Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1936, a wave of spontaneous strikes exploded in France against the aggravation of exploitation provoked by the economic crisis and the development of the war economy, In July, in Spain, in response to Franco's military rebellion, the whole working class came out on strike against this attack. Trotsky believed he was seeing the beginning of a new international revolutionary wave.

However, in a few months, the political apparatus of the left of capital, by putting itself at the head of these movements, was able to sabotage them from within, to participate in their repression and shut the workers up in the false alternative between fascism and anti-fascism, thus playing the role of ideological recruiting sergeant for what would be the second world­wide inter-imperialist butchery.

On the anniversary of these events we are publishing two articles about them, because today it is indispensable:

-- to denounce the lie put about by the left of capital that during these events it embodied the interests of the working class, showing on the contrary that the left was the proletariat's executioner,

-- to recall the tragic lessons of these experiences, in particular the fatal trap of the working class abandoning the intransigent defense of its specific interests in order to submit to the requirements of one bourgeois camp against another;

-- to point out what distinguishes the 1930s - a period marked by the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave and by the triumph of the counter-revolution - from the present period in which new generations of proletarians are seeking to detach themselves from counter-revolution­ary ideologies through a permanent and growing confrontation with capital and this same left; a confrontation which the proletariat won't be able to take to its conclusion - the communist revolution - unless it reappropriates the lessons of its past experience, which it has paid for so dearly.

The Spanish Civil War,

a rehearsal for the 2nd World War

1986 marks the 50th anniversary of the events in Spain 1936. The bourgeoisie has been commemorat­ing this date with campaigns of falsification, launching the pernicious message that while the events of 1936 were a ‘proletarian revolution', today, by contrast, we're in a situation of ‘retreats and defeats', of a ‘crisis of the working class', of an ever-increasing submission to the laws of capital.

It's obvious that the lessons the bourgeoisie wants us to draw from past events are part of its whole tactic against workers' struggles, aimed at keeping them dispersed, isolated and divided. The object is to prevent them from extending and unifying by drowning them in a climate of so-called apathy and demobilization.

Against these maneuvers, our militant position is to defend the immense potentiality of the present struggles of the proletariat with the same force as we reject the lie of a ‘social revolution' in 1936. We link ourselves to the courage and lucidity of Bilan  , who, against the stream, denounced the imperialist massacre in Spain, and provided us with the method which enables us to affirm the potentialities of the class struggle in the ‘80s and carry out a determined intervention within it.                                                                                    

Imperialist war or proletarian revolution?  

How can we characterize the events which took the place in Spain after 1931 and which accelerated from 1936 on?                       

Our method isn't just based on the violent and radical nature of the class battles which shook Spain in this period, but on an analysis of the balance of forces between the classes on an international scale and over a whole historical period.            

This analysis of the historic course allows us to determine whether the various confli­ct and situations were part of a process of defeat for the proletariat, were contained in a perspective of generalized imperialist war, or, by contrast, part of a process of rising class struggle, opening the way to revolutionary class confrontations.

In order to see what course the 1936 events were part of, we have to answer a series of questions:

-- what was the world-wide balance of forces between the classes? Was it evolving in favor of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?

-- what was the orientation of the political organizations of the proletariat? Towards opportunist degeneration, disintegration or integration into the capitalist camp, or, on the other hand, towards clarity and the development of their influence? More concretely: did the proletariat have at its disposal a party capable of orienting its struggles towards the seizure of power?

-- did workers' councils develop and affirm themselves as an alternative power?

-- did the proletariat's struggles attack all the forms and institutions of the capitalist state?

Faced with these questions our method is that of Bilan and other left communists (for example the minority of the International Communist League of Belgium, headed by Mitchell); they began from a world-historic analysis of the balance of forces within which the events in Spain were taking place; they registered not only the non-existence of a class party, but the disarray and passage into bourgeois camp of the great majority of workers' organizations; they denounced the rapid recuperation by the capitalist state of the embryonic workers' organs of July 19, and, above all, they raised their voices against the criminal trap of a so-called, ‘destruction' of the Republican capitalist state which ‘disappeared' behind the mask of a ‘workers' government' whose function was to destroy the workers' class terrain and lead them into the imperialist butchery of the war against Franco.                    

What was the balance of forces after the terrible defeat of the 1920s? In what way did the death of the Communist International and the accelerated degeneration of the Communist Parties condition the situation of the Spanish workers? What was the definitive result of all this in the 1930s? A course towards confrontations between imperialist bandits or a course towards confrontations between the classes?           

The reply to these questions was vital for determining whether or not there was a revolution in Spain and, above all, for pronouncing on the nature of the violent military conflict between the Francoist and Republican forces, for seeing how they fitted in with the aggravation of imperialist conflicts on a world level.      ­

Abandoning the class terrain   

On 19 July 1936, the workers came out on strike against Franco's uprising and went en masse to the barracks to disarm this attempt, without asking permission from the Popular Front or the Republican government who put as many stumbling blocks in their way as possible. By uniting the struggle for demands with the political struggle, the workers thus held back Franco's murderous hands. But other murderous hands paralyzed them by appearing to offer a hand of friendship: the Popular Front, the Republican government of Companys who, with the aid of the CNT and the POUM, managed to get the workers to abandon the class terrain of a social, economic, and political battle against Franco and the Republic, diverting them onto the capitalist terrain of an exclusively military battle in the trenches, a war of positions exclusively against Franco. Faced with the workers' response of July 19, the Republican state ‘disappeared', the bourgeoisie ‘ceased to exist', hiding itself behind the Popular Front and the more ‘left wing' organs like the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias or the Central Council of the Economy. In the name of this easily-conquered ‘revolutionary change', the bourgeoisie demanded, and obtained from the workers a Sacred Union devoted to the single objective of beating Franco. The bloody massacres which then followed in Aragon, Oviedo, Madrid, were the criminal result of the ideological maneuver of the Republican bourgeoisie who had aborted the class embryo of 19 July1936.                                         

Having left its class terrain, the proletariat was not only plunged into the war but, as a consequence, more and more sacrifices were imposed on it in the name of the ‘war of liberation'; wage cuts, inflation, rationing, exhausting working days ... Disarmed politically and physically, the proletariat of Barcelona launched a despairing uprising in May 1937 and was vilely massacred by those who had so basely deceived it:

"July 19th 1936 - the workers of Barcelona, barehanded, crushed the attack of Franco's battalions which were armed to the teeth. May 4th 1937 - the same workers, now equipped with arms, left many more dead on the streets than in July when they had to fight back against Franco. This time it is the anti-fascist government - including the anarchists and receiving the indirect solidarity of the POUM - which unleashes the scum of the forces of repression against the workers....Are the military fronts a necessity imposed by the current situation? No! They are a necessity for capitalism if it is to contain and crush the workers: May 4 1937 is stark proof of the fact that after July 19 1936, the proletariat had to fight Companys and Giral just as much as Franco. The military fronts can only dig a grave for the workers because they represent the fronts of capitalism's war against the proletariat. The only answer the Spanish workers can give to this war is the one given by their Russian brothers in 1917: revolutionary defeatism in both camps of the bourgeoisie, the Republican as well as the ‘fascist'; the transformation of the capitalist war into a civil war for the total destruction of the bourgeois state." (Bilan, ‘Bullets, Machine Guns, Prisons: this is the reply of the Popular Front to the workers of Barcelona who dared to resist the capitalist offensive').

The ‘argument' that Spain 1936 was a ‘revolution' has no foundation and implies a total ignorance of the conditions for a real proletarian revolution.

The international context was one of defeat and disarray for the working class:

"If the internationalist criterion means anything, it must affirm that under the sign of a growing counter-revolution on a world scale, the political orientation of Spain-between 1931 and 1936 could only go in a parallel direction and not in the opposite direction, towards a revolutionary development. The revolution can only reach its full development as the product of a revolutionary situation on an international scale. It's only on this basis that we can explain the defeats of the Paris Commune and the Russian Commune of 1905, as well as the victory of the Russian proletariat in October 1917." (Mitchell, ‘The War in Spain', Jan ‘37).

The immense majority of proletarian political organizations were going through a terrible rout: the Communist Parties were being definitively integrated into their respective national capitals; Trotskyism was dramatically losing itself in opportunism; the rare organizations who remained loyal to the proletariat (Bilan, etc) were suffering a dreadful isolation:

"Our isolation is not fortuitous: it is the result of a profound victory by world capitalism, which has succeeded in contaminating with its gangrene even the groups of the communist left, of whom up to now the Trotskyists have been the main spokesmen." (Bilan, ‘The Isolation of Our Fraction in Front of the Events in Spain').

"If there was any doubt about the fundamental role of the party in the revolution, the Spanish experience since July 1936 is enough to eliminate it definitively. Even if you assimilate Franco's attack to that of Kornilov in August 1917 (which is false historically and politically), the contrast between how the two situations evolved is striking. The one in Spain led to a growing class collaboration culminating in the Sacred Union of all political forces; the other, in Russia, led to the heightening of the class struggle culminating in a victorious insurrection, under the vigilant con­trol of the Bolshevik party which had been tempered by fifteen years of criticism and of armed struggle." (Mitchell, ‘The War In Spain').

There can't be an opportunist rout of all the revolutionary forces towards the bourg­eois camp at the same time as the working masses are going from victory to victory. It's quite the opposite: the rising class struggle is both the result of, and the impulse behind, a movement towards clarifi­cation and regroupment among revolutionaries; but when the revolutionary forces are reduced to their lowest ebb, this expresses and rein­forces a course of defeat for the working class.

Submission to the bourgeois state

Despite all the propaganda about the ‘revolutionary value' of the factory committ­ees, the collectives, etc, neither did any workers' councils exist in 1936:

"Immediately smothered, the factory comm­ittees, the committees of control in enter­prises that had not been expropriated (in consideration of foreign capital or for other considerations) were transformed into organs which had to activate production and thus their class meaning was also deformed. They were no longer organs created during an insurrectional strike to overthrow the state, but organs oriented towards the organization of the war, essential to the survival and strengthening of this state" (Bilan, ‘The Lessons of the Events in Spain').

In order to dragoon the workers into the imperialist slaughter, everyone, from Companys to the POUM, from Azana to the CNT, ‘ceded power' to the workers organs:

"Confronted with class conflagration, capitalism cannot even dream of resorting to the classical methods of legality. What threat­ens capitalism is the independence of the proletarian struggle, since that provides the condition for the class to go on to the revolutionary stage of posing the question of destroying bourgeois power. Capitalism must therefore renew the bonds of its control over the exploited masses. These bonds, previously represented by the magistrates, the police and prisons, have in the extreme conditions which reign in Barcelona taken the form of the Committee of Militias, the socialized industries, the workers' unions managing the key sectors of the economy, the vigilante patrols, etc." (Bilan, ‘Bullets, Machine Guns, Prisons...').

In the final analysis, the worst lie of all was the criminal mirage of the so-called ‘destruction' or ‘disappearance' of the Republican state. Let's leave the marxists of Bilan and the minority of the ICL to denounce this lie:

1) "Concerning Spain, there has been much talk of a proletarian revolution on the march, of dual power, the ‘effective' power of the workers, ‘socialist' management, the ‘collectivization' of the factories and the land, but at no point has the problem of the state or of the party been posed on a marxist basis." (Mitchell, ‘The War in Spain').

2) "This fundamental problem (he refers to the question of the state) was replaced by that of destroying the ‘fascist bands' and the bourgeois state remained standing while adopting a ‘proletarian' appearance. What has been allowed to predominate is a criminal equivocation about the ‘partial' destruction `of the state, with much talk of a ‘real workers' power', and the ‘facade of power' of the bourgeoisie; this has been concretized in Catalonia in two ‘proletarian' organs: the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias and the Council of the Economy." (Mitchell, ibid).

3) "The Central Committee of the Militias was the weapon inspired by capitalism to drag the proletarians away from their towns and localities towards the territorial fronts where they were pitilessly massacred. It was the organ which re-established order in Catalonia, not with the workers, but against the workers who were dispersed to the fronts. Certainly the regular army was practically dissolved, but it was gradually reconstruct­ed with militia columns whose general staff remained openly bourgeois - Sandino, Villalba, and their consorts. The columns were based on volunteers and could remain so until the illusion of revolution gave way to capitalist reality. Then there was a rapid march towards the official reestablishment of a regular army and towards obligatory service." (Bilan, ‘Lessons of the Events in Spain').

4) "The essential components of the bourg­eois state remained intact:

-- the army took on other forms - the militias - but it retained its bourgeois content by defending the capitalist interests of the anti-fascist war;

-- the police force, formed by the assault guards and the civil guards, wasn't dissolved but hid behind the barracks for a while to return at an opportune moment;

-- the bureaucracy of the central power cont­inued to function and extended its grip into the militias and the Council of the Economy. It wasn't at all a mere executive agent of these organs - on the contrary it inspired them with directives in accord with capital­ist interests." (Mitchell, ibid).

5) "The tribunals were rapidly re-establish­ed with the aid of the old magistrates, with the added participation of the ‘antifascist' organizations. The popular tribunals of Cat­alonia were always based on collaboration between the professional magistrates and the representatives of all the parties ... The banks and the Bank of Spain remained intact and everywhere precautionary meas­ures were taken to prevent them (even by force of arms) from falling into the hands of the masses." (Bilan, ibid).

From the ‘30s to the ‘80s

We've already seen that, as Marx said, bourgeois ideology turns reality on its head: it presents the 1930s as ‘revolutionary' years whereas today we are in a ‘counter­revolutionary' period.

If the bourgeoisie insists so much on this upside-down reality its precisely because of its profound fear of the potentiality of the workers' struggle today and because, at the same time, it mourns the passing of the ‘30s when it was able to enroll the proletariat into the imperialist butchery and present each of its defeats as ‘great victories'.

A that time, in 1936, the mystifications about anti-fascism, ‘defending democracy', taking sides between contending capitalist factions (fascism/anti-fascism, right/left, Franco/Republic) were increasingly polarizing the world proletariat, augmenting its demoralization and its enthusiastic adherence to the war-plans of the bourgeoisie, culminating in the terrible butchery of 1939-45.

Today, the mystifications about anti-fascism, national defense, supporting the ‘socialist fatherland' in Russia, convince less and less workers who are increasingly distrustful and hostile towards such lies. It's true that, for the moment, this hasn't been translated into a massive understanding of the necessity to put forward a revolutionary alternative to the bankruptcy of capitalism; there is still a skeptical, wait-and-see attitude prevailing. But this attitude can and must be transformed through the development of workers' struggles against the increasingly brutal and massive attacks of capital, and through the intervent­ion of revolutionaries within these struggles.

At that time, the left governments, the Popular Fronts, had wide support amongst the working class, to the point that in many count­ries (France, Sweden, Spain), it was they who convinced the workers to accept every imagin­able sacrifice ‘for the good of the country'.

Today, the working class is defending its class interests against all governments, whether right or left, applying in practice the watchwords that Bilan put forward without success in the ‘30s: "Not to play the game of the left when struggling against the right and not giving any benefit to the right when strugg­ling against the left." A conclusive demonstrat­ion of this is that the ‘socialist' governments in France, Greece, Spain, Sweden, etc, have been faced by massive and determined responses by the workers, who haven't been taken in by the line that they have thereby been fighting ‘their own' government.

At the time, the proletarian parties which had been created round the time of the format­ion of the Third International, the Communist Parties, were reaching the end of a tragic process of opportunist degeneration and were integrating themselves into the capitalist camp, using their undeniable working class past to excuse a policy of defending the bourgeois state. As for the communist fract­ions which broke from them and continued the intransigent defense of class positions, they were increasingly isolated and came up against the growing incomprehension of the workers.

Today, the organizations which have remained loyal to the historic continuity of communist positions are enlarging their echo in the class; at the same time, we are seeing the emergence in a whole number of places of nuclei, groups and elements who are clearly posing the question of breaking with the left of capital and seeking a communist coherence. All this, though still at its beginnings and accompanied by all sorts of doubts, hesitations and confusions, constitutes the basis for a process of political decantation which will lead to the formation of the world communist party, the new proletarian International.

In other words, while the workers' strugg­les in 1936, in particular in Spain, took place within the course opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the triumph of the counter-revolution in Germany, Italy, central Europe and Russia, today's workers' struggles are p art of a process of the reconstitution of the unity of the world proletariat, which is breaking out of the grip of the ideology of the ruling class and entering upon decisive battles against capital.

The maneuvers of the Left: an experience never to be forgotten

The comparison between the two periods leads us to another fundamental lesson: the continuity in the anti-working class activity of the left parties and the unions, both then and now. Their tactics aren't the same because, as we have just seen, there are obvious differences in the balance of forces between the classes and in the state of consciousness of the working class, but what hasn't changed is their anti-working class function as a fundamental bastion of the capitalist state against workers' struggles.

Despite the different historical conditions, an examination of the maneuvers of the left parties and the unions - especially the CNT - in Spain ‘36 can provide us with a perspective for fighting against their maneuvers and traps in the present struggles.

In 1931, the PSOE, which had already demon­strated its integration into Spanish capital through its open collaboration with the dict­atorship of Primo de Rivera (Largo Caballero was the dictator's state adviser and the UGT played the role of stool pigeon in the factories), made an alliance with the Republic­ans and, up until 1933, participated in the ferocious repression of the workers' and peasants' struggles, the high point of which was the cruel massacre of Casasviejas. Today the PSOE has been at the head of the govern­ment since 1982 and, as in the ‘30s, has left no doubts about its capitalist nature and its fierce hatred for the workers, assassinating a worker during the shipyard strike in Bilbao.

But, as we have indicated:

"The left doesn't accomplish this (capitalist) function only or even generally when it's in power. Most of the time it accom­plishes it when it's in the opposition because it's generally easier to do it when in opposit­ion than when in power ... In the ‘normal' situation of capitalism, their presence in government makes them more vulnerable; being in power wears out their credibility more quickly. In a situation of instability this tendency is even more accelerated. Then, their loss of credibility makes them less able to carry out their task of immobilizing the working class..." (International Review 18, ‘In Government or in Opposition, the ‘Left' Against the Working Class').

For these reasons, the PSOE, which in January 1933 had wet its hands with workers' blood at Casasviejas, left the government in March and, followed by the UGT, ‘radicalized' its language to the point where Largo Cabellero, the former state adviser to Primo de Rivera and Minister of Labor between 1931 and 1933, became the ‘Spanish Lenin'.

In opposition, the PSOE promised the work­ers ‘revolution' and talked about ‘huge arms depots ready for the right moment to carry out the insurrection.' With this celestial music, it opposed the workers' struggle for immediate demands, since they supposedly ‘prejudiced the plans for insurrection.' In fact, like its compatriots in Austria, it was deliberately leading the workers towards a suicidal clash with the bourgeois state.

In October 1934 the workers of the Asturias fell into this trap. Their heroic uprising in the mining areas and in the industrial belt of Oviedo and Gijon was completely isolated by the PSOE which used all the means at its disposal to prevent the workers in the rest of Spain, particularly in Madrid, from coming to the support of the movement. It played the trick of tolerating ‘peaceful' strikes which couldn't extend the front opened up by the Asturias miners.

This criminal maneuver of the PSOE and the UGT allowed the Republican government to crush the workers' revolt with the most savage re­pression, At the head of the troops sent to carry out the massacre was Franco, qualified by the parties of the time as a ‘professional general, loyal to the Republic'.

But the maneuver in the Asturias opened up a phase of ferocious repression throughout the country; any known working class militant was put in prison without the ‘Spanish Lenin', Largo Caballero, raising a finger.

The finger that the PSOE did raise, in accordance with a general tactic put into practice in other countries, was the famous ‘Popular Front'. This leagued together the PSOE and the UGT, the Republican parties (Azana and co.), the PCE (in this way definit­ively integrating itself into the capitalist state) and the CNT and the POUM, two organisms which had been working class up till then, and which supported it in a ‘critical' way.

The Popular Front openly advocated replacing the workers' struggle with the electoral farce, the struggle of the class as a class against all factions of capital, with a struggle on capital's terrain, against the bourgeoisie's ‘fascist' faction and in favor of its ‘anti‑fascist' faction. In opposition to the struggles of the workers and poor peasants for their own demands, it put forward an illusory and ridic­ulous ‘reform program' which would never be applied; in opposition to the only perspect­ive possible for the proletariat (the commun­ist revolution), it put forward the phantasmag­orical specter of a ‘democratic revolution'...

This was a criminal demobilization of the workers, a way of derailing their combat onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie, of disarming them, of breaking their unity and conscious­ness and delivering them, bound hand and foot, to the military, who since the very day of the triumph of the Popular Front (February 1936) had been calmly preparing a bloodbath for the workers with the tacit approval of the ‘peoples' government.

When Franco finally staged his uprising on 18 July, the Popular Front, showing its true colors, not only tried to calm the workers, telling them to go home, but categ­orically refused to hand out arms. In a famous declaration, the Popular Front appealed for calm and coined the slogan: ‘The Government Commands, The Popular Front Obeys', which concretely meant calling on the workers to remain passive and obedient so that they could be massacred by the military.

This is what happened in Seville, where the workers followed the advice of the very ‘antifascist' PCE to remain calm and await government orders; this allowed general Queipo del Llano to take control very easily and organize a terrible bloodbath.

As we've seen, it was only the uprising of the workers of Barcelona and other industr­ial centers, on their own class terrain, uniting the struggle for demands with the political struggle, which paralyzed the ex­ecutioner Franco.

But the forces of the left of capital, PSOE, PCE and co were able to react in time and set in motion a maneuver which proved decisive. Rapidly, within 24 hours, they put themselves at the head of the workers' uprising and succeeded in derailing it into a struggle exclusively against Franco - thus giving a free hand to the Republic and the Popular Front - and exclusively on the military terrain, outside of the social and political terrain of the working class, away from the major industrial and urban concentrations.

In 24 hours, the government of Martinez Barrio - formed to negotiate with the mili­tary rebels and jointly organize the massacre of the workers - was replaced by the Giral gov­ernment, more ‘intransigent' and ‘antifascist'.

But the essential thing was to gain the unconditional support of the CNT, which regrouped the major part of the Spanish workers and which had quickly called off the strike and oriented the workers' organs created spontan­eously in the factories and working class neighborhoods - the committees, militias, patrols - towards ‘antifascist' collaboration with the Republican authorities (Companys, Azana, Popular Front, etc) and towards trans­forming them into agencies for recruiting the workers to be butchered at the front.

With this step, the degeneration of the CNT was complete and it integrated itself definitively into the capitalist state. The presence of CNT ministers first in the Catalan government, then in the central government, presided over by the inevitable Largo Caballero, merely sealed this trajectory. All the leading organs of the CNT declared a ferocious war against the rare currents who, despite terrible confusions, struggled to defend a revolutionary position, such as for example the groups around the publication ‘The Friends of the People'. These elements found themselves being isolated, expelled, sent to the most dangerous positions at the front, denounced indirectly to the Republican police, by the whole band of Garcia Oliver, Montseny, Abad de Santillan, etc.

The Popular Front's maneuver, the ‘anti­fascist war', was definitive. It led the Spanish workers to a slaughter of monstrous proportions: more than a million dead. But the killing was also accompanied by incredible sufferings behind the lines, not only in the Francoist zones but the Republican ones as well. In the name of the ‘antifascist war', the few workers' gains conceded to pacify the workers' uprising of 19 July ‘36 were immediately annulled, with the CNT being the first to de­mand it. Starvation wages, exhausting hours of work, rationing, the militarization of labor, in short the savage and total exploitation of the workers.

The PCE was then the main party of exploit­ation, of sacrifice for the war, of anti-working class repression.

The slogan of the Stalinist party was ‘No To Strikes in Democratic Spain.' This was in fact more than a slogan. It was the banner under which, by means of the police, the majority of which were under its control, it aimed to put a stop to all strikes and class demands in the factories. It was the PCE's Catalonian front organization, the PSUC, which in January 1937 organized a ‘popular' demonstration against the factory committees which were too reticent about accepting the imperatives of militarization.

In Republican Spain the PCE was the party of order. This is why so many military men, agri­cultural and industrial property owners, police functionaries and numerous ‘senoritos' of the extreme right joined it or supported it. Through such elements it rapidly gained control of the repressive apparatus of the Republican state, emptying the prisons of fascists and bosses and filling them with militant workers.

The culminating point of these outstanding services to capitalism was the killings of May 1937. The workers of Barcelona, having had enough of suffering and exploitation, rose up against a police provocation against the telephone workers. The PCE immediately organized a ferocious repression, dispatching troops from Valencia and the Aragon front. The CNT and the POUM, appealing for ‘calm' and ‘reconciliation between brothers', etc, collaborated in all this by immobilizing the workers. Franco momentarily stopped hostilities in order to facilitate the crushing of the workers by the Stalinist executioners.

The war in Spain went on until 1939. It ended in the victory of Franco and the estab­lishment of the political regime that we all know about.

The dreadful repression which then descended on the workers who had participated in the war on the Republican side completed the blood­letting that the bourgeoisie had imposed on one of the most combative sectors of the proletariat at that time.

The horrors of the obscurantist dictatorship to some extent effaced the memory of those of the ‘democratic dictatorship' of the Republic at the beginning of the ‘30s, and the whole work of sabo­taging and repressing workers' struggles carried out by the ‘left' forces of capital (PCE, PSOE, CNT) during the civil war years.

Fifty years later, the Spanish workers are again subjected to the power and exploitation of capital in the form of bourgeois democracy. The Francoists and Republicans are reconciled behind the same police and the same army in order to preserve and manage the existing social order.

Fifty years later, when the workers are again resisting the effects of the world capitalist crisis and are constituting anew, in the four corners of the planet the world proletarian army, the warnings of Bilan in 1936, the lessons of the Spanish tragedy, must be clearly assimilated: the workers can only defend themselves by counting on their own forces, by building their own class autonomy. Any abandonment of the class terrain, of the intransigent defense of their class interests, in favor of an alliance with any faction of the ruling class, will be at the workers' expense and will end in the worst defeats.

Adalen

The "Popular Front" in France,

from sabotaging to "national unity" (extracts from Bilan)

"The Popular Front shows itself to be the real process of the dissolution of the class consciousness of the proletarians, the aim of which is to keep the workers on the terrain of the maintenance of bourgeois society in each and every aspect of their social and political life." (Bilan No 31, May-June 1936).

At the beginning of the 1930s, the anarchy of capitalist production is complete. The world crisis throws millions of proletarians onto the streets. Only the war economy - not just the massive production of armaments but also the whole infrastructure required by this production - develops strongly. Industry organizes itself around it, imposing new methods of toil of which ‘Taylorism' will be one of the finest emanations.

On the social front, despite the powerful counter-revolution ‘from within' in Russia, despite the routing of the world's most power­ful proletariat, the working class in Germany, the world vacillates, still seems to hesitate at the crossroads between a new world war or a new revolutionary upsurge which alone would be able to overcome this terrible perspective and open up a new future. The defeat of the workers' movement in Italy, the popular fronts[1] in France and Spain, the ideologies of national unity, nourished by the most colossal dupery and ideological swindle of the century -"anti-fascism" - finally put an end to these last hesitations. In 1939 the world will be plunged into butchery, the darkest hour of the century. The future no longer has a future; it is entirely absorbed and destroyed in a present of hate, murder and massive destruction.

The credit for this great service rendered to capital, of having wiped out the last pockets of workers' resistance in imprisoning the proletariat in a nationalist, democratic ideology, making it abandon its terrain of struggle against the consequences of the histor­ic crisis of capitalism, must go to those who today celebrate this sinister anniversary: the capitalist left and its union guard dogs.

To celebrate the anniversary of the Popular Front is to celebrate the anniversary of war, of the final victory over the international proletariat of nationalist ideology and of the class collaboration which three years later led the workers of all nations into the colossal fratricide of the second world-war.

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

The history of the Popular Front has been raised to the status of a myth and the truth, whether about its deeds, its real content, or above all its real consequences, is far from the picture painted by those who lay claim to this glorious past and who evoke it nostalgically today.

To reveal the truth about these dark years in which the consciousness of the working class was pierced by those who, claiming to be on its side, sunk to the lowest servitude, that of nationalism, we have chosen contemporaries of that sad epoch who avoided and opposed the large-scale and hysterical ideologies, who held high the banner of workers' emancipation and of its cornerstone, internationalism. We therefore let the review Bilan speak of the content, the unfolding and of the attitude of the official left to the workers' struggles, as well as on the ‘workers' acquisitions' of the Popular Front.

Of all the myths about the history of the Popular Front, that of the workers' acquisitions, above all of ‘paid holidays', is the most widespread.

The acquisitions of the Popular Front: one big smokescreen

The reader of the long quotations from Bilan will note, if he didn't already know it, that there was nothing idyllic about the conditions of the workers during the period of the Popular Front, as the long and hard strikes which punctuated its entire history prove best of all. As far as paid holidays are concerned, to take but one example, we should say straight away that the struggles which obtained these were always conducted spontaneously by the workers in refusing the militarization of labor:

"It's not a coincidence that these big strikes have broken out in the metal industry, beginn­ing with the aircraft factories. These are the sectors which today are working full steam as a result of the policy of rearmament pursued in all countries. This fact, sensed by the workers, leads to them launching their movements in order to reduce the brutal rhythm of the assem­bly lines; for the improvement of their wages; in order to obtain a collective work contract, and for the recognition of the unions by the employers; for paid holidays, on the basis of an intensification of work in the metal sector linked to the war. It is therefore a painful paradox, for which the workers are not respons­ible, but which has to be put down to the forces of capital which have put the workers in this situation." (Bilan No 31, May-June 1936, p. 10-15).

In the face of the tension of the work force in the framework of the reinforcement of the war economy and of the new organization of work flowing from this, the workers took up the struggle, among others, in order to obtain an annual break. But in the hands of the unions this victory, to which they themselves have not contributed, becomes a final goal, an institution to allow for the integration of the working class into the framework of the militarization of labor.

On the eve of the Popular Front: the nationalist poison

The articles of Bilan throw a different light on the period from July 1934 to the spring of 1937 than the traditional fairy tales told by the left. On what basis was the Popular Front constituted?

"Under the star of July 14"

"Under the imposing star of mass demonstrations the French proletariat is being dissolved into the capitalist regime. Despite the thousands and thou­sands of workers marching in the streets of Paris, it can be said that in France just as much as in Germany, there is not a proletarian class fighting for its own historical objectives. On this subject, July 14 marks a decisive moment in the process of disintegration of the proletariat and in the reconstitution of the holy unity of the capitalist nation. It's been a true national festival, an official reconciliation of class antagonisms, of exploiters and exploited. In this complete triumph of republicanism the bourg­eoisie, far from imposing limits through a heavy-handed stewardship, allowed it to unfold in all its glory. The workers thus tolerated the tricolor flag of their imperialism, sung the ‘Marseillaise' and even applauded Daladier, Cot and other capitalist ministers who, along with Blum, Cachin, solemnly swore ‘to give bread to the workers, work to youth and peace to the world' or, in other words, lead, barr­acks and imperialist war for everyone.

"It can't be denied that events are moving fast. Since the declaration of Stalin, the situation has rapidly been clarified. From now on the workers have a fatherland to defend, they have reconquered their place in the nation, and, from now on they admit that all the revolutionary proclamations concerning the incompatibility between the Internationale and the ‘Marseillaise', the communist revolution and the capitalist nation, are nothing but fine phrases which the October revolution launched in vain, since Stalin has shown their insufficiency ...

"July 14 is therefore the final summit of the devouring of the proletariat by the demo­cratic republic. It's the example of militant communists and socialists which convinces the workers - quite rightly hesitating - to sing the ‘Marseillaise'. What an unforgettable spectacle, writes Populaire. What a triumph, adds L'Humanite. And both refer to the ‘typical' old worker who, "with tears in his eyes", expresses the joy of hearing the hymn of his exploiters, the hangmen of June, the murderers of the communards, the civilizers of Morocco and the war of 1914, become proletarian. Duclos, in his speech, said that in saluting the tricolor flag, the workers salute the ‘revolutionary past' of France, but that his red flag represents the future. But this past continues in the present, in other words, in the fierce exploitation of the workers, in the robber wars of capitalism massacring entire generations of proletarians, In 1848 too, the bourgeoisie tried to revive the past, the traditions of ‘93, the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, in order to shroud the present class antagonisms: the killings of June were the consequence of proletarian illusions ...

"And after this imposing demonstration, the defeat of the class called upon to over­throw bourgeois society, to install a comm­unist society, we have to ask ourselves if a fascist menace is really posed in France. Until now, it seems that the Croix de Feu has been more a means of blackmail, a scarecrow to accelerate the wearing down of the proletarian masses through the united front, than a real danger. But the raising of anti-fascism to a supreme law has justified the vilest capit­ulations, the lowest compromises, in order to end up diverting the workers far away from their organization of resistance towards an antifascist front including even Herriot. It's not by coincidence that the decree-laws came immediately after July 14 and that they found the proletariat clearly incapacitated, whereas thousands of workers had marched a few days beforehand shouting for ‘the workers' councils'." (Bilan, July-August 1935).

In face of the defensive struggles

The preparation of the Popular Front thus already announced its future evolution, in particular in face of the defensive struggles of the workers. How did the famous year 1936 unfold on the social front?

"The reconciliation of the French and union unity"

"A breath of fresh air has crossed France on December 6th: parliament achieved an "historic day" since Blum, Thorez, Ybarnegaray have sealed the ‘reconciliation of the French'. From now on, no more murderous struggles will stain republican and democratic France. Fascism has been vanquished. The Popular Front has saved the republican institutions. If these events hadn't drawn millions of French workers behind them, if they weren't so repug­nant, one could almost laugh at all this buffoonery. Nobody is menacing the bourgeois republic and everybody is menacing it. The right accuses the left and vice versa. The Popular Front proclaims its republican civil spirit, whereupon La Roque and his Croix de Feu repeat the same litany. The formations of the Croix de Feu - certainly more powerful and infinitely better armed than the workers - no more menace the Republic than do the combat and self-defense formations of the Pop­ular Front, since both put themselves at its service to reinforce the capitalist domination which is all the more republican the better it pays to be so ...

"From the point of view of the immediate situation, the dupes of the historic day December 6 are incontestably the workers. Already, after their resistance at Brest and Toulon, they are called ‘provocateurs' by the chained dogs of the Popular Front. After the ‘reconciliation', the proletarian who tries to violently resist capitalist violence will be beaten up, injured and delivered by the agents of the Popular Front into the hands of the police. Rosa Luxemburg said that against the Spartakists, the social patriots mobilized heaven and earth, unleashed sword and fire. Spartakus had to be massacred! In France, the Popular Front, loyal to the tradition of treason, doesn't hesitate to provoke murder against those who don't yield to the ‘dis­armament of the French' and who, like at Brest and Toulon, launch defensive struggles, class battles against capitalism and beyond the pillars of influence of the Popular Front." (Bilan No 26, December-January 1936).

This attitude and this beginning to the year 1936 are but the prelude to a fantastic work of attrition by the left and the unions during the movement of the spring.

"The conditions which accompany the triumph of the Popular front are thus those leading to the annihilation of the consciousness of the working class. The triumph of the government of the Popular Front signals the disappearance of any proletarian resistance to the bourgeois regime, at least of all resist­ance organized by the proletariat. From the centrists[2] to the socialists, all are forced to admit that the Blum government will not be a revolutionary government, that it will not touch bourgeois property, that we shouldn't take too seriously the centrist formula: make the rich pay. The program of the Popular Front has the amnesty as its first point, and not the revolution; the cleansing of the admin­istration, the dissolution of the Leagues, and then economic measures, public works to be carr­ied out, like those of de Plan in Belgium, to reabsorb the unemployed. The centrists will be satisfied by the last decisions of the radical party, declaring its participation in the Blum government and demanding a united vote for its election to government. Two good decisions according to L'Humanite which is impressed en­ough to dectare that the Popular Front finally represents the revenge of the Communards over Versailles.

"The whole bourgeois press praises the mod­eration of the socialists and centrists and doesn't take too seriously the claim by the extreme right that the CP is preparing a seizure of power by the soviets in the form of its Popular Front committees. But there is one discordant note in this idyllic atmosphere: the menace of wage conflicts by proletarians fed up of promises of ‘humanization' by the    decree laws. The CGT has gone to great lengths to liquidate the threat of a general strike in the mines of Pas-de-Calais, a threat which could have created dangerous ripples in the period between the two electoral rounds. After the victory of the Popular Front, strike movements developed progressively, going so far as to embrace the whole Paris region recently. A Belgian journalist remarked quite rightly that the movements in France have broken out just like the May ‘36 strikes in Belgium: outside of and against the unions, and are thus ‘wildcat' movements ...

"From May 14 on, the movement reached the Paris region. At Courbevoie, the workers went on strike in the factory and won a 0.25ff in­crease and a collective contract for six months. At Villacoublay, the workers obtained paid holidays, then at Issy-les-Moulineaux, Neuilly, Gennevilliers. Everywhere the movements broke out without any union prompting, spontaneously, and took on the same character: strikes inside the factory.

"On Thursday May 28, at lasts the strike at Renault where 32,000 workers moved into action. On Friday and Saturday, the metal plants of the Seine entered the movement ...

"In L'Humanite and in Populaire a particular effort is made to prove that the Popular Front isn't in these movements for nothing, and above all can affect their focus. It's necessary at all costs to reassure the bourgeoisie, which, as the article of Gallus in L'Intransigeant proves, got quite a scare. Capitalism under­stands perfectly well that it's not a question of a real occupation of factories, but of a workers' struggle using the inside of the factory as a field of battle, and one where the intrusion of the parties of the Popular Front, of the CGT, is less to be feared. In Belgium too the miners' strike of May 1935 took on this character and clearly expressed it in refusing to receive the official delegates of the soc­ialist unions of the POB or the CP in the mines.

"Such movements are symptomatic and full of dangers for capitalism and its agents. The workers sense that their class organizations are dissolved in the Popular Front and that their workplace becomes their specific terrain of action where they are united by their chains of exploitation. In such circumstances, one false maneuver of capitalism can lead to clashes and shocks which could open the eyes of the workers and distance them from the Pop­ular Front. But Sarraut once again understands the situation. He leaves things as they are. No mobile guards, no brutal expulsion of workers from the factories. Negotiate, and leave the socialists and centrists a free hand.

"May 30, Cachin tries to link these class movements in opposition to the Popular Front to the latter. He writes: "The tricolor fraternizes over the factory with the red flag. The workers are unanimous in supporting the general demands: Croix de Feu, white Russians, foreigners, socialists, communists are all fraternally united for the defense of bread and respect for the law." But Populaire of the same day isn't completely in agreement with this appreciation, since after having called the return to work at Renault a victory, it writes: "This is the end. It's victory. Only at the Seguin some fanatics - there are sincere ones among them, but also provocateurs of the Croix de Feu - seem to doubt it." It's probable that the "victory at Renault hasn't been approved by numerous workers who don't want to partake of the ‘spirit of conciliation of which Frachon speaks in L'Humanite and who very often returned to work ‘with only part of what they fought for'". These will be the ‘provocateurs', the ‘Croix de Feu'.

"These gentlemen of the Popular Front have demonstrated not only to the bourgeoisie but also to the workers themselves, that no rev­olutionary events are taking place. Here, ‘a revolutionary occupation', writes Populaire, ‘goes on. Everywhere: joy, order, discipline.' And they show photos of workers dancing in the factory yards; talk about pleasure parties: ‘the workers go swimming, play games, or flirt'" (Bilan No 37, May-June 1936).

From sabotage to direct pitiless repression

Thus, before and during its reign, the Popular Front never made a workers' front against capitalism, but the front of the bourgeoisie against the working class. It's as such that it signs its counter-revolutionary work with the blood of the Parisian workers. That's what the repression of spring 1937 shows us.

"The ‘free, strong and happy' France assassinates the proletarians"

"The whistle of bullets has torn the mask of the Popular Front. The workers' bodies explain the ‘pause' of the Blum government. In the streets of Clichy the program of the Popular Front has been expressed through the salvoes of the mobile guards, and nothing could have better illustrated it.

"Ah! the defenders of republican order, the hangmen of bourgeois democracy can cry in jubilation. The mutiny has been broken and the old traditional cry "order reigns in Warsaw" echoes once again with the Cossacks of Max Dormoy.

"But workers' blood hasn't stained the streets of Paris for nothing, this Paris ready to commemorate the Communards of 1871. From now on, the Union Sacree has acquired a bloody significance and the workers can draw from this tragic experience a precious class lesson. Notably that there cannot be a ‘reconciliation of the French' through the voluntary capitulation of the workers' move­ment. The mobile guard will beat hand to impose it with bullets. That bourgeois democracy, the ‘free, strong and happy France' and the famous slogans of the ‘Popular Front', ‘bread, peace and liberty' really signify: the jurisdiction over the workers' demands, the falsehood of national defense, and bullets of the mobile guard for proletarian demonstrat­ions which go beyond the framework traced by the social-centrists ...

"That's what the workers have learnt with the Popular Front, and the song begins to get worn out. Why didn't Blum put a stop to this fascist danger he says is imminent? Why does he take back from the workers all they have gained with their strike movements? Why does he treat them as ‘provocateurs', going over to the attack despite arbitration? Blum makes his ‘pause' solely so the workers can be compelled to continue to make sacrifices.

"All of this has created a state of irrit­ation among the workers which expresses itself particularly in the Paris region where the reformist-centrist top brass are cornered in the union assemblies. Already, in the face of this state of tension, it was decided to organize two demonstrations in the Paris area: one for the unemployed and the other for the workers. Finally, in the metal sector, they were confronted with workers' demands for a general strike to protest against the decisions of the deciding umpire.

"It's in this tense situation that the social-centrists gave the last touch of anti-fascism in order to keep the workers on the path of the Union Sacree, ‘voluntarily' agreed to by the workers. The counter-demonstration at Clichy was to be imposing: La Roque could be shown that ‘the French nation' lives and fights for the bourgeois democracy of which Messers Daladier-Herriot are authentic representatives. The bourge­oisie too prepared itself, since, knowing the situation among the workers, it suspected somehow that the social-centrist bosses might be swamped by their troops. The mobile guards were seriously armed, as if to go to war. Among the leaders of the repressive forces there was a conviction that Blum's ‘pause' was also the pause of the workers' movement. The directive was therefore to ferociously repress the latter and the necessary ambiance was certainly stirred up among the mobile guards. There was not and couldn't have been any contradiction between the ‘fascist' police chiefs and the Popular Front government. The latter talked of the ‘pause' in explaining this necessity to the workers, whereas the former did no more than apply it with their stupid cop mentality, brutally carrying out instructions without caring about the consequences ...

"Two forces collided at Clichy: the prol­etariat and the bourgeoisie. The workers concentrated in masses for anti-fascist goals discovered in their numbers the exalting force to impose their anger and express the tension implanted in their flesh as eternally duped proletarians: the bourgeoisie went over to repression where the Popular Front could no longer maintain the workers on the front of the interests of capital ...

"Nothing can change the battle of Clichy. Like nothing can change the massacres in Tunisia and those carried out in recent times in Algeria, in Indochina. It's the Popular Front, which in wanting to stay in power during the ‘pause' went over to massacre the proletarians of the metropole and the colonies, where the accumulation of set-backs imposed upon the workers by Blum pushed towards more and more violent battles. The demagogic program of the Popular Front arrived at the end of the line, and the new program passes away via the massacre of the workers. And where else would one search for ‘provocateurs' than in a situation created by workers?

"The truth comes out with a clarity above and beyond any commentary: the workers going on strike come up against the capitalist state, and with it the Popular Front which opens fire. The social-centrists, conscious of this situation (which could prompt the bourgeoisie to employ material other than Blum to maintain its domination) tried to organize a vulgar anti-fascist demonstration. That's why it was to be strictly limited time-wise (until midday); it should be noted that the point was not to take up the calls for a general strike to defend the workers' demands (communiqué of the CGT and the Parisian union syndicate).

"And finally, the point was not to fight against the Popular Front government but to consolidate it" (Bilan No 40, April-May 1937). PRENAT

Glossary

Popular Front: electoral, then governmental coalition-(1936-37) regrouping the Socialist Party (SFIO) the Radical Party (or ‘Radicals') and the French Communist Party.

Croix de Feu: war veteran organization of the extreme right. Founded in 1927, it was dissolved in 1936.

Some political figures

Duclos, Cachin: French CP leaders.

Thorez: Secretary-general of the CP.

Daladier: leader of the Radical Party.

Blum: leader of the socialist party, SFIO, heading the coalition government of the Popular Front.

Herriot: President of the chamber of deputies from 1936-1940, leader of the Radical Socialist Party.

La Roque: leader of the Croix de Feu.

Newspapers

L'Intransigeant: the standard right-wing paper.

L'HumaAite: daily organ of the CP.

Le Populaire: journal of the Popular Front.

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[1] A brief glossary giving the principal parties and movements, politicians, papers, etc, is to be found at the end of this article.

[2] The communist left and Bilan considered the Stalinists and the communist parties affiliated to the International to be ‘centrist'. On ‘centrism and opportunism', see the International Review No 44.

Since its formation, this organization, made up of former members of the ICC, has engaged in a campaign of calumnies against our Current. In our International Review 45 we refuted some of these lies (to have refuted them all would have taken far too much time and would have meant filling up the entire issue to the detriment of much more important questions). Among these lies, there was one which really went beyond all limits: that the ICC excluded these comrades, when it was they who voluntarily left the organization despite our insistence on the irrespon­sibility of such a course. In no. 3 of Internationalist Perspective, the organ of the EFICC, there is an article which proposes to explain the reasons "why we (the comrades of the minority) had to leave the organization". Although the article is a tissue of ridiculous little lies and stupid corridor gossip, at no point does it talks about an exclusion (which would after all have been a good explanation for their departure). Furthermore, the next article, ‘Why Do We Call Ourselves a Fraction' attempts to explain with so-called ‘theoretical' and ‘historical' arguments why the minority had to leave the ICC. It would be a waste of time going once again over these calumnies and the specious arguments that accompany them.

Nevertheless, we take note of the EFICC's rectification of its previous assertions about being excluded. We encourage them to go further in this direction and in their ensuing issues withdraw all the other lies which up to now they've been circulating about the ICC.

The formidable class combats that shook Belgium last April/May - the most important since Poland 1980, and since the end of the ‘60s in western Europe - have revealed the poverty of the bourgeois speeches about the "working class' realism in the face of the crisis", its "understanding of the need to make sacrifices" and other such nonsense aimed at demoralizing the workers, at preventing them from seeing the force that they represent when they struggle and unite against capitalism. These combats have highlighted the fact that the bourgeoisie's hands are not free to deal out the brutal blows against the working class that the increasing collapse of its economy demands. And this is true not only in Belgium, but throughout the countries of Western Europe, which are already, or soon will be, in the same situation. But there is more to this movement. Just as the struggles in the state sector in September 1983 - in Belgium once again - gave the signal for a powerful renewal of the workers' struggle in the major capitalist metropoles after the retreat that had followed the proletar­iat's defeat in Poland 1981, so the combats of spring ‘86 are the proof that the struggle of the world proletariat has entered a new phase in its development. Whereas in 1985, the bourgeoisie in the central countries succeeded .in splitting up the signs combativity, and succeeded in dispersing the workers' fight-back by keeping its attacks separate in both time and space, the workers' struggles in Belgium have highlighted the limits of this kind of policy. The imminence of a new recession, far deeper than that of 1982-83 (see the article ‘The Dead End' in this issue), is increasingly forcing the bourgeoisie to give up its dispersed attacks in favor of massive, head-on ones. As in Belgium in April/May 1986, the workers' struggles against these attacks will more and more tend to be massive and unified across branch and regional divisions.

This is the crux of the article ‘From Dispersal, Towards Unification' in the previous issue of the Review, and of the resolution adopted by our organization in June 1986, which we are publish­ing in this issue. Since the resolution was adopted, events have clearly confirmed its analysis. Whereas the holiday break discouraged the development of widespread movements on the part of the working class, the bourgeoisie on the contrary seized the opportunity to unleash anti-working class attacks of unprecedented brutality. As we shall see ...

Unprecedented attacks

During the summer, the most spectacular blows have been dealt in Holland - a country famed for its high living standards and social ‘pro­tection'. A few months after its Belgian neighbor, the Dutch bourgeoisie announced attacks comparable in every way to those that, in Belgium, had provoked the massive movements in the spring. No sooner had it come into office on July 14th, than the centre-right government that emerged from the May elections announced the need to reduce drastically the budget for 1987: 12 billion florins were to be saved (the equivalent of $360 per person!). The government declared that 1987 would be "tough", but that things would improve afterwards, and that in 1990, wages would return to the level of 1986. We know what this kind of promise is worth. In the mean­ time, the planned measures need no comment:

-- disappearance of 40,000 out of a total of170,000 jobs in the state sector, and of more than 100,000 jobs among regional and council employees;

-- setting up a ‘self-contribution' scheme for health care (eg: payment for the first day of a stay in hospital);

-- a 5%Q increase in social security contributions which corresponds to a 2% fall in wages;

-- reduction by 25% of the sum made available for council housing (which hits above all the unemployed and the poorest workers);

-- reduction of the number of state-built houses from 41,000 to 30,000 a year (in a country which suffers from a permanent housing crisis): these last two measures will lead to the loss of 30,000 jobs in the building industry;

-- massive reduction in unemployment benefit to 60% of wages (whereas previously it stood at 85%, during the first six months, 70% for the next 18, then 60%);

-- in the private sector, limitation of wage in  creases to 1.3%, with inflation at 2.3% for 1985, and rising;

-- again in the private sector, reduction of the working week to 37,5 hours, without compensation.

All in all, these measures mean a 10% fall in wages for the working class, and a 15% increase in the number of unemployed. As in Belgium, every sector of the working class (the private and state sectors, as well as the unemployed), and every element of working class income (whether it be direct or ‘social' wages) is coming under heavy attack.

Although to a less spectacular degree, the same kind of measures has hit workers in many other countries over the last few months:

-- job cuts amongst state employees in Spain and France (30,000 for 1987 in the latter country);

-- massive job cuts or redundancies in state- owned companies (50,000 in Spain's INI, 20,000 at Renault and 9,000 on the railways in France);

-- continued and intensified lay-offs and factory closures in the ‘lame duck' sectors like steel (job cuts Of 10,000 in west Germany, 5,000 in Spain, 3,000 in France, the shutdown of USX steelworks in 7 states of the US), shipbuilding (again, 10,000 job losses in Germany, 5,000 in Spain, and the closure of 3 Normed shipyards in France with 6,000 lay-offs as a result), or coal mining (example, 8,000 lay-offs in the German Ruhr.);

-- wage freezes or cuts (state employees' wages and old age pensions frozen in France, widespread wage cuts in the US, etc, );

-- rising social security contributions (0.7% tax surcharge for pension contributions, plus a 0.4% ‘exceptional' tax on all wages in France, similar measures in Spain, etc);

-- dismantling of ‘social insurance' (new reduction in the list of medicines paid for by the health service and suppression of the 100% repayment of health expenses by cooperative health schemes in France, similar but far more brutal measures in most US companies);

-- reductions in unemployment benefit (eg: elimination of special food, clothing and housing benefits in Britain).

This list could be lengthened much further without fully accounting for the terrible attack the working class is undergoing today in every country in the world. And although such attacks may make it possible for each national ruling class to escape suffocation at the hands of its competitors in the trade war that all are en­gaged in, in no way can they prevent the overall collapse of the world economy; they will inevitably be followed by further, still more brutal, massive and head-on attacks. The worst is yet to come.

The class struggle

Announced, for the most part, during the summer holiday period, these anti-working class measures have not yet provoked any significant response in the large industrial concentrations of Western Europe. This impression, however, is deceptive: everywhere, workers discontent is explosive, all the more so because these blows have been dealt in such an underhand way, behind the workers' backs, at a time when they could not defend themselves. The bourgeoisie moreover, is well aware of the situation: everywhere, it has entrusted its unions and left parties to            prepare the ground. The same phenomenon can be seen in every country: the unions are adopting a more and more ‘radical', or even ‘extremist' language. The Swedish union L0, for example, despite being controlled by the social democrat­ic party at present in power, has adopted an unprecedented tone of ‘combativity' and ‘intransigence'. The French CGT, controlled by the CP, has adopted a language and behavior that it would have denounced as ‘leftist' and ‘irrespons­ible' only a short time ago. It declares loudly that "struggle pays"; it calls for a "massive and unified counter-attack everywhere" against   the government's "heavy blows"; it denounces vigorously the policies of the previous govern­ment (which it had nonetheless supported for 3 years); it is not afraid of organizing actions            that are illegal (eg: blocking railway lines or   motorways, or violent confrontations with the police) . If the trade unions are everywhere adopting a ‘tougher' line, it is for one very simple reason: they must keep one step ahead of the movements that are brewing, to be able to        sabotage and divide them.

But whereas in Western Europe it is essentially through the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie that we can gauge the class' potential for struggle, in the US - the world's major power - the workers themselves have proven their combativity and their developing consciousness of the need for unity. In a country subjected to a deafening            propaganda on the economic ‘success' of liberal ‘Reagonomics' and the ‘recovery', there have been no holidays for the class struggle:

-- in the telephone industry, 155,000 AT&T workers were out on strike for 26 days during June; 66,000 workers from other companies came out during August;

-- in the steel industry, LTV (the USA's second largest producer) was strike-bound in July; 22,000 USX workers were on strike on July 1st for the first time since 1959;

-- several other movements broke out or contin­ued, in the airlines, the paper industry (7,500 workers), the food industry (the Hormel meat packing plant in Minnesota and the Watsonville canning factories in California); .

-- in the state sectors, 32,000 municipal workers struck in Detroit and Philadelphia (two of the biggest industrial metropoles in the East) during July/August, in particular the transport and health workers, and the dustmen.

In these last two strikes, acts of solidarity were frequent among the workers, and to some extent defused the maneuvers of div­ision conducted together by management and unions (separate agreements being signed for each category of workers). And whereas in Philadelphia the workers' combativity and solidarity was finally defeated by lay-off threats from the law-courts after a three week strike, in Detroit they were strong enough to prevent the ruling class from resorting to such measures, and to force it to abandon one of its main objectives: making wage rises dependent on the municipality's ‘financial health' for three years to come.

In a country where the bourgeoisie has always been renowned for the cynicism and brutality of its attitude towards the working class (eg: the sacking of 12,000 air traffic controllers in August ‘81), this retreat before the Detroit strikers is a new illustration of the resolution published below:

"(The struggle) ‘pays', and ... it ‘pays' all the more when it is widespread, united, and fought with solidarity ... the stronger the working class that the bourgeoisie confronts, the more it will be obliged to dampen and put off the attacks that it intends to carry out."[1]

These workers' struggles in the US, and the extreme tension prevailing in western Europe, demonstrate that this is no time for the whining about ‘the passivity of the working class', or it being ‘under the control of the trade unions' that so many revolutionary groups still like to indulge in. In the near future, the working class is going to engage in combats of great importance, where revolutionaries will be confronted with their responsibilities: either they will take part in these combats in order to push them forward, which presupposes that they are aware of what is at stake and of the role that they must play, or else they will be mercilessly swept aside by history.

FM September 7, I986

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[1] This is not contradicted by the fact that, after a brief retreat in the face of the spring strikes, the Belgian government has finally decided to apply all the proposed budget cuts. This only shows: the skill of the bourgeoisie, whose government announced the measures just before the holidays, so as to confirm them once the workers had demobilized; the continued ability of the unions to sabotage the workers' struggles, and therefore the necessity for the workers not merely to insult them as they did in Belgium, but to confront them, not to leave them the initiative, constantly pushing forward the search for unity, and in so doing to take their struggle in their own hands and to organize it themselves.

1) The resolution on the international situat­ion from the 6th Congress of the ICC in November ‘85 was placed under the heading of the denunci­ation of a whole series of lies put forward by the bourgeoisie in order to mask what's really at stake in the present period:

-- "the myth of an amelioration in the situat­ion of world capitalism, incarnated in the ‘success' of the American recovery in ‘83 and ‘84";

-- "making people believe that there is an attenuation of imperialist tensions: Reagan's speeches in ‘84 were presented as being more moderate, ‘holding out a hand' to negotiations with the USSR, and this had its equivalent in the line of diplomatic seduction being pushed by the newcomer Gorbachev";

-- campaigns to spread the idea "that the proletariat isn't struggling, that it has given up defending its class interests, that it is no longer an actor on the international political stage" (International Review 44).

If at the time these lies were based on a semblance of reality, eight months later this same reality has openly refuted all the previous campaigns, confirming once again that the ‘80s are indeed years in which the historic bankruptcy of capitalism, its barbaric and decadent nature, are being revealed in all their nakedness, and in which the real stakes of the period we're living through are being made more and more clear.                                                          

Moreover, the speeds with which events have shattered the lies of ‘85 illustrate another fundamental characteristic of these years of truth: the growing acceleration of history.

Thus the present resolution does not seek to repeat the work of the previous one in demolishing the whole inanity of what the bourgeoisie is say­ing. It seeks to use the November resolution as a point of support, to complement it by showing that the last 8 months have confirmed its orient­ations, by underlining this acceleration of history, and also to draw out the main lessons of the experience of the working class in the recent period.

The acceleration of economic collapse

2) The resolution of the 6th ICC Congress pointed to the limits of the US ‘recovery' and of America's capacity to act as a ‘locomotive' for the economies of the other countries in its bloc:

" ... it was mainly the phenomenal indebtedness of the third world in the second half of the ‘70s which allowed the industrial powers to temporarily boost their sales and relaunch production:               

-- after 1982, it was the even more major debts of the USA, both external...and internal...which allowed that country to reach record growth rates in ‘84, just as it was, its enormous commercial deficits which momentarily benefitted the exports of a few other countries (such as West Germany) and thus the production levels...                          

In the final analysis, just as the astronomical indebtedness of the third world countries could only result In a catastrophic rebound shock, in the form of unprecedented austerity and recession, the even more considerable indebtedness of the American economy can only lead, under the threat of an explosion of its financial system....to a new recession both of this economy and the other econ­omies whose external markets will be subject to a severe shrinkage." (ibid)

The evolution of the situation in recent months constitutes a concrete illustration of these limits:

-- the US federal budget deficit, which made it possible to create an artificial demand for US enterprises ($380 billion in ‘83 and ‘84) will simply have to be reduced (Congress has even adopted legislation in order to underline the urgency of and for this measure);

-- even more important, the 30% fall in the dollar over a few months (a fall deliberately organized by the authorities) means that the US is determined to reduce drastically its now astronomic trade deficit (which has put it at the head of the most indebted countries in the world) and thus to reconquer both its internal and external markets.

This latter fact thus signifies an intensification of the trade war against the competitors of the US (which are also its allies) - Japan and Western Europe. The latter will see their own markets collapsing, without this bringing new health to the US economy because it will mean a general restriction of the world market. Similarly, this fair in the dollar means that these countries will get their debts repaid at a rate 30% less than their initial value.

3) Similarly, the fall in the dollar in no way implies a respite for the countries of the third world. If on the one hand their 1000 billion dollar debt (most often to be paid in dollars) will be partially reduced, the revenue from their exports which is used to reimburse this debt will be amputated even more, since it's also expressed in dollars. Furthermore, their situat­ion can only be aggravated by the often consider­able fall in the price of raw materials which, under the pressure of generalized overproduction, characterizes the present period, since raw materials are generally their main if not their exclusive export. This situation is particularly spectacular and dramatic with regard to the most crucial of all raw materials, oil (the collapsing price of which shows that the price rises of ‘73 and ‘79 were based solely on speculation and not on any kind of ‘shortage'). Countries like Mexico and Venezuela, already incapable of coping with their phenomenal debts when they were selling oil at $30 a barrel, will be plunged into total bankruptcy by the $15 barrel. Thus there will be an intensification of the hellish and permanent barbarism which reigns in the third world, which the November ‘85 resolution presented as one of the most eloquent indices of the downfall of the world economy.

Again, the countries of the Russian bloc beginning with the USSR itself whose main export is raw materials just like the under-developed countries, will also see the deterioration of an already deplorable economic situation, and will once again have to give up the hope of buying          from the west the modern industrial equipment they so sorely lack (which will in turn reduce the outlets of their western suppliers).                                 

4) As regards Western Europe whose grave economic situation was underlined by the November resolution, the fall in the price of raw materials, notably oil, will not bring any hope of improvement. Contrary to the smug declarations which present these price reductions (in conjunction with the fall of the dollar) as a ‘shot of oxygen' because of the cuts in inflation and trade deficits they are supposed to bring about, what really lies in store is a further worsening of the whole situation. One the one hand, countries like Britain,           Norway or Holland are direct victims of the fall            in oil prices (and of natural gas whose price is linked to that of oil). On the other hand, and above all, all the western European countries who export an important part of their production to the third world countries and in particular the oil producing countries, will increasingly see the markets in these countries closing down as the latter's' financial resources run dry. Rather than ‘oxygen', what's really contained in the fall in price of raw materials and of oil is a dose of poison gas. What's more, behind the facade of euphoria, the bourgeoisie of the western European countries is aware that there is an extremely bleak economic prospect opened up by the joint effect of the growing closure of the US market (because of the fall of the dollar and the protectionist measures taken by the Americans), the anemia in the COMECON market and the running out of the ‘fabulous' contracts with the OPEC countries. The official - thus under-estimated - figures already indicate that 11% of the labor force cannot be employed. It's precisely because it doesn't have any illusions that in all the western European countries the bourgeoisie is pushing through brutal austerity measures (like the ones taken by the Martens government in Belgium), in order to preserve as best it can its already weak competivity in the face of the terrible economic war which is going to be unleashed by the       recession now gathering pace.

In these vital centers of capitalism, which contain the biggest and oldest concentrations of industry, and thus of workers, the only short-term perspective is therefore a new and considerable deterioration of the economic situation with all the terrible attacks on the working class this implies. This deterioration cannot fail to have its repercussions on countries which hitherto have been in a stronger position, such as the USA and Japan.

The intensification of imperialist conflicts

5) As the ICC, along with all the marxists, has always stressed (and this was repeated in the November ‘85 resolution), the collapse of the economic infrastructure of capitalist society can only lead to a headlong flight towards generalized imperialist conflict. Hardly six months after the great ‘show' of the Geneva summit, the embraces of the Reagan and Gorbachev duet have been completely forgotten (as the November resolution said they would). Just as quickly as he abandoned it during his electoral campaign, Reagan has returned to his diatribes against the ‘evil empire', denouncing with renewed vigor Russia's ‘violation of human rights' and its ‘war-like intentions'. Forgotten also are his hypocritical proposals about arms reductions, as can be seen most recently by the abandonment of SALT 2 by the White House. Here is a striking confirmation of the offensive of the US bloc with its aim of "completing the encirclement of the USSR, of depriving this country of all the positions it has been able to maintain outside its direct area of domination" (ibid). At this level, a particularly significant expression of the general acceleration of history brought about by the economic disintegration of capitalism was the US bombardment of two major cities in Libya as well as the main military bases of this country. This was a new illustration of the fact that "one of the main characteristics of this offensive is the western bloc's more and more massive use of its military power" (ibid).

6) While the American raid of April ‘86 was not directly aimed against the USSR or one of its strategic positions, in that Libya has never been part of the eastern bloc, behind this spectacular action is the global offensive against the Russian bloc. The aim of the raid was:

-- to confirm forcefully and unambiguously that the from now on the Mediterranean is an American ‘mare nostrum' (on the eve of the raids, Russia prudently removed its ships from the Libyan coast, which clearly indicates that it has given up contesting the USA's total hegemony in this region);

-- to serve as a warning to all countries (and not only Libya) who, without belonging to the eastern bloc, show too much independence or an insufficient degree of subordination vis a vis the USA.

In particular, it was a sign to Syria that it had to get on more effectively with implementing the deal drawn up with it in exchange for the removal of the western task force from Lebanon in 1984 - a deal stipulating that Syria, along with Israel, should act as a ‘gendarme' in the Lebanon, notably by disciplining the pro-Iranian factions. But above all the message carried by the F-111s was once again for Iran. The reinsertion of Iran into the US bloc constitutes the main objective of the present stage of the western offensive. And indeed it seems that the message got through: its recent diplomatic rapprochement with France (which made a gesture by pushing dissident Iranian leader M. Radjavi out of the country, while still maintaining full military support for Iraq), indicates that the Tehran regime is beginning to understand where its interests lie.

However, the function of the American raid wasn't limited to the question of imperialist strategy. With all the media noise that accompanied it, notably around the ‘denunciation of terrorism', this operation was also a contribution to all the ideological campaigns aimed at diverting the work­ing class from the struggles which it is obliged to launch in response to the intensification of the attacks on its living standards.

Because, for the bourgeoisie of all countries, more important than the problem of commercial antagonisms between nations, more important than the imperialist confrontations between the blocs, is the problem posed to it by the huge stores of combativity, which exist in the proletariat, notably in the central countries of capitalism, and which constitute the key to the present world situation, the determining element in the current historic course.

The acceleration of the class struggle       

7) If there is one sphere where the acceleration of history is being expressed in a particularly lucid way it's that of the development of the working class struggle. This "is expressed in particular by the fact that the moments of retreat in the struggle (as in 8I-82) are getting shorter and shorter, whereas the culminating point of each wave of combats is situated at a higher level than the previous one" (6th Congress resolution point 15). Similarly, within each of these waves, inevitable "moments of respite, of maturation, of reflection" (ibid, point 11) are themselves more and more short-lived. Thus the whole recent campaign about the ‘passivity' of the working class, based on an apparent drop in combativity in 1985, has come to grief against the formidable movements which took place in April and May in Belgium. These struggles, which followed widespread movements in Scandinavia and particularly Norway (and, given the low level of workers' struggles in this region in the past, this indicates the depth of the present wave of struggles), constitute a striking confirmation of what was said in the 6th Congress resolution, (point 11):

"...the present moments of respite...which the class may go through are limited in time and space; and although the bourgeoisie does everything it can to turn the workers' efforts of reflection into a wait-and-see, passive attitude, the situation remains characterized by an accumulation of discontent and of potential combativity which can explode at any moment."

But what the movement in Belgium expresses especially is the limitation of the bourgeois policy which, in 1985, allowed it not to extinguish the workers' combativity, but to disperse its manifestations into a series of isolated struggles carried out by a more limited number of workers than in the first phase (‘83-‘84) of the third wave of struggles since the historic resurgence of 1968, which began with the massive public sector strikes in Belgium in September ‘83.

8) This policy of dispersal was based essentially on the dispersal of the economic attacks themselves, on a careful planning which staggered the attacks in time and space. This was made possible by the slight margin of maneuver granted by the effects of the American ‘recovery' of ‘83-84, but this also posed the objective limits of the policy since this respite of the capitalist economy could only be short-lived. What's more, this policy contained a number of other limitations:

-- to the extent that, in the most advanced countries, a considerable part of the price of labor power is made up of all sorts of social benefits (social security, family allowance, etc), any reduction of this part of the wage could only be done in a global manner, to the detriment of all workers and not of those in this or that sector;

-- in these same countries, an enormous proportion of workers (often the majority) depend on a single ‘boss', the state, either because they work in the public sector, or because they are unemployed and need state subsidies for their very survival. Thus the field of application of this policy is limited essentially to a particular sector of the class, those who work in the private sector (which explains to a large extent the efforts of many governments to ‘reprivatize' the economy as much as possible).

What has just happened in Belgium confirms that all these limits are beginning to be reached, that the bourgeoisie is now obliged to mount its attacks in an increasingly massive and above all frontal manner, that the main tendency in the struggle isn't dispersal but the overcoming of wave this dispersal. This is particularly clear when you consider that the measures which provoked this terrific response from the class:

-- were forced on the bourgeoisie by the almost total absence of any economic margin of maneuver, by the urgent need to adapt the economy to the perspective of an unprecedented intensification of the trade war that the coming recession is going to bring about. It is no longer possible for the attacks to be staggered or put off;

-- concern all sectors of the working class (private, public, unemployed) and threaten all elements of workers' wages (the nominal as well as the social wage).

It's even more clear when you see that practically all sectors of the working class participated massively in the movement, not just in a simultaneous way, but with increasingly determined attempts to seek solidarity from other sectors, to unify the struggles.

9) Just as the strike in the public sector in Belgium in ‘83 announced the entry of the world working class, and particularly the workers of western Europe, into the first phase of the third wave of struggles, the phase marked by massive movements and a high degree of international simultaneity, the recent strikes in this same country announce the beginning of a third phase in this wave; after the second phase marked by the dispersal of the struggles, this new phase is going to exhibit more and more tendencies towards the unification of struggles. The fact that in both cases it's the working class of the same country which has been in the front line is not without signifi­cance. Despite the small size of the country, Belgium is a resume of the fundamental characteristics of all the countries in Western Europe;

-- a developed national economy in a catastrophic situation, and one which is extremely dependent on the world market (70% of production is for export);

-- a very high level of unemployment;

-- very strong industrial concentrations in a limited area;

-- old established bourgeoisie and proletariat;

-- a long experience of confrontation between the two classes.

Because of this, the battles which have just taken place in this country can't be seen as a flash in the pan, an event with no European or world-wide significance. On the contrary they augur what awaits the other countries of Western Europe, and more generally the main advanced countries, in the period ahead. This applies particularly to the main characteristics of the coming struggles, most of which have been identifiable since the beginning of the third wave;

"-- a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneous­ly in one country, thus posing the basis for the geographic extension of the struggle;

-- a tendency towards the outbreak of spont­aneous movements showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions ...

-- a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists." (6th Congress Resolution, Point 10).

-- the search for active solidarity and for unification across the boundaries of factory, category and region, in the form of street demonstrations and in particular of massive delegations from one workers' centre to another, a movement which takes place through a growing confrontation with all the obstacles erected by trade unionism, and during the course of which, "the necessity for self-organization is being imposed more and more on the workers in the great capitalist metropoles, notably in western Europe." (ibid, point 13).

10) This necessity for and tendency towards the active search for unification, going beyond the simple extension of struggles, constitutes the major trait of the third phase of the third wave of struggles. This trait (which hadn't yet been indentified at the 6th ICC Congress at the beginning of November ‘85) derives from the bourg­eois policy of dispersing struggles based on the dispersal of its economic attacks (an element noted at the beginning of ‘86 in the editorial of International Review 45).

By the very fact that it is following a bourgeois offensive which aimed to break the élan of the third wave of struggles, and that it expresses the attempt to overcome the difficulties posed by this offensive, this trait introduces into the third wave of struggles a general dimension of the highest importance, comparable in significance to the other characteristic of this wave which we identified from the beginning: "the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the future world-wide generalization of struggles." (IR 37, first quarter of ‘84). However, though of compar­able importance, these two characteristics don't have the same significance from the standpoint of the concrete development of workers' struggles and the intervention of revolutionaries within them. International simultaneity, despite its historical dimension as the prefiguration of the generalization of the future, is today much more an objective fact deriving from the simultaneity of the bourgeoisie's attacks in all countries than a deliberate approach taken in hand in a conscious manner by the workers; this is notably due to the systematic policy of the black-out carried on by the bourgeoisie. By contrast, the tendency towards the unification of struggles, while having a historic significance as a step towards the mass strike and thus towards the revolution, also constitutes an immediate element within the present proletarian combats, an element which of necessity the workers have to take up in a conscious way. In this sense, if the international simultaneity of struggles poses the bases, the historic framework for their future world-wide generalization, in so far as this generalization can only be a concrete act, the concrete road that leads to it necessarily passes through the tendencies towards unification. This is why in their intervention revolutionaries must stress the whole importance of this push towards unification. And this is all the more so because it's in this process that the class will be forced to develop its self-organization through repeated confrontations with the union obstacle.

11) One of the components of this movement towards self-organization, and one which has already manifested itself in recent struggles, was expressed very clearly in the combats in Belgium: the tendency towards the spontaneous upsurge of struggles, outside any union directives, a tendency which we pointed to at the very beginning of the third wave. The following points should be made about this tendency:

1. It is an aspect of one of the general characteristics of the class struggle in the period of decadence, one identified long ago by revolutionaries: "The kind of struggles that take place in the period of decadence can't be prepared in advance on the organizational level. Struggles explode spontaneously and tend to generalize...These are the characteristics which prefigure the revolutionary confrontation." (‘The Proletarian Struggle in Decadent Capitalism', IR 23).

2. However, spontaneous movements don't necess­arily express a higher level of consciousness than movements which are called by the unions:

-- on the one hand, many struggles which begin spontaneously are easily taken over by the unions;

-- on the other hand, the systematic occupation of the social terrain by the left in opposition often leads the unions to put themselves in the forefront of movements which have a strong potential for the development of class consciousness;

-- finally, in certain historical circumstances, notably when the left is in government, as was frequently the case in the ‘60s and ‘70s, spont­aneous or even wildcat strikes may be no more than a simple translation into practice of the unions' overt opposition to any struggle, without this expressing a high level of consciousness in the class.

3. However, the fact that the tendency towards the multiplication of spontaneous struggles is devel­oping when the bourgeoisie has placed its left forces in opposition, when these forces have been radicalizing their language to a very marked degree, gives the spontaneous struggles of today a very different significance to that of the struggles mentioned above. It reveals in particular a growing discred­iting of the unions in the eyes of the workers. This discredit, resulting from the maneuvers in which the unions present themselves as the ‘vanguard' of the struggles, even if it doesn't automatically result in a development of conscious­ness about the real nature of the unions and the necessity for self-organization, does create the conditions for such a development.

4. One of the major causes of this tendency towards spontaneous struggles resides in the accumulation of an enormous discontent which often explodes in an unexpected manner. But here again, one of the reasons for this accumulation of dis­content is that the discrediting of the unions prevents them from organizing ‘actions' whose aim is to serve as a safety valve for the workers' anger.

Thus, by expressing an overall maturation of combativity and consciousness, notably at the level of a growing understanding of the role of trade unionism and of the necessity to struggle, the present development of spontaneous movements is fully inscribed in the historic process which leads to revolutionary confrontations.

12) This discrediting of the unions, the growth of which is a condition - not sufficient, but certainly indispensable - for the develop­ment of consciousness in the class, is going to broaden to a significant degree in the present phase of class struggle. The central contribution the unions and the left have made over many years to the bourgeoisie's policy of dividing the class, of derailing and exhausting its struggles, already explains the considerable distrust the workers have right now in the unions. The beginning of the third wave of struggles already expressed a certain wearing out of the left in opposition after this card, put into use after 1978-79, had been largely responsible for the premature grinding down of the second wave and the disarray which accomp­anied the defeat in Poland in ‘81. But the period in which the bourgeoisie was able to disperse its attacks made it possible, in most countries, to avoid a too obvious deployment of the left and the unions. During this period it was the right and the private bosses who were in the front line of the strategy of dividing workers' struggles, in that this strategy was based above all not on the maneuvers of the left but on the way the direct attacks were themselves carried out. The unions' job was merely to accentuate the dispersed character of the struggles which derived from the very nature of the attacks they were responding to.            

However as soon as it's narrowing margin for economic maneuver compels the bourgeoisie to give up its dispersed approach and attack in a frontal manner, it can only carry on its policy of dividing the workers (a policy it will contin­ue until the revolution) through the left and the unions. But this more open contribution to the bourgeois strategy of division can only result in further unmasking of the unions' real function. The numerous maneuvers undertaken by the unions in the recent struggles in Belgium (notably the cutting up of days of action sector by sector), their efforts to cut into pieces the workers' response to the government's measures, the clear development of consciousness among the workers about the divisive role of the unions, constitute a first concretization of this general tendency towards the discrediting of the left and the unions, which is a feature of the present phase of the development of the class struggle.    

13) The workers' growing distrust in the left and the unions is, as we've seen, rich in potential for massive outbreaks of proletarian struggle, for the development of the workers' self-organization and class consciousness. In particular, the coming period will see clear tendencies towards the formation within the class of more or less formal groupings of workers seeking to counteract the paralyzing influences of unionism and reflecting on the more general perspectives of the struggle.

It is for this reason that the bourgeoisie will more and more put forward the weapon of ‘rank and file' or ‘militant' unionism - as was shown in the strugg­les in Belgium recently - trying, with its ‘radical' language, to lead back into the union prison (whether the existing trade unions or trade unionism as such) those workers who have been trying to break out of it. In this situation it's important to be able to distinguish what expresses the vitality of the class (the appearance of groups or committees of combative workers engaged in a process of break­ing with the left and the unions) from the bourge­oisie's attempts to bloc this process (the development of rank and file unionism). This is all the more true in that at the beginning of such a process the elements of the class who have embarked upon it may adopt positions which appear to be less advanced than those of the leftists and rank and file unionists who specialize in ‘radical' phraseology. Thus it is up to revolution­aries not to have a static view of these two kinds of phenomena which appear during the course of struggles but to consider, on the basis of an atten­tive study, the dynamic of each particular phenomen­on in order to be able both to combat with the great­est vigor every ‘radical' maneuver of the bourgeois­ie but also to encourage and push forward the still embryonic efforts of the class to develop its consciousness, and not to sterilize these efforts by confusing them with bourgeois maneuvers.

14) One of the other lessons of the recent combats in Belgium, which confirms what marxists have always defended against the Proudhonists and Lassaleans, and more recently against the modernists, is that the working class not only can and must struggle for the defense of its immediate interests in preparation for its struggle as a revolutionary class, but that it can also push back the bourgeoisie on this level. While the decadence of capitalism makes it impossible for the capitalists to accord real reforms to the working class; while phases of acute crisis - like the one we're going through now - compels them to attack the workers more and more brutally, this in no way means that the working class has no choice between immediately making (or preparing) the revolution and massively submitting to these attacks without any hope of limiting them. Even the when the situation of a national capital seems to be desperate, as is the case with Belgium today, when it seems that the situation doesn't permit the attacks on the class to be attenuated the bourgeoisie still retains a small margin of maneuver which allows it to momentarily - even the cost of worse difficulties in the future to put aside some of these attacks if they encounter a significant level of resistance on the part of the working class. This is what happened in Belgium with the ‘re-examination' of the measures affecting the Limburg mines and the shipyards, and the delay in applying the Martens government's austerity plans.

In the final analysis the urgency and gravity of capital's attack depends on the degree of the saturation of the market. But while the latter tends to become more and more total, this saturation never reaches an absolute point, and so the economic margin of maneuver available to each national capital, while tending more and more towards zero, never reaches such a limit. It's thus important that while revolutionaries must show that the perspective is more and more towards the collapse of capitalism and thus that it is necessary to replace it with a communist society, they must also be capable of pushing forward the immediate struggle by showing that it ‘pays' and that it ‘pays' all the more if it is conducted on a broad scale, in a unified manner, that the more the bourgeoisie is confronted with     a strong working class the more it will be compelled to attenuate and delay its attacks.

15) Another thing confirmed by the April-May events in Belgium is the growing importance of the struggle of the unemployed, the capacity of this sector of the working class to integrate itself more and more into the general combat of the class, even if this phenomenon has as yet only appeared in an embryonic form in this period. Along with the appearance and development in recent years of numerous unemployed committees in the main countries of western Europe, this is a confirmation of the analysis which holds that:

-- unemployment will be "an essential element in the development of workers' struggles right up to the revolutionary period...

-- the unemployed workers will more and more tend to be at the front line of the class struggle." (6th Congress resolution, point 14).

A further point confirmed by the recent period concerns the organization of the unemployed: what has been shown by the Gottingen conference in Germany in ‘85, by the experience of a number of unemployed committees like the one in Toulouse in France, is that, fundamentally, the organization of the unemployed follows the same pattern as that of the rest of the class: it arises and centralizes itself in the struggle and for the needs of the struggle. Even if unemployed committees can exist in a more durable manner than strike committees, any attempt to maintain the life of such organs, to give them a centralized structure outside of such needs, can only lead them to become something very different  from unitary organizations of struggle: in the best of cases, workers' discussion groups, in the worst, new trade unions.

16) Finally, the struggles in Belgium confirm something that revolutionaries have been saying since the historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the ‘60s, and more particularly with the considerable acceleration of history that has taken place in the ‘80s: because the crisis leaves less and less respite to the bourgeoisie, and because the latter is obliged to leave less and less to the working class, the present generation of workers is accumulating a wealth of experience in the struggle against capital, and "this accumulation of the experience of struggle by the proletariat, as well as the proximity between each experience, is an essent­ial element in the coming to consciousness of the whole class about what's really at stake in its struggles." (6th Congress resolution, point 15).

Thus it's clear that in Belgium the workers were able to struggle on such a wide scale in Spring ‘86 because they had drawn and conserved many lessons from the struggles waged three years before. This is a phenomenon which will tend to   generalize and intensify in all the central countries of capitalism, and is key to the enormous and untapped potential for the struggle in these countries, a potential which must not be underestimated by revolutionaries. And this is all the more true in that, in contrast to what happened in the past, in ‘74-75 when the recession hit a class in momentary retreat, or in ‘81-82 when it intersected with a proletariat still suffering the effects of the defeat in Poland in 1981, the recession opening up today is going to meet up with and further intensify an already mounting class movement. Nevertheless, it would be false and dangerous to imagine that, right here and now, a straight road to the revolutionary period has opened up. The working class is still far away from such a period. In order to reach it there has to be a whole transformation within the proletariat, which will turn the exploited class which it is within capitalism - and through its struggles as an exploited class - into the revolutionary class capable of taking charge of humanity's future. This indicates the scale and difficulty of the road it still has to go down, notably at the level of undoing the whole pressure of the dominant ideology which weighs on it, of overcoming through repeated and increasingly conscious confrontations, the many traps and mystifications which the bourg­eoisie, its left and its unions, set and will continue to set against its struggles and the development of its consciousness. Though historically doomed, the bourgeoisie, like a mortally wounded wild beast, will continue to defend itself tooth and nail to the very last, and experience shows just how capable it is of inventing new traps aimed at undoing the proletariat or at least slowing its advance.

This is why it's important to underline the uneven character of the working class struggle, to remember the lessons already drawn by Rosa Luxemburg from the battles of 1905 in the Russian Empire, in particular the fact that the mass strike which marks the opening up of a revolutionary period, is "an ocean of phenomena", of apparently contradictory elements, of multiple forms of struggle, of advances and retreats during the course of which the flame of struggle seems to go out, while in fact the class is preparing for even vaster combats.

Despite their limitations and even if they are still far away from the mass strike (which is still a long-term perspective in the advanced countries), the recent struggles in Belgium, with their various ups and downs, confirm the necessity to remember the uneven nature of the class movement, remind us not to bury a struggle when it meets its first setback, to remain confident in all the potentialities which can be contained within it but which may not be immediately expressed.

If revolutionaries have to show their class the whole importance and potential of its present struggles, they also have to show the length and difficulty of the road ahead, not to demoralize the class, but on the contrary to struggle against the demoralization which threatens after every setback. It's up to rev­olutionaries to express to the highest degree the qualities of a class which bears the future of humanity: patience, a consciousness of the immense scope of the tasks to be accomplished, a serene but indestructible confidence in the future.

25.6.1986

This article is the last part of a study on the history of the Dutch Left between 1900 and 1914. Having dealt with the difficulties in the emer­gence of a marxist current in the conditions of Holland at the beginning of the century and with the beginnings of what would become the Dutch Left (International Review, no.45), then with the fragility of the political organizations of the proletariat confronted with the permanent pressure of bourgeois ideology (IR, no.46), this part of the study looks at the birth of the ‘Tribunist' current until its exclusion from social democracy (the SDAP) by the latter's opportunist wing.

The birth of the Tribune movement

In October 1907 the radical marxists began to publish their own social democratic weekly. In charge of De Tribune here the future leaders of the Tribune organization: Wijnkoop, Ceton and van Ravesteyn, who had the unconditional support of the third Amsterdam section, the most revolutionary one in the party. Pannekoek and Gorter regularly contributed to it, providing some of the most theoretical and polemical texts. They were all inspired by the hope of the future revolution: historically it was the most favorable period ever, with the beginning of an economic crisis which they didn't yet analyze as the general crisis of capitalism.                                                                 

The orientation was already anti-parliamentarian: the workers' struggle should link up with the international struggle by freeing it of any parliamentary or national illusions. The aim was indeed:                                               

"Firstly, to unmask the real meaning of the treacherous maneuvers of bourgeois democracy in the realms of the right to vote and social transformation; and secondly, to give workers an idea of the real meaning of the international situa­tion and the class struggle abroad." (Gorier, Sociaal-democratie en revisionisme, 1909)

It is remarkable to note that this political line is very close to that of the future Bordiga current, with the proclamation of the political and theoretical struggle against bourgeois demo­cracy and the affirmation of internationalism (cf ICC pamphlet, The Communist Left of Italy, 1981). The essential difference however, and this was linked to the period, was the fact that the organized struggle of marxism against revisio­nism was seen to take place around a theoretical review, under the form of an opposition. It was very much later in the workers' movement that little by little the necessity was imposed to form an organized fraction, and not an opposition in the party. The Bolsheviks were the first to understand this, even though they too were late in doing so.

It is clear that the Tribunists would have found it extremely difficult to have had an organized activity, apart from in the sections-like that of Amsterdam - where they were in the majority. Driven out of the central organs by the revisionists, they conceived their struggle as essentially theoretical. The theoretical contributions of the marxist Tribunist current from 1907 to 1909 were in any case extremely important and decisive in the constitution of an international communist left.

But the political struggle - with the publication of De Tribune which made no concessions in its struggle against revisionism - very quickly hardened and soon posed the question of a split in the party. A drive to hunt out the Marxist ‘witches' was undertaken. In Rotterdam, the revisionist leaders dismissed the marxist editors from the local organ and that was just after the Arnhem Congress (1908) which had rejected Troelstra's proposition to ban De Tribune. After this, the process of banning other Marxist ­inspired local organs became generalized.

The crisis in the party was opened up; it was going to be pushed forward with Troelstra's pub­lic intervention against marxist positions in parliament in front of the bourgeois political parties.

a. The question of the period and the crisis

The confrontation with the Tribunists took place in the autumn of 1908 when Troelstra took up cer­tain positions in parliament: namely, he denied publicly the necessity for workers to understand the evolution of capitalism in a theoretical way, within a marxist framework; he maintained that there was "no need for abstract, logical theory" the class struggle. Finally, he defended the idea that "capitalism would, lead of itself to socialism" - without the necessity of a revolution         and therefore in a peaceful and automatic manner. It was tantamount to saying that socialism was no longer determined by the existence of the objective conditions of the crisis and the proletariat's maturation of consciousness; it became a simple religious belief. De Tribune responded to these affirmations in a very violent and biting manner against Troelstra, symbol of revisionism in the party:

"A practical politician of social democracy must also understand theory; he must know it and have the power to defend it. For a ‘ bourgeois' it is perhaps a heavy task, but the working class demands no less of its leaders. This knowledge, this socialist science, is certainly very often easier for a worker to understand than for a man coming out of the bourgeoisie. The worker can understand immediately from his own life what socialism means, whilst the bourgeois must first of all understand the theory; for example, what isn't yet clear for Troelstra, namely that the economic gap between the classes must always. widen ... If the possibility exists that the gap between the classes doesn't become deeper, then our socialism dissolves into a belief; certitude becomes passive hope. The workers are already awash with ‘hopes' and ‘beliefs'. They don't need socialism for that. The church also sup­ports them in the belief that all will be better in heaven and the brave liberals and democrats hope that it will be better soon." (Die Grundung der SDP)

But what was most important in the Tribunists denunciation of revisionism was the theoretical affirmation of the historic course of capitalism towards a world crisis. In this, the Dutch Left - except Pannekoek much later on - joined up with Rosa Luxemburg's position which she expressed in 1913:

"The so-called ‘prophecy' of Marx is also being fully realized in the sense that modern capita­lism's periods of development are growing shor­ter and shorter, that in general ‘crises' as a force of transition from strong production to weak production are still persisting and with the development of capitalism are becoming more prolonged and extensive, so that ills that were once limited locally are more and more becoming world-wide catastrophes."

These attacks against Troelstra's revisionist theories were considered by the majority of the SDAP to be no more than personal attacks. After this the revisionists forbade the selling of De Tribune at a public meeting where Troelstra was speaking, thus committing an extremely ser­ious deed in the history of the workers' movement and in contradiction with the freedom of criti­cism in a workers' party. This was the beginning of the process of the exclusion of marxist posi­tions, a process which was going to brutally accelerate in the years following 1909.

b. Gorter against Troelstra on the question of a proletarian ‘morality' (Dec. 1908)

During 1908, De Tribune published a collection of Gorter's major contributions on the vulgarization of marxism: Historic Materialism Explained To Workers. Taking the example of the 1903 strike, Gorter showed that the class struggle produced an authentic class morality which entered into contradiction with the ‘general' morality defended by the tennents of the existing order. The materialist conception, defended by Gorter, which undermined the fundamentals of any religious morality, was violently attacked in parliament by the Christian delegate Savornin Lohman on 19 and 20 November. In defending the unity of the nation, he accused social democracy of wanting to incite the war between the classes and thus intoxicate the working class with marxism.

Instead of making a bloc with Gorter in the face of attacks by a representative of this bourgeois conception, Troelstra launched into a diatribe against Gorter, whom he presented as non-representative of the party and a simple caricature of marxism. For him, morality wasn't determined by social relations; it was equally valid for the proletariat as for the bourgeoisie.

To support this he drew on the ambiguous concepts that Marx had used in the statutes of the Ist International: those of rights, duties and justice. But Troelstra, by deliberately confus­ing values common to mankind and the official morality which he presented as universal, transformed the morality of the class struggle - guid­ed by common interests and an activity aiming at victory - into a monstrosity. Gorter's material­ism was a pure appeal to murder and ended up in a vision of barbarism. According to him, Gorter, for example, would be against "a worker saving a capitalist's son from drowning". Troelstra's demagogy in this argument was identical to Lohman's, with whom he sided.

Gorter replied furiously, as was his style, as much against De Savornin as Troelstra, with a rapidly written pamphlet, published for the needs of the struggle: Class Morality: A Reply to  Savornin Lohman and Troelstra, Members of the  Second Chamber. After a period of political isolation, he threw himself into the struggle for the party.

Gorter focussed sharply on the person of Troelstra who "in reality, in the essence of what he's saying, has chosen the camp of the bourgeoi­sie". He also showed that Troelstra was betraying Marx's real thinking by using the ambiguous terms of the statutes of the Ist International. The correspondence between Marx and Engels, published some years later, gave a triumphant justification to Gorter's arguments. In a letter of 4 November 1884, Marx explained that he had been obliged to make some concessions to the Proudhonists: "I was obliged to include in the preamble to the statutes two phrases containing the words ‘duty' and ‘right' as well as ‘truth, morality and justice', but I placed them in such a way, that they could no harm".

At the same time, Gorter replied vigorously to the accusation that the morality of the proletariat meant attacking individual capitalists without any concern for human feelings. The morality of the proletariat was essentially a fighting morality which sought to defend its interests against the bourgeois class an economic category and not as a sum of individ­uals. It was a morality which aimed to abolish itself in a classless society, leaving in its place a real morality, that of humanity as a whole liberated from class society.

Following this polemic, a split became inev­itable. It was what Troelstra himself wanted, in order to rid the party of any critical mar­xist tendency. In a letter to Vliegen on 3 December he wrote: "The schism is there; the only recourse can be a split".

The split at the Deventer Congress (13-14 February 1909)

In order to eliminate the Tribunists and their review, the revisionist leaders proposed a referendum to examine the question of suppressing the De Tribune review at an extraordinary cong­ress. The party committee was hesitant about and even opposed to such an extraordinary mea­sures. Troelstra went over the committee's head and through a referendum obtained the two-thirds vote needed to convoke a congress. It thus became apparent that the great majority of the SDAP was gangrenous with revisionism; it was even more revisionist at the base than at the summit.

Furthermore, the marxist elements who had come out of Nieuwe Tijd and had collaborated with De Tribune capitulated to Troelstra. Dur­ing a conference held on 31 January, to which the main Tribunist editors weren't even invited, Roland-Holst and Wibaut declared that they were ready to quit the editorship of their review in order to run a future weekly supplement (Het Weekblad) of Het Volk, the SDAP daily. The new publication would be free of any marxist criti­que of revisionism. Instead of solidarising with their comrades in struggle, they made an oath of allegiance to Troelstra, declaring themselves in favor of "a common work of loyal party comradeship", trying to take refuge in a centrist attitude of conciliation between the right and the marxist left. In the marxist movement in Holland, Roland-Holst constantly maintained this attitude.

The Tribunists didn't fail to reproach Roland-Holst for this capitulation; it was an attitude that only made more certain the split that the revisionists wanted.

It's true that, for its part, the marxist minority was far from homogeneous about taking the struggle inside the SDAP to its ultimate conclusion. Wijnkoop, van Ravesteyn and Ceton, who constituted the real organizing head of the minority, had already resolved on a split before the Congress, in order to keep De Tribune going. Gorter, on the other hand, who wasn't formally on the editorial board, was much more reserved. He distrusted this triad's impetuo­sity and did not want to precipitate a split. He hoped that Wijnkoop would moderate his posi­tion and that the Tribunists would stay in the party, even at the price of accepting the sup­pression of De Tribune if they failed to stop this at the Deventer Congress:

"I have continually said against the editorial board of Tribune: we must do everything we can to draw others towards us, but if this fails - after we've fought to the end and all our efforts have failed - then we'll have to yield." (Letter to Kautsky, 16 February 1909)

In fact, at the Extraordinary Congress at Deventer, the Tribunists fought bitterly for two days and in extremely difficult conditions. Often interrupted by Troelstra who systemati­cally used an anti-‘intellectual' demagogy, with his irony about the ‘professors of De Tribune', often encountering the laughing incomprehension of the Congress, they stayed on the offensive. They fought to maintain the revolutionary essence of the party, the "salt of the party" in Gorter's phrase. Without free­dom for a marxist critique of opportunism - a freedom which did exist in the big parties, such as the German - you were suppressing the possibility of "awakening revolutionary consc­iousness". More than any other, Gorter was able to express at the Congress the revolutio­nary conviction of the Tribunists: a decisive period was opening up, a period of menacing war and of revolution in Germany, which would draw Holland into the ferment:

"Internationally, the period is very important. An international war threatens. Then the German proletariat would make the insurrection, and Holland would have to choose its colors; so the party should rejoice that it has in it men who put the revolutionary side of our struggle at the forefront."

Aware that the SDAP was sinking fast, Gorter concluded at the end of the Congress with a vib­rant appeal for the regroupment of revolutiona­ries around De Tribune: "Come and join us round De,Tribune ; don't let the boat go under!" This appeal was not however an invitation to split and set up a new party. Gorter was still convinced of the necessity to stay in the party - otherwise the Tribunists would lose any poss­ibility of developing: "Our strength in the party can increase; our strength outside the party can never grow".

But this battle to remain within the party failed. The splitting process was irreversible given the decisions taken by the Congress majority.

The Congress decided overwhelmingly - 209 mandates against 88, and 15 blanks - to suppress De Tribune and replace it with a weekly run mainly by Roland-Holst. But, above all, it ex­cluded from the party the three editors of Tribune: Wijnkoop, van Ravesteyn and Ceton. In the view of the revisionists, it was necessary to cut off the organizing ‘head', to separate the ‘leaders' from the mass of Tribunist sympathizers in the party.

This maneuver failed. After the shock of the exclusion of these spokesmen for Tribunism, in the sections the militants got back on their feet and solidarised with the three editors. Very quickly, what until then had been an infor­mal tendency became an organized group. Immediately after the Congress - proof that the Tribunists had envisaged this possibility before the split - a permanent organization commission was formed to regroup the Tribunist tendency. Members of the group Nieuwe Tijd, including Gorter, ended up joining the commission. Gorter, after six weeks of doubts and hesitations, fin­ally resolved to commit himself wholeheartedly to working with the expelled Tribunists. How­ever, Gorter warned against the foundation of a second party on a purely voluntarist basis.

It was in fact the SDAP's publication, on 13 March, of the party referendum approving the decisions at Deventer, which pushed the excluded comrades to form a second party. By 3712 votes against 1340, the SDAP confirmed the expulsion of the whole editorial board of Tribune.

In the meantime, on 10 March, before this definitive announcement of expulsion was known, Gorter and Wijnkoop had gone to Brussels. They were met by three members of the Bureau of the Socialist International - Huysmans, Vandervelde and Anseele, all known to belong to the right - which resided in the Belgian capital. The aim of the meeting was to resolve the ‘Dutch' ques­tion'. Contrary to their fears, Gorter and Wijnkoop got a lot of understanding from the BSI; it was indignant about the expulsions dec­ided at Deventer, and tried to obtain the rein­tegration of the excluded members as the free expression of marxism within the SDAP. To act as a mediator, Huysmans, the secretary of the Bureau, went to Holland to obtain the following decisions from the SDAP:

-- annulment of the Deventer exclusions

-- the acceptance of one of the excluded editors in the new weekly run by Roland-Holst

-- the recognition of the right of expression for the marxist minority.

On all these points, the leading organs of the SDAP seemed to be shaken by Huysmans opinions, put forward on 15 March. But the day before, 14 March, in Amsterdam, had been held the Founding Congress of the Tribunist party, which took the name SDP (Social Democratic Party). Its foundation had thus been decided on by its members without even waiting for the results of the BSI's negotiations with the SDAP. The latter, though aware of the discus­sions since 10 March, had confirmed the exclusions on 13 March.

Thus the SDP was- born in a situation of extreme confusion. It was a small party of 419 members divided into nine sections. Its pro­gram was that of the old party prior to 1906, before the revisionist modifications.

Wijnkoop was nominated by the Congress as party president, because of his organizational capacities. Gorter became a member of the SDP leadership. But his organizational weight was too weak to counteract the personal, ambitious policies of Wijnkoop, who was ready to sacrifice any possibility of unity on the altar of ‘his' group. Such a policy was only too convenient for the revisionist majority of the SDAP who wanted a definitive split with the marxist current.

For all these reasons, the BSI's efforts to put an end to the split failed. An Extraordi­nary Congress urgently convoked for 21 March, a week after the Founding Congress, rejected by a majority Huysman's proposal to return to the SDAP. Gorter, along with a few of the SDAP old guard, was in favor. He judged the attitude of Wijnkoop to be particularly irresponsible, denouncing him in private as being "opinionated without limits". He was so demoralized at this point that he even momentarily considered leav­ing the SDP. However, the rejection by the BSI and the SDAP of the conditions for the reinte­gration of the Tribunist militants made him dec­ide to commit himself fully to the activity of the new party.

The Congress of 21 March, despite Wijnkoop's far from clear attitude, had in fact left the door open to a reintegration into the new party. A Congress resolution expressed the majority's desire to maintain a single party in Holland; therefore the Congress put forward the condit­ions that would allow the Tribunists to carry on their marxist critique and activity within the SDAP, if they were accepted:

"(the Congress) wishes there to be a single social democratic party in Holland and charges the Party committee, in the interests of unity, to give itself the full power to dissolve the SDP as soon as:

-- the SDAP, through a referendum, cancels the exclusion of the three editors;

-- the SDAP recognizes in a clearly formulated resolution the freedom of all its members or any group of members, openly, in any form, writ­ten and oral, to proclaim the principles consigned in the program and to express their criticisms."

The rejection of these conditions, which appeared as an ultimatum, by the BSI and the SDAP, created a new situation in the International: in one country there were two socialist parties, both claiming adherence to the IInd Internatio­nal. This situation was an exceptional one in the IInd International. Even in Russia, after the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the two fractions remained adher­ents of the same party: the Social Democratic Labor Party of Russia. But in Holland, it pro­ved politically impossible to remain members of the same party; and neither the revisionist majority nor the Tribunist minority had the will to do so.

It was however very clear for the marxist militants of the SDP that their party was a party of the International. The split was a local one, not a split with the IInd International.

Up until the First World War

Up until the first world war, when it was to gain a growing audience in the proletariat, the SDP was ‘crossing the desert'. It remained a small party without much influence in the Dutch proletariat: a few hundred militants against several thousand in Troelstra's SDAP. Its numerical growth was very slow and limited, despite its militant spirit: at the time of the split, the SDP had 408 militants; in 1914, 525. The number of subscribers to De Tribune was limited and fluctuating: 900 at the time of the Deventer Congress; 1400 in May 1909 and 1266 in 1914. Because of its limited audience, the SDP was never a parliamentary party - it became one at the end of the war; its participation in elections was always a debacle. At the June 1909 elections, it obtained 1.5% of the votes in each district. Even Gorter, reputed to be the best orator in the party, the only one able to arouse the workers' enthusiasm, met with a resounding failure: pushed to be an election candidate in1913, in Amsterdam and the industrial town of Enschede, he won 196 votes for the SDP as against 5325 for the SDAP in the latter town. But even if it participated in elections, this wasn't the real terrain of the SDP, in contrast to the SDAP which had become completely bogged down in it.

Reduced to the size of a small cohort, the SDP - owing to the unfavorable conditions in which the Deventer split had taken place - was unable to rally to its side the youth organization, which had traditionally held its ground actively and radically in the struggle against capitalism and war. The youth organization De Zaaier (‘The Sower'), which had been created in 1901, wanted to remain autonomous: its sections were free to attach themselves to one or the other of the parties. When, in 1911, the SDAP created its own youth organization, essentially to counteract the anti-militarist activity of Zaaier, the latter broke up. The few remaining militants (about 100) nevertheless refused to follow the SDP, despite the common orientation.

Despite the party's theoretical solidity, there was a risk that the SDP would slide into sectarianism. The party's links with the industrial proletariat had become distended since the split. Less than half its members worked in factories or workshops; a considerable part was made up of employees and teachers. The summit of the party - at least until 1911 - was composed of intellectuals, solid theoreticians but - except for Gorter - often sectarian and doctrinaire. This leadership of teachers was tending to transform the SDP into a sect.

The struggle against sectarianism within the  SDP was posed from the beginning. In May 1909 Mannoury - one of the leaders of the party and a future Stalinist chief - declared that the SDP was the one and only socialist party, since the SDAP had become a bourgeois party. Gorter, the one who had fought most bitterly against Troelstra, vigorously opposed this conception, at first as a minority; he showed that, although revisionism did lead towards the bourgeois camp, the SDAP was above all an opportunist party within the proletarian camp. This position had direct implications at the level of propaganda and agitation in the class. It was in fact possible to fight alongside the SDAP, whenever the latter still defended a class position, without making the slightest theoretical concessions to it.           

‘Sect or party?', this was the question Gorter            posed very clearly in front of the whole party in November 1910. The question was whether the to associate itself with a petition for universal suffrage launched by the SDAP. The SDP, like all the socialist parties of that time, was fighting for universal suffrage. The central question was therefore the class analysis of the SDAP, but also the struggle against sectarian inaction during political battles. At the beginning, only a small minority, led by Gorter, supported the idea of the petition and agitation for universal suffrage. It needed all Gorter's weight for a small majority to emerge in favor of common activity with the SDAP. Gorter showed the danger of a tactic of non-participation, which ran the risk of pushing the party into total isolation. Towards the SDAP, which was certainly "not a true party" but "a conglomeration, a mass trooped together under a band of demagogues", the tactic had to be that of a ‘hornet' stinging it in the right direction. This attitude was finally that of the party until the war, when the SDAP crossed the Rubicon by voting for war credits.

The evolution of the SDAP in fact confirmed the validity of the combat which the Tribunists had waged against the revisionists since the beginning. The latter were being progressively drawn into the ideology and state apparatus of the bourgeoisie. In 1913, the SDAP pronounced itself in favor of military mobilization in case of war, and Troelstra openly proclaimed adherence to nationalism and militarism: "We must do our duty" he wrote in the SDAP daily.

Strengthened by its electoral success in 1913, the SDAP, which had won 18 seats, declared that it was ready to accept ministerial posts in the new liberal government. The participation in a bourgeois government would have meant the total abandonment of the remaining proletarian principles by Troelstra's party. However, there was a last, weak proletarian reaction within the party: at its Congress in Zwolle, against Troelstra's advice, there was a small majority (375 against 320) against ministerial participation. It's true that the agitation against participation carried out by the SDP - in the form of an open letter written by Gorter and addressed to the Congress - was not unconnected to this reaction, even though the letter wasn't made known to the Congress.

The SDP's activity wasn't limited to the critique of the SDAP. It was essentially grounded in the class struggle, in economic struggles and in action against war:

-- the international resurgence of class struggles after 1910 favorised the activity of the party, giving it enthusiasm and confidence. Its militants participated with those of the NAS in the struggles of the Amsterdam masons in 1909 and 1910, in defiance of the SDAP which the workers judged as a ‘state party'. In 1910, the party formed with the NAS an ‘Agitation Committee against High Living Costs'. Thus began a long joint activity with the revolutionary syndicalists, which helped the SDP develop its influence in the Dutch proletariat before and during the war. This joint activity had the consequence of progressively reducing the weight of anarchist elements within the small union and of developing a receptivity to revolutionary marxist positions.

It was obvious for the SDP that the IInd International remained a living body for the international proletariat and that it had not at all rea­ched a state of 'bankruptcy. The bankruptcy of Troelstra's SDAP was not at all that of the International. For the SDP, the ‘model' party was still, as it was for the Bolsheviks, the German social democracy, with which it had close links. Gorter, as a member of the SDP leadership, was in regular correspondence with Kautsky, at least until 1911, when the left broke with the Kautskyist centre. Pannekoek, who had been living in Germany since 1906 and had been a member of the SDP since the split, was also a member of the Bremen section of the SPD, after hav­ing taught at the party school.

To become a section of the International, the SDP had promptly applied to the BSI. Gorter and Wijnkoop were mandated to explain to the BSI the reasons for the split, basing themselves on rep­orts specially drawn up for the purpose. The request for the new party to be accepted as a full section was the object of a conflict between a left represented by Singer (SPD) and Vaillant, and a right whose spokesman was the Austrian Adler. By a small majority the SDP's application was rejected: Adler's resolution against accep­tance got 16 votes, Singer's 11. Thus, on 7 November 1909, through this vote, the SDP was de facto excluded from the international workers' movement, by a BSI majority which had taken up the cause of revisionism.

The SDP nevertheless had the unconditional sup­port of the Bolshevik Left, Lenin - who had made contact with Gorter before the BSI - indignantly condemned the BSI's decision. For him there was no doubt that the revisionists were responsible for the split. "(the BSI) has adopted a forma­list decision and, clearly taking the side of the opportunists, has placed the responsibility for the split with the marxists." He unreservedly approved the Tribunists for not accepting the suspension of De Tribune. Like them, he con­demned the centrism of Roland-Holst "who has unfortunately shown a dreary spirit of concilia­tion."

Thus there began between the SDP and the Bolsheviks a community of action which was to become closer and closer. In part thanks to the Russian left, the SDP was finally accepted in 1910 as a full section of the International. Granted one mandate against the SDAP's 7, it was able to participate in the work at the interna­tional Congresses at Copenhagen in 1910 and Bale in 1912.

Thus, despite the maneuvers of the revisio­nists, the SDP was fully integrated into the international workers' movement. Its struggle for the defense of revolutionary principles would be carried out conjointly with the inter­national left, particularly the German left.

The political struggle against the threatened war was a constant activity of the SDP. It particip­ated very actively in the Bale Congress of 1912, a Congress whose central issue was the threat of war. The SDP, like other parties, proposed it­self in favor of protest strikes in case war broke out. This amendment, which was rejected, took care to distinguish itself from the idea of the ‘general strike' launched by the anarchists. Unfortunately, following the ban on debates at the Congress, the speech that Gorter had prep­ared against pacifism wasn't read. The revolu­tionary voice of the SDP wasn't heard in the International, while the pacifist Jaures held forth from the Tribune.

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

On the eve of the war, the SDP - after a crisis of sectarian isolation - had undeniably developed an activity in the Dutch proletariat which was not without its fruits. The SDAP's evolution to­wards ‘ministerialism' - ie participation in bour­geois governments, its acceptance of ‘national defense' had incontestably confirmed the analyses of the marxist current. But given the very unfavorable conditions of the Deventer split, this current remained very weak numerically: the revo­lutionary current was hidden behind a revisionist current in full numerical and electoral expansion.

In such a small party, the political orienta­tion remained partly determined by the weight of personalities. The theoretical clarity of a Gorter and his active support were vital in the face of the organizational ambitions and lack of principles of people like Wijnkoop and Ravesteyn. This opposition was pregnant with a new split.

However, the strength and echo of the Dutch marxist current went beyond the narrow confines of little Holland. It was in the International and alongside the German left that Dutch marxism contributed decisively to the birth of the com­munist left. This contribution was less organizational than theoretical, and was determined by the work of Pannekoek in Germany. This was at once a strength and a weakness of the Dutch ‘Tribunists'.

Chardin

The debate on the period of transition has always been the object of fierce polemics between revolutionary groups. With the devel­opment of the class struggle, revolutionaries have been compelled to focus their attention on more immediate questions, in particular the question of organization and intervent­ion. But in playing its role of advancing concrete proposals in the workers' struggles, the revolutionary organization, because it is based on what is ‘general', on what concerns all workers, the whole class, can't afford to neglect the problem of the historical goals of the struggle: the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the communist transformation of social life. In devoting this article to the positions of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt - Battaglia Comunista) on the period of transition, as expressed in the document from their 5th Congress (Prometeo No 7), we are aiming to help reanimate this important discussion in the revolutionary movement. (For further reading on this question see the ICC's pamphlet ‘The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism').

******

For our part, we have no doubt that the PCInt's text does share with us an important extent of common ground in the historical acquisitions of marxism. In particular:

* against the idealist theories typical of bourgeois historiography, it locates the origins of the state in the real historical and material evolution of class society;

* against anarchist utopianism, it affirms the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletar­iat and for a state in the transition period, which will still be marked by class divisions;

* against reformism, now a counter-revolution­ary ideology of the bourgeoisie, it affirms the lessons of the Paris Commune about the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a state of a new type, a semi-state destined to disappear with the overcoming of class antagonisms

* following Lenin's State and Revolution it affirms that the semi-state must be based on the soviet form discovered by the working class in 1905 and 1917;

* and finally, in line with the contribution of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s, it draws a certain number of critical lessons from the Russian experience:

-- the causes of the decline of the Russian revolution and of the transformation of the Soviet State and the Bolshevik party into a counter-revolutionary capitalist machine reside first and foremost in the failure of the revol­ution to spread internationally;

-- within the objective framework of the isolation of the revolution and the conditions of backwardness and famine facing the Russian proletariat, certain errors of the Bolshevik party acted as "accelerators" of the process of degeneration;

-- the first of these errors resided in an identification between the party and the dic­tatorship of the proletariat, resulting in the entanglement of the party with the state, the growing rift between party and class, and the increasing inability of the party to play its real role as a political vanguard.

There is also an echo - though, as we shall see, a faint and inconsistent one - of the position, developed by the Fraction and further elaborated by the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC, that not only can the party not be identified with the state, but also that the transitional state and the dictatorship of the proletariat are not identical.

The importance of these shared points is not to be underestimated because they constitute the basic class lines on the problem of the state, the essential ‘starting point' for a marxist understanding of the question. The exception to this is the question of the non-identification of the state with the dictator­ship of the proletariat which, as we have always maintained, is an ‘open question' which cannot be definitively settled until the next major revolutionary experience.

Having briefly defined these areas of agreement, we can now develop our criticisms of the PCInt's inadequacies and inconsistencies which weaken their capacity to defend or develop the marxist position on these questions.

An incomplete assimilation of the work of the Italian Left

The PCInt claim that: "The political positions mentioned here represent the theoretical baggage and traditions of struggle of the Italian Left, whose hist­orical presence has been ensured through the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy and the consecutive acquisitions of the Fraction and the PCInt constituted during the course of the Second World War."

As we have said, the text undoubtedly reflects the influence of the Fraction. But while the PCInt doesn't merely sweep the work of the Fraction under the carpet like the Bordigists do, neither can it be said that it has fully assimilated its work and above all its method, which enabled it to initiate a fundamental critique of the positions of the Communist International. But in a number of areas the PCInt reverts back to the ‘Leninist' orthod­oxy which the Fraction dared to call into question. This is especially clear on the quest­ion of the relationship between the proletariat and the transitional state.

According to the PCInt, the ICC digresses from marxism into opportunism when it argues that a crucial lesson of the Russian revolution is that the transitional state, emanating from a social order still divided into classes, will have a con­servative rather than a dynamic character, at best codifying and administrating the push towards communism deriving from the revolutionary class, at worst opposing it and becoming a focal point for the renascent counter-revolution. That, consequently, the proletariat must not identify its class rule with the state machine, but must rig­orously subordinate it to the control of its own class organs.

The PCInt want to be very ‘orthodox' on this question and so go back to Marx's statement that in the transitional period, "the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" (in which Marx was essentially attacking reformist deviations about the state). For the PCInt, the state is "a workers' state", even "a socialist state" (in the sense that it permits the realization of socialism). It is the same thing as the soviets: "The error is to see the soviets (which hold all power) distinct from the state; but the proletarian state is none other than the centralized synthesis of the network of soviets."

In fact, the PCInt can only remain ‘orthodox' on this question by ignoring some of the fundamental issues posed by the Fraction and the continuators of its method. The text does have a glimmering of the Fraction's developments in this area, in that certain passages imply that the state and the dictatorship of the proletar­iat are not identical: for example, the text begins by saying:

"To talk about the period of transition is to talk about the workers' state and its political and economic characteristics, and about the re­lationship which has to be established between it and the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the soviets."

But this insight is then contradicted by the PCInt's insistence on defining itself against the positions of the ICC. And in doing so, it inevitably defines itself against the work of the fraction.

The pages of Bilan (organ of the Italian Left in exile, 1933-38) contain many profound studies on the question of the state. Its historical origins, the different forms of the state in capitalist society, and so on, are analyzed in the series ‘Party-State-International'. The political and economic questions posed by the transition period are examined above all in Mitchell's articles ‘Problems of the Period of Transition' (which the ICC intends to republish). In the light of the Russian experience, where the Soviet state was transformed into a monstrous bourgeois apparatus, Mitchell returned to some of Marx and Engels' warnings about the transitional state being a necessary evil, a "scourge" which the proletariat is compelled to use, and concluded that the Bolsheviks had made a fundamental error in identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the transitional state:                

"Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilized them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance.           ­                                                                                               

"Even in Lenin's thoughts the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the state' began to predominate. At the end of 1918, in his polemic against Kautsky (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky), he was unable to distinguish between two conflicting concepts: the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat." (Bilan No 31). Or again:

"The safeguard of the Russian revolution, the guarantee that it would stay on the tracks of the world revolution, was therefore not the absence of all bureaucracy - which is an inevitable excrescence of the transition period - but the vigilant presence of proletarian organs in which the educat­ional activity of the party could be carried out, while the party itself retained a vision of its international tasks through the International. Because of a whole series of historical circum­stances and because of a lack of indispensable theoretical and experimental equipment, the Bolsheviks were unable to resolve this basic problem. The crushing weight of contingent events led them to lose sight of the importance of retain­ing the Soviets and trade unions as organs which could be juxtaposed to the state, controlling it but not being incorporated into it." (ibid).

The link between this position and that of the ICC is clear. The class organs of the proletariat are not to be confused with the state. Thus, the PCInt should take issue with Bilan on this matter.

Of course, the ICC's position is not merely a repetition of Bilan's. By assimilating the work of the GCF, it has made it clearer on a number of points:

* on the party question: Bilan saw the need to distinguish the proletariat and its party from the state, but tended to identify the party with the proletarian dictatorship. For the ICC, the party is not an instrument for wielding political power. This is the task of the workers' councils and other unitary organs. The function of the party is to conduct a political fight within the councils and the class as a whole against all the vacillations and bourgeois influences and for the implementation of the communist program;

* on the union question: while the proletariat in the period of transition will still require organs to defend its immediate interests against the demands of the state, these will not be trade unions, organizations which arose on the basis of specific trades in the struggle for reforms last century, and which have proved themselves antithetical to the needs of the class strugg­le and have passed over to the capitalist camp in the epoch of social revolution, but the workers' councils, factory committees, militias, etc, (see below);

* on the question of the state itself: the GCF and the ICC, inquiring more deeply into the origins of the state in history and in the transitional period, have rejected the formulation ‘proletarian state', which still appears in Bilan's work.

In the passage in their document dealing with the historical origins of the state, the PCInt correctly summarizes Engels' writing on the subject by saying that:

"1) the state is the product of a society divided into classes

2) the state is the instrument of domination by the economically dominant class."

However, they do not draw all the appropriate conclusions from this, in particular, that the state did not emerge as the simple, ex nihilo creation of a ruling class but arose ‘spontaneously' from the inner contradictions of a social order dividing into classes. It is this understanding of the state as first and foremost an instrument for the preservation of social order which makes it possible to explain how, in the phenomenon of state capitalism, the state can ‘substitute' itself for the traditional ruling class. And it is this understanding of the fact that the state arises from a class-divided social situation which enables us to see that the transitional state doesn't emanate from the proletariat but from the exigencies of the transitional society itself. In a sense, the destruct­ion of the bourgeois state represents a break in a millennial continuity which takes us back, on a higher level, to the situation preceding the emergence of the first state forms. The transitional state coheres out of the ‘disorder' bequeathed by the smashing of the bourgeois state power. But in contrast to all previous states, this state won't ‘automatically' become the organic expression, the prolongation of an econ­omically dominant, exploiting class, because such a class will no longer exist. The proletariat will have to wage a constant political struggle to ensure that the state remains under its control: no automatic unfolding of economic laws will ensure this. On the contrary, the period of transition will be the battleground between con­scious human will and economic automatisms of all kinds, and thus between the communist proletariat and the state which will tend to reflect the continuing pressures of economic laws in a society still marked by scarcity and class divisions.

To be more precise, the emanation of the state from the transitional society means that it will be based on organisms - the territorial soviets - that regroup the whole non-exploiting population. Though containing proletarians these organs are not proletarian in themselves and the proletariat must always maintain a strict political independence through its specific class organs, the workers soviets, which will exert a rigorous control over the territorial soviets and all the administrative or repressive organs which emerge from their centralization.

It is striking that the PCInt's text almost entirely evades the problem of the organization of the non-proletarian, non-exploiting strata in the transitional state - particularly in view of the PCInt's self-proclaimed ‘sensitivity' to the problems facing these strata in the peripheries of capitalism, where they greatly outnumber the working class and thus pose a central problem to the revolution. Consequently, when it is compelled to touch on this problem, it falls into two symmetrical errors:                                      

-- the ‘workerist' error (which has in the past been particularly marked in the Communist Workers Organization), of denying that these strata will have any participation whatever in the transitional     state. Thus they write:

"The soviets will be elected exclusively by workers, excluding any electoral rights to those who profit from wage labor or who, in one way or another, economically exploit the labor of the proletariat".

The exclusion of the exploiters from participation in the soviets is one thing and we agree with it. ­But this passage gives us no idea at all about what is to be done with the vast mass of humanity - peasants, artisans, marginalized elements, etc, etc who belong neither to the working class nor the bourgeoisie. To have attempted to exclude these masses from the soviet system would have been unthinkable to the Bolsheviks in 1917, and so it should be to communists today. To draw in these strata behind the workers' revolution and not against it, to raise their consciousness about the aims and methods of the communist transformation, to push forward their integrat­ion into the proletariat - these strata must be incorporated into into the soviet system through a network of soviets elected on the basis of neighborhood or village assemblies (in contrast to the workers' soviets which will be elected by workplace assemblies);

-- the interclassist error, which consists of fusing or submerging the class organs of the proletariat into the organs regrouping the entire non-exploiting population. This confusion raises its head when the PCInt talks about the trans­itional state as "the state of all the exploited... directed politically by a working class organized on an international basis." Again, the formulation itself is not totally incorrect; the confusion arises out of what is not said. Who are "all the exploited"? Only the working class, or, as the passage seems to imply in the phrase "directed politically by the working class", the other non-exploiting strata as well? And if the state is to be the state of all the non-exploiting strata, how will it be "directed politically" by the working class if the working class is not organized in an independent manner?

Both these errors reinforce each other, since they spring from the same source: an incapacity to analyze the real social conditions giving rise to the state in the period of transition.

On the trade union question, it is normal to expect today's revolutionary groups to be clearer than the Italian Fraction, since the absence of autonomous class struggle for most of the ‘30s did not provide the latter with all the material required to resolve this question. As we have said, both Bilan and (in an initial stage) the GCF considered that the necessary defense of the proletariat's immediate interests against the demands of the transitional state would be carried out through the trade unions. What is strange, however, is to read that the PCInt - which says the trade unions are no longer proletarian organs and will have to be destroyed in the revolution - also argues in its period of transition document, written in 1983, that:

"The soviets are really revolutionary and political organs. They should thus not be mixed up with the trade unions which, after the revolution, will still have the function of defending the immediate interests of the prol­etariat and organizing struggles against the bourgeoisie during the difficult process of the ‘expropriation of the expropriators'. Neither should they be confused with the factory councils which have the task of ensuring workers' control over production."

We have often said that the PCInt and the CWO retain certain confusions about the unions as ‘intermediary' or even ‘workers' organizations in this epoch, and this quote confirms it: they seem unable to understand why the trade union form no longer corresponds to the needs of the class struggle in this epoch, the epoch of capitalist decadence and of the proletarian revolution. The essential characteristics of the class struggle in this epoch - its massive character, its need to break down all sectoral barriers - won't change after the seizure of power by the workers. We have already said that we recognize the continuing necessity for the workers to be able to defend their immediate and specific interests against the exigencies of the transitional state, but to do this they will require organs that regroup proletarians irrespective of trade or sector: the factory committees and the workers' councils themselves. In the PCInt's view of things, where the workers' councils ‘are' the state, we are presented with the bizarre scenario of the workers using trade unions to defend themselves ... against the workers' councils!

In conclusion

This article in no way claims to be an exhaustive study of the question of the period of transition, or even of the PCInt's view of the matter. It's aim has rather been to give a new impetus to the discussion of the transition period, to define certain basic starting points, and to criticize the confusions, contradictions, or outright concessions to bourgeois ideology contained in the positions of another revolutionary organization. The PCInt's positions, though setting off from this marxist starting point display on certain crucial issues - the relationship between class and state, party and state, the union question - a difficulty in moving from this point of departure to its most coherent conclusions. They stand half-way between the most advanced positions of the communist left and the depasse theses of the Communist International under Lenin. But as even the revolutionary bourgeoisie understood, you can't make a revolution half-way. All confusions and contradictions about the revolutionary process will be exposed mercilessly by the revolution itself. This is precisely why the debate on the period of transition can't be ignored today: when we are launched on the ocean of the communist revolution, we will have to be equipped with the most accurate compass permitted by the present evolution of Marxist theory.

MU

The crisis deepens, trade wars heat up, the attack on the working class intensifies

At the beginning of 1986, before an audience of skeptical workers, fed up both with 15 years of inexorably rising unemployment and with the end­less refrain that “we are nearly at the end of our economic difficulties”, the world’s govern­ments shouted from the rooftops that this time the end of the tunnel really was in sight - as long, of course, as the workers were prepared to accept a few more sacrifices. Why? Because the price of oil was collapsing on the world market and because the dollar’s exchange rate was dropping. The press spoke of the “oil counter-shock” and the “oil windfall” which were to solve all our problems. The nightmare was at last coming to an end.