At its Fifth Congress, the ICC made an appeal to the proletarian political milieu (International Review no. 35) to face up to its respons­ibilities in the context of today's serious world situation. The destructive contradic­tions of the capitalist system, exacerbated by the world crisis, reveal all the more starkly the alternative facing the working class: war or revolution. "But instead of serving as a reference point, a beacon in the emerging social storms, the political vanguard of the proletar­iat frequently finds itself buffeted and shaken by events ... incapable of overcoming its dis­persion and divisions which are an inheritance of the counter-revolution."

The ICC Address does not pretend to offer any miracle solutions to this problem. We essentially wanted to insist on our conviction that intervention in struggles and above all, the preparation for future decisive encounters "can­not be carried out by the mere efforts of each group taken individually. It is a question of establishing a conscious cooperation between all organizations, not in order to carry out hasty and artificial regroupments but to develop a will, an approach, which centers attention on a systematic work of fraternal debate and confrontation between proletarian political forces."

We clearly stated in the Address: "The time has not yet come for calling for new conferences of communist groups". The lessons of the breakdown of the previous cycle of International Confer­ences (1977-80) must first be drawn and the deb­ate seriously taken up again on questions still left unclarified. This is particularly true of the question which provoked the dislocation of the Conferences: the role, the function, of the future party of the proletariat.

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In this article we intend to answer the differ­ent letters and proposals we received from the groups which responded to our Address. The very fact that various organizations felt the need to answer and explain their positions is, in itself, a positive sign. At least it can be said that the political organizations of the proletariat are not deaf and dumb.

But although revolutionaries are by nature opti­mistic, we could not help getting the distinct impression that the answers to the Address were often less the result of a profound conviction than a knee-jerk reflex: how to save face by answering while in fact washing one's hands of the real problems of the milieu by not going to the heart of the issues. Reading between the lines, one sees that groups continue to think: if other organizations are in difficulty, all the better! It gets rid of the competition! Each group builds ‘its' party and defends ‘its' territory. Is the confrontation of political positions a necessity? ‘Sure', each group writes. But in fact this answer is no more than a half-hearted ‘why not?'. The basic needs of the class are not understood and thus, this activity is not seen as a vital necessity.

The desire to think, much less act, collectively only appears when some particular event rouses the milieu from its sectarian torpor, but it is far from being a constant concern, a systematic process. ‘Intervention in the class' and ‘int­ervention in the political milieu of the class' are still being played off against each other. The latter is still seen as an afterthought if not an outright sterile exercise. But if poli­tical groups were really convinced:

-- that class consciousness cannot come from out­side the working class itself and that it is not injected into the class as the Leninist position in What is to be Done? Claimed;

-- that the political milieu of the proletariat exists for a purpose: so that the goals and means of the class can be expressed and clarified;

all groups would understand in practice and not just in words that the debates in the milieu are the reflection of the needs of the class. They would see that discussions are not superfluous and that the themes of debate are not just fortuitous choices. They would see that the vital process of clarification within the international working class as a whole must be expressed by a movement towards clarification in its political milieu. It is futile to just keep a scorecard of groups disappearing or splitting as though the milieu were a boxing ring. Without a thorough clarification in the milieu, any errors will simply be perpetuated and this would inevitably be detrimental to the possibility of a victorious revolution.

Today, most groups recognize that a major dec­antation is taking place in the political mil­ieu; they can hardly do otherwise. But they are still basically passive in this situation. There is no understanding of the urgency invol­ved in the need for active, conscious clarifica­tion without which this dislocation will merely be a dead loss. They do not recognize that sectarianism and fear of debate doomed the International Conferences and hindered the poli­tical milieu from consciously assuming its tasks. Only a confrontation of positions can help us all to evolve towards political coherence and assure an intervention appropriate to the needs of our historical situation.

We have so far received letters from the Commu­nist Bulletin Group (Britain), the Groupe Comm­uniste Internationaliste (Belgium), the Commu­nist Workers Organisation (Britain) and the ICP/Battaglia Comunista (Italy). The Fomento Obrero Revolucionario promises an answer in December 1983. Elements of the Groupe Volonte Communiste (ex-Pour Une Intervention Communiste) (France) are working on a balance sheet of their political trajectory. To begin with the basics ...

Communist Bulletin Group

How can one tell the difference between hot air and sincere conviction? By seeing whether words get translated into actions. Talk is cheap. The CBG writes:

"We want to express our solidarity with the approach and concerns expressed in the Address ... open, fraternal and continuing debate is a material necessity for the revolutionary milieu ... We have to fight for the recognition of the existence of a proletarian political milieu ..."

Fine! There is only one problem -- but a big one. The founders of this group are the same ex-mem­bers of the ICC section in Aberdeen (and ex-CWO section in Aberdeen) who covered up, participa­ted in and justified the taking of material and money from the ICC when they played around in the troubled waters of the Chenier affair (see IR no 28). These ‘comrades' knew about Chenier's maneuvers for months beforehand and said noth­ing to their own comrades. They later justified stealing from us by saying this "was normal in the case of splits". Our indignation was to them the proof of our "petty bourgeois ownership attitude". The CBG as a whole still politically justifies these acts and positions. They still refuse to give back what they took. In the first issues of the Bulletin they covered all this up with baseless personal attacks against the ICC of the vilest and most stupid sort. To­day, (probably because this attitude did not bring the results they counted on) they have changed their tune and hypocritically discovered "the need for healthy polemic". Whether the tone is hysterical or sickly sweet the result is the same: nowhere in the CBG press is there any disavowal of the actions or position of stealing as the origin for a group.

How can they talk about ‘solidarity' and the ‘rec­ognition of a political milieu of the proletariat' when the very basis for this doesn't exist for them? The CBG actually put pen to paper to write: "The existence of the milieu engenders a community of obligations and responsibilities". But who is to say that these words do not actu­ally mean: watch out the day after we disagree with you, because stealing, or whatever else comes into our head, will then automatically become ‘anti-petty bourgeois' activity. Or perhaps their view can be formulated as foll­ows: when one splits, one can take whatever is at hand but when, at last, one is one's own master, with one's ‘own' little group, the ex-highwayman joins the circle of property owners. Or maybe because they have some new members, the old ones hope to hide behind their new name. New name, new game?

The CBG's letter cannot be taken seriously. If there are any sincere comrades in this group, the least they can do is to make an effort to understand this problem and act accordingly. It is impossible to talk about the existence of a milieu in words and do the opposite in deeds.

When El Oumami split from the ICP/Programma ste­aling material in France, we showed our solida­rity on this elemental level. We will have the same attitude in the future: defending the pro­letarian political milieu against destructive attacks whatever the group concerned. At least it can be said that El Oumami's actions went along with their leftist platform. But what about the CBG?

What are its positions? The same (more or less) as the ICC! Another group whose existence is politically parasitical. What does it represent in the proletariat? A provincial version of the ICC platform minus the coherence and plus the stealing. But there is probably an evolution in the air. Most little circles which split be­fore first clarifying their positions follow the path of least resistance at first and adopt the same platform as the group they left. But quite soon, to justify their separate existence once the drama has died down, all kinds of secondary differences are discovered and before you know it, principles are changed. This was the case for the PIC, and to a certain extent, the GCI (which both left the ICC), and the CBG is already following the same route by rejecting any coherence on the organization question.

However, this has never prevented us from pole­micising with these other groups, nor from con­sidering them as a part of the proletarian mil­ieu in general or even inviting them to International Conferences. But this is not true for the CBG. A political group which does not resp­ect the ‘community of obligations and responsibilities' to a point where they participate in acts aiming to injure, or destroy other organizations of the proletariat, puts itself out­side the political milieu and deserves the ostracism it gets. Until the fundamental ques­tion of the defense of the political organizations of the proletariat is understood, we are obliged to consider the CBG's letter as null and void. They got the wrong Address.

Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (Belgium)

The GCI has written us:

"We agree with the principle of the need for regroupment and the world centralization of communist forces on the basis of a program. But for us this means not the primacy of consciousness over existence (discussion and ex­change of ideas as a precondition) but the need for a real practical-theoretical convergence as a basis, a cement for the development of debate and polemic. That is why we are formulating real proposals for work and not the endless talk in a vacuum which characterizes, for the moment, your public meetings.

1. We think it vital that the few workers' gro­ups that do exist develop elementary measures and practices of security and solidarity toget­her so as to oppose a compact front against the increasingly virulent attacks of state or para-­state repression. What do you think?

2. Concerning the recent important wave of struggles and the fact that unions have once again acted as strike-breakers, we feel that it is fundamental and necessary to develop a campaign of propaganda, agitation and actions centered around the question: unions equal strike-break­ers; autonomous organization outside and against them; solidarity with the victims of repression, etc. We think that it is on this terrain and only on this terrain that groups can show their will to struggle." (GCI letter to ICC, 29.9.83)

We are not against joint actions if the situa­tion requires them. We share the GCI's concern for the defense of proletarian organizations; this has always been our practice (the position taken by the ICC section in Belgium against Amada/Maoist calumnies on the GCI; the position on Chenier; against the attacks of El Oumami in France). Other occasions can arise. But for us the effectiveness of this ‘type of action' does not flow from a preparation against rep­ression ‘in itself' (defense groups? mili­tary training?) nor from unprincipled fronts for the defense of victims in general, but from solid, principled agreement on the existence of the proletarian milieu and the need to defend it. This cannot be accomplished ‘only on the terrain of actions' but must necessarily involve what the GCI sees as ‘endless talk' -- discuss­ions, debate, public statements at our meetings, in the press, etc. The same thing is true for the denunciation of the unions: this cannot be reduced to painting up slogans or launching ‘propaganda campaigns'. We know these kinds of campaigns only too well; the PIC was very fond of them for years. They only hide confusion and an inability to carry out real revolutionary work. The denunciation of unions is a long-­term work requiring a whole framework so that intervention is not just a one-off agitation but part of a constant activity in the press, leaf­lets, strikes, demonstrations, etc, on an international level. Putting forward ‘projects for joint actions' as a basis is turning revolu­tionary activity on its head and leading it to disaster.

The GCI seems to be falling into the trap of seeing agitation as the ‘only terrain' for confrontation. This approach creates a separation between ‘theory' and ‘action' which can only make theory into sterile academicism and action into a no less sterile activism. In the end, this logic leads to depriving the class struggle of its consciousness, it's crucial element.

The GCI accuses us of idealism and Hegelianism, of giving ‘primacy to consciousness rather than existence'. In the answer to the GCI letter written by the section in Belgium (see Internationalisme, Dec. 1983), the ICC wrote:

"Just as a man breathes in order to live and not just to exercise his lungs, the ICC exists and discusses not for tea room chats but to develop a clear intervention in the class struggle. The alternative is not theory or practice; the ques­tion is what intervention, on what basis, with what positions?

It was in the name of the primacy of existence over consciousness that the Communist Interna­tional imposed the policy of the united front. It was in the name of the same argument that the PCI (Programma) forbade any discussion and political intervention in the immigrants' strug­gle; that the GCI made a mountain out of a molehill with their phantom workers' committees (France) which evaporated as fast as they arose, and it was with the same reasoning that the GCI expelled the ICC from an unemployed committee in Brussels because according to the GCI the choice was between pasting up posters or discus­sing decadence.

We have seen the result of this sort of approach in the degeneration of the CI, the break-up of the PCI (Programma), the disappearance of all the GCI committees, a split in the GCI ... This logic which seeks at all costs to make agitation the only terrain of confrontation leads only to apoliticism and activism."

We do not reject joint actions; we can even add that the strike movement in Belgium in September 1983 would have required such actions. But they cannot be improvised. They call for a certain common analysis and political agreement which must be worked out through what the GCI calls ‘endless talk'!

We have gone into the implications of the GCI's approach because this kind of reasoning is not limited to them. Far from it. How many times have we heard groups say: "each group has its positions; no one is going to change -- so why bother talking". And to the extent that politi­cal groups do not try to defend their positions through rational arguments within a principled framework but try to ignore each other and avoid debate, discussion in the political milieu in­deed stagnates. Some, like the GCI then con­clude that rapprochement can only come from ‘one-off actions' (the GVC/ex-PIC text promised for the future will be interesting on this point) while others are glad to polemicise as long as it leads to nothing, as long as no com­mon statement results. This was the case with the ‘dumb' International Conferences (see IR no.17). Either way the result is a dead-end.

ICP/BATTAGLIA COMUNISTA (Italy)

With its roots in the Italian Left and with its platform, this revolutionary group represents a serious current in the political milieu. It's will to polemicise, to confront political posi­tions in the press and in public meetings is an indisputable reality. Battaglia participated in a public meeting of the ICC in Naples on the theme ‘Crisis in the Revolutionary Milieu: What is to be Done?' and later answered our address with a letter sent to all the groups which par­ticipated in the International Conferences.

Battaglia begins its response by criticizing the ICC: "We reject the ICC conception of the revolutionary camp itself. The ICC is unclear because it does not distinguish between the revolutionary camp and the camp of proletarian political forces."

If ‘revolutionary organizations' mean those gro­ups with a coherent political platform, an organizational structure and a systematic and regular intervention in class struggle, and if ‘proletarian political camp' includes revolutio­nary groups but also groups without a platform or coherence or historical roots and which, on an unstable basis, claim to want to be part of the proletariat, then we can agree with this definition. Despite some occasional errors in vocabulary, we have always defended the need for this distinction. This is why in 1977 we insis­ted so much that Battaglia agree to define the International Conferences with clear political criteria.

Unfortunately, Battaglia uses this distinction for its own purposes:

"Who is in crisis? Certainly the ICC is. Cer­tainly the PCI (Programma) is. Certainly not the (numerically small) forces which knew how to evaluate the situation and the problems of the Polish experience, which did not fall victim to mechanistic or idealistic positions and which benefit from solid doctrinal positions[1]. There is no crisis in the revolutionary milieu; it is a purging of the proletarian camp."

So which are the organizations of the true revo­lutionary camp? The CWO? If we judge from its over-estimation of the class struggle in Poland (when they called the workers to insurrection ‘now'), the CWO is not of the chosen either. But Battaglia keeps a discrete silence on this issue. The only group left is ... Battaglia! This sort of reasoning only makes us think that the sad result of Programma's megalomania has taught Battaglia nothing.

But wait. The rehabilitation of the CWO is com­ing. The object of the exercise is to justify the elimination of the ICC from the Internatio­nal Conferences. Polemics in the press are for the "vast and agitated" milieu but the Conferen­ces are "for work towards the formation of the party". According to Battaglia and the CWO, as the three Conferences wore on they realized that the ICC did not have the same position as they did on the party. Appalled by this sudden rev­elation, BC "assumed the responsibility that is expected of a serious, leadership force" (BC letter) by introducing on this question an add­itional selective criterion unacceptable to the ICC. This is a pretty story. The ICC never ever had a Leninist position on the party, from way before the Conference in 1977. If that is what prevented the Conferences from continuing in 1980, it should have stopped them right from the beginning. So far as ‘taking up its res­ponsibilities', we can quote an extract from our letter to BC in June 1980:

"Are we to think that your decision wasn't taken until during the conference itself? If that was the case, we can only be flabbergasted by your irresponsible underestimation of the importance of such a decision, by your improvised and pre­cipitous behavior, which completely turned its back on the demands of the patient and systema­tic work which is so indispensable to revolu­tionaries.

But at the Conference, you said that this was in no way an improvised decision, but that you had previously talked about the necessity for a ‘selection'. Do we have to remind you, comrades, that during the meeting of the technical committee of November 1979 we clearly asked you about your intentions towards the future of the Conferences and about your apparent desire to exclude the ICC, and that you responded equally clearly that you were in favor of continuing them with their participants, including the ICC?

If, in fact, you felt that it was time to intro­duce a new, much more selective criterion for the calling of the future conferences, the only serious, responsible attitude, the only one compatible with the clarity and fraternal discus­sion that must animate revolutionary groups, would have been to have explicitly asked for this question to have been put on the agenda of the Conference and for texts to have been writ­ten on this question. But at no point in the preparation for the third Conference did you explicitly raise such a question. It was only after negotiations in the corridor with the CWO than you dropped your little bomb at the end of the Conference." (Proceedings of the Third Conference of Groups of the Communist Left)

And having rid themselves of the ICC, BC and the CWO held a fourth Conference, the culmina­ting point in the decantation of the ‘proletar­ian camp' towards the ‘revolutionary camp' and the formation of the party -- with the SUCM, Sup­porters of the Unity of Communist Militants, a group which was just about to form ‘the Party' in Iran along with Komala, which is engaged in armed struggle for the liberation of Kurdistan in alliance with the Kurdish Democratic Party.

What is this group with whom BC "assumed its responsibilities"? According to the letters which BC sent to the SUCM in July and September 1983, the UCM "underestimates revolutionary def­eatism", and its position of "defending the gains of the (Islamic) revolution does not exc­lude participating in the Iran/Iraq war". The UCM defends "just" wars and BC spends three pages of its letter giving lessons to its supp­orters on how to understand the falling rate of profit. To be sure, BC protests against the UCM's ‘social chauvinism' -- but ever so politely and it whispers to the SUCM that it really shouldn't go so far as to defend the state.

To the ICC, BC writes about our "congenital incapacity", our "theoretical inconsistency", saying that "only incompetent and incurable mil­itants" could have our ideas. To the SUCM, it writes in the following style "allow us to say, dear comrades, that the organization of which you are the supporters can be said to have, dare we say it, a clear Stalinist leaning". What sweetness for our brothers ‘in evolution' from the third world! But for the ICC, any old insult will do. The only time BC loses its cool is when it learns that the UCM held a meeting of the ‘Internationalist Committee for Iran' to celebrate the constitution of a committee for the construction of the Communist Party of Iran, a meeting that took place in Italy with the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalista, the Lega Leninista and others, but without BC!

In reality, the problem with BC and the CWO (which follows BC faithfully) is not that they have established a distinction between the proletarian camp and the revolutionary camp, but that they don't see the difference between the proletarian camp and the bourgeois camp. The SUCM, at least, seems more clear; it writes to BC: "either you are with the ICC, or you're with us". Now BC seems to want to distance itself somewhat from the SUCM and it has sent to different organizations the recent correspondence it's had with this group. But in the let­ter replying to the ICC's Address, it obstin­ately defends what it has done on this issue. One step forward, two steps back.

How is it that a political organization like BC, with all its experience, could have allowed itself to be drawn into a flirtation with the SUCM, a support group for bourgeois, Stalinist-type organizations?

It's true that political organizations are not infallible. But this isn't an error of enthus­iasm about an unknown group. For over a year we've been warning BC and the CWO about the bourgeois content of the SUCM's political posi­tions. Today, the fusion between the UCM and Komala, the military communiqués that we get from the SUCM on the armed struggle in Iran (how many tanks destroyed, how many people kill­ed for the liberation of Kurdistan), as well as the Stalinist language of their documents and leaflets, can leave no doubt about what these groups are, at least for militants who aren't ‘incompetent and incurable'. The only doubt about the SUCM is knowing exactly who's behind them. BC has never posed the question about the origins of the enormous funds at the disposal of this group of Iranian dissidents, which in a year and a half has been able to cover all the main countries of Europe with its propaganda. Why does it have such an interest in penetrating the small groups of the present proletarian mil­ieu, who can't offer anything material to the objectives of Komala? The SUCM is a very skil­ful group which knows how to talk the language of everyone in the milieu, which knows how to flatter the flatterers.

It's not as BC still claims, a ‘group in evolu­tion'. How can a group coming from Stalinism, in alliance with the bourgeoisie, ‘evolve' to­wards the proletariat? A political organization can't cross this class frontier. If they keep slopping about in this muck, it's BC and the CWO who will evolve towards the bourgeoisie. "To know how to draw a clear line of demarcation vis-a-vis groups infested with social patriotism is the least we can demand of organizations as serious and as important as BC and the CWO." Rivoluzione Internazionale, no.33)

BC has allowed itself to be led by the nose be­cause the SUCM, UCM and Komala talk about the party, and BC and the CWO have their vision clouded by the word ‘party'. They have turned away from the ICC under the pretext that we're ‘against the party'. It seems quite secondary whether we're talking about the bourgeois party of Kurdish nationalism.

BC has made this mistake because it has a penchant (one might say a ‘congenital' one) towards opportunist operations. According to their res­ponse to the Address, BC and the CWO are "the only ones to carry out this work towards the proletariat of the third world". If BC had re­ally done its work towards the proletariat of the third world, it would have been quite intr­ansigent in its denunciation of nationalism, as was the ICC in its interventions on the ‘gueri­lleros' in Latin America and elsewhere. This whole condescending attitude towards the mili­tants of the third world (who are, it seems, so backward that you have to judge their positions with the indulgence of a Battaglia) is nothing less than an insult to the anti-nationalist com­munists of the third world, and a pure and sim­ple alibi for Battaglia. Battaglia is no more clear on the program to be followed in Europe itself. This isn't a question of geography and it doesn't begin in 1983. In IR no.32, we pub­lished the documents of the ICP of Italy in 1945 when Battaglia and Programma were both in the ICP. Their ambiguities about the partisans, those ‘forces in evolution' during the ‘libera­tion' of Italy speak for themselves. Battaglia replied to us that one has to know how to get one's hands dirty. Well then, the flirtation with the SUCM is not surprising.

But the main reason behind Battaglia's wavering and contradictory policies towards the proleta­rian political milieu, towards the definition of this milieu and of Battaglia's own responsi­bility within it, is the inadequacy of their platform, full of ‘tactical' loopholes on unio­nism, electoralism and national liberation.

Battaglia boasts about having ‘solid doctrinal positions'. But where are they? Certainly not in the new edition of their platform. The ICC must haunt BC's dreams because they keep attri­buting their own weaknesses to us. According to BC, the ICC suffers from a surfeit of ‘open questions'. What exactly this refers to, we do not know. What we do know is that BC has, not ‘open questions', but gaping holes, so much so that it prevents them from seeing class lines. On all the main issues, including the question of the party, BC merely repeats the errors of the Communist International, but makes them worse with vague and contradictory formulations.

Examine the positions of the ICP/Battaglia; there is never an honest, clear rejection of the errors of the CI on the union question, electoralism or national liberation. There is not even a clear rejection of the errors of their own party, the ICP, since 1943. Just a little attenuation here and there, a fudge of formula­tions when the situation requires it. If Batt­aglia occasionally asserts the opposite of the IIIrd International's positions, it is only paying lip-service, enveloping; it in so many ‘diplomatic' and ‘tactical' ambiguities that everything is fundamentally back to square one. BC continues to twist around, equivocating; all the way.

Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

At the beginning of the twenties, the centrist majority of the Communist International, led by the Bolsheviks chose to eliminate the Left to join with the Right (the Independents in Germany, etc). This was a fatal move, a tragedy for the communist movement.

In 1945, the newly created ICP of Italy, chose to eliminate the Gauche Communiste de France (see the article on the Second Congress of the ICP (1948) in this issue of the Review), in order to join with the survivors of a voluntary participation in the imperialist war in Spain in 1936, with the remnants of those who participa­ted in the Anti-Fascist Committee of Brussels and with those who flirted with the Resistance and national liberation. This again was a trag­edy for the communist milieu but it already had something of a farce played out by megalomaniacs.

In our period, the International Conferences were sabotaged to eliminate the most intransigent communist current in order to run after all­iances with the UCM and other defenders of nati­onal liberation in Iran and Kurdistan. The rem­nants of sixty years of Stalinism were taken for ‘embryos of the future communist party' in the Third World.

This time it was a complete farce! All the more so because at least Lenin's concern was the mass unity of the proletariat, and not, as in BC's more prosaic case, the defense of a little group.

The ‘juniors' of today are no different from their ‘seniors' of 1945. The same approach, the same positions. Perhaps a bit watered down but with a good dose of hypocrisy added on. Altho­ugh history repeats itself as farce, opportunism always remains the same.

Communist Workers Organization (Britain)

In its open letter of September 1983, the CWO writes:

"We agree that the working class and its mino­rities are in an extremely difficult and dangerous situation at the moment, though when you speak of ‘the crisis in the revolutionary mili­eu' it is not the one we have in mind ... More significant of the real crisis is our continued isolation as communists from the working class." (‘Reply to the "Address" of the International Communist Current')

But isolation as such isn't what provoked the crisis. For the CWO, the loss of revolutionary energies today can be put at the same level as in the past. Are we then still in the middle of the counter-revolution?

The CWO considers that the Address is "an expr­ession of the crisis in the ICC". Does it therefore reject discussion? In the end, no: "though it is not possible to carry on rela­tions between our tendencies at the level of the international conferences, this does not ex­clude debate." Thus, the CWO proposes a public meeting between the ICC and the CWO "on the top­ic of the present situation of the class strug­gle and the responsibility of revolutionaries". We have accepted this perfectly valid proposal.

But in its letter, the CWO makes a number of reproaches against the ICC and we want to deal with some of them here (to deal with all of them would be too much even for a Hercules).

* According to the CWO's letter, the ICC is not ‘serious' because "the CWO offered the ICC the opportunity to solidarise with our international intervention on the Iran/Iraq war, the ICC ref­used on the most ridiculous grounds." (For our response to this proposal, see World Revolution no.59.)

In the framework of the International Conferen­ces, the CWO refused to take up a common posi­tion against imperialist war and the inter-imperialist tensions because, as it says in the same letter, these were "vague and meaningless joint positions on self-evident banalities".

But did the CWO want the ICC to rubber-stamp its dangerous ambiguities about the UCM? The CWO doesn't bring out a leaflet for every local war in the world, only for the Iran-Iraq war. And although the leaflet did take a position on those ‘self-evident banalities' it must be seen as part of the rapprochement between the UCM and the CWO.

* Also, in their response to the Address, the CWO reproaches us for not inviting them to ICC Congresses whereas they invite us to theirs.

For some years, we invited BC and the CWO to our different Congresses and they came along, together with delegations from other political groups. But after the breakdown in the Inter­national Conferences, after being pushed out by the maneuvers of BC and the CWO, we consider that it would be nonsense to invite these groups to our internal meetings. The CWO does not want the ICC to participate in conferences between groups, but it wants to come to our Congresses? It kicks us out of the conferences, but invites us to its Congresses? Is that a logical approach? Does the CWO understand the significance of its own actions?

In the article ‘On the so-called Bordigism of the CWO' (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.20, second series), the CWO doesn't want to talk about that exactly. It prefers to defend its elder brother Battaglia against a sinister plot: the ICC has called BC ‘Bordigist'. If the word bothers you, comrades, let's drop it. It does not change the basic issue. The truth is that, in this article and in the letter, the CWO is furious with the ICC because we have published documents about the ICP's opportunism towards the partisans. In fact, these articles were aimed mainly at Programma, but the hat burns on the heads of Battaglia and the CWO. And with good reason. Between 1945 and 1952, BC was at the helm of the ‘united' ICP. But what is the CWO's reply: it wails ‘mummy' and stamps its foot. ‘Lies!' it says. But it explains nothing and justifies everything.

* According to the CWO, "before 1975, the ICC never mentioned the PC Int (Battaglia)" as tho­ugh we'd ‘hidden' the existence of BC from the CWO, for fear that these two titans might meet up. We did talk about Battaglia, but the CWO had its ears closed at the time. In the early seventies, the group was emerging out of the libertarian milieu and considered the Russian Revolution to be a bourgeois revolution, the Bolshevik party a bourgeois party. But when it finally recognized the October revolution and the Communist International, it was only paying lip-service. For the CWO, the counter-revolu­tion was definitive by 1921 (it didn't say whe­ther this was in January or December) and this fateful date was a sufficient basis to denounce the ICC as a ‘counter-revolutionary group'. At the time, we were Leninists because we talked about Bilan, but today we are called councilists because the CWO has discovered Battaglia. The CWO has gone through so many zig-zags in its life that you never know how long the latest zig will last. The CWO is reduced to polemics of the kind that appear in RP no.20 because it was born in ignorance of the history of the workers' movement, and because it has never sought for a real coherence in its attitude towards proletarian political groups.

* We can't reply to everything here, but we do want to deal with one final important point. In RP no.20 the CWO accuses us of condemning its rapprochement with BC. This is wrong. We are always for the regroupment of organizations as soon as they find themselves on the same basic political positions. We would never have con­demned a BC/CWO regroupment within the Inter­national Conferences. We followed the same path ourselves with the formation of our section in Sweden in the same period. We are against the perpetuation of little sects. If groups agree, they should unite. This helps to clarify things for the proletariat.

We would go further. We have known the CWO for a long time, and comparing its present rapprochement with BC to the strange alliances its anti-ICC reactions have produced in the past (with the PIC, the Revolutionary Workers' Group of Chicago, etc) we say: much better!

The question we must ask the CWO is this: why do you maintain a separate existence? Either one thing or the other: either you agree with the platform of BC, and that means that its ambiguities on the electoral, union and national questi­ons are shared by you; or you don't agree -- in which case, where are the discussion texts between your groups?

The CWO wants to wait and see whether the ICC is ‘really serious', whether its Address is ‘sincere'. Our Address expresses the position we have always had on the necessity for a dialogue in the political milieu of the proletariat. For more than fifteen years, we haven't shifted one iota on this point. We aren't chameleons like the CWO which changes color every two or three years. If the CWO has a short memory, we're happy to refresh it for them.

Perspectives

The groups write to us: your suggestions are vague. What do you want exactly with this Addr­ess?

We want to call for a change of heart in the pol­itical milieu of our class: the end of pretensions and of arrogance in a state of magnificent isolation; the end of evasions, of dangerous ac­tivism, of poetic licence on questions of principle.

First, to the basics. It's time to stop making the question of the party an alibi. It's time to discuss it seriously without anathemas, without going around in circles about empty formulae. It's time to respond clearly on some elementary questions before the debate can really go deeper:

-- does class consciousness come from outside the class as Lenin wrote in What is to be Done?

-- either in the past or tomorrow, is the class party the sole crucible or depository of class consciousness?

-- is it the party that takes power?

-- can the party impose itself on the class through the use of force, as in Kronstadt in 1921?

-- what criticisms, modifications, and elaborat­ions on the question of the party can we draw from the Russian Revolution, the experience of the first revolutionary wave, and the degenera­tion in Russia, and in the Communist Internatio­nal?

These are the fundamental question which have to be answered by pushing forward the criticism of the errors and insufficiencies of the past, and by benefitting from the contribution of the en­tire international communist left, without any ‘Italian', ‘German' or other exclusiveness.

Even Programma, after thirty years of being clo­sed and self-sufficient, is today being compelled by events to open a debate inside itself on the party, its function and mode of organization. But why only an internal debate? Can you catch some shameful disease by taking part in the poli­tical discussion going on in the proletarian mil­ieu? Is the confrontation of political positions a luxury, an annexed to ‘normal' activities, something you do if there's time, or is it a necessity, the only way to verify the premises of our political contribution to the decisive struggles of our class?

It's undeniable that the absence of the International Conferences is a real problem today, that ­ it makes it even more difficult to respond to the acceleration of history, to ensure that militant energies aren't lost in the convulsions of the political milieu, to present a principled framework for the newly-emerging elements of the class, to assist clarification in all countries, especially those which haven't had the time to develop marxist traditions. And it is also undeniable that the International Conferences were dislocated because of the sectarianism in the milieu: the PIC which rejected a ‘dialogue of the deaf'; the FOR which didn't want to discuss the economic crisis and which loudly with­drew from the Second Conference; the actions of Battaglia and the CWO which we have criticized; Programma which saw in the conferences only the ‘fuckers' and the ‘fucked'.

To create a new spirit is the only way to make it possible to hold new conferences in the future, the only way to ensure a conscious decanta­tion in the milieu, to work towards new and absolutely necessary efforts of regroupment.

For who dares to look at the political milieu of the proletariat and say that it will never be anything else but what it is today?

JA

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[1] In Battaglia, crisis is never expressed clearly and openly through opposition and confrontation of political divergences for the simple reason that there is not much of a political life of discussion within the organization. There is no real confrontation; one votes with one's feet by discretely, in silence, leaving the organization, one by one. This is not so immediately visible to the eye but just as important.

As to its ‘solid doctrinal positions', we refer the reader to the article in this IR on the Second Congress of the PCI/Italy in 1948. A reading of this report can help give the reader a more exact idea of Battaglia's ‘solid positions'.

The course of history: The 80s are not the 30s

In which direction is history moving; where is our society going to? Are we heading for a new world war? Or, on the contrary, are we heading for class confrontations that will pose the question of proletarian revolution?

This is a basic, fundamental question for any­one claiming to play an active and conscious part in the class struggle.

This is why the congresses of a proletarian pol­itical organization always devote a large part of their effort to the analysis of the inter­national situation, with the aim of grasping as firmly as possible the general dynamic of the balance of class forces.

The Partito Communista Internazionalista (Batt­aglia Communista) held its Fifth Congress in November 1982 and has just published the fruits of its labors in Prometeo no.7 of June 1983. The question is touched on ... even if this is partly to insist that this kind of question can­not be answered.

In a recent text (distributed at the ICC's July 1983 public forum in Naples, Italy) BC states that they consider this Congress' Theses as a contribution to the debate in the revolutionary milieu, and "is still waiting for them to be discussed in their political substance." Rather than deal superficially with all the questions touched on at BC's Congress ("crisis and imperialism", "tactics for intervention and the rev­olutionary party", "the transitional phase from capitalism to communism") we have limited our­selves in this article to the question of the present historic course, and what the Theses of BC's Congress have to say about it.

Is it possible to move towards world war and world revolution at the same time?

According to Battaglia, we cannot answer the question of the present perspective for class struggle more precisely than to say: it may be war, it may be revolution, it may be both. For Battaglia, there is nothing that allows us to assert that one outcome is more probable than the others. Here is an example of how this idea is formulated:

"The generalized collapse of the economy immed­iately gives rise to the alternative: war or revolution. But by marking a catastrophic turn­ing point in the capitalist crisis and an abrupt upheaval in the system's superstructure, the war itself opens up the possibilities of the latter's collapse and of a revolutionary dest­ruction, and the possibility for the communist party to assert itself . The factors determining the social break-up within which the party will find the conditions for its rapid growth and self-affirmation -- whether this be in the period preceding the conflict, during or immediately after it -- cannot be quantified. We cannot therefore determine ‘a priori' when such a break-up will take place (eg Poland)." (‘Tactics for the Intervention of the Revolu­tionary Party', Prometeo, June 1983)

BC starts from a basic idea which is both correct and important: there is no ‘third way out'. The alternative is war or revolution, and there is no possibility of capitalism starting on a renewed peace-time economic development. Apart from anything else, this is important in the face of the flood of ‘pacifist' illusions that the bourgeoisie is pouring over the prol­etariat in the industrialized countries. But it is inadequate, to say the least, in determining a perspective.

Battaglia says "the factors determining the soc­ial break-up ... cannot be quantified. We cannot therefore determine ‘a priori' when such a break-up will take place."

However, the question is not to determine the date and time of an eventual proletarian revolution but, more simply and more seriously, one of knowing whether the world bourgeoisie has the means to lead the proletariat of the industrialized countries into a third world war or whether on the contrary, pushed by the crisis and not enrolled under the capitalist banner, the prol­etariat is preparing for the confrontations that will pose the question of the world communist revolution.

When it says that the revolutionary situation may arise before, during or after a coming war, Battaglia admits its inability to take position on the present historical perspective.

BC justifies this inability by saying that the economic crisis can lead simultaneously to one or the other historical outcome.

There are supposedly two parallel tendencies, each with as much chance of being realized as the other.

It is true that from an objective standpoint, the economic crisis simultaneously exacerbates the antagonisms between social classes, and between rival capitalist powers. But whether one or the other of those antagonisms comes to a head depends in the last instance on one and the same factor: proletarian practice and consc­iousness.

It is the same, exploited, class which either affirms itself as protagonist of the revolution or serves as cannon-fodder and producer of the material means for imperialist war.

The state of mind, the consciousness of a class ready to overthrow the capitalist social order and build a new society is radically different from that of workers atomized, broken, ‘identified with' their ruling class to the point where they accept slaughtering each other on the battlefield in the name of ‘their' respective fatherlands. Marching under the red flag towards the unification of humanity is not the same thing as marching in ranks of four under the national banner to massacre the proletarians of the opposing imperialist camp. The working class cannot be in these two mutually exclusive states of mind simultaneously.

This is an obvious fact that Battaglia would accept without hesitation. However, it seems to be unaware that the processes leading to one or other of these situations are also mutually exclusive.

The process that leads to a revolutionary out­come is characterized by the proletariat's increasing disengagement from the grip of the domin­ant ideology and the development of its consc­iousness and combativity; in contrast, the pro­cess that leads towards war is expressed in the workers' growing adherence to capitalist values (and to their political and trade union repres­entatives) and in a combativity which either tends to disappear, or appears within a polit­ical perspective totally controlled by the bourgeoisie.

These are two thoroughly different, antagon­istic, mutually exclusive processes.

Anyone who analyses history in the light of the proletariat's role of central protagonist knows that the march towards war cannot be the same as the march towards revolutionary confrontations.

To affirm that these two processes can unfold simultaneously, without it being possible to determine which has the upper hand, is quite simply to reason by reducing the working class' consciousness and combativity to a mere abstr­action.

How do we recognize the course towards war?

Today, Battaglia claims to be the only authentic heir to the inter-war Fraction of the Italian Left. But for this current, which remained on a class terrain throughout the dark days of triumphant counter-revolution, one of its great­est merits was its lucid recognition of the revolution's retreat after the 1920s and the opening of the course towards war in the 1930s. If it was able to recognize the Spanish Civil War and the 1936 strikes in France not as "the beginning of the revolution in Europe", as Trotsky thought, but as moments of the march towards world war that had already started, this was thanks to its ability to reason in terms of a historical course and to situate particular events within the overall dynamic of the balance of class forces on a world historical level. We only have to consider the periods leading up to the two world wars to see that they did not come as bolts from the blue, but were the result of a preparatory process during which the bourg­eoisie systematically destroyed proletarian consciousness to the point where it could enlist the workers under the national banner.

In 1945, applying the method of the Italian Left, the Communist Left in France produced a remarkable summary of this process of war prep­aration:

"Through the intermediary of its agents within the proletariat, the bourgeoisie managed to put an end to the class struggle (or, more exactly, to destroy the proletariat's class power and its consciousness) and to derail its struggles by emptying these struggles of their revolutionary content, by setting them on the rails of reform­ism and nationalism -- which is the ultimate and decisive condition for the outbreak of imper­ialist war.

This must be understood not from the narrow and limited standpoint of one national sector taken in isolation, but internationally.

Thus, the partial resurgence of struggles and the 1913 strike wave in Russia in no way detracts from our affirmation. If we look more closely, we can see that the international proletariat's power on the eve of 1914, the elect­oral victories, the great social-democratic parties and the mass union organizations (the pride and glory of the Second International), were only an appearance, a facade hiding a pro­found ideological decay. The workers' movement, undermined and rotten with rampant opportunism, was to collapse, like a house of cards before the first blast of war.

Reality does not appear in the chronological photography of events. To understand it, we must grasp the underlying internal movement, the pro­found changes which have already occurred before they appear at the surface and are recorded as dates.

It would be a serious mistake to respect hist­ory's chronological order to the letter and present the 1914 war as the cause of the Second International's collapse when, in reality, the outbreak of war was conditioned by the previous opportunist degeneration of the international workers' movement. The greater the internal triumph and domination of the nationalist ten­dency, the louder sounded the public fanfares of the internationalist phrase. The 1914 war simply brought into the light of day the passage of the Second International's parties into the bourgeois camp, the substitution of the class enemy's ideology for their initial revolutionary prog­ram, their attachment to the interests of the national bourgeoisie.

The open completion of this internal process of destruction of class consciousness appeared in the outbreak of the 1914 war which it cond­itioned.

The outbreak of the Second World War was sub­ject to the same conditions.

We can distinguish three necessary and succ­essive stages between the two imperialist wars.

The first came to an end with the exhaustion of the great post-1917 revolutionary wave and con­sisted of a series of defeats for the revolution in several countries: in the defeat of the left, excluded from the Communist International by the triumph of centrism, and the beginning of Russia's evolution towards capitalism, through the theory and practice of' "socialism in one country".

The second stage is the general offensive of international capitalism, which succeeded in liquidating the social convulsions in the dec­isive centre where the historical alternative of capitalism or socialism was played out -- Germany -- through the physical crushing of the proletariat and the installation of the Hitler regime playing the role of Europe's policeman. This stage corresponds to the definitive death of the CI and the bankruptcy of Trotsky's left opposition which, unable to regroup revolution­ary energies, engaged itself in coalitions and mergers with the opportunist currents and groups of the socialist left, and took the road of bluff and adventurism by proclaiming the Fourth International.

The third stage saw the total derailment of the workers' movement in the ‘democratic' countries. Under cover of defending workers' ‘liberties' and ‘conquests' from the threat of fascism, the bourgeoisie's real aim was to win the prolet­ariat's adherence to the defense of democracy -- ie of national bourgeoisie and the capital­ist fatherland. Anti-fascism was the platform, the modern capitalist ideology, that the prol­etariat's traitor parties used to wrap up the rotten produce of defense of the nation.

During this third stage occurred the definitive passage of the so-called communist parties into the service of their respective capitalisms, the destruction of class consciousness through the poisoning of the masses with anti-fascist ideo­logy, the masses' adherence to the future imper­ialist war through their mobilization in the ‘Popular Fronts', the perverted and derailed strikes of 1936. The definitive victory of state capitalism in Russia was expressed, amongst other things, by the ferocious repression and physical massacre of all attempts at revolution­ary reaction, by Russia's entry into the League of Nations, its integration into an imperialist bloc and the installation of the war economy with a view to the oncoming imperialist war. This period also witnessed the liquidation of many revolutionary and Left Communist groups with their origins in the crisis of the CI, which (through their adherence to anti-fasc­ist ideology and the defense of the ‘Russian workers' state') were caught in the cogs of capitalism and definitively lost as express­ions of the life of the class. Never has history recorded such a divorce between the class and the groups that express its interests and its mission. The vanguard is in a state of absolute isolation and reduced in numbers to a few negligible little groups.

The immense revolutionary wave that sprang from the end of the first imperialist war has put such fear into international capitalism that this long period of disintegration of the proletariat's foundations was necessary to create the conditions for unleashing a new worldwide imperialist war." (Report to the July 1945 Conference of the Comm­unist Left in France)

As we can see, the historic course towards war has its specific manifestations which are sufficiently prolonged and recognizable -- even if they cannot be "quantified" as Battaglia would like -- for us to risk taking up a position.

It might perhaps be said that it is not always easy to recognize such a process -- but it would mean shunning the responsibilities of revol­utionaries, and resigning ourselves to impotence and uselessness, to pretend that it is imposs­ible, in a general way, to determine the hist­oric course.

How do we recognize the course towards decisive class confrontations?

The process leading towards the creation of rev­olutionary situations is very different from that leading towards war. The march towards war does not break with the logic of the dominant system.

For the proletarians, going to war means com­plete submission to capital at every level ... to the point of sacrificing life itself. There is no fundamental change in the relationship between exploiting and exploited classes. The ‘normal' relationship is simply pushed to one of its most extreme forms.

"In reality, what could be called the ‘normal' course of capitalist society is towards war. The resistance of the working class, which can put this course into question, appears as a sort of ‘anomaly', as something running ‘against the stream', of the organic processes of the capitalist world. This is why, when we look at the eight decades of this century, we can find hardly more than two during which the balance of forces was sufficiently in the proletariat's favor for it to have been able to bar the way to imperialist war (1905-12, 1917-23,1968-80)." (International Review, no.21, second quarter 1980, ‘Revolution or War'.)

In this sense, the course towards rising class struggle is far more fragile, unstable and un­even than the course towards war. Because of this, it can be interrupted and reversed by a decisive defeat in a confrontation with the bourgeoisie, while the course towards war can only be broken by the war itself.

"Whereas the proletariat has only one road to victory -- armed, generalized confrontation with the bourgeoisie -- the latter has at its disposal numerous and varying means with which to defeat its enemy. It can derail its combativity into dead-ends (this is the present tactic of the left); it can crush it sector by sector (as it did in Germany between 1918 and 1923); or it can crush it physically during a frontal confronta­tion (even so, this remains the kind of confrontation most favorable to the proletariat)." (ibid)

The course towards war and the course towards decisive class confrontations

To take account of this ‘reversibility' of the course towards revolution we prefer to talk of a ‘course towards class confrontations' in trying to understand the present situation.

"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'." (International Review no.35, ‘Resolution on the International Situation', Fifth Congress of the ICC.)

This is why we make less use of the term ‘course towards revolution' ... not because we have overturned our analysis of the question of the present course, as Battaglia claims, trying to raise an unreal polemic which avoids the real questions (as in their public reply to the ‘Address to Proletarian Political Groups' of the ICC's Fifth Congress).

This term, ‘course towards revolution' is just­ified essentially by the need to insist that there is no third way out of the dilemma: war or revolution. But if it were left at that, such a formulation could imply an outcome which we can­not affirm with certainty, at least not at the present stage of development of the historic course: we know that we are heading towards large-scale confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat which will once again pose the question of the revolution, and not towards war. But we cannot predict in advance the outcome of this confrontation.

Revolution during the war?

History gives us far more examples of situations where the balance of forces is totally in favor of the ruling class, than of periods where the proletariat has shaken or really limited bourg­eois power. As a result, we have fewer histor­ical references to define the characteristics of what a course towards revolutionary confront­ations might be than is the case with a course towards war. All the more so since the exper­ience of the proletariat's previous great revolutionary movements has generally occurred during or immediately after a war (the 1871 Paris Comm­une, 1905 and 1917 in Russia, 1918-19 in Ger­many). And the conditions created by war are such that, though they may provoke the develop­ment of a wave of revolutionary struggles as in 1914-18, they prevent these struggles from be­coming truly international.

War can provoke revolutionary movements -- and may even do so extremely quickly: the first sig­nificant strikes in Russia and Germany took place in 1915 and 1916; the revolution broke out ‘only' 2-3 years later. But these 2-3 years were a period of world war, of history speeded up so that, on the level of the balance of class forces, these years were worth decades of exploitation and ‘peaceful' crisis.

However, "... the imperialist war (1914-18) also brought with it a whole series of obstacles to the generalization of revolutionary struggles on a world scale:

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- it offers the bourgeoisie no way out except a new imperialist war, which it can't unleash until the proletariat has been defeated." (International Review no.26, third quarter 1981, ‘Resolution on the Class Struggle', Fourth Congress of the ICC.)

History does not, therefore, provide us with all the possible characteristics of a period of rising class struggle like today, marked not by war but by society's slow decline into economic crisis.

We can nonetheless identify this course:

-- firstly, because it does not have the essen­tial characteristics of a course towards war;

-- secondly, because it is marked both by the proletariat's progressive disengagement from the grip of the dominant ideology, and by the development of the workers' own class consciousness and combativity.

The present course of history

Battaglia's Fifth Congress does not really take a position on the perspectives for the class struggle. It remains vague ... just as the ICP's Second Congress in 1948 did on the same question (see the article in this issue). But the Cong­ress' Theses do say, as regards the present sit­uation:

"If the proletariat today, faced with the grav­ity of the crisis and undergoing the blows of repeated bourgeois attacks, has not yet shown itself able to respond, this simply means that the long work of the world counter-revolution is still active in the workers' consciousness." (Synthesis of the General Political Report)

Battaglia has never understood the importance of the historic break with the counter-revolution constituted by the strike wave opened up by May 1968 in France. In reality, BC considers that today, just as in the 1930s, "the long work of the world counter-revolution is still active in the workers' consciousness."

To a large extent, BC still doesn't see the qualitative difference between the 1930s and the 1980s. They do not see that qualitatively diff­erent historical conditions are created for the proletarian struggle by the economic crisis' systematic destruction of the ideological mystifications which weigh the proletariat down and which have enlisted it in war in the past.

According to Battaglia's Fifth Congress Theses:

"The fact of having, for decades, yielded first to opportunism, then to the counter-revolution of the centrist parties; the fact of having undergone the weight of the collapse of polit­ical myths like Russia or China; the frustra­tion of emotional/political campaigns created artificially around the Vietnam War: these have engendered, in the shock of the vast and dest­ructive economic crisis, a proletariat, that is tired and disappointed, though not definitively beaten." (idem)

It is only normal that BC should observe, at the least, that since the Second World War the prol­etariat has not been massively crushed and is not "definitively beaten". But, once this is said, BC continues to see no more in the prolet­ariat and its struggles than "the long work of the counter-revolution", tiredness and disapp­ointment.

Let us examine the real situation.

As we have seen above, the existence of working class combativity (strikes, etc) is not enough to determine a course towards revolutionary con­frontations. The struggles on the eve of the First World War, steeped in the spirit of reformism, in illusions about democracy and an endless capitalist prosperity; those of the late ‘30s diverted and annihilated in the dead-end of ‘anti-fascism' and so in the defense of ‘democratic' capitalism: these demonstrate that without the development of proletarian con­sciousness, class combativity is not enough to block the course towards war.

Since the end of the ‘60s, throughout the four corners of the earth, the workers' combativity has undergone, with ups and downs, a renewal that breaks unequivocally with the previous period. From May ‘68 in France to Poland 1980, the working class has shown that it is far from being "tired and disappointed", that its combat­ive potential remains intact and that it has been able to put this potential into action.

What point has class consciousness reached?

Here we can distinguish two processes which, though tightly linked, are nonetheless not identical. Proletarian consciousness develops, on the one hand by its disengagement from the grip of the dominant ideology and, on the other, ‘positively' through the affirmation of the class autonomy, unity and solidarity.

As regards the first aspect, the devastating effects of the economic crisis, which no government -- right or left, East or West -- has been able to check, have dealt some heavy blows to the bourgeois mystifications of the possibility of a prosperous, peaceful capitalism, of the Welfare State, of the working class nature of the Eastern bloc and other so-called ‘socialist' regimes, of bourgeois democracy and the vote as a means of ‘changing things', of chauvinism and nationalism in the most industrialized countries, of the working class nature of the ‘left' part­ies and their trade union organizations. (For a more extensive treatment of this question, we refer the reader to our previous texts, in part­icular the Report on the Historic Course adopted at the ICC's Third Congress in IR no.18, third quarter 1979.)

As to the second aspect -- the ‘positive' devel­opment of class consciousness -- this can only be evaluated in relation to the proletariat's open struggles considered not in a static or local manner but in their worldwide dynamic. And indeed, the struggles of the last 15 years, from May ‘68 in France to September ‘83 in Belgium. (the strikes in the public sector), while they have not reached a revolutionary degree of cons­ciousness -- which it would be childish to expect at their present stage of development -- are nonetheless marked by a clear evolution towards autonomy from the bourgeoisie's control appar­atus (unions, left parties) and towards forms of extension and self-organization of the struggle. The mere fact that the bourgeoisie is more and more systematically obliged to have recourse to ‘rank and file unionism', especially in the ‘democratic' countries, to contain and divert the workers' combativity because the workers are deserting the unions in ever greater numbers, and because the union leaderships are less and less able to make themselves obeyed, is in itself enough to demonstrate the direction of the dynamic of workers' consciousness. Unlike the 1930s, when the workers' struggles were accompanied by increased unionization and the grip of bourgeois forces on the movement, the struggles in our epoch are tending to affirm their autonomy and their ability to go beyond the barriers that these forces erect against them.

Certainly, the proletariat still has a long way to go before it affirms its fully-formed revolutionary consciousness. But if we have to wait for this before taking a position on the present movement's direction -- as Battaglia seems to -- then we might as well give up any hope of a serious analysis of the present course of history.

Battaglia's Fifth Congress seems to have devoted a lot of effort to the analysis of the present economic crisis. This is an important aspect of our understanding of today's historical evolution -- as long as this analysis is correct, which is not always the case. But the best of economic analyses is no use to a revolutionary organization, unless it is accompanied by a correct appreciation of the historic dynamic of the class struggle. And in this sense, Battaglia's Congress is 40 years behind the times.

To judge from the work of its Fifth Congress, all the signs are that, as far as the analysis of the class struggle goes, Battaglia has still not arrived at the years of truth -- the 1980s.

RV

"' ... 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 worldwide 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." (‘Resolution on the Internatio­nal Situation', International Review, no.35)

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After the 1970s, dominated by the illusion of an economic recovery, the 1980s are indeed Years of Truth. While the development, after the invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops, of the mass strike by the workers in Poland demon­strated, at the beginning of the 1980s, the concretization of the historical alternative of war or revolution, the years that followed the partial defeat of the world proletariat have been marked by a step forward in imperialist tensions, without the working class showing itself in a significant manner.

Confused by the activity of the left in oppo­sition, and by intensive ideological campaigns around the danger of war, and partly demoralized by the defeat in Poland, the working class struggle has marked time, which has still further facilitated the rapid acceleration in the bourgeoisie's war preparations.

However, capitalism's ever more rapid plunge into the crisis, combined with the fact that the world proletariat remains undefeated, means that this pause in the struggle can only be temporary. Today, the renewal of working class combativity in the central countries is there to show that the reflux is coming to an end.

History is accelerating under the pressure of the deepening crisis. Understanding this acceleration, at the level of inter-imperialist ten­sions as well as of the class struggle, is an essential task for revolutionary organizations today if they intend to be able to carry out their function in the class tomorrow.

Exacerbation of imperialist tensions

Ever since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the proletariat has been subjected to intensive propaganda on the danger of war. Just in these last few months: a Boeing 747 with hundreds of passengers aboard shot down by the Russians over Sakhalin; hundreds of French and American soldiers killed in murderous bomb attacks in Beirut; American marines landing in the mini­scule Caribbean island of Grenada; French and Israeli aircraft bombarding the Lebanon -- and all this against a back-drop of long-standing conflicts that not only show no signs of end­ing, but on the contrary are getting worse: the Iran/Iraq war which has already left hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, the wars in Chad, Angola, Mozambique, the Western Sahara, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cambodia, etc. There is a long list of wars to illustrate the exacerbation of military tension. And every one a pretext for the intensification of the Western bloc's obsessive bludgeoning designed to paralyze the proletariat with fear or a feeling of its own impotence, and to denounce the Russian bloc's aggression, even when the latter's influence is insignificant.

"Today ... the bourgeoisie has discovered in a muffled but painful way that there is no solution to the crisis. Recognizing the impasse, there is nothing left but a leap in the dark. And for the bourgeoisie a leap in the dark is war." (‘The 80s: Years of Truth', International Review, no.20)

It is in this context that we are witnessing a qualitative change in the evolution of imper­ialist conflicts. Contrary to the propaganda spewed out daily by all the media of the Western bloc, this evolution's major character­istic is an offensive of the American against the Russian bloc. The Western bloc's aim in this offensive is to completely surround the USSR, and strip it of all its positions outside its immediate influence. The West aims to expel Russia definitively from the Middle East by reintegrating Syria into its bloc. This will include bringing Iran to heel, and resituating it in the US bloc as a major component in the bloc's military apparatus. The ambition is to follow up with the recuper­ation of Indo-China. In the end, the West aims to strangle Russia completely, and strip it of its super-power status.

One of this offensive's main characteristics is the US bloc's ever more massive use of its military might, in particular through the dispatch of expeditionary forces, either American or drawn from the bloc's other major powers (France, Britain, Italy), onto the terrain of confrontations. This corresponds to the fact that the economic card -- played so frequently in the past to lay hold of the enemy's positions - is no longer adequate:

-- because of the US bloc's present ambitions,

-- and above all because of the aggravation of the world crisis itself, which has created a situation of internal instability in the sec­ondary countries that the US bloc once relied on.

The events in Iran are in this respect reveal­ing. The collapse of the Shah's regime, and the paralysis of the US military apparatus that this provoked throughout the region, allowed the USSR to score points in Afghanistan. This persuaded the American bourgeoisie to set up the rapid deployment force (and allowed it the more easily to force this down the throat of a population traumatized by the affair of the US embassy hostages in Tehran 1979), and reorien­tate its imperialist strategy.

In the same way today, the difficult economic and social situation of Israel, the Western bloc's most stable military bastion in the Middle East, demands the bloc's direct and growing military presence in the Lebanon.

The US bloc's increasing difficulty in main­taining its advance against the Russian bloc through its economic might, as the crisis strikes ever harder, pushes it to subordinate its economy more and more completely to its military requirements. For a long time, the USSR, given its congenital economic weakness, has been obliged to maintain its domination over its bloc by sacrificing economic comp­etivity to the demands of its military strength through the hypertrophy of its war economy. The primacy of the military over the economic is a general tendency of decadent capitalism, which is accelerating today, and which is laid bare by the years of truth.

This tendency is not a sign of capital's strength, but, on the contrary, of its growing weakness. The flight forward into the war econ­omy, and toward war itself, is the product of the collapse of the super-saturated world market. The particularity of armaments product­ion lies in that it is destined to produce neither labor-power, nor means of production, but means of destruction; it is itself a sterilization and a destruction of capital.

Since the end of the seventies armaments pro­grams have been developing throughout the world. The US state's arms procurements are one of the determining factors in the present econ­omic "recovery". But, in the end, this gigantic destruction of capital only accentuates the effects of the crisis and accelerates the bankruptcy of world capital (see the article in this issue).

The proletariat: a brake on the generalization of conflicts

The bankruptcy of world capital pushes the bourgeoisie towards war, as two imperialist holocausts this century have already shown dramatically. The economic crisis is deeper today than ever before. How is it that, in these conditions, none of the innumerable imperialist conflicts has yet been generalized into a Third World War?

The working class remains a decisive obstacle to world war. It is not the accumulation of fantastically destructive weaponry that holds back the bourgeoisie's tendencies. But, since 1968, the bourgeoisie has been unable to secure the submission of the capitalist world's major social force -- the proletariat.

A generalized imperialist war would be a total war. The bourgeoisie needs a proletariat docile enough to man the factories at full capacity, to accept the complete militarization of labor and of social life in general, to submit with­out complaining to draconian rationing, and to play the part of victim if not submissive object to the bourgeois state, in the name of the fatherland and the national flag, arm-in-arm with its exploiters.

The development of workers' struggles against the effects of the crisis since 1968 in the heart of world capitalism -- ie at the centre of the rivalry between the two imperialist blocs that have divided up the world, in Europe -- shows that this condition is not fulfilled. It is this worldwide recovery in proletarian struggle at the end of the sixties that obliged the US bourgeoisie to withdraw its 400,000 troops from Vietnam, in the face of the gather­ing risks of a social explosion.

The capitalist class must penetrate and break this proletarian resistance to have its hands free to fight it out on the battlefield of imperialist confrontations. The sole aim of the intensive ideological campaigns on the danger of war, since Russian troops invaded Afghanistan, is to paralyze the proletariat, and make it accept the effort of increasing military interventions, and, in the end, war. These campaigns are primarily directed at the working class in the industrialized countries, and especially in Europe, which in the past has always played a decisive role in the march towards war. The two world wars were made possible by the proletariat's enrol­ment under the national banner, and behind the bourgeoisie's mystifications. We are not in the same situation today. Nowhere are there to be found major fractions of the proletariat beaten into submission and controlled by the bourgeoisie. Everywhere the struggles of resistance to austerity demonstrate that the working class' fighting potential is intact and far from being broken.

Two years ago, in the face of the outburst pro­voked by the sending of several thousand "counter-insurgency advisers" to E1 Salvador, Reagan announced his intention to overcome the "Vietnam syndrome" -- ie the American populations resistance to the dispatching of American soldiers into open conflicts. Today, with thousands of US troops in Lebanon or Grenada, we can see that the western bourgeoisie, thanks to inten­sive propaganda, has taken a step forward at this level, However, we are a long way from the counter-revolutionary period when the US could comfortably send 16,000 men to Lebanon to impose "order". The bourgeoisie still has a long way to go to break the working class' resistance and open the way to a Third World War.

Thus, since 1968, the dominant bourgeois pre­occupation has been the proletariat, since they know that this is the main danger confronting them. We find a striking example of this situation in the current organization of the bour­geoisie's political apparatus: increasingly, to confront the class struggle, it is tending to put its left fractions into opposition, whereas world war demands a "national unity" which for the moment they are not able to institute. It is the class struggle that is on the agenda.

But even if the working class holds back the tendencies towards war, this does not mean that inter-imperialist tensions cease to exist. On the contrary, they can only get worse under the pressure of the crisis. The proletarian struggle is unable to prevent the multipli­cation of localized imperialist conflicts; what it prevents is their generalization into a third holocaust.

Inter-imperialist tensions never disappear under capitalism, and the pacifist illusion -- ie the illusion of a peaceful capitalism -- is one of the worst poisons for the proletariat. Even during the 1980 mass strike in Poland, when the two blocs were thick as thieves in isolating and defeating the Polish proletariat, inter-imperialist tensions did not disappear -- even if they were pushed into the background: conflicts continued on the periphery, and the major powers' armaments programs leapt forward.

The present level of class struggle, while it prevents the outbreak of a Third World War, is not enough to push the bourgeoisie back on a military level. The workers in Poland have posed the question of the international generalization of the mass strike in the heart of Europe -- a question which, isolated as they were, they were unable to answer. This is the only perspective that can push the bourgeoisie back worldwide, and lay the groundwork for the communist revolution, which will put an end to war by putting an end to capital. This perspective is in the hands of the West European proletariat, which, through its historical experience and its concentration, is best able to defend it. Humanity's future depends on its ability to struggle and confront the attacks of the bourgeoisie.

Resurgence of class struggle

While the proletariat is constantly hammered by all the media with the ubiquitous, obsessive theme of war, where, in capital's infernal logic, the mounds of corpses justify still further massacres, all channels of information maintain a complete black-out on the subject of the class struggle.

However, after a real lull following the defeat in Poland, the strikes that have been taking place in Europe for several months show a renew­al of class struggle; they confirm that the proletariat, far from being beaten, has kept its combative potential intact, and is pre­pared to use it.

The September strike in the Belgian state sector is significant in this respect; this is the most important movement of workers' struggle since the battles of 1980 in Poland, given the combination of the following elements:

-- the number of workers involved (some 900,000 out of a population of only 9 million);

-- the fact that the movement involved one of the world's most industrialized countries, one of its oldest national capitals, situated in the heart of the enormous proletarian concent­rations of Western Europe;

-- the dynamic that appeared at the movement's outset: a spontaneous upsurge of struggles which took the unions by surprise and got beyond them; a tendency to extend the struggle; overcoming regional and linguistic divisions;

-- the enormous discontent that these struggles revealed, and which continues to grow;

-- the fact that the movement took place in an international context of workers' combativity (car-workers in Britain, postal workers in France, public service workers in Holland etc) .

The state-imposed black-out on all information on the strike during its first ten days, in the countries bordering on Belgium (France, Germany, Britain) points up the ruling class' fear of an extension of these explosions of discontent in Western Europe.

These struggles seem insignificant alongside the magnificent flare-up of the mass strike in Poland 1980. However, they are developing in a very different context, which gives them their value or meaning.

The weakness of "official" union control and the rigidity of the Polish state made possible the dynamic of the mass strike (extension and self-organization) on a national scale. However, in their isolation, the workers in Poland came up against the illusion of a western-style "democratic" unionism peddled by Solidarnosc.

"The proletariat of Western Europe, by contrast, because it is not in the 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 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 Bal­ance of Forces Between the Working Class and the Bourgeoisie', International Review, no.35)

The strike in Belgium showed the weaknesses that continue to weigh on the working class, and which were revealed especially by the absence of any clear calling into question of the unions or of any self-organization of the struggles. However, these weaknesses should not diminish or mask the importance of the movement. In fact, while the active installation of the "left in opposition" in most countries from 1979 on succeeded in exhausting the workers' thrust in 1978-80, the 1983 strikes in Belgium constitute the first large scale threat to bourgeois strategy. They are an unquestionable indication that the working class is recovering from its defeat in Poland 1981, and that the retreat that marked the years 1981-82 is coming to an end.

Now that the economic crisis is hitting the capitalist metropoles full blast, the bourge­oisie can no longer put off its austerity programs, nor spread them out in time. The exploiting class is increasingly forced to attack every fraction of the proletariat at once, in old Europe, at the heart of the industrialized world. The working class is thus pushed to call on its reserves of combativity at an increasingly massive level. The conditions for extension and generalization are gathering, as the proletariat confronts the generalized attacks of the bourgeoisie. The conditions for self-organization are gathering, as the proletariat is forced to confront the left and the unions in struggling against the state, and as the deepening crisis exposes the democratic and trade-union mystifications that the bourgeoisie has maintained for 50 years with the myth of the Welfare State.

The struggles in Belgium, France, Holland etc, herald the large scale struggles of the future. The renewal of the class struggle in autumn 1983 is only at its beginnings.

"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." (‘Resolution on the Inter­national Situation', International Review, no.35)

To the extent that the historic course is the result of the balance of force between classes, it might seem paradoxical in the present period, to witness a simultaneous acceleration in inter-imperialist tensions and a renewal of class struggle. The balance of class forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie is not immediate and mechanical but historic. The exacerbation of contradictions provoked by the crisis demands a qualitatively superior response from the class struggle to push back the bour­geoisie and prepare for the final assault against the barbaric reign of capital.

Today's renewal of class struggle announces the mass strikes of the future, first on a national scale, and then generalized internationally, which will allow the proletariat to set forward its perspective of revolution. On this road, the proletariat of Europe must consciously assume its opposition to the problem of war, since in today's imperialist contexts it con­fronts the problem more and more directly.

More than ever, the world proletariat will be forced to take up the slogan of the revolutio­nary proletariat at the turn of the century: War or Revolution!

JJ

The text from Internationalisme no.36 (July 1948) published here is a critique of the political and organizational weaknesses of the Internationalist Communist Party in its beginnings. We have already on a number of occ­asions republished texts from Internationalisme criticizing the ICP (see especially IRs nos. 32, 33 and 34). The following text, by looking at all the positions of the ICP at its second congress, gives a precise idea of what the ori­entations of the group were. The weaknesses criticized at the time still exist today -- fuzziness on the national and union questions, on the role, function, and mode of operation of the revolutionary organization, the lack of a clear perspective on the period etc -- and have in fact grown more acute, resulting in the near total dislocation of the ICP's main con­tinuator, the International Communist Party (Programma Comunista) last year (see IR no. 32). But these weaknesses are not restricted to Programma -- they raise questions which need to be addressed by all revolutionary groups. This is why we are republishing this text to coincide with the discussions raised by the ‘Address to proletarian political groups' (IR no.35) which the ICC put out in response to the present state of crisis and dispersion in the revolutio­nary milieu (see the article dealing with the replies to the Address in this issue). The preface, taken from the previous re-edition of the text, alludes to a number of texts: here we are only publishing one. The others can be found in the Bulletin d'Etudes et de Discussion of Revolution Internationale, no. 7, June 1974.

Preface

From the Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion, no.7, June 1974 -- published by Revolution Internationale.

The following texts[1] are extracts and articles which first appeared in Internationa­lisme, organ of the Gauche Communiste de France.

Although nearly thirty years old, and unknown to the great majority of militants, these texts still retain considerable interest for today.

The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation is a historical movement. When struggles emerge, they cannot be seen as a new beginning, as certain groups have claimed[2], but only as the continuation and surpassing of previous struggles. The history of the revo­lutionary struggle is not a sum of dead moments, but a living movement which carries on and con­tinues, bearing its ‘past' within it. There can be no surpassing that doesn't contain the gains of previous experience. In publishing texts that are thirty years old, we hope to contribute to a better knowledge of a particularly obscure, ignored period -- the one which followed the Sec­ond World War -- and of the often passionate deb­ates and controversies which animated the weak revolutionary groups of that time. If the pers­pective of today's period is different from what it was then, the problems raised in the discus­sions, the way to understand and resolve them, remain central to the concerns of revolutionary groups and militants today. Problems such as: the historic period we're living in, imperialist wars, the nature and function of the unions, so-called national liberation movements, parliamen­tarism, the problems of the proletarian revolu­tion, the tasks of revolutionaries, the rela­tionship between party and class, and particul­arly the question of the historic moment for the constitution of the party.

The Italian Left: Myth and Reality

The International Communist Party (Programme Comunista) claims to be the uninterrupted, orga­nic continuation of the Italian Left, both organizationally and politically. That is a myth. Only the ignorance of a majority of the ICP's own members, and the prudent silence of others, can give a semblance of reality to this myth. After being excluded from the Communist Party, the Italian Left constituted itself into a Fraction in exile (Pantin 1929). Up until 1943-45, the Fraction in exile was the only organization of the Italian Left. In Italy itself there was no organized group and the old militants were dis­persed and reduced to total inactivity by rep­ression. When the Internationalist Communist Party was formed in 1943-45 in Italy, this was done independently and separately from the Frac­tion, both on the organizational and the poli­tical levels. The ICP (Programma) has never claimed any organic continuity with the Fraction and has always been ambiguous about considering the Fraction as an expression and continuation of the Italian Left. It therefore follows that the much-vaunted organic continuity was inter­rupted by a gap of twenty years (and what a twenty years!). Either that or it has never existed and is no more than a myth kept up for reasons of convenience and mystification.

The activity of the Italian Fraction up until its dissolution in 1945 represents a very impor­tant contribution to the development of commu­nist theory, and the political positions it took up in the face of contemporary events were firm­ly rooted on a revolutionary class terrain. Around the Italian Fraction, other groups were formed in France and Belgium, thus constituting the International Communist Left.

One has to become acquainted with the positions of the ICL, to read their texts, particularly those in the review Bilan (even when these texts took the form of ‘gropings' as they used to say themselves), to see and measure the reg­ression that the present positions of the ICP (Programma) represent in comparison to the ICL.

Crisis and end of the International Communist Left

The ICL did not represent the whole current of the communist left that came out of the IIIrd International, but only one of its branches. Other branches were the German, Dutch, and British Lefts. But it was more homogeneous, more organized, and to a certain degree more coherent. This enabled it to put up a longer resistance against the terrible pressures exerted on revo­lutionaries by successive defeats of the prole­tariat, the degeneration of the Communist Inter­national, the triumph of the Stalinist counter­revolution in Russia, the opening up of a course of generalized reaction and finally the imperialist war. Under the crushing weight of these events, the ICL struggled to draw the appropriate lessons from them, to serve as programmatic material for and in the revival of the proletarian struggle. However great the efforts and the merits of the ICL, such a work could not be without its shortcomings and vacillations.

In a general period of retreat, each new event tends to result in another numerical reduction of the revolutionary organization and to provoke serious political disturbances. No revolution­ary group can have a foolproof shelter against the pernicious influence of events. The ICL didn't escape from this rule. The war in Spain was the first shock, provoking discussions and splits. The approach and outbreak of the Second World War profoundly affected the ICL, giving rise to divergences which grew and grew, result­ing in a deep crisis. The texts we are publishing here give a fairly exact idea of the diver­gences which resulted, on the one hand, in the dissolution of the Fractions and their absorp­tion by the new Party created in Italy, and, on the other hand, in the emergence of the Gauche Communiste de France and its separation from the ICL.

The dissolution of the fractions

The first two texts deal essentially with the question of the dissolution of the Italian Frac­tion. This was a central issue at the time, not only because the dissolution brought a sudden end to the necessary process of clarifying the problems under discussion, but also because it meant the abandonment of positions defended so stubbornly by the Fraction throughout its exis­tence - touching on the very concept of the party and implying a false analysis of the per­iod and its perspectives.

The existence of the party is closely linked to and conditioned by the period and state of the proletarian class struggle. In a period of developing struggles the class secretes the pol­itical organization, the party[3]; but if the class goes through decisive defeats a long per­iod of retreat opens up, inevitably resulting in the disappearance or degeneration of the party. In such periods, when the counter-revolution has the upper hand over the class and its organizations, to try to reconstitute the party dis­plays a voluntarist conception and can only lead to adventurism and opportunism, During the thir­ties, the Communist Left waged the most violent battles against Trotsky's voluntarist concep­tion of artificially building the party.

The proclamation of the ICP in Italy was done without the embarrassment of any analysis of the period or its perspectives. As with the Trotsk­yists, this was an act of pure voluntarism. But even more crucial was the fact that the constit­ution of the new Party, the ICP of Italy, had neither an organizational nor a political link with the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left.

The Fraction was a living revolutionary organ­ism which appeared once the old Party had become enmeshed in the counter-revolution and destroyed as a class organization. It did not have the idea that it would ‘dissolve itself' and have its members enter individually into a Party con­stituted separately and independently of it. This was by definition impossible and politic­ally inconceivable. The dissolution of the Italian Fraction and the entry of its members into the ICP of Italy formed outside and inde­pendently of the Fraction, was the worst kind of liquidationism, a political suicide. It is understandable that the GCF categorically refu­sed to associate itself with such a policy and criticized it violently.

The organic continuity of the Fraction does not exist today. It has been broken and interrupted by fifty years of reaction. But the question of its dissolution is still of considerable inte­rest to the revolutionaries who are emerg­ing today. These groups are the product and expression of the new period of rising class struggle. They are thus the nuclei of the future party. The future party will not arise ‘spontaneously' out of nowhere, but will be the result of the development and accentuation of the class struggle and of the work of existing revolutionary groups. We can't talk about the dissolution of these groups preceding a hypothetical party that has come from who knows where. Such a view removes any meaning and value from the activity of these groups. On the contrary, we should see in the existence and activity of these groups the mate­rials that will be used to build the future par­ty. Their dissolution and the constitution of the party are not acts separated in time but simultaneous. It would be more correct to talk about them being transformed into the party than about their ‘dissolution', because they are con­stituent elements of the future party. Far from being pretentiousness and self-.flattery, this view highlights the seriousness of the responsi­bility that these groups bear, a responsibility they must assume fully and consciously. Any other view is just blather and dilettantism.

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The ICP (Programma) pretends that its program and positions have an invariant continuity, that its political practice is irreproachable, a true example of revolutionary purity. Reading the texts we are publishing here will erase that legend. Many readers will learn with surprise and astonishment about the real history, the sum of confusions on which Programma is founded. From the proclamation of the Party to the anal­ysis of the post-war period, from the theoretical meanderings about the war economy to the partic­ipation in the Anti-Fascist Committee in Bruss­els, from the participation in elections to its positions on the union question, all these were expressions of political eclecticism and opp­ortunism. They show the gulf between Programma and the Fraction, the enormous regression of the former in comparison to the latter. The trenchant criticisms of all this made by Internationalisme are still of interest, and it is clear that they have been shown to be fully justified, remaining equally valid today with regard to the invariable errors of Programma Comunista.

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Internationalisme n 36, July 1948

The 2nd Congress of the ICP in Italy (1948)

On the basis of various reports, written and oral, we can get a fairly precise idea about what happened at the Congress of the ICP of Italy.

First of all, we have the one published in the last .issue of Internationalisme, which gives a fairly complete picture of the debates at the Congress.

In Battaglia Comunista, organ of the ICP in Italy, and in L'Internationaliste, organ of the Belgian Fraction, there are articles dealing with the work of the Congress.

Finally, there was the public meeting organized by the French Fraction.

The general impression can be summed up by what comrade Bernard wrote at the beginning of his article: "This wasn't really a Congress because the problems dealt with were done in such a skimpy manner."

To convince oneself of this, it suffices to read the press of the ICP of Italy, and of its sections in Belgium and France. The delegate from France said in his oral report: "The Congress did not deal with any of the fundamental problems, did not make any thorough analysis of the present evolution of capitalism and the perspectives that derive from it. Of the whole agenda, the only things discussed were the possibilities for the Party's activities in the present situation." For its part, the Belgian Fraction, in its last bulletin, devotes one roneo page to the Congress and restricts itself to a "rough resume of the two tendencies which emerged at the Congress." It concludes by saying that the Congress decided to "take up a deeper discussion on the analysis of capitalism in its present phase."

How far we have come from the fanfares which accompanied the formation of the Party in 1945, the enthusiastic and grandiloquent salute to the "reconstruction of the first class party in the world by the Italian proletariat," and the whole bluff that carried on for two years about the successes and mass activities of this Party.

Today, the result of three years of activism has led the comrades to be a bit more modest and to engage in some rather bitter reflections, despite certain young neophytes like the French delegate who was unable to finish his report without using a phrase which reminds one of the tradition in Russia: "And we say thank you to the ICP of Italy."

Recruitment: the number one aim of the Party

During its first period the Party got drunk on recruitment. For the sake of recruitment, it sacrificed the clarity of political positions, avoiding pushing problems too far in order not to ‘hinder' the recruitment campaign and ‘trouble' the members already acquired. Ferociously, categ­orically, it refused to hold a discussion, either in front of the workers, or the members of the Party, or the founding Conference at the end of 1945, about the lamentable experience of the participation of one of its sections and of comrades who later became leaders of the Party in the Committee of the Anti-fascist Coalition in Brussels. An experience which lasted from the liberation to the end of the war and which these comrades continue to defend as being correct and revolutionary. Again, so not to make things awkward for recruitment, and also perhaps because this conception was also held in the Party (which would be even more serious), flattery was used towards the workers who participated in those military organisms, the various armed formations of the Resistance.

On this point, the Party Platform adopted at the 1945 Conference says:

"Concerning the partisan, patriotic struggle against the Germans and the fascists, the party denounces the maneuver of the national and international bourgeoisie, which, with its propaganda for the rebirth of an official state militarism (propaganda which it knows is devoid of any meaning - ? - ) is aiming to dissolve and liquidate the voluntary organizations of this struggle, which in many countries have already been attacked with armed repression."

And while warning against the illusions these organizations spread among the workers, the Platform characterizes them as follows:

"These movements which don't have a sufficient political orientation (apart from being ‘partisan' and ‘patriotic', what more does the ICP want?) express nevertheless the tendency for  local  proletarian groups to organise and arm  themselves to conquer and maintain control in local situations, and thus to take power."

Thus, so not to risk losing popularity and the possibilities for recruitment, the Party refrained from attacking these groups for what they really were, and for the role they played, instead pref­erring to flatter the workers involved in "these tendencies which constitute a historic fact of the first order."

As on this last question, the Party has not shown any concern to push ahead with its analysis of the evolution of modern capitalism. We of course do see, and even very clearly, the affirmation that capitalism is evolving towards a new form -- state capitalism -- but the Party still doesn't have a very precise idea about what state capitalism is, what it means on a historic level and what profound changes it has brought to the structures of the capitalist system.

In section 14 which deals with the problem of state capitalism, the Platform talks about the "reaccumulation of wealth between the hands of entrepreneurs and of state bureaucrats whose interests are linked to the former." Having seen in state capitalism only the class unity of the state and of private entrepreneurs in the face of the proletariat, but not seeing what opposes and distinguishes the two, the Platform denounces "the inept slogan of the socialization of the monopol­ies which serves only to travesty this strengthen­ing."

In nationalizations, which are the economic structure of state capitalism, the Platform sees nothing but a maneuver of the "powerful industri­al and banking monopolies which are trying to get the collectivity to foot the bill for the recon­struction of their enterprises."

With such an analysis of modern capitalism and its tendencies, which doesn't go any further than what was already being put forward in 1920, it's not surprising that on the political level the Party takes up essentially the positions of the Third International twenty-five years ago, without any real changes: revolutionary parliamentarism and trade union policies.

What have been the results? After nearly three years, the Party admits that it has lost half its membership. Entire groups of militants have left, some to form the Trotskyist group the POI, others the Autonomous Ferderation of Turin, the majority falling into indifference and disgust towards any kind of militant activity. In brief, the reprod­uction of what happened to Trotskyist parties in other countries. The Party has not strengthened its positions among the workers. The flight from theoretical research, the imprecise, equivocal character of its positions has not helped it to keep militants. In its number one objective -- to recruit at any price, to grow numerically -- the Party now has to register that there has been a fiasco, a smarting failure which was not difficult to foresee and predict.

A party without cadres

But there's something more serious in the defect­ion of half its numbers, and that is the extremely low ideological level of the militants remaining in the Party. Bernard talks about the "scenic function" of the majority of delegates at the Congress, their non-participation in the debates.

Frederic said that the workers' delegates considered the general theoretical analyses went over their heads and could not be carried out by them, that this work was incumbent on the intellectuals. Vercesi expresses this reality as follows: "In order to run after chimeras, the work of educat­ing militants, which is in a deplorable state, has been neglected." Especially when we remember that Vercesi himself bears a considerable responsibili­ty for this deplorable state, since he contributed to it for three years with his refusal to hold discussions in public, for fear of ‘troubling' militants.

This is a typical failure of artificial formations which pompously declare themselves to be parties: they don't understand that the subjective foundat­ion of the new party can't be based on voluntarism but on a real assimilation by the militants of past experience, and on the solution of problems which the old party came up against without providing the answers. Because it wanted to act on the basis of repeating old formulae and positions, even those of the Rome Theses, without taking account of the profound changes that have occurred in the last twenty-five years, the ICP embarked on a course of action in a vacuum, using up energies and wasting precious time and forces which could and should have been applied to the formation of cadres for the Party and the struggle to come.

The absence of cadres and negligence towards their formation -- this is the clearest thing in the balance sheet revealed by the Congress of the ICP.

Is there realty a Party in Italy?

Reduced numerically by the loss of half its members, an absence of cadres, "a complete lack of any analysis of the evolution of modern capitalism," (Vercesi), so much for the subjective conditions. As for the objective conditions, we have a period of concentration of capitalism which "has been conditioned by the international defeat which the proletariat has suffered and by its destruction as a class" (Document of the EC after the Congress. See ‘Our Line of March' in Battaglia Communista 3-10 July). What remains then of the necessary conditions justifying the construction of the Party? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except voluntarism and bluff, so familiar to the Trotskyists.

At the Congress, Damen in his report tried to justify the proclamation of the Party. We leave to one side the argument that the Italian workers are "politically more healthy" than those of other countries. Such arguments show only the persistence of nationalist sentiments even among very advanced militants. The opening up of a revolutionary course can only take place on an international scale, just as the break with capitalist ideology can't be the isolated manifestation of the ‘golden' proletariat of a single country. Patriotism about the revolutionary proletariat of Italy has no more value than the patriotism of socialism in one country. Setting this argument aside, Damen justifies the proclam­ation of the Party by the fact that a Fraction could not have served as a pole of attraction for the workers, which is true for a period where the conditions for the polarization of the proletariat around a revolutionary program are present, but this simply isn't the case in Italy or anywhere else. Finally, Damen argues that the Fraction only had a raison d'être when it was a question of "ideological opposition and resistance to opportunism in the party up to the time of open struggle, which could only be waged by a political organism which has the characteristics and the tasks of the Party." We heard the same theme developed at the meeting of the French Fraction of the Communist Left. What a backward step in comparison to the Congress of the Italian Fraction in 1935! This is an argument typical of Trotsky­ism which, during the pre-war years, defended against us the idea that with the death of the old party the conditions are given for the proclamation of the new party. Whereas the reverse is true: the death of the old party or its passage into the enemy camp means precisely that the conditions for the existence of a revolutionary party are absent, since the latter is conditioned by the development of a revolutionary orientation within the prolet­ariat.

When the comrades Vercesi and Daniels, at the Congress, denied that the ICP could really play the role of a party, they were only reiterating the thesis which we have developed since 1945 about the absence of the conditions for the formation of the party, and at the same time they recognized implicitly that the ICP is not carrying out the tasks of a fraction either; ie programmatic elaboration and the formation of cadres. Here we have nothing other than the translation into Italian of the artifices and behavior of the Trotskyists in other countries.

For Damen the Party is a fact, a "wedge driven into the crisis of capitalism." That may console him but we would remind him that the Trotskyists see their parties in the same way in other countries.

For Vercesi, there is neither a "wedge", nor a "breach, however minimal, in capitalism," nor a party, since it is only an enlarged fraction. Unfortunately, we would say that in Italy there is neither a party, nor an enlarged fraction; neither an influence on the masses, nor the formation of cadres. The activity of the ICP tends to comprom­ise one in the immediate and the other for the future.

The confirmation of perspectives

An orientation towards the formation of the party could have had some meaning in the period 1943 to 1945, which saw the events of July 1943 in Italy, the fall of Mussolini, the growing discontent in Germany, and which permitted revolutionary mili­tants to hope for the development of a course towards a break with the imperialist war and its transformation into a vast social crisis. The fundamental error of the ICP and above all its sections in France and Belgium was to persist in this perspective after the end of hostilities, when Russian and American imperialism had succeed­ed in occupying Germany, in dispersing and putting into prison camps millions of German workers -- in a word, in controlling this crucial focus of revolt, this centre of the European revolution.

But far from understanding that the cessation of war without a movement of revolt meant a consummate defeat for the proletariat, a new period of retreat opening up a course towards a new imperialist war, the International Communist Left came up with its theories about the opening up of a course towards class struggle. It saw the end of the war as the condition for the resurgence of revolutionary struggles, or as it wrote, correcting Lenin, "the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war begins after the end of the war."

The whole orientation of the ICL was based on this perspective, and all events examined from this angle. Thus, the bloody events in Algeria, Greece and the Middle East were seen as the premises for the revolutionary crisis; economic strikes were hailed as movements towards the radicalization of the masses; union actions and movements were supported and the Party gave itself the task of winning the leadership in them; finally the immed­iate task was seen to be the construction of the class party in all countries. And while they gloated over all this, we were charged with being "pessimists", "doctors and theoreticians in their studies" and treated with disdain.

Today this whole perspective has collapsed. And Vercesi is absolutely right. He is merely repeat­ing our own criticisms of the ICP when he declares: "The interpretation that the war would open up a revolutionary cycle has been shown to be complete­ly wrong."

Since revolutionary activity only has any value if it is based on predictions drawn from an exact evaluation of the historic situation, the recognit­ion by the Congress that its previous perspectives were unfounded means the implicit condemnation and the collapse of all the past activities and policies of the Party that were based on this perspective.

However, we also have to warn against the orient­ation expressed by the Vercesi tendency, which bases its analysis on "the capacities of the capitalist economy to enjoy a renaissance through the system of planning, the disappearance of cyclical crises and of competition within states." This conception is not new: it is connected to the old theory of the economic strengthening of capit­alism, the so-called theory of the war economy, which we have analyzed and opposed on a number of occasions, both before and during the war.

Today a growing number of ICP militants have felt and understood the sterility of an activism that has no analysis of the situation. Although this has come three years late, we consider this fact as the only positive result to have come out of this Congress. We entirely agree with Daniels when he declares:

"The weapons that the movement possesses are twenty-five years old and are completely blunt. In the meantime capitalism has transformed its whole structure and all its methods of struggle. The class party must do the same if it wishes one day to be the guide of the working class, to prepare the reawakening of the class."

Internal life of the Party: discipline or the consciousness of militants

On several occasions we have criticized the tenden­cies towards bureaucratization in the ICP of Italy. Alluding to this criticism, the French delegate says in his account: "Those who participated in the Congress and in its often passionate debates can recognize the democracy that reigns in the party, the gratuitousness of the accusation of bureaucratization." But using the same argument one could cite as an example the sittings of the Trot­skyist parties and even the Socialist parties. There also there is ‘free' and passionate discuss­ion. What is important is not the greater or less­er democracy in congresses but to know what the activity of militants is based on, the cudgel of ‘freely consented discipline' or a real conviction about the positions, the greatest possible consci­ousness, on the part of the militants? The comrade cited the case where the ICP expelled militants for political divergences, and added: "Like any self-respecting party." Indeed there have been a striking number of expulsions from the ICP, but it must be said that not once have these expulsions taken place after discussions in the Party as a whole, the only method that could have allowed these crises to be a moment in the clarification of militants. They have always been the result of pronouncements by the leadership.

The Congress, for example, revealed the existence of profound divergences in the Party, but you would look in vain in the Party press, even in the weeks preceding the Congress, for the least discu­ssion and controversy. This would obviously have risked troubling the members and undermining the prestige of discipline. The Party seems to prefer to leave it to Congress to reveal, as Vercesi said, that "there are parliamentarist delegates, others in favor of a sort of compromise with centrism (ie Stalinism). The majority doesn't have clear ideas and follow different paths depending on which zone they come from."

Even more categorical and biting is Daniels, talking about the Congress itself. He says:

"There is a tendency at the Congress to pass in silence over the errors of the past, to avoid discussing problems which could lead to wide debates, debates which could really enable the Party to gain a new life and to lay bare every­thing which, under the excuse of defending traditional positions, hides opportunism and prevents a clear ideological elaboration and a consequent assimilation of this on the part of the militants."

This would be the way to a healthy internal life in the organization -- by basing the strength and effectiveness of the activity of each one of its members on the continuous, widest possible confron­tation of ideas, stimulated and maintained by the whole life of the Party.

When, by contrast, Maffi, a great leader of the Party, declares that he has "abstained from dealing with such problems" because "I know that this discussion would have poisoned the Party," we say that such a concern undeniably and in the clearest possible way demonstrates that there is a tendency towards ossification and bureaucratization in the internal life of the organization.

And because it's the latter conception which prevails in the ICP, we saw the absurd ending to the Congress which Bernard talks about, when, "Vercesi ... in a way apologized for being a trouble-maker and for having created disquiet among the militants." Because, in the final analysis, neither one tendency nor the other admit the existence of tendencies and fractions in the Party; for both, the Party remains a monolithic, homogeneous, and monopolistic organization[4]. 

The question of the participation in elections

One of the questions which provoked the stormiest debates was that of participation in elections. To be sure, no one advocated a policy of active parliamentarism. This derives less from a certainty about the uselessness of parliamentary action than from the fact that the present strength of the Party makes it impossible for it to get anyone elected. Thus, they were able to save time on a debate which could, in any case, only be a theoretical one, and like any theoretical debate could only "uselessly trouble the Party."

For the same reason the Party at the last election could pay very cheaply for being extremely revolutionary, to the point of inviting the electors not to vote, even for the Party. But we are already aware of the case of someone elected to a municipal council who came up with good reasons to retain his mandate. After all, the definitive justification of all parliamentarism can be found in the following theoretical arguments which Damen put forward to justify the ICP's participation in the electoral campaign:

"If the bourgeoisie is compelled (?) to adopt a means of struggle which can be usefully exploited by the class party in order to turn it against the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary vanguard cannot renounce using and infiltrating the electoral competition."

No Trotskyist could fail to support this argument. This is the purest and the worst from Lenin's Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder. The truth is that the proletariat cannot in its struggle for emancipation use the "means of political struggle" that belong to the bourgeoisie and which are aimed at the subjugation of the proletariat. It was different in the period before1914 when the proletariat could not pose yet the revolutionary transformation of society as a concrete and immediate objective. From this flowed the necessity to struggle on the terrain of capitalism itself to wrest from it as many reforms as possible.

Revolutionary parliamentarism as a real activity has never existed for the simple reason that the revolutionary action of the proletariat presupposes the mobilization of the class outside the capitalist framework, not the taking up of positions inside capitalist society, what Damen calls "using" and "infiltrating" from within.

The policy of revolutionary parliamentarism played a major part in the corruption of the Third International. The parliamentary fractions served as fortresses of opportunism in the parties of the Third International as they had done previously in the Parties of the Second. But the participationist believes that he has found an           impressive argument when he declares:

"The abstentionist problem has now been surpassed because it only had a raison d'être in a period when it was necessary to define precisely a principle against the parliamentary current of the old socialist party. Today, when there is no longer any possible doubt, about the clearly anti‑parliamentary character of the ICP the latter ...can adopt, this method of struggle."

Here is a highly astute form of reasoning: in the old parliamentary party we had to be anti-parliamentarian, but now, because our party is anti‑parliamentarian, then we can engage in parliamentarism. We don't doubt that such an argument will empress the party patriots who would not for a single instant dare to question its revolutionary infallibility, guaranteed a priori and forever. On the other hand, those who knew the Communist International, either because they militated inside it or simply because they have studied its history, will probably be less inclined to give such ample credit to any party, even the Party of Damen and Maffi. Can we seriously believe that the Bolshevik Party and the CI in its early years were less sincerely revolutionary than the ICP of Italy? In fact they offered a better guarantee, if only because at the time they expressed the most advanced programmatic positions of the proletariat, whereas the ICP, even according to its own admission, is notably behind them. Nevertheless, all the precautions taken by the CI (read the theses of the Second Congress on revolutionary parliamentarism) did not prevent this policy from becoming a lever for opportunism. The degeneration of the Party is not only the result of the general situation and of the balance of class forces; it also depends on the policies practiced by the Party itself. During the last twenty-five years the proletariat has paid too high a price for the militants of the vanguard to forget this basic truth.

The slippery nature of the parliamentary slope can be measured by the results obtained from it, results which are constantly referred to in order to prove the strength and influence of the Party. The reporter to the Congress did not hesitate to show that in this or that region, the Party's list to the last elections obtained four times as many votes. As though one could talk about the strength and influence of the Party when sales of the press are falling, when the organization has lost half its members, and when the ideological level of its members, even according to the ones responsible for it, is "lamentable". Hearing Damen talk about the victories of the Party, one can't help thinking that there are victories which are the worst kind of defeats.

It might be useful, to sooth the fever of the participationists, to cite the example of the Trotskyist party in France which in 1946 also had a certain success, winning nearly 70,000 votes. This didn't stop this party seeing the majority            of its electors melting away like snow in the sun       at the following elections, and a year later from seeing its own ranks collapse. A large part of its militants pushed the logic of going to the masses to its conclusion, ending up joining the Rassemblement Democratique Rdvolutionaire which had more numbers and whose words could have a greater echo.

Because this is exactly how comrade Damen reasons: "by participating in the elections," he says against the anti-participationists, "the party was able to penetrate the broad masses, bring new words, try to give shape to the vague aspirations to leave the old worn-out paths." Carried away by the noble sentiment of sowing good words, it doesn't seem to enter his head that, in order to reap, you have to sow in the right soil, other­wise it's a waste of seed and energy. Revolut­ionaries don't draw their inspiration from the missionaries of the Salvation Army who go to preach the divine word in the brothels. Socialist consciousness isn't acquired in a vacuum no matter what conditions; it's not the fruit of voluntarist actions but presupposes a tendency for the workers to detach themselves from bourgeois ideology, and electoral campaigns (which are privileged moments in the brutalization of the workers) certainly don't provide the conditions for this.

It has long been shown that the psychological roots of opportunism are, however paradoxical this may seem, its impatience to act, its inabil­ity to accept times of retreat and of waiting. It must immediately "penetrate the masses, bring new words." It doesn't take the time to look where it's putting its feet. It is impatient to implant the flag of socialism, forgetting in its rush that this flag only has any value when it is implanted on the class terrain of the proletariat, not when it's thrown onto the first capitalist dung-heap that comes along.

Despite Leninist orthodoxy, the cudgel of discipline and the electoral successes that have been registered, the resistance of militants against participation has been growing continuously, proving that the ICP of Italy is made up of many healthy elements. But despite lively criticisms, the Congress did not resolve the question. The compromise agreed not to participate in the November elections but it leaves the question of principle open. The cult of unity and "don't let's trouble the militants, the rank-and-file," prevailed over clear and intransigent positions. This is just a step back to prepare a bigger jump. Revolutionary militants can't be content for long with such half-measures. With or without the assent of the leadership, they must liquidate these ‘old blunt weapons', or liquidate themselves as revolutionaries.

The position taken on the union question is definitely the salient feature of this Congress.

What was the ICP's previous position? A completely orthodox copy of the theses of the Communist International:

"Work within the trade union economic organizations of the workers, in order to develop and strengthen them, is one of the prime political tasks of the Party.

"The Party aspires towards the reconstruction of a unitary trade union confederation, independent of any state commission and utilizing the methods of the class struggle and of direct action against the bosses, both for local, categorical demands and for general class demands ... communists do not call for or provoke a split in the unions simply because their leading organs have been conquered or held by other parties." (Political Platform of the ICP, 1946).

This was the basis for the Party's work in the unions which, when it was possible and especia­lly in the provinces and small unions, went as far as participating in union commissions and leaderships. It unreservedly supported economic demand struggles, considering these struggles as "one of the prime political tasks of the party".

This conception has for a long time been a principle for the ICL. One of the reasons for the ICL's hostility towards us has been our anti-union position. We can therefore only express our satisfaction in seeing the ICP now abandoning the main part of its old position on the unions and on economic demands.

We can only agree with the following definition: "The Party categorically affirms that the present unions are a fundamental organ of the capitalist state, the aim of which is to imprison the proletariat tin the productive mechanisms of the national collectivity."

Or again:

"The working class,, in the course of its revolut­ionary attack, must destroy the unions as one of the most sensitive mechanisms of capitalism's class rule."

We agree all the more wholeheartedly because here  we find, not only the ideas that we have defended for a long time, but even the reproduction of our own terms and expressions. (See in particular our theses on the present problems of the workers' movement, Internationalisme 31, February 1948).

We would however point out that on the union question, as on so many other questions, the ICP has once more left open a little window which enables it to reintroduce the same ideas which it has kicked out the door.

For example when the ICP declares its "indifference to whether or not workers belong to the union," it takes up a passive position which poorly hides its continuing attachment to the unions. To say that "it would be fishing in the abstract to put forward the slogan ‘leave the trade unions', a slogan which is conceivable only when the historic situation poses the objective conditions for sabot­aging the unions," is to look for sophisticated pretexts to avoid shocking the backward sentiments of the masses. If you are convinced that the unions are and can only be an organ of the capit­alist state, whose function is to imprison the workers in the service of the capitalist order, you can't remain "indifferent" to whether workers are or are not organically part of the unions, any more than we are indifferent to whether the workers are part of the maquis, of committees for national liberation, of parties or any other political formation of capitalism.

It has never entered the head of a serious militant that the workers' abandonment of the political form­ations of capitalism depends on whether or not he calls for it; he knows quite well that this is the result of objective conditions. But this does not prevent him -- in fact, it obliges him - to make propaganda calling for the workers to desert these organizations of the bourgeoisie. The desertion of the organizations of capitalism is not only a manifestation of, but also a precondition for, the development of consciousness in the class. This applies both to union organizations and to political organizations. In any case, indifference towards political positions merely camouflages a real and shameful acquiescence.

But there's more, The ICP denounces the unions but it advocates that workers come together in the union fraction. What then is this union fraction?

"It is," says the above-cited EC document, "the network of Party factory groups which, acting on the unitary basis of its program ... constitute the union fraction."

At first sight one might be led to believe that this is simply a reference to the cells of the Party, but if one examines it more closely, it becomes clear that something quite different is meant here. First of all, it is difficult to see why the sum of the factory cells should form themselves into a separate organism. This divides the unity of the Party in two: on the one hand, the workers grouped separately in the factory cells, and on the other hand the non-workers grouped who knows exactly where, but equally separ­ate. Secondly, within the CI the Italian Left always opposed the introduction of this factory cell structure, seeing in it a tendency towards ouvrierism and a bureaucratic method of stifling the ideological life of the party (see for example ‘The Nature of the Party' published by Bordiga in 1924). It would be really surprising to see the ICP break from this traditional position, which is more valid today than ever. Thirdly, what could be the specific tasks of worker members of the Party distinct from the tasks of the Party as a whole? And finally, we don't understand why this organization, which is centralized and unified at the national level, should constitute and bear the name of ... the union fraction.

In fact, the union fraction isn't the factory cells of the Party but a separate organization, distinct from the Party, but created and led by it. Certainly the Party doesn't have too many illus­ions about the scope this organization could have in the immediate future:

"In the present situation, what will happen most often is the reduction of the union fraction to Party members and a ,few sympathizers acting inside the factory or the union."

But this isn't why the Party has created this organization: it is destined to have a much more important function:

"The regroupment of the workers -- unionized or non-unionized, members or non-members of other parties -- around our factory groups does not depend on a voluntaristic effort, by the Party but on the evolution of the general situation and the dynamic of social struggles".

In these texts it emerges clearly that the union fraction has a dual function: in the immediate period, "acting inside the factory or the union," and also to serve, right now, as the nucleus around which, tomorrow, will be regrouped the workers of all tendencies and parties -- a sort of embryonic soviet.

It should be pointed out that the ICP, which is so afraid of "fishing in the abstract" by calling for the destruction of the unions in the absence of the necessary conditions, has no fear of fishing            with the bluff of creating the embryos of the            future soviets.

On the one hand the Party has given up acting in the unions, and has also given up the illusion that you can have an influence in the masses today; on the other hand, it returns to the idea of union activity and mass work, not directly but through the intermediary of a special organization created for this purpose: the union fraction. Thus no one can reproach the Party: everyone has been taken into account and everyone can be happy. The step forward taken on this question is immediate­ly followed by two steps back[5]. Yesterday's error has been supplemented by today's confusion. By adding the new confusion to the previous error, you end up with a confusion within an error and you haven't advanced one iota.

Conclusions

We have looked at the work of the ICP. If we cannot talk about its contribution to clarifying the basic problems of the period, since even in the opinion of its own partisans it has not done this, we can say that the clearest part of its work has been the total overturning of the positions and orientations adopted at its founding Conference.

It would be hard to find, in the annals of politi­cal groups, another example of a founding Platform being so slated and refuted, in such a short space of time.

Our period can rightly be characterized by these sudden changes, by the rapidity of its course. But the surprising obsolescence of the ICP's Platform can't be attributed to this because it was already senile at birth. This reality, observed by Congress delegates themselves, is not the result of chance. It has its roots, among other things, in the fact that the Party has had the pretension of being the sole bearer of revolution­ary consciousness, shrugging its shoulders at the mere idea that it could learn something through a confrontation of ideas with other revolutionary groups in various countries.

Two- and- a-half years have sufficed to ensure that not one page of the December 1945 Platform remains intact. This is a severe lesson, but one that could be salutary if the comrades of the ICL understand and accept the lesson. Only on this condition will the experience not have been in vain.

To finish, and insofar as it is possible and permissible for us to judge and pass an opinion from a distance, we think that the conclusion drawn by comrade Bernard is premature. He says: "For sincerely revolutionary militants there is no way forward except to split and create a new political regroupment whose fundamental task is the search for and formulation of the ideological bases for the future formation of the real class party." We don't underestimate the immense difficulties which these comrades will come up against in the atmosphere that presently reigns in the ICP. But it is undeniable that the ICP of Italy remains to this day the main revolutionary proletarian organization in Italy, and probably the most advanced. Just as after the 1945 Conference, we consider that within it there are a large number of healthy revolutionary militants, and because of this the organization cannot be seen as being already lost to the proletariat.

In 1945 we wrote that behind the patriotism and the appearance of unity there existed real diver­gences which could not fail to manifest themselves and crystallize into opportunist and revolution­ary tendencies. Today, we still consider that the most urgent task of a sincere revolutionary is to help this crystallization to take place, to enable genuine revolutionary energies to find their most advanced level of maturation and expression.

M.

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[1] For the lack of space, we cannot publish all the articles in full. We know this is unsatisfactory, and contains the risk of deformation, and we are the first to deplore it. We try to avoid it as much as possible. The best solution would be the publication of a collection of the main articles from this review. A hope to be followed up ... 

[2] Cf the theorizations by dissident Bordigists and Situationists like Le Mouvement Communiste, Negation, and especially in Invariance no. 2, new series.

[3] It is perhaps necessary to point to another error that is committed today - that of linking the existence of the party to the revolutionary, insurrectionary period. This idea, which conceives of the party existing uniquely in the period of the revolution, is the source of many confusion:

a. It mixes up the party with the councils. The latter, because they are the specific organization of the class for carrying out the revolution and the seizure of power - which is not the function of the party - can only appear and exist in the revolution;

b. such an idea leads one to say that a party of the working class has never existed in history, which is a pure absurdity;

c. it ignores the reasons for the party emerging in the class, the functions of the party, one of the most crucial of which is to be an active factor in the process whereby the class becomes conscious of itself;

d. "the organization of the proletarians into a class and thus into a party" (Marx) means that the existence of the party has a constant character, which can only be put into question in a period of profound defeat and reaction;

e. a period of rising class struggle opens the process towards the reconstruction of the party. Not to understand this means putting one's feet on the brakes precisely when the road is beginning to go uphill.  

[4] See the series of articles which we published under the title "Present Problems of the Workers' Movement', in Internationalisme 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25 and particularly the last number. (Note by the International Review: the article from Internationalisme 25, on the concept of the ‘brilliant leader', was republished in IR nos 33 and 34.)

[5] For anyone accusing us intentionally distorting the thinking of the ICP we cite the explanation given by the Belgian Fraction on this point: "if there are workers who don't want to join the Party, they should be organized in the Party's union fractions, which tomorrow could also perhaps be the basis for the creation of new unions", (Bulletin of May 1948, on the Congress of the ICP of Italy).

The big industrial countries have been strengthening their armed presence in the thea­tres of military operations with a new-found vigor, after a period in which, following the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1975, this presence had been reduced. In 1982, the ‘war game’ writ large played out in the Falklands clearly marked a turning point in the military policy of the western bloc and was a prelude to the ‘interposition’ in the Lebanon of the American, French, British and Italian expeditionary force that same year, an ‘interposition’ which became a direct intervention in 1983.

This policy has been accompanied by an intensi­fication of military expenditure, expressing capitalism’s headlong flight towards the only solution it can offer to the definitive crisis of its system of exploitation: generalized war. However, the massive weight of the war economy doesn’t mean that we are in the same situation as the 1930s. Today, the policy of arms spending can in no way provide a palliative to the crisis, as was the case then. On the contrary, this policy can only accelerate capitalism’s plunge into the abyss of the crisis. It is un­able to reabsorb the massive unemployment in the heart of the industrial centers, and does not allow for a real economic recovery. Thus, the conditions ripen for a response from the working class, which is beginning to raise its head again in the central countries of capitalism.

The acceleration of military spending

The big capitalist countries are more and more directly carrying on the dirty work of military confrontation between imperialist rivals -- work that was previously left to smaller client states. In the 1970s, the great powers tended to hold back the acceleration of military spending, delegating the role of gendarme against the Russian bloc to their Third World allies. How­ever, this relative slowing down never amounted to an actual reduction. Military spending never stopped growing, particularly in the Third World and the eastern bloc.

After relying mainly on their economic pre­ponderance on the world market to counteract the Russian bloc, the main western countries are be­ing compelled by the deepening crisis to accel­erate their armaments policies.

Industrial production in these countries is at best using 75 per cent of its capacity, and investments are dwindling. Even those bourgeois analysts who believe most strongly in the US economic ‘recovery’ -- now fewer and fewer in number -- are perplexed about the fact that this ‘recovery’ is being accompanied by a fall in in­vestment. The pressure from the falling rate of profit is intensifying, all the more because productivity in the industrialized countries has not stopped growing.

In the USA, including high technology sectors like electronics, bankruptcies are proliferating. In automobiles and aeronautics, giant companies like Chryslers, Boeing, Macdonnell Douglas etc owe their survival to military orders: tanks for Chrysler, Awacs for Boeing, fighter planes for Douglas.

France, the second biggest arms producer in the western bloc, is experiencing an unprecedented blockage in agriculture and the food industry, mines, steel, and electronics. In aeronautical construction there is a greater and greater fus­ion between the civil and military sectors, with the arms sector dominating. Civil aviation Is stagnating; the military sector is the only one that is to some extent holding up against the recession.

Along with the USA, France and Britain, Japan is playing a growing role in arms production, notably on the electronics side, which is so indispensable in today’s military strategy.

Similarly, West Germany, which like Japan is supposed to have a ‘low profile’ in military matters, is spending as much as France in this sphere.

What’s more, the official figures only show a part of what is actually devoted to armaments. In 1981 for example, 25 per cent of world res­earch was officially devoted to military needs. In fact, 90 per cent of research programs are under the control of the army. All the ‘techni­cal advances’ in civil society are spin-offs from the arms industry. In computers, for exam­ple, the international standards for scientific or management programming are decided by the Pentagon.

The open crisis reveals that the entire capi­talist economy is oriented towards war, and that this war economy is no longer capable of ensuring the accumulation of capital, to say nothing about satisfying human needs. On the contrary, a growing proportion of investments are directed towards producing the means of des­truction. According to the World Bank, 10 per cent of world spending on armaments represents what it would cost to resolve the problem of hunger in the world. Military expenditure has now reached the astronomical sum of more than a million dollars … each minute.

Military spending accelerates the crisis of capitalism

“… armaments have the unique characteristic of possessing a use value which does not allow them to enter, in any form, into the process of production. A washing machine can contribute to the reproduction of labor power, just like loaf of bread or a shirt. Through the content of their use value, these goods can serve as capital in the form of variable capital. A com­puter, a ton of iron or a steam engine, insofar as they are means or objects of labor can func­tion as capital in the form of constant capital. But arms can only destroy or rust.” (from the ICC pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism)

Even for the exporting countries, arms today less than ever constitute a palliative to the crisis. The costs of armaments cut into the competitiveness of each national capital, a fact vouched for by the USA’s insistence that Japan and Germany rearm themselves so as to share the burden of these costs.

Also, competition in the arms market is getting more acute. The buyer countries are themselves becoming competitors at many levels: “It has be­come practically impossible to obtain import contracts that don’t to some degree stipulate introducing the buyers to the techniques of arms production” (L’Expansion, 1.12.83).

Finally, arms can only be bought thanks to loans from the great powers -- loans that are less and less likely ever to be repaid. Armaments don’t help to delay the effects of the crisis: they only serve to maintain and advance strategic positions in the rivalries between east and west.

Just as the USSR gets its allies to pay for its arms, the USA gets its arms paid for through the particular place of the dollar as an inter­national reserve currency. Using high interest rates to drain towards the USA capital given over to speculation on the dollar, the bloc lea­der gets other countries to finance its budget deficit. Because the dollar is becoming more expensive, the US buys at almost half price in these countries. In 1982, the American budget deficit corresponded exactly to the national defense budget (Survey of Current Business, 7/83). The American ‘recovery’ is entirely bas­ed on the printing of money, and the inflatio­nary pressures that this inevitably engenders are leading towards a new surge of hyper-infla­tion that will threaten the international mone­tary system. And it was precisely against this danger that the bourgeoisie had to reshape its policies at the end of the seventies.

But it’s the extension of mass unemployment that most clearly shows the true bankruptcy of, the system. Whereas before World War II arms production permitted a spectacular reabsorption of unemployment -- from 5,331,000 to 172,850 in the US between 1933 and 1938, from 3,700,000 to 200,000 in Germany -- this isn’t the case today. With the gigantic growth in productivity based on the microchip etc, the present level of re­armament in the big industrial countries has had a negligible effect on unemployment. This hasn’t stopped growing and will continue to do so.

Arms production does not provide a real outlet for capitalism, and today less than ever. It is becoming a greater and greater burden for each national economy.