, to unmask the mystifications of Stalinism.

On a much larger scale, the struggle of the proletariat in Western Europe will provide a clarification for the entire world prolet­ariat; it alone can give a direction, a per­spective, a unity to all the struggles of the working class faced with the economic crisis, with war, with the barbarity of capital in all its forms.

Because the terrain for the development of struggles and of class consciousness is today an inexorable economic crisis and not an imp­erialist war; because the proletariat has not been through any historic defeats, the con­ditions have never been so favorable for the emergence of a revolutionary perspective.

More than ever, the future belongs to the proletariat, and, in this future, the workers at the heart of the capitalist world, in old Europe, have a vital role to play.

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[1] In Germany, the Nazi state gained a ‘popular' image mainly by developing the war economy, which enable it to absorb a considerable amount of unemployment.

1. At the beginning of the ‘80s we analyzed the new decade as the ‘years of truth' in which the convulsions and open bankruptcy of the cap­italist mode of production would reveal in all its clarity the historical alternative: commun­ist revolution or generalized imperialist war. At the end of the first third of this period, we can say that this analysis has been fully confirmed: never, since the 1930s, has it been so clear that the capitalist economy is in a total impasse; never since the last world war has the bourgeoisie set in motion such huge military arsenals, so much effort towards the production of the means of destruction; never since the 1920s has the proletariat fought battles on the scale of those which shook Poland and the whole ruling class in 1980-81. However, all this is just the beginning. In particular, although the bourgeoisie is apparently consol­ing itself by talking about the ‘economic recovery', they have a hard time masking the fact that the worst of the crisis is still ahead of us. Similarly, the world-wide retreat in the workers' struggle following the tremendous fight in Poland is only a pause before enormous class confrontations that will involve the decisive detachments of the world proletariat, those of the industrial metropoles and of western Europe in particular. This is what this resolution will attempt to show.

2. The recession which marked the beginning of the ‘80s has shown itself to be "the longest and deepest" of the post-war period (Third Congress of the ICC, 1979). In the main advanced count­ries, the heart of world capitalism, this rec­ession has been characterized by:

-- a brutal fall in industrial production (-4.5% in the seven most important countries of the OECD in 1982, after a stagnation in 1981);

-- a massive underutilization of the productive forces, both industrial potential (nearly a third unused in the US and Canada in 1982) and labor power (32 million unemployed in the OECD countries, ie 10% of the working population);

-- a very sharp drop in productive investment (-14% in 1982 in the US for example) ;

-- a regression in world trade (-1% in 1981, -2% in 1982).

All these elements show that the crisis capit­alism is suffering from has its roots in the saturation of markets on a world scale in the overproduction of commodities in relation to solvent demand.

This inability to find outlets for its commod­ities has its repercussions on what constitutes the actual objective of capitalist production: profit. Thus, in the main world powers, the annual rise in industrial profits (before tax) fell by 90 billion dollars (-35%) between ‘80 and ‘82 while a number of basic sectors, like steel and automobiles, were running at a loss. Thus one of the classic theses of marxism is confirmed: from being a mere tendency, the fall in the rate of profit becomes effective when the markets are saturated.

3. The crisis of capitalism has its sources in the industrial metropoles. However, and for the same reason, it is a world-wide crisis: no country can escape from it. The countries at the periphery, in particular, suffer from it in the most extreme forms. The decadence of the capitalist mode of production has made it impossible for these countries to go through a real indust­rial development and to catch up with the most advanced countries, so that the open crisis of the system puts them in the front ranks of its victims. In fact, in the early phases of the crisis, the most powerful economies were able to push an important part of the effects of the crisis onto the weaker ones. Today, the world crisis is leading to a new and tragic aggrava­tion of the endemic afflictions the third world countries suffer from: huge masses of workless stuck in shanty towns, the development of fam­ines and epidemics. Those third world countries that were pointed to as examples of ‘miraculous' growth, like Brazil and Mexico, provide the proof that there is no exception to the rule: their efforts to acquire a modern industrial apparatus in a world where even the strongest powers are now experiencing the full rigors of the crisis has led them to bankruptcy, into an astronomical accumulation of debts which every­one knows cannot be repaid and which force them, under the whip of the IMF, to adopt draconian austerity measures which plunge their popula­tions into even greater poverty.

The list of insolvent countries is swelled by the so-called ‘socialist' ones. The backward, fragile economies of these countries are now being hit head-on by the world crisis, a fact expressed by their permanent and growing inab­ility to reach the objectives laid down in their plans, even though they are less and less ambitious, and also by the development of an increasingly catastrophic scarcity which puts paid both to the Stalinist and Trotskyist lies about their ‘socialist' character and to the ramblings of certain proletarian currents about their capacity to ‘escape' the law of value.

4. The recent convulsions of the world econ­omy, notably the regular threats of an explos­ion of the whole international financial edif­ice, have led a number of economists to compare the present situation to 1929 and the 1930s, usually concluding that the present crisis is less grave than the one 50 years ago. It's up to revolutionaries, to marxists, to show both what the two crises have in common as well as their differences, to understand the true grav­ity of the present situation and the perspect­ives which flow from it.

The common factor in the two crises is that they constitute the acute phase of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production which entered into its decadent period around the time of the First World War. They result from an exhaustion of the stimulant provided by the reconstruction which followed both imperial­ist world wars. They are the brutal manifesta­tion of the world-wide saturation of the mar­ket that results from the absorption or destruc­tion, more or less completed by the beginning of this century, of the extra-capitalist sec­tors which, since capitalism first appeared, were the soil for its expansion.

However, if the basis of these two crises is the same, they differ both in form and rhythm because of the different characteristics of capitalism today and capitalism 50 years ago.

The crisis of 1929 broke out in a capitalism which in many respects was still living accord­ing to the rules it inherited from the period of full prosperity in the 19th Century. In part­icular, the statification of the economy which was introduced with much ado during the First World War to a large extent gave way to the old ‘laisser faire'. Similarly, the imperialist blocs which were constituted during this war significantly relaxed their grip, in particular with the illusion that this had been the ‘war to end war'. Because of this, hardly had the reconstruction finished, when the re-emergence of the contradictions of capitalism resulted in a brutal collapse. The banks and the firms re­acted in a dispersed way, which only aggravated the ‘house of cards' effect of the financial crash. And when the states intervened, it was also in a dispersed manner on the international scene, through a quasi-total closing of front­iers and savage devaluations.

Capitalism today is very different from the cap­italism of 1929. The state capitalism which went through a major leap in the ‘30s in the form of Stalinism, fascism and Keynesian policies, has since that time only continued to strengthen its grip on the economy and on society in gen­eral. Also, while the imperialist blocs were realigned at the end of the last war, their existence and power were in no way called into question. On the contrary: while they are fund­amentally based on a military alliance around the two dominant nations, they have more and more extended their prerogatives into the econ­omic sphere (COMECON in the east, IMF, OECD etc in the west). For these reasons, it was not private enterprises which individually confront­ed the aggravation of economic contradictions that marked the end of the post-war reconstruc­tion in the mid-60s; it was nation states. And the states did not carry out their policies in a dispersed manner but in agreement with the orientations decided at the level of the blocs. This does not mean that the commercial rival­ries between the different nations within each bloc have disappeared. On the contrary: the growing saturation of the market can only shar­pen them and protectionist tendencies, however much they are exploited in nationalist cam­paigns, are nonetheless real. However, the sit­uation demands that each bloc prevents these rivalries and protectionist tendencies from hav­ing a free rein, because otherwise they would run the risk of bringing about the immediate collapse of the world economy.

5. The development of state capitalism and the elaboration of economic policies at the level of the blocs also make a financial crash like that of 1929 very improbable. Although the development of the crisis since the ‘60s has gone through sudden spurts (1967, ‘70-71, ‘74-75, 80-82), capitalism has since the ‘30s learned how to control the overall pace of the crisis, to avoid a brutal collapse. This does not mean that the situation today is less grave than in 1929. On the contrary: it is in fact much more grave. The measures that allowed a certain re­covery in the world economy in the mid-‘30s have already been massively deployed since the end of World War II and were further strength­ened during the ‘70s. Huge armament expendit­ures, Keynesian policies of public works and ‘stimulating demand' through budget deficits and state debts, which were momentarily poss­ible after 1929 at a time when there had been a period of deflation and the state treasuries were not completely exhausted, are now quite incapable of giving rise to any kind of revival, after decades of inflation resulting from in­tensive armaments programs and the abuse of neo-Keynesian drugs. These drugs also include the astronomical piling up of debts. The world economy is now resting this pile ($750 billion owed by the third world should not hide the $5000 billion debt of the US economy alone, not to mention other advanced countries) and this can only lead to the death of the patient through an apocalyptic surge of the inflation­ary spiral and the explosion of the internat­ional financial system. In particular, the development of military expenditure, which in the ‘30s momentarily contributed to a revival, is now clearly showing itself to be a factor that aggravates the crisis even more. The ‘mon­etarist' policies orchestrated by Reagan and now followed by all the leaders of the advanced countries are a recognition of the failure of neo-Keynesian policies and allow the underlying causes of the crisis to come to the surface: generalized overproduction and its inevitable consequences -- the fall in production, the elimination of surplus capital, unemployment for tens of millions of workers, massive dec­line in the living standards of the whole prol­etariat.

Because of this, the so-called ‘recovery' we have heard so much about in recent months won't last long. The timid way it has expressed itself, and the limited number of countries benefitting from it (USA and UK) express the fact that it is now out of the question that capitalism should repeat the operation of ‘76-78 when .mass­ive loans to the third world allowed production in the advanced countries to pick up somewhat. One of the indices of the continued aggravation of the crisis is the fact that the periods of recession are getting deeper and longer, whereas moments of upturn are getting shorter and more insignificant.

6. The inexorable aggravation of the crisis thus confirms that we have indeed entered the ‘years of truth', a period that will unmask the real nature of the contradictions of the capit­alist mode of production. These years of truth will not only manifest themselves on the econ­omic level but also and above all at the level of what is at stake for the whole of society, of the historic alternative already announced by the Communist International: war or revol­ution. Either the proletarian response to the crisis, the development of its struggle leading to the revolution, or the bourgeois outcome of the crisis: a generalized imperialist holocaust.

For its part, the bourgeoisie is pursuing and will continue to pursue its military prepara­tions as long as its class rule is not directly threatened. But it is important to show what it is that today and in the coming period funda­mentally determines the policies of the bourg­eoisie: preparations for war or preparations for a decisive confrontation with the working class. Here it is important to distinguish, when look­ing at the warlike gesticulations of the govern­ments, what directly serves to aggravate imper­ialist conflicts from what is above all part of a global policy against the proletariat.

7. In the recent period, the aggravation of imperialist tensions manifested itself in the first place through a new advance by the US bloc in one of the crucial zones of the conflict, the Middle East. The ‘Peace in Galilee' operation carried out by Israel, the disciplining of the PLO and the expulsion of its troops from Lebanon the installation of western expeditionary forces in that country constitute a new phase towards the complete liquidation of Russia's presence in this region. This is what explains the desp­erate attempt of the latter to maintain a last foothold through the intensive armament of Syria. The attempt to impose a ‘Pax Americana' in the Middle East is complemented by the grad­ual disciplining of Iran and the strengthening of Iraq's integration into the western bloc, to the extent that the delivery of weapons to these two countries to feed the war in the Gulf makes them more dependent on the western world. The liquidation of the Stalinist party in Iran (Tudeh) illustrates that these maneuvers are more and more reducing Russia's hopes that the invasion of Afghanistan would one day enable it to gain access to the ‘hot seas'.

The other expression of the aggravation of imp­erialist tensions is the new step taken by all the main countries, and notably the USA, in re­inforcing armaments, particularly their deployment in Europe, the essential theatre of a third world war - in the form of Pershing II and cruise missiles. This latter operation is a good confirmation, if it was ever really in doubt, of the absolute loyalty of the western European countries to the American alliance.

8. Quite different is the significance that we should attribute to all the noise we've heard recently over the Falklands and Central America. In the first case, this was an inter­nal operation of the western bloc aimed above all at disorientating the working class of the advanced countries (notably in Britain) through a deafening ideological campaign, and second­arily at serving as a live test of the most mod­ern armaments. In the second case, the presence of Cuban advisors and Russian weapons in Nic­aragua, or this country's support for the guerrillas in El Salvador, in no way threatens the USA with the appearance of a new Cuba on its frontiers. Reagan's campaigns on this question, and the opposition to them by the ‘pacifists' and ‘doves' of the American bourg­eoisie are all part of a concerted policy by all sectors of the ruling class in the west, aimed at diverting the proletariat from its class struggle.

Similarly, the huge pacifist campaigns which, with some success, have been organized in most western countries don't have the same role as those of the ‘30s which were a direct prepara­tion for the Second World War. Here again, the main objective of these campaigns, which are based on a real disquiet about the preparations for war, is to disorientate the working class and to fragment its inevitable reactions to the deepening crisis and its declining living stan­dards. These campaigns are part of the division of labor, now operating more and more clearly on a world scale, between the ‘right' sectors of the bourgeoisie, whose task is to carry out from government harder and harder austerity measures against the working class, and the ‘left' sectors whose function is to sabotage the workers' struggles.

9. This division of labor between sectors of the bourgeoisie, the use of the ‘left in oppos­ition' card which the ICC has pointed to since 1979 has been further confirmed in recent months with the arrival of the Christian Democrats in the government of Germany and the crushing vic­tory of the Tories in the British election, to the detriment of a Labor Party which ‘committed suicide' on the electoral level through its ‘ex­tremism' and ‘pacifism' -- a fact seen even by bourgeois observers -- with the aim of streng­thening control over the working class. This perspective is in no way negated by the fact that the forces of the left have come to power in a number of countries recently -- France, Sweden, Greece, Spain and Portugal. In all these cases, this has not been an expression of the strength of the bourgeoisie, but of weakness. In the case of the last three countries, it was basically the expression of the difficulty the ruling class has in constituting solid right wing forces following a long period of fascist or military rule. In the case of Sweden, it's the result of the long hegemony of social demo­cracy which did not allow the forces of the right to accustom themselves to exercising power. As for France, it is a very striking illustration, a contrary, of the left in opposition perspective. Whereas in the other countries, the needed arrival of the left in power was consciously carried out by the bourg­eoisie, Mitterand's victory in ‘81 was an ‘acc­ident', something that is being confirmed day by day through his government's difficulties in carrying out coherent policies and through the preparations of the CP and the left of the SP to go into opposition. While in the majority of the advanced countries of the west (USA, West Germany, UK, Belgium, Holland, Italy), the com­ing to power or maintenance in power of the right leaves the left and the unions with their hands free to sabotage workers' struggles from the inside, notably through a radicalization of their language, the ‘strained' presence of the left in power in France (ie the second power in western Europe) clearly reveals the bourgeois nature of the so-called ‘workers' parties' and thus represents a weakness for the bourgeoisie, not only in that country, but on a world scale.

10. The ‘left in opposition' card which the bourgeoisie is playing all over the west is not limited to this part of the world. It was used and continues to be used in the eastern bloc, in Poland, with the anti-working class activit­ies of the ‘independent' union, Solidarnosc. Although the congenital fragility and rigidity of the Stalinist regimes has not allowed a ‘democratic', western-style facade to be set up in these countries, or even the preservation of the legal existence of Solidarnosc for any longer than was strictly demanded by the combativity of the working class, the basic mech­anisms and effectiveness of the ‘left in opposition' showed themselves to be comparable to those in the west, not only before December 1981, but afterwards as well. Before this date, thanks to its apparently intransigent opposition to the authorities, Solidarnosc, supported by the western bourgeoisie and in the context of an offensive by the whole ruling class, was an essential instrument in sabotaging the struggle and opening the door to military/police repress­ion. But its function did not disappear when it was made illegal. In fact, the persecution of its leaders, by conferring on them a martyr's halo, has facilitated the organization in its work of disorienting the working class, just as Thatcher's attacks on the unions in Britain only strengthen their anti-working class effic­iency. In the final analysis, the ‘left in clandestinity' is only an extreme form of the ‘left in opposition'.

11. The defeat of the world proletariat in Poland, and the general retreat of 1981-82 which allowed this defeat to happen, must there­fore largely be attributed to the policy of the left in opposition, both in the east and the west. There is no doubt that there has been a retreat. Whereas the years ‘78-80 were marked by a world-wide resurgence of workers' strikes (strikes of the Rotterdam dockers, steelworkers in Britain, metal workers in Germany and Brazil, the clashes at Longwy-Denain in France, the mass strikes in Poland), the years ‘81 and ‘82 have seen a clear reflux in the struggle. This phen­omenon is particularly evident in the most ‘classic' of capitalist countries, Britain, where 1981 saw the lowest number of strike days since the last war, whereas in 1979 they had reached their highest quantitative level since 1926 (the year of the General Strike) with 29 million strike days. Thus, the setting-up of martial law in Poland and the violent repress­ion which descended on the workers of this country in no way came like bolt out of the blue. The most advanced point of the workers' defeat after the huge battles of summer ‘80, the December ‘81 ‘coup de force', was part of a defeat for the whole proletariat.

The proletariat suffered this defeat from the moment that capitalism, through concerted action and particularly through its left forces, managed to isolate the Polish workers from the rest of their class, to imprison them ideolog­ically within the frontiers of the bloc (the ‘socialist' countries of the east) and nation (Poland is a Polish affair); from the moment it succeeded in turning the workers of other countries into spectators (troubled certainly, but passive) and in diverting them from the only form that class solidarity can take: the generalization of their struggles in all countries. They managed this by holding up a caricature of solidarity: sentimental demonstrations, human­ist petitions, and Christian charity with its Christmas parcels. To the extent that it doesn't provide an adequate response to the demands of the period, the non-generalization of the work­ers' struggle was in itself a defeat.

12. Thus, as we already said in 1981, one of the essential lessons of the class confronta­tions in Poland is the necessity for the prol­etariat, faced with the holy alliance of the bourgeoisie of all countries, to generalize its struggles on a world scale, with a perspective of a revolutionary attack on the capitalist system.

The other major lesson of these battles and their defeat is that this world-wide generalization of struggles can only begin from the countries that constitute the economic heart of capitalism. That is, the advanced countries of the west and, among these, those in which the working class has the oldest and most complete experience: Western Europe. The world bourgeoisie was able to create a ‘cordon sanitaire' around Poland because it was part of a backward bloc, where the counter-revolution weighs heaviest, and where the proletariat has not been directly confronted with decades of democratic and union mystifications. These conditions explain why the proletariat there was able to straight away find the formidable weapon of the mass strike; they also explain why it was then able to be imprisoned in unionist, democratic and nation­alist mystifications. In the advanced countries of the west, and notably in Western Europe, the proletariat will only be able to fully deploy the mass strike after a whole series of str­uggles, of violent explosions, of advances and retreats, during the course of which it will progressively unmask all the lies of the left in opposition, of unionism and rank and filism. But then its struggle will really show the way to the workers of all countries, opening the door to the world-wide generalization of work­ers' struggles and thus to the revolutionary confrontation with the bourgeois order.

If the decisive act of the revolution will be played out when the working class has dealt with the two military giants of east and west, its first act will necessarily be played out in the historic heart of capitalism and of the proletariat: Western Europe.

13. Another lesson of the events in Poland is that the working class will remain at the mercy of defeats, of tragic ones, as long as it has not overthrown capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg said, "the revolution is the sole form of ‘war' whose final victory can be prepared by a series of defeats'", but the proletariat, and partic­ularly its revolutionary organizations, must guard against a series of partial defeats lead­ing to a complete defeat, to the counter-revol­ution. Some communist elements have said that this was already the case with the defeat in Poland and the present stagnation of struggles on a world level. For our part, we affirm the opposite. Since the proletarian resurgence of 1968, we have said that the historic course was not towards generalized imperialist war but to­wards class confrontations. This does not mean that the course cannot be reversed.

The existence of a course towards war, like in the ‘30s, means that the proletariat has suffered a decisive defeat that prevents it from opposing the bourgeois outcome of the crisis. The existence of a course towards class con­frontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butch­ery; first, it must confront and beat the work­ing class. But this does not prejudge the out­come of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a ‘course towards class confrontations' rather than a ‘course towards revolution'.

Whatever the seriousness of the defeat the work­ing class has been through in the last few years, it does not call the historic course into question, in that:

-- the decisive battalions of the world prolet­ariat have not been in the front line of the confrontation;

-- the crisis which is now hitting the metropoles of capitalism with full force will com­pel the workers of these metropoles to bring out the reserves of combativity which have not yet been unleashed in a decisive manner.

Thus, by provoking an increasingly brutal, simultaneous and universal degradation of the living conditions of the proletariat, in part­icular through the massive intensification of unemployment in the main industrial centers, the crisis shows itself to be the best ally of the world proletariat. It is developing, to a degree unprecedented in history, the objective and subjective conditions for the internationalization of struggles, for the development of a revolutionary consciousness. Because there is no perspective today of even a temporary restabilisation of the capitalist economy (in contr­ast to the ‘30s when the recovery allowed the bourgeoisie to put the finishing touches on an already beaten proletariat), the perspective is still one of class confrontations.

The greatest battles of the working class are yet to come.

This editorial gives the broad outlines of our analysis of the events of summer ‘83, at the time of appearance of this issue of the Inter­national Review which is devoted to the reports and resolutions of the 5th Congress of the ICC. These events illustrate the orientations of the Congress texts with regard to the threat of war and the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie.

The summer of 1983 has been marked by the hotting-up of inter-imperialist tensions on a world scale:

-- the Chad conflict in the heart of Africa, which has been going on for years, has gone onto a higher level owing to the determined interven­tion of the armed forces of the western bloc, most notably of France;

-- the Lebanon conflict, after several months of relative calm, has savagely caught fire again and Beirut is once more under a hail of bombs;

-- finally, the destruction of the South Korean Boeing 747 by Russian fighters has demonstrated the hypocrisy of the American bloc which does not hesitate to use civil passengers as hostages in a sinister game of espionage, while the USSR has shown that it had no hesit­ation in killing them for the sacrosanct defense of national territory and military secrets.

There has been an intensive propaganda campaign around these events, amplified by all the media, with the aim of dulling consciousness and kind­ling fears of a third world war. All this prop­aganda tries to show that the adversary is the real aggressor, the true barbarian and war­monger, and the western bloc is a past-master in this art: if troops intervene in Chad, it's a response to the aggression by that ‘crazed meg­alomaniac' Khadafy, the ally of the Russians; if American, French, Italian and British troops are stationed in Beirut, it's to ‘protect' the freedom and independence of the Lebanon from Syrian imperialism, supported by Russia, etc. These are all alibis which hide the real point: it's the western bloc which is on the offensive and which is demonstrating its superiority by attempting to rid Africa and the Middle East of the last vestiges of eastern bloc influence.

Precisely at a time when the great powers are negotiating about Euro-missiles and armaments in general, all in the name of peace (Madrid, Gen­eva, etc), there has not been such an intense war effort since the Second World War. Increas­ingly sophisticated and murderous armaments are being designed, produced in huge quantities and deployed all over the world. To use this weapons technology the great powers are more and more being led to intervene directly in military oper­ations: the USSR in Afghanistan, France in Chad, France plus the USA, Italy and Britain in the Lebanon, etc -- not to mention the numerous strategic military bases being set up and maintained        over the globe.

The so-called divergences within the American bloc -- between France and the USA, for example -- are nothing but a smokescreen of propaganda which seeks to mask the real unity, the real division of labor, between these allies and the Russian bloc. This shows that if the speeches are different -- Reagan on the right, Mitterand on the left -- the aims and results are the same: militarism and imperialism in defense of the same camp.

Faced with this pressure, Russia is in a position of weakness -- on the economic, military and pol­itical levels. Unable to really support its allies on the periphery (Libya, Syria, Angola, etc), saddled with a weapons technology which is falling behind that of the west, bogged down in the Afghanistan conflict, the eastern bloc also finds that its capacity for military mobilization is weakened by its difficulties in contr­olling the proletariat -- as the 1980-81 strikes in Poland showed.

If the western bloc is able to take advantage of this situation, it's because it has so far been able to muzzle the class struggle in the main industrialized countries, through an intensive utilization of democratic and trade union mystif­ications, and through relentless campaigns about war (Falklands, E1 Salvador, middle East) which have disorientated the working class and rein­forced its passivity. The different conflicts with their toll of massacres should remind the proletariat of its historic responsibilities. Pinned down by the crisis, the world bourgeoisie is intensifying its military preparations for war. The only obstacle it encounters on this road is the class struggle of the proletariat. All the diplomatic verbiage about peace is pure propaganda: all wars are waged in the name of peace. There is no peace in capitalism. Only the communist revolution, by doing away with capital, can do away with war and the threat of war.

However, if the present passivity of the world proletariat, especially in its main concentrations in Europe, is permitting the accentua­tion of inter-imperialist tensions, the road to a third world war is not open. The working class is passive, but it is not yet mobilized and it has not been crushed. The bourgeoisie in all countries is well aware of this, and the western bloc is proceeding cautiously, only using pro­fessional troops, and developing a whole propaganda campaign which doesn't aim at an immediate and direct mobilization, but which seeks -- by stirring up fear of war -- to demoralize the working class and prevent it from struggling.

At a time when the bourgeoisie is more and more obviously on the war path, when military budgets are devouring social spending, when unemployment is hitting millions of workers, when the miser­ies imposed by austerity are becoming more and more dramatic, a response by the western prolet­ariat would be a key factor in opening up a pers­pective for the struggles of the world proletariat.

The future of humanity -- war or revolution -- depends on the ability of the main fractions of the working class to throw off the dead weight of the ideology of resignation which bourgeois propaganda seeks to sustain.