The Communistenbond Spartacus (‘Spartacus' Communist League) began in 1942 as a split from the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, itself a split from the RSAP. Before its dissolution by the Dutch government in 1940, the RSAP, whose dominant figure was Henk Sneevliet, oscillated between the POUM and Trotskyism, with anti-fascist positions, the defense of unions, ‘national liberation' and the Russian state. The MLL front which succeeded it, in clandestinity, began the internationalist work of denouncing all the fronts of the capitalist war. In 1941 its leadership, unanimously, except for one Trostskyist vote, decided not to support the USSR and denounced the German-Soviet pact as a part of the imperialist war front. The arrest of the MLL Front leadership, including Sneevliet, and their execution by the German army decapitated the MLL in 1942. Several months later the vestiges of the Front split in two: the small Trotskyist minority which chose the capitalist camp and the militant internationalists who, starting from great confusions would eventually form the Communistenbond. This latter organization would gradually evolve towards council communism. After representing the internationalist revolutionary current in Holland from 1945 through the fifties, it completely degenerated into councilist ideology. It disappeared as a group at the end of the seventies, leaving only epigones like Daad en Gedachte.
We are presenting the history of Communistenbond Spartacus here because this history is not well-known and even the Bond in degeneration considered its own history as just ‘old hat'. For revolutionary internationalists, the history of a communist group is never ‘old hat'. It's our history, the history of a political current which the working class gave life to. Making a balance sheet of this group and the councilist current today, drawing the positive and negative lessons from this experience is the way to forge the weapons of tomorrow. Because the councilist current is organizationally in decomposition in Holland, because it is no longer a living body capable to drawing essential lessons for the revolutionary struggle, the ICC must take up the task of drawing the lessons of the history of the Communistenbond Spartacus, in order to show elements of the class who are attracted to councilism that the logic of councilism leads to the void.
Two fundamental lessons to draw:
1. the rejection of October 1917 as a ‘bourgeois' revolution inevitably leads to a rejection of the whole history of the workers' movement since 1848. It necessarily goes along with a refusal to recognize the change in the historical period in 1914: the decadence of capitalism. It also logically leads to defending ‘national liberation struggles' as ‘progressive bourgeois revolutions'. This logic was chosen by the Swedish group Arbetarmakt who plunged head first into the leftist magma.
2. an incomprehension of the role and centralized functioning of the revolutionary organization inevitably leads to the void or to anarchist conceptions. Anti-centralism and individualism in the conception of the organization opens the door to workerism and immediatism which can happily coexist with academicism and opportunism. The results? The history of the Communistenbond shows us what they are - an abdication to anarchist and petty bourgeois tendencies. The end result is dislocation or capitulation to bourgeois ideology (unionism, national liberation struggles).
We hope that this history of Communistenbond Spartacus will help those who follow the council communist tradition to understand the need for organized activity based on the marxist conception of the decadence of capitalism. The political organization of revolutionaries on an international and centralized basis is an indispensable weapon that the class creates for the triumph of the world communist revolution.
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The evolution of the MLL Front towards the internationalist positions of non-defense of Russia and against the imperialist war without any distinction for labels - either ‘democracy', ‘fascism' or ‘communism' - is an atypical evolution. Coming from the RSAP, which had been oriented towards left socialism, it went towards council communist positions. This orientation was largely due to the strong personality of Sneevliet who despite his old age was still capable of evolving politically and had nothing more to lose on a personal level[1]. Such a profound political transformation cannot be compared to even that of the Munis group or the RKD which were also atypical[2].
But this evolution didn't go to its ultimate consequences. The death of Sneevliet and his comrades - particularly Ab Menlst - totally decapitated the leadership of the Front. The MLL owed its cohesion to the political weight of Sneevliet, who was more a militant guided by intuition and revolutionary convictions than a theoretician.
The death of Sneevliet and almost all the members of the Centrale reduced the organization to nothing for several months. From March to the summer of 1942, all the militants were in hiding and avoided any contact with each other because they thought the gestapo was using an informer from within the organization itself. But the police archives and the records of the Sneevliet trial show no evidence of a gestapo agent within the organization[3].
Of the leadership, only Stan Poppe survived. Under his influence the Revolutionair-socialistische Arbeidersbeweging (the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Movement) was founded during the summer. The use of the term ‘Workers' Movement' meant that the organization that was the formal continuation of the MLL front saw itself as neither a front, nor a party.
In the wake of the formation of the Stan Poppe group the last partisans of Dolleman formed their own group with a Trotskyist orientation on 22 August 1942 at the Hague. Thus the ‘Comite van Revolutionaire Marxisten' was formed on the basis of the defense of Russia[4]. This group was much smaller than Poppe's . It published a newspaper De Rode October (Red October) printing 2000 copies per month. Among the leaders of the CRM there was Max Perthus who had been freed from prison. The old Trotskyist faction of the MLL Front was thus reconstituted. The younger, more activist elements of the Front mainly joined the CRM. Logically the CRM was in the orbit of the IVth International; it became the IVth International's section in the Netherlands in June 1944[5].
This last split was the result of a confrontation between two irreconcilable positions: one defending the internationalist positions taken by Sneevliet and his comrades in July 1941; the other participating in the war by supporting Russia and thus the Allied military bloc.
Other personal and organizational reasons played a role in the split. In the summer of 1942 Poppe formed a new leadership eliminating all the supporters of the defense of Russia. Poppe was the last person to see Sneevliet before his arrest and this appeared suspicious to some[6].
In fact, the organization formed around Stan Poppe was perfectly prepared for clandestinity and was able to continue its political life until the end of the war without arrests. Leen Molenaar was one of the best counterfeiters of false papers and ration cards for the clandestine militants[7].
At the end of the summer, this group of fifty militants began editing more or less regularly a mimeographed bulletin called Spartacus. This was the organ of the Communistenbond Spartacus. Several pamphlets were edited which showed a higher theoretical level than the MLL Front. Towards the end of 1944, Spartacus became a monthly theoretical organ. From October 1944 until May 1945 they distributed a weekly page on immediate events: Spartacus Actuele Berichten (Current Events).
Politically, the Bond members, being older were less vulnerable and more theoretically formed than the younger Trotskyist elements. Many of them had been militants in the NAS and kept a certain revolutionary syndicalist mentality. Thus, Anton (Toon) van den Berg, a militant first of the OSP then the RSAP, had been a leader of the NAS in Rotterdam until 1940. The Rotterdam group of Communisten was formed around him and this group was characterized by an activist spirit until the end of the war. Other militants had a political past marked not so much by unionism but by left socialism and even the MLL Front. Such was the case of Stan Poppe.
Stan Poppe had played an important role in the OSP. He was in the leadership of this party as Secretary. At the fusion with the RSP, he became a member of the political bureau of the RSAP. Elected Secretary-Treasurer of this party, he was delegated - with Menlst - in December to the Conference of the Centre for the IVth International. A member of the political bureau in 1938, he was one of the leaders of the MLL Front in 1940. In the Front and later in the Communisten Spartacusbond, he was known under the name of Fjeerd Woudstra. Very oriented towards economic study, his political orientation was still a mixture of Leninism and councilism.
Most militants came from the old RSAP without going through the Trotskyist movement which was very weak in Holland anyway. Many of them continued to work in the Bond after the war, most of them until the end of their lives: Bertus Nansink, Jaap van Otterloo, Jaap Meulenkamp, Cees van der Kull, Wlebe van der Wal, Jan Vastenhouw, were these kind of militants.
But for two more years, the evolution of Spartacus contained political ambiguities which proved that the spirit of the RSAP had not totally disappeared. The old left socialist reflexes still showed through in contacts with a Social Democratic group which had left the SDAP at the beginning of the war and whose dominant personality was W. Romljn. At the end of 1943, under the pseudonym Soclus, Romljn wrote a pamphlet where he ‘tactically' supported the military struggle of the Allies. Spartacus strongly attacked this position[8] and gave up the idea of negotiations for fusion with Romljn. But the very fact that there were proposals for fusion with this group showed that the Bond had no class analysis of Social Democracy. In this, ‘Spartacus' was very far from council communism which had always denounced socialist groups of the right and left as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois. This persistence in looking for contacts with left socialists could still be seen in November 1944, when for a time common work was done with the De Vonk work which finally failed because of the political divergences.
As for the Trotskyist current, although the organizational break was completed, the same was not true ideologically with these left tendencies. Poppe had two meetings in 1944 with the group ‘Against the Stream' (Tegen de Stroom, led by Vereeken). Although this group rejected the defense of Russia in June 1941, it remained linked to the French Communist Internationalist Committee of Henri Molinier. It joined the IVth International after the war[9]. More significantly was the fact that even within the Spartacus Bond, the last hesitations on the defense of Russia were not totally eliminated. A small part of the organization - which was against the defense of the Russian camp in World War II - took a stand in favor of this defense in case of a third world war between the western Allies and the USSR[10].
For two years - until the theoretical contribution of the ex-GIC became preponderant - the Bond tried to clarify its political positions. Its activity consisted in large part in carrying out theoretical work, in the form of pamphlets. This work rested in large part on the shoulders of Bertus Nansink and above all of Stan Poppe.
Stan Poppe's pamphlet on Perspectives of Imperialism after the War in Europe and the Task of Socialist-Revolutionaries was written in December 1943 and appeared in January 1944[11]. This text was very influenced by Lenin's book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and claimed a continuity with the ‘scientific socialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin' but not Rosa Luxemburg. It tried to define the evolution of capitalism and develop revolutionary perspectives for the proletariat.
The cause of the world war was attributed to ‘the general crisis of capitalism' since 1914. In a Leninist way, Poppe defined the new period as a crisis of ‘imperialist monopoly':
"This last and highest phase was defined by Lenin as imperialism. Imperialism is the political expression of a society producing in a capitalist-monopoly mode."
This reference to Lenin is particularly interesting when we think of how the ‘councilists' of Spartacus would define themselves as anti-Leninists in the future.
However, a certain amount of theoretical reflection can be discerned below the surface of these somewhat scholastic references to Lenin. Poppe saw the crisis as a crisis of overproduction. This led to state capitalism, the end-product of the monopoly stage, which gave rise to the arms economy. The latter invades all of production and "the (capitalist) system can only be propped up by war or production for war". In this text Poppe does not refer to Russia as state capitalist. On the contrary, he asserts that the USSR "is outside the hold of monopoly capitalist production and of the domination of the market"; Russia is "the only state organized adversary of imperialism". Such a statement is all the more surprising because in the MLL Front Poppe was one of those who considered Russia as state capitalist. The denunciation of state capitalist measures in all countries, "whether they be democratic or autocratic, republican or monarchical", except in Russia, is thus a notable contradiction in this text.
The analysis of the conflict in Europe was more lucid: "the war is ending. The military defeat of Germany and its allies is no longer speculation but a fact of life ..." Paradoxically Poppe thought that the second world war would be extended into a third world war in Asia, pitting Japan against the Anglo-American camp for the control of the colonies.
Somewhat like Bordiga after 1945[12], Poppe thought the war was leading to the political fascisation of the western democracies:
"On the level of foreign policy, the imperialist war is the other side of the monopolistic exploitation of labor power. In domestic policy, bourgeois democracy, corresponding to the same social order, is like fascism."
In the case of a revolutionary crisis, the democracies will see "their own future" in fascism. If there is no such revolutionary crisis, a form of neo-fascist economy will be imposed: "In words, there will be no more fascism but in fact we will live in the second golden age of fascism. At the heart of the neo-fascist social policy will be a constant decline in the workers' standard of living, the necessary consequence of deflationary policies."
With the example of the thirties in his mind, Poppe thought that the open crisis of capitalism would continue after the war: "there will be no reconstruction or else a very short and limited one". The alternative for the proletariat was "either socialism or a fall into barbarism", either proletarian revolution or war. But the text does not go into any prognosis. It emphasizes that the war "for the conquest of Indonesia and the Far East" implies "an inevitable war against the Soviet Union itself", either in the course of ‘third' war in the Orient or a ‘fourth' world war.
Nevertheless, "the general crisis of capitalism ripens the revolutionary crisis of the system". This does not mean to imply that "the revolution arises automatically". It "depends on the conscious intervention of the revolutionary class during the (revolutionary) process".
Theoretically, Poppe defines the revolution as the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of this "dictatorship and of the state itself". This dictatorship will be a dictatorship of the factory councils which will form "the central councils of power". It is interesting to note that peasant soviets are excluded. In the ‘struggle for power' which is the "struggle for and with the councils", the proletariat of the factories is at the heart of the revolution. It is symptomatic of a Gramscilike factoryist vision that Poppe takes factory occupations like those in Italy in 1920 as his example[13].
But a separation is made between the revolution of the councils in the industrialized countries and the call for support for ‘national liberation struggles':
"There can be no socialist policy in Europe and America without proclaiming the complete independence of the former colonial peoples."
On the colonial question, Poppe takes Lenin's position on ‘the rights of peoples to self-determination'. It seems that Poppe's position on this did not reflect the opinion of all the militants: in 1940 Jan Vastenhouw, then a member of the MLL Front, firmly attacked Lenin's conception in an internal bulletin.
Poppe goes very far in his analysis. Not only does he consider that "the task (of revolutionary socialists) is of course to call on workers of all countries to get rid of the Japanese in the occupied territories of China and Indonesia" but he also proclaims that this ‘liberation' should be done under the banner of the USSR. Of course Poppe is not talking about a Stalinist USSR but a liberated one - as a result of the workers' councils taking power in Europe - ruled by the workers and peasants who will have overthrown Stalinism. In this vision, a mixture of fantasy and belief, there could be a revolutionary war of ‘national liberation':
"If socialists are correct in their analysis, it means that the Soviet Union will also become the most important factor in the struggle against Japanese imperialism. A Soviet Union that can count on an alliance with the people's councils in power instead of doubtful treaties with capitalist governments; a Soviet Union that enjoys the support of a system of united councils in Europe and the solidarity of the proletariat guided by revolutionary socialism will also be able to expel Japanese imperialism from Mandchu-Kuo and other parts of China and Indonesia - without the help of the British and American armies."
This idea of a war of ‘revolutionary liberation' is akin to the theory of the revolutionary war launched by the Comintern in 1920. One cannot help but notice that Poppe's ‘liberation' from the barrel of a gun was even more ‘national' (if not downright nationalistic) than revolutionary in its offer to "restore the territorial integrity of the Republic of China". He appears to be talking about a bourgeois national revolution, like the wars of the French Revolution, which established rather than destroyed the national framework. Poppe's theory of workers' councils is a national theory of a federated union of councils. The concept of a ‘national liberation struggle' is the corollary of a concept of workers' councils emerging from a national revolution.
The positions of Poppe and the Communistenbond were still at this time very far from the positions of council communism. They were still a mixture of Leninism, Trotskyism and even Gramsci. Until the summer of 1944 the Bond was unable to come to a political position on the nature of the USSR.
It was finally through discussions with former members of the GIC that Spartacus definitively moved towards council communism. Some members of the Bond made contact with Canne-Meijer, BA Sijes, Jan Appel, Theo Massen and Bruun van Albada and asked them to work in the Bond. They agreed to contribute theoretically through discussion and texts[14] but they did not in any way wish to dissolve their own group nor immediately join the Bond. They were still very suspicious towards the new organization since it was marked by a Leninist tradition. They wanted to wait and see how far the Bond would evolve towards council communism. Little by little they participated in editorial activities and interventions, with a hybrid status as ‘guests'[15]. They avoided taking positions on organizational matters of the Bond and did not participate in meetings when these questions were on the agenda. But a little before May 1945 they became full members of the organization once political and theoretical agreement had been reached on all sides.
The fruit of this political maturation of the Bond was the pamphlet published in August 1944: De Strijd om de macht (The Struggle for Power). This pamphlet took a stand against any union and parliamentary activity and called for the formation of new anti-union proletarian organs emerging from the spontaneous struggle: factory councils, the basis of the formation of workers' councils. The pamphlet pointed out those changes in the capitalist mode of production had led to structural modifications within the working class and thus required new forms of workers' organizations corresponding to the emergence of a ‘new workers' movement'[16].
In this pamphlet, and unlike the old GIC, the Bond called for the formation of a revolutionary party an International. However, unlike Trotskyism, the Bond emphasized that such a party could only emerge after the war when the organs of struggle of the proletariat would be formed.
When in May 1945, the Communistenbond Spartacus legally published the first issue of its monthly Spartacus it could no longer be considered a continuation of the MLL Front. With the militant contribution of the members of the GIC, the Bond became a council communist organization. As Canne-Meijer was to write in 1946:
"The present Spartacusbond cannot be seen as a direct continuation from the RSAP. Its composition is different and on many questions its positions are not the same ... Many of those who were part of the RSAP did not join Spartacus; some were attracted by Trotskyists. But they were not numerous because in any case Trotskyists are not very numerous."[17]
Spartacus was the most important revolutionary organization in Holland and bore a heavy political responsibility on an international level in terms of the regroupment of revolutionaries in war-torn Europe, isolated by the Occupation and once again looking for international contacts. This possibility of becoming a pole of regroupment depended on the solidity of the organization, its political and theoretical homogeneity, of a clear will to escape from the linguistic barriers of a small country like Holland.
Numerically, the Bond was relatively strong for a revolutionary organization, especially in a small country. In 1945 it had about 100 members. It had a monthly theoretical review as well as a weekly paper printing 6,000 copies[18]. It was present in most large cities, and in particular in the workers' centers of Amsterdam and Rotterdam where the council communist tradition was real.
But the organization was far from being homogeneous. It regrouped former members of the MLL Front and the GIC, but also syndicalists from the pre-war NAS. Anarchists were also in the Bond from the old ‘Libertarian Socialist Movement'. Many young people also joined Spartacus but without political experience or theoretical formation. It was thus a union of different origins but not really the fusion which could represent the basis for the creation of a homogeneous organization. Centrifugal tendencies were very strong as we will see later on. Libertarian elements carried with them anti-organizational conceptions. The ex-Syndicalists around de Toon van den Berg in Rotterdam were very activist and workerist. Their conception was more syndicalist than political. On the other hand, the young people had a propensity to follow along after one or the other tendency, mostly the first, because of their political immaturity.
Organizationally, the Bond had nothing to do with the old GIC which had seen itself as a federation of working groups. The Bond was a centralized organization and remained so until 1947. Its organization was composed of nuclei (kerne) or local sections of six members, and then city-wide or territorial sections. An executive committee of five members represented the organization to the outside world and was responsible to the Congress of the Bond which was the sovereign body. As with any revolutionary organization worthy of its name, it had elected working bodies: a political commission regrouping the editorial staff and responsible for political questions; an organization commission for current questions; a control commission responsible for verifying that decisions taken were indeed applied; a financial control commission. In 1945 there were between 21 to 27 people in the central organs.
The basis for joining was clearly defined by the statutes adopted in October 1945[19]. The Bond put a very high value on the organization and accepted new members only with the greatest prudence and demanded of them "the discipline of a democratic centralist party"[20]. In fact, the Bond followed the tradition of the KAPD. But Communistenbond took over certain aspects of this tradition which were the least favorable for its work. The Bond was centralized by its organs but decentralized on a local level. It considered that each "nuclei was autonomous in its own region"[21]. Aiming at a ‘decentralization of work', it was inevitable that this decentralization clashed with the centralism of the organization.
At the same time, the Bond maintained certain conceptions of organization which had flourished during the period of mass political organizations. The organization was still seen as an organization of ‘cadres': hence the formation, decided at the conference of 21/22 July 1945, of a ‘school of marxist cadres'. It was not totally unitary: at its periphery there were the ‘Associations of Friends of Spartacus' (VSV). The VSV was the Bond's autonomous youth organization. Composed of young people between 20 and 25, this parallel organization was in fact an organization of young sympathizers. Although it had no duties vis-a-vis the Bond, it had to participate in propaganda and make financial contributions. Such a hazy line between militants and sympathizers helped to strengthen the centrifugal tendencies that existed within the organization.
Another example of the weight of the past was the creation in August 1945 of a ‘Workers' Aid' (Arbeidershulp). The idea was to set up, in the enterprises, an organ, or rather an assistance fund, to give financial aid to workers on strike. Underlying it was the notion that the Communistenbond had to direct the workers' struggle by substituting itself for their spontaneous efforts at self-organization. Nevertheless, this ‘Workers' Aid' only had a brief existence. The discussion on the party which took place throughout the Bond led to a more precise view of the nature and function of the political organization of revolutionaries.
Spartacus thought that the workers' struggles which broke out at the end of the war would open up a revolutionary period, if not immediately then at least in the future. In April 1945 the Bond's conference proclaimed the necessity for a party and the provisional character of its existence as a national organization:
"The Bond is a provisional organization of marxists, oriented towards the formation of a real international communist party, which will have to arise from the struggle of the working class."[22]
It's noteworthy that this declaration posed the question of the birth of a party in the revolutionary period. Such a conception was the opposite to that of the Trotskyists in the 1930s, and then the Bordigists after 1945, who saw the question of when the party is formed as a secondary issue and considered that the party was a product of mere will. It was enough to ‘proclaim' it for it to exist. No less noteworthy was the ‘Inaugural Address' - voted at the July Conference - to internationalist revolutionary groups. It excluded the Trotskyist CRM of Holland, with whom the conference broke all contact, because of their position of ‘defense of the USSR'[23]. It was an appeal for the regroupment of the different groups of the communist left, those who rejected the idea of the party taking power:
"It is in and through the movement itself that a new communist international can be born, with the participation of the communists of all countries, free of bureaucratic domination but also of any pretensions towards taking power for it itself."[24]
It must be said however that this appeal for the regroupment of internationalist revolutionaries only gave rise to some limited measures. The conference decided to set up a secretariat for information in Brussels, the task of which would be to make contact with various groups and edit an information bulletin. At the same time there was a very brief revival of contact with the Vereeken group. It was clear that the positions of his group ‘Against the Stream' (Tegen de Stroom)[25] were incompatible with those of the Bond. But the very fact of reviving contact showed an absence of political criteria for demarcating internationalist communist groups from confused or anarchist groups. This same absence of criteria could be seen again in 1947, at an international conference held in Brussels.
The Bond's preparation for the emergence of a party implied a greater homogeneity in the organization on the theoretical conception of the party. This is why the ‘Theses on the Task and Nature of the Party' were written for the Congress of 24-26 December 1945[26]. They were adopted by the Congress and published as a pamphlet in January 1946[27]. It is very significant that they were written by a former member of the GIC: Bruun van Albada. This fact itself showed the unanimity which then existed in the Bond on the question, and above all expressed an explicit rejection of the conceptions which had reigned in the GIC during the thirties.
The holding of public meetings on the theme of the party during the course of 1946 showed the importance that the organization accorded to the Theses.
The Theses are centered around the change in the function of the party between the period of capitalism's ascendance - described as the period of ‘liberal capitalism' - and the period of decadence that followed the first world war, the period of the domination of state capitalism. Although the concepts of the ascendance and decadence of capitalism are not used, the text strongly underlines the change in historic period, which implied a need to go beyond the old conceptions of the party:
"The present critique of the old parties is not just a critique of their political practice or of what their leaders get up to, but is a critique of the entire old conception of the party. It is a direct consequence of changes in the structure and objectives of the mass movement. The task of the (revolutionary) party is in its activity within the mass movement of the proletariat."
The Theses in a historical manner showed that the conception of a workers' party acting on the model of the bourgeois parties of the French revolution and not distinct from other social strata became obsolete with the Paris Commune. The party does not aim for the conquest of the state but for its destruction:
"In this period of the development of mass action, the political party of the working class had to play a much broader role. Because the workers had not yet become the overwhelming majority of the population, the political party still appeared as the organization necessary for mobilizing the majority of the population behind the action of the workers, in the same way that the bourgeois party acted in the bourgeois revolution. Because the proletarian party had to be at the head of the state, the proletariat had to conquer the state."
Showing the evolution of capitalism after 1900 "the period of growing prosperity for capitalism", the Theses traced the development of reformism in social democracy. They had a tendency to reject the parties of the IInd International after 1900, given their evolution towards parliamentary and union opportunism. And they ignored the reaction of the revolutionary left within these parties (Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek). Demonstrating very clearly that classical social democracy only had a "semblance of real democracy" and that there was a "complete split between the mass of members and the party leadership", the Theses came to a negative conclusion and failed to show the positive contribution these organizations had made to the workers' movement of the time:
"The political party ceased being a formation of working class power. It became the diplomatic representative of the workers inside capitalist society. It participated as a loyal opposition in parliament, in the organization of capitalist society."
The First World War opened up a new period, the period of the proletarian revolution. The Theses considered that it was the absolute pauperisation of the proletariat and not the change in period which was at the origin of the revolution. From this standpoint it was hard to see how the revolutionary period of 1917-23 differed from that of 1848, a period of ‘absolute pauperization' characteristic of the situation of a nascent proletariat:
"The outbreak of the world war meant that the phase of relative pauperization was followed by that of absolute pauperization. This new evolution forced the workers into a revolutionary opposition against capital. Thus, at the same time, the workers entered into conflict with social democracy."
The Theses did not fail to underline the positive gains of the post-war revolutionary wave: the spontaneous emergence of "enterprise organizations and workers' councils as organs of workers' democracy within the enterprise and as organs of local political democracy". But the Theses minimized the revolutionary significance of 1917 in Russia: all they seem to retain of 1917 is what happened afterwards - the counterrevolution and state capitalism. They even saw the Stalinist counter-revolution originating in the revolution itself. The process of degeneration was denied and the Russian workers made responsible for the failure of the Russian revolution. Thus the development of ‘state socialism' (ie state capitalism) was seen as the "result of the revolutionary struggle of the peasants and workers".
However, the Theses were quite lucid about the pernicious effect of the confusion between socialism and state capitalism in the workers' minds at that time. This confusion got in the way of a full maturation of revolutionary consciousness: "... through the Russian revolution, the state socialist conception was given a revolutionary aura and this played no small part in preventing the development of a real revolutionary consciousness in the working class."[28]
The implicit rejection of the Russian Revolution and the contribution of the Bolshevik party in 1917 led the author of the Theses to establish an identity between the revolutionary Bolshevism of the beginning, and Stalinism. For him there was no difference between Bolshevism and social democracy, "except in method". The aim of both was an "economy planned by the state".
More marginal was the definition of the role of the party and of revolutionaries in their intervention. Taking up the KAPD's conceptions in the 1920s, the Bond insisted that the role of the party was neither to guide, nor educate nor substitute itself for the working class:
"The role of the party is now restricted to that of an organization of clarification and propaganda. It no longer aspires to rule over the class."
The genesis of the party is tightly linked to the changes in capitalism - where the period "of liberal capitalism is definitively closed" - and to the transformation of the workers' class consciousness. The revolutionary struggle which gives rise to the party is above all a struggle against the state, produced by mass action. It is also a conscious struggle for organization: "The state has clearly become the mortal enemy of the working class ... In every case, the workers' struggle involves an irreconcilable opposition to the state, not only the government but the whole (state) apparatus, including the old parties and unions ... There is an indestructible connection between the three elements of the workers' struggle for emancipation: the upsurge of mass action, of organization and of consciousness."
The Theses established a dialectical interaction between the development of the revolutionary organization and the revolutionary struggle: "Thus organization develops materially and spiritually in the struggle; and with organization, the struggle itself develops."
The most significant aspect of the Theses is that they demonstrate the positive role of the revolutionary party in mass movements and define the type of revolutionary militant who corresponds to the new period. The party's field of action is clearly defined:
A. Necessity for the Party: The development of consciousness
The Theses show that the party is necessary, because it is a dialectical product of the development of class consciousness and consequently an active factor in this process of development. Here we are far indeed from the councilist vision that was to develop later on, in which unorganized revolutionaries simply dissolve themselves into the class[29]. Also rejected was the Bordigist view which makes the party a sort of general staff to which the workers are blindly subordinated. The necessity for the party derived not from a relationship of force between this organization and the class, but from an organic relationship between party and class, born out of the development of class consciousness.
"In the process through which consciousness develops in the struggle, where the struggle itself becomes conscious, the party has an important and necessary role to play. In the first place tit supports this development of consciousness. The lessons that are drawn both from victories and defeats - lessons of which the workers, taken separately, are more or less aware - are formulated by the party and disseminated among the masses through its propaganda. The ‘idea', when it seizes hold of the masses, thus becomes a material force.
The party is neither a general staff detached from the masses, nor the ‘thinking brain' of the workers. It is the focus for expressing the growing consciousness of the workers."
While the party and the class have an organic, complementary relationship within the same unity of consciousness, they are not identical. The party is the highest expression of the proletariat's class consciousness - a political and historical consciousness, not a reflection of the immediate struggle (the immediate consciousness in the class). The party is thus a part of the class.
"A part of the class, the most conscious and formed element in the struggle, the party is the first to be able to understand the dangers that threaten (the workers' struggle), the first to discern the potentiality of the new organs of power. It must struggle within them so that its opinions are used to the full by the workers. It must propagate its positions through words, and then necessary through an intervention in deed, so that its example can advance the class in its struggle."
This conception of the propagandist function of the party "through words and deeds" is identical to that of the KAPD in the 1920s. Here the Bond had almost a voluntarist conception of the party's action, where the example of the party's action is a form of struggle and even a way of inciting struggle. This definition of the party is close to that of Bordiga, for whom the party was a program and a will to action. But for the Dutch Left, the program was less a totality of theoretical and political principles than the formulation of class consciousness, or even the sum of workers' consciousnesses:
"What every workers feels, ie that the situation is intolerable and that it is absolutely necessary to destroy capitalism, must be synthesized by the party in clear formulae."
B. The tasks of the Party: Theory and Praxis
For the Communistenbond, it was clear that there could be no separation between theoretical and practical intervention. Theory was not defined as a sum of individual opinions but as a science. As the Bond had already written in January 1945: "dialectical materialism is not simply the only exact method but also the only universal method of research"[30]. Paradoxically, it was the scientist Pannekoek who in his Workers' Councils rejected the idea of materialist scientific theory, considering that an organization expressed various opinions without scientific results and without method. In contrast to the Bond in the 1945-46 period, Pannekoek defended an eclectic method, ie he rejected any method of theoretical investigation, in line with the notion that a sum of units gives you a totality. As he put it: "in each of these diverse thoughts you can find a greater or lesser portion of truth"[31]. In contrast to this, the Theses affirmed that:
"Questions must be examined in their coherence; the results must be presented in their scientific clarity and determinism."
From this method derived the tasks of the party in the proletariat:
-- the task of ‘enlightenment' and not of organization, the latter being the task of the workers in struggle. The function of organizing the class disappeared in favor of the task of clarifying the struggle. This clarification was defined negatively as an ideological and practical struggle against "all the pernicious attempts of the bourgeoisie and its accomplices to contaminate the workers' organization with its own influence";
-- the task of "practical intervention in the class struggle". Realizing this task stems from the party's understanding that it cannot "carry out the workers' functions on their behalf":
"(The party) can only intervene as a part of the class and not in contradiction with it. Its position in its intervention is solely to contribute to the deepening and extension of the power of the democracy of the councils ...".
This function of the party didn't imply passivity. In contrast to the ‘councilists' of the fifties and sixties, the Spartacusbond had no fear of affirming itself as a ‘motor' of the class struggle, taking initiatives that compensated for the hesitations of the workers:
"... when the workers hesitate to take certain measures, members of the party can, as revolutionary industrial workers, take the initiative and they even have a duty to do so when it is possible and necessary to accomplish these measures. When the workers want to abrogate the decision to take action to a union representative, conscious communists must take the initiative for an intervention by the workers themselves. When, in a more developed phase of the struggle, the enterprise organizations and the workers' councils hesitate about a problem of organizing the economy, conscious communists must not only show them the necessity for such organization; they must also study these questions themselves and convene enterprise assemblies to discuss them. Thus, their activity unfolds within the struggle and as a motor to the struggle when it stagnates or threatens to be diverted into a dead-end."
We can see here a somewhat ouvrierist interpretation of intervention in the workers' councils. The idea that party members intervene as ‘industrial workers' seems to exclude the possibility that ‘conscious communists' of an intellectual origin can defend their point of view in front of the workers as party members. By this token Marx, Lenin, and Engels would be excluded. We know that in 1918 Rosa Luxemburg was deprived of the ‘right' to intervene in the Berlin Central Council on the pretext that she was an ‘intellectual'. Those who defended the motion excluding her were SPD members who were quite aware of Luxemburg's political weight. Here, the Theses seem to hold that the ‘intellectual' members of the party are foreign to the proletariat, even though the party is defined as "a part of the class".
At the same time, it is characteristic that the intervention of the party in the councils is straightaway centered round the economic problems of the period of transition: the management of production and the "organization of the economy through the democracy of the workers' councils, the base of which is calculation of labor time." In insisting that "the necessity of organizing a planned communist economy must be clearly demonstrated", the Spartacusbond showed a tendency to underestimate the political problems which would first be posed in the proletarian revolution, ie the seizure of power by the councils, the precondition for the period of transition to communism.
C. The functioning of the Party
The Theses were silent on the question of the centralization of the party. Neither the question of fractions and tendencies, nor that of internal democracy, were posed. The Bond showed a tendency to idealize the homogeneity of the party. Just like the Bordigist Internationalist Communist Party after the war[32], it did not conceive that divergences might appear within the organization. But while the Bordigist party found ‘guarantees' against divergences in an ideal and immutable ‘program', the Spartacusbond thought it had found them in the existence of ideal militants. According to the Bond a militant was someone who was always capable of being autonomous in his understanding and his judgment:
"(The party members) must be autonomous workers, with their own capacity for understanding and judging ..."
This definition of the militant appears as a ‘categorical imperative', an individual ethic within the party. It must be stressed that the Bond thought that an entirely proletarian composition and the high quality of each militant would shield the party from the risk of bureaucratic degeneration. However, it has to be said that parties composed overwhelmingly of workers, like the CPs in the twenties and thirties, were not shielded from Stalinist bureaucratization and that the organization of the party by factory cells stifled the militants' political capacity for "understanding and judgment"[33], even that of the best militants. Furthermore, in a revolutionary party, there is no formal equality in everyone's capacities: real equality exists on the political level because the party is above all a political body whose cohesion is reflected in each one of its members. It is this body which enables its militants to tend individually towards political and theoretical homogeneity.
More profound is the Bond's rejection of a zombie-like Jesuit discipline - as in the famous watchword of the Society of Jesus ‘perinde ac cadaver' -which breaks the profound convictions of each militant:
"Adhering to the main general conceptions of the party, which are also their own conceptions, (the militants) must defend and apply them in all circumstances. They do not follow a zombie-like discipline, submitting to decisions without any will of their own. They only obey out of a deep conviction, based on a fundamental conception. In case of a conflict within the organization, it's conviction that settles things."
Thus the conception was of a freely consented organizational discipline, based on the defense of the party's main positions. It was this notion of discipline that was to be rejected a few years later by the Bond on the pretext that it infringed the free activity of each member as a "free man who thinks for himself".
There is a very important idea contained in the Theses. The party is not just a program, but is composed of men animated by a revolutionary passion. This passion, which the Bond called ‘conviction', was to protect the party from any tendency towards degeneration:
"This self-activity of the members, this general education and conscious participation in the workers' struggle makes it impossible for any bureaucracy to arise in the party. On the organizational level, there can be no effective measures against this (danger) if this self activity and education are missing. In that case the party can no longer be seen as a communist party. In a real communist party, whose fundamental idea is the self-activity of the class, this idea is incarnated in the flesh and bones of each one of its members. A party with a communist program can end up degenerating, perhaps; a party composed of communists, never."
Traumatized by the Russian experience, the Bond thought that militant will and theoretical formation constituted sufficient guarantees against the threat of degeneration. It thus tended to build up the image of a pure militant not subjected individually to the pressure of bourgeois ideology. Holding that the party is a sum of individuals following a ‘higher calling', the Theses express a certain voluntarism, even a naive idealism. The separation between the program, which is the fruit of constant theoretical research, and militant will, led to the rejection of the idea of a party as a programmatic and organic body. If the party is just a sum of individual wills, it can no longer be an organ irrigating the totality of its militant cells. A couple of years later, the Bond was to push this separation to an extreme.
D. The link with the class
Born out of the mass action of the proletariat, the party can in the end only find ‘guarantees' through its links with the proletariat.
"When this link doesn't exist, when the party is an organ which situates itself outside the class, there is no choice but to put oneself outside the class in a defeatist manner, or to force its leadership on the class. Thus, the party can only be truly revolutionary if it is anchored in the masses to such an extent that its activity is not, in general, distinct from that of the proletariat, and if the will, the aspirations and the conscious understanding of the working class are crystallized in the party."
In this definition the link with the class seems contradictory. The party catalyses the consciousness of the class in struggle and simultaneously fuses with the proletariat. The Bond only sees any contradiction between party and class when there is a process of degeneration, when the ‘link' is lost. The reason for this is that the revolutionaries of that period were haunted by the fear of a repetition of the horrors of the counter-revolution in Russia. But it needs to be said that the correspondence between the historic goals of the proletariat and those of the party doesn't mean a fusion. The history of the workers' movement, in particular, the Russian and German revolutions, is the history of the tormented relationship between party and class. In a revolutionary period, the party can be in disagreement with the actions of the class; thus in July 1917 the Bolsheviks were in disagreement with the working masses of Petrograd who wanted prematurely to take power. And like Luxemburg's Spartacusbund, the party can also be in agreement with the ‘will of the masses' when they are anxious to take power, as in Berlin 1919, which ended in the decapitation of the party. In fact, the ‘fusion' between party and masses is rarely achieved. Even in a revolutionary period and much more so in a counter-revolutionary phase, the party often has to go ‘against the stream' rather than with it. While being a ‘part of the class' - as the Theses put it - it is distinct from the totality of the class as long as its principles and its activity are not fully accepted by the mass of workers, or even encounter their hostility.
E. Party and state in the revolution
The Theses of December 1945 did not raise the problem of the relationship between party and state after the seizure of power. The question[34] was raised within the Bond and in March 1946 there appeared a pamphlet which devoted a chapter to this problem: ‘Van slavenmaatschannij tot arbeidersmacht' ('From slave society to workers' power'). It affirmed that the party can neither take power nor ‘govern' the workers. Indeed, "whatever party forms the government, it must govern against men, for capital and a bureaucracy"[35]. This is why the party, which acts within the workers' councils, is distinct from the state:
"It is a very different party from those of bourgeois society. It does not itself participate in any form of power ... the proletarian seizure of power is neither the conquest of the state government by a ‘workers' party' nor the participation of such a party in a state government ... the state as such is by essence completely alien to the power of the workers; thus the forms of organization of workers' power have none of the characteristics of the exertion of power by the state."
But in 1946, in contrast to what happened later, it was Pannekoek who was influenced by the Communistenbond! In his Five Theses on the Class Struggle[36] he affirmed - in contrast with his previous position -"that the work of (revolutionary) parties was an indispensable part of the self-emancipation of the working class", It's true that he reduced the function of these parties to a purely theoretical and propagandist one:
"It's the parties who have the second function (the first being the ‘conquest of political power'- ed), that is to disseminate knowledge and ideas, to study, discuss and formulate social ideas and enlighten the minds of the masses through propaganda."
The divergences which appeared in the Bond on the conception of the party - during the preparation for the Christmas 1945 Congress - were more in the nature of nuances than a rejection of the Theses. In any case, they were a rejection of Pannekoek's educationist theory. In another set of draft Theses - accepted by two members out of five of the political commission - it was stressed that "the new party is not the educator of the class". This draft aimed mainly at making more precise certain points that were somewhat vague in ‘Taak en Wezen van de nieuwe Partij'. In the first place - to clearly mark the break with Sneevliet's RSAP - ‘tactical' participation in parliament was firmly rejected: "The party does not of course participate in any parliamentary activity." In the second place, the author of the draft saw in the Theses a return to the activist conceptions of the KAPD, or rather of ‘leadership' tendencies in the mass struggle:
"The party does not lead any action and, as a party, does not conduct any action of the class. It's task is precisely to combat any subordination of the class, and its movements, to the leadership of a political group."[37]
In this spirit, the new party "does not recognize any ‘leaders'; it simply executes the decisions of its members ... As long as a decision subsists, it is valid for all members."
Chardin
(to be continued)
[1] Of Sneevliet's two sons, one committed suicide and the other died in Spain with the POUM militia fighting under the banner of anti-fascism, a victim of the positions of the RSAP.
[2] The Munis group, exiled in Mexico during the war, took internationalist positions on the nondefense of Russia. The RKD also came from Trotskyism and was composed of French and Austrian militants. It worked with the French Fraction of the Communist Left at the end of the war. Little by little it went towards anarchism and disappeared in 1948-49.
[3] The studies of Max Pesthus and Wim Bot on the MLL Front based on studies of German archives in Holland give no basis for this hypothesis.
[4] Winkel in his book De Ondergrondse pers 1940-45 (Hague 1954) asserts that the ex-head of the KAPN and friend of Gorter, Bavend Luteraan was the editor of the CRM. It seems that during the war Luteraan created his own group on the basis of Trotskyist positions. After the war, he became a member of the Dutch Social Democracy (Labor Party).
[5] The ‘Bolshevik-Leninist Group' was constituted on the basis of the positions of the IVth International in 1938 and disappeared during the war, after the arrest of the leadership. The CRM proclaimed itself a party in December 1945, even though very small, under the name Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). It published the weekly De Tribune which had nothing to do with the Tribunism of the SPD in the days of Gorter.
[6] After the war, suspicion fell on Stan Poppe. Sneevliet had been arrested after his visit to Poppe. In the Sneevliet trial records it was said that Sneevliet was arrested "with Poppe's help". An enquiry commission was formed in 1950 made up of the RCP, Communistenbond and a small independent union, the OVB. The commission unanimously arrived at the conclusion that Poppe's attitude was above reproach and that no blame could fall on him.
[7] 300,000 people out of a population of 6 million inhabitants lived in clandestinity with false papers and false ration cards in Holland.
[8] See Spartacus, Bulletin van de revolutionairsocialistische Arbeidersbeweging in Nederland, Jan 1944.
[9] See Vereeken, Le Guipeau dans le mouvement Trotskyiste, Paris 1975, 1st chapter.
[10] See Spartacus no.4, Oct.1942 and in the same review, the issue of Feb.1944 in the article ‘De Sowiet-Unie en Wij' (the Soviet Union and US).
[11] ‘De perspectiven van het imperialisme na de vorlag in Europa en de taak van de revolutionaire socialisten' Dec 43. It is remarkable that this pamphlet whose theses are very far from council communism is given as the political basis of the Bond in 1945 without any criticism of the theses. See Spartacus Maanschrift voor de revolutionair-socialistische Arbeidersbeweging, May 1945, Beschonwingen over de situatie: de balans.
[12] See Prometeo, no.3, Oct.1946, ‘Le Prospettiva del dopoguerra in relazione alle piattaforma del Partito' (Post-war Perspectives in relation to the Party Platform). The author of this article, Bordiga, asserts that "western democracies are gradually moving towards totalitarian and fascist forms". In using these terms, Bordiga, like the Dutch Left, meant to emphasize the state capitalist tendencies in the countries of Western Europe.
[13] The Bond published a study of factory occupations in Italy ‘Een bedrijfsbezetting' (‘Factory Occupations') in its theoretical review Maanblad Spartacus in 1945 (nos. 9 & 12). This study asserts that in 1920 "The factories formed a unity which was not attached to a party as a union". "the movement ended with a compromise between the bosses and the unions". The text showed that factory occupations are not enough and that there must be workers' councils whose "first task is not managing industry but organizing struggle. A period of war will exist - civil war". This criticism of the factory occupations in Italy is very different from the factoryist view of ‘production management' by the councils defended later in the Bond by Pannekoek.
[14] For the history of the fusion between the ex-GIC and the Communistenbond, a letter from Canne Meijer of 30 June, 1946, to the paper Le Proletaire (RKD-CR) provides some useful details. In 1944 Canne Meijer wrote a discussion text on workers' democracy entitled ‘Arbeiders-democratie in de bedrijven', in Spartacus, no.1, Jan. 1945. Bruun van Albada published a study of the marxist method as a scientific, dialectical method of investigation: ‘Het marxisme als methode van onderzoek'.
[15] "... they were only ‘guests' (Canne Meijer notes in the same letter) doing all the work ... along with the comrades of the Bond but they took care not to interfere organizationally."
[16] In 1943 and 1944, however, members of the Bond participated in the creation of a little clandestine union Eenheidsvakbewweging. For the history of this union, see De Eenheidsvakcentrale (EVC) 1943-48. Groningen, 1976, by Coomans, T. de Jonge and E. Nijhof.
[17] In the letter of 30 June 1946, already mentioned, Canne Meijer thought that the Bond was part of the development of a "new workers' movement which was not an ‘opposition' to the old one, nor its ‘left', nor its ‘ultra-left' but a movement with another basis."
[18] Letter of Canne-Meijer in 27 June 1946, in the paper Le Proletaire. In 1946 the circulation of Spartacus fell to 4000 copies.
[19] The Statutes are in the internal bulletin of the Bond Uit eigen kring (In our circle), no.5, Oct.1945.
[20] A decision of the Conference of 21-22 July 1945, where twenty-one militants of the ‘Kerne' of Leiden, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, HilversumBussum were present. See Uit eigen Kring, no.2, August 1945.
[21] "The nucleus is autonomous in its own circle. It decides the admission and exclusion of its members. The central Executive Commission must first be consulted for admissions and exclusions". By this point of the Statutes, the autonomy of the nuclei remained limited in theory, all the more so because organizational discipline was affirmed: "The nucleus (main nucleus) are supposed to observe the decisions made by the Conference of the Bond and disseminate the principles of the Bond, as they are established by the Conferences of the Bond."
[22] Uit eigen kring, no.l, April 1945.
[23] Uit eigen kring, no.2, August 1945:
"The conference agrees to reject any collaboration with the CRM. The decision is made not to hold any discussion with the CRM."
[24] Uit eigen kring no.4, August 1945, draft inaugural address "to the manual and intellectual workers of all countries".
[25] The proposal to establish an information secretariat in Brussels came from ‘Against the Stream' and the Communisten Centre. The conference agreed. (Cf Uit eigen kring no.2, August 1945, point 8 of the resolution)
[26] The Theses, which was one of three draft Theses, appeared in Uit eigen kring, no.8, Dec. 1945, then as a pamphlet in January 1946. The two other drafts were put under discussion without being rejected.
[27] The Theses weren't questioned until 1951. Draft amendments were submitted to the organization by the Amsterdam group. (Cf Uit Eigen kring, 20 October 1951.
[28] In 1943, Pannekoek himself, despite his analysis of the Russian Revolution as ‘bourgeois' showed that October 1917 had a positive effect on class consciousness:
"Then, like a shining star in a sombre sky, the Russian Revolution illuminated the whole earth. Everywhere hope came to the masses. They became less receptive to their masters' orders, because they heard the appeals coming out of Russia; appeals to end the war, appeals for fraternity between the workers of all countries, appeals for the world revolution against capitalism." (The Workers' Councils)
[29] Cf Bordiga in Party and Class, 1921 (republished in Le Fils du Temps, no.8, Oct.1971): "A party lives when there lives a doctrine and a method of action. A party is a school of political thought and, consequently, an organization of struggle. First of all, there is a factor of consciousness; then a factor of will, or more exactly, a tendency towards a final goal."
[30] Cf Spartacus, Maandschrift voor de Revolutionaire-socialistische Arbeidersbeweging, no.l, ‘Het marxisme als methode van onderzoek', an article written by Van Albada, who was an astronomer.
[31] cf The Workers' Councils.
[32] Bordiga's Internationalist Communist Party saw itself as a ‘monolithic' party in which no ‘liberty of theory' could exist. Internal debates were made impossible by the ‘organic centralism' of a leadership which saw marxism as a matter of ‘conserving the doctrine'. In the Bond, internal debates existed, but its statutes did not define the framework in which they had to take place.
[33] Cf Bordiga, L'Unita, no.172, 26 July 1925:
"... leaders of a working class origin have shown themselves to be at least as capable as the intellectuals of opportunism and, in general, more susceptible to being absorbed by bourgeois influences ... We say that the worker, in the factory cell, will tend to discuss only particular questions of interest to the workers in his enterprise."
[34] A second set of draft theses on the party raised this question. It explicitly rejected the idea of the party taking and exercising power. Cf ‘Stellingen, taak en wezen van de Partij', thesis 9, in Uit eigen kring, no.7, Dec.1945.
[35] The pamphlet was one of the programmatic foundations of the Bond. It examined the question of power through the evolution of class societies from antiquity to capitalist society.
[36] Pannekoek's ‘Five Theses' were republished by Informations et Correspondence Ouvriere (ICO) in the pamphlet: The Generalized Strike in France, May-June 1968, supplement to ICO, no.72.
[37] Uit eigen kring, no.7, Dec.1945, ‘Stellingen over begrip en wezen van de partij' (‘Theses on the concept and essence of the party'). These Theses formed the third draft submitted to discussion by the Bond's Congress.
In the previous issue of the International Review (No.37) we dealt with the international resurgence of class struggle. Following the defeat of the proletariat in Poland and the reflux in class struggle which ensued in 1981 and 1982, we have recently witnessed a massive resurgence of the struggles throughout the world and principally in Western Europe.
This resurgence confirms that the working class is refusing to put up with more belt-tightening, that it doesn't accept sacrificing itself in order to ‘save the national economy'; that the bourgeoisie has neither succeeded in obtaining social peace, nor any support for its immediate economic projects: the slashing of wages, massive lay-offs, generalized misery. This social indiscipline of the proletariat signifies that the bourgeoisie does not possess the political means to unleash a third world war, despite the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries and conflicts. Incapable of making the accumulation of misery acceptable, which doesn't mean that it won't succeed in imposing a large part of it, the bourgeoisie is all the more incapable of imposing the greatest sacrifices up to the ultimate one which would open the road to the capitalist conclusion to the crisis: generalized war.
We continue therefore to affirm that the historic course of the period opened up at the end of the ‘60s is towards class confrontations and not towards war.
In the 1980s, the ‘years of truth', the bourgeoisie can no longer delay its economic attacks against the working class. This attack is not improvised, but has been prepared over several years now by the ruling class, at the international level:
-- at the political level, through the implementation of the ‘left in opposition', in other words outside all governmental responsibility;
-- at the economic level, through the planning by organs such as the IMF or the OECD, or by inter-state agreements, of the economic attack against the working class.
We have frequently elaborated this question in the pages of the International Review (notably in No.31, "Machiavellianism, and the Consciousness and Unity of the Bourgeoisie") and in our territorial press. We will not return to the question here. It is certainly an internationally coordinated, planned and organized attack against which the working class has been defending itself since the end of 1983[1].
The Silence of the Press
The silence, the various lies developed by the bourgeois media, cannot prevent revolutionary groups from recognizing this resurgence. Since last September, all the countries of Europe have been affected by strikes, by massive and determined reactions of the proletariat. Without neglecting the hunger revolts in Tunisia, Morocco, and recently in Santo Domingo, it is necessary to insist that the movements which have once more swept the USA, Japan (22,000 dockers on strike) and above all Britain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, etc, are taking place in the historic centre of capitalism, and on this account acquire a particular importance.
Despite the blackout of press coverage, we are aware (and one of the tasks of revolutionaries is to spread the news) that:
-- in Spain, "the workers under attack have begun to defend themselves against the plans of the government. Not a single day passed without a new strike breaking out..." (Der Spiegel, 20.2.84). Involved in the strike were workers from SEAT, General Motors, textile workers, Iberia (aviation) the railways, the public service sector, the steel industry (Sagunto) and the shipyards;
-- on March 24th, 700,000 workers demonstrated in Rome against plans to eliminate the ‘scala mobile' (inflation-linked pay compensation scheme);
-- on March 12 and 13, 135,000 miners launched a strike in Britain which has continued ever since;
-- in France, after Talbot and the post office, it's now the steel sector, the shipyards, the mines and the automobile industry which are featuring in the workers' reactions;
-- in May, in the paradise of social peace - in West Germany - the strike launched by the unions around the 35-hour week is the response of the bourgeoisie to the combativity of the workers which has begun to express itself in a series of spontaneous wildcat strikes.
From the movement of the general strike in the public sector in Belgium in September 1983, to the present strike of the metal workers in Germany, it's the entire international proletariat which is returning to the road of the class struggle, to the refusal of the logic of sacrifices which capitalism offers us.
The weapons of the bourgeoisie
1. The Campaigns of Diversion
The silence and lies of the press are not the only weapons used by the bourgeoisie. The organization of campaigns of diversion allows for confusion, a demobilization of the workers -- essentially those who have not yet entered the struggle. This was the whole thrust of the pacifist demonstration organized by the left and the leftists in the middle of the public service sector strikes in Belgium and Holland last autumn. The utilization of the "aerialoil-detection" fraud campaign invented during the Talbot strike in France, the fuss made over the financing of political parties in Germany -- what a sudden outburst of honesty! -- at the moment when the metal workers'' strike began, are intended to enable the workers' struggles to be passed over in silence. All these campaigns (and there have been many others, too) create a smokescreen to hide the reaction of the workers, thereby reinforcing their isolation.
2. False Appeals for Extension
Faced with sectors of the class which are already on strike, these smokescreens are not sufficient. Today, the one thing the bourgeoisie is afraid of is the extension, the real coordination of the strikes. It can no longer prevent proletarian reactions; it is no longer capable of doing so. And so it tries to smother them in despair and isolation. Since the proletariat is not an amorphous mass incapable of reflection, the bourgeoisie has to develop themes which permit this isolation and this division. This task falls primarily to the loyal servants of capital, the trade unions: enclosing the workers in dead-ends, in the defense of the national economy, in the "produce French, consume French" slogan of the CGT (the trade union of the French CP), in opposing the workers of one region to those of another such as in Belgium, of one sector against another as in Holland where the unions during the public sector strike proposed a ... reduction of wages in the private sector!
It becomes more and more obvious that workers, who are isolated, dispersed by region, by industrial sector, are destined for defeat. The concern for the necessity of extension is affirmed more strongly each time. In order to oppose this will, to empty it of its proletarian content, the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to take the lead. It proposes false extensions, false generalizations, and false solidarity.
We have already seen how the unions have ‘generalized' the struggle of the railway and postal workers in Belgium towards the less combative and more easily controlled public sector The bourgeoisie uses base unionism in order to workers. In doing so, they wipe out a real extension in order to assure complete control over the strike. It was in the attempt to achieve the same goal that the CGT organized, called for and supervised, under the ‘protection' of its stewards and wardens, the ‘March on Paris' of the steel workers on the 13th of April. It was in pursuit of this same goal also that the ‘March on Rome' of the 24th March was organized. The same goes for the union of the Spanish CP, the ‘workers commissions' who, along with the leftists have appealed for a ‘March on Madrid' on the 6th March aimed at enforcing the same isolation and dispersion as the Belgian FGT.
3. Base Unionism
The accumulation of all these maneuvers damages the image of the unions among the workers even more. And despite the radicalization of their image, they have not succeeded in reversing the drop in union membership, in preventing their leaders from being more and more jeered and shouted down as soon as they appear and, above all, in keeping complete control over the workers' reactions. This is the point where critical, ‘radical' unionism sets in, tending to bring back into the union prison those workers who are turning their backs on it, and trying to avoid the unmasking of the unions as a whole. It is base unionism, rank-and-file unionism, the ‘Collectif' of 1979/84 which at Longwy has corralled the workers into ‘commando actions' serving only to isolate them all the more in ‘their' region, ‘their' town, ‘their' factory. It is the ‘coordination groups of the trade unionist forces', the committees of solidarity and struggle which, with Camacho -- the leader of the Spanish ‘workers' commissions' -- have promoted a hypothetical ‘general strike' on some as yet unspecified date which ... only the unions should decide on.
The best example of the dirty work accomplished by base unionism is in Italy. It would have taken the official unions a great deal of time to mobilize so many people -- but 700,000 workers responded with the ‘March on Rome' called by the ‘national assembly of factory councils'. It must be said that these ‘factory councils' are councils in name only. It's not the first time that the bourgeoisie has usurped words and names of the proletariat in order to disfigure their real meaning, their class content. These councils are nothing but a trade union structure, the base of which has existed since 1969. They are quite the reverse of organs produced by the struggle, controlled and directed by the workers united in their general assemblies. Created at the end of the movement of 1969 to keep the struggles enclosed in the factories and workshops, they return to the scene today, having constituted a nation-wide base unionist organization credible in the eyes of the workers, ready for use from the beginning of the movement. It serves therefore to streamline the official unions. The motto of the ‘factory councils' of the Italian leftists is "we are not against the unions: we are the unions."
The bourgeoisie uses base unionism in order to empty the struggle of its content and take control through an application of the tactics of ‘a free hand for the base', of ‘recognizing all the actions'. One of the arguments of base unionism is to make workers believe that through their struggle, their determination, their combativity, they can exert pressure on the unions in order to push them to give their recognition or to take the struggle in hand. In this way they constantly draw the workers back into the union prison, in taking up the arguments of the radicalization of their language.
These alterations in the language of the unions reveal their true meaning in those strikes, such as at Citroen or Talbot in France where the employers announced a greater number of lay-offs than was really necessary, in order to permit the unions to show off their radical image in refusing any retreat, and allowing them finally to get people to believe in their victory, in their effectiveness in making the bourgeoisie ‘back down' by ‘reducing' the number of lay-offs ... to the levels originally planned! And so, at Talbot, having announced 3,000 lay-offs, ‘only' 2,000 were finally sacked, ‘thanks' to the energetic reactions of the unions.
Even if this tactic is not new, its coordinated application by employers and unions is becoming increasingly common today.
4. The Utilization of Repression
The state cannot allow itself a blind and frontal repression against the workers' struggles which are presently developing. This would only have the opposite of the desired effect: one acceleration of the coming to consciousness of the workers that it is the entire bourgeoisie, the state, which has to be confronted. However, the state needs to display its presence and its force. And therefore it makes use of selective repression. It tends to create points of fixation in order to divert the combativity of the workers.
This is the reason behind the court actions against the miners union in Britain over the organization of strike pickets. Moreover, this enhances the credibility of the union by giving it a martyr's halo. The British bourgeoisie hasn't hesitated to arrest over 500 miners to date. This was also the aim at Talbot in France in allowing the hired militia of the bosses to intervene against the workers on strike under the noses of the police. The same thing at Longwy with the "punch up" and "commando" operations. This is also what has happened at Sagunto in Spain with the violent repression against a workers' demonstration. This is a favorable terrain for base unionism, for the leftists, who are therefore able to benefit from state violence through their need for victims in order to give their actions credibility. The utilization of selective violence and the violence of leftism are perfectly complementary and comprise a unity.
5. Keeping the Left in Opposition
In order to be fully effective, all the obstacles which the bourgeoisie places in the path of the proletariat require the existence of an apparent opposition to governments charged with attacking the working class. In order to gain the confidence of the workers and in order to play on their illusions and weaknesses, the maintenance of a workerist language by the important left parties allows for a credible and effective deployment of the obstacles previously mentioned. The return of the SPD into opposition in Germany last year made possible the organization of powerful pacifist demonstrations. Today it permits the DGB trade unions to organize preemptively a strike movement around the 35-hour issue, with the goal of exhausting and demoralizing the workers' combativity which was beginning to express itself spontaneously. Equally, the calling of pacifist demonstrations in Italy corresponds to a more pronounced opposition of the CP in relation to the government and to a radicalization of its language; just like the GCIL which, in developing a base unionism of the ‘factory council' breed, tries to occupy the social terrain. Although participating in government, the French CP is trying to follow the example of the Italian and Spanish CPs, and of the German and Belgian SPs, in appearing to be opposed to the attack mounted against the working class. This is the reason be behind the ever-growing criticism which its trade union - the CGT - is making against Mitterand.
For the bourgeoisie, the time has not yet come for changing the deployment of its political apparatus in face of the proletariat. On the contrary, it needs to reinforce the policy of the ‘left in opposition' in confronting the working class.
The characteristics of present struggles
The present resurgence of struggles signifies that the proletariat - on the one hand, under attack economically and on the other hand maturing and reflecting on its defeat in Poland, progressively losing both its illusions in a way out of the capitalist crisis and its confidence in the left parties and the unions - is returning to the path of its class combat through the defense of its living conditions, through the struggle against capital.
The necessity to maintain the left in opposition, the need for a political force of the bourgeoisie to be present in the struggles in order to control, sabotage and divide them, has been the tactic employed since 1979-80. The present resurgence of the class struggle reveals the progressive wearing out of this tactic. In the majority of the west European countries, the existence of the big left parties in "opposition" is no longer sufficient to prevent the upsurge of struggles.
At the same time as the card of the left in opposition progressively wears out, the present workers' struggles express equally the end of the illusions concerning the economic renewal of capitalism. The illusions maintained by the left and the unions concerning the protectionist, nationalist, or ‘anti-capitalist' solutions of the ‘make the rich pay' variety, tend to collapse more and more. This is what is expressed in the refusal of the steel workers, whether in Spain or in France, to be fooled by the plans for ‘industrial reorganization' or for ‘retraining'. The same thing is expressed all the more by the return of the workers of the USA and West Germany to the path of struggle after two years in which they accepted wage cuts in order to ‘save' their companies.
The maturation of consciousness in the working class proceeds today via the recognition of the bourgeois character of the left as a whole, the inevitability of the deepening of the crisis of capitalism and that only determined, massive and generalized workers' struggle can open an alternative perspective to the continued degradation of its living conditions. This progressive maturation is expressed in the very characteristics of the struggles unfolding today before our eyes:
-- a tendency towards the upsurge of spontaneous movements expressing a certain overflowing of the unions;
-- a tendency towards large-scale movements;
-- a growing simultaneity of struggles at the international level;
-- the slow rhythm of the development of these struggles.
1. A Tendency Towards the Upsurge of Spontaneous struggles
Whether we take the public sector strike in Belgium which began without the unions in September ‘83; the rejection of the agreement drawn up by the unions and the employers by 65,000 shipyard workers in October ‘83 in Britain; the struggle of 15,000 miners without union approval the same month in the same country; the criticisms made by and the disgust of the Talbot workers with the unions in December ‘83; the violent, spontaneous demonstrations of the steel and shipyard workers in France in March ‘84; whether in Spain at General Motors or in Germany where wildcat strikes broke out in Duisburg (Thyssen) and Bremen (Klockner) or even the hunger revolts in Tunisia, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, in Brazil, etc - all these workers' reactions express a general tendency towards a spontaneous overflowing of the unions.
The unions no longer succeed in preventing workers' reactions even if, for the most part, they still, succeed in keeping control. The coming to consciousness concerning the anti-working class role of the unions grows. The lies about their working class character, about the possibility and necessity to utilize them, about their indispensability, are unmasked more and more.
2. The Tendency Towards Large Scale Movements
Millions of workers throughout the world, and particularly in the major centers of capitalism, have and are continuing to participate in the present struggles. As we have already noted, large-scale movements have hit and are continuing to hit the whole of western Europe, the USA, South America, both North and southern Africa, India etc. Moreover, every sector has been affected by the workers' reactions: the public services, the car industry, steel, shipbuilding, mining etc.
Inevitably, the workers learn of the existence of these movements. Inevitably, in order to break out of their isolation, the question of the extension and the coordination of struggles are posed. At the beginning the answer was given by the railwaymen at Liege and Charleroi (Belgium) who went to the postal workers and succeeded in drawing them into the strike of last September. The miners in Britain have come out on strike against massive lay-offs. 10,000 flying pickets appealed for extension, and on the 12th and 13th March 135,000 miners ceased work. That also is a beginning of a response to the question of extension.
Extension, however, is not solely directed to towards workers who still have a job. Those who are out of work are just as concerned by the struggles of their class. We have seen how unemployed workers have joined demonstrations of workers in Longwy and Sagunto. In the Dominican Republic the unemployed, 40 per cent of the population, have participated in the workers' revolt against price rises of basic foodstuffs. The same goes for Tunisia and Morocco last winter.
3. The Simultaneity of Struggles
At no time either during the first wave of workers' struggles (‘68-‘74) or during the second wave of ‘78-‘80 was there such a degree of simultaneity. And each of us knows the price which the proletariat in Poland paid for this: the incapacity to break with the entanglements of bourgeois propaganda on the specificities of ‘the east' in the mass strike of August ‘80; the incapacity of the workers' struggles to break the international isolation of the proletariat. Today, this simultaneity is merely a juxtaposition of workers' struggles, and not the international generalization of the class struggle. However, the idea of generalization is already making progress. In the general assemblies, the workers of Charleroi, up against the unions, reacted to the bitter clashes between the workers and the French police at Longwy by shouting "to Longwy! to Longwy!" Make no mistake, the strikes in Europe, particularly (though for different reasons) in Germany and in France, have captured the attention and aroused the interest of the workers.
4. Self-Organization
Up to now the proletariat has not extended, coordinated, not to mention generalized its combat. As long as the workers do not come to challenge the union control of their struggles, as long as they don't succeed in taking them into their own hands, as long as they don't confront the unions concerning the goals and the control over the movement, they cannot organize the extension. In other words, the importance of self-organization in response to immediate needs is primordial in every struggle today.
It is up to the general assemblies to decide on and to organize the extension and the coordination. It is up to them to send mass delegations or delegates to call for strikes in the other factories, to nominate, and if necessary at any moment to revoke the delegates. In fact, up to now the bourgeoisie has succeeded in emptying all the existing assemblies of their content.
Without self-organization, without general assemblies, there can be no real extension, never mind the international generalization of class struggle, But without this extension, the rare examples of self-organization, of general assemblies in Belgium, France, and Spain lose their function and their political content and allow the bourgeoisie and its unions to occupy the terrain. The workers are in the process of understanding that the organization of the extension can only be achieved at the price of combating trade unionism.
5. The Slow Rhythm of the Development of the Struggles
The present difficulties in the self-organization of the working class are only the most obvious result of the slow progress of the present development of the struggles. The economic attack is, however, very strong. Some people see in these difficulties and in the slowness of the resurgence, in the absence of a ‘qualitative leap' towards the mass strike overnight, an extreme weakening of the proletariat. They are confounding the conditions of struggle facing the proletariat in the major industrial and historical countries of capitalism with the conditions prevailing in the countries of the ‘third-world' or of the Russian bloc such as Poland. Before being able to unleash the mass strike and an international generalization, the proletariat must face up to and surmount the obstacles placed in its path by the bourgeoisie - the left in opposition and the unions - and at the same time organize the control and the extension of its struggles. This process necessitates a coming to consciousness and a collective reflection on the part of the class, drawing the lessons of the past and of the present struggles. The slow rhythm of the resurgence of struggles, far from constituting an insurmountable weakness, is the product of the slow but profound maturation of consciousness in the working class. We affirm therefore that we are only at the beginning of this wave of struggle.
The reason for this slowness is due to the necessity to take up again the lessons which were posed during the previous wave, but which have not been resolved: the lack of extension in the dockers strike in Rotterdam in 1979; the absence of general assemblies at Longwy-Denain the same year; the base unionist sabotage of the steel strike in Britain; the necessity for an international generalization after the mass strike in Poland; the role of the ‘left in opposition' in the reflux and at the end of this wave of struggles.
But, as opposed to ‘78-‘80, it is the totality of these questions which the workers find themselves confronted with in each struggle today. It's not one question which is raised in each struggle, but all of them at one go. Therein lies the slowness of the present rhythm of the struggles. Therein lies the difficulty but also the profundity of the maturation of consciousness in the working class.
6. The Present Particular Role of the Proletariat in France
In the coming to consciousness of the international proletariat, its sector in France has a particular responsibility, be it temporary and limited. As a result of the accidental arrival of the left in power following the election of May and June 1981, this country presently constitutes a cleavage in the international deployment of forces of the bourgeoisie. The participation in government of the left parties, the SP and the CP, is a serious weakness for the international bourgeoisie.
If the mass strike of August 1980 in Poland has contributed considerably to the destruction of the mystification of the ‘socialist' character of the Eastern bloc, the present development of struggles in France cannot but contribute to unmasking the mystification and the lies hawked by the left in the other countries and weakening these same parties in the workers midst.
The sacking of thousands of workers by this government, the support it has received from the unions, the strikes themselves such as in the public sector (post office, railways) or in the car industry (Talbot, Citroen), the violent confrontations between the police and the ‘left' and the steel and shipyard workers (Longwy, Marseilles, Dunkerque) can only accelerate the recognition within the entire working class of the bourgeois character of the left parties of capital. On this coming to consciousness by the proletariat depends to a great extent the development of the class struggle up to the proletarian revolution.
The role of communists
There is another part of the proletariat which plays a particular role, which cannot be measured with the same scale as the previous one. This part carries a historical, permanent and universal responsibility. It consists of the communist minorities, the revolutionaries.
"Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary movement", wrote Lenin in What Is To Be Done? Without a communist program, without a clear position in the class struggle, no proletarian revolution is possible. Without political organization, without a programme, no clear position and therefore no revolution. The struggle of the working class can only develop in affirming and maintaining its autonomy from the bourgeoisie. The workers' autonomy depends on the political clarity of the movement of struggle itself. As an integral part of the working class, its political minorities have an indispensable and irreplaceable role in this necessary political clarification. The political groups of the proletariat have the responsibility of participating and intervening in the process of coming to consciousness of the working class. They accelerate and push to the limit this collective reflection of their class. This is why it is important:
-- that they recognize the present resurgence of the workers' struggles after the defeat in Poland;
-- that they denounce the ‘left in opposition' as a major obstacle thrown up by the bourgeoisie to the workers' struggles;
-- that they understand that Western Europe is the key, the epicenter of the renewal of the struggles today and of their development;
-- that they recognize that the historic course is, since the end of the sixties, towards class confrontations and not towards imperialist war.
Only this general understanding can allow for a clear intervention:
-- the denunciation of unionism in all its forms. We have seen the disastrous effects of the Solidarnosc union in Poland after the mass strike of August ‘80. It wasn't only a very great portion of the workers who were blinded and at sea concerning the profoundly syndicalist and capitalist character of Solidarnosc, but also numerous revolutionary elements and groups. The rejection and the overcoming of unionism in the organization of the extension by the workers themselves requires the unyielding and unwavering denunciation of the unions, of base unionism and its proponents, by the communist minorities, organized for that purpose. This is indispensable and determining for overcoming the traps of the bourgeoisie.
-- putting forward perspectives of struggle through the organization of the extension and of the generalization in the general assemblies. This is a permanent fight which has to be taken to the most combative and advanced workers, and, among them, the small communist groups in the struggles, in the assemblies, to organize the extension and the coordination against the trade unionism which opposes it.
Intervention, propaganda, the political combat of revolutionaries will determine more and more the capacity of the proletariat as a whole to reject the traps laid by the bourgeoisie and its unions in the struggles. The bourgeoisie for its part does not hesitate to ‘intervene', to be present, to occupy the terrain in order to block the development of the coming to consciousness of the workers, to obscure the political questions, to divert the struggles into dead ends. Here is the necessity for communist minorities to struggle within the class (the assemblies) to expose the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and of all its agents, and to trace a clear perspective for the movement. "The revolutionary organization is the best defense of workers' autonomy". (IR, no 24, page 12 ‘On the Role of Revolutionaries')
These communist minorities, theoretically, politically, materially organized and "therefore the most resolute fraction of the proletariat" of all countries, the fraction which pushes forward the others (in accordance with the idea of Communist Manifesto). Revolutionary groups must march in the front line of the proletarian combat. They ‘direct' in the sense of orienting the working class towards the development of its struggles, along the road of the proletarian revolution. This development passes today via the inseparable necessities of self-organization and extension of the struggles against the unions.
That is the task that the ICC has assigned itself. It is the whole meaning of our combat in the movement of the present struggles.
R. L.
[1] On this subject, we want to correct a formulation which we have often used, in particular in the ‘Theses on the Present Resurgence of Class Struggle' in the International Review No 37: on page 4, point 2, it is said that: "it is the working class which holds the historic initiative, which on a global level has gone onto the offensive against the bourgeoisie..." It is true that the working class holds the key to the historic situation in the sense that its combat will decide its outcome in capitalist barbarism or in the proletarian revolution and communism. On the other hand, it is wrong to say that the working class has moved onto the offensive against capitalism. To move onto the offensive means for the proletariat that it is on the eve of the revolution, in a period of dual power, organized in workers' councils, that it is consciously preparing to attack the bourgeois state and to destroy it. We are still far away from that.
Belgium-Holland
Crisis and class struggle
If we have decided to publish in the IR a report devoted to the political, economic and social situation in two European countries, this is precisely because they are in no way particular or specific, but are exemplary expressions of the proletarian condition in all the industrialized countries.
The vicious austerity in these two countries, which only a few years ago boasted some of the highest living standards in Europe, and an enviable level of ‘social security’, highlights the evolution of the economic crisis at the heart of world capitalism and the force of the attack on workers’ living standards. Similarly, the workers’ ability to counter-attack and the bourgeoisie’s efforts at political adaptation provide valuable pointers to the development of the balance of class forces.
We therefore consider that this text is an excellent illustration of our overall approach applied to a concrete situation and that it shows clearly how indispensable is the deepening of our analytical framework regarding the role of the left in opposition, rank-and-file unionism, the historic course and the process of the generalization of class struggle based on the lessons of the previous wave of struggles in grasping today’s social reality.
********************
The Fourth Congress of the ICC’s section in Belgium (held in February 1982) took place two months after Jaruzelski’s putsch in Poland, when the working class was still stunned by the full force of the bourgeoisie’s international counteroffensive.
Within this framework, it was no accident that, after years of hesitation and under direct pressure from the rest of the western bloc, the Belgian bourgeoisie had just brought its policies into line with those of the bloc as a whole and launched a direct attack on the working class. The Congress resolution on the National Situation correctly described the bourgeoisie’s strategy as follows:
“the elections of November 1981 have legalized the bourgeoisie’s new battle order in confronting the class struggle; a qualitative step has been taken in the head-on attack against the working class:
a) a tough and arrogant right, firmly anchored in power as a long-term perspective and speaking the ‘language of truth’;
b) a necessary division of labor within the bourgeois political apparatus, between a tough right in government and a left in opposition confronting the class struggle, as well as various subdivisions in both government and opposition, allowing a more supple development of mystifications;
c) a radical-sounding opposition, whose present themes are no longer those of a responsible team developing the illusory perspective of a return to government and whose sole function today is to derail the class struggle and the reactions engendered by draconian austerity.” (Resolution on the Situation in Belgium and Holland, February 1982).
As early as February 1982, the Resolution clearly indicated the major axes of the bourgeoisie’s policy in Belgium for the two years to come. In Holland, the situation was still less clear-cut, and the left had just returned to power. In the report on the situation in Holland, we nonetheless emphasized that “the PvdA’s (Social-Democrat) participation in the government was nothing other than a temporary jury-rig solution” (idem), and this was quickly confirmed by the end of 1982. Overall, then, in both countries, the period that has just come to an end was characterized by draconian austerity and the continued sabotage undertaken by the left in opposition.
Under the inexorable pressure of the crisis and the austerity that came with it, the confrontation between the classes was renewed still more vigorously in the very heart of the industrialized countries. Belgium and Holland returned to the front rank in the renewal of the class struggle. This is the perspective for our evaluation of the results of the bourgeoisie’s strategy, on both the economic and political levels, and of its impact on the development of the proletarian struggle.
Crisis and austerity
A) Belgium: Two Years of Austerity and ‘Sacrifices’
“For several years, the situation of the Belgian economy has been characterized by multiple and severe imbalances. Their origin lies in the effects of the international crisis to which Belgium is particularly sensitive given its openness to the world outside. They also have internal causes, amongst the most important being, on the one hand, an insufficient adaptation of production to the evolution of internal and external demand and, on the other hand, a rigid incomes system which has led to important changes during the 1970s in the distribution of the national income.” (Etudes Economiques de l’OCDE-Belgique Luxembourg, May 1983, p. 9).
Put more clearly, Belgium, since the end of the 1970s has been in a particularly difficult economic situation, caused by:
a) the deepening of capitalism’s world crisis, which hits Belgium more directly and brutally than others due to its dependence on international markets resulting from the small size of the home market.
Exports as a % of production (OECD figures)
| Belgium | Holland | Germany | Main OECD countries |
1970 | 53.2 | 51.3 | 26.0 | 13.6 |
1980 | 85.4 | 64.4 | 38.3 | 20.7 |
b) the Belgium bourgeoisie’s hesitations in applying a rigorous social and economic policy aimed at rationalizing the economy and substantially reducing wages and social allowances.
Thus as soon as it came to power, the MartensGol government’s action concentrated on:
-- “transferring income from households to business,” (sic!) carried out by a policy of wage controls (with a partial restriction of the sliding scale) along with an 8.5% devaluation of the Belgian franc within the European Monetary System (EMS) and a restrictive budget policy (the aim being to reduce the budget deficit in 1982 and 1983 by 1.5% of GNP in order to diminish the weight of the civil service on the available financing for the economy (Etudes Economiques de 1’OCDE, p. 9);
-- rationalizing those sectors that are badly adapted “to the evolution of internal and external demand,”: the steel industry (Cockerill-Sambre), ship-building (Cockerill-Hoboken, Boel), the Limburg mines, the textile industry (Fabelta, Motte) and engineering (Nobels-Peelman, Boomse Metalwerken, Brugeoise and Nivelles) . As Gaudois, the government’s ‘special advisor’ cynically admitted, this is nothing other than a “socially camouflaged liquidation” by means of mergers, partial closures and state aid at the expense of large-scale wage cuts.
After two years in force, what are the results of this draconian austerity? This is an important question to the extent that Belgium, thanks to its situation at the beginning of the ‘years of truth’, has served as a laboratory for the western bourgeoisie in testing ways of imposing generalized austerity and an overall attack on working class living standards.
i) The Situation of the Belgian Economy
Despite two years of restriction and ‘sacrifices’ the economic indicators clearly show a situation that is far from brilliant, as we can see from the growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
GDP – variation in volume | 1970-74 | + 4.9 |
1974-80 | + 2.1 | |
1981 | - 1.1 | |
1982 | - 0.3 | |
1983 | + 0.25 |
Still more explicit is the graph of industrial production (1974 = 100) which reveals a quasi-permanent stagnation since 1974.
Even in relation to the other industrialized countries taken as a whole, the Belgian economy can hardly be said to have made up lost ground. At best, the recession can only be said to have stabilized:
Growth of GDP in Volume | ||||
| 67-73 | 73-80 | 81 | 82 |
Belgium | 5.4 | 2.5 | -1.1 | -0.3 |
EEC | 5.0 | 2.3 | -0.4 | +0.2 |
OECD | 4.9 | 2.5 | 1.5 | -0.2 |
This general observation will be further detailed by a closer examination of the four factors that allow a more in-depth appreciation of the Belgian economy’s state of health.
a) Competitiveness. For the government, this is the key to the problem and the solution to the crisis: industry’s renewed competitiveness will allow production to take off again and re-absorb unemployment. On the face of it the results of government policy look spectacular.
However, three considerations strongly diminish the benefits of this renewed competitiveness:
-- the recovery in competitiveness is above all tied to a reduction in labor costs and, generally speaking, to a reduction in hours worked due to the increase in unemployment and not to any real development of production or exports (see above);
-- since the other industrialized countries have by now adopted similar measures (see the report on Holland) , the improvement in competitiveness will be quickly eliminated;
-- the recovery of company profits and competitiveness on the market has in no way led to a recovery in productive investment. The fall in capital equipment deliveries, as well as the volume of gross composition of fixed capital, confirm that investment continues to decline.
Gross Composition of Fixed Capital, annual rate of variation (OECD) | |||
1974 | +7.5% | 1979 | -2.4% |
1975 | -1.6% | 1980 | +5.2% |
1976 | +3.0% | 1981 | -16.2% |
1977 | -0.1% | 1982 | -4.9% |
1978 | +2.2% | 1983 | -4.0% |
Faced with the impossibility of selling on an over-saturated market and with the under-utilization of the productive apparatus, the bourgeoisie in prefers to use its capital for speculation (gold, currency, raw materials) . The industrial investments that are still made aim above all at rationalization: “On average, faced with persistently weak demand and the continued high cost of credit, companies seem to have been concerned above all to restructure their accounts and increase their rates of self-financing,” (Etudes Economiques de 1’OCDE, p. 31).
b) Exports. Here again, exports have risen by 2% in 1983.
But the balance of trade (the difference between exports and imports) is still in the red. Moreover, this improvement is explained:
-- by the drop in imports, due to devaluation and austerity policies;
-- by the devaluation, which reduced the export prices of Belgium products.
However, given that Belgium exports essentially to other industrialized countries (83% to the OECD, of which 70% goes to the EEC, as against 2% to Comecon and 5% to OPEC), the increasing austerity and subsequent import restrictions in these countries is likely to have a disastrous effect on Belgian exports.
c) Inflation. Despite the stagnation of industrial production and the drop in wages and consumption (see above) , inflation - after falling at the end of the ‘70s - is once again on the rise.
% Variation in Consumer Prices | |||||
70-75 | 75-80 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 |
8.4 | 6.4 | 6.6 | 7.6 | 8.7 | 9 |
d) Budget Deficit and State Finances. The budget deficit of the Belgium state remains catastrophic - 16.2% of GNP in 1981, 15.8% in 1982 and 15.5% in I983, according to government estimates - against a European average of 7%. Belgium’s current account deficit was 190 billion francs ($1 = 510 BF) in 1982 while the cost of servicing interest on state debts is today 8% of GNP - 20% of the administration’s regular income.
Interest Charges as % of GNP | |||
| 1971 | 1975 | 1981 |
Belgium | 3.3 | 3.5 | 8.0 |
13 OECD majors | 1.5 | 1.8 | 3.1 |
Moreover, since a large part of this indebtedness (the foreign debt) is calculated in dollars, the recent rise in US currency will have catastrophic effects on interest charges.
ii) The “Reduction of Social Costs”
If we had to sum up succinctly the last two years, it would undoubtedly be in terms of the head-on attack on working class living conditions.
Certainly workers’ living standards were already being bitten into in the 1970s, but indirectly through increases in income or indirect taxation, through rising productivity (see graph) and through galloping inflation. But with the ‘years of truth’, especially since the installation of the bourgeoisie’s present strategy (right in power, left in opposition), the attack has become brutal, massive and generalized: falling wages and social benefits, an accelerated rise productivity and constantly increasing unemployment.
a) Real Social Wage
“Belgian experts estimate that if consumer prices rise by the forecast 7.5% in 1983 (8-7% 1982), the effect of the measures of wage restraint will be to reduce wages by about 7.5% between December 1981 and December 1983, of which 4.5% occurred during 1982,” (Etudes Economiques de 1’OCDE, p 16). Since inflation in 1983 stood not at 7.5% but at an estimated 9%, the “official” drop in wages should exceed 8%. Another indication of the extent of the attack is the index of labor unit costs in manufacturing industry, calculated in relation to the 15 major OECD countries which in 1982 had fallen well below its 1970 level. At the same time, individual consumption is falling as we can see clearly from the collapse in the volume of retail sales:
b) Increase in Productivity. The improvement in competitiveness through devaluation and the reduction in wages has in no way led to a drop in unemployment, which continues to increase (see below), but to a strong growth in productivity through rationalization (a higher rate of use of the productive apparatus) and through intensive mechanizations and automation.
Productivity in manufacturing industry: Percentage variation on the previous year | ||||
| 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 |
By employee | 6.5 | 0.7 | 2.7 | 5.1 |
By hour worked | 5.5 | 3.2 | 4.1 | 5.5 |
c) The Growth in Unemployment. At the end of January 1984 there were 523,000 full-time unemployed receiving benefit and this figure gives a highly inaccurate picture of the real situation. According to the OECD, the real number of unemployed (including those not receiving benefit) in March 1983 was about 600,000 and the rate of increase had scarcely altered (over 16% in March 1983 against 20% for the previous 12 months).
Employment/Unemployment variation (in thousands) | ||||
| 74-80 | 81 | 82 | 83 |
Wage earners | -28 | -78 | -53 |
|
In administration | +110 | 0 | 0 |
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In industry | -241 | -49 | -35 |
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Full-time unemployed | +239 | -97 | -79 |
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Rate of unemployed | 2.4% | 10.4% | 12.3% | 13.7% |
Moreover, some 180,000 people benefited from a program of state-aided employment (putting the unemployed to work, special temporary measures, etc) so that, in all, about 19% of the working population is outside the normal job circuit.
To conclude, the fierce austerity imposed by the5th Martens government is the first direct and generalized attack on the whole Belgian working class, without opening the way to an economic recovery which “is entirely dependent on external demand,” (OECD, p. 46) . The relative improvement in Belgian industry’s competitiveness is only a passing phenomenon which will soon be eliminated by the austerity and wage reduction programs being applied in the other industrialized countries. Capitalism’s generalized crisis leaves no other way out for the Belgian bourgeoisie than redoubled attacks on the working class.
B) Holland: An Ineluctable Economic Dead-end
Two years ago, the Dutch economy, in the wake of the German locomotive, still passed for one of the strongest; today, it boasts the most widespread unemployment and, after Belgium, the second largest budget deficit of the industrialized world. The economists can no longer see the end of the tunnel, but hope that it may still be found in the long-term, after several governmental terms - perhaps in the year 2005!
During 1982-83, the economic indicators abruptly deteriorated:
Fall in investments, indicated by gross fixed capital composition as a % of GDP (source: OECD) | |||
60-70 | 70-80 | 81 | 82 |
25% | 22% | 19.3% | 18.3% |
Moreover, the rate of utilization of the productive apparatus has fallen to 77% of total capacity in 1983, the same level as in 1975.
In 1982, the rate of utilization of the productive apparatus was 8% less than in 1973 and 6.5% less than in 1979. The budget deficit, which rose by 6.7% in 1981, rose by 9.4% in 1982 and a rise of 12.5% is forecast for 1983.
The growth in the Dutch state debt has been stunning, rising by 19% in 1981 and by 22% in 1982, to reach the impressive sum of 144.7 billion florins.
The foreign trade figures seem to contradict the above data since the balance of payments surplus rose by 9.8% in 1982 and by 12% in 1983. However, the significance of these figures is limited since they are largely the result of increased sales of natural gas and the fall in imports in turn resulting from the fall in domestic consumption. In reality, Dutch capital is not so well placed. “It owes its reputation to several powerful multi-nationals - Phillips, Royal Dutch Shell, Unilever. But its structure and its presence in the most buoyant sectors are weak. The textile, clothing and ship-building industries are in headlong decline. Over the years, Holland’s industrial fabric has worn thin. The strength of the florin and a strong tendency to invest abroad have played their part here,” (Le Monde, February 5, 1984).
As a result, from late 1982 onwards, the direct attack on the working class has increased in Holland as well, following the bourgeoisie’s reorganization of its political forces, with the left’s move into opposition and the right’s arrival in power (with the Lubbers government). While wages were already stagnant or falling at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to the right wing Van Agt/Wiegel government and to more direct measures of the centre-left Van Agt/Den Uyl government in 1982, by the end of 1982 the attacks on workers’ living conditions fell thick and fast:
-- a 3.5% wage cut in 1983 and even a 5% cut for state employees;
-- a 15% cut in wages and benefits forecast for 1984-86.
Variation in Dutch wages (1972 = 100) | |||
1972 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 |
100 | 103.9 | 101.2 | 100.1 |
At the same time, unemployment has taken off spectacularly:
Unemployment as % of working population | |||||
67-71 | 72-74 | 75-80 | 81 | 82 | 83 |
1.3 | 2.3 | 5.5 | 8.6 | 11.4 | 14.0 |
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|
|
|
|
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In a few years, Holland has gone well beyond the OECD average of 10%.
*****
In conclusion, the years 1982-84 are characterised by an inescapable deepening of the economic crisis from which no country is immune, and by the unleashing of an unprecedented and generalised attack on working class living standards and conditions. In this framework, we have seen Holland - which, in Germany's wake, seemed to stand up better to the crisis in1981 - gradually join Belgium in the midst of the social and economic whirlwind.
While the ruling class is fundamentally weakened by the deepening of the generalized crisis, in that this reveals more and more clearly its inability to present any economic or ideological alternatives and sharpens its internal tensions, it is nonetheless able to silence its internecine struggles in order to confront the mortal danger of the proletariat.
The solutions that it lacks on an economic level are henceforth compensated by a remarkable skill on the political level. Every day, the ruling class demonstrates its ability to defend bitterly and intelligently its power and privileges. In the major industrial countries, the trump card of the bourgeois apparatus in imposing generalized austerity and the acceptance of war preparations is the left's move into opposition. This has been perfectly illustrated in Belgium and Holland.
a) The Need for the Left in Opposition in Belgium and Holland
As early as the recovery of workers' struggles in 1978, the ICC analyzed the ruling class' need for a left in opposition to break them from the inside, but experience has shown us that there are a mountain of difficulties between the bourgeoisie's objective need and its ability to satisfy it. In Belgium and Holland, while the bourgeoisie managed fairly adequately to adapt its defensive apparatus to the demands of the period, it nonetheless had great difficulty in carrying out concretely the left's move into opposition:
-- in Belgium, from 1980 on, a series of ‘transitional' governments tried to create the necessary conditions for the left's move into opposition (see the Report for the Fourth Congress) , but this only took place at the end of 1981;
-- in Holland, the right had already come to power in 1978 to carry out an austerity program (the Van Agt/Wiegel Christian-Liberal government) . However, from mid-1981 to mid-‘82 the left returned to power and this clearly ran counter to the needs of the bourgeoisie, at both the national level (the socialists lost elections and a draconian austerity had to be imposed) and the international level (generalized worldwide crisis). It was only after a year of governmental paralysis and a growing discrediting of the left that the bourgeoisie found a way to return to the situation of early '81.
All this delay and confusion was not, as some said, an expression of a better resistance to the crisis:
-- these are the two countries most geared to exports. They thus feel more quickly and heavily than others the weight of the world crisis of overproduction;
-- despite possessing its own energy resources, Holland's industrial tissue is in decline, which led the government to take austerity and rationalization measures as early as 1978 (DAF cars, the textile and shipbuilding industries);
-- in 1979 the crisis already provoked a reaction from the workers which showed that the left's place was in opposition (Rotterdam ‘79, the Limburg and Athus mines in '80, the struggles in Wallonia in 1981) .
The difficulty in putting the left into opposition was thus the expression of the Belgium and Dutch ruling classes' real internal weaknesses, whose origins lie essentially in the creation and organization of the Belgian and Dutch states:
-- the artificial creation of Belgium and Holland's restricted national frameworks slowed down the development of both these states, creating a multitude of contradictions within the Belgian bourgeoisie and hindering the development and centralization of Holland's economic and political forces;
-- the complexity and heterogeneity of the bourgeoisie's apparatus of political domination (in Belgium, the existence of regional parties made it necessary for a long time to keep the socialists in the government; in Holland, the multitude of religious and other parties ‑ hangovers from the country's historical development - makes all maneuvering very difficult for the bourgeoisie) imposed a certain delay on the left's move to the position where it could make itself most useful.
Nonetheless, despite these internal difficulties the Belgian and Dutch ruling class has shown under economic pressure and faced with the danger of the class struggle that it possesses a strong enough basis and a rich enough experience to develop a formidable apparatus designed to control and mystify the struggle.
b) The Role of the Left and the Renewal of Class Struggle
Although the development of the crisis leads to an identification of the present period with the 1930s, a comparison of the left's activity in each reveals their fundamental difference.
During the 1930s, faced with the crisis and the workers' struggles (the insurrectional strikes of 1932), the left (the Parti Ouvrier Belge ‑ Belgium Workers' Party) put forward a ‘Labor Plan' (or DeMan Plan) to "get Belgium out of the crisis." In this way, the working class was massively mobilized behind the perspective of state capitalism (nationalizations) and led to support the parliamentary action of the POB and PCB (CP) "to fight fascism".
Today, the left's tactics and activity are fundamentally different:
--it no longer speaks the language of realism, of national conciliation and of patriotic unity. On the contrary, it wants to appear critical, radical, even workerist . Ambiguous personalities (Cools, Simonet) are eliminated and it makes no effort to return to government;
-- its tactics are no longer offensive, but defensive. Far from trying to mobilise the workers behind the national capital, the left today is doing everything it can to prevent struggles from developing.
Whereas, in the ‘30s the control of the working class was directly assumed by the POB, the union commission being a mere appendage of the party, today the unions are in the front line, within the struggle, to try and derail it. The left's campaigns during the ‘30s, around the DeMan Plan for example, aimed to mobilize the workers in favor of radical measures in defense of the national economy, as a precursor to the defense of the nation. The struggles were ‘politicized' on a bourgeois terrain. The measures were new and able to deceive the workers who had lost all class perspective. Today, the only alternative that the left can propose is a ‘better-wrapped' or ‘fairer' austerity. After years of crisis, of socialist ministers and ‘reasonable' austerity, its plans no longer have the same power of deception. This is why the left's efforts are concentrated on the union terrain, to divide the class by emptying its struggles of any perspective and so breaking its combativity.
The left's different behavior today is explained by the complete reversal in the dynamic of the balance of class forces since the 1930s. In the 1920s, the working class had been defeated on the international level and in those countries where the workers had not been physically crushed the left's aim was to enroll them under the anti-fascist banner for a new world war. Today, an undefeated proletariat's struggle against austerity is tending towards unification on the national and international level; the left is trying to prevent this development and push the class off-course.
c) The Left in Opposition to Confront the Struggle
All through the last two years, the working class in Belgium and Holland has constantly come up against the left in opposition and often undergone the bitter experience of its refined sabotage techniques within the struggle. These revolve around three major axes:
-- occupying the terrain: the strength of both the left and the unions is not derived from any original perspectives or new solutions put forward to confront the deepening of the crisis. Their strength lies in their organization within the class; their apparatus for controlling the workers; the weight of old pre-conceived ideas within the proletariat - in particular the still wide-spread conviction that a struggle can only be developed, organized and won through a union organization. Through this occupation of the social terrain, the left and unions can still weigh heavily on the struggle's development and orientation;
-- isolating or refracting the working class response: faced with generalized austerity and attacks on working class living conditions, the left can defuse the thrust of the movement by preventing its quantitative extension (limiting it to the factory, the industry or the region) . In this respect, it must be said that the left makes very skilful use of the system's internal contradictions, of the false oppositions or various ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie to either divide or submerge the proletarian struggle;
-- regional conflicts (Flanders/Wallonia) are systematically used to prevent the extension of struggles throughout Belgium;
-- in Holland, feminism is used to divide the workers of different sexes, and set them against each other, while pacifism was used directly to break the state employees' strike.
Moreover, the struggle can also be isolated and controlled by defusing its combative dynamic. Thus, during the autumn of 1983 in Belgium the unions managed to take control of the movement and reduce it to an empty shell by means of a formal, but empty generalization of the strike. In reality their efforts at dispersal aim above all to separate the extension of the movement from its self-organization - these being the two components that are vital if it is to develop. To achieve this aim, the unions can act on different facets of the struggle:
-- at the level of methods of struggle: sit-down strikes, occupations, self-management, "new methods of struggle" ("savings strikes", etc);
-- at the level of preparation: emphasizing the financial and technical aspects (leaflets, strike pickets ...);
-- at the organizational level: putting the struggle under the control of the unions, or of union strike committees run by union officials or rank-and-filists;
-- at the level of the struggle's perspectives: keeping it within the logic of the system and its crisis; fighting for ‘real cooperation', to save the factory, the region, or for ‘fair sacrifices', or ‘to make the rich pay' for nationalizations ... ;
-- trapping the workers' anger within the union framework: as we have seen, the unions have a central role to play in the ‘left in opposition' strategy, and this role is even more important in Belgium and Holland due to the discrediting of the socialist parties by the bourgeoisie's own internal conflicts. This is why the union leaderships have ‘worn out' more quickly and explains, given the persistent combativity of the workers, the growing importance of rank-and-file unionism which has played a central part in both Belgium and Holland over the last few years in the major struggles that have broken out (Rotterdam ‘79, the 1981-82 strike wave in Belgium, the state employees' strike in Belgium and Holland in 1983). The vital function of rank-and-filism has been confirmed in the period that has just come to an end:
-- through the concentration of the leftists in union rank-and-file work;
-- through the attempts at coordinating rank-and-file ideas and forces on the national level ("Vakbond en Demokratie" in Belgium, or "Soliclariteit" in Holland) .
In today's struggles, rank-and-file unionism plays a double role:
-- taking control of radical struggles to prevent them going too far and therefore to sabotage them under cover of radical language and spectacular action (confrontations with the police in the 1982 steelworkers' strike) to restrain their extension and radicalization;
-- bringing the ‘lost sheep' back into the union fold while at the same time winning the confidence of the most combative workers through their radical talk and ‘tough' actions (Rotterdam 1979 and 1982, 1983 public sector strikes in Belgium and Holland) .
Rank-and-file unionism is already one of the bourgeoisie's most pernicious weapons, now that the traditional unions are more and more often contested and overtaken by the workers' struggle. Thanks to its flexibility, which can even tolerate a superficial anti-unionism, it will be used by the bourgeoisie right up to the revolutionary period and within the workers' councils to push the proletariat away from the combat for revolution towards the logic of unionism and self-management. While its already frequent utilization allows the bourgeoisie momentarily to control the movements, to stifle any perspective of revolutionary struggle and to cripple the self-organization of the class, it nonetheless indicates the bourgeoisie's historical weakness and in the long-term heralds the discrediting of its most radical weapons of mystification.
The proletariat against the left in opposition
The bourgeoisie's hesitations and its accumulated delay (which had to be overcome abruptly) in taking the necessary draconian austerity measures, Belgium's long-standing role as ‘laboratory' in the vanguard of the world bourgeoisie's attack on workers' living conditions in Western Europe, have all profoundly affected the conditions of the class struggle. Under heavy and almost continual attack, the class has been forced to react - and has done so at regular intervals (winter 1981, February-March 1982, September-October 1983). For this reason, the workers' struggles in Belgium and later in Holland have expressed especially clearly not only the obstacles and problems facing the world working class and which it will have to overcome (particularly in the industrialized countries) but also the movement's strength and dynamic.
From February 1981 on massive strikes broke out in a whole series of factories (Caterpillar, British Leyland, FN) in the steel industry and in public transport, in both Flanders and Wallonia, against the austerity measures applied by a government where socialist ministers held key positions (Economy and Labor ministries). They showed the bourgeoisie that a rapid and appropriate strategy was urgently needed to attack the working class directly. By November 1981, after an early election, the right was in power; a few weeks later, the left was demonstrating its formidable effectiveness in opposition.
a) The Strikes of February-March 1982: Disarray faced with the retreat in class struggle
The movement of February-March 1982, which mobilized tens of thousands of workers around the Liege, Charleroi and Hainaut steelworkers against the sharp drop in wages that followed devaluation, was without doubt the most important movement in Belgium since the 1960-61 general strike. Breaking out a few weeks after the putsch in Poland, they showed, through their great combativity and through the tendency towards widespread struggle going beyond corporations or particular demands in the face of a general anti-proletarian attack, through the tendency to express class spontaneity and to call into question control by the unions, through the confrontation with the state and especially with the police, that the defeat in Poland had not fundamentally shaken the world proletariat's combativity, and that the working class' disarray faced with the bourgeoisie's ideological counter-offensive was not eternal, and did not express a profound and long-term retreat in the class struggle.
Nonetheless, the proletariat's general confusion after the defeat in Poland and its inexperience in dealing with the maneuvers of the left in opposition were to affect the 1982 struggles profoundly and encouraged neither their development nor their ability to put forward clear perspectives. Thus, we should note:
-- firstly, the isolation of the struggle in Belgium, surrounded by complete social calm in the other industrialized countries, plunged in the depths of the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns over Poland;
-- the limitations of the movement which developed around the actions of the steelworkers in Wallonia while the unions managed to defuse any attempts at resistance in Flanders (eg the long struggle at Boel/Tamise);
-- the relative ease with which the unions prevented the movement's extension by their open efforts at division: between unions, between sectors, between regions (Liege against Charleroi), allowing the bourgeoisie to keep the movement firmly under control, maintaining a particularly arrogant tone, while giving way on nothing.
b) September-November 1983: At the Heart of the Recovery in Class Struggle
The long struggle in the Belgium (September-October) and Dutch (October-November) public sectors is the most important movement of workers' struggle since the combats in Poland in 1980. It has renewed the positive characteristics of the previous movement, but benefits from the accumulation of objective conditions allowing an international recovery in class struggle:
-- a long period of austerity, unemployment and attacks on the working class, generalized throughout the industrialized world, without bringing the slightest improvement in the health of the economy;
-- the working class in Belgium has gone through the experience of the left in opposition and its mystifications at the same time as this experience has spread to neighboring countries (the left in opposition in Holland and Germany);
-- the struggles in Holland and Belgium are part of a new international wave of combats against capitalism.
This ripening of the objective conditions for the renewal of the class struggle is confirmed by the development of the following characteristics within the combats in Belgium and Holland:
1) A tendency towards massive and unitary movements involving large numbers of workers and affecting whole sectors, or even several sectors simultaneously in the same country. In 1983, in both Holland and Belgium, the whole public sector was in struggle - ie 20% of the working population. Workers from all the unions took part. Never in the history of the Dutch working class has the public sector fought on such a scale, while in Belgium, the movement overcame the divisions between Flanders and Wallonia and was on the point of extending to the private sector.
2) A tendency towards spontaneous upsurges of struggle, to some extent escaping from union control, especially at the beginning. The engine drivers in Belgium and the busmen in Holland came out spontaneously, against union orders. In Belgium, the other sectors (post office, local transport workers) joined the struggle spontaneously. The power of this spontaneous extension can be measured by the fact that:
-- the unions were obliged to give their blessing to the strike and even - formally - to extend it, adopting a laissez-faire attitude in the ranks in order to regain control of the movement;
-- the unions in Holland had enormous difficulty in stopping the strike.
3) A tendency towards a growing simultaneity of struggles on an international level. The movements in Belgium and Holland broke out in the same sectors, at almost the same moment, while at the same time, postal workers in France were also on strike; this in two neighboring countries whose large working class concentrations are outward-looking, well-versed in class struggle and at the heart of the industrialized world. This goes a long way to explain the fear of the bourgeoisie which showed itself in the international news blackout of these movements and in the conciliatory attitude of the Belgium government.
These characteristics have been confirmed by the strikes in April 1984 which, although not on the same scale as those the previous autumn, demonstrated the strengthening of the following tendencies:
-- the increasingly obvious simultaneity of struggles in a large number of industrialized countries (struggles in Belgium, France, Britain and Spain during the month of April), and the confrontation with both the mystifications of the left in opposition (Britain and Belgium) and the austerity of the left in power (Spain, France);
-- the accelerating rhythm of class confrontations (the April strikes followed only 5 months after the public sector movement);
-- the continual confrontation with the left in opposition, strengthening the workers' tendency to call into question trade union strategies and to take charge of the struggle themselves.
The central and persistent weakness, common to all these struggles, is the working class' inability on the one hand to stand up to the maneuvers of the left in opposition - especially the unions - within the struggles and on the other to put forward its own class perspectives. While the workers are becoming more and more aware of the unions' role in their daily attitude of champions of ‘reasonable austerity', they remain helpless when the same unions deploy all their cunning within the struggle. This weakness is linked to a lack of experience and self-confidence on the workers' side, and an impressive capacity for adaptation on the part of the bourgeoisie, especially through trade unionism.
The left in opposition's major form within the struggle is rank-and-file unionism, which is the spearhead of the bourgeoisie's response to class struggle. Making use of brief or isolated struggles, rank-and-file unionists use combative talk and pseudo-radical actions to win the confidence of combative sectors of the working class, and spread the idea of the possibility of a different kind of unionism from that of the ‘union leaderships' (within the traditional union structure if possible, outside it if necessary). Thus in Belgium, these ‘combat unionists' have taken the lead in a whole series of isolated struggles, often coming up hard against the union leaders (Boel/Tamise, Fabelta, Motte, ACEC, Valfil, FN, Brugeoise et Nivelles, etc). In Holland, the 1982 Rotterdam dock strike, for example, was entirely conducted by the ‘rank-and-file' under the slogan "We are the union!".
It is from such struggles that rank-and-file unionism has drawn its experience and won the necessary authority for derailing and sabotaging more large-scale strikes: for example, in 1982, the rank-and-file unionists took the initiative in setting up an inter-sector regional strike committee in Hainaut province, to isolate and exhaust the workers combativity within the regional framework. It was they who led the steelworkers towards a confrontation prepared and provoked by the bourgeoisie to liquidate the movement. In both Belgium and Holland 1983, it was they who had the job (in the framework of a generalization in form decreed by the bourgeoisie) of wearing down the movement with actions that were ‘radical', but at the same time dispersed, isolated and without any perspective.
These elements confirm and explain the slow development of the struggle in the industrialized countries. However, with the system in a total economic dead-end, with increasing attacks on working class living conditions and responses from the workers, even the bourgeoisie's most radical mystifications will tend to wear out as class confrontations become ever more massive, powerful and simultaneous.
The general conditions of the working class resurgence since 1968 and the implications for the process of regroupment for the party
1. The future party will not emerge as the result of a reaction against war but from a slow and uneven development of class struggle against a relatively slow evolution of an international crisis. This implies:
-- the possibility of a much greater maturation of working class consciousness before the final assault; this maturation would be expressed especially within revolutionary minorities;
-- the fact that the struggle is developing on an international scale creates the basis for a process of regroupment of revolutionary forces emerging directly on an international level.
2. The ‘uniqueness' of the period 1917-23 lies not so much in the rapidity of events (we should expect a much greater rapidity in the future, against a better prepared bourgeoisie, once the revolutionary process has begun) but rather in the fact that it came at a turning point in history.
Today, with seventy years of capitalist decadence behind us, a whole number of questions are now posed in much clearer terms than at the time of the first revolutionary wave: the nature of the unions, of democracy and parliamentarianism, the national question. Although we are still far from the insurrectional period, every workers' struggle is obliged to confront the forces of bourgeois mystification and control. Even in the midst of confusion, the present proletarian milieu is forced to take a stand on the lessons of these seventy years of decadence. The task of clarifying the conditions opening up for class struggle because of capitalist decadence is much easier today than in 1919.
3. Although the present period suffers from a lack of organic continuity with the movement of the past and despite the fact that this situation weighs heavily on revolutionary forces and their relations, it should be remembered that the organic continuity between the Second and Third Internationals, in providing the living forces of the Communist International, also determined many of its weaknesses. It was not only on the programmatic level that the vanguard was unable to offer a sufficiently profound critique of Social-Democratic traditions and take into account the new conditions of the period. On an organizational level as well, the different factions of the Left before 1914 had great difficulty understanding what they represented and realizing that they had to go beyond the stage of an opposition intent upon redressing the degenerating Social Democratic organization. The process of confrontation and regroupment itself was marked by the model of the Second International, functioning as a sum of national parties; even within nations, such as Germany, the Left was weighed down by habits of federalism. Thus:
-- even without any ‘organic break', the framework of discussion set up was not sufficiently international; it was difficult even in Germany alone;
-- the unfolding of the split with the Second International remained a series of national processes implying gaps in time and political heterogeneity.
The long period of defeat suffered by the proletariat after the failure of the revolution was at the same time a crucible where the class went as far as it could in an effort to draw the lessons of the revolutionary wave. Today we can draw on the living experience of October, the efforts of the fractions, Bilan and Internationalisme to prepare for the coming wave of struggle.
4. Today the organic break with the movement of the past means that revolutionary groups are no longer confronted with the need to break with organizations which have gone over to the enemy. They are no longer what Bilan was either, a fraction with the basic task of building a bridge towards the next revolutionary upsurge - drawing all the lessons of defeat from the depths of the triumphant counter-revolution. The existence and development of today's groups is above all determined by the emergence of open struggle in 1968.
5. Never before have conditions been better for carrying out what the text adopted as a Resolution of the Fifth ICC Congress ("On the Party and its Relationship to the Class" IR 35) puts forward: in the period of decadence "the political party can perfectly well emerge before the culminating point of the appearance of workers' councils."
The simplistic vision of the Bolsheviks as the "exemplary party" in contrast to the German situation where regroupment proved much more difficult does not take into account the fact that in 1917 the absence of an international party was a great weakness which weighed heavily on the whole revolutionary wave. The delay in the regroupment for the world party was felt on the international level, everywhere, and not just in Germany. The pole of clarification which the Communist International represented took off too late and lasted too short a time. Today, conditions are much better for the constitution of a pole of clarification before the decisive moment. Also, such a pole will be able to organize, must organize, on a clearer programmatic basis, integrating, at the very least, all the lessons of the first revolutionary wave.
6. Today, because conditions make it possible to have a clearer party, a more mature and more directly international one, these characteristics are more necessary than ever. Although the bourgeoisie can no longer take advantage of the crucial counter-revolutionary weapon of the mass organizations which had just gone over to the enemy in 1914, it has now developed more subtle methods of control and we have to expect a desperate effort to recuperate any bodies the class will create. Above all, the proletariat will face a bourgeoisie which is much more capable of unifying extremely rapidly on an international level. In such a situation, the clarity of the proletarian vanguard, its unity and its capacity to develop an international influence will be vital.
The proletarian milieu and the effort towards regroupment today
1. The failure of the cycle of international conferences which led to a crisis in the revolutionary milieu at exactly the time of the acceleration of history opening up today, shows to what extent communist minorities are weak and not up to their responsibilities. Thus, although objective conditions today exert a favorable influence on clarification and the unifying tendency among revolutionary forces, they are not enough in themselves to determine automatically a process of regroupment of the party.
2. The organic break with the past and fifty years of counter-revolution imply qualitatively different tasks for communist minorities today. The question is no longer posed in terms of assuring a continuity of the program by making a clear break with old, degenerated organizations. But the task ahead is no less difficult. Revolutionaries must carry through a long process of decantation which started with the proletarian resurgence in 1968. A decantation not only in the sense of a reappropriation of the lessons of the past but also a clarification of the new conditions opening up. This decantation implies an understanding of what these new conditions actually are and are not - linked to an analysis of the present period. Megalomania, the myth of pretending to be the party today and rejecting any confrontation with the milieu; sectarianism, the idea that history begins with ‘oneself' or that the party and the program have been ‘invariant' and unchangeable since 1848; the general confusion on the process of regroupment: these are all in fact expressions of the difficulty of the milieu in its efforts to deal with its responsibilities today.
3. In saying that conditions exist today for the party to emerge before the crucial moment we do not mean to say that it can be formed tomorrow morning. Its link with the development of class struggle means that for the party to be formed, the working class must answer the call of history and develop its consciousness in a dynamic movement towards internationalization of its struggle.
The appearance of proletarian parties requires such a dynamic not only so that the party can be ‘heard', not only because it is only at that stage that revolutionary ideas can become a ‘material force', but because only such a dynamic can bring to the regroupment of revolutionary forces on a world scale the essential elements of clarification in practice on such questions as: the problem of international generalization, the organizations of the class pitted against all the forces of the unions, the role of violence...and, especially, clarity on the question of the party and its relation to the workers' councils.
4. While rejecting the idea of a party artificially created around a ‘PCI + ICC + CWO' and the absurdity of such a hypothesis, the ICC does not consider the future party as a fatalistic, mechanical result of the pre-revolutionary period. For the party to be formed there must be an effort of will on the part of communist minorities starting today but with no immediatist illusions. Our will to participate in the Conferences initiated by the PCI (Battaglia Comunista) was based on:
-- the rejection of all sectarian practices which refuse debate;
-- the understanding that it could not be a question of creating any premature regroupment;
-- the need to create an arena of confrontation and decantation as large as possible but within the framework of class frontiers;
-- the need to have sufficiently clear criteria for participation, rejecting among others ‘anti-party' modernist currents or councilist ones, particularly so that the point of such conferences would be clear;
-- the objective these Conferences represented in relation to the class - working towards an active pole of reference capable of taking a stand on essential issues;
-- the need for agendas which deepen the effort towards unification of revolutionaries today; the analysis of the present period and of the crisis on the one hand, the question of the role of revolutionaries on the other hand (as one of the least clear questions today which makes such a confrontation of positions urgent).
It must be noted that sectarianism and the refusal of open debate have weighed heavily even on the groups which actively participated in the Conferences. The immaturity of the milieu was also expressed in the idea finally adopted by the PCI (BC) and the CWO (Communist Workers Organization) of much more immediatist conferences aimed at a precipitous regroupment before the debate even took place. They finally ended up expecting nothing more from the first Conferences than the material means to get rid of the ICC - in the name of a disagreement on the party that had not even been debated.
5. This experience shows the extent of the road still ahead of us. We have put the question of the party on the agenda in the ICC because we feel that this question crystallizes the understanding of the tasks of revolutionary minorities today and the attitude they should have towards each other. At the heart of the process of decantation which, like it or not, is happening within the milieu - even in the form of an open crisis leading to the disappearance of whole groups - is the question of the party and the process of the development of class consciousness.
The crisis the milieu is going through, which has not spared the ICC, is a serious warning.
It shows that confusions on the role of the political organizations of the working class, the search for an immediate result and impatience in relation to class struggle is the terrain for the destruction of communist organizations through the material and ideological pressure of the bourgeoisie.
We cannot get any satisfaction from the fact that the PCI (Programme Communiste) gave rise to a bourgeois organization (E1 Oumami) or from seeing the CWO flirt with nationalist groups. This shows that without a clear programmatic resistance to the pressure of the bourgeoisie, without developing a capacity to integrate new lessons from class struggle, any effort at decantation within the milieu can be destroyed from one day to the next.
6. Our understanding on the question of the party goes further than others in drawing the lessons of the first revolutionary wave. It is on this question that there is the most confusion in the milieu because the experience of 1917-1923 did not completely clarify the issue. We have often said that our position is more negative than positive. But we have to understand that only the coming movements of mass strikes can fully clarify this question on an international level.
The events of Poland with all their limitations were for us a clear confirmation of our positions on the development of class consciousness, the role of revolutionary minorities and the unitary forms of organization of the working class. They also compelled us to go further in our understanding of the problem of internationalization, of the rejection of the theory of the ‘weak link'. The entire milieu was tested by these events. Faced with such a movement in a more central country, how long could the CWO have continued to call for immediate insurrection? Would the PCI have continued to claim that there is no class movement without a previous organization of the workers by the party?
The coming movements, even more than the downswing at the beginning of the ‘80s, will severely test revolutionary groups. There will undoubtedly be other changes in the milieu; we will also see the appearance of new groups who will not be immune from the confusions of the past. To take in the lessons of future experiences of the working class, to constitute a pole of reference so that the new communist vanguards will not commit the same mistakes, an effort towards clarification must be carried out within the present milieu.
The skeleton of the future patty is not given once and for all by the currents and groups existing today. But it is their task today to carry through in this effort of decantation indispensable for the regroupment of tomorrow. That is why the working class produced them as soon as it took up once again the path to struggle.
JU
May 1983
Within the working class, there exists a historical ‘collective memory’. Revolutionary political organizations are an important sign of its existence, but not the only one. Throughout the class, conclusions have been drawn from the years past struggles and of ruling-class onslaughts, often more or less consciously, often in a purely negative form, more in the sense of knowing what not to do than disengaging a precise, clear and positive perspective. The power and depth of the workers’ movement in Poland were in large part the direct fruit of the successive experiences of 1956, 1970 and 1976.
This is why, within the worldwide unity of the proletariat, the different sections of the class are not all identical some have a longer tradition, a greater tradition than others. Old Western Europe regroups the proletariat with the strongest industrial heart (there are 41 million industrial wage-earners in the EEC, as opposed to 30 million in the USA and 20 million in Japan) and the longest historical experience; here the proletarian steel has been tempered by struggles that stretch from 1848 to the Paris Commune and the revolutionary wave at the end of World War I, by the confrontation with the counter-revolution in all its forms - Stalinist, fascist and ‘democratic’ (unionism and parliamentarism) - by hundreds of thousands of strikes of all forms and of sizes1.
Today, not only are the world proletariat’s major battalions concentrated in Western Europe, this is also the industrialized part of the US bloc where the revolutionary class, in the short- or medium-term, is destined to undergo the most violent economic attack. Western European capital is slowly collapsing, incapable of confronting (either on the world market or its own internal market) the economic competition of its American or Japanese 'partners' - a competition that has become all the more aggressive and merciless since these latter have themselves been plunged into the deepest crisis since the 1930s.
The combination of these subjective and objective conditions are transforming Western Europe into the formidable revolutionary detonator foretold by Marx.
The economic decline of Europe
In the decade from 1963-1973, the economies (GDP) of the EEC states grew by a yearly average of 4.6%. The rate fell to 2% in the decade that followed. At the beginning of the 1980s, it had fallen to zero or less in several countries. At the end of the 1960s, unemployment in the EEC stood at 2.3% of the working population. Today it is over 10% and has reached 17% in countries as different as Spain and the Netherlands. Between 1975 and 1982, the EEC’s ‘market share’ (measured by its share of total exports of manufactured products throughout the OECD) fell from 57% to 53%, while the USA’s remained stationary at 18% and Japan's rose from 13% to 16%.
In the second half of the ‘70s, the West European economy increasingly lost ground before the American and Japanese. This tendency speeded up at the beginning of the 1980s. At the same time, European capital's dependence on the power of its bloc leader - firmly established ever since the Second World War - has increased sharply.
Western Europe’s economic decline within the bloc is partly explained by the characteristics of international relations in decadent, militarized capitalism.
The law of the strongest
The laws that regulate relations between national capitals - even within the same military bloc - are those of the underworld. When the crisis hits, the economic competition by which the capitalist world lives rises to a paroxysm, just as gangsters shoot it out when the loot is rarer and more difficult to get.
In the present period this is expressed on the planetary level by the worsening tensions between the two military blocs. Within each bloc, each nation is under the absolute military control of the dominant power (the ammunition of the Japanese, like the Polish, army is kept at a strict minimum; it is supplied by its bloc leader). But economic antagonisms are none the weaker for all that.
Within the richer western bloc, a certain freedom of competition - much less than official propaganda pretends - makes it possible for economic antagonisms to appear in broad daylight: war is waged with reduced production costs, state export subsidies, protectionist measures and ‘market share’ bargaining, etc. In the poorer Eastern bloc, still more ruined by a gigantic effort of militarization, the economic tensions between national capitals appear less clearly, being more suppressed by military imperatives. (East Germany is proportionately more industrialized than the USSR; it is nonetheless obliged to buy Russian oil at an arbitrarily fixed price which is always higher than that of the world market and is usually obliged to pay in hard (western) currency).
However, with the acceleration of world capitalism’s crisis and decadence, it is the more backward bloc’s way of life that shows the shape of things to come for the better-off. As we said at our Second International Congress (1977), “The United States is going to impose rationing on Europe”. Since the beginning of the 1970s, the West has moved, not towards a greater freedom of trade and economic life, but on the contrary towards a proliferation of protectionist measures and the ever more merciless domination of the US over its rivals. The most recent reports of the GATT, the organization supposed to defend and stimulate free trade between nations, complain endlessly and denounce the suicidal sacrilege of proliferating customs barriers and other measures hindering ‘free trade’ between nations.
As for the USA’s economic relations with its industrialized partners, these are characterized - above all since the so-called oil crisis - by a series of economic maneuvers, whose concrete result boils down to ‘looting’. And the fruits of this plunder are essentially used by the dominant power to finance its military expenditure.
Like the USSR, the United States bears the heaviest military load of its bloc2. Ever since the Nixon presidency, the USA’s bloc-wide military-economic policies have forced its vassals to finance a part of its military strategy.
The violent increases in the price of oil (1974-75, 1979-80) whose production and distribution is largely controlled, directly or indirectly, by the US, have provided:
1) through the flood of dollars that poured into the Middle East from Europe and Japan, the means to finance the ‘Pax Americana’, essentially via Saudi Arabia;
2) through the enormous demand for dollars thus created (since oil is traded in dollars), an over-valuing of the green-back which allowed the US to buy anything, anywhere, at lower cost. This amounts to a forced revaluation of the dollar.
Since the beginning of the ‘80s, the US policy of high interest rates has had an analogous effect. The economic crisis creates a mass of ‘inactive’ capital, in the form of money, which cannot be profitably invested in the productive sector since the latter is constantly diminishing. If it is not to disappear (at least in part) it is forced to find placements in the speculative sector, where it is transformed into fictitious capital. These placements are made where interest rates are highest. US policy is thus sucking in an enormous mass of capital from throughout the world, which must be converted into dollars to be placed. The demand for the dollar grows and its price rises: it is overvalued (some January 1984 estimates put this over-valuation at 40%). Buying cheap (or rather, at the price it imposes), the US can afford the luxury of the biggest balance of payments deficit in its history ... without its currency being devalued; quite the reverse - at least for the moment. At the same time, and with the same impunity, the budget deficit has reached the unprecedented level of $200 billion, ie the equivalent of official defense spending estimates.
As we have pointed out several times in previous issues of this Review, this policy cannot go on forever. This headlong flight is simply laying the groundwork for gigantic financial explosions to come.
Conducting a policy of high real interest rates means being able to repay the borrowed capital with high real revenues. But the economic crisis, which is also devastating the US, deprives it of the real means for paying the interest. As for military production, which alone is undergoing any real development, this destroys rather than creates these means of payment. In reality the US pays these revenues with paper which is, in its turn, reinvested in the USA. At the end of this road, lies the bankruptcy of the world financial system3.
But the USA does not really have any choice and is not leaving any to its ‘allies’ either. The American economy 'supports' the European just as the rope supports a hanged man.
Just as in the rival bloc, and as in the whole of social life under decadent capitalism, economic relationships within the US bloc are increasingly modeled on and subservient to military relationships.
Speaking of relations between Europe and the bloc leader, Helmut Schmidt - an experienced representative of German capital - declared recently that Washington tends to “replace or supplant its political leadership by a strict military command, demanding that its allies obey orders without discussion, and within two days.” (Newsweek, 9.4.84)
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In the Eastern bloc, the USSR plunders its vassals directly, under the menace of its military might. In the Western bloc, the United States’ pillage is conducted essentially through the play of the economic mechanisms of the ‘market’ that they dominate militarily. But the result is the same. The bloc leader pays for its military strategy with the tribute of its vassals, whether direct or indirect.
Europe’s increasing lag is largely the result of the capitalist world’s law: the law of the strongest.
The intrinsic weaknesses of the European economy are those of a continent divided into a multitude of nations, competing amongst themselves and incapable of overcoming their divisions, in order to concentrate their forces to resist the economic competition of powers like America and Japan.
The myth of the common market
One of the most classic signs of economic crisis is the proliferation of company bankruptcies. For several years these have spread with growing rapidity, like an epidemic, throughout the major nations of the US bloc, reaching a rhythm unequalled since the great depression of the 1930s.
But bankruptcies are only an aspect of an equally significant phenomenon: the accelerating concentration of capital. In the capitalist jungle, where solvent markets are increasingly scarce, only the most modern companies, those able to produce at the lowest price, can survive. But in the present period the modernization of the productive apparatus demands ever more gigantic concentrations of capital. Against the American (and even the Jap anese) giants the Europeans - divided and unable to agree on anything other than how best to attack the proletariat - are less and less able to keep up in the technology race. It is easier and more profitable for a European company in diff iculty to make an alliance with US or Japanese capital than with other Europeans. And this is what happens in reality, despite the passionate declarations of the high priests of ‘United Europe’.
The EEC has been a unified market essentially for American and Japanese capital, which have the power or the material means to control a market of this size.
After years of effort, the EEC is only able to plan and organize the destruction and dismantling of the productive apparatus (the steel industry is only the most spectacular example).
From the standpoint of its objective conditions, Western Europe is turning into a social powder keg thanks to the acceleration of the economic crisis. But this is not the only reason. Two characteristics of capitalism in Western Europe make the class struggle particularly explosive and profound in this part of the world - the weight of the state in social life and the juxtaposition of a series of small nation-states.
The state’s weighting in social life makes the workers’ struggle more immediately political
The greater the state’s presence in economic life, the more each individual’s life depends directly on state ‘politics’. Social security, pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefit, state education, etc all make up a large part of the European workers’ wages. And this part is directly managed by the state. The greater the presence of the state’s institutions, the more the state is the boss of the whole working class. In these conditions, ‘austerity’, the attack on wages, takes on a directly political form and obliges the proletariat (in fighting back) to confront more directly the political heart of capital’s power.
With the development of the crisis, the class combat thus opens more immediately onto a political ground in Europe than in Japan or America. It is the governments, more than private companies that take the decisions that modify the workers’ conditions of existence. Austerity in Europe is the German government reducing scholarships and family allowances, the French government cutting unemployment benefit, the Spanish government proposing to lower the pension rate from 90% to 65%, the British government slashing the jobs of more than half a million state employees, the Italian government deciding to destroy the sliding wage-scale.
The weight of the state has grown regularly in all the Western bloc countries, including Japan and the USA. We can measure this weight in terms of the state administration’s total spending taken as a percentage of GDP. Between 1960 and 1981, this percentage grew from 18% to 34% in Japan and from 28% to 35% in the US. But at the same time, in 1981 it rose to:
47% in Britain
49% in Germany and France
51% in Italy
56% in Belgium
62% in Holland
65% in Sweden
This is one of the reasons that workers’ struggles in Western Europe tend, and will tend, to take on more immediately their political content.
The juxtaposition of several states makes the international nature of the proletarian struggle more obvious
Like wage-labor, the nation is a basic, characteristic institution of the capitalist mode of production. It constituted an important historical step forward, putting an end to the scattered isolation of feudal existence. But, like all capitalist social relations, it has now become a major barrier to any further development. One of the fundamental contradictions that historically condemns capitalism is the contradiction between the world scale on which production is carried out, and its national appropriation and orientation.
Nowhere in the world is this contradiction so striking as in old Western Europe. Nowhere does the identity of interests between proletarians of all countries, the possibility and necessity of the internationalization of the class struggle against the absurdity of the capitalist economic crisis, appear so immediately.
This generalization of the workers’ struggle across national frontiers will not happen overnight. It cannot be a mechanical response to objective conditions. A long period of simultaneous struggles throughout the small European countries will certainly be necessary for the working class to forge, from the boiling crucible of the prerevolutionary period, the consciousness of its international and revolutionary being, and the will to assume it. For this, the working class in Europe has the determining advantage of the greatest historical experience and revolutionary tradition. It is no accident if the proletariat’s main revolutionary political organizations are concentrated in Western Europe. Weak though they may still be today, these organizations have and will have a determining role to play in the revolutionary process.
The collapse of the capitalist economy is a planetary phenomenon affecting every country, creating the conditions for the world communist revolution. But it is Western Europe that, because of its place in the world productive process, its special position within the American military bloc, its political structure (importance of the state and multiplicity of nation-states), and the subjective conditions of proletarian existence, is necessarily at the epicenter of the world revolution.
RV
1 See ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Heart of the Generalization of Class Struggle’ (IR 31, 4th quarter, 1982) and ‘Critique of the Weak Link Theory’ (IR 37, 2nd quarter, 1984)
2 Russia’s relative backwardness in relation to certain countries of its European slope, like the GDR, reflects the burden of its military costs. The only sectors where the USSR leads its bloc are the military ones.
3 The growing difficulties of American banks and the proliferation of bank failures are the first signs of the disaster that such a policy must lead to.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/communistenbond-spartacus
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/council-communism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/25/fake-workers-parties
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/life-icc
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/holland
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/40/belgium
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis